From Eternity

Prologue

The moon can hardly escape the trees tonight, he thinks, as he gazes on that silver eye where it hung above a little thicket of bare, reaching branches. She is a kindred spirit, a being caught between two worlds. His bare feet are cold against the floor, the broken window pane digging into a gooseflesh-pebbled arm.

He watches and dreams with his ice-blue eyes wide open, gazing up, ever up. He dreams of warmer days fading away and breathes in slowly, steadily, the life of the moor. The garden is a wonderland of lights, tiny orbs of pastel pink and new green; ambers and blues, merging with touches of a gold and deep violet. An owl, enshrouded in ivory and nocturnal blue, glides across the face of the moon on silent wings. The blue stretches back, looping far away into the darkness beyond his sights, where a second owl keens out the hunting cry.

It is a sight he has watched shimmer into autumn for three weeks. It has been three weeks since a cottage illuminated by sunshine yellow struck his senses and drew him in, a moth to a flame. An elderly woman with an immense, coiled power sleeping within answered the door. She offered him a hot meal, said that she lived here with her son. He is both too polite to tell her that he dislikes parsnips and that her son is nothing but a ghost. She has no idea what she is; he has no idea how to tell her. The woman is ninety-three, and the golden life she stands within is slowly draining away to a milky spectre of what it once was. He gladly accepts the offer of a bed for the night, gladly helps the chores she needs him for, and so he waited for the milky pearl cloud to trickle away.

Three days ago he had prepared to leave.

Tonight his bags are packed by the door.

The owl screams, shrill and piercing, a raw sound that shatters the peace. Deep silence follows soon after, cool and dark and safe. He wanders down the hallway in a near-daze, feet barely touching the floorboards until he reaches her room. The golden light is vanishing into a realm where he holds no power.

She reclines in an armchair, her old body like paper come to rest after a storm. On the bed, a young woman made from pastel pink and rose gold is watching, the lights swirling in and out with every slowing breath. Both are smiling.

Her eyes open.

"Goodnight," he whispers, removing her wire reading glasses. They are still warm against his cold fingers, and he lays them very carefully on the arm of her chair.

Maybe she nods, maybe she smiles, and maybe his name just ghosts over already cold lips- something happens, but he can't see it. She isn't lit up any more, her shine is gone, and her eyes are closing with one last sigh.

For the first time, the house goes dark.