What Remains

A Power-up Prompt Response

The first time they celebrated my grief, I thought it an obscenity. They hadn’t meant it that way. They came with flowers woven through their hair and music that carried across the sea. Children chased one another in the very place where I found his body so long ago. When the moon began its slow passage across the sun, they gathered before my likeness in quiet reverence, believing they were honoring the greatest love their world had ever known.

They were wrong. They honored only its ending.

An age has passed since then. Kingdoms have risen, named the island sacred, and vanished into history. Their successors inherited the festival as though it had always belonged to them. The songs changed. The prayers changed. Even my face upon the stone softened beneath the hands of generations who had never seen me. Only the eclipse remained faithful. Once every hundred years, its shadow returned to the sea, and the people returned with it.

They called it the Festival of Reunion. I never found the name fitting.

Long before memory became myth, before temples crowned the cliffs or sailors spoke my name with hushed voices, there had been only the two of us. He was among the first lives I shaped from the new earth, and I loved him with a recklessness I had not known I possessed. Divinity is often mistaken for certainty. It is not. I did not foresee what loving a mortal would demand of either of us.

The years gathered until they became centuries, and the centuries became millennia. He remained beside me while every face he had ever known disappeared into history. I watched the wonder slowly leave his eyes. Even grief became familiar to him. There came a day when he confessed that he no longer feared death. He envied it.

He tried to leave me more than once. Fire refused him the first time. The sea carried him safely ashore the next. Time itself bent around him because he belonged to me. In the end, he discovered what neither of us had understood.

It was not my power that kept him alive. It was his love. By the time the eclipse returned, he had already begun letting me go.

The rest of the world remembers that he died beneath a darkened sun. That much is true. They carved the moment into songs. No one remembers the quieter tragedy that came before it. They do not remember the months he spent teaching his own heart to loosen its grip upon mine so that, for the first time in countless ages, he could become mortal again.

When he stepped from the cliffs, the earth accepted him as it would have accepted any other man.

And I remained.

That is why those who outlive their soulmates are honored here. They walk before my statue during every eclipse, not in mourning, but in witness. The people believe they carry the last fragment of my blessing. They bow their heads as the procession passes, thanking them for enduring what I once endured.

They have never understood that endurance was never my gift. It was simply the only thing left to me.

This must be the hundredth festival. Perhaps the hundred and tenth. I stopped keeping count centuries ago. Every century I tell myself it will be the last. Every century I return.

No one looks twice at the woman stepping from the morning ferry. That is one of the quieter blessings of godhood. Mortals rarely see what they do not expect to see. To them, I am another pilgrim come to honor an old promise beneath an ancient sky.

By the time I make it to the square outside my temple, it is full of life. Bakers pull warm loaves from stone ovens built by hands long turned to dust. Children dart between stalls draped in ribbons the color of the coming eclipse. Old friends embrace as though a hundred years were no greater inconvenience than a night’s sleep. Every face carries the same anticipation. Before this day is over, another generation will witness what every soul born into this world waits for.

It happens sooner than I expect. A young woman carrying a basket of figs stops so suddenly that one tumbles free and rolls across the stones. At the far side of the square, a man turns as though someone has spoken his name.

They simply stare. The crowd notices before either of them moves. Conversations soften. A pair of merchants step aside without thinking. A father places a gentle hand upon his son’s shoulder, silently asking him to wait. No one intrudes upon the moment. Everybody knows what it means.

The young man laughs first, though he seems as surprised by the sound as anyone. The woman begins to cry. They meet somewhere between the market stalls while strangers smile as though they have witnessed a miracle, and perhaps they have. Every life born after mine enters this world carrying the certainty that somewhere another heart has begun beating in time with its own. Some find each other as children. Others as gray-haired elders. None are ever truly alone.

I turn away before they reach one another.

The temple bells ring three slow notes, deep enough that the laughter fades beneath them. Musicians lower their instruments. Conversations fade into whispers. One by one, people bow their heads as the temple doors open. The Remaining emerge in silence.

There are more of them than there were a century ago. A war, perhaps. Or another generation that learned grief the old way. Some are young enough that grief still clings to them. Others have carried it for half a century. Wrinkled hands rest where another hand once belonged. Empty sleeves sway beside robes woven for two. The crowd bows as they pass, not in pity, but in gratitude.

They believe these souls have walked beside me. Perhaps they have. But now they take the symbolic walk to the top of the cliff, the cliff he threw himself off so long ago. They climb the path in silence, just as they always have. No priest remembers who first chose the route. No scripture explains why the procession ends upon the western cliffs instead of at the temple. They believe it symbolizes perseverance. Perhaps that is reason enough.

The crowd follows a respectful distance behind. Some carry bouquets gathered that morning. Others hold only a single bloom between weathered fingers. Children who spent the morning laughing now walk in silence beside parents and grandparents, learning a ritual older than memory. None of them know where the path first began. They know only that it ends at the western cliffs, where flowers are surrendered to the wind.

One by one they step to the edge. One by one they open their hands. Blossoms scatter upon the sea breeze before drifting toward the rocks below. They believe they are honoring those they have lost. I have always preferred to think they are giving something beautiful back to the earth. They do not kneel as I once did beside his broken body. The earth accepted him long ago. It has accepted flowers ever since.

By the time the procession returns from the western cliffs, the sun has begun to emerge once more. Light spills across the square in narrow shafts between the clouds. Musicians lift their instruments again. Merchants uncover their stalls. Children, never burdened by ceremony for long, reclaim the streets as though the silence had merely been another game.

The great willow waits at the center of the square, its long green branches sweeping almost to the stones. I planted it when its trunk was no thicker than my wrist. No one remembers that now. They call it the Reunion Tree, believing it has stood here since the beginning of the world. In a way, perhaps it has.

One by one, the couples who found one another during the festival gather beneath its canopy. The elders speak the old blessings. Parents wipe tears from smiling faces. Friends cheer as hands find hands. Every century ends the same way. Grief is remembered. Love is celebrated. Life, stubborn as ever, insists upon beginning again.

I linger at the edge of the square. This is where I usually leave. My place in their celebration has long since ended. The blessing belongs to them now. It has for centuries.

I turn to go, but something catches my eye across the square. A man stands alone just beyond the circle gathered beneath the willow, as though he had long ago accepted that there was nowhere else for him to stand.

There is nothing remarkable about him. His face is unfamiliar. His hair is darker than I remember. His shoulders carry a different life than the one I once knew. Time has rewritten every feature that belongs to a mortal.

And yet, a soul does not wear a face. I knew his before the world possessed language enough to name such things. I held it before it had ever drawn breath. Death has changed him. Life has changed him. Neither has made him a stranger.

It is him. And then he looks up.

For a heartbeat, the world narrows to the space between us. I see the question cross his face before recognition answers it. His breathing catches. Mine does too.

Around us, the square understands before either of us moves. The priest falls silent in the middle of his blessing. A smile finds its way across his weathered face. Conversations fade into whispers. Parents place gentle hands upon restless children. Those nearest us step aside without being asked, opening a path through the crowd. Everybody knows what this means.

He takes a hesitant step toward me. Then another. The smile I lost finds me before I can stop it.

I watch him come closer, and with every step the man I buried slips a little further into memory.

The laugh I loved has not yet reached his lips. The lines upon his face were written by years I did not witness. Every choice that shaped him belongs to another life, another family. For the first time since I lost him, I understand what my grief has hidden from me.

Once, I believed love meant forever. I know better now. Forever was never the gift I imagined it to be. If this life grants us ten years, or fifty, or only one, I will not ask for more. I will not wrap eternity around another mortal heart.

For the first time in ages, I find I am not walking toward a memory. I am walking toward a future.

The distance between us disappears one careful step at a time.

This one wears his own smile, uncertain and a little embarrassed beneath the attention of an entire square. I find that I love it no less.

I spent an eternity believing I wanted the past returned to me. I was wrong. The past had already given me everything it could. Whatever waits between us now belongs to this life.

He stops before me. Close enough that I can see questions gathering behind his eyes. Close enough that I can hear his breathing over the wind stirring the willow above us.

“Hello,” he says, quietly.

“I’m Tomas.”

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This is a prompt response for Bradley Ramsey’s Power-up Prompt #34.