349. Memorial Mountains

Taren exhaled a thousand thoughts, each a separate path into the mountains of memory as clear as twilight, and began to write. His quarters on the pod were cramped, almost cocoon-like, and the light seemed more luteous than on the command ship, which, he couldn’t say, either aided his recollection or simply colored it in warm hues of distance seen. He preferred to write longhand, he claimed for aesthetic reasons although many suspected privacy. Digital data, no matter how encrypted, was an invitation for prying eyes. Pen on paper, on the other hand, was as secure as the fire that burned them.

“Ten minutes to dock.”

“Acknowledged,” he responded, with the enthusiasm of a ill-behaved child waiting on his father to come home, his ears as attuned to the ticking clock as the child's to the sound of tires.

His hand trembled with remembrance past. Kyra, whom he would soon see again, was a being, a force, unlike anything known, and Arc’teryxians knew more than most. He had seen her anger first hand, the blood of his friends spattered on her albugineous face like speckled eggs writ large. Why she did not kill him as she did the others he could not say. She could have. She almost did. But at the last second, for reasons still unknown, she showed him mercy. Or, so it was written. In his own heart, his life ever since, had been anything but, and he wondered if she had known that the greater torture was in survivorship than in the quiet peace of the next world.

Words didn’t flow on paper as much as pain bled from his neurons, synapses forever firing with the throb of fate’s door closing one entrance and opening another. His movements, since that day, lacked fluidity, spontaneousness, or joy as the case may have been. He was seen, justly or not, as a pariah. He had failed to break the Hynerian. He had failed to protect his men. And most distasteful of all, he had survived. No one could think of a proper punishment, until now.

“Five minutes to dock.”

“Yes, yes. I’m on my way.”

Perhaps this is it, he thought. Perhaps this is where I (he) find (found) my (his) peace, he (they) wrote. Looking at the words on paper, they looked like something someone else had written, as if he were no longer of this world and those that hated him the most found their hate had exhausted itself in wishes and now that the event had occurred, that Taren was no more, they had nothing left. And so, for their own devices, they showed him the false mercy in death that high ranking failures receive in the pulpit of state eulogies.

The doors opened with their familiar hiss, as if they couldn’t be bothered, and the ramp lowered slowly in step to the surreal sense of slow motion Taren felt, as one might have on the walk from cell to maker. Everything sounded distant. Light seems faded, muted. There was movement all around but it matters no more than the falling of leaves to the autumnal wind. Taren felt as if he were watching a movie of someone else that looked like him. He stepped from pod to deck alone. His crew remaining onboard like townspeople watching from behind curtained windows as a doomed gunfighter took to the street. He didn’t blame them. His fate was not theirs.