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The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle, unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price. And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.
What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind?
Because she has spent weeks getting to know him. And he has spent hours forgetting her.
No, Adeline has decided she would rather be a tree, like Estele. If she must grow roots, she would rather be left to flourish wild instead of pruned, would rather stand alone, allowed to grow beneath the open sky. Better that than firewood, cut down just to burn in someone else’s hearth.
But a life without art, without wonder, without beautiful things—she would go mad.
What she needs are stories. Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget. Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books. Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.
Of all the inventions Addie has seen ushered into the world—steam-powered trains, electric lights, photography, and phones, and airplanes, and computers—movies might just be her favorite one.
Books are wonderful, portable, lasting, but sitting there, in the darkened theater, the wide screen filling her vision, the world falls away, and for a few short hours she is someone else, plunged into romance and intrigue and comedy and adventure. All of it complete with 4K picture and stereo sound. A quiet heaviness fills her chest when the credits roll. For a while she was weightless, but now she returns to herself, sinking until her feet are back on the ground.
she swears sometimes her memory runs forward as well as back, unspooling to show the roads she’ll never get to travel. But that way lies madness, and she has learned not to follow.
Three hundred years, and some part of her is still afraid of forgetting. There have been times, of course, when she wished her memory more fickle, when she would have given anything to welcome madness, and disappear. It is the kinder road, to lose yourself. Like Peter, in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. There, at the end, when Peter sits on the rock, the memory of Wendy Darling sliding from his mind, and it is sad, of course, to forget. But it is a lonely thing, to be forgotten. To remember when no one else does.
There is a defiance in being a dreamer.
Live long enough, and you learn how to read a person. To ease them open like a book, some passages underlined and others hidden between the lines.
The evening is quiet, and she is alone, but for once it is not the same as being lonely.
“I would see you again,” he says, “in daylight, or in darkness. As a woman, or a man. Please, let me see you again.”
They do not fit together perfectly. He was not made for her the way Luc was—but this is better, because he is real, and kind, and human, and he remembers.
“I just want to be alone.” The biggest lie he’s ever told.
“Pain can be beautiful,” he says, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “It can transform. It can create.”
Addie is better than any little pink umbrella. She is better than strong whisky on a cold night. Better than anything he’s felt in ages. When Henry is with her, time speeds up, and it doesn’t scare him. When he is with Addie, he feels alive, and it doesn’t hurt.
I have seen your truest form. You cannot scare me now.
There are days when she mourns the prospect of another year, another decade, another century. There are nights when she cannot sleep, moments when she lies awake and dreams of dying. But then she wakes, and sees the pink and orange dawn against the clouds, or hears the lament of a lone fiddle, the music and the melody, and remembers there is such beauty in the world. And she does not want to miss it—any of it.
“Because happiness is brief, and history is lasting, and in the end,” he says, “everyone wants to be remembered.”
“I love you,” he says, and Addie wonders if this is love, this gentle thing. If it is meant to be this soft, this kind. The difference between heat, and warmth. Passion, and contentment. “I love you too,” she says. She wants it to be true.
the simple truth is that he would have sold his soul for less, would have traded an entire life of this for just a day—an hour, a minute, a moment—of peace. Just to numb the pain inside his chest. Just to quiet the storm inside his head. He is so tired of hurting, so tired of being hurt. And that is why, when the stranger holds out his hand, and offers to pull Henry back from the edge, there is no hesitation. He simply says yes.
“Nothing is all good or all bad,” she says. “Life is so much messier than that.”
Were the instants of joy worth the stretches of sorrow? Were the moments of beauty worth the years of pain? And she turns her head, and looks at him, and says, “Always.”
He is all restless energy, and urgent need, and there isn’t enough time, and he knows of course that there will never be. That time always ends a second before you’re ready. That life is the minutes you want minus one.
They teach you growing up that you are only one thing at a time—angry, lonely, content—but he’s never found that to be true. He is a dozen things at once. He is lost and scared and grateful, he is sorry and happy and afraid. But he is not alone.
