Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
Alderian returned to A’aru while Augustine remained absorbed in preparing new material for her channel, as he didn’t wish for her to abandon her mortal life for his sake.
He felt Aldana’s presence vividly within his chamber.
He’d left the letters on the side table, next to a bed he almost never occupied, and for a moment, he considered returning them to where they belonged.
However, curiosity and anxiety had been eating him alive all morning.
“Let’s stop playing cat and mouse, my love,” he said as he picked up the papers and sat on the edge of his bed.
I have never tried to write a letter in A’aru.
It is a logical way to communicate with you, Alderian, yet the thought had never occurred to me before.
I feel absurd, because it’s like trying to speak to you in a future that does not belong to us.
I’ve accompanied you for twenty-three human years now, and I don’t want to break the rules too much by telling you about your life, but I want you to know that, in these last few years, I have visited you in your dreams many times.
Too many. Your company comforts me and evokes nostalgia at the same time, can you believe it?
We’ve never shared time together in A’aru, yet I miss you.
Today a gorgeous woman invited you out, you told her you’d think about it.
And I hated you for it. For even considering it.
In our recent lives, this has happened to me frequently and I no longer know how to handle my feelings.
It drives me mad to think of you with someone else, to witness you falling in love, getting married, and it never being with me.
Have you felt anything similar when you see me?
Or am I the only one suffering with these feelings?
—Aldana.
Alderian looked up from the letter and smiled. “Of course it’s not just you, you little fool,” he said as he turned the page and found another entry.
February 10, 2004
You rejected her, and it made me immensely happy, but I know it is a fleeting joy. I realize how futile my feelings are when I think of all the things we’ll never do… And yet, I know tonight I will visit you in your dreams once again…
—Aldana.
Alderian stared into the void after finishing that brief message. He knew that throughout the years and in Aldana’s countless lives, he too had visited her in dreams far more than other A’aruin were known to do. He felt a sense of relief to discover that Aldana shared the same longing.
“Thank you for coming to see me, my love,” he whispered aloud, his heart tightening with emotion. The ache he felt at that moment brought him to the brink of tears, forcing him to take a few minutes to compose himself before reading further.
May 1, 2004
Something strange happened to me today when I entered Lethe…
I had a sort of… memory… I wouldn’t know how to describe it, because it makes no sense.
Do you want me to tell you? It was like a dream taking place in the palace where we live…
It was full of people, lights, and… how to put it…
colors. It was a ball, celebrating that my wings had emerged…
it meant I had reached adulthood… Everyone looked happy and I felt as if I were floating in the clouds…
It was a beautiful dream… but what is most surprising is that, in the middle of that crowd, there you were.
What meaning could this vision that Lethe showed me have?
—Aldana.
Alderian was stunned by this revelation, wondering if Lethe had truly shown Aldana a memory.
He had never heard of such a thing, but if it came from Lethe, then it could not be an anomaly, but a gift.
It was disconcerting, especially because of the content of that vision.
People in the palace? A ball to celebrate her reaching adulthood?
None of that resembled the traditions of A’aru, and he didn’t remember a single day when anyone else besides himself had set foot in that palace.
And certainly, there had never been a day where colors existed there.
July 16, 2004
It happened again… Lethe has shown me a new vision of the day I came to live in our palace.
It was a… sunny day? That makes no sense, does it?
But there was a sun in A’aru! And it felt hot.
The garden was full of flowers of a thousand colors, like a painting from the human world.
I saw you in the middle of the garden; you were training with a sword alongside someone else.
You were so skilled. Your white wings looked beautiful, like an apparition.
When I remember it, my heart races. I feel like a fool.
But I also feel afraid. I don’t dare tell anyone what is happening to me; it seems like an anomaly.
If I speak, they will take these memories from me, and even if they are only visions from Lethe, I do not want to forget. Not yet.
—Aldana.
Alderian shook his head and looked at his black wings—large, imposing, and dark as a raven’s.
Aldana knew he had black wings; everyone knew it.
Why, then, would she recall him with white wings in those supposed visions?
Could there have been a time when his wings were white like everyone else’s?
But if he accepted that fact, he had to assume that Aldana’s memories were real, and that made no sense.
A sun in A’aru? Impossible. Furthermore, he had never held a sword, and he wouldn’t know how to wield one even if he were told how.
July 18, 2004
Today you did something impossible, Alderian. As a human, you have many talents, but you have stood out in one in particular: sketching. Today you made a new drawing and do you know what you did? You drew me. Do you remember me? Can I believe that you also think, even if just a little, of me?
—Aldana.
Alderian held his breath. He had sketched her? Had he remembered her? That sounded too much like Augustine’s anomaly to be a coincidence.
November 29, 2004
You seem depressed, Alderian. What is wrong?
You are nostalgic and melancholy, as if something were withering you from within.
When I enter your dreams you look radiant, happy, but you do not share any of your worries with me.
Is it perhaps that my continuous intrusion into your unconscious is hurting you?
Forgive me. Forgive me, Alderian. I have been so greedy.
I’ve wondered so many times if you could belong only to me…
trust only me… look only at me… I shouldn’t have these feelings. Forgive me.
—Aldana.
Without knowing it, he was a mirror of the feelings she had already endured in the past. That contradiction—wanting to possess her, to comfort her, to be everything to her, while knowing he could not desire her that way—had made him feel miserable for centuries.
However, knowing she felt the same way did not ease his anguish.
At what point had they entered this spiral of chasing one another, as if following a mirage?
February 2, 2005
I can’t take any more. What is happening to me?
Today I had a “memory” and I wasn’t even in Lethe.
These memories fill me with joy and nostalgia in equal measure.
I want to cry and break everything… was anything I am seeing ever true?
It doesn’t seem possible; I remember a world that looks nothing like A’aru, except that it IS A’aru.
It makes no sense, and I don’t know if I want to remember anything else…
if it’s a time before memory, to which we cannot return, I don’t want to know anymore. I feel it is breaking me inside.
—Aldana.
A question formed in his mind, one he had not yet fully shaped until that moment: “Who are you, Aldana?”
February 13, 2005
Alderian, what are you doing? What am I doing?
Today I couldn’t resist and I entered your dreams. You said nothing and you kissed me…
you kissed me just as I always imagined…
you told me you needed me, though you didn’t know who I was…
you said you would be my shield and my sword, that you would give me freedom…
you asked me to let you accompany me, wherever I had to go…
Yes, a thousand times yes… stay with me…
love me. Tell me that everything you told me tonight is true…
that you feel the same as I do, even if you don’t understand it, even if you don’t remember me…
Tomorrow, facing your Oblivion will be more painful than facing the memories of our distant past…
I can still feel your lips on mine and the warmth of your hands on my back.
—Aldana.
He stopped reading, chilled. He had kissed Aldana in a dream while he was human, meaning that the kiss he had stolen from Augustine today was not the first they had shared. Long ago, he himself—and also in a dream—had lost restraint.
The inability to remember was driving him crazy, and he stood up, trying to make sense of what was happening.
He had to be insane. Human or A’aruin, his feelings for this woman were his greatest vulnerability.
He gathered the letters and put them away, and though there were still a few pages left unread, what he had already read was more information than he could process.
He yearned to return to the human world, to slip into Augustine’s dreams once more and finish what they had begun.