Somnium semper remotum: Chapter 5: it isn’t over my friend

The air in the camp was a held breath. That peculiar, liquid hour had settled over Camp Half-Blood, the time between the sun’s rise and the night’s dominion, a world painted in the melancholy hues of rising gold and deep violet.

Silence, thick and expectant, lay upon the camp like a blanket. It wasn't the quiet of peace, but the hush of an audience waiting for the curtain to rise on some inevitable, daunting act.

I found her on a rise overlooking the empty amphitheater, a solitary figure etched against the vast, darkening loom of the woods. She seemed uncaring of anything surrounding her, of anything that could happen to her. I may be wrong, but if I remember well, Half-Blood camp was patrolled at night by literally human-eating harpies, proof that maybe the Olympians took more from their father than they would probably ever admit.

Thinking of the Olympians as real, as tangible as I was, felt bizarre, as if I had woken up one day to find that the sky was now brown, a feeling that summed up my entire situation. What a mess. Why couldn’t I have woken up in a better universe, with fewer omnicidal maniacs plagued by daddy, mother, brother, and sister issues?

Sally Jackson sat on a log worn smooth by time and weather, her posture not defeated, but bearing a gravitational weight that seemed to bend the very air around her into something solemn. She didn’t startle at my approach; her gaze remained fixed on the horizon where the night bled its last light onto the stones.

“Place for one more?” I asked, my voice a scratch on the perfect parchment of the stillness. I gestured to the empty space on the log beside her.

Her head turned slowly, a statue coming to life. In the half-light, her face was a map of quiet exhaustion, the topography of a long campaign. But beneath the weariness, I could see veins of a resilience so profound it had become its own kind of armor. I suppose anything less and life would have broken her, especially considering how she had to endure the human equivalent of a piece of garbage for the well-being of her son.

“Do what you want. You don’t need to ask for that.” Her voice was a low, warm contralto, the kind spun from worn velvet and long nights spent watching over a sleeping child. It wasn't a 'nice' voice; nice is cheap, performative. This was kind. It was the voice that would tell you a terrible truth and somehow make you feel brave enough to hear it. “Especially after saving my son and me. Thanks, by the way.”

“You’re welcome,” I said, lowering myself onto the rough-hewn wood. The bark was a grounding bite through the fabric of my pants, a tangible, real sensation in a reality that felt like a poorly rendered dream. A good sensation. “You don’t need to thank me. But you’re welcome.”

You're welcome? For what? An intervention that felt as meaningful as rearranging furniture on a sinking ship. You still would have been fine even if I had done nothing, I didn’t say. In the end, maybe I had even made things worse for her and her son. I may have followed some suicidal or idiotic instinct, but that felt cheap when, in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t something that could be called truly necessary.

I didn’t truly continue to pay attention to her. No, instead I turned inward, swimming in thoughts about the things I had learned. It almost felt like the air carried the phantom tick of a clock only I could hear, a morbid metronome synced to the rhythm of my own heart. Two months. The number echoed in the hollows of my mind, a laughable, devastating sentence. I was a paradox wrapped in a cliché, an overpowered isekai protagonist whose ultimate villain wasn't a dark lord or a world-ending calamity, but a simple date on a calendar. The sheer absurdity of it was a taste I couldn't get off my tongue, a joke so profoundly unfunny it looped back around to a kind of cosmic hilarity. I was the punchline.

Sally broke the silence, her words not quite aimed at me, but released into the twilight like a confession offered to the gathering dark. “I was amazed, once. By the world. By people. By the sheer fact of everything. I thought it was a beautiful, just machine. That the story we were in was one of those movies where the right things eventually find the right people, where good begets good, where the music always swells for a happy ending no matter how bleak the third act gets.” She paused, and the silence that rushed in to fill the space was heavier, more profound, than the words themselves. “I was wrong.”

She turned her head, and her eyes, in the deepening gloom, were pools of ancient, patient sorrow. “Do you ever think about it?” This time, the question was a hook, cast directly into the waters of my own contemplation.

I fished a lighter from my pocket. The shnick of the flint was a violent, tiny explosion in the sacred quiet. A flame bloomed, a fleeting sun that illuminated the lines on my palm, a map of a life that was supposed to be over, before I touched it to the end of a cigarette. The tobacco caught, glowed a fierce orange, a miniature forge in the twilight. I drew the smoke in, a familiar, carcinogenic ritual, a pantomime of calm. Inhale. Exhale. A plume of grey ghosted between us, holding its shape for a moment before the evening breeze took it, unraveling it into nothing.

“Kinda. But not truly, to be honest.” The words came out wrapped in smoke, a defense against their own truth. “Things are the way they are. It’s how it is. I can hate it. I can love it. I can try to change it. I can change it.” I gave a half-shrug, a gesture that felt foreign on my shoulders, as if my body was forgetting the language of casual indifference. I tilted my head back to look at the stars and their glint above. This sky, it gave me the feeling of being all wrong. The constellations felt as if they were strangers, aliens. It was as if I was looking at a celestial map drawn by a cartographer from another dimension. And yet, the vast, indifferent beauty of it was crushingly familiar. I was a stranger under a stranger’s sky, asking, wondering, thinking about the same unanswerable things, worries, questions man always had.

“I wish I could think like that,” she murmured, the words almost a prayer. “It would make things… simpler.”

“Why don’t you?” I asked the stars, not her.

“Because I’m human.” The answer was a simple, devastating statement of fact. “Because I’m weak. Because I am a parent. Because I lie, to myself, to my child, to the world, that I have it all figured out when the only thing I know for certain is that I don’t.” Her laugh was a short, sharp, painful thing, like a bone snapping. “Not at all.”

“The way you’re talking,” I said, finally dragging my gaze from the cold heavens to her profile, a pale cameo against the dark trees, “it almost seems like you think I’m not all those things, too. I could be, you know. Well, except the parent part. I’d probably fuck that up spectacularly. Love-bomb the little creature into a state of permanent expectation, then lose interest the moment it became… demanding. Inconvenient. Real.”

That was kinda one of the reasons why a lot of the important relationships I had, the precious ones, broke. I may have had the wealth, the support network necessary for children to grow up right, at least before giving it up for what I had thought as freedom but I knew that sooner or later, I would fuck it up, that I would act, become like my mother or my father, or like the combination of the two that I was, and I didn't want that.

A sound escaped her then, a choked gasp that unraveled into genuine, surprised laughter. It was like a seismic event starting deep in her core, shaking loose the dust of her grief for just a moment. It was real, and it was beautiful.

She held out a hand, palm up, a wordless request. Without a single thought, I plucked the cigarette from my own lips and placed the filter end against her fingers. She took it, held it aloft as if examining an artifact from a lost civilization, then brought it to her mouth. She took a drag, the ember flaring, painting her face in a brief, dramatic chiaroscuro of light and shadow. She exhaled a slow, deliberate stream of smoke that seemed to be both a surrender and a sigh of profound relief. The gesture seemed familiar to her. It looked more like she was relearning a thing than anything else.

“It’s things like this,” she said, her voice now carrying a pleasant, smoky rasp. “The way you speak. It’s too carefree. Perfectly, utterly uncaring.”

“In that case,” I replied, reaching over to take the proffered cigarette back, our fingers brushing for a millisecond, a touch as cold and final as my prognosis, “I’d say it’s the complete opposite. It’s human at its utmost. The ultimate, final act of not giving a single, solitary fuck.”

It was such a shame that it was only when I was dying, with everything I could have ever hoped for, unwillingly, that I couldn’t truly be carefree.

“I’m tired, you know.” The confession was a whisper, so quiet it was nearly stolen by the rustle of the awakening trees. “So very… tired. I love my son. I love him with every atom of my being, every shred of care I can scrape together and more. I love him selfishly. Completely. And because of that… his life is shit.” The vulgarity was a stone dropped into a still pond, shocking in its honesty, rippling through the polite twilight. “Because of that, he was chased by a literal bull-man who should have stayed between the pages of a D’Aulaires’ book, not breathing real air and smelling of a butcher’s shop behind a New York parking lot. I love him, and that love is the anchor that’s pulling him under. His life isn’t stable. It isn’t safe. It isn’t as happy as it could be. My love is his curse.”

“You’re saying a lot of personal stuff to a stranger,” I observed, my tone flat, a deliberate contrast to her raw emotion. I brought the cigarette to my lips again. Inhale. Exhale. The cycle was a meditation. A postponement of everything.

“What makes you think I care, in any way?” I asked the night, the world, her, me, the question aimed at the entity that had put me here, at the stars, at myself.

“Because you helped when you could have not.” Her reply was immediate, an arrow loosed with unerring certainty. “I saw you. How you looked. How you acted. Maybe the rest is a lie. A play. A scheme. A manipulation. Something of the sort. But you… drawing that monster’s attention, goading him so we could run… you standing there, looking at him like you already knew how the scene ended, like you’d already read the last page…” Her voice caught, fraying at the edges. “It was like you’d made your peace with the suffering that would come because of your actions, with death. I know that part was real because it was like looking into a mirror. And maybe that’s arrogance, but I don’t think that’s something you can fake.”

“Still could be wrong.”

A small, sad, knowing smile touched her lips. “I don’t think I am.”

I took a final, long drag, burning the cigarette down to the filter, consuming every last bit of its false comfort. I flicked the butt into the darkness, a tiny meteorite extinguished against the earth. “…still could be, though.”

“I’ll take that as my victory.”

“Since when did this become a thing about winning or losing?”

“It’s always about winning or losing. And you’re the loser.”

The sheer, ridiculous, glorious non-sequitur of it broke something loose inside me. A dam of tension I hadn't even fully acknowledged gave way. “That doesn’t make any sense. And even then, what tells you I didn’t have another witty sentence cocked and ready to fire back? Hmm?”

“A feeling.”

“Feelings can be wrong.”

“Not when you’re not the sore loser.”

She looked at me. I looked at her. Our faces were pale ovals in the near-complete darkness, two moons in a shared orbit. And then it happened.

A chuckle, born from the sheer, stupid, sublime absurdity of the exchange, bubbled up from a place deep in my chest I thought had turned to stone. Hers followed a half-second later, a mirror of my own unexpected release. It wasn't gentle laughter; it was a cracking open, a seismic event of the spirit.

We laughed without any reason. We laughed freely. We laughed madly. We laughed like we were coughing up shards of glass, the sound raw and real and echoing faintly in the silent, silent camp. We laughed until our sides ached, until tears, of mirth, of grief, of sheer, bewildered exhaustion, tracked through the dust on our faces.

For one suspended minute, the weight lifted. The clock in my chest paused its relentless ticking. We were just two people, on a log, under a strange and watchful sky, laughing at a joke only the universe and we would ever understand.

When it subsided, leaving us breathless, spent, and strangely wiped clean, the world felt different. Lighter, somehow, even though the burdens remained, immutable as mountains. The air was cooler now, the stars sharper, harder, like diamond chips scattered on black velvet.

I didn’t feel as if I was spiraling as much as before. Two months. I still knew that was all the time I had left, decreed by an entity that may have been God with a capital G. I was still dying. But so what? Let's be fucking real; what would moping about it change?

The thing had said it: I could do whatever I wanted. I could become the greatest villain, the greatest martyr, the greatest hero, the strongest that there would ever be in this reality. I could feel them inside, their names at the forefront of my mind, Avalon, Rhongomyniad, Excalibur, beating with the same cadence as my heart, alive but not, soulless yet soulful and compassionate, and that was without mentioning the essences I had on top of it. I could swear that they were almost whispering, almost telling me that no matter what, they'll be at my side to help me try to make the impossible possible.

The thing had said that I could do anything I wished. I had only two months left, and I think that I knew what I wanted to do.

I spoke into the new, comfortable quiet, my voice sober but clean. “You told me you wished you could think like me, but you can’t. Because you’re a parent. Because you’re human. Because you lie to yourself. You hate the way things are.” I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, my hands dangling between them. “And to be frank, I’m bored. I’m aimless. And more than that… something in my gut”, the fact that this world had once been a book I had read in my childhood, “tells me that whether you like it or not, your future, more precisely, your child’s future, is going to be the least boring thing on this planet. I want to change your words by the end of the summer. I want you to try to fight. To reach for everything that would let you sand down the rough, cruel edges of this world, make it a shape that fits your boy better. I want you to fight Fate. To try the impossible.”

I wanted her to do so because I would try too. Maybe it was selfish? Nah, it probably was selfish. The woman before me had a traced, safe future whether she knew it or not, one seeming less and less likely the more she interacted with me. The right thing would be to leave her, but I never said that I was a saint, and it had never been truer than misery loving company.

I wanted her to leave the expected, to go beyond trying to reach what she thought unreachable, because if she did, why shouldn’t I be able to? If she succeeded, why couldn’t I?

I turned my head to look at her. Her eyes were wide, reflecting the cold starlight, and in them I saw not fear, but a dawning, terrifying hope. “I’ll be there at your side, all the way. So tell me. Do you want to try? Try with me?”

I had only two months left, two months guaranteed, godlike power with an approaching end, and I would not accept it; I couldn’t accept it, at least not like that. I didn’t want to go without trying.

A slow, wondrous, and utterly terrifying smile bloomed on her face, the first true one I’d seen. It was like watching a flower open in time-lapse, etching away the years of worry in an instant. “We don’t even know each other’s complete name.” It wasn’t a refusal. It was the last vestige of sane, rational thought protesting against the tidal pull of madness and hope.

“I can’t hide things anymore,” she continued, the words coming faster now, a dam breaking inside her. “I can’t conceal them. My son is in danger. Was attacked. His life was threatened. His existence… it’s going to be a magnet for everything that goes bump in the night, in this world hidden to most, this mad world of gods, monsters and heroes. I am so tired of being afraid.” She took a deep, shuddering breath, a new, fierce resolve straightening her spine. “Hey, stranger. What’s your name?”

With a smile, one that felt damning, that felt honest, I told her. “Call me Allen.”

“Hey, Allen.” She held out her hand, not for a cigarette this time, but for a pact. For a promise that would alter the course of everything either spectacularly or disastrously, a pact for something that would make Mephistopheles and the like laugh. “I want to make things different. I want to fight. You’ll truly have my back, won’t you? Even though we only just truly met?”

I took her hand. Her grip was firm, calloused from a life of hard work and harder choices. It was real. It was the most real thing I’d felt since I’d woken up in this world. “I want to fight too, or do my best at least to reach what I want no matter how impossible it is. It’s stupid. We’re being stupid, idiots, fools, mad. Yet isn’t it people like us, for the best and the worst, who create by their actions epics and myths? Myths are, after all, just stories of the glorious impossible. Stories are how we become immortal, unforgettable, even after the end.”

The words felt right. They tasted of truth. This, finally, was a purpose. Not waiting to die, but choosing how to live what was left. Fighting for more. And even if I failed, better I do so fighting, giving everything that I had and that I didn’t have, instead of accepting whatever the world, others, the thing thought or agreed would fucking happen.

This was a story worth burning for. “Let’s make a new myth, Sally. For the best and the worst. What better way to go toward the end than in glory, head held high?”

Under a sky now full of indifferent, brilliant stars, we sealed the first note of my requiem. This would be, this moment, for the best and the worst, something I would never regret no matter what.