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Autumn Angel
Where are you now, the boy who used to love me?
Autumn suspends the 96th floor of the Tower in a sheet of copper and gold.
They meet at the end of the castle’s drawbridge, where the floor’s tests were supposedly conducted. Khun realises later that it’s a farce; the rumour was spread to ensure that they meet her.
Surrounding red leaves were reflected in the clear waters of the castle’s moat. The black walls of the castle were especially striking against a bright blue autumn sky.
“Aguero,” she says, appearing at the door like a magician.
Aguero is beyond words.
Bam studies her carefully because she appears to be important to Khun. Maria was a plain looking princess in an ordinary dress that reached a pair of delicate ankles. Her hands were clasped together elegantly below her chest, a blue faceted ring on her left middle finger. She wore a pair of earrings identical to Khun’s.
Bam cannot help but wonder if Khun had given them to her.
“You look well,” she says almost dreamily.
Bam is uncertain of her interpretation of ‘looking well’ because Khun has never looked more ill.
Khun finds his voice after twenty smattering heartbeats.
“They say you’ve changed,” he whispers. If there was even the slightest wind, his words would have been carried away. He fails to elaborate whether he believes that she has indeed changed.
Maria steps forward; the drawbridge creaks. Her long hair flutters around the wide blue ribbon at her waist.
“I told you before not to listen to what others say.”
She lifts her hands and Bam is on guard. If she harmed Khun he would –
Her pale fingers formed a curved shell over Khun’s ears, as if there is something she doesn’t want him to hear. To Bam’s surprise, Khun does not even flinch. He concludes that she must have done this before.
“I told you to listen only to your own heart.”
She leans closer; two silver blue heads coming together. Bam watches the scene unfold with an inexplicable sourness - hoping very much that Khun would stop her - as she presses her lips on the edge of Khun’s cheek.
Khun hardly blinks and Bam thinks with a sinking heart that she has done this before too.
The smile on her face is genuine, the sort of smile you gave someone when you haven’t seen them for the longest time.
“It’s good to see you, Aguero.”
*
She leads them both into separate spaces and settles herself in the castle’s drawing room with Khun. Their footsteps are softened against the velvet carpet.
Khun is aware that she has obviously hijacked the castle because none of the castle’s embellishments are of her preference.
A fireplace that crackles in shades of ochre and brown forms the centrepiece of the room. Maria hated the warmth and loved the cold, it could not have belonged to her. There is a tapestry of the Jahad family crest on the wall beside the window and Khun resists a laugh. Maria would have brocades of blushed apples and amber leaves - her favourite season in the Tower was always autumn - this tapestry would have never been of her selection.
She busies herself with a crystal biscuit jar on a side table.
“Your favourite pastries,” she finally says, sliding three spiced biscuits towards him. He can smell the familiar scent of ginger and apricot. Khun does not touch it; he could not find an appetite.
“Maria.” He turns her name into a sigh.
“What are you doing here?”
She sits across him on a luxurious piece of furniture with her hands neatly on her lap. She’s a young woman now, a feminine figure with soft curves and long hair. Her lips are a dash of pink.
“I came to see you of course.”
“You could have seen me years ago. There’s a reason why you have come to see me now.”
Khun assumes that she doesn’t protest because it is true. The timing of her visit was too shrewd; too strategic. Bam had just taken down a series of high rankers and most recently, one of Jahad’s vice commanders. The invisible forces within the Tower began to shift uneasily in anticipation of a change which they fear they cannot prevent.
Maria laughs and it’s as innocent as the one he remembered from more than twenty years ago.
“You’re always so clever.” She wants to add that he has grown very handsome but it seemed inappropriate in the current situation.
She stands by the window which offers a delightful view of the moat and the garden. A shaft of light enters the room from one of the high apertures and she glows; an angel of autumn.
“Do you remember why I love this season?” She seems to ask an irrelevant question.
Of course he does. He remembers everything about her.
“You said that struggling to survive is beautiful. Autumn is nature’s last struggle to be beautiful.” He recalls how she had taken his hand in hers when she said it. He had packed that bittersweet memory into his Manbarondenna a long time ago.
She turns round to beam at him, and she’s very much prettier when she smiles. Maria was older than him, yet her childlike innocence remained.
“We have a chance now,” she says, “to make the Tower beautiful again.”
“You will have to tell me more for me to understand.”
“The irregular!” She comes clean now with some of her intentions. “If he works with us, we will have a chance to bring change.”
Her fingers pull a drapery tie at the side of the tapestry, the one that carried the Jahad family crest. Just like magic, the weaves of silk rippled into an image of the Khun family symbol.
Khun raised his eyebrows at the theatrical feat. “Us?”
“Why, you and me of course.”
“No other?”
Maria waves vaguely at the window. “The rest can come later.”
They are silent for a whole few minutes and an unlit chandelier winks above their heads. Khun has too many memories of her, more than enough to fill the chambers of this empty castle. More than the number of autumn leaves that fill the garden. More than what he could afford to forget.
Maria seems to realise that he needs more persuasion. She walks towards him, her eyes gently tracing the outline of his nose and his lips. She chooses to avoid his eyes.
She bends in front of him, bringing her arms to her knees. Like a child asking for a toy.
“It’s our chance to unseat our Father.” She manages to say things of treason innocently. Khun is now sure that she has changed.
She looks up and the way she holds his eyes is still sublime. “It’s our chance to be together, Aguero.”
Maria holds the last three of his fingers and he is almost convinced that she is sincere. The blue faceted ring on her left middle finger is a cherub that sits on a blue moon.
Khun places his other hand on top of hers, but says very firmly: “Bam is not a pawn. He will walk his own path, and I will follow him.”
If Maria is disappointed, she does not show it. She’s close enough for him to smell her scent: a woody, sweet pinecone. The princess stands and her petite frame manages to block most of the light from the window.
“Will you not try to do it? Not even for me?”
This time, Khun doesn’t hesitate. “No, not even for you.”
He picks up a pastry from the biscuit plate, wanting to taste a bit of the autumn. His appetite was back now that he had made a decision. He is surprised when Maria swipes it from his hand and tosses them into a silver waste bin.
“I guess I don’t deserve to eat them anymore,” Khun remarks, rising from his seat.
“Think about it properly, Aguero.” She attempts to appeal to his sense of reason. “Aguero!” The sun outside quivers on the horizon, it has just started to set. Maria casts a shadow over the bloodred carpet. Khun is almost out of the door.
“I miss you,” she murmurs, but her sentiment is silenced by the swish of the thick curtains as Khun leaves her standing alone.
Behind her, the tapestry transforms back to the Jahad family crest. The three red eyes of Jahad were watching.
*
The chamber Bam was placed in looked splendid but his mind was occupied with dozens of questions which he had currently no answer to. He has worn out the carpet with his pacing and Khun had still not returned. The baroque wall mirror reflected a young man with worried eyes and clenched fists.
Maria Jahad.
Bam wondered what she had done to make Khun look like this. To make Khun feel like this. He wants to rub away the creases on Khun’s brow and hold the stones on his shoulders.
“Go,” Khun had mouthed to him when he refused to leave Khun alone with the woman who seemed to be more important than him. It was the first time he struggled to comply with Khun’s direction.
He counts the number of crystals on bejeweled lamps and the number of petals in flowers of different species to distract himself. Khun finally enters the room when he counts to two thousand.
“Bam,” Khun says breathlessly, as if he had just exerted an immense amount of energy.
Bam grips the fold of Khun’s arm. “What did she want from you?” There is an unspeakable tension in his body and he grips Khun a tad too hard.
“She –”
“Did she ask you to leave?” Bam says fiercely and his other hand now clutches around Khun’s wrist.
“Because I’m not going to let you go with her!”
Bam’s exclamation evidently has a profound effect on Khun, who just stares back at him. Khun realizes only moments later that he had forgotten to breathe.
“I-I’m not going anywhere.” Khun hates to stutter, but he lets himself go this one time. “I mean, I am going somewhere, but with you.”
Bam drops his hands, slightly embarrassed. It was an answer that he was satisfied with. “Good,” he says simply. “Because you belong with me – with us, I mean.” He suddenly finds the wick of a candle terribly interesting as Khun studies him.
“Bam, it’s unlike you to get so worried.”
They settled on a high backed sofa upholstered in burgundy velvet. On the ceiling whirled an indiscernible pattern.
“She is special to you Khun, I can tell.”
“She was special,” Khun corrects him. “Well maybe she still is,” he mutters, “but it’s a different kind of special now.”
Khun sighs. “She wanted to use you, which is never an option. You make your own choices Bam, and I will walk with you.” He doesn’t dare add the word forever.
There is a pause. “Why did you even choose to walk with me?” Bam thinks that he has many flaws which cannot be corrected.
“At the start?” Khun smiles handsomely, reminiscing. “It was because you reminded me of her.”
He knows he has said something wrong when Bam turns rather stiffly away from him. “No, no –” Khun hastily tries to correct the message. “That was just the start,” he explains, exasperated.
“I chose to climb the Tower with you after that, because I felt that it would be the end of the world if you weren’t here with me.”
Khun coloured after he said this – it had been much easier saying this statement to Evan. He manages to control his flush so that it is not visible in the lamp light. Bam turns to face him with a frown and Khun is perplexed.
“They say that you have become weaker with me, you have lost sight of your goals, and –”
Khun covers Bam’s ears with his fingers irritably. “Don’t listen to what others have to say, Bam. Listen only to me.” He unfurls his fingers gently. “I want to climb the Tower with you.”
Bam blinks, because Khun is leaning closer, and he feels his cheek burn as Khun presses a kiss on it. The kiss that Maria had taken earlier in the day. He wants to return the kiss but there was something more important he needed to say.
“Khun.”
“Hm?”
“You were always there for me, even with Rachel, with FUG, with the Wolhaiksong...”
Bam looks so earnest that Khun melts like butter on a warm autumn crumble. Khun knows in that moment that he would follow Bam anywhere.
“This time, let me be there for you.”
Khun grins at him and Bam feels that he has the world again.
There was one last question that caught the tip of his tongue. “Khun, did you give her the earrings?” The question is superfluous now that he is clear of Khun’s intentions, but to young budding love, every detail made a difference.
“No.” Khun takes him by the wrist and walks briskly towards the door. “I gave her something else.” His hand slips from Bam’s wrist to his fingers, and Bam decides that he likes it better this way.
“Let’s get out of here.”
They find their way back to the entrance easily, sweeping past a spiral staircase and numerous corridors. Khun is surprised that there is no fight, no resistance. The servants they passed by were as silent as statutes and Maria was nowhere to be found. It wasn’t long before they reached the drawbridge, their fingers still held together.
Khun stops midway on the drawbridge because he senses her.
“Is this your final decision, Aguero?”
Bam stands between them, prepared to do what he needs to keep the person precious to him. He looks at the princess in the wind, streaks of silver blue strands across her nose and cheek. He would have thought that she should at least glance at him, the irregular who she came for, but her eyes never left Khun. She looked unmistakably sad.
“I won’t change my mind,” Khun says, as Maria does a graceful turn in the air and lands in front of them.
Maria takes a step closer, but she knows that they have never been so far apart.
“If this is your choice, we will be enemies.” There is a dagger hidden beneath her sleeve and she wonders if she has seen Khun bleed before. She decides that she has not.
He does not answer and so she resolves to be the one to leave instead. After all, there was nothing else worth staying for. She turns into the autumn as the leaves swirl around her, the colour of crisped apples. Her thumb absentmindedly touches her left middle finger.
“Do you like it?”
She opens an intricately designed box and a ring sits delicately on a cushion.
“Aguero, it’s beautiful!”
Khun smiles, weaving her long hair into a slender braid. The right over the middle. The left over the middle. Repeat.
“Congratulations on becoming a princess.”
She turns to look at him. “I wouldn’t have made it without you.”
He ignores the statement and takes the ring from her as she attempts to put it on her fourth finger. “Don’t be silly,” he says. “Wear it on this one.” He slides it on her left middle finger.
“It’s a promise ring, Maria.” She laughs, prodding the wings of the cherub that was set on the jewellery. It was lovely.
“What do you promise?”
Khun pretends to think for a long while and she gives him a poke. “Earth to Aguero. What do you promise?”
He smiles. “I promise that you will always be special to me.”
If there are moments that one would never forget, this was one Maria chose to always remember. She gives him a peck on the cheek, as pure as a baby’s breath. “I promise that you will always be special to me too.”
“Is this me?” She points to the cherub that has two chubby wings. “Why did you make me fat?”
Khun rolls his eyes. “Because I think it’s adorable.” His finger touches the moon. “And this is me.”
She allows her fingers to trace the outlines of the silver, the silkiness of the float stone. The cherub on a blue moon, always together.
Her fingers follow the curve of the crescent moon and there is something that hurts in her chest. Love and loss were both a beautiful kind of pain. Where are you now, the boy who used to love me? She disappears into the sunset of gold; her final burst of beauty.
“Khun,” Bam whispers, although he is unsure why. There is no one near them.
“I just remembered a promise that I made,” Khun murmurs, as Bam’s fingers squeeze his comfortingly. “I wonder if I have broken it.”
“Are you okay?” Bam continues to have a thousand questions but he asks the one that is the most important.
Khun pivots to face him and his face is bathed in the glow of the twilight. “As long as you are here with me,” he smiles, “I will be fine.”
He allows Bam to tuck a stray strand of silver behind his ear and leans his cheek against a warm palm. Comfort could be as simple as this.
The sun goes down quietly into the horizon. With Maria’s departure, the floor of tests was mysteriously revived the following day within the castle and they cross successfully to the 97th floor. In the castle, an image of a young angel with a basket full of apples is weaved on a tapestry in the drawing room.
Three years later, Khun learns that a Princess of Jahad was severely punished for letting a traitor of the Khun family live. Jahad was testing her loyalty, they whispered. Jahad was watching! She was presented with two items to kill him, the voices gossiped maliciously – a toxic dagger and a jar of poisonous autumn biscuits made by her own mother.
They say she still wears a ring on her left middle finger.