WRITTEN IN STONE  BY PHOENIX E

We'll be there in just a minute, okay?  Okay, sweetie?

A promise made in an instant just as quickly turned into a lie.  One moment, a second spanning the rest of my eternity my innocence, my trust, my certainty sealed beneath the capstone of fate.

The stone, coming between us, forever barring me from what I hold most dear.  Too young to have to know this pain, barely able to understand the stone's hard truth, too bereft to forgive the inadvertent cruelty of the oath-breakers.  They rest beneath it, forever lost to me, sleeping in the sepulcher of their futile good intentions, the stone that took them and keeps them my only solace, comfort and source of answers.

Written in stone....

Fair or not, life goes on and so did I.  Struggling to survive, to understand, to do for others what I could not do for them.  To make a difference.  Seeking to reclaim what the first had taken from me brought me to the second  stone.  Another puzzle, an ancient enigma,  a mute and mocking monument that spoke to only me. It held the next portion of my damnation. My fate proscribed within an ancient riddle and a ring.

Daring me to solve it, to use it, to tread the siren path of wonder paved with tears.

Through a portal to another world - and her.

I love you, Danyiel.

In another instant, equally horrible in its hopelessness the quest, the faith, the promise turns to ashes as the life in her eyes fades.  Forever.  For one precious, tremulous instant she tastes true freedom again, says those words, so kind, like knives rending through me, shearing soul deep, and then she too passes from me. Right before my eyes.  Once again all I know is loss and lies, the ones the ring whispered to me, the ones I told her.

Told myself.

Oath-breaker.  I have become what the child accused.

Lied to her, broke all my promises. Didn't keep her, didn't protect her, didn't save her. Found her, yes, I found her, but I didn't - didn't make a difference. Not to her.  I couldn't keep her from the fate that claimed her, or escape the cold, consuming truth in its heartless, devouring judgment.

Yes, her soul is light and clear.  Worthy.  But mine...

She forgives me with her last breath, but she shouldn't.  Tries to breathe her love into my heart when she should sear it with her contempt.  I am not worth what she has suffered.  The price she paid so I might continue.

For what?  To do - what?

Life goes on, and so must I.  Without the one who gave it meaning, shape and form - the one I did all of it for. Why am I here - what do I serve - what's the point if all the circle does is bring me back to this?

Pain, loss, failure, bereavement. Striving to achieve only my emotional immolation.

I don't understand.

Hi....hey...

A single, triumphant moment changing everything I thought I knew and understood.  Before my joyous eyes life is affirmed, hope fulfilled, faith confirmed, death's certainty cheated.  The proof smiles up at me, blazing in eyes so dear, dark fire warming my soul and sparking anew the almost extinguished conviction there is a point to striving.  To believing.

To loving.

The wheel turns, spoked with past loss and suffering but pain does not define the totality of its circumference. Nor is the inevitability of loss its ultimate truth or lesson.  There is more, so much more - not everything it has brought me to has been a lie. Or a futile waste of effort.  Not worthy of what has been sacrificed to sustain it.

Any more than I am. Or love...is.

At last the circle of my life has come back to him. Giving, not taking, giving him back to me.  Restoring me to myself as I take him by the hand. I look deep into the mirror of my soul and I see.  I begin to understand.  What I have been seeking has been right beside me all this time. Not out there in the stars, beyond my grasp, not locked in the granite enigma that blighted my past, not entombed in the sand on a distant world where I thought I buried my heart forever.

It's all there, standing right in front of me, with sparkling brown eyes and a shit-eating grin.

Hide in plan sight.  Well, what do you know about that?

Life goes on.  So will we.

Together.

FINIS