Dawn's Return: a short story by Gulmaram (copyright 1999 by the author)
Dawn was rather long in coming. A bit too long. He anxiously gazed at the horizon, then told me he had to leave. It was false, it wouldn't last, there was no hope.
And so he left, his snowy-white wings outstretched and feathery. He couldn't be caught here, no, not with the likes of me. Not now, not never. I was the One, the Only, the Time-Eater and Mirror without a face of my own.
"Come back," I called to him, "My love, my warrior," but he was gone. And I needn't have really cared, but I did. Because I would spend the rest of my senseless day waiting, wondering, not knowing if I would see him again that night or if a silver-skinned prince of the night would be my visitor instead.
I led an odd existence, torn between the angels of the sky and the vampyres of the night. I was between, neither one nor the other of them, yet like both of them at the same time. I, too, had my wings, and I flew on the velvet wind and sang to the sky and stars. Also, I, too, drank the red juices of life to sustain myself and shifted my bodily form with practised ease.
They came to me in the night only. But that night after Adrian left me, no one came again. So my nightly masks became insane, and they stuck to my face when the sun still shone or when others were watching, the secrets of their otherworlds becoming trodden upon through me.
After Adrian left, I waited. I spent the day wearing my mask of Mary Vardit, The-Young-Woman-With-Smiling-Eyes, and danced amongst my friends, drinking sour coffee older than the coffee machine. I walked down the hall with that yellow linoleum that smelled like filing cabinets.
When night fell I went home and opened the window, flinging the drapes wide and shouting out to the sky that I was there, I was waiting, I could fly, and then I sang to the moon.
Adrian didn't come, which saddened me, because he was always kind and polite. His passion was young, warm, immature. He smiled with puppy-dog brown eyes, wanting nothing but to please me. His eyes lit up when I giggled like a child. He was only serious when it was time to leave.
Peter was the other one who visited me. He was cold, and he didn't come that night either. In the morning I wept silver tears for him, wondering if some Sun-Daughter had caught him, pierced his heart with golden rays and taken him from me.
I loved Adrian most, but Peter was my favourite. Tall, cold, with short hair and a cynical mouth. Though his skin was pale and cold, and his whole being was cold, his eyes burned with a green-gold light. That was his soul, but he didn't know who he was. We would sit in the shadows, sip each other's warm salty blood and talk of strange things.
I waited for one or the other of them until morning, remembering Peter's last words to me.
"You're one or the other, or you're not one of us," he said referring to angels and vampyres. I had come to believe I was both. By night only, of course. In the day I was Mary Vardit, The-Woman-Dancing-Like-The-Sun.
"You need to find a world to belong to," Peter told me. Then he kissed me, his thin lips hiding pointed fangs, and disappeared on the wings of the wind.
Mist. I could do that too, I often raced through the thick dark night, through trees and telephone poles, even through people and houses. I liked to let go. It was exhilarating to be free, instead of trapped under the mask of Mary-The-Bittersweet-One or The-Young-Woman-With-Hair-Too-Long.
At least a week had passed, the writhing serpent of Time inching forward slowly on her scaly belly. I missed them, unable to bear loneliness anymore, so I grabbed Lisa's hand as I danced down the hallway towards the cafeteria.
"Have you seen Adrian?" I asked her. "He's tall, six foot, with beautiful-brown-eyes that glow, and long brown hair in a ponytail."
Lisa stared at me, confused, holding her scalpel in her left hand. It dripped red blood onto the floor as she blinked at me.
"Oh, he has big white feathery wings," I added. "He's an angel."
With polite and absentminded precision she smiled at me and shook her head, then hurried down the hall back to the emergency room, where she was cutting up someone's body to save the poor wretch's life.
The hallway suddenly became very long, too long for me to walk down, so I went back to the office. My friends didn't notice me with my head bent. The light shining from my eyes formed pools on the floor instead of dæmonds dancing on the wall. When I sat down at a round oak table, then they noticed me. Because I raised my head to shake back my hair. Long, flowing, brown-red-shining silky hair.
"Mary, have you tried this new lipstick?" Elizabeth asked as she leaned close to me and drew smiley faces on my cheek with something from an Avon catalogue. Her breath smelled of gingersnaps, her clothes of Hollywood and mothballs, her hair of beauty-parlor shampoo, and her flesh of saucy happiness.
"Have you seen Adrian?" I asked.
"Who's Adrian?" she asked.
"He's an angel," I told her, lisping my words delicately.
She drew stick figures on the polished oak table with her lipstick. "King Arthur sat here once," she giggled.
The days continued to crawl by, still too slowly. I was still too lonely. I took a day off and stayed home. I never stayed home when I was sick. I wasn't sick, so I stayed home. But I was homesick and heartsick and I didn't know where I'd come from. Or whence I'd arrived.
The air on the balcony was hot, a sultry breeze teased the snowy feathers on my wings. Just when I was about to jump over the railing to fly, the doorbell rang.
"Ode to Joy" sounded through my flat. Here was where it all began, here would be where it all came to an end as well. Everything exists in a circle, revolving around itself, the snake biting its tale. No beginning and no end.
I opened the door to a man whose hair shone brighter than the sun, whose eyes were more dazzling than the deepest clearest sky. I led him in, no longer trailing my wings, wearing once more the mask of She-Who-Sings-Too-Much.
The stranger sat down on the couch and opened a beer. He smiled at me, drank nothing. His jeans were tight and he wore a loose leather vest with fringes.
"Have you seen Adrian?" I asked.
"The angel?" he asked.
"He's an angel," I replied.
"My name is Roger," he told me, the essence of the sun somehow not corresponding to his name, yet caught up in it all the same. Because the name labelled him, he filled the name with his essence, and the name mirrored who he was.
"Have you seen Adrian, Roger?" I asked. Delighted to know his name. Sometimes people aren't very revealing, like me. Roger was a stranger and I had told him nothing, not even the colour of my eyes.
"I don't have wings," Roger said. His voice a delicious British accent.
"Sing for me," I pleaded. I had to hear his voice.
"Nothing to say and nothing to hear
And nothing to see.
Each sensation makes a note in my symphony. "
His voice was more beautiful than his face.
"Have you seen Adrian?" I asked.
"Fly up to the sun, you have wings. You might find some answers. Me, I just got back from Brighton, I haven't been anywhere. I'm the key to some of your troubles. Give me your old treasure box, the one you lost the key for," Roger smiled. He held the beer can in his hand.
It took me a few hours to find it, buried and hidden under centuries of forgotten memories and layers of space. Space is what happens when someone gets obsessed with Time and becomes trapped in its web. I, the Time-Eater, jumped from place to place periodically to avoid boredom.
Pulling aside an Easter bunny and an old patchwork quilt, opening a small trapdoor in the ceiling, I finally found the box in a corner. It was rusty and the wood buckled from moisture, but a moisture long gone, because it was hot and dry now.
I brought it to him, and he opened it, much to my delight. Inside were three treasures: A peppermint candy, a frozen teardrop, and a pendant with a phosphorescent marble on it.
Thanking Roger profusely, I gave them all to him. He bade me farewell. I called out to him, begging him to stay, but like all the visitors I'd ever had, he knew when he had to leave. And he left then, without thought.
Dawn came the next morning like an Indian-rubber ball, bouncing with defiant spunk. I embarked on my journey, untying my hair and dressing in a simple translucent gown. Its loose folds clung to the contours of my body.
Spreading my wings, I leaped off my balcony, which was on the second-to-the-top floor of a fourty floor building. But I didn't go down, I went up. Because I could fly.
The wind kissed my face like a lover. Like Adrian had kissed me, so long ago. Like Peter almost had, once, an even longer time ago, when he was drunk from the sweet nectar of my veins. But his drunkenness faded, and he became cold and hard once more. But I never forgot that moment. I had seen his vulnerability.
Flying ever higher, my heart and lungs pumped madly until I slowed down. The chill air bit at my face. This was more like Peter now. Like his fangs. All around me, in the sky, I saw bits and pieces of the aspects of my friends.
Not only Peter and Adrian. The playful gusts and currents in the air, ruffling my feathers, tossing my long locks of hair around. That was Elizabeth. The air itself was Lisa. Firm, steady, accommodating, kind. There were others there too. I felt their strength, though it was only a manifestation of a resemblance of them. Their strength was still there for me to draw upon.
The air became thinner as I rose higher. And colder, until it was below freezing. My blood became thick brittle chrystals in glass veins. Rather than die, I dissipated the atoms of my being slowly. Mist, first, then wind. Soaring and free.
The particles of the universe flowed through me as I spiraled upwards. I was the One, the Only, the Wind-Child, Atom-Mother. I wasn't a magician and I never would be, but I was a shapeshifter. This was a new way to experience the world. No lungs pumping air through my body, no pulse guiding the ebb and flow of blood through my veins. I had no veins now, an odd sensation. Akin to that when someone has always worn shoes, all their life. Then they take a walk on the beach, barefoot. The liberty is exhilarating. The senses are opened up in a new way and bombarded with things impossible to understand.
I felt no cold, I only existed there, spiraling up towards the sun with a consciousness. Peter could never do this. No, the sun would claim the misty atoms of his essence as he dissipated, and he would be gone. Is that why he hadn't come?
And what of Adrian? He didn't fill my thoughts as much. Time was gone, swallowed up by a hungry skinny dog. The colours of the sky would have been beautiful, had I been able to see them, but without eyes my senses were quite different. Everything was within my soul.
Different layers of existence unfolded reluctantly like the petals of a virgin rose. There was me, there, an effervescing presence. And there was everything else. Particle after particle, neutrons and electrons, within me and out of me. All was infantesmal and and infinite. The world existed in whole and in halves and quarters within the smallest unit matter could be broken down into.
And beyond that, there was no matter. But there was a vast continuem, stretching, pulling, and growing with no inhibition.
Bursting triumphantly through the last barriers of the atmosphere and the planet's gravity, I catapulted through the thick void vacuum towards the sun. Roger's answers would be there. They should be there. But nothing was definite yet, nothing was even substantial. And it would feel very strange to feel again.
It was hot, almost too hot, so I held it delicately suspended between two fingers. Magnets rippled and pulsed under the surface at either end. Flames licked my finger nails, turning them a lovely orange-gold.
"Have you seen Adrian?" I asked.
"He's an angel," I continued.
"He's six foot tall, with the softest-sweetest-most-romantic-brown eyes, and he wears his long brown hair in a pony tail," I explained.
"Oh, and he has wings," I added.
My questions asked and answers received, I returned, following my old path back home. But this time the universe furled up tightly as I passed instead of opening. It was drawing me farther and farther in and closing tight, making escape impossible. And also return to the sun.
Shadows like black stockings crawled across the walls. I was Mary Vardit, The-Woman-Sighing-At-Night. But this time it was no moan of passion escaping from my lips. I was exhausted. Staggering over to my bed I collapsed and huddled deep under snowy mounds of comforters and posturepedic foam pillows. The mattress was plastic, filled with tears, not water, and covered with mattress pads of woven silk: the hair of exotic creatures long shorn and gone on to better pastures than mine.
Roger woke me in the morning. It was the morning, but there was no way to say whether it was next morning. There was no way for me to say anything because he pressed his finger over my lips.
"The sky is shining," he said, and I awoke to gaze at dawn.
The world lifted her soft veil slowly, her irises adjusting spasmodically to the light. Walls were bathed in ethereal sunlight. Dæmonds glittered on my eyelashes. Smiling with contentment for the fist time in three millennia, I lay back into Roger's arms. He was an Apollo incarnate, perfect in flesh and in voice, and in all else.
I spent the day turning cartwheels through the halls, introducing my Sun God to everyone who passed me by. His voice sang softly in my ear, then louder for my friends to enjoy. Elizabeth, grinning and making goo-goo eyes. Flirting with her finger tips instead of her eyes. Jim played the melodies of Roger's songs.
Dappled walls and corridors reeled and buckled under the strain of something new, something seismically different. Kaleidoscope windows stood between perception and the world. Or perhaps perception had always stood between the kaleidoscopes and the world. Now things were in order, yin and yang where they ought to be.
The file cabinets were older than ever before. Roger and I kissed each other like school children in the cafeteria before I went home. His radiance filled my lips and my finger tips, I needed no lamps in my flat.
He came to me by midnight. I had conquered Time at last and finished her off in my glass ice-cream bowl. A tasty pudding. He came to me by midnight, and there was ample opportunity for him. Roger lit up the world, his golden hair blazing. There would have been no need for the sun. So I spent day with him instead of night, nestling in his strong arms and tasting the exciting flavours of his skin. He sang to me of a Messiah who martyred himself out of love for his disciples although they rejected him.
I had loved before, but I had never been in love. This was childish and breezy. Care-free like whipped cream. We held hands and explored the inner landscapes of each other's mind. He didn't marry me because he wasn't the type and I was too different from him for the chemistry to work.
The day finally came, and it did take its time. Time's spawn, a bastard daughter, rose like a Phnix from its own flames and ashes. The calendar stretched out once more, pages and pages of little boxes hanging on the wall.
The day finally came in which I lost a piece of my happiness. As I wound a barbed-wire bracelet slowly around my wrist, a silver steel barb pierced my skin and vein. Red blood, a single shining drop, welled up and wept before my eyes.
Peter! Oh, dear Peter! My Prince of the Night. It had been so long since we shared our life's essence, sucking each other's warm red juices as the moon laughed down from the sky.
And Adrian! My sweet lover, my proud warrior. I remembered how he once bandaged one of my wounds, a wicked gash won from slipping off the couch in a fit of hysteric laughter. He was so worried when I fell onto the wine goblet, with the loud crunch of shattering glass.
Roger watched me, not knowing what to do, as silver icicle tears flowed down my cheeks, erasing the radiance he had infused in my very soul. He reached his hand out to me, an attempt at a comforting gesture, then stepped back away from me, aching and hurt to see me in such a state.
I smiled weakly at him, brushing away tears of mercury quicksilver, and said, "I need to find Adrian." My voice rang hollow, the clipped London accent slightly slurred.
He sifted his fingers through his thick golden curls and gazed at me helplessly. "I never know what to do when a woman cries." Pain filled his face.
I tried to comfort him, and embraced him, but the blood from my wrist stained his skin. Bitter little rubies clung to his body where my wound passed.
"Where does the sun go at night, when it's dark and cold?" I whispered sadly.
He stood up and walked over to the door of my flat. A cold, yellow door with red Egyptian fertility symbols decorating it. "It's been jolly good to know you, lassie, in all senses of the word," he told me as tears streamed down his face. Then he was gone, the door closing slowly after him.
"My love, my sweet!" I sobbed in anguish, but he was gone. My visitors always knew when it was time to leave, and always left, there was nothing I could do about it, except be broken by it.
Gloomy shadows filled every corner the next day. The yellow linoleum in the hall was faded and cracked. The walls loomed massive and dreary, cold and old and gotheque. Lisa's face was pale as she sat in the cafeteria. Elizabeth's usually cheery face was downcast and sullen.
My eyes were dimmed by tears, and thus the whole world was dark. A piece of the sun had gone away. Rain fell through cracks in the roof, splattering down on the round table and smearing Elizabeth's artwork.
"Have a drink," Jim suggested, pouring me a shotglass of tequila and setting it before me. The raindrops fell in, filling it to the brim with the sky's tears.
I didn't smile at him. I didn't say anything. Elizabeth said "I'll have it if you won't," and drained my glass, leaving a smear of bright red lipstick on the rim.
The daughter of chaos spread out her gnarled bony fingers, plucking random stars from the sky. Seconds turned to minutes, minutes to hours, hours to day, and days to weeks. Everything multiplied so quickly that soon there was no space left, everything was colliding, and nothing could ever makes sense anymore.
Everyone liked Elizabeth, but today she couldn't make us smile. I reached my hands behind my head, sifting my fingers through thick uncombed hair, and untied the old shoelaces that held my mask in place. Mary-With-Soft-Eyes fell to the table, an empty mask, its wooden hull filled with tears. Spreading my huge feathery white wings I soared up through a hole in the roof and out into the city.
I had to find Adrian before it was too late. And I had to find Peter. That fire behind his eyes, someone had to unlock him from his icy prison.
My journey slowly descended. Through one door after another I walked, down a long dark hall lighted with guttering sputtering billowing torches, set deep into miniature caves in the black chrystal walls.
Down into the earth, where Time hid her womb and bred hybrid drægons. My breath was quick, my heart was strained from the pressure, from the heat and weight of the world which rested more heavily on my shoulders for every step I took.
One must go into bondage to liberate another one in bondage. That's the way it has always been. I remembered the answers I got from the sun as it pulsed between my fingers, and smiled despite myself. I smiled despite everything. Despite the unrelenting blizzards, despite the war-torn homelands of tiny children, despite the wanton shedding of blood as prehistoric brutes battled over mates and offspring.
As the passageway widened into a cavern, Adrian stood in the middle of the huge subterranean room. The light shed by phosphorous cast an eerie glow over his features. He was older, his hair was shorter, and he knew much more than he had ever known.
"Love!" I whispered, falling to my knees, then stood up again to race over to him. "Love, what has become of you, my warrior?" My heart wept red tears, staining the front of my silk white shirt.
Adrian was bound by heavy chains, in a pose like a statue. He was likewise as immobile as a statue, but I hurriedly broke the shackles from his wrists.
"You are not one of us," he told me. Peter's words, not his! My heart thundered.
Biting my lower lip, bringing forth blood, I said "My love! They did this because of me?"
"I was caught, as I flew from your balcony. Nothing escapes my kind. Our eyes see everything." He still stood in the same perfect statuesque pose.
"Oh, love!" I moaned, half groaning, and pulled him away from where he had been standing. I folded him into my bosom and stroked his face, his shortened hair, his moist cheeks.
"I shall return with you!" he said with passionate determination. "Let them take my wings! I would rather be of your world, of your flesh, of your grounded sphere, than have immortality forced upon me from which I cannot escape. Immortality which binds my soul and forces me to be inhuman!"
I hugged him tightly against my chest. "Don't speak so," I whispered, kissing his forehead. The feathers of his wings were soft against my skin. We fell asleep in the cavern and returned to my flat in the morning.
Roger had returned sometime while I was gone, and left me one last farewell gift. On every step of the stairs leading up to the door of my flat, he had written "I Love You", and on my doorstep "Good Luck".
The sun had returned, bathing the world in universal brilliance. I was an angel by daylight, my world turned upside down, but it was a wonderful change. The warmth of Adrian's body against my own, the warmth of his breath against my neck, melted every last scrap of ice which the glaciers of more than a million millennia had deposited in my soul.
When the sun set he fell asleep in scarlet blankets before my fireplace. I combed my hair slowly, then stepped out onto the balcony. As I gazed up at the starry sky, Peter materialised out of the shadows of the night to stand beside me.
"Peter!" I gasped.
"As far as I know," he replied.
"I thought the sun had taken you." My questions about him had only ever been answered in riddles. I got no clear messages about like I had gotten about Adrian.
"Bright girl," he smiled without warmth.
"But then you'd be dead!" I cried in disbelief.
"Cats have nine lives." He did look very catlike suddenly.
I reached up my fingers and touched his face hesitantly. His skin was cold and pale, his eyes blazed with a fire he didn't know of. I took one of his hands in mine, brought it up to my face, and kissed his fingertips. "Peter, what have you been doing all this time? Why didn't you come back to me? You let me think some horrid fate had befallen you! I lost both my loves at once. Why did you do this to me?" I demanded. Was he really so lost in his eyes, in his cold frozen world of the undead, the night, the vampyres, that he didn't know he had hurt me?
I pressed my tongue against the edges of his perfect fingernails as I clasped his hand.
Peter gazed into my face, the flame in his eyes glowing a soft molten golden-brown. "You would have asked me questions. I would have had no answers. I would rather try to sip life through your experiences, try to live a little for you, even if it meant to die. I followed you on your journey to the sun."
A fierce flutter filled my chest, tears rushed to my eyes. I blinked them back. No wonder he had filled my thoughts so much as I floated, disembodied, up through layer after layer of altitude. He had died with me while I was born into freedom and light!
"Peter, why?" I asked, placing his hand against my cheek. His skin was so soft. Cold, but so soft.
"I love you," he told me.
And then I realised. Realisation welled up from the depths of my soul and from every nook and cranny of every single part of me. Just as Roger had warmed me and Adrian had melted all the ice within me, I had warmed Peter and melted all the ice within him. He loved me, he had always loved me.
I embraced him tightly, and he pulled me against his chest. He had no heartbeat, but I felt secure against his slender feline body. Safe, secure, and loved. He had always loved me. But the glacier within his soul held it all trapped, trapped behind his eyes, where it smouldered as it waited for me to release him. Now, the ice gone, the love was all there, all at once. He stood before me in his pure essence now, weeping on my protective embrace.
I placed my palms against his cheeks, turned his face to look into mine, and pressed my lips against his. The fire which had so far been only in his eyes now ignited his whole being, his whole body. Like a supernova, we glowed together as our mouths joined.
His fangs nicked my lips, but that didn't matter. Everything else was outshone by the brilliance of our union. Our souls, together, burning as one flame. Our tongues entwined like honey-suckle vines. He drank me in, this time not the juices of my life, but my very life itself, in all its vibrancy and vitality.
My soul opened up as he injected his fire into my heart. His eyes were clear molten rainbows now. His pale face was pale not from emptiness but from a shining white light we had infused each other with.
He stepped back from me, shifting habitually between flesh and shadow, but remaining substantial and material all the while.
"Peter, I love you," I said. I, Mary Vardit, Queen-Of-Life. I was the One, I was everything and nothing, I was an angel and a vampyre and a Sun-Child all in one. And I held the seeds of creation itself within my soul. I had finally chosen which world I belonged to-- I was just like everything else in the universe and thus a part of every single thing.
There was a strange look on Peter's face, half-ecstacy, half-rapture. "I should have known the sun won't take me," he whispered as he gazed at my breasts. I looked down and saw the burning golden orb pulsing within my heart. Roger had put it there, I was sure of it. And Peter had awakened it.
"I should have known," Peter continued, "the sun gives life, it doesn't take it. I have never lived until now, and it is the most wonderful thing!"
I hugged him with the deep affection of a friend. "Now that you are alive, where will you be staying?" I asked, hoping he would not leave me like he had before.
Peter shrugged. "Here and there. Here mostly, I suppose."
Nothing had changed. Oh, the fundamental essence of it all had changed. But nothing else had. Everything was still what it was. It was just more beautiful. It was just correct now.
Peter and I went into my flat, the sun in my breast lighting the world. We curled up together with Adrian by the hearth. Amethyst chrystals danced in the fire, with slender figures proclaiming their freedom in the smoke from the chimney.
Time was our sister now, as she crept up to us slowly and hesitantly like a starved child who must steal for food. We opened our arms and embraced her, drawing her to our bosoms.
Dawn came soon enough, rising from my breasts and spreading over the world as I sang. No one would ever leave again. Everything was real, and eternal.