The Short Mortal Life of an Immortal - Writing Competition Post

This is for a writing competition hosted by @kyrios. You can see the post and the prompt HERE
For any writers out there - you have till September 15th to enter, and if you're into fantasy at all, the prompt is pretty interesting.

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The Short Mortal Life of an Immortal
It is her hands he misses most, the soft trailing of fingers down his arm, his back, the line of the vein along his neck. He lies on the feather cot, a ghost of the bed he’d shared with her for two decades, and lets his eyelids fall closed. He pictures those soft, soft hands on him. There is an ache he shouldn’t feel in the pit of his belly, a sadness. He lies still wishing he could sleep. Wishing his body was made in the new way, of flesh and blood and guts. Wishing he carried his scars on the outside, a wrinkle for every worry, a line around the mouth for every moment she had made him smile.

But his body was forged in the Elysian Temple, his birth swift and painless. A melding of the song of firebirds and water-spirits, an elemental dance as thin and practiced as any of the rituals he’d endured for the centuries that followed. A collection of long days and longer nights, until the one that changed everything.

It is starting to storm outside the cave and he wishes he had the will to send it away.

It stormed the day he’d met her, too. There was a coolness in the air as it swirled around him. His peasant tunic kept lifting and whipping against his skin and he was strangely thrilled that he could feel it. He’d stopped at the scarred door to the shack, faced the wind and let it lash his face, his neck, the exposed flesh of his chest. A soft click alerted him to her presence and he turned. The whine of the wind at his back suddenly thinned, muffled, as if water-logged. He felt a kind of tension, a strange tingling in his blood he couldn’t explain as he took her in.

She wore a white dress, the fabric flowing down to her bare feet, hugging her form, as if molded to her--a serpent’s skin. Her dark hair whipped about her face, a frantic dance of silky waves, but her eyes were on him and calm. He found it hard to hold her gaze. Harder still to tell her who he was and what he was there to do. They stared at each other in silence for a long moment. He could hear the wind clearly again, could feel its bite on his skin, but it no longer felt a comfort that he could share in something so human. It felt a foreboding of dark things to come.

He never did find the courage to tell her what he was that day and for many days and years after that. She took him in as a weary traveler who’d lost his mule and luggage in the storm. He stayed for just over two decades. He’d made her father’s passage a painless one, more out of guilt than any real compassion. That would come later––the stirrings of the lightest and darkest of human things. The punch to the gut when he held his son for the first time, his heart not beating, no matter how hard he tried to coax it to. The helplessness, the impotence of it, the fear of having to tell Belsie, the overwhelming sadness at not being able to save this tiny being made in the new way.

He’d sworn that he’d leave then. He had convinced himself that he was being punished for abandoning his duties; for running away like an unruly teenager would. He could almost picture the Council presiding over the fate of a little child, a child who’d never gotten a chance to be. They’d have treated his son as a minor annoyance, a pesky task that simply needed to be done to teach him a lesson. He’d go back, he’d decided then. He’d do what they wanted of him. This other thing––that he could never face again.

But he didn’t leave. Belsie needed him, though it was more than that. He had grown soft in the quiet shack in the simple village. Soft and content. He had grown too used to smiling at the few locals he’d befriended, too used to the cool pre-dawn mornings at the side of Milory Lake, a line swaying gently in the water, fish the color of liquid silver nudging at the bait on the hook. He’d never caught much, but Belsie would greet him as if he’d slain a dragon whenever he’d caught anything at all. But more than anything, he couldn’t give up the moments before she’d wake. The lines of her face soft, childlike. Her skin glowing as the sun just started to pink the sheer white curtains, throwing wide swaths of light into the room. He’d watch as the corner of her lips turned up into a small lazy smile. Two breaths and her hands would come up, fisted as if defying the sunrise, and rub at her eyes. She’d finally look at him then, still smiling, and he couldn’t help but smile back.

Sometimes, she’d reach for him, and they’d make love, slowly, without words. In those moments, she’d watch him watch her, openly, not ever hiding from him, her eyes a pale amber in this light.

The wind whips a rock or a branch against the wall of the cave and he jerks himself to his feet. He paces to the entrance, a small spirit light a white globe in his hand, just enough to see by, but not so much that it would give comfort or warmth. He no longer wanted either.

When Ellie was born, her tiny heart strong and loud, her eyes the color of her mother’s in pre-dawn light––he should have left then. He knew he should have. The little girl was a gift, an atonement by the gods for taking his first born. It was also a clarion call to come home. He should have heeded it, but he was too weak by then. And Belsie…. The way she was with Ellie–there was a magic to them, a kind of magic he couldn’t part with. It made his heart ache in love and fear for them both. He felt then, especially then–in those happy moments of observing Belsie put Ellie to bed, the simple act of wrapping his daughter up in a lavender blanket–that the price for this kind of happiness would be too high. And yet, he could not leave. Not when Belsie got sick and he couldn’t fix her any more than he could fix the hole in his son’s heart. Not when he'd finally told Ellie who he was, guilt making him want to vomit. Not when Ellie had gotten pregnant by the one she loved. He had gone to her then to warn her, and it hurt worse than anything to tell her about the brother she never got to meet. But Ellie always had been stubborn and she had wanted the child. She’d slammed the door in his face that day and wouldn’t talk to him for the long two months it took Belsie to die.

That’s when he finally left, but he left a being diminished, robbed of his power to do much beyond survive, and that was the most painful thing of all. He’d wished the Council would simply let him go to wherever his Belsie went. That they’d release him from having to live with what he’d done. With who he was.

A soft thud against the door of the cave. Another rock, maybe. Again. He faces the door, spirit light shaking in his open palm. He thinks they have found him after all and will now drag him back to Elysium, will make him beg their forgiveness. He knows he will not go, but still, he shivers though he does not feel cold. He takes the few steps to the door and removes the spell keeping it shut. A head of silky brown hair pokes into the barely lit space, looks up. He is staring at the amber eyes that belonged to Belsie and Ellie after her, set in a young boy’s face. His chin free of any dusting of adolescence lifts defiantly, a small smile curving his lips as he speaks: “I was told I’d find you here. I’m Argon, Ellie’s boy. She….” The boy swallows hard, looks down. Shakes the too long hair. Looks up again, jaw set. “She wanted you to know she’d forgiven you after all. For everything.”

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note: there are some fantastic folks at MSP Fiction Writers Workshop who'd made this story a heck of a lot more readable than it would have been without their help. For any writers/aspiring writers, if you're not a member of that nifty spot of the Steemit/Discord universe - you should really check it out. Follow the link below: