Chapter Two – Echoes and the Infinite Spiral

I walked for days through the dark desert with just a sword in hand; I trudged endlessly onward through an ocean made of sand. I searched every horizon for any sign of trees, but all I ever found was a forceful desert breeze. I lost the love of my life and lied to my head; I swore to myself that she wasn’t really dead. I both denied and lamented the tragedy, but it burrowed in my heart like a cavity; the truth was inescapable as gravity. I screamed in my head to force myself on track; I swore to myself that one day I’d have her back. I forced my frail legs to stumble on the path, whispering the reality that there was nowhere to go back.

I wandered that windswept plain for what felt like an eternity, but I limited my body to only its most essential functions. My legs ambled onward with practically no instruction or direction. My eyes scanned the starlit sand for silhouettes of either giants or towering trees. But just as my body endlessly traversed the desert to distance myself from her body, my mind danced hopelessly through histories and hypotheses to distract itself from the finality of love and loss.

Bones City always had a fascination with those that they call heroes. Even when I lived at the orphanage as a child, we were occasionally visited by a group that called themselves Vaida’s Disciples. Vaida was the name of an ancient hero to the people of Bones City. The story goes that she herself first lived as an orphan in our city countless generations ago. Like many others at the time, she lost her family in flames to an Interfectus—an ancient demon of flashing blades and shifting shadows. She set out to take revenge and strike down the demon, but before she did, she spent her time in the orphanage as an inventor. She designed low-tech weapons and vehicles which steered the course of progress for years to come.

The story goes that she and a second hero both died defending helpless people from the shadow demons, but they found her notebook some short time later. She had written countless pages detailing mathematics and her observations of the physical world; she wrote the foundational treatise for science as we knew it. This group felt compelled to instruct the orphans to follow in her footsteps; they taught us the fundamentals of math and science in hopes that we could use her knowledge to build a better world. They were overall quite successful, as many of their students went on to facilitate the technological boom which made Bones City so prosperous. But as for me, I simply studied the material and learned the concepts; I never had the ingenuity to invent anything worthwhile. I retained many concepts that I seem to have internalized, but constancy is the one that hangs heaviest in my head. The law of conservation of mass, the law of conservation of energy—it is the notion that there are certain quantities in this world that can never truly change. They can transform in type but never in number.

In my younger years, I stumbled together a hypothesis of my own to explain the ebb and flow of misery in our broken world. I call it the law of conservation of happiness. Just like the total mass which builds this universe, or the total energy which sets all life in motion, or the total water which dances between the sea and the sky, I believe that there exists an immutable sum for all things in this world. Happiness itself is bound by this same constraint, which means to me that any happiness we find in this world is invariably stolen from someone else, indirect though it may seem.

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This means that when Alyssa was thrown from her life of comfort to the outside of the wall, humankind seized the happiness stolen away from her. When she wandered for days in a desolate land where only monsters lurk, she lost the last of the happiness she had taken from the world. When I found her body in the darkness and buried her beneath the stars, I lost everything that mattered to me. With every step as I wandered the desert, as I slowly came to accept the gravity of her eternal absence, I lost a small portion of the little I had left. I thought of myself as a bowl begging to be filled, but I have a small hole in the bottom through which all water I find eventually leaks out. The ocean itself could not fill this broken bowl. It all leaks out of me, never to return. And just as water may trickle down a mountainside and wander into streams or lakes, the happiness I lost was not simply gone. Nothing can be created or destroyed. The happiness which pours out of me inevitably trickles into the lives of others. They are enchanted by my misery. It is a mathematical truth that the rest of the world is happier because of the tragedy that stole her away from me.

I think there are people who would find solace in knowing that their tragedies leave surplus happiness for the others who wander helplessly through this hopeless world. There are those who would find solace if, after having their wealth stolen, realized that a portion of their wealth was given to those who needed it most. There are those who would find solace in sacrificing themselves for others in the world. I envy those people because they possess a clarity I could never achieve for myself, but I am not one of those people. I owe nothing to the people of this world.

I told myself as I walked through that desert that if I had the power, I would crush everyone and everything. I would intentionally destroy their lives and rob them of their happiness so that it could flow into me instead. Perhaps, then, as the universe struggled to realign itself into equilibrium, death itself would bend over backward to give her back to me. After all, Alyssa is the only thing that ever meant anything to me. Like water overflowing a bucket with only one hole, the stolen happiness would have no choice but to pour itself back into me by recreating her. Otherwise, it would violate the law of conservation of happiness.

But as I dreamed of distant joys which I sought to steal, I swore to my soul that that dream was not real. It was a hope and a prayer and a makeshift ideal, but the hole in my heart still would not heal. There was even a moment when I dropped down to kneel, when I screamed to the sky as some hopeless appeal; I swore if it’d save her that I would make any deal. But God is unhelpful, uncaring, unreal. He stayed in the stars and used the clouds to conceal. It was then and only then that the truth was revealed. I could not have her back, no matter how much happiness I stole from the people of this world. If I truly believed it would recreate her, then perhaps I could convince myself to betray my peaceful nature. But I could not convince myself that my calculation was true, because as mentioned before, I am an empty bowl with a hole in the bottom. Even if I could refill with water, it would not last forever. Reality itself had condemned me to misery without her.