Mistwalker

SEVEN Grey

I watch her move through the village. She’s distinct from the rest. Her light has shape now. It outlines the fall of her hair and the sway in her step. The others simply gleam, so many fireflies in the dark.

She’s seen me. Recognized me. But she doesn’t come.

Why doesn’t she come? Is there some trick I’ve never learned? Some secret that Susannah kept when she trapped me here? Standing on the cliff, I try to be a beacon. It’s foolish; wishful thinking. Even if she could make me out at this distance, I’d be a firefly, too.

If I were a siren, I could sing to her.

If this were a fairy tale, I could send a tainted apple.

But this is a curse, and curses come with torment. I’m supposed to suffer, and this is a brand-new agony. I spent so many years holding back the fog because no good man, no man with scruples, would buy his freedom with someone else’s blood.

Now I realize, I’m not a man anymore. And she’s a trick of the light, no more real than a daydream. In fact, she’s worse than a daydream. She’s a glimmering ring of promises, just out of reach. I can go round and round, forever reaching for it, forever missing it.

Hope is the thing that torments me.

So it doesn’t matter that she’s thinking of me. That she’s seen. That she knows. There will be no rescue. No salvation. And I will spend two thousand years in this lighthouse, twenty thousand, eternity.

Unless I do that thing. I wonder now, why shouldn’t I?