The wind whistled through the barren wood floor boards. The sound of a low pitch flute and the creaking of the walls. I laid there taking it all in, the sounds, the way the light danced off the walls bounding in and out with the shadows. It was dark and the snow was already a swirling sea of a frozen abyss. I couldn’t sleep, course I couldn’t remember the last time I slept even if I tried. Life had frozen in motion, and I was to walk in between this moment in the next for all eternity. I think of all the days past the days that turned into months which turned into years which turned into decades and into centuries. I can’t even remember a life before the world I am now apart of. I sit up on the old copper and steel bed that time had ravaged. I looked at her as she slept next to me her head on the pillow just beside me. It has been about 6 months years since Annah and I had met. She was a young woman with so much promise. We had met by accident on an august evening in the town square of Loveland Colorado. I was walking the streets as I usually did in the evenings, wondering at the colors of fall. The forests reds and browns and yellows that lined the sky and the ground beneath. She was reading a book under an oak on a blue metal bench that seemed to contrast the world around it as if it was a futuristic being sitting in the ashes of times past. She was wearing an off white dress that fell from her shoulders like ribbons of sunlight. He hair was light brown then and curly. I remember how she looked back then, happy, before the world she knew was taken and shattered into the reality she now is apart of. Back then she would never believed in the fact that there are those who are not bound by death and those of which time does not ravage. To these people the laws of this world are not the same ones that humans believe to be unbreakable.
I sit mesmerized by her peace full beauty. The way she sleeps, the contour of her cheeks, the soft edge of her jaw line. She rolls over slowly, burying her face into my hand and the pillow. I lay down, cursing myself for all that I have become and loathing the feeling of love and adoration for this girl who will only suffer as long as she is next to me. I bend over kissing her forehead as I remember the promise I made to her. The promise that will haunt, torture, and torment me in a sadistic bliss till the end of her days. I feel my heart being to ache as I remember days past the way she smiled the way her heart flittered about without a care in the world. Those moments only memories on a film of burning hell. I reach down and touch my oldest friend, my sword “Unguis Primum”. The first weapon produced that could kill a shadow walker. This fang was given to me by the late teacher. He told me that one day I would understand the tears it cries.
I get up and walk to the window at the new day. Its early and we should get moving staying too long in one place creates a footprint that we cannot afford to leave. I turn to look at Annah.
“How long have you been awake?” she moans as she rolls over and looks at me.
“All night.”
“You really should learn to sleep, it may help.”
After she says it she knows it’s a lie. Even her own sleep is a shadow of what it really means to sleep. For us every year that we sleep we age only sightly, Its not a true sleep, its hollow, we are awake with in our own minds fighting against a barrage of memories from our past ‘lives’. Each emotion just and real as it was back then and all the pain twice as much.
I turn and walk over to our suit cases and start packing what little clothing we have. I reach for my coat as she places her hand on mine. I can’t look at her it hurts more than she can imagine. Every second she is ‘alive’ I am reminded that I took what life she had and wiped it away as if it were only a hair in the way. Even with all this I must the strength to look her in the eye she smiles at me and takes me in her arms and kisses me ever so slightly. I pull her in close losing my self in her presence. When we brake, I look into her eyes remembering everything.
“We should get going.”
“Okay.”
The wind is soft but carries a bitter cold, a signature of the season. The snow squeaks under each step and we carry on to the next town.
