Primal Gambit

Epilogue: Doerrman's Paradise

Months passed like minutes once it was all over.

The inhumanity of the remote Antarctic outpost was nearly as cold as the frost-bitten winds that whipped against the walls outside. It was here on the outskirts of the world that Ridley would seek respite. He needed not speak to a soul had he wished – the sounds of the bombing and the drilling and the fracking his only connection with the outside world.

He sat down at the foreign desk and opened the empty journal. It was no surprise to him that the lined pages would soon be riddled with bleeding ink that etched his thoughts into something physical, something he could return to whenever he felt lost. The pen rested heavy in his palm, a deadlier weapon than the many rifles he took into his paws during the years of service that would forever torment him. A dull light flickered against the worn and faded table. Unable to recall the last time he wrote by hand, Ridley couldn't decipher the truth behind the sudden urge to write. Whether it was a pointless act to deceive a coy mind or the meaningful journey to deeper thought, the weary expat touched the tip to the paper and released his demons.

It's now clear that I've lost my struggle. To track my prey in the dead of night, to stalk Vikhr – wherever in Siberia he has gone to wage his war, to hunt down Shuke for taking from me what, in the end, he has attained. No matter who it may be, my acts would not be justified. I have lost. I am lost. That is the difference between Vikhr and I. He grew up with the ideals of vengeance, I grew up with love. His fight has just begun. My fight never began.

The truth unobscured itself to him then. Blurry for all his life but now for the first time coming into focus.

Paradise was lost. Unobtainable. Forever out of reach now.

Though on the coldest of nights in the dead of winter, when a lumbering aircraft tore the clouded sky in half, a trembling Ridley Doerrman would become more nervous than during the briefing of any operation.

Because he knew that when the hooks of the ship clawed into the runway and the two worlds were joined together, when that metal blast door fell, Valerie would be on the other side to bring him back to life.

And so throughout his life, for brief and fleeting moments, he was in the arms of paradise.

He was simply unaware of its presence.

I've been down the long road, the dirt path, the shortcut. I've gone one way on a fork in the road only to turn back and go down the other. Point is, we will never find paradise. It is our friends, our families, our struggles. Paradise is the end of a life well-lived. It's having had something to fight for, someplace to revel in, someone to care for. When all substance has ceased to present itself, the fight becomes something both futile and pointless. Devoid of meaning, clinging to what we once loved becomes a battle for revenge – for a false sense of completion. Of peace.

Paradise isn't a place, just the feeling you get when you're exactly in life where you're supposed to be.