SciFi and Fantasy Stories: Mood piece

I danced her death, there beneath the moonlight. What I felt, it is impossible to convey. How do you feel when someone who you have lived two hundred years of your life with is taken away? More, when the feel of the warm vibrancy of the mind cushioned next to yours is suddenly stripped from your senses, when a bond from soul to soul more subtle, more complex, deeper and more powerful than such a superficial than such an emotion as love is shattered like fine china? How do you feel when it has happened again?

But still, I danced her death beneath the moonlight. Step…pause…step. Turn, pause, step, turn. Arms rising and falling, head bowing and twisting, fingers waving in a way to bring to mind trees in the wind, or fronds of some underwater plant...

And it took form, softly, slowly, built from dreams and hopes, souls and desires, starshine and moonbeams. The Stair. Passageway to Tir'adey. Suddenly, she was there, dancing with me, her ghost tracing the proper steps with four dainty hooves, horn raised, lowered, raised...

And then we were climbing, dancing, up the steps, and the cold/warm wind streamed past us, exhalations of another world. After a timeless time, we reached the top, and stopped. I could go no farther, being of the living and of the human, but I could see the gatekeeper, a stallion with alabaster coat and eyes of blue fire, and father on, a shape, an object, a gateway, that shed my gaze like oiled cloth sheds water.

She could see it though; her expression made one long for death, if only to behold that one sight...

But she turned, one last time, to look at me. I fell to one knee, there, before her ghost, at the gates of forever, and she bowed her head one last time. Perhaps it was imagination, but I fancy I felt a faint touch, a whisper…goodbye…and then she was gone, proof that there is, indeed, such a thing as redemption, and I was kneeling on the cold, hard earth, while the unfeeling stars looked down upon me and moon sailed indifferently above.

Ah, Nirel, Nirel, why did you have to go? Why did you leave me here in this cruel world? Although the path be guarded by ten times ten the dangers we have faced, together, I would beat my way to thee. Though every step be razor edged or white with heat, I would climb ten thousand mountains to be with thee. Alas, you have left, gone to the one place I may not follow. And now the night is too long, and the day is filled with cheerless light, and nothing is whole anymore, now that you are gone.

And yet-there was a faint, faint hope. When Gairan was killed, murdered, at Green Fire Falls, Nirel came to me, drawn by inexorable demands of destiny and the vacuum in my mind. Gairan, light of heart and wide of mind, the one who first bonded me, or I him. Gairan, Gairan, I still hear thy laugh echoing in my mind, and when the wind blows, cold and harsh, from the west, carrying the scent of the ocean, I am reminded of the first time we met. I mourn thee still, after all these years, as I shall mourn Nirel, and all those who may come after. For I, cursed to live, not to die for a thousand, thousand years, I shall see and mourn hundreds upon hundreds of deaths. There will always be life, but with mortality as its constant companion, there will be no peace. But I have had companions upon the journey, and I doubt I could exist, unbroken, without them. Gairan and Nirel, Nirel and Gairan. Could I, should I hope for another?

I opened my eyes, and on the ground before me before me lay a bit of ivory. I picked it up; it was a piece of Nirel's horn. Those who have been danced to heaven leave nothing behind but what they want to, and this small piece of kindness, amid the bleakness of the world, broke the floodgates inside me, and my anguished sobs echoed into the incurious night.