Chapter 24 Goodbye
GOODBYE
“I’VE BEEN WAITING a long time,” Peter replied. “I wasn’t convinced you’d be able to sit at this table, to see me again. I left you signs,” he said.
Ella absorbed the easiness of his words, trying to grapple with his apparent calm. She was unsure of where the conversation would lead, but settled in the moment of it, she was unafraid now that she was finally here.
He looked like a statue in front of her, beautifully crafted with a sculpted face and hair like waves of sunlit wheat. She saw the forest in his green eyes and remembered walking through it with him. She remembered as he’d named the trees.
“I always hated them,” Ella replied, “the people out at the gate, never wanting to experience any pain, but I ended up just like them, forgetting everything.”
She’d called them rats, and he told her she’d be humbled by her own words one day. He’d been right.
Even now, she could not forget all of those people who she’d never had the courage to thank. Every day in the illusion, she tried to thank them in her own way. In so many ways, they’d all been given a second chance.
“Why did you create this illusion?” Ella asked.
“Illusion?” he asked, as if puzzled by the word. “Everything that can happen is truth. I simply created another truth to protect my people from the world. All I ever wanted was to spare them pain,” he said, giving answers easily like he always had.
“But it isn’t real,” she said.
“People call madness, madness because it bends their perceived laws, but true madness is only made in the making sense of things. We did not evolve to understand the world, only to live in it. Understanding it is just as hedonistic a pleasure as anything else, as hedonistic as stopping the Burning of the Strike.”
She tried to trace the full meaning of his words, caught on the potency of the final sentence. “What do you mean?”
Peter tilted his head in the slightest way, for as he explained these things it was as if he were also admiring her in front of him, pleased perhaps to see her after all this time, and yet intent to share these truths with her.
“Baker,” he said, “this you may forget again, because human beings always forget. The Burning of the Strike has happened before. Strike are born, people offer them pain, they feed and grow, and are eliminated through the only weakness they have, which is people again. This is a cycle. Strike come from the North and the North is always there,” he said, resurrecting the chant she remembered from Valentine, “frostbitten fingers play the chords. This song has repeated a thousand times. I’ve seen many cities burned, many versions of the ROSE rise and fall.
The people move south. The Strike follow. ”
Her heart began to race as she tried to digest the implications of what he shared.
“Even my attempts to stop it were fruitless. I did much to create this new world in The Ocean. I’ve created prototypes before, versions that failed at the cost of many lives.
I did everything in my power to prevent the Burning of the Strike, but even in this version of things, don’t you see?
Walls were built all over again. Already there are stirrings in news and gossip.
The authorities of the Imperia will take hold of the world and soon a rebellion will be incited against them.
People have fed this government. People will burn it down.
The cycle will begin again, even in this version of the world I’ve created to prevent it, a world where even the Strike don’t realize they are Strike.
The Burning of the Strike is as human as humanity itself. ”
She struggled with the words, trying to decipher it and break it into digestible pieces.
She looked at him and asked a question that lingered deep inside her, painfully deep, “You tried to prevent something horrible, but you did so many horrible things. Are you good or are you evil?” His answer would in many ways help her determine her feelings about herself, because despite it all, as a girl, she had loved him.
“I don’t claim to be either,” he said softly, “I’ve only ever wanted to be what I searched for. I believe in the end that is what I became.”
He’d searched for life, for a way to create it. She wondered what the connection was now. Was he saying that in the end he became life?
She sat with his words for a moment, mulling over the last few months of her life, mulling over the questions. She’d thought so often of what to ask Peter, that as she sat before him now, she could only summarize all of those questions ambitiously into one broad inquiry.
“Peter,” she said, and it felt strange to say his name still. “Why did you save me?”
He nodded in a quiet acceptance of her inquiry.
“You remember our initial agreement?” he asked. “It was that I give you a path to be free from your fear just as you helped me find life. I am here to deliver on that promise.”
Her brows furrowed thoughtfully. “What do you mean?” she prompted.
He leaned back in his chair slightly, resting his hands on his knee.
“I told you it would be difficult, that many never pursue the end of fear, but you see, Baker, freedom from fear only ever comes in the end of all things.”
“You mean death?” she asked.
“A version of it, yes. And you have followed it faithfully to the end of the story, followed me, because that is what I meant to you,” he continued and paused for a moment.
“Baker,” he said, “to Strike, in our understanding of time, a hello is in so many ways the same as goodbye. I said both when I first met you, but humans, in their way, cannot say them at once. This journey has always ever been about saying goodbye. Your goodbye. It’s what we’ve both waited for. ”
“Goodbye,” she repeated quietly.
“Yes,” he confirmed, “to everything you were afraid to lose.”
“What happened at the Burning of the Strike?” she asked, shaking her head as she squinted forward. “I can’t…I still can’t remember.”
“Are you ready to remember?” he replied, ever calm. “That will be the end of this journey.”
She inspected his features, almost angelic in the light. She hardly believed it was real, wanting to reach out and touch his face, his hands, anything. He wore a light blue shirt, one she remembered him wearing on the last day she could still recall.
Was this real after all?
He stood to his feet and invited her up.
“You came to this room, and I healed your wounds from Amiel. I preserved the moment, hoping you might find me one day. Baker, you see. I had plans once fate placed you so intentionally into my lap. In your dependence on me, you had the makings of a Strike, but in refusing that life, you showed me a path to something else. I found the answer. I discovered how to become life and how to end suffering. The solution was always in the Burning of the Strike, repeating itself until I could at last make the right decision.”
He stood in front of the window, the brilliant light darkening his form. He invited her to look outside.
“Do you want to remember?” he asked, “the choice is yours. But know, once you agree, the purpose of the present memory will be fulfilled and will cease to exist. I have delivered my final message, and you will not find this place again.”
She approached and squinted through the light of the window, determined to see beyond it. A sudden sadness came over her at her inability to see and in a moment of strength she admitted that she was finally ready to.
“Yes,” she said and the light outside grew brighter until she had to turn away, finding herself outside in the courtyard of the Bleeding Grin.
She was a girl again, standing at the steps of the Bleeding Grin as if she’d just followed Peter out from the white table.
Her clothes were bloodstained still, but her wounds had been healed.
Walls of flame shielded the horizon at every angle as explosions and echoes of battles could be heard among the roaring fires.
The gate at the base of the Bleeding Grin rattled violently as the crowds converged in panicked wails and harsh clawing. They beat and they screamed away from columns of smoke and burning houses. The city was on fire and their fear raged.
This was the Burning of the Strike. She’d been there for it.
The people of town didn’t look like people at all. They looked ravenous, just as they always had, fighting through the gates but now not out of just hunger but out of terror at the sounds and the chaos. Pandemonium had turned them into animals.
But they were not rats or vermin. She no longer looked down on them. She understood, and her heart broke for their fates.
Ella was surprised to find next that Peter was looking back at her from where he stood near the gate. She could not read his expression, and there was a peaceful smile on his face, not as if this moment had happened years ago, but as if it were happening now.
Though he waited in the past, he saw her watching in the present.
In the next moment, he stepped forward toward the gate.
Ella imagined he might quell the people, might raise a hand and deliver them from the flames, or transport their city to another realm.
She thought that he might bring rain or a storm, deliver pleasures to satisfy them, and instead he opened the gates.
Like an ocean they poured over him, the waves of their hands lapping against his body, tearing his clothes, leaving marks across his skin.
His body jerked to the left and then the right before The Ocean pulled him under, and Ella realized then that perhaps in the end they’d always been hungry for him.
She accepted in the strangeness of her shock that perhaps what he’d always wanted was to be eaten. Their hunger had been what kept him alive, now, even as it killed him. His solution to create life and to end suffering, the experience of his own suffering, had been this.
Ella felt her stomach twist violently as the memory hit her mind with an unrelenting wave of terror.
She stumbled away, now an adult again on the lawn of the Imperia’s courtyard.
The images of the people eating Peter had cemented themselves in her mind.
Soon after came the memories of the curse that commenced with his death, the storm that never stopped raining, filling the world with waters that poured over every gutter, street and home, covering everyone who struggled to swim, thinking it would drown them until it ferried their minds to another world in which The Burning of the Strike had happened a century ago.
Ella remembered it all, the feelings sending her sprinting toward the stables in a panic.
She crashed into the stable door, cutting her hand but barely feeling the pain as she burst into tears, struggling to breathe as she hopped on her horse and rode hard from the capital, riding past people who lived their lives out in this dream world.
The horse slowed from exhaustion and when it did, she sprinted the rest of the way down the path to Samual’s. She ran through the fields, stopping when she realized the cottage was no longer there.
“Samual!” she screamed his name, and the wind carried it off with no response. She shouted it again. Sweat dribbled down her temple, her hair in disarray. She opened her mouth, but at last even his name, like all the other words, she did not repeat.
A breeze pushed through the valley and Ella turned to realize she was in the field of wildflowers.
A strange calm settled over her. Her heartbeat slowed.
Her breathing eased and she wiped the tears from her face as she glanced up at the sun.
It was blinding, but she realized that it did not hurt her eyes. It never had. It wasn’t real.
Ella took a deep breath of the flowers and marveled at the strangeness of the peace forming inside her.
With one deep exhalation, she breathed out and released the smallest laugh, the laugh that had been trapped inside her chest for a decade since first wandering into the woods outside of Fort Kit. Her entire body relaxed.
She had regained all of her broken pieces, and every ounce of her restlessness was gone at last.
The flowers swayed in the breeze, and she plucked one, marveling at the yellow petals that sat unflinchingly in her blood stained hand. Suddenly, they went so well together, and Ella lowered her arms to her sides as she looked back into the sun that filled her eyes with nothing but light.
The flowers no longer represented graves. The graves no longer represented names.
It was all beautiful together, and at last, it all was together. She was all together.
The birds chipped. A breeze pushed through the field like a wave and at last the world was silent.
Baker realized she had grown into a beautiful, wounded, quiet woman, but she was no longer quiet because she couldn’t speak.
At last, it was because there was nothing left to say.
Birds no longer chirped.
The sea of flowers stood as still as a painting ahead of her as she waited there in the adornment of a familiar yellow dress, standing, just as Jackson once had, admiring the beauty of it all.
The moment extended on forever.
Peace.
She resolved to stay forever, but felt the call of the world beyond.
She opened her other hand to find Mark’s single coin now lying out in her palm as if she’d summoned it.
He’d tossed it to her in thanks, payment for a life she’d lived in service to a broken world whose illusions she’d now overcome.
This single piece of metal represented all of the value in the world.
It wasn’t happiness. It was choice. That’s what she’d been looking for from the start.
She moved it slowly across her fingers, rolling it from one to the other and each flip represented a different path forward.
Fearless at last, she flipped the coin.