“It was quiet,” he says, when she asks of death.
He wishes he could give her more – tales of heaven and pearly gates, a bastion of loved ones – but those did not exist, for him. It had simply been quiet, nothingness – like sleep, he supposes, though death had been more in a way he cannot articulate.
“Perhaps the ones you met died before their time,” he says. It’s a meager suggestion. Besides, who is he to say he wasn’t actually unhappy in death? He cannot remember it, so he fills in the space with words like peaceful and quiet and slumber, but had that been it? He can recall none of it, after all, the way one cannot really recall sleep – though we can say we slept well, or poorly, but little else.
(A dreamless sleep, sure – but he’d often welcomed such sleep, in his living time. Dreams could wound.)
He had been willing to go. He had not fought it. Maybe fighting made them unhappy. He had been so ready to sleep.
He listens as she speaks of her own quiet, one created by a magician. He feels a strange parallel to her experience – a brief time of quiet, then back into the noise.
She has it worse, of course – she has ghosts to deal with. He only has to deal with the awful din of his own mind, the ache of feeling again. He wishes again that he could try to heal her.
“It was…useful,” he says, “I used it to save someone’s life, once. I used it to have children, where otherwise children couldn’t be had.”
He omits the fact that one of those particular children had been begat into a stallion whom he’d left, and he had never met the child.
“I don’t know if it could make ghosts go away,” he says, “I wasn’t particularly good at it. I don’t think I would have gotten sick if I was. But I didn’t try to make ghosts go away, either.”
you ask me about love and I tell you about violence
@Narya