Regret is more complex than all other human experiences. Simple definitions simply don't define regret. In youth, the individual-human or the human-species, has only a superficial use for regret. With age, immortality, the true complexity and the real meaning of regret becomes clear. Yet in a contradiction, in this clarity, regret becomes impossible to define.
"Death is our enemy! Our species grew up with death and formed a bond! It is a relationship of bondage and attachment! We are not a people that need death; in order to define ourselves or to be happy!" Iyereyi was screaming at the crowd. A tearstreak of blood had formed on her right cheek and now another scarlet droplet glistened on her left.
"CAN'T YOU HEAR ME?!" she finished with a scream. This became more of primal shriek as she collapsed to her knees. Her lips trembled and then closed. The drop of blood fell from her left eye and splatted into an asterisk on the alabaster pavilion. A sort of dimming and echoing silence felt like deafness in the wake of her ravening thoughts.
The crowd did not looked pleased by this preacher-girl. Angry witch-burning scowls of blackhole eyes consumed her image. Her braided hair of half dirty-white and dark-orange and her translucent-cyan earrings, shaped like diamonds, marked her as a Believer. The last of her kind. The Belief was a dead religion. Nobody wanted to hear her evangelism.
They were all wearing the black and white patterned robes of Cyclists. The Cycle, although founded on death, was very much alive. A faith of twelve hundred immortals, all three hundred thousand days old, had between them a million-years-worth of reasons to desire death. And death had become a guarantee in the world of Ruin.
Standing apart from the one who raised her voice and expressed her will against so many was an observer. This was Svetlana. She herself had once worn the robe of a Cyclist. She had once braided her hair with the sign of a Believer. She had even made a pilgrimage to Cryonicle. Standing there alone as the youngest of all living humans she was unique. In her short life she had embraced each of the primary understandings and found each to be incomplete and insufficient for salvation.
She had not found death at Cryonicle. She had not solved the knot of eternity with faith alone. She had not wanted to die when the opportunity came as her only escape from suffering. But each experience had taught her something. She now knew something none of these people knew. Yet.
The Cyclists had exhausted the apologetics of their last spiritual obstacle. They had waited before Iyereyi until she could not stop them with her willpower. Then they opened the gates into the Temple Of Humanity with their own collective willpower. It was astounding that one human had held them shut against the will of so many. Then they went past her inside.
"No." Iyereyi protested in a hoarse and broken whisper. This was no roar. It was the whimper of defeat. She knelt there with her head aching and sore from screaming for so long.
The greats doors closed behind the last of them. Inside the Rite Of The Cyclists began. And ended.
Svetlana went to her and walked up to her. The trembling woman kneeling at her feet was unresponsive to her presence.
"I witnessed what you did. You truly are alone." Svetlana tried not to sound condescending but her words and tone somehow came out that way.
"Leave me." Iyereyi wished the shadow befalling her to torment her no longer. Her voice was like the gasp of the dying.
Svetlana realized Iyereyi, in that moment, wanted the same thing the Cyclists had desired for so long in agony.
"That is what they felt like. You did not understand. They did not listen." Svetlana made no effort with her further words. They were biting and cold. Like Cryonicle. No sense of warmth or compassion. Just pragmatism.
"Alone." Iyereyi was so quiet now. Like midnight following dawn. Silent darkness after a nova sunrise. The contrast struck Svetlana, but she would not turn away until she was finished speaking.
Svetlana was about to say: "There is another way to see life and death and there is another answer." except she did not know how to explain it if her subject were to inquire to such a promise. Although she now knew it in her heart she could not yet explain this deeper meaning she had found.
She walked back the way she had come. Or another way. She was wandering without direction.
The effigy of the Apostate seemed to be magnetically repulsed from the Temple Of Humanity and it was like following gravity to the ground. Her feet wanted to yield to the pressure of walking away from such a dark place. She imagined the giant walking slowly beside her. Then as evening fell and she found an ancient highway she turned and followed this new road.
There in the distance stood a lone figure. She knew she must be seeing things. Lack of sleep and such bitter revelry had let this apparition slip through a crack in her memory and onto the dusty pavement. There stood Desmond. He was smiling. The ghost's smile made her feel very old.
"There is a way." he promised.
"I was told by my mother to never speak to the dead." Svetlana stopped and beheld him. She tried to smile back, but the effort made her cry instead.
"Your mother? Did she follow that rule?" Desmond always knew what to say. At least now that he was gone he always knew what to say. In life he had sometimes struggled to make himself understood.
"She did not. When I was a child I would wake up sometimes and she was talking to someone. There was nobody there."
"Was she speaking to your father?"
"Yes."
"How did that make you feel?"
Desmond had asked her how she had felt. She knew that as a grown woman she could easily identify the emotion. She also knew it would help her to understand the experience she was thinking about. But some ancient and proud sense of womanhood insisted she not make things so simple for herself. Instead she told Desmond to tell her how she had felt by saying:
"I don't know."
"You were afraid. It was a dream you were missing out on. A love you could not receive from your father was there and you could not perceive it." Desmond explained carefully. He was right.
"I pretended I could see him too. So that maybe he would see me, and be there, and I could have my father in my life." Svetlana was crying as she spoke this out-loud.
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Desmond stood there for a long time as Svetlana sniffled and wiped away relentless tears.
"I am going to tell you who he was." Desmond had an impish gleam as he said this to her.
"You can't. You are from my memory. You cannot know something I cannot know." Svetlana almost smiled and almost laughed at the absurd offer. Instead it make her let out a post-crying breath, like hissing and puffing the cold air in reverse. It burned until she coughed. Then she looked up smiling warily at her friendly apparition of Desmond.
"He was the poet, Arvil. The one who wrote Argosy. Your own mother was a Cyclist. How could she follow him when she had to stay behind and take care of you?" Desmond unveiled the shadow that had haunted her for one lifetime.
"My mother was no Cyclist." Svetlana frowned. She shook her head and walked past the apparition. Desmond was dead. He knew nothing anymore except being dead. She had buried him a long time ago it seemed. But in her heart she knew it was the truth.
She walked all night. She had done this the past few nights and sleep deprivation was playing games with her. Like a spider toying with a fly. She saw this happening and realized she had stopped to watch.
Dawn found her staggering forward clutching the effigy she carried. There was some kind of deserted settlement ahead. It sat amid the shattered rubble of some destroyed city. With their own hands they had built it. Now they too were dead.
Sleep caught up to her and tackled her. She hit the ground and lay there breathing. The cold grass felt so soft and inviting. There she slept until she was found.
Svetlana awoke in darkness. She sat up and realized she was in a bed. She was uncovered by a warm yet ragged blanket. "Hello?"
"Yes, I am here." An old woman sat in the gray light of dusk by the exit.
Svetlana just sat there for a moment. She wanted to ask this person to explain where she was and who she was. She wasn't sure how she wanted either questions' answer explained. So she said so:
"I don't know how you should tell me, but if you could, then where am I and who are you?" Svetlana made this inquiry. She old woman smiled warmly and with a fondness for such depth.
"Who I am? I am just Kaira, an old woman. Where are you? In my home. We are near the center of the old city of Ulbri. In the Province Iowa. The world is Ruin, this earth is Ruin. But that tells you nothing. I see that tells you nothing." Kaira looked out at the gathering gloom outside and her gaze drank it in before she sighed and turned to her guest and said what Svetlana wanted to know, after Svetlana said:
"And?"
"I don't know who you are. You are like a lost child wandering alone in a desert filled with broken things and bones. And that is where you really are. I am the one sitting here that can see this in your frightened and troubled eyes. How they shine there in the shadows."
"Thank you." Svetlana was crying again. The pain was less and the relief was more. It was easier to be recognized and seen.
"While you slept I planted it there in your dreams." Kaira had a trailing-away quality to her confession that Svetlana identified. She was talking about the one called Apostate. It had infected with terror the enemy Cryonicle and chased away a monster. Now it had gone back to where it belonged.
She could feel it lodged in her skull, damming up the ghosts leaking out into the night from her memories. There was so much clarity now that all the confusion that came before was, in itself, confusing.
"I see. And what must I do now?" Svetlana knew she would, of course, be needed and called upon once more to carry the warrior into another impossible battlefield.
"Go back the way you came. Return to the place and take it there. It does not belong here in this world. We have no time left for heroes. It is too late for this world." Kaira nodded and spoke sagely.
"Desmond did not think so. He brought both of us here, me and this Apostate of your Ruin!" Svetlana blurted out in passionate protest. She wasn't to be sent off to some make-believe or dreamy Otherwhere.
"Desmond?" Kaira hesitated. Suddenly the old woman did not know everything. The name of a man she had forgotten so long ago invoked uncertainty in her.
"He died trying to stop Cryonicle. What could possibly be left that is as bad as that?" Svetlana attempted to reason with Kaira.
Kaira considered this and in some calamitous logic she concluded that Svetlana and the Apostate she carried must be gotten rid of. Sending her home was too simple and wouldn't work. They had to die. They had to die a thousand times, burned away. There was only one thing she knew of with the destructive power to destroy an empathical. The giant robots, even as just imaginary friends or as memories, still retained an almost invincible status.
"I will show you." Kaira cackled.
She led her guest outside to a place where many people had lived. Now just one remained a resident. There on the ground was one of the last working sleds. They climbed into it and Kaira guided it at great speed through the air to their destination, far away.
On the horizon it stood watching them come. The sled landed and the two women got out and continued on foot. A massive tower amid a blackened landscape. Arrays of reflectors caught magnified sunlight and pushed the protons towards the eye of the scorched tower. In the heavens were the angels of this fire god. One by one an endless phasing of satellites stole energy from an even more powerful fire deity and gave it to the earthbound destroyer and savior.
"Solariel?" Svetlana recognized the burning tower. She almost refused to believe it was operational and diabolically commanding fire as a force of destruction again. This was supposed to be a cold monument to an old legend. A myth.
"Apostate." Kaira was saying to the watchful eye of flames as she pointed to the young woman from behind.
Without warning a beam of hot energy traveled from a distance between them and the top of the tower and rent the ground with a clawing rake of fiery doom. It was quickly coming towards them. There could be no escape.
Svetlana was loudly and hysterically screaming when the incendiary jet of energy hit something that was suddenly there. Something taking the full blast of the furnace-breath out-of-nowhere. A towering metalclad figure stood like an armored knight between the two women and the burning beam. Then the beam ended.
Solariel had to recharge for a moment. It was then that Svetlana saw it there. It was Silver Swordsman. The warrior was home again, armed and ready for battle.
"Get behind me!" Silver Swordsman's voice was like a charming cavalier. But the urgency was undeniable. Both humans stood in its shadow as another blast lanced across the battlefield and struck with such heat and force that the mechanized knight was driven backwards step by step, leaning against the inferno's torrential push. Is two-toed feet dug furrows as they clutched scorched earth.
As the second attack ended it was evident that Silver Swordsman had sustained painful burns to the countless and sensitive nerves. Bluish-white smoke was steaming from it and the edges were blackened.
"Are you alright?" Svetlana worried.
"It does hurt like nothing I have ever felt. I must destroy this...thing." Silver Swordsman readied itself to charge on its long spindly legs.
"Solariel." Svetlana identified the tower.
"Right." Silver Swordsman somehow sounded pained and battle-frenzied. Thrown into yet another pitched battle without warning; it did the necessary dash without fear.
They watched as the lone assailant seemed to shrink ever smaller against the mighty sky-smoking fortification.
Jet after jet of flames blasted down charring and punishing the approaching warrior. Solariel relentlessly tried to defend itself with all its fury. Its enemy, it knew as Apostate, could only withstand so much heat before it would burst into molten wreckage. Solariel knew this. It had burnt up empathical giant robots before. The enemy was glowing and another spear of heat would be the last.
Then something was spinning crazily upward through the air. The sword was torn free and hurled with the herculean strength of the fully powered enemy machine below. If it could bellow a roar of defiance it would call out the accursed name of its deadly foe. Solariel would rave:
"Apostate!"
But it was forced to die in dignified silence as its control over its core stabilizer was severed by the blade. Thus impaled in its heart the tower stopped its attacks against Silver Swordsman. For a moment it sat silent. Then flames began to erupt from it all over, anywhere they found an opening. Vast dark clouds of smoke gathered above it and lightning cracked like demon whips from the clouds. Many of the bolts arched down and caressed the monolithic structure.
Then the top exploded and it was so huge and far away that the crumbling tower seemed to fall almost slowly. Seconds later the ground trembled and a blast swept outwards signalling the final demise of Solariel. The top half was now in chunks all around the bottom half, burying itself.
And Silver Swordsman.