I emerged from the cellar doors with the sword in my hand and stepped out into the swirling sand. It was only after three footsteps that I heard Bellaina pull the doors shut behind me, and then clamorous chains sealed the exit. I glanced at the towering wall which surrounded Bones City behind me, but then I turned to face the starlit plains. Even as I walked away from the wall, I searched the sand for a trail of footprints, but I knew that this was pointless. Powerful gusts tore across the windswept world and wiped away my own footsteps in seconds. Her path was torn from the sand and stolen by the wind. My only choice was to wander across the land until our entangled souls found our way to each other like the unraveling of an invisible thread. I think it was always this way for the two of us. Destiny itself created the thread and bound us to each other, even if at first from a distance, like a lonely night illuminated by the pulsing flare of a shooting star.

It was not long before I saw a monster from afar. It stood out in the distance beneath the glow of stars. I felt a sudden urge compel me from the darkness of my soul; I felt an urge to kill it that was out of my control. I felt compelled to kill anything that stood in my way. There was nothing in that moment that I felt I could not slay. I didn’t care if it’s wrong, and I didn’t care what it’d bring—I didn’t care if I’d be judged at the end of all things. It was perhaps a premonition of the villain I’d become, but if I fought the monster there’s no way I would have won. Love and fury were not enough to overcome the beast, so instead I chose to turn away and run while discreet. The giant did not notice me; it stood alone and from afar. I ran on and chased the girl who dwelled in the sand beneath the stars. She is my rain and my shimmer; she is my shooting star.

Even as I ran for hours across the empty plains, I could still feel the aftereffects of the madness which drove me to slay the monster. Though it was a silhouette which showed no signs of aggression, I had steeled myself to strike him down if he dared to stand in my way. It left a bitter aftertaste in my mouth, for I had never considered myself a violent person. I tried to surrender myself to the classic adage that I am a lover and not a fighter. But when unknown obstacles and an unclear distance separated me from her, I came to realize that lovers and fighters are not mutually exclusive. Instead, I slowly came to consider that a lover is inherently a fighter, or otherwise he’s no true lover at all. Just as destiny itself had driven the two of us for eternal love, the circumstances of an apathetic world stood in our way. This is the nature of reality—this trial is imposed upon all love, and most people willfully accept that they cannot overcome the obstacles that they are dealt. Most people are resigned to their own powerlessness. But I am an optimist, which means I can still see the future in which these hurdles are destroyed. However, I am also a realist, and this means that the only way to vanquish the obstacles is if I am to crush them myself.

This determination pushed me endlessly onward, even as minutes turned to hours and hours faded to days. I ran through the starlit sands, circumventing giants while holding my sword close. I felt my body approach its breaking point, but I drowned my exhaustion with the whisper that I would find her again.

A silent brutality guards this desolate land. It is the strangling hold of competing predators; it is a race to see which assailant will strike you down first. More than anything, I discovered a new respect for Alyssa in the days I spent scouring the sands. I found myself running from silhouettes in the sandy gusts. I ate a plant with sharp thistles just to overcome the pains of starvation. I slurped moisture from leaves and drank the suspect waters of a murky creek. I felt like the desert could defeat me at any moment and claim my body for its own, but I also reminded myself that this was the world from which my Alyssa first arrived. I was at my limit in hours, but for her, this was once everyday life.

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

She rarely spoke about her time before Bones City, and whenever I asked, she said that fate itself compelled her to leave so she could find the soul with which she was meant to spend her life. So after losing the family which gave her her name, Alyssa had committed herself to the sea and swam for sixteen hours to the coast of Bones City. She bypassed the walls and climbed her way ashore during a gathering by the sea. Everyone was too distracted by the display to notice. Everyone except me. Something had driven me to watch the sea and not the celebration. I told myself that fate itself guided me to find her, and it was on that night that my story began. I had nothing worth anything until the night we first met.

But as fate would have it, it was on this night that our story ended. Like a good book with the last page torn, I felt my destiny evaporate when I found her in the starlit sand. Faint frantic footsteps scattered the ground around her. Alyssa had spent her final moments in this world first running and then fighting, clinging desperately to the world where we first fell in love. But in the end, her ardent struggle was simply overpowered by the brutality of the monster. She had collapsed in the sand in a puddle of her own blood, using the last of her life to reach for my hand from the darkness. The one arm she had left stretched toward our distant city; the other had her flesh scraped from the bone by broad teeth. Bite marks covered her quiet corpse. Her emerald necklace had been taken from her body. A monster had devoured a portion of her, but I had no interest in investigating the circumstances of our separation. As the finality of her death dawned upon me, I drew my sword and held it against my throat.

I convinced myself that predestination was more powerful than the fragility of our human bodies. The stars in the sky illuminated a parabolic path past any fault or failing. Even if we were to lose our lives, the thread of destiny still bound us together for eternal love. I convinced myself it was an obvious axiom. Fate was immutable, indisputable; it would not be limited by our ephemeral bodies. From the very start, they were too fragile to house our eternal love. I convinced myself that she and I would still fulfill our eternal love, but not in life. We could only be together in death, and I could join her as soon as I shed my fragile body in the desert sand beside her.

“I won’t let you traverse the afterlife without me. I will be with you so soon, my love. The howling wind warns me, but the dancing stars tempt me; I won’t let this worthless world lock us apart,” I said to the sword with one hand on my heart.

But even as my other hand prepared to swing the sword and sever my throat, I glanced again at her body. For reasons I cannot entirely put into words, I felt no anger even as I stared upon her desecrated corpse. I did not care about the monster that had certainly slain her. I did not care that it had partially eaten her. I did not care to hunt it across the badlands and exact some vague revenge. It would not recreate her. It would not in any way rebuild the future which evaporated in the moment that she died. I harbored no hatred for the city that banished her or the desolate plains which saw her end. I suppose one could call that the benefit of monomania. But for that same reason, I lowered the sword from my neck. Our love was an orchestra silenced before its crescendo, but suicide was nothing more than a desperate whisper—a hopeless longshot toward a future I could not fathom. Or perhaps it was no future at all.

I instead convinced myself to wander onward through the desert. It was years before that day, on a night with a gathering by the swift sea, that I overheard two city guards mention a place outside the wall. They muttered quietly about a forest where existence and the afterlife pierced the boundary between them. It was there that they had heard the voices of the foregone past; it was there that they had conversations with the dead. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was the only thing I had left. If I could find Alyssa in that lurid forest, then at the very least we could together embark on our road to eternal love.

The fact of the matter is that I was too weak to accept the reality of our dissevered eternity, so instead I chose to accept that I would never be the same again. I forced myself to envision an impossible future and stride breathlessly toward it.