Something Beautiful

Steven read the passage again and sighed. Then, aloud, he recited the final line of John Burroughs’s treatise Accepting the Universe, “…that man is good because he is as free to do evil as to do good.”

His words echoed in the small guesthouse, seemed to sweep into the flames of the small fire and crackle and burn there.

Steven sighed and leaned his head against the chair’s high back. His thoughts were even darker than usual, and by nature he was inclined to somber reflection. After several long moments, he turned his gaze to the nightstand beside him and stared at the steel blade of the long-knife he’d set there earlier.

The weapon was a relic of the fifth century, a gift from someone he’d long ago forgotten. He’d had the knife for so many years, it had become a part of his wardrobe, his life. The blade’s polished steel captured the colors of the blaze and held them trapped there.

Like Beleale. Like himself. Both of them trapped in a world not their own. Each wanting, needing, the other gone. Brothers on one plane, enemies on another.

Steven stared at the blade as if it would transform, become something other than an instrument of bloodshed.

Once, just once let it be useless.

But it wasn’t useless. It was as sharp as ever, and as deadly.

Steven ran a finger along the knife’s thick shaft, the deceptively paper-thin, razor-sharp blade, and the curvature of the handle. Intricate carvings had once adorned the handle, but he’d worn them away over the long, long years.

It was only a knife. Just a simple tool.

He slipped his fingers into the grooves created by his countless years of handling it, and lifted the heavy weapon into the air, turning it, letting it catch the fire’s reflection. The blade caught the reds and golds of the blaze, and more, it caught his eyes, as well, shadowed, green, and hard.

Unable to bear seeing his own reflection, he rose and lowered the knife to his thigh, resenting the flow of memories of the innumerable occasions he’d used this blade before. Too many times he’d used it, and afterward, mortals had fallen victim to its bite.

And for the first time in this ten-thousand-year hell, Steven resented knowing the intimacy of the knife, hated the certainty that within the hour he would use it yet again.

He thought of that perfect moment he might offer Jillian Stewart. The day of her marriage? The birth of her daughter, Allie? That summer afternoon she, Dave and Allie had lost their way in the forest and huddled together like nesting cups, a day when her husband had clung to her and told her all the things a husband should? She might choose any of them. She’d called them all perfect days, perfect moments.

And he wondered, if he had that choice, what moment he would choose. What day, what instance, what timeless, perfect moment, would epitomize his entire existence?

There were none. No perfect moments. No perfect days, afternoons, nights. Only that almost endless stream of war, of living only to fight, of winning only to fight again.

Even to himself, he felt he was little more than an instrument, a machine in human guise, who was forever doomed to search for meaning in immortality, to live vicariously from the perfect moments he reflected back to the dying mortals who allowed him to vanquish one more of the fallen.

But he couldn’t even achieve that vicarious joy. He’d long ago realized that only mortals could measure joy by perfect moments. Only a mortal could feel that infinite pleasure of recognizing the brevity of life, of knowing that a single moment, one singular day, one hour, even one second, could put paid to an entire lifetime of pain.

He’d decided that only a mortal being could fully appreciate the notion of perfection of a moment, because, from the moment of birth, mortals were faced with dying. Carpe diem…. But seizing the day only had relevance when one was tortured by thoughts of the succession of days ending.

Steven’s hand trembled slightly as he turned the knife’s blade over and again, allowing it to catch his own reflection. He’d held this absolute evidence of his betrayal of humankind a hundred times—a thousand times—before. But it had never troubled him as it did now.

Did his betrayal bother him tonight because this was the final battle, the last one? One of them would win and the other lose for all time. Was he, after all these centuries, learning fear at last? Or was he merely afraid he would never understand the depths that could mean to a mortal?

If only he were simply a man. Just a man. A mortal. If only he could know what a single perfect moment might truly mean.

If only Jillian weren’t the one.

Steven slowly crossed the small room to the heavy wooden door. The long-knife felt like a lead weight in his hand.

Jillian didn’t deserve the gift of the perfect moment, he thought. Not because she wasn’t deserving, but because it wasn’t fair. She might carry the portals in her, but that was purely a random chance, a once-in-a-hundred-years occurrence. Like the others, the ones before her, she didn’t deserve dying. Like them, she had so much good to offer, such a tremendously strong life force in her. But also like them, her creation of the portals, her death because of them, was her ultimate destiny.

What moment would she choose?

Steven started to open the door and hesitated. For some reason, he didn’t want to do this tonight. He wanted to wait, delay the inevitable.

In so many of the others, those who had carried the portals, he’d perceived an arrogance, an awareness of their destiny, a brightness honed to the same sharp edge as his blade. Their gift moments had captured times of triumph, achievement.

Jillian was different from these. She seemed too vulnerable for this, too much love lingering inside her.

He knew this. Had seen it, had tracked it for years. Jillian hadn’t yet achieved what she could hope to find, hadn’t had the time to place her mark upon the world. And she had a child. It wasn’t fair that she was the last one to give her life for this too-long, too-bitter war.

But, of all beings, Steven knew that nothing was fair. Nothing at all. Perhaps that was the definitive awareness that an immortal carried…knowing with utter certainty that all life was unfair, an unending stream of imperfections.

He should know. He’d traded his entire being, his existence, for the dubious honor of fighting the fallen, others like himself, but those who had eschewed mortal form. He, better than other men, knew how little of life could be considered fair, because fairness was born of impartiality, of balance, and nothing about mortal life was neutral or symmetrical.

It didn’t serve any purpose to hesitate. The rules of this damnable war had been laid down long ago, and were carved in every fiber of his being, in his very soul. One couldn’t argue destiny, one didn’t dodge fate. Or duty. No matter how little sense it seemed to make, or how much he might be reluctant to act.

Steven depressed the handle of the guesthouse door, and with unaccustomed violence, wrenched it open, the long-knife held fast in his other hand.

Like Jillian, he had no choice in his role in this battle. But for the first time in his many years of battle, he found himself pausing, casting about for alternatives.

He knew he had no choice. No options existed for him.

And yet he frowned heavily, his heart pounding roughly in his chest. He knew the reasons Jillian had to die; he knew the consequences of this of all battles.

How was it, then, that even knowing these things, he could feel regret? When had he, an immortal, a warrior, learned remorse?

Jillian drew a deep breath after switching the cordless telephone to the standby position. Glad that Allie wasn’t in the kitchen or the adjacent dining room, she simply stood beside the counter, staring at the receiver still cradled in her palm.

“Dark with excessive bright,” she murmured. That had been the phrase she’d used after linking eyes with her gardener…after losing herself in Steven’s gaze. His words, repeated while thinking about his sharp contrasts.

The phone call had come from Elise, who had looked up the odd quotation as soon as she got home and riffled through her battered copy of Paradise Lost. The quote was from Milton, she’d told Jillian, taken from the epic poem that wove the tale of the creation of earth and the angels’ war over its governance. It was essentially the tale of fallen angels, beings “dark with excessive bright.”

Insignificant, inconsequential words, a snippet of a poem written eons ago, yet made somehow important by Elise’s agitation over them, her recounting of Allie’s strange comment—or rather Lyle’s—that Steven wasn’t real. Whatever that might mean to Allie.

How utterly ridiculous, Jillian had thought, but, oddly, she hadn’t voiced that to Elise.

The phrase had only occurred to her because Steven had said the words a few days earlier. Then, when she was standing there looking at him this afternoon, feeling the effects of that oddly compelling gaze and thinking about her dark, frightening departure into surreal paintings of doorways, she’d thought of them again, felt a connection with them.

Why didn’t Allie want Steven in the house, even if such an event was wholly unlikely to happen? Or was she asking the wrong question? Should she alter it to “Why didn’t Lyle want Steven in the house?”

For the first time since she’d hired Steven, she wondered if she might not have made a serious mistake. And for the first time in his two-week tenure on her place, she wondered if there wasn’t more to his being there than his needing a job, than her needing a handyman.

From the first day he’d come and taken up residence in the small one-bedroom guesthouse flanking the main structure, she’d slept a little more soundly, feeling safe because the somber-eyed man was close enough to respond to an alarm raised in the dark, lonely night.

Now, tonight, she thought of that unusual connection she’d experienced when she looked into his eyes, of that taut expression on his face while he was loading the plastic bag with leaves, and she worried that Elise was right, that she’d made a colossal error in trusting him so much.

And, more than her disquiet over allowing Steven such access to their lives, she worried about the wisdom of having admitted Lyle into it.

“This is bunk,” she muttered, angry with herself, half-angry with Elise for calling her, scaring her with such nonsense.