The Gloaming of the Gods

Albus was wading through streams choked with marsh weeds and cattails. The waters had lost their sweet, cool aroma; they were musky now, heavy with stagnation of life. The fog of this land was thick and yellowish, caressing his tired skin with filthy, deviant hands.

This was the middle land, the terrain of his hours between dream and awakening; the waste land of the divided soul. Purgatory was not a place of cleansing fire, but of rancid, still rivers, filled and consumed by weeds, traveled by those who cannot let go, even as holding tightly commutes the joy to mere tiredness.


The young students who sat before him with their fresh faces, like open windows and the dawn shining through, made him feel tired. He moved through the motions of daily activity; he washed himself and he pushed food down his throat, he taught the children to turn matches into needles and back again. He smiled and sometimes he convinced himself that there was Life behind the weary upward turn of his lips.

~~**~~

They sat in their damp Elysium, thighs touching, looking out over the grasses that rustled in the breeze. A wind that blew up from nowhere, and had nowhere to go.

Freya’s long fingers smudged a drop of moisture on his knee, rubbed the dark, clinging soil into a stripe of earth-colored pigmentation.

“I think,” she began haltingly, “that this is our last meeting here.”

He looked into her face, the beloved lines of her cheekbones and the set of her jaw line. She was still the barefoot, olive-eyed weaver of his dreams, and looking at her now he could almost feel the heat of those long nights in India. He could almost feel the thick-spun cotton sheets and the muslin of her old dress as he pulled it from her warm body. The spices and incense from the village came to him, along with the aching scent of the creeping jasmine plant that had wound around his window in the Flamel house.

Since they inhabited his dream, Freya smelled it too, and she smiled.

“India was our true Elysium.”

He brushed a strand of brown hair from her cheek. “And now you are saying goodbye to me again?”

“This is not helping either of us. I can see it in your face every night. I do not wish to mire you in these murky waters anymore, Albus.”

She would pretend all the rest of her days that she hadn’t seen the relief in his blue, blue eyes; she would never tell him. It was Freya’s gift to him.

Albus did not mouth any comforting platitudes to her. He wove no words of the future, nor did he say it was for the best; the best was not for them. He said only, “I have filled myself so with these nights in Elysium that I have forgotten to live. But I love you, Freya…and that love will never wane.”

It was his gift to her.

~~**~~

The next morning rose up in a fury of crystalline beauty. The highland air knocked against his ribcage and Albus breathed deeply of its astringent purity. He stood by the open window and bathed in the sharp, cold air, his body waking and his thoughts turning in circles up through his mind.

He dressed and reached the door to his chambers before he saw the small woven basket on the floor. He lifted the covering and looked at the script of his beloved.

Albus~
Your feet are always so cold. Take these prosaic tokens for what they are – a wish and a prayer for you. My Love. All the things between us that can never be, I have woven into my loom, and finally I have found a use for the fabric.


Albus pulled the dozens of woolen socks from the basket and as he pulled a red pair over his feet he imagined he heard a faint echo of himself, telling some dark-haired boy that it did not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.

Today, however, it was only an echo.