This post was originally published through Patreon on May 31, 2017.
“You found me.”
“You weren’t hard to find.”
Arcturial nodded. He hadn’t wanted to be caught exactly, but neither had he tried very hard to evade his captor.
“What happens next?” He looked toward the shadowy figure in the doorway.
The figure emerged into the soft, mystical glow of moonlight, resolving into a man of indeterminate features, skin tight and pallid, as if he donned a mask rather than a face.
“You come back with me,” the man said, “and we return together to the Council.”
Arcturial nodded again.
“Just as well. I’m tired. I don’t want to run anymore.”
“Five hundred years is a long time to be away from your kind.”
“It is.”
The man fell in beside him, and together they walked, boots clip-clopping through the darkened street. Arcturial flipped his gaze upward, finding the moon, white and luminescent. He drank in its otherworldly glow. He’d walked through hundreds of worlds, had existed long before the births of most, and still the vision was unlike anything else he’d seen before. He committed a snapshot to memory, for this would be the last time he saw it with his eyes.
“There will be punishment,” said the man.
“I understand.”
The echo of footfalls. Buildings rising before them, falling behind them.
“What was it like?”
Caught off-guard by the question, Arcturial stopped.
“What do you mean?”
“To live as a human. To feel, laugh, cry. What was it like?”
This was not a question he’d expected.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because,” said the man, features set in a perpetually emotionless state, “there are those of us who envy what you’ve taken, even if we will never partake of it ourselves.”
“I see.”
Now, it was the other man’s turn to nod.
How to sum up centuries of life in a human body that could never grow old or die? How to explain the desire and the need to feign mortality, to spend so many long years in the shadows, always on the outside looking in, knowing all you could ever do was pretend?
Arcturial thought before he spoke.
“Lonely.”
“Ah,” said the man.
Arcturial continued walking, and the man once more took up station beside him.
“I think we’ve gone far enough,” said Arcturial. “We should be hidden from any mortals who might have seen us in the alley.”
“Yes,” the man agreed, “I think it’s time to be on our way.”
The two turned a corner, taking a detour that was neither north nor south, neither east nor west. The blackness of night enveloped them like a cloak, and the physical world melted away.
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