Descending Star

EPIPHANY

Alice had been sitting on the floor, under the electronic keyboard, staring emptily at the silent MacBook. She had been contemplating all that she had heard and labored to reconcile it from Ben's perspective. Prior to this session, only Ben had heard Colleen's testimony, poor Benjamin Swan alone, among all of humanity, over the past twenty thousand years. He had lamented, before parting and leaving her here, that the burden of that knowledge was killing him. She could not imagine the weight that he bore. She could not bear it, herself. He had not commanded her to destroy the thumb drive. She felt that this was demanded of her, but he had not specified, and she knew that it wasn't her place. She had tucked it under a baseboard, and she had been cowering against the wall, under the keyboard, staring up at the dark MacBook, ever since.

She understood, now, why Ben had refused to share even the most cursory summation of Colleen's testimony with Edythe, she who wanted nothing more of this life than to find some way to make the choice of Luthien, to forsake her immortality and live out a finite span of days as a mortal human, with her beloved, a universal fantasy of their kind, from a comparative infant, like Rex Hale, all the way back into antiquity, an endless progression of trapped and indentured parasites that could neither grow, nor complete themselves, nor culminate and finally die, their purpose upon this earth finally fulfilled. Vampires universally yearned for the gift of that escape, and so how much more acutely did Edythe suffer with that yearning, possessed as she was of a cherished mortal lover, with whom to share it?

Alice understood why Ben was being crushed under the weight of the knowledge that Colleen had imparted to him; she knew why that knowledge was killing him. He had known all along, ever since their crossing of the labyrinth into their garden, what Edythe had wanted from him, her single, solitary wish. And how much more acutely had that knowledge tormented him, with the steady progression of his recovery from the injuries inflicted by Jillian, as he had gradually regained his ability to love Edythe, as she so desperately needed? He had known, through the long road of his recuperation, why she had tirelessly and constantly attended him, soothed him, caressed him, fasted for him, starved herself in waiting for him; Ben had known all along that she had yearned for neither gold eyes, nor red eyes, but blue eyes. He had wanted it, too. It would have been so easy, so effortless, to give her what she had wanted, even in the early days of his recovery, when he had begged her for patience and had lamented the dysfunction of his broken body.

Day by day, she had exerted ever greater pressure on him, to give her the one thing that she truly wanted, and on the very day that the fiberglass casts came off, when he might have relented and given himself over entirely to Edythe's needs, diabolical Colleen had stepped in, with her preternatural omniscience, to burden his shoulders with the crushing weight of twenty thousand years.

Alice crouched under the keyboard, back against the wall, and struggled to formulate an escape for besieged Benjamin David Swan, a way out from under the terrible weight that crushed him, a means to allay his terrors, to mitigate his fear and trembling.

Colleen had told him, over the course of her testimony, what she believed Edythe's blue eyes signified, what would have become of their lovemaking, had they followed through with their promises and consummated the vows they had exchanged in the high grotto of the rock wall, behind the waterfall, seconds before Artemis had entered the scene to shatter their world.

Alice believed she could patiently convince Ben that Colleen was not infallible and could be capable of terrible errors, that she could have been wrong all these millennia, about what had happened to her, a near-eternal misapprehension that rang dolefully to this very day and colored her impression of the meaning behind Edythe's blue-gray eyes..

Perhaps Ben could be convinced that Colleen's belief system and perspective were incomprehensibly old, far older than any of them had imagined, since even as the human child named Cythæra, she had been burdened by her own ancient legends, which since her childhood had been lost by humanity and vampirism alike, lost to all knowledge, lost to the universe.