"So now…" she said.
"Yes?" I swear I would have done anything for her at that moment. I was like a lover standing before his beloved; I could deny her nothing.
"Take it back…" she said.
I didn't comprehend what she was telling me. "Take what back?" I said.
"The breath. The pain. Me. Take it all back. It belongs to you Maddox. Take it back."
I understood. It was time to repossess all that I'd attempted to put away from myself: the visions that were a part of my blood, though I'd hidden them from myself; the pain that was also, for better or worse, mine. And of course the very air from my lungs, whose expulsion had begun this journey.
"Take it back."
I wanted to beg a few moments' grace, to talk with her, perhaps; at least to gaze at her, before my body was returned into its agony. But she was already easing her fingers from my grip.
"Take it back," she said a third time, and to be certain I obeyed her edict she put her face close to mine and drew a breath of her own, a breath so swift and strong it emptied my mouth, throat and lungs in an instant.
My head reeled; white blotches burnt at the corners of my vision, threatening to occlude the sight before me. But my body acted with a vigor of its own, and without instruction from my will, did as Cesaria had demanded: it took the breath back.
The effect was immediate, and to my enchanted eyes distressing. The fabled face in front of me dissolved as though it had been conjured out of mist and my needy lungs had unmade it. I looked up-hoping to snatch a glimpse of the ancient sky before it too dissolved, but I was too late.
What had seemed unquestionably real moments before came to nothing in a heartbeat. No; not to nothing. It unknitted into marks such as had haunted the air when I'd first entered the room. Some of them still carried traces of color. There were smudges of blue and white above, and around me, where the thicket had not been consumed by fire, a hundred kinds of green; and ahead of me glints of gold from the flame and scarlet-flecked darkness where my father's wife had stood. But even these remains evaporated in the next heartbeat, and I was back in the arena of gray on gray which I had mistaken for a maze of stained walls.
All of the events that had just unfolded might have seemed a fiction but for one simple fact: I was still standing. Whatever force my mind had unleashed here, it had come with power enough to raise me up off the ground and set me on my feet. And there I stood, amazed; and of course certain I would fall down again at any moment. That moment passed, however; so did the next and the next and the next, and still I stood.
Tentatively I glanced back over my shoulder. There, not six yards from me, was the door through which I'd stepped all these visions ago. Beside it, overturned, lay my wheelchair. I fixed my gaze upon it. Dared I believe it was now redundant?
"Look at you…" said a slurred voice.
I glanced back from the wheelchair to the door, where Luman was now leaning. He'd found another source of liquor while I'd been occupied in the room. Not a bottle but a decanter. He had the glazed look of a well-soused man. "You're standing," he said. "When did you learn to do that?"
"I didn't…" I said. "I mean, I don't understand why I'm not falling down."
"Can you walk?"
"I don't know. I haven't tried."
"Well, Lordie, man. Try."
I looked down at my feet, which had not taken any instruction from me in a hundred and thirty years. "Go on then," I murmured.
And they moved. Not easily at first, but they moved. First the left, then the right, turning me around to face Luman and the door.
I didn't stop there. I kept moving, my breath quick and fast, my arms stretched before me to break my fall should my legs suddenly give out. But they didn't. Some miracle had occurred when Cesaria had raised me up. Her will, or mine, or both combined, had healed me. I could walk; stride. In time, I would run. I would go all the places I'd not seen in my years in the chair. Out into the swamp, and the roads beyond,- to the gardens beyond Luman's Smoke House; to my father's tomb in the empty stables.
But for now, I was happy to reach the door. So happy indeed that I embraced Luman. Tears were coming, and I could not have held them back if I'd cared to.
"Thank you," I said to him.
He was quite happy to accept my embrace. Indeed he returned it with equal fervor, burying his face in my neck. He too was sobbing, though I didn't quite know why. "I don't see what you have to thank me for," he said.
"For making me brave," I said. "For persuading me to go in."
"You don't regret it then?"
I laughed, and took his bleary face in my hands. "No, brother, I do not regret it. Not a moment."
"Were you nearly driven mad?"
"Nearly."
"And you cursed me?"
"Ripely."
"But it was worth the suffering?"
"Absolutely."
He paused, and considered his next question. "Does that mean we can sit down and drink till we puke, like brothers should?"
"It would be my pleasure."
What must I do, in the time remaining? Only everything. I don't yet know how much I know; but it's a great deal. There are vast tracts of my nature I never knew existed until now. I lived, I suppose, in a cell of my own creation, while outside its walls lay a landscape of unparalleled richness. But I could not bear to venture there. In my self-delusion I thought I was a minor king, and I didn't want to step beyond the bounds of what I knew for fear I lost my dominion. I daresay most of us live in such pitiful realms. It takes something profound to transform us; to open our eyes to our own glorious diversity.
Now my eyes were open, and I had no doubt that with my sight came great responsibility. I had to write about what I saw; I had to put it into the words that appear on the very pages you are reading.
But I could bear the weight of that responsibility. Gladly. For now I had the answer to the question: what lay at the center of all the threads of my story? It was myself. I wasn't an abstracted recanter of these lives and loves. I was-I am-the story itself; its source, its voice, its music. Perhaps to you that doesn't seem like much of a revelation. But for me, it changes everything. It makes me see, with brutal clarity, the person I once was. It makes me understand for the first time who I am now. And it makes me shake with anticipation of what I must become.
I must tell you not only how the living human world fared, but also how it went among the animals, and among those who had passed from life, yet still wandered the earth. I must tell you about those creatures God made, but also of those who made themselves by force of will or appetite. In other words, there must inevitably be unholy business here, just as there will be sacred, but I cannot guarantee to tell you-or even sometimes to know-which is which.
And in my heart I realize I want most to romance you; to share with you a vision of the world that puts order where there has been discordance and chaos. Nothing happens carelessly. We're not brought into the world without reason, even though we may never understand that reason. An infant that lives an hour, that dies before it can lay eyes on those who made it, even that soul did not live without purpose: this is my sudden certainty. And it is my duty to sweat until I convince you of the same. Sometimes the stories will recount epic events-wars and insurrection; the fall of dynasties. Sometimes they'll seem, by contrast, inconsequential, and you'll wonder what business they have in these pages. Bear with me. Think of these fragments as the shavings off a carpenter's floor, swept together after some great work has been made. The masterpiece has been taken from the workshop, but what might we learn from a study of some particular curl of wood about the moment of creation? How here the carpenter hesitated, or there moved to complete a form with unerring certainty? Are these shavings then, that seem at first glance redundant, not also part of the great work, being that which has been removed to reveal it?