The Letter

My love Morrigan,

 I know when I tell you this you will probably laugh and tell me that it is nothing new, but I only ask that you wait until I have been in your arms for a few moments before you start to mock me. I am writing this letter as I sit in my room at the place most people consider the birthplace of civilization, and what I have just experienced before entering this place of temporary solitude has changed me in a way that I have never thought possible.

 I do not talk about my work, and that is because it does not bring me as much joy as you do. I travel the world mostly alone dealing with other people’s problems. My work is important to plenty of people, but I am convinced that fixing problems is not as important as I thought it to be.

 It is nothing new to you that I like to stay in the here and now and do not use things that would make me be anything more or less than who I am, but what I just experienced came to me in waves of emotions, thoughts, and images that almost convinced me that I had some how consumed something extremely potent.

 I will call what happened a vision for lack of a better term, it lasted as long as it took me to take the nine or ten steps from entering the hallway to my room’s door. What I saw during that brief time was strange, but it had everything to do with us; the love we share, the willful defiance we possess, and the darkness within both of our souls.

 I have never thought about past lives or other worlds, and what they contained. Yes, I participated in those conversations, but I was never truly certain that they existed. That particular topic is one that is dear to your heart, and I love it when I see your eyes light up with all the hidden possibilities the unknowable holds for you. Now, the only thing that I am certain of is that our love is held in perpetuity.

 What I experienced did not have any true order to them. It was as if the perception of time as we know it held no sway over them. Everything happened all at once; and yet, my mind cannot help but attempt to organize the chaos of sight, sound, and feelings. I will try to explain them as best as I can, but I fear that my words will not truly convey everything that happened during my vision.

 In this first glimpse into another life, I was an old man, I was not sure of my age, but I knew that I could not walk so well on my own. There were two younger much taller men than I on each side of me holding me up as I took short painful steps.

 The men wore undyed wool clothing and darkly painted leather masks that only showed their eyes. These oddly dressed men helped me down a dark passage that ended in a chamber made of roughly cut stone lit by torches. This chamber contained nothing but low stacks of straw that lined the walls and had a strangely graceful winged symbol scratched into a narrow wooden column across from the entrance.

 The men guided me to the stack of straw to the left of the wood column and set me atop it. My breathing eased as the pain of walking slowly started to leave my body. I looked up at the two men and started to thank them, but the look in their eyes seemed to beg me not to speak. One of the men nodded his head in gratitude for my lack of words just before they turned and left the chamber.

 As I sat there, I could remember being swept away by memories of a life that was fulfilling but was never complete. It was a life filled with the happiness and pride of accomplishment, but I remember thinking of that life as one of always being alone.

 I am not sure how long I sat contemplating the topic when I saw the two masked men return with another person in their arms. The masked pair set the person down to my right on the other side of the wooden column. The men left, and I painfully turned my head to get a better look at the newcomer.

 The woman who rested within arm’s length of me wore a simple white dress and appeared to be as old as I felt. I don’t know why, but when our eyes met in that dimly lit room all the loneliness that I felt in that life suddenly vanished.

 Somehow, I knew that the woman sitting next to me was you. While her features were not yours, I could feel the same peace and love that I feel when I look into your eyes. I knew that she had felt something similar because she reached out with her left arm, and I took her offered hand with mine. I let out a sigh of relief and lay my head back on the wall of the chamber then closed my eyes. I remember feeling that my life was finial complete before that life faded from my body.

 I know that this letter is turning out to be strange, but what you just read is what my mind has determined as the beginning of this journey. There were times we charged into battle on horseback and others when we were afoot; times we fled from those hunting us, and times we were the hunters. In these brief moments of memory, it was impossible to tell right from wrong simply because you were at my side, and I did not need anything else.

 In one of those moments, we fought side by side clad in leather armor as we invaded a small town. Burning buildings lit our path as we made our way to the town’s hall where we butchered those within, and then made love on a table that had intercut designs carved into it while surrounded by corpses.

 In another memory, you were a slave and I was a thief. We met when I was breaking into your master’s house to steal an object for a man whom I owed money to. I had just tucked away the object I was searching for when our eyes first met. Your master was trying to take you to his bed before he had his nightly meal, and you had just plunged the knife set aside for slicing meat into his chest.

 Up until that moment in that memory, I had never seen a woman who held as much passion and the desire to live in their eyes as you did. All I did was ask you to come with me, and together we ran into the night. Every night after that was filled with love and the danger of being exceeded for the crimes we had committed.

 During another one of these lives, I was a slave beaten, branded, and condemned to die, but you a woman of high birth paid five times my worth so that I could enter your service. We swiftly became lovers in spite of your marriage to a man of equal standing. In the end, our fate was to face bloodthirsty beasts for the amusement of the crowd and the satisfaction of your husband.

 It was always you and I experiencing joy, pain, passion, sorrow, and hope as life after life flashed through my mind. As these memories from other lives appeared to pick up in speed and intensity, I started to notice that there was one thing that kept appearing in all of them aside from you and me.

 My overly-stimulated mind first started to truly notice the connection when in yet another memory we had been tied to our bed as the house, we had built burned around us. Amongst the sting of tears and professions of love, I noticed a symbol that suddenly appeared when the ceiling started to catch fire. The symbol looked like a rhombus-shaped eye enclosed in a circle with a pointed oval on each side of the eye extending halfway out of the circle.

 I saw that same symbol in many different forms during my vision, and I am convinced that a rudimentary form of it was scratched into the column in that first memory I described to you as well as on the table that we had made love atop, on the object I was sent to steal, and one of the images they had branded into my flesh when I was your slave.

 In a wild influx of memories, I saw that symbol as we lived lives that were long, peaceful, and happy; as we plotted the death of a person, ideology, or nation. The symbol was with us no matter the circumstance.

 It became painfully obvious that every memory I witnessed revealed that symbol to me. This was compounded by the fact that once we met in each memory only death could rip us apart. I know a lot of what I have written has been vague, I think that has something to do with how the details of a dream start to fade over time. In that short time, I have experienced thousands upon thousands of lives; all of them with you, but the one that has not started to fade from my mind is what I consider as the last memory.

 In this memory, I could remember fighting creatures that had feathers and those that had scales before starting to run up a long broadly curving spiral staircase. It was night and the windows I passed provided me with different views of the battle being fought in the air around the tower I was ascending.

 The multicolored bursts of light would have been a beautiful sight to behold; if I did not know that each explosive strike was another life winking out of existence. I did something that made the glass staff that I carried start to glow, and I started to run faster up the steps.

 When I made it to the top of the tower, I was certain that I would find and destroy the one responsible for the impending destruction of my civilization, but what I found there was you or I should say a version of you.

 This woman out of all the others looked exactly like you. She had those deep eyes that seemed to explore the depths of my soul just as yours do. We both reacted in the same instant and used our staffs to send brilliant beams of white light toward each other, and that is when time itself stopped.

 Everything that I could see from the top of the tower was frozen in time; all except for you and I. We moved freely gazing at the motionless battle. While we did this, we had a conversation without any words. It was one of thought and emotion, and by the end of it, we both came to the same conclusion.

 I am not sure if it took an instant or millennia, but our very beings knew what needed to be done. We were creatures of power, and we started to do the only thing that we could think of that would keep our souls together for an eternity.

 We each drew a dagger to cut our wrists and started to draw half of a symbol in our own blood. The symbol I had described earlier was an interpretation of what we drew, but it was ultimately wrong. We each drew a Trinity Knot upon the stone floor. The two knots were rotated so that they would connect to each other at two different points adding a circle to unify and provide power to the spell-form we were creating. That part I had described as a rhombus-shaped eye was in fact the center of the spell-form where our blood comingled signifying the unification of our souls.

 This symbol represented the union of our intent to disregard the demands of the world so that we could forge our own destiny. The cemetery and perfection of what we had created felt as natural as breathing to us, and all that was left for us to do as we stood at the center of the spell-form with our blood still running from our wrist that we now held together was to provide the energy that would bring our spell to life.

 We did not hold back as we focused all of our combined energy and will into the blood-drawn symbol around us. The blood seemed to transform itself into ghostly ethereal flames as our efforts gave it the ability to be more than what it could be if there was only one of us committing ourselves to the spell.

 There was this blissful moment where we knew there was nothing that could stop what we were creating, and that is when we kissed for the first time. This physical act of devotion to each other and what we were making sealed the spell, and as we continued to kiss, I was dimly aware of the trimmers in the tower.

 The world around us started to be consumed by a rising tide that started to make its way up the tower we stood upon, and we still kissed. Both of us knew that we were giving up our power; we knew that we were forfeiting our lives. We had dismissed an entire world for an eternity of always finding each other.

 That final vision did not end with us drowning in the middle of a newly birthed sea but with the impression of that kiss. The end of that memory echoed every kiss we have ever shared since we found each other in this life and the only thing I want to cherish more than it is you.

This letter should reach you before I do. These memories of other lives are swiftly fading, and I am going to make a copy of this letter to carry with me before I send the original to you. Some people will not be happy with my decision to quit what they consider my calling, and I know whatever happens due to my choice that you will not let me face it alone. I am convinced more than ever that what we share is a bond that we have forged to be unbreakable. With you at my side all things are possible.

My heart and soul are eternally yours,

Setanta

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