<font color=#000000 face=times size=2>chased your ghost across the yard; <i>Ciara</i></font>

chased your ghost across the yard; Ciara
IP: 82.19.140.112
Posted on October 26, 2013 at 02:31:07 AM by Arthur

He watched her as she ran her hands over the silken fabric of the gown. She looked beautiful � made it look far more beautiful than it had done gathering dust inside a wardrobe. He had left her things where she had put them and locked her room so that no one could touch it; even Arthur had never unlocked it. Often he wondered why he had done it, if he was never going to look at it. It would have made no difference if he had ordered everything packed up in boxes and stashed away in the attics. For a while, perhaps, he had preserved it in the vain hope that she would return one day, and then he could have unlocked it and given her her life back. That hope had long since died. On his worse days he sometimes found himself hoping that she would never come back. It would be too hard, too painful, for him, but more so for Tristan. To all intent and purposes the boy had grown up without a mother. Arthur couldn�t help but wonder how different his son would have been if Lilith had stayed. Would he have been hurtling down the path he had chosen for himself, whether he realised it not or yet. Arthur knew. He had been there. He knew what it was like to feel like you were being crushed beneath a destiny too big for you and to seek distraction from it. Finding freedom in places where it was possible to grab hold of it, whilst never really being free at all. How could he teach his son to walk a different path to the one he had walked? He knew no other way. Lilith would have done. She could have helped him.

�I doubt it, Ciara,� the king replied heavily, any liveliness there might have been dropping from his voice, �you could look as captivating as Helen of Troy and it would bother Lilith not at all, because she will never know.� His grey eyes reached out towards his old friend, allowing her a rare glimpse at the hole that his wife had left in his heart. There was sorrow there, sorrow and bitterness, anger and love, and because he trusted that she would share his grief, he let her see all of it. �She�s gone, Ciara. She was ill for a long time, her connection with Gwythr took its toll until she became someone you would never have recognised, but I still loved her, and our boys. They never got the mother they should have had, not really, but they made her better when she was with them. Then the ice came...� He was talking too much. Once he had started he discovered that it was impossible to stop, everything he had kept bottled up for so long spilling out. �The ice came, and men came with it. They took our eldest boy and they killed him out on the ice. He might have drowned, he might have frozen, I don�t know, but he�s been dead for nearly five years. I searched for him for days and I couldn�t even bring my son�s body back for my wife to bury.�

The King sighed, moving away from Ciara in order to sit back down on the bed, his head in his hands. �She didn�t even say goodbye. I went to visit her...and she was gone without a word. I had to tell our younger son that his mother had left him, Ciara, and when he asked me why, I couldn�t even give him answers, because I didn�t know! I can understand her leaving me, I can be a difficult man to love, but how could she leave Tristan without thinking about what it would do to him? I see him growing up into a man, making me proud and making mistakes and I wonder...how many of the mistakes he makes are because his mother left him? ...and because his father could never tell him why.�

He reached out and took hold of his friend�s hand, pulling her gently back towards the bed so that she could sit beside him on top of the rumpled covers. �Damon�s gone, Cia, the Lagoon is gone, hell, even Aura is gone. The world has changed a lot since you left it. I don�t even know if it�s for the better or the worse or if it�s just different...� Arthur broke off, pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes as if trying to force his emotions back inside where they belonged. �Do you remember when we were all happy?� Did he? He didn�t think he did. There were moments, preserved in golden light in his memory but there had always been something, some obstacle. He was happy now. He had his son, and he had his family...but there was still a hole in his chest that persisted in reminding him that he had lost something irreplaceable somewhere along the line.

_{photography and editing by merlin}

Replies:

where there is desire there is gonna be a flame - By c i a r a November 4, 2013 at 08:21:46 AM

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