Short Story: Voiceless Elegy

Click clack, click clack… horseshoes striking the grimy cobblestones. Pitter-patter of rain collects in weary puddles, rippling beneath the clatter of hoofbeats.
The city thrums with voices, with screams, with echoes that belong not to this world. It has ever been tiresome, this ceaseless tide of cacophony. Yet your little lamb wanders. Wanders and wonders, drifting through moments you shall never claim, through times you have never lived. The past. The present. The morrow. None of it matters.

You study her sleeping face, serene beneath long, trembling lashes. How strange, the waning quiet of sleep. Was it ever yours to know? Perhaps.

Questions rise, cumbersome, insistent, yet you set them aside. Unnecessary. You are what you are. Tethered, somehow, to the frail form at your side. Clawing, as ever, at something resembling meaning. Perhaps.

Your fingers drift through the soft flocks of her hair, parting them with delicate care. Skin beneath, soft, untroubled. Quiet. Something stirs. Warmth, neither sweet nor sharp, only the quiet insistence of being. Only the weight of what is alive beneath your touch.

Greed? Want? Hunger? Need?

These notions are obscure. Improper. Yet they linger. Are they yours? Do you belong to them? Or do you only watch, only feel the edges of a world that has never been yours?

You shift, eyes returning to the city, to the living, to the incessant noise. Stillness swells in the space between the world and her, between what you are and what you might have been.

Curiosity.

Deep. Deeper than you have ever known yourself, rooted within your being. When you gaze upon the lives, and the lives that once were, you feel curiosity. You wonder. You ponder. The reason, the echoes, the significance, and the insignificance of it all. Souls of the time, and of the timeless, rush somewhere, act upon something that shall lose all meaning by what they call tomorrow.

Yet you cannot understand why. Knowing, seeing, hearing all of this, you wonder still. You wonder at the ache in your chest. The pressing need to stay. To watch. To watch over her.

You feel restless. Of feelings foreign. Emotions, in all their forms, have always been a realm apart. You are not even certain whether you belong to them, or they to you, or both, or neither. It is as if you are learning, alongside your lamb, to be of her. To feel her, not through your fingertips, but through something deeper within. Skin beneath skin beneath skin.

She shifts in her place, restless. The city’s echoes have ever been her foe. The visions no different from your own. As if her eyes reflect your sight. Yet hers is a burden far greater than yours. A body and mind so fragile, so full of yesterday, of today, of tomorrow. Small things that gather, that cling, beneath her glassy gaze. She fears. And because she fears, her sight fears her in turn. Allowing itself only to slip through the cracks of night, when her eyes close, and she sees.

“Riven…” She speaks, unaware. Asking for aid from sights she will forget upon waking. You reach. Trace your fingertips along her hand. Then her fingers. Delicate. Cold. Trembling.

Hunger?
No. Greed?
Perhaps?
Ownership?
More likely.

Who else would she belong to, but you? You have been there all along.

Her brows ease beneath your touch. Her body yields. A quiet sigh escapes her lips…

Your duty.
Your claim.
Your prize.

You lace your fingers with hers, gaze drifting outward. To the rain. To the dark.

To the city of Blackford.