Soulwoven: Exile

Chapter 35

Tyash, where are you going? she would ask when she got them hopelessly lost. Tyash, you're a terrible cook, when she let a pot boil over or a loaf of bread burn. Tyash, you're too slow. Tyash, you talk too much. Tyash, Tyash, Tyash.

She was still there.

"Tyash," he said. He sat on the leaves, leaving the bed of flowers she'd been tending between them. "Will you tell me your story?"

The girl who was his beloved reborn took a moment to think. She brushed her hair behind her ears. She looked at the garden she had come to tend, then down at the city.

The sunlight felt warm on Tsu'min's neck. The breeze playing with Tyash's hair smelled of salt and the freedom of the ocean. I shouldn't be here, he thought. I should be helping the others save the world. He swallowed. I promised her.

But neither of them had known this was possible when that promise was made.

Tyash sat carefully on the other side of the garden. She drew her knees to her chin and wiggled her toes. The afternoon light dappled spots of brilliance and blue shadow over her face.

The birds quieted. She began to speak.

And Tsu'min stopped caring about the world and had ears only for her.

#

An hour later Tsu'min sat contentedly on the moss and watched the sun slip toward the horizon. Tyash had returned to Emeth'il, to what he was sure was a dormitory she shared with the kinship group she would live with for her first hundred years. If she was forty, her parents would be dead already, victims of the 'thmesh'sh'nar. The love-death. The wasting sickness that gripped all Sh'ma after the birth of full-blood children.

But not me, he thought. Never me.

He'd seen the death many times. The skin grew sallow and rubbery. The eyes bleared. The bones became more and more pronounced, until one day a Sh'ma simply did not wake up.

It didn't seem painful. Those in the grip of the love-death had a halo of joy around them. Like there was a happiness and a completeness to their lives that he would never know.

The nar'oth alone could not procreate. The nar'oth alone could survive forever.

Tsu'min got up and walked deeper into the forest, toward the camp he and Maegan Heramsun had set up in the trees. Tyash would return to the garden the next day.

She was still her and yet not her. His veins coursed with the curious, potent brew of first love. He was getting to meet her all over again. Getting to know her for the first time, see her follies and curiosities and fall in love with a new person who was still, somehow, someone he had known for centuries, thousands of years ago.

And he had rarely felt so blessed.

#

He seems like a different person.

Maegan Heramsun's pen scratched across the parchment in her lap. Tsu'min was seated on a hill overlooking the bay below, staring at the waves. He still hadn't allowed her to see Mi'ame, but Maegan had managed to overhear their conversations several times, hiding behind a hummock just above the spring.

She hadn't understood the words, but there had been other things more meaningful.

Like laughter.

He laughs now. Often when he is with her, and even sometimes when he is not. It feels like watching the cone of a pine, cauterized by flame and ground underfoot, sprout after lying dormant for years. I understand the stories so much more clearly now. The way his eyes light up when he speaks of her—the way they seem like old friends, though they have just met in this incarnation. It is a remarkable thing to watch.