The Tearsmith

Thorns Of Regret

The first time he saw her, they were five years old.

She arrived on a day like any other, as lost as they all were, motherless ducklings.

She stood there, framed against the wrought-iron gates. The colours of fall swallowed her brown hair and the leather of her unlaced shoes.

She hadn't been anything more than that. He remembered her as dispassionately as one remembers a simple stone: lifeless, slender, moth-like, neglected. As quiet as the silent sobs that he had seen on an endless sequence of faces.

And then, she turned to face him, leaves swirling around her.

The ground shook, the world stopped, his heart skipped a beat. He was overcome by the sight of her eyes, the like of which he had never seen before – stunningly, dazzlingly grey, more sparkling than water. Shimmering like the fairy tale, Rigel saw her otherworldly eyes filled with tears and clear as glass.

He froze when she turned her Tearsmith eyes on him.

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They had told him that true love never dies.

That's what the matron had told him, when he asked her what love was.

Rigel couldn't even remember where he had first heard of this fabled love, but he spent the mornings of his childhood searching for it – in the garden, inside hollow tree trunks, in other children's pockets, in his clothes, in his shoes. It was only later he learnt that it wasn't like a coin or a whistle.

It was the older boys who told him about it. They had felt it first. The most reckless, or maybe just the most mad.

They spoke about it as if they were intoxicated by something invisible, intangible. Rigel couldn't help but think they seemed even more bewildered, lost, but happy in their bewilderment. Shipwrecked, castaways, lured by a siren's song.

They had told him that true love never dies.

It was true.

It was useless to try to shake it off. Love stuck hard to the walls of his soul like pollen on a bee's legs. It was a condemnation of poisonous nectar, smearing his thoughts, breath and words, sticking to his eyelids, tongue and fingers. There was no escape.

One glance from her had torn his chest asunder, obliterated it with one flutter of her eyelashes. She had branded his raw heart with her Tearsmith eyes, and torn it away from him before he could clutch it back.

Nica had ransacked him in the blink of an eye, leaving him with a writhing, burning sensation in his chest. Without ever having touched him, with nothing but the ruthless, devastating grace of her delicate smile and those subtle moth colours, she had left his heart bleeding in the doorway.

They had told him that true love never dies.

But they hadn't told him that true love tears you to shreds, that it roots itself inside you and ensnares you in its clutches.

The longer he looked at her, the more he couldn't tear his eyes away.

There was something about how sweetly, how gently she moved, something childlike, small and true in her sincerity. She looked out at the world through the wrought-iron gates, her hands gripping the bars, hoping, longing, in a way he never had.

He watched her wandering about barefoot through the overgrown grass, cradling sparrow eggs in her arms, rubbing flowers on her clothes to make them look less grey.

Rigel wondered how something so simple and delicate could have the power to hurt him so much. He pushed the feeling away as stubbornly as an obstinate child, burying it deep inside him, trying to stifle the seed of the feeling, nip it in the bud.