Ever After Still in the depths of senseless sleep, he stirs heavily, rolls onto his back. The sand shifts and packs underneath his hips and shoulders, gritty and sliding. Above him, tall plumes of dry grasses sway and bend against a sky filled with low clouds. What little remains of his clothes is no barrier to the damp, chilly sea breeze. He remembers cold. Then he sits up, slowly, his hand sinking into the sand under his weight. The sea spreads out before him, endless. White sand, grey meeting grey at the horizon. Tufts of grass, the green bleached out of them by wind and sun and salt, march up the sides of the dunes, a scattered desert campaign. He gets to his feet. Lately (how long?) his dreams have been about nothing but this beach, and it's hard to know whether he is still asleep, dreaming. Once he dreamed, occasionally, of home, but now there is no home but this edge between the strong waves and the comforting and ever-present wind. The beach stretches ahead and behind, curving away into a haze. The tussocks on the dunes above sing in the wind, a thin, rustling song like the breath of an elderly sleeper, and the dry sand, whipped up by the unrelenting wind, flies in sheets and swirls across the hard-packed flats. He walks. Unsteady, uncertain at first, as if he has slept for days or weeks rather than hours, or been in convalescence, but then more steadily. His heels sink into the dry sand, flattening the arches of his feet with each step, and his progress is slow. Waves rise and fall farther out, beyond the low-tide sand flats, and the water they bring in fans out in wide sheets, racing across the wet, packed sand towards his feet. Every so often the rhythm of their crashing will cease for a moment, or speed ahead, and time ceases in the moment between one wave and the next. It becomes difficult to tell whether it is a second that passes or a century. Always, another wave follows, inevitable but as unpredictable as a heartbeat - now slow, serene, now quick and anxious with yearning. The horizon follows him, or he follows it, its unchanging faraway line. He passes tide pools and drifts of rocks, villages of pebbles in sandy valleys, swept by waves as Northfarthing villages are by the winds. Driftwood piles, like collapsed skeletons, mark the tide line. The distant dunes that rise away beyond the sandy expanse, the bumpy spine of the land, remain the same, too vast to be changed. A solitary tern, light as a rush stalk thrown into the wind, swoops soundlessly into view and he tilts his head back to follow its flight. As if he wasn't there, it soars out to hover above the frothing waves, motionless except for the darting eyes. It is white against the dull grey clouds, and from its stretched wingtips, his eyes drift to the horizon. Not yet. When does not yet come to an end? Will he know when the time comes? He knows that the word has been given, but not when it will be brought to completion, or indeed if it ever will. Not even the wise can see all ends, and nothing is certain. The wind has to blow in the right direction, the light has to take on a certain quality, and the season must be right for a heart to be moved, for a journey to begin, for sails to fill. Plants should be moved at night, after a rain, when the moon is as thin as the edge of your nail. Otherwise they grieve overmuch, and do not thrive. The white edge of a swell breaks and spreads, and instinctively, he moves as if to step backwards, as if it still mattered if he gets wet. But some remnant of faith and defiance holds him still, and the water slows and begins its retreat in one fluid motion that reaches its highest point more than a foot away from his toes. He is surprised, faintly, vaguely. I knew it. It would not touch me. All I had to do was stand still. The ship's lantern will glow in the unearthly pre-dawn greyness. The water will play around its prow as it steers towards the landing place, coming in from the open sea into shelter under the land. His heart moves painfully at the thought, and he stares unseeingly out to sea, the wind blowing his eyes dry and tender as if he had rubbed them. But how ill the bleakness of this shore will compare with the lushness of the one left behind. To the recently arrived, the land seems empty, and it takes time beyond time for an unquiet heart to learn its rhythm. And what heart would not be unquiet? It seems as though you have arrived at a place beyond reckoning, as if you have sunk to the bottom of the sea or been lifted beyond the stars, and the absence of the twinges and aches that used to tell you that you were alive is terrifying. But then, when the longing lies down for a moment and the fear recedes, when the stillness inside comes to match the stillness outside, then all sorrow and all pain is blotted out, and there is only light. And this light brings you to life better than the tired, red blood or the laborious working of heavy lungs, it lights the night alike to the day and the years alike to a single heartbeat. Still, for those who have a choice between the familiar and the unknown, the mere distance will seem vast, and the land itself as vague as a dream, as unreal as a bank of fog. The sea that embraces this island batters other coasts with waves like snarling teeth. He looks away, quickly, and the ground underneath his feet seems to move, shift, as if breathing. Is it a dream, after all? It is much to ask. He begins to walk again, and another wave rolls in, but he keeps to his straight path. This one, this one will get me. It doesn't matter. But again the wave spends itself a few inches from his toes, soaking harmlessly into the packed sand, and he swallows an inexplicable sob of relief, as the wind pulls relentlessly at his clothes. His hair is a thick, matted tangle, dark as seaweed. How long has it been? Too long? But yet another wave gently refuses to touch him, to break itself around his ankles and drown his hope. He spreads his arms and leans into the wind. It tears at him in long, gentle, hopeless skeins, carrying parts of him away, and he closes his eyes. The wind blows through him, soothing as a caress, and his body offers no more resistance, now, than the open crown of a tree. He can feel it touch his heart, and his heart tugs at its moorings as though it wants to fly away and be one with the wind. Will I still be here? He senses, rather than feels, another wave approach, but not touch him. And he turns into the wind again and resumes his long walk, but it is easier now, and no footprints remain after he crosses each ridge, no more than where the wind has skimmed the dunes. One by one his thoughts are carried away by the waves and the wind, and then his heart and mind are open like the sky above the deep, grey sea. The end of the day comes quickly here, a matter of darkening clouds and swift, shadowless dusk. The place where he finally stops is much like that from which he rose in the morning. A hollow beneath a dune, the greatest shelter the open beach can offer. He can feel the pull of the earth in his bones, can feel the weight of its solidity beckon to him, and he lies down. There is some remnant of the day in the sand, a warmth like that of a breathing thing. The light dies slowly over the sea, and the stars come flickering into the clear sky. The wind skims over his body, and sand collects in soft drifts climbing slowly up his back. Soon. One day soon he will lay himself down, somewhere like this, and not get up again. His bones will fall to the ground like crumbling branches, hollowed by years, and he will feel the prickle under his skin, like fine roots waiting to break through, before he closes his eyes. And by morning, there will be pillows of flowers marking the place where his body lay, his arms, his head, his legs, clusters of sea pinks lifting their heads to the rising sun. But when that happens, he will not be alone. And where their hands once lay, the stalks of the flowers will tangle together in the wind. Back to fanfic page | Send feedback