Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Some decades would send Nicolò in spirals of guilt. The years after must become refugia comforts from the relentlessness of passing time and worse, the passing-ons of versions of themselves. Some two hundred years after their second birth, there was a change - not just in the world, but in them, and in Nicolò most of all. 

Maybe Andromache and Quỳnh had seen worse, but never, never had Yusuf thought the two of them would see such a great dying. Nicolò, sensitive Nicolò, had taken it the hardest from the ward bedside tables. Overnight, he had gone from delivering babies to delivering news - gray, shaking news. And that was only the beginning of the long years that brutalized and crippled the sallow 1340s.

After, they had felt drawn to settle down to rolling hills and tending farmland - taking on dozens of sheep to busy their hands. The locals did not mind the odd sight of them and although some bird nesting instinct seemed to ruffle their feathers, they never accused or questioned them. When Yusuf went out into town to buy, sell, and trade, they bartered with him as if he were one of their own. Some locals even began to grow roguishly fond and teasing once they realized that Yusuf, too, could fall in for some music and dancing and small island gossip. 

Scottish was a hard accent for Yusuf and he ached with pity for how Nicolò’s head must spin but, try as he might to coax him out in those years, Nicolò retreated into a homebody. Instead of the comfort of people, Nicolò spent all his time with trees and flowers and books and sheep. A tortured soul, the locals called him, and left him to his melancholy. 

Nicolò would fall asleep in those days and be visited by specters of desolation and death. When he fell asleep, Yusuf would have to recount poetry to his sleeping form. 

Tentatively, Yusuf would approach Nicolò and ask for his secrets and Nicolò would further withdraw. Nicolò would shake his head - frustrated by the words that would not come. He would walk off, walk for hours across Scottish shorelines and rock walls, only to come back red-eyed and cold. He would have to burrow into the blanket of Yusuf’s arms and warm softly by the fire. They would lay like that and Yusuf would beg, bit by bit, for Nicolò to reveal himself. This, too, could end badly, like the decade, like the whole damn century.

“What's underneath?” He would ask, “What has tied you into knots and left you bound, wordless, inexplicable?”

Yusuf would reach for him, would take and kiss each of Nicolò’s palms and ask to wield a shield, asking that Yusuf might stand guardian between true love and truly terrible thoughts. 

Often, it would be weeks at a time in silence. Nicolò would wake early and press a loving kiss to Yusuf's shoulder - Yusuf would pretend to sleep so as to not rush the fluttering touches. Then, Nicolò would disappear into the grass fields to watch the sheep, to tend to their coats, to care after their hooves and the gravitas, soon-to-be mothers. 

Yusuf would paint landscapes in all the time Nicolò drifted, or he would be off to the pub to take lessons with a fiddler, or he would run into town to pick through books and gossip. It was a painful, necessary distance that came to zenith when Nicolò had awoken one night from a sweat-soaked nightmare, dried his brow, and then turned over to go back to sleep. Yusuf, worried, had been left sleepless at the very sight. Fog had come in the morning and, in the late afternoon, it had finally crept up the hill to sit beside Yusuf.

“Death comes and there isn’t anything to do about it,” Nicolò said after a while. “I can't help but think about it, after all these years. I am so petrified by death. I feel helplessly pursued by it.”

Abandoning his loose notes, his linen canvas, his charcoal sketches, Yusuf had sat with him at the foot of the old tree. 

“In my sleep,” Nicolò finally admits, “I meet every man, woman, and child that has died in my arms - many by my own hands. I meet them in heaven, in God’s palace, amongst great hills of white. When I am surrounded by light and the high singing of angels, I meet the spirits.

“They curse me, spit at me, they pass me by with looks of hatred. I fall to my knees and plead to them. When I reach up, grab them, beg them, not for forgiveness but for anything but solitude, they pull mockingly away. They say ‘Who built the palaces of your god?’ I cannot answer, for I know there is atrocity but I cannot guess its name. 

“‘We condemn you’, they say to me. ’For you, there are no safe Kingdoms. In these endless gardens we wait for you. Across infinity, we hunt you down.’ Then they open their mouths and they swallow me whole. The black abyss of the fall becomes endless and cold. I pray, as I fall, for the nonexistence of God and therefore the nonexistence of the fate of hell.

“In my sleep, I invent a way to change the past. I go back and change everything. When I awake, I am furious that the journey was false.”

Sometimes the hopeless thoughts from the heart are exposed, not to be consoled or advised, but just to have them aloud and for them to exist elsewhere but inside a crowded head, to allow someone else to see them, sit with the weight of them. Nicolò did this from time to time. He granted Yusuf insight, to test the weight of his burden like one might test the weight of a bag before lifting it. He did not want his burden shifted, nor parsed through, nor shared.

‘Just look at it, see it, see me, and let me hold it alone next to you .’

“Weak men will do terrible things to feel any sense of community,” Nicolò continued. “In my weakness, I found God and believed with everything. I gambled with, even, the souls of others. I was a man of God once, now I am a man of no one. I am no one's man.”

When Yusuf heard those words, he had been ashamed to have let it fester so far. Nicolò, like a child at a scab, had reopened an old wound and dug at it to rawness, to ruinous infection.

“Have you confessed it all, my battlefield companion?”

“I have.”

“May I comfort you now?”

Hesitant, but not surprised, Nicolò nodded, “If you wish.”

“I wish,” said Yusuf and he turned in for the warmest, most sunshine of all kisses - the only kiss to be had, to give and be given in these moments. it had been a true center-hearth of a kiss and within it Nicolò had melted. 

‘I will not take your burden ,’ this kiss said. ‘ You hold the baggage, I will be the ground that holds you.’

“You will never be no one's man,” Yusuf was still close when he declared. “You are immutably, forever mine as I am yours. No matter how God leads or abandons I am beside you. Call me blasphemous but equally call me by your side. Call me omnipresent, see me always, always with you. Come death, come fate, come unforgiveness. Our love will bend them to their mighty knees.”

Holding his scimitar again is like remembering he has another arm - like fighting right handed and recalling, at the peak of crossing swords, that he has always been left dominant. Holding Nicolò’s longsword again, however, is like remembering an old agony. It is like memories best hidden but jolt-seen. It is like recovering the shatter-glass of his spirit and finding the shards splinter thin. 

He would clean and tend to the leather, run the edge of the blade across coarse stone, and hold it in his hands long enough to know its weight again, but it has been cared for immaculately. The hilt, last he saw it was cracked, has been replaced. The blade is sharper, more deadly, than he has ever known it. 

“I have gotten into the habit of shedding tears,” he explains as he wipes his face. “It’s been like this since…. It seems I will cry over anything.”

She has come to take the longsword from Yusuf before they leave and Yusuf grips it tight. 

“You have enough to carry,” she says. Her hold on the body of the sheath is relentless.

“It is not a burden.”

“I never said it was.”

“I can take it.”

“I’ve carried it all this way.”

“Let me carry it some,” Yusuf begs.

Andromache pulls away as if Nicolò’s sword has come right out of the kiln. 

“Of course,” she says. As if her spirit, too, were immortal, she heals immediately.

Throwing her pack over her shoulder, she moves from their campsite - slow and unrelenting like an army, like a river, like a storm. 

“This is a heavy sword,” Yusuf calls to her stone back. “I had forgotten how heavy.”

“Yes.”

“I can hold it for a while,” Yusuf says, “but could we take turns carrying it?”

“I can take it in the afternoon,” she does not look back, but she slows her pace and allows Yusuf to nearly keep up.

“Thank you,” Yusuf says, and the words are deeper and heavier than either of them can afford to add to their packs at this time.

Yusuf buys a pocket watch in Genova. He checks the watch every five minutes to see how time is doing. Once he had realized that time was going to betray him again, he snapped the watch closed to never be reopened.

They stay for years that go creaking on and on and on at the beaches of Genova. 

He speaks only Genoese or Italian and Andromache refuses it, she speaks in everything else. When they walk in public, they are an odd sight and sound, a mix of everything under the sky but never together. They are oil and vinegar in this way. 

At times she would be so concentrated with rage that Yusuf could see it as if it were alive and roiling under her skin. She will subconsciously tense and consciously relax. She will whip her head around as if surprised at her thoughts, as if she understands reality in delays. If he says a word too many. she will suddenly turn on him like a snake.

“I am so angry with him,” Andromache snaps. She is glaring, sneering, lip pulled up like a snarl. “I had him in my hands! I was holding him! He was mine!”

Yusuf and Andromache do not grieve alike, and her anger devours him. He shuts his eyes against it, but eyes are no defense anymore. They are just doors to other places, to painful memories, to unholdable him .

Yusuf has many dreams in these years, all of which are disquieting and make him start uneasily. In his sleep, he enters the last room of his life and is never allowed to leave. In his sleep, something is moving slowly towards him, spiraling around and around in a hunt to the center of his room where he is hidden. 

Sometime in the short days and dark nights, sometime after the complete leaflessness of trees and the frozen-overs of lakes, Yusuf realizes that he is starving to death. He is not hungry nor is he thirsty, and there is no use in getting up to find food or drink. It is better, instead, just to lay here.

“I have died all these same ways when I lost her,” Andromache says. She brings him bread, nuts, fruit, and honey. “I still die like this sometimes, after all these years.”

“What if he is dead, Andromache?”

She looks up at him, shocked. 

He is begging for her reassurance and she is looking at him like she needs it now, too. 

“What if the ocean has taken him and there is nothing left to find. What if it is only us.”

“Why are you saying this to me,” she grabs him by the collar of his shirt and thrashes him around - shaking him back and forth as if she means to shake the very doubt out of him. “Are you two competing to be in the dog house? When I find him, I’m knocking your heads together!”

She releases him and he sprawls backwards.

Soft, livid, and cautious, she says, “Is this what you’ve been thinking about all this time?”

“Only some of the time,” Yusuf admits. “I thought it once and could not let it go.”

“Well, let it the fuck go. Or else.”

“Please,” Yusuf blinks tears away, but he is croaking and desperate. “Please don’t leave me alone with the thought.” 

“When I find Nicolò,” she says, “I’m going to build a big prison around him. Lots of iron and shackles. I’m going to sit at his door and stare at him for ten years, at least. I’m just going to fucking watch him, like a hawk, until I know he’s not going anywhere. When I’ve seen enough of him, I’m going to take you both to a stall in the markets of Ṭarābulus where I found the best curcuma cakes.”

She waits. Eventually, she gets what she wants. Yusuf looks up at her.

When she has his attention, she asks, “What will you do when we find Nicolò?”

“I will do anything, anything to hear his laugh again,” Yusuf says. 

In the spring, as he navigates his way through a city that makes him want to fall to his knees and cry, he is surprised to find himself followed by street urchins. Everywhere he goes for weeks, there are usually three, four, eight of the little dirty children who whisper and point. He goes to the market to stare at the flowers, there are their little blonde heads ducking behind stalls. He goes to the town hall to request boat logs and there are their feet racing like the wind. He goes to sit at the beach and there are their cupped hands hiding secrets. They watch him curiously and race off when he waves at them. They never ask for change or offer to shine his shoes; they simply smile at him in the hope, usually fulfilled, that he will smile back.

Genova treats him like family. 

Men buy him drinks at the bar. Women see him passing by on the street and give him flowers, give him warm smiles. More than once, he is offered free bread as he is walking through the city at night by shop owners closing their doors. More than once, he is challenged to card games in the alleys and his pocket is only picked twice and each time it is by fumbling, well-meaning young men who are trying to keep food on the table. He is offered a lovely and gently refused date with a beautiful woman. As he walks through the northeast district where there is housing and small businesses, Yusuf is kicked a foot ball and joins an afternoon bout. When he is found crying on the shore, a kind man sits beside him and tells him stories of falling in love fifty years ago. 

Each kindness and friend and smile he sees, each flower on the road, each dinner made from scratch, each breeze, each cry of the gull and every bit of light from the sun is a living exhibition of a love that can stretch forwards and backwards in time. Everything and everyone in Genova is beautiful and kind because Nicolò is beautiful and kind. He is welcoming Yusuf home from a moment in time both an eon ago and a blink from now. 

Yusuf walks in the city that Nicolò loves because he wants that love for himself. He wants to have Nicolò back by loving what he loves. He wants to be loved by something to stuff up all the leaking holes in his heart. 

He survives only on the hope that the sweetness of Genova will allow Nicolò to visit him in his sleep.

Marseille. Marseille. Marseille.

To never see it again in all his immortal years would be too soon. 

Yusuf spends a year looking out to the bay like a pirate in a crow’s nest. Blind to all else but the horizon, he is scared, sometimes, that he will look down only in time to see the fall of his ship off the edge of the world.

He looks at Andromache for peace but she is never at peace. Only rarely now does she look at Yusuf with hatred; the comradery of their conjoined suffering has softened her edges. She’s not angry with Yusuf anymore - not like she used to be. She doesn’t look at him with hatred. She hardly looks at him at all. Mostly, the anger turns toward the sea, finally where it belongs, and she paces, she storms across piers as ships come in and reads logs incoming and outgoing with the pragmatism of an ancient hunter. 

The dueling, broken heart in her chest can be heard by Yusuf from any point in France. Maybe even across the whole world he could hear how she aches. He can see through her dams and dikes to the raging flood water beyond. But that hasn’t changed in over three hundred years - it’s not louder, there is just one less abasement to help her defy the storms.

They cannot handle a full year of waiting. After nine months, they have to go. Both of them are homesick with nowhere to go. They are stir crazy and too tired to move.

“I know why he jumped,” Andromache looks out towards the sea and says on their last day, “I don't condone it. But had it been her ….”

She finished this sentence once before when she was drunk. Maybe twenty years after the drowning of the iron coffin, when they were ripping through the earth in search of clues still living. There had been a great English man-of-war claimed by their war with the world. The three of them were burning their paperwork, pilfering their gold, freeing their slaves, putting holes in their helm, reading their logs. Yusuf found them in the captain’s cabin. Nicolò had been rereading and rereading the logs again. Andromache had held up her tumbler of whiskey and sat amongst maps - looking at Nicolò, peering into his soul and freezing him through.

“Had I been there on the ship I would have, I would have killed them,” she promised. “I would have killed every last one of those men with my own two hands - no! I would have built them each a coffin and made them dig their own graves and - Oh! I would have leapt , Nicolò, I would have left after her! I would have broken my arms into the mouth of that iron beast and twisted them around to let them heal as hooks and not even a hundred thousand fucking deaths and all the oceans storms would have torn me away! I would have held onto her with my fucking teeth, Nicolò! I only have peace in the dreams when I am drowning with her, doomed with her rather than her alone.”

Nicolò had stood up from the desk, sat before her, and said, “We would know, right? If she was gone?”

“I hope not. I don't think I can survive a second after knowing. If that hope is gone, I will be gone, too. I want as long as I possibly can to reach for her. If I’m reaching for no one, I don’t want to know.”

A lake of silence fills the space between them until Yusuf can’t take it anymore, it’s sink or swim. They sit on the beach with their feet in the water, tide licking at their soles as hot as blood.

“We should go. Try somewhere else,” Yusuf’s voice is hoarse. He’s not sure when he used it last. “It isn’t good to stare at things too long.” 

There comes a dream of Nicolò - of his voice, of his call across a snowy pass. Yusuf hears him clear across time, feels himself slip backwards a hundred years as if it were only an excruciating hour, only a fleeting moment from his side. Stunned by joy, Yusuf whips his head up and around, trying to find his voice as it rebounds and echoes louder from each hopeless mountain. 

“Nicolò,” he calls, bends over laughing for relief, “I’m here! I’m here! Where are you!”

In this valley, he waits just to see him, for Nicolò to crash into Yusuf like the ocean. For just one little second, Yusuf wants to see him, even if he cannot hold him or approach or say a single word.

When he wakes, the flame of excitement and delirium of dreams leave him too dazed to sort out why he is alone, why there is nothing in his arms but a sword. His flame is put out - drenched. He is left cold and quaking. 

This isn’t what was supposed to happen. Destiny has always had something bigger in mind for them. They are meant for great, great acts together. Their fates are entwined. 

Yusuf enfolds the longsword in his arms, kisses it, and kisses it. 

Rumors find them and root in Yusuf’s soul - rumors of an undying man, who cannot be harmed or scored on a rose bush, who does not age and is immortal. They ripple down the mountains of Northern Poland like a beautiful, shimmering river and Yusuf races after. 

Tales are accompanied by boastful claims of having hit the monster with bullet, stick, stone, snare, trap.

“You'll never believe it,” say the locals in the town at the base of the mountain. “I hit it right between the eyes but it turned and vanished!”

It is a beautiful day to be close to him. The Clouds move and there is song again. Yusuf knows that he is close. He will find Nicolò at the top of this mountain and pick him like a flower! He runs, lovesick and dumb, to die so crack-suddenly between one step and the next that he only knows it’s happened when he wakes up on his back with a bullet tumbling down his skull. 

Some other thing is standing at his feet, gun poised but slipping down as shock is absorbed, as the man sees the stop-bleeding and the renewal of skin. Unrest settles between them - Andromache behind him, standing, hand at her back, and Yusuf on the ground, and there is this man, this limited thing of graying age and gun violence.

He is maybe eighty years old, this other thing, this man that is not who he is supposed to be. Years have worn him as hard as hurricanes; his hair is matted, his body is gaunt, his eyes are crazy and isolated. His eyes shift up to Andromache, down to Yusuf and with them lists the barrel of his gun.

“You’re no immortal,” Andromache hisses and gains the full concentration of the gun.

Aghast, the old man vies, “Why, yes I am!”

“So, if I were to,” Andromache raises her labrys and the man howls, taking shelter. 

“It seems that something like you, something everlasting, may not fear to die and yet still fear the form in which death comes.” She follows with her ancient, angry eyes, but the old man peers from his hiding spot and throws glassware, pottery, coins, rocks. 

“What,” screeches the old man, “What do you want! You come to me just to flaunt? Get out of here!”

“You the thing they call immortal in these mountains,” Yusuf grieves.

“I am immortal,” the old man cries. “God just has not decided to give it to me yet.”

He comes and goes and is visible at times - a bundle of unbrushed hair and tattered clothes and scars and scabs and dry skin and sores and yellowed teeth and foggy eyes and open wounds. He appears curious, distrustful from behind a chair. 

“What do you want! Have you come to give it to me, Teacher? What must I do to deserve eternal life?”

Nicolò is not here, Yusuf comes to know reluctantly. His hopes are blown away like sand. It is only the immortality of human need to live forever that sequesters in these mountains. He has come running to death, to questions of forever, to the asking of unanswerable questions all over again. If this old mortal only knew the true state of immortality, the cyclical never ending of it. He is blessed, and surely he doesn’t feel very blessed, but he will never know what he does not suffer. 

“How are you here, old man,” Yusuf cries out. “Why are you alone on this big mountain?”

“I don’t trust those mortals in the town, same as you,” he says. “They don’t trust me either! They knew from the beginning that I was something special, something strange! They knew I was of witchcraft, of magic spells! They chased me with rocks, yes sir! They shot at me with guns! They feared what they knew I would become! They feared you two and you coming and the gifts that you would grant!”

Yusuf stares up at him helplessly.

“How long have you been up here?”

“Forever! And I will stay here forever!”

“And they shot you? And you healed?”

The old man proudly lifts his shirt to reveal his tired bones, his mortal flesh, his starred, silver scars, “Every wound they’ve given! Healed! I have sat up on my mountain, cursing and scaring and hurting, if I have to, every unworthy man. I have chased them with weapons from the altars of my shrine to your gift!”

“You’ve made yourself into lore. You have alienated yourself from mankind to become some guardian of fool’s gold,” Yusuf pleads for him to understand. “You have wasted all of your time.”

“Wasted? No! Earned! I have earned this moment! I want to live forever!”

“I want, I want, I want and the world does not listen!” Yusuf answers, “I want everyone to live forever, I want to grow old and move on! I want you to be free of the crushing desire to live through even the things you don’t want to! I want there to exist only good and I want to cherish the good because the bad is there to compare! I want to be someone who isn’t disappointed! I want to take pride in the world and stop looking around expecting a better place! I want to be the man that he sees! More than anything, more than your life and mine, I want to see him again! I want to tell him everything. I want to sit next to him and touch him and cry into his arms! He is the reason for there to be wanting in the world!”

“You should be grateful,” the old man scolds. “God has given you an endless life! I should want to take it from you if you dont guard it!”

“You should be grateful,” Yusuf snaps and the man leaps away. “God has given you a mortal life! I should want to take it from you if you don’t guard it!”

The oldest thing to ever walk the earth comes to take Yusuf up and force him forward, back down the mountains of Northern Poland and to… where? Where is there to go next?

Over her shoulder, Andromache says, “You want to know how to live forever?”

“I do,” the old man cries. 

“Climb down this fucking mountain and be kind to people. That’s the only way to live longer than me.”

They make camp on the foot of the other side of the mountain and Yusuf looks up, past the fire, to the low hanging moon that is half hidden by clouds. 

When she calls to him, asks him to say something, asks him to wrestle up anything that can lighten this dark fire, this star-full, man-effacing sky, Yusuf cannot hear her exact words and can barely shake his head.

“My head hurts and I am sad.”

Andromache contains titan fury. Within her there is a maelstrom and mammoth waves that change courses and destinies and all life on earth. She is angry with whatever god or nongod is out there for existing or non-existing. She is angry with the ocean for taking and the land for being plentiful. She hates the sun for shining on bitter days and the storms for coming when she needs absolute stillness the most. She despises the currents, the waves, the moon that pulls the tide. She hates mankind, the source of all her savagery, the breaker of her heart, the drowner of her love. Most of all, she hates Yusuf for standing there and bearing too much of his soul.  

“I can’t stop thinking about it,” he says, unaware that this is an accusation. “The way it could have been if we had never gone to sea. If we had waited for those repairs, those months to pass, that shipment of food to come in. I would never know any of this, I would never know these questions so well - will we starve? Will we die this way? How do I go on? How do I live through this? How do I know if he’s gone? What will become of me?”

“It was you who fell from the ship,” Andromache accuses cruelly, defensively, and then there is a sudden shame on her shoulders that speaks of regret before she can.

Yusuf speaks even faster, “It was you who forced us to get on that ship in the first place! It was you who turned my days into deserts!”

“Forced you? We took it up to a vote and left together!”

“You know exactly what threat we were under, it was leave with you then or watch you leave alone! You backed us into a corner, choosing what was right or choosing you. What sort of vote is that? It will always be you!”

“You would do the same if it was him! You would drag me and her to all corners of the earth, to the underneath of every rock and the top of every mountain if you had to! Yusuf, don’t tell me you wouldn’t! If it was him in her place you wouldn't be here, you would be out on the ocean!”

“Don’t tell me who I am, Andromache! If you think I have not put the same care and effort into finding her as I would if it were him or you, then you know nothing of me! I will go to the ends of the earth to find Quỳnh!”

She flinches, bodily, from the name. 

“You think I won’t spend every immortal moment looking for her? Ask, Andromache, and we will always come with you.”

“I am asking now! Drop everything! Forget him! Leave this landlocked waste and sail away with me! We can spend the next thousand years sailing to nowhere and nothing, wasting away and wondering what has happened to our dear baby brother. Is he forever drowning in the ocean, same as her? Has he been spit out and taken prize in some castle? Is he tortured day in and day out with thoughts of you and what ocean you must drown in? Is he dead, gone from us, eternity burnt away in only a few hundred years?”

“Your grief makes you cruel, Andromache,” Yusuf wipes his eyes. “We gave everything to find her.”

Like a kicked stray with hackles up, she looks at Yusuf and growls, “Where is she, then? Where is your effort now? Nearly three hundred years and she is still breathing water! Waking, drowning, waking and drowning. How long will I have to wait before you stop dragging you feet and dredge at least one of them out of the fucking water! You don’t know anything, Yusuf! You are a child! You may be old but I am older. I am six thousand years old. Six thousand.” 

She says it with such pain that it twists Yusuf’s heart.

“Six thousand years of stagnation and decay. I am going to pieces and everyone is going away.”

She whirls on him and glares savagely, “You! Why don't you go away, too? Why do you stay? You have been trying to leave me for three hundred years! You’re always looking for an exit! All you want to do is run away with him to your islands, your Malta and your Scotland, your fucking sheep!”

She attacks him for the crime of not being another man. Yusuf is living for him but he is not him. He has committed the mortal crime of being too painful to look at and too painful to leave.

Her words leave him in tears and petrified that she will storm off and disappear at any moment. He will be doomed to more years of empty campfires.

“All these years you’ve lived and you have perfected the art of forcing everyone away,” he says. “If you are so afraid of being alone, stop lashing me with your tongue and that rotten look in your eye! Stop chasing me away!”

She recoils, “You want to see chased away? I’ll show you a chased away like you couldn’t fucking imagine. I’ll show you a disappearing! Good luck on your own, Yusuf, and try to make it a hundred years before you swallow your own sword!”

“Good riddance,” Yusuf says. “I’ll cover more ground on my own, anyway!”

“You’re shit with reading maps and we both know it!”

“I don’t need a map, I just need to keep moving!”

“You’re going to take the map!”

“I don’t need it!”

She scours through her bag, dumping her supplies - her flint, her knives, brined beef, ship biscuits, twine, bow string, more knives, leaflets of letters from three hundred years ago. Her maps come in a tumble of notes, of drawings in Yusuf’s hand, little lists in Nicolò’s sharp letters, a line of silk once used to tie back beautiful, black hair. 

Andromache slaps the maps across the fire and works to collect her spillage. 

Yusuf lifts, instead of the maps, her shaking hands off the floor.

“We have lost so much,” Yusuf says.

“Everything.”

“Everything.”

Andromache wipes her sweaty hair off her forehead. 

“We wanted to get on the ship. We would have without you, just for the chance to see her again.”

“Don’t lie to me,” she hides it all in her bag again. It feels better to not have to look at it, but to know it’s there, that it’s all in her care.

She stands. She offers her hand. Her grip is grounding - something steady, fierce, recovering. Then she draws back. She drops to a seat fireside, leaving Yusuf standing alone, more alone than he can recognize in himself.

“You hated me so much,” Yusuf chokes out before she can protest or before his strength to say it is gone. “All those years we looked for her you hated me. I could see it in your eyes.”

“I did.”

Yusuf’s breath leaves like all hope leaves - instantly. 

“I won’t pretend I didn’t. You deserve the truth, and you’re smart enough to puzzle it out. I have been on this earth for so long, I know when I’m being a child.”

She sits back and looks him over, hard and cold as ever - as hard and cold as the start of the Era of the Iron Maiden. Then the spring comes, unexpectedly, and begins to melt her ice. Her shoulders soften, so does the look in her eyes, and she thaws forward and takes his hand. Her hands are smaller than he remembers - though he cannot recall the last time she’s touched him like this. It breaks his heart to not know her hands anymore. 

No longer the god of anger, she is a stopped and tired human. 

“I am sorry that I made you into something that you’re not. I am sorry that you had to carry me for so long. I am sorry that I cast you away when I knew that you wanted to help. I am sorry that I did not see your wisdom. I am sorry that when I did see your wisdom, I chose fury instead. I am sorry that I hated you for all those years, you deserved that least of all. I am sorry that I did not hide my hatred from you. I am sorry that I could not keep Nicolò safe for you, and that I put you both in danger to begin with. It’s my fault.”

“It’s not!”

“It is,” she says. “I know that now. For years after Quỳnh was,” the first flash of emotion - frustration, fury, fear, “After Quỳnh, I could not see the best paths or the best options. I could only see red. I hated you because you were there to hate. The men who took her away weren't there. Everything else that stepped in my way would die in my hands. All that survived was the truth of what those men had done and you. You were there.”

“Why me? I watched you take Nicolò into your arms. You received his comfort and not mine! You left me alone without you! You were my guidance, my teacher! You were my sister, too! But you and Quỳnh were severed from me in one cut!”

“When we first dreamt of you, I hated you both. I woke from that vision and cursed you. I cursed you to plague and war and death most of all. Take your eternity and shove it, I thought. After Lykon, I couldn’t stand the thought of you. A pair? Twins? I had to make room for two of you in my heart? No. I couldn’t meet you. I couldn’t love you. I couldn’t lose you in a hundred, thousand, ten thousand years. I couldn’t outlive anyone else.”

“You never told me that,” Yusuf says. 

“I’m still a trove of secrets,” she holds a note of self deprecation, “even after all these years.”

“Why did you find us then?”

“When she dreamt of you two, she woke up in love. She spent all our travels west talking about you two. She spent every fucking day planning your lessons, making lists - she filled a whole continent with promises. She wanted to teach you better hunting and fighting and sneaking and hiding and planning and on and on and on. When she finally got her hands on you two, she unleashed decades of love and she scared Nicolò away.”

Yusuf laughs wetly, thumbing his tears away, “Yes, he was a bit of an iceberg in those days - cold, detached, slow moving.”

“You took to her, though.”

“I did.”

“And she loves you dearly.”

“I know that she does. I love her, too.”

Her love was never a question. Her love is fire warm. Her love is binding. Her love is a kiln. Her love has taken three cold stones of metal and melted them, shaped them, flattened them out on the anvil of her strength with hammers of her affection, dunked them in the ice bath of her resolve, and sharpened them into a lethal, loving blade. She has forged them and she has formed herself into their hilt. 

“You don’t take after her, though. You may be open, kind, and soft like her, but you are passionate, you are a romantic, you are eager. You are heavy and fierce. You want to get in people’s faces and tell them how it is, you want to fight them man on man, and you want to fight them on even terms. You take after me.”

Yusuf understands, “And Nicolò….”

“Nicolò,” Andromache looks away. She stops for a long time. She clears her throat. “He has my bite.”

“But he takes after her.”

“I can’t be mad at him when he looks at me like that - like her. That quiet, disappointed understanding. That patient compassion. I slammed myself closed, but he opened me up and thumbed through me like a fucking book. He played me like an instrument. He could ask anything of me, and I’d do it. Kill, die, eat, sleep, be nicer, be more patient. I would do anything but wait, just a few months, for the ship to be fixed and the storms to pass.”

Yusuf has never held back his tears. He has never kept himself from crying in all his life. His father had taught him that. To show your tears is to expose yourself to the world and there would never be a braver act than to face the world exposed.

Andromache worries him. The way she crushes her feelings down puts him on edge. He can feel the pressure building in her. He flinches away from her like she is a lit fuse every time the smallest emotion comes to be crushed away. He knows there are no containers, no matter how old or strong, that can hold that stress forever. When it gives, and it will give, all the earth may give with it. 

“In my head, I made you me,” Andromache admits. “Because you spoke the truth about my desperation and my shortsightedness, I made you my failures to save her. Because you stood in the way, I made you my failures to find her. I had to live with myself so I made you into my mirror.”

She squeezes his hand, “Yusuf, I love you. I love you. I know I have done you harm and I do you harm to this day. You deserved none of what you were given. When you needed your family, when you needed me to get my act together, I failed you. I can’t change that. I have spent the last hundred years wandering alone, understanding my regret. Now I think I know it. Know that I don’t seek your forgiveness, I wouldn’t ask you to shoulder that burden, but I will work to fix what I’ve done. I will find him. I will put him back in your arms and I will destroy anything or anyone who tries to take him from you again.”

Yusuf has never, in all his years or hers, known Andromache the Scythian to make such a promise and fail to keep it. 

She brings him home more dead than alive. Although Yusuf thought himself to be drained dry by the years, he bursts into tears right there on the docks. 

“He has to be here,” Yusuf says. “I can feel him here!”

Perhaps Andromache has never been called merciful before, but in thousands of years it was bound to happen. Merciful Andromache does not mention to Yusuf, though he knows she thinks it, that he has felt the soul of his lover in every city they have visited together. These feelings are just memories, she does not say. These feelings are false, you are getting your hopes up, you are acting foolishly with your heart, she does not say. 

Yusuf leads her with the certainty of only yesterdays to where his childhood house once stood. Before, it was beautiful and richly white. Now it is the last stall of a street market. Before, his mother kept a garden. Now, there is a mean-eyed man who sells rugs and trinkets and dismisses him like an insect when he hesitates at the front of his store.

“I’m looking for someone,” Yusuf says. 

“Somone, I don’t have, but something - I have plenty of somethings, take a look.”

“He would come here,” Yusuf says, “He’s about this high and he has light hair and he has a Roman nose and broad shoulders like this and he carries so much in his eyes. It’s like looking into the sky, those timeworn eyes. It’s like looking into the sky and knowing there’s more out there, those eyes. It’s like knowing there is endless kindness, that there’s reason, that better times are coming, those eyes. He would have come here sometime yesterday or last year or maybe forty, eighty years ago. Sometime over the last hundred years. Have you seen him?”

“Look,” says the shopkeeper irritably, “I sell glassware and souvenirs, not ancient men from ancient times. If you see anything you like you can purchase it, and if you find the man you’re looking for in my shop, you can purchase him, too. I can’t help you beyond that.”

Andromache leaves quickly, ducking out of the stall to cool off in the street.

“Would you like a couffa? Slippers? Hand painted bowls? I’m your guy.”

“Thank you,” says Yusuf, and he purchases a simple leather purse with the last of his coins. 

The shopkeeper softens as he takes Yusuf’s money, frowning thoughtfully at the tourist with a familiar accent. 

“ Ella al-liqaa,” Yusuf wishes him well.

“ Allah mahak ,” the shopkeeper says, looking surprised at his own sincerity. 

Andromache leans against a wall just outside and as he pushes his way past the tapestries she throws her arm around his slumping shoulders and reels him in like a carp, “Don’t look so miserable, little brother. We cross another city off the list. We’re getting somewhere. We’ve barely checked past the Indus River. He could have gone home to Đại Việt.”

They had many homes still to check. They had many countries, continents, and stretches of land still to check. They had many oceans and rivers and rolling hills and valleys and cities and rural tundra and cattle land and not to mention the moving ships and nomad colonies. There are so many hiding spots in the world. There was still the topmost of every mountain and there was always down, too. They could always check down into the ocean depths where all the earth’s last secrets reside. 

Andromache pinches his cheek hard, “Don’t dig yourself a grave just yet, little brother.”

“Wait,” the shopkeeper shouts as he runs to catch them. He stops, halfway between them and his shop, “There was a story. I will tell you, but never did I think this day would come. If all this is some big joke I won’t be very happy about it!”

Yusuf turns, frozen in the place where he stands. He shouts, “Tell me!”

“Before my father’s death he told me of a Roman who had come to the shop. It was a long time ago, my father was still young and unwed. My father described him as a strange sort - some man who spoke perfect Arabic, some fool who up and left his career at a hospital to find work as a weaver. He wanted to work at my father’s stall, and stuck around for months like a bad smell trying to get my father to hire him.”

“Did he?”

“Yes,” says the shopkeeper, “My father liked his employees to be determined and no one showed so much dedication - my father loved him at once. The Roman stayed a year making rugs and in that year he made my father a lot of money. Strangely, he asked for very little - just a room to sleep in and food to eat.”

“Do you still have any?”

“What?”

“Anything he made?”

“Sure,” said the shopkeeper, motioning back to his stall. “He made these.”

The three tapestries that fringe the door to the shop are worn by salt ocean breeze and sunshine to dullness. The edges are frayed and the images are too aged to make out, but once they were golden and once they were blue. They are well loved - many of the old holes have been patched with freshly dyed wool. Much of the aging has been postponed through evident care. They are beautiful, they are homely, they were once in Nicolò’s hands. 

“Can I buy them?”

“With that empty purse?”

“I will give you everything,” Yusuf strips off his bag, his sword, his shawl, he reaches for Andromache’s purse and she lets him. 

“I don’t want everything,” the shopkeeper says, “I don’t want anything. They’re not for sale. My father was very fond of these ugly things and I will keep them all my life and my daughters will keep them for all their lives, too. You can come visit them, anytime, when you buy things from my shop.”

Shortsighted with heartsick, Yusuf turns away. He falls against the white walls of Tunisia and looks up at her sky.

Brilliant Andromache thinks to ask, “Did your father ever mention where the Roman went when he left?”

“Yes,” says the shopkeeper with uncertainty. “My father asked him to stay, but he said he had a lot of searching to do. He left north, he said he would try to find home in Northern Europe. He would be an old, old man now. He spoke a bit of a retirement in France, if that matters to you.”

“Northern Europe,” Yusuf’s mouth is dry.

“He left a message,” the shopkeeper says. “He told my father to pass it down to his children and his grandchildren. He said someone like you two would come looking for it one day. That Roman was a strange, prophetical fellow.”

Dizzy, Yusuf asks, “What was the message?”

“He said that if he hadn’t found what he was looking for by the turn of the century he would find trouble to occupy him. If there was no trouble to be found, he would create some trouble of his own.”

“Everywhere is at war,” Andromache says on the ship. “I can’t think of anywhere where there isn’t war. That little troublemaker, he could be anywhere. And he can’t just sit still for a couple hundred years? France is at war, the British are at war, the Ottoman is at war, the Portuguese are at war, the Spanish are at war, the Irish are at war, the Russian Empire is at war, the Colonies are at war, the Prussians are at war, the Swedes are at war, the Swiss are at war. There is simply too much trouble. Where are we to start? What are you so happy about?”

“He’s alive,” Yusuf grins impossibly. “He’s alive, alive, alive. He’s out there causing trouble.”

Yusuf's face hurts with it, he feels like he will split in two. The grin won’t diminish for anything in the world. It’s an unstoppable grin that flutters his stomach and sends his heart racing and soaring all at once. It’s an unquenchable grin, an unsinkable grin, and grin that could swim across the whole ocean. 

The coast of Tunisia and her beautiful harbors are tucked into the horizon and beyond that, to the west, is the setting sun. The sky is clear and the clouds are soft and there isn’t a whisper of a storm.

“You can run, Nicolò!” Yusuf calls. “You can be kingdoms and countries and oceans from me but distance will never tear you out of my heart! Shall I chase you a while? Shall I only kiss your footprints when you’re gone?”

There comes a dream of snow.

He is choking, choking, pressure at his throat, at his neck, closing his windpipe and bottling all words for forever. Hanging, creaking back and forth, tongue swollen, lips blue, eyes red and bulging. Blackness.

He is choking, choking, pressure, swaying, at the mercy of the breeze, hands knotted behind his back, friends dead at his feet, freezing solid and unrotting. 

They snatch him in Kiev. It’s February. It’s cold as death. Yusuf is so tired of being cold.

This new immortal is easy to track down. He’s stolen vodka and has drunken himself into a four week stupor, even drunken himself to death twice. He’s out of sorts when they find him, sleeping in the attic at the top of a town house that overlooks the city and the exact angle of a familiar tower that Yusuf recognized in his dream. 

Seven hundred years ago, when Nicolò and Yusuf had realized their dreams meant something impending, something incoming, they had closed their eyes against noticeable landmarks. They had stayed in unremarkable villages and spoke nothing to anyone. They stayed away from the locals, afraid that the art, the clothes, the language, the color of skin would give them away. They spent half a century alone in a cabin and happy for it. 

Andromache needs a thimble’s worth of her intelligence to sort this new immortal out. If she could find her twins in such obscurity, she can find someone who sleeps outside the Saint Sophia Cathedral. 

This new immortal doesn’t know what’s coming for him. 

He’s sleeping in the corner of a room on a platform bed that was rented out for whatever he had in his pockets. He holds a bottle in his limp fist. There is drool down his chin. He is still in his army white pantaloons, but by now they’re stained yellow and brown and gray and black. His boots are missing; Yusuf had dreamt of their pawning. He’s in socks and a blue, open uniform shirt with a blouse underneath that’s stained with blood and puke. He smells. He smells like death, sweat, piss, and vodka. 

The sleeping immortal hasn’t moved once since Yusuf and Andromache kicked in his door. He is still snoring, still twitching in frightful dreams - dreams, perhaps, of Nicolò. 

Andromache has moved to the window to pick through the books he’s collected in just this last sorry week. She lifts a war worn musket leaning against the wall and checks to see if it’s loaded, laughing quietly at whatever she sees in the chamber. Yusuf gravitates towards a long-burning candle and paper and quill. 

‘ I am sorry,’ the note on the desk says in sharp, quick letters. ‘ I could not come home to you and I cannot tell you why. Even now, I do not think you should understand. If they give you my body, please send it to be burned. Gather all the ashes. Scatter me in an ocean breeze and make sure I do not clump together. Such is the end of all cowards. Did you know that? When you first fell in love with me, did you know this was our ending and love me anyway? You are brave and ridiculous. My brave, ridiculous woman.’

Yusuf leaves the note where he found it.

“This can’t, this is, this,” the new immortal babbles senselessly in French as he falls from his bed. “You,” he whispers, color draining from his face. “You are in my dreams.”

“What do you dream of,” Andromache advances and he falls, ashen, at her feet.

“You! I dreamt of you, War! And you, her shadow! Sickness at her heels!”

“What more,” Andromache stands above him - she is Babylon tower and horrific god above. She is the jaw-dropper, prayer eater, sacrifice abound. The godly call her godless, the ancient call her god.

“I dream of Death in her coffin!”

She makes a howling noise, an angry animal thing, “What more!”

“Famine,” he chokes, and clenches at his gut as if it pangs, “Famine and his cage.”

Yusuf wails, and the new immortal stares at him with wide eyes, with fear.

“Tell me more,” Andromache hisses. 

“That’s everything! That’s all that comes to me! You four. I didn’t think you were real, I thought you were tortured images from Hell come to haunt me. I thought it was the afterlife. I thought these visions were demons sent to me as punishment.”

“Tell me about the cage!”

The new immortal shields himself from her. 

“I don’t know! I don’t know! It is dark! It is cold! Once, I saw snow!”

“Tell me more!”

Yusuf throws himself between Andromache and her enlightenment, grabs her and is grabbed back. She seizes him by the coat and thrashes him fiercely. 

“Please,” Yusuf tempers. “Let me try! Let me talk to him!”

She spits, vicious, and retreats to pace - staying close enough to hear. 

The new immortal scrambles away when Yusuf kneels at his feet. 

“What is your name?”

“Sébastien,” is wrenched from him. “Please, don’t hurt me. I need to get home to my family. I have little sons. The youngest is only a few months old. I’ve never met him! I was away, I was at war, I have seen terrible, terrible horrors. Let me rest, let me lay next to my wife again,” Sébastien lays back against the bed and sobs. “Let me hold my children!”

“I will take you to your children, Sébastien. I will take you home to them!”

“No, don’t go near them! You are sick, something ill and spreading!”

“Fine, I will hand you a map, I will give you all the food in my bag, and I will point you home and stay away, but please tell me of the caged man!”

“What can I say?”

“What do you feel when you dream of him? What do you see, speak, hear?”

“I feel,” Sébastien clenches his gut again, “cold, most of all. Hungry. I wake so tired that I fall to my knees. I could be asleep all night and, when dreams of him come, I wake feeling like I have not slept for ages. I think, as I sleep, in a language I have never heard before. I think of names I don’t know. In my dreams, I become a skeleton man. When hands are on me they touch bone. I die, sometimes, in the night and I awake and no one has noticed. Sometimes,” Sébastien’s voice cracks. 

“Tell me, please!”

“Sometimes, there are beatings and I only think in gratitudes. Thank you for kicking stomach, for breaking ribs, for twisting arm around in the places where bruises won’t be seen. I think like a spy with a secret, in a torture of a chair, bound and interrogated. I don’t know what I’m hiding, but it is a secret worth my life.”

Yusuf’s breath catches. 

“In my dream, they have taken everything - all the ties to an eon of memories. I reach for my neck for a thread necklace of recollection, I reach to twist rings on fingers and find my skinny hands bare.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

Yusuf howls, “Please! Anything! What language is it, what does it sound like!”

“It’s from the South, I don’t know!”

“It’s not snowing in the South!”

Poor, pale Sébastien turns and vomits in a metal bucket at the side of his bed and then falls, fastly, into unconsciousness. 

“A dream,” he whispers in his waking. 

He thinks he is alone in the room because ancient things are often overlooked by the young. Yusuf is sitting against the short side of the desk with his head back. Andromache is standing beside the curtains basking like a poison lizard in the sunlight.

Sébastien swallows all the last of his vodka and throws the bottle to the floor. He turns to face the wall and his shoulders shake with sobs.

“A dream. Just a dream. It’s all a bad dream.”

“Not a dream. A nightmare,” Andromache peers through the blinds. “And it doesn't end when you wake up.”

Sébastien’s small cries stop immediately, but he doesn't flinch. He doesn't turn over. He doesn't move.

“When will it end?”

“It won’t,” she says.

“So we will never die?”

“Everything living must die,” she says. “All stories move toward death. We just move slower than most. We need your help. We need your dreams. We will find our brother with your help and, after that, we will help you get home.”

“I should go home. I should, right?”

“No. You shouldn't.”

“I shouldn't?”

“But if you want to, I won't stop you. In fact, give me Nicolò and I'll get you home. What city are you from?”

“Marseille, a coastal port town in France.”

“We know it,” bites Andromache, and she looks at Yusuf with eyes that say, ‘ Can you fucking believe this?’ No, Yusuf truly cannot fucking believe this. 

Small world. And it’s just getting smaller.

“Are you demons? Angels?”

Andromache meets Yusuf's eyes in a flicker.

“Depends if we like you or not.”

Yusuf says, “We fight for what we think is right and hindsight allows us to look back and judge for ourselves. I think we are good, though not angelic.”

“How did I see you before? How were you in my dreams?”

“We dream of each other,” Andromache says. “They stop when we meet.”

“Why?”

Andromache looks to Yusuf. He can feel her eyes on him, and although Yusuf opens his mouth, he says nothing. He can’t think of the words. Nicolò is a man of predestination. He believes that the dreams are supposed to pull them together on strings of fate. Their group of immortals were meant to find each other. 

“Some might say destiny,” Andromache speaks from her corner. 

Yusuf thinks of Nicolò, far away, and how his voice lingers even in absence. So strong are his words that they root, sprout, and survive even without his hands there to tend them. 

Sébastien huffs bitterly, “Sure. And you’ve been running around like this for how long? How many years does it last?”

“A long time,” says Andromache. 

Sébastien watches her, but it is Yusuf who finally finds his words.

“I died during the crusades.”

“The crusades,” Sébastien says, “Which crusades.”

“The first.”

“The first? That was what, three hundred years ago? And you?” Sébastien shrinks down when he meets her eyes, “You’re the oldest?”

“Yes.”

“How old are you?”

“Old.”

“So it’s not age, not hanging, not knife wound. What can kill us? How do we die? What will it finally take? The woman in the ocean! She’s another one of us, right? How old is she? She’s been drowning for weeks! What will it take if not that?”

“It’s a lot to understand,” Yusuf comes to Sébastien’s side. 

“I need to go home,” Sébastien says quickly, grabbing Yusuf up by the shirt. “I need to see my wife, she’ll know what to do. She always knows.”

“It’s for the best that you don’t go home,” Andromache says.

“I have my sons, my wife. There’s nothing else.”

Andromache says, “And in a hundred years?”

“What?”

“In a hundred years when they are dead?”

Horrified and sick, Sébastien gasps, “Dead?”

“A hundred years. When you are young, healthy, alive and they have aged and died.”

“My sons,” Sébastien stutters.

“Will grow older. In forty years you will look like a brother. In eighty, it will be you who is seen as the son.”

“A hundred years,” Sébastien says. He falls into a chair, sitting still and thinking and he keeps thinking, thinking, gets lost in his thoughts. 

Andromache unlatches and pushes open the little, tilted window. 

“It’s always better to think with fresh air,” she explains.

Sébastien wakes up shaking, trembling until his teeth are heard clattering from across the room and Yusuf, pale as death, can only hope to be set free.

“What was the dream?”

“Nothing. It was nothing,” Sébastien snaps up, looking around, “Where is the other one?”

“She went to get supplies.”

“Supplies?”

“For the trip. The trip to find Nicolò. The man in the cage.”

“You’re leaving?”

“You’re coming with us.”

“No, I’m staying. I won’t go with you.”

“We have to stick together.”

“No, thank you,” Sébastien stands and begins rushing around the room. He straightens his hair in the mirror, he tucks in his shirt, he gathers his books and notes in a pillowcase. “Good luck and Godspeed to you, wherever you’re off to. I need to get home.”

“We have to stick together.”

“No, we don’t! What! Three of our kind, whatever the fuck we are, running around the continent together like refugees from death? That just spells trouble. Why don’t we just walk around with signs that read, ‘ God’s little mishaps, can be exploited.’ Don’t give me any speech about our united strength, that’s not looking so good to a man who sees your mistakes when he sleeps.”

“You can’t go,” Yusuf leaps off the window sill and blocks the door. “You haven’t told us how to get to him!”

“That’s not my problem.”

“He’s your brother!”

Sébastien looks shocked to hear it and snorts, “You’re a madman.”

“Tell me more about him! Please, I will beg if I have to. I will bow to your feet on my knees. You have seen him, how he suffers?”

“I won’t listen to you,” Sébastien continues to pack in a frenzy. “If you tell me anything more I will run out of here screaming.”

“Tell me of his body, tell me of his heart, tell me anything. I am an incurable, dying man.”

“You certainly are and I can’t seem to logic your insanity away.”

Yusuf drops to his knees, hands clasped together, and catches Sébastien by the shirt as he tries to slip through the door. Sébastien pulls back, as if afraid to be touched, to be held by this thing . Then he returns, forcing his way around Yusuf. 

Yusuf pushes Sébastien back into the room and stands, guarding the door as a sentry, “Listen, just ten minutes. Please! You act as if there is no one on earth more miserable than you!”

Sébastien tries to run around Yusuf to the door and is caught around the middle and thrown back into the room. He tries to swing his bag of books at Yusuf’s head, but Yusuf steps close and seizes the sack from his hands. Out of breath with anxiety, Sébastien lunges at Yusuf and meets his solid, furious body. He is picked up by the waist and thrown to the floor. 

“Are you truly such a coward?” Yusuf cries, “Where will you run? You can race around the world a hundred times and you won’t escape this. Look at you, what use is your immortal soul? The hardest part of life is to live without giving up. Can you live even a single year in this state without quitting? Show me your strength! Show me you are worthy! Life is worth living, even this endless one, even with all its terrors and phantoms! Do you not feel your importance? Please do not drive me away from you, I can see you quitting already. Get up off the ground, little brother, or you might as well lay there and never get up again!”

Sébastien crawls across the floor from him on his back and stumbles, almost as if by accident, into the belly of his musket. After teetering for a second, the gun falls forward onto Sébastien’s lap. Sébastien calms it, stills it, then looks up at Yusuf. 

“Wait,” Yusuf says, hands rising. 

Sébastien lifts the musket, finger snapping to the trigger, and - 

A June morning came and with it came raspberry jelly, pear slices, honey on warmed bread, and soft boiled eggs. Breakfast was set before a humble priest in a mighty, white dining hall at the end of an old oak table. Despite all the rod-straight seats and the grand tablecloth and the food that came on exorbitant serving dishes fit for weddings, there sat only the priest at the banquet. On either side of him stood two servers that came with plates, knives, forks. Not a care went into the faces of those servers, they were but pairs of hands at disposal. 

The priest straightened his back as his chair was pushed in and he revealed the softness of his neck to his server for the tuck in of his napkin. He had found that napkin snapped around his throat and pulled tight. It froze the priest thoroughly.

Nicolò had revealed himself then; a wolf in sheep's clothing - some hellion thing dressed nice in a server's Sunday best. He came like a nightmare at the corner of vision, from the back and the right and clouding forward. 

He said, “Here is a filthy, mean creature to sit on a throne.”

“You? I thought you were killed,” the priest managed.

“Leave the deep thoughts to deeper minds, Father,” Nicolò sat against the table. 

Yusuf held the priest back from lashing out by the tightening of his napkin. When the priest sneered, his acid words were cut off in his snake throat with one quick snap. 

“It is the duty of the wealthy to be generous,” Nicolò drew a butter knife from the table and it may as well have been an angry viper for how it was placed with much threat under chin. “It is the duty of the religious to be altruistic.”

What was simply implied was how un-altruistic and ungenerous the priest had been these days of late. What the priest had been doing - strong-arming, bullying, politically manipulating his little community - had required a measure of protection. And passersby Nicolò and Yusuf had been enlisted to help. They had guarded the nervous priest and learned soon after that they were protecting him from a just punishment delivered by the people. Nicolò, having solved this little puzzle on his own and in the night, had discovered the villain, the snake in the grass, and he had been bitten.

These transgressions looked definitively angelic when set beside the ruse taken to protect the priest’s false image. That cloak invention of a happy, benevolent church and a kind, charitable priest was a façade that had fooled even them for a time. This, perhaps, was the least forgivable sin. Not the act of deception - because to be deceived after all these years comes with some corresponding and nearly charming life lessons - but the hypocrisy of the smokescreen itself was indefensible. The insincere, mockery of the church would come to strike too near the heart.

Nicolò, sensitive Nicolò, had found himself again a victim of his own trusting kindness and his own belief in divinity. 

“A beaten body can heal,” Nicolò said. “But you don’t send your men to beat me. They come to kill me. You send men to meet me on the bridge and they kick, hit, cut me. They carve me up. On your order, they stomp my teeth out of my mouth. On your order, they drag me down to the river. On your order, they hold my face in the water. From your own mouth comes deliverance, comes boulders lifted by four men! It was your idea that I die this way, was it not?”

When Yusuf had finally found Nicolò, it had been hours too many. He had crashed into the shallow waters and held tight to Nicolò’s thrashing hand. Nicolò, in his panic, had dug in his nails and twisted Yusuf’s wrist. 

Yusuf had kissed his knuckles, had waited for the thrashing to weaken and go limp before he dared let go to attempt to lift the boulder. It had been a heavy, immovable burden - it had sat on Nicolò’s chest, it had crushed his ribcage, it had burrowed him into the soft mud of the river bed and left his head underwater. 

It still hurts to remember it - the helplessness. How Yusuf had scrambled, how he had pushed and pulled, screamed, begged, howled and howled for the boulder to roll. He had returned to Nicolò’s terrified hands when they came to wretched life again. 

Yusuf had tried to push himself under Nicolò’s head to angle the broken chest up to access just one measly, pitiful gulp of air and had paled, had sickened, to see Nicolò’s face unable to break the surface. Yusuf had plunged under the water to give all the air in his lungs to his precious Nicolò and found, to his horror, that Nicolò could not take the air in for the weight on his chest. He had felt the sapping of Nicolò’s life again, again, again with each fainting of his wrist. 

Eventually, his wails of anguish had brought a stream of young women - a noblewoman and her chambermaids totaling three - to the bridge’s edge. They had seen Yusuf’s struggle, heeled off their shoes, hiked up their dresses, and clambered down the muddy slope to the water. Wordless, they had come to surround the boulder and wordless, Yusuf had stood to help. Together, on the second attempt, as Nicolò was sparking to life, they rolled the big rock over and Nicolò came rushing to the surface. 

Yusuf, absolutely beside himself and blubbering, dropped into the water to wrap his arms around Nicolò’s shoulders and kissed them, kissed his eyes, kissed his lips.

“It just caught his clothes, caught his clothes under the water,” Yusuf had clung Nicolò to his chest as his ribs popped and cracked. 

The noblewoman had taken off her thin summer shawl and draped it around them. Generations, centuries, millennia, Yusuf would look after all of these women’s lineages. 

The shaking priest gasped at the frightening Nicolò and Yusuf that was left - the man of shallow-water drowning and the lover who could only hold his hand.

“What are you? You,” stammered the priest, “you have the devil in you.”

Nicolò shook his head, “Any time a man kills me and I do not die, they think I am otherworldly. I am not demon, nor angel, nor test from God. I am not a spirit, ghost, or witch. I am a man, same as you. Same as you when trouble comes, I ask myself, is this the end for you, Nicolò? Each time I try my best to embrace my fate. I acknowledge the guilt and the pain all at once. I recognize my faults and I find something positive. I try to learn my lessons.

“For you, it is not enough to learn your lessons. It must be that I dismantle your empire and redistribute your undeserved wealth. It has only taken us one night to do this. Your community hates you, your people know what you are. I leave you a senseless, penniless fallen figure with no one to blame but the demons. It is your people who will sort you out now.”

“Confess,” the priest demanded in tremors. “Are you a great healer?”

“You think I am of witchcraft and magic spells, Father?”

“I think you are from Hell. You are of the Legion of demons, false prophets, and beasts.”

“All of this world may think that I am a vicious beast and that is exactly right.”

The speechless priest looked up at Nicolò. He sat, finally appetite-less, at a banquet fit for kings.

“May your wine turn to vinegar and your bread turn to stone,” Nicolò’s lilting curse echoed down beautiful halls and left the three of them alone. Nicolò, too, turned to leave.

“That’s it?” Yusuf chased after him, “Should we not do more? He killed you, over and over.”

“If I were to do as I want, I would slit his throat. I would sink my teeth into him - I would bite him.” Nicolò said, “Instead, I only pray to God to punish him and I wisely turn away.”

“That is all?”

Nicolò stopped, turned around, and froze Yusuf on the spot - not with anger, not with the fire and brimstone expected. Yusuf was struck, as if by lightning, by the wickedness of mischief in Nicolò’s unexpected, little grin.

There had once been a time when Nicolò was too brutally betrayed by his religion. There had been nearly five hundred years of delicacy. Painful, tender wounds had been picked at for so long that Yusuf had feared this, like all betrayals by Nicolò’s God, would consume him. A priest had led Nicolò astray. Nicolò had done again - by accident and with good intention - wrong in the name of God. 

But this time, when Nicolò had been eaten up, he turned to bite back. Now he smiled, plotted, planned. Now he has scarred over and the white hardness of scar tissue was his shield.

‘ Look at the strength of you, ’ Yusuf thought. ‘ Look what you’ve become. A man of metal, like the coming age. Unlike the coldness of industry, however, I see to the center of you. I see to the warm invulnerability of you - untouchably far and strong. For men like him, there is no reaching you .’

Yusuf, left without choice or thought, could only grin back. Nicolò took him by the hand and led him away.

“I pray to God to punish him, but who do I ask to bring my prayers to the ears of God?”

“The church?”

“The church. And so I write my letters to the church, Yusuf. If word is to spread of a commune in France without proper leadership, the rumor must start somewhere.”

“Do you not worry that no one will act on your letter?”

“Well, what rush are we in? We have another twenty years before we meet our sisters in Jamnagar. Should we spend our time vengefully?”

Andromache waits with him while his chest pulls together. She even holds his hand during the worst of it.

“See that, Yusuf?”

Sweating, grunting, and delirious with pain, Yusuf tries to pick his stone slab head up off the ground to see what she’s looking at.

“Your heart doesn’t look broken to me.”

“It's only a matter of time before the world catches up to us and it’s us on the run. Changing names, changing looks, that’s just the start of it. Maybe we will have to become entirely new people every hundred years or risk the world catching on.”

Andromache is pacing by the fire, “It took millennia to find Quỳnh, centuries to find Lykon, decades to find you two. It took less than a year to find this new one. The next one,” she wonders, “could be found in a matter of days. That's the way the world’s going. Fast.”

“What’s wrong, Andromache? You’ve been holding your heart all this time.”

“It’s such a painful feeling, whatever it is,” she rubs her sternum and grimaces.

“What feeling? What do you feel? An omen? An instinct?”

“Nothing like that,” she is reproachful, nearly lost in thought. Aloud, she wonders, “I feel this twinge when I remember the sound of you two in the kitchen - I would wake up next to her and you two would be awake cluttering around. I would lay back and picture, perfectly, that you would be at the window pretending to read and he would be cooking,” she smiles. “Covered in dough. Singing.”

“I am nostalgic for those days, too.”

“Nostalgic. Yes, that's the word. It has been so long now that I have felt nostalgic - I don’t think I have felt much more than grief in nearly three hundred years.”

She sits beside him on his bed roll.

“I like this new immortal. He’s a whip crack. It takes guts to shoot a man older than you can fathom,” she considers her words and their existence outside her head, then says, “A father, that’s never happened before. None of us have been parents. He is destined to truly suffer.”

“I know.”

“I don’t know what help I can give him.”

“Sometimes there is no help to give. Some of the greatest wars are fought alone.”

She knows. She knows better than anyone.

“Do you think I could send a message through him?”

Andromache laughs under her breath.

“Maybe I could talk to Nicolò through him?”

“I don’t know. Try it.”

“What about you? When we catch up to him, are you going to ask about her?”

“No,” she says. “No.”

“Why not?”

“What if,” unable to finish, she looks away. 

“What if she knows where she is?”

“How could she?”

“We can ask!”

“What if she’s thinking about how I haven’t saved her yet? What if she’s thinking about how I must have given up? What if she’s counting? What if she’s keeping track of how many times she has died and Sébastien will give me the number? I can’t take it. I can’t know. I will suffer for nothing. It will all be exactly the same but worse. With her love, I could do it. When she was at my side, it was worth it to suffer anything.”

He wakes up thinking that Nicolò is beside him and ends up laying awake the rest of the night. All day, he sees shadows move in the corner of his eye and that is him, too.

When they return to the cream, too familiar beaches of Marseille, Yusuf feels such a sudden and deep sickness that he cannot participate in the hunt down of young Sébastien for the first days. 

“We just keep coming back to it,” he whispers, eyes closed to escape the labyrinth spinning. “I think I am stuck in a spiderweb nightmare. If I see that harbor again I'll drop dead, I'm sure!”

She sits on the edge of the bed, brushing his hair from his sweat soaked forehead. 

“I feel a calling east, Andromache. Let's go east and leave this miserable place. Forget Sébastien and his dreams, secret me away from here like a fugitive but do not call me out on my crime - do not call me deserter! I must go east, Andromache. To the snow. Or you must forbid me to depart. Hold me here with words or hands or chains, whatever it takes! Tell me what to do, sister. I don't know what to do. How am I to lead without him to follow? How do I know if there is sun without my shadow?”

But it is Sébastien who finds them before the end of the week. After six months of running home, of hiding, of living so saint-silently that even Andromache had considered that he had not come to this city, Sébastien knocks. Yusuf is expecting shadow. He is expecting ghost, he is expecting nightmare or the twisting insanity of dream. He expects sleeplessness and waking up from sleep. He expects the end of days and is paralyzed, bedridden, by each morning. He expects all of it, but not Sébastien himself.

Sébastien comes bearing that pariah look on his face, like he’s been dragged behind horses but there is a quickness in his eyes like he’s been eating better and in better company. Sébastien is learning quicker than most new immortals that he can be haunted by the living as well as the dead. 

“I am scared to sleep,” Sébastien admits.

Yusuf sits up on his cot, taking in the misery of the new immortal.

Andromache has her boots half laced up - she was just about to start a day of hunting, of making Sébastien her prey.

She observes, “You came back.”

“I am so afraid that sleep will come when I am not ready. I lunge, screaming, from the grasp of nightmares and frighten my wife. I scare my children if I sleep on the couch. I wake up sick, I can’t stop being sick, I can’t eat anything. All I taste is iron, all I feel is cold. You say I can be rid of these dreams? Tell me how. I will do it.”

Numbly, Yusuf asks, “What do you dream of?”

“Every night it comes,” Sébastien says. “When it is not the hands and the knife, it is the vicious, biting cold. I thought, eventually, the dreams would fade into obscurity like the dreams of the ocean. But, no, they come so intensely, as frightfully vivid as it was the first time.”

“What do you dream of?”

“I dream of a great journey and tall, boundless mountains. Again, it is snowing.”

“Yes,” Yusuf encourages.

“I am so weak that I can only make it a few steps at a time before I am breathless. I am always wet and cold. I knew it was coming, when they held me to the ground. I had heard whispers of it for weeks, had known from the first bullet wound, from the falling of our pack down the face of a cliff, I had known. But it still surprised me when the moment came.”

“What came?”

“Even in my first life, when I fought for Napoleon, I had never tried it. Even in those last, worst months. I have seen it happen, of course, but I was sure I would rather choose death than become that. I had eaten the horses, surely, and dogs and rats, too. I escaped those miserable lands without ever tasting human flesh only to be cursed with dreams of it now. That is how I know I have actually died, that this is all some endless, worsening Hell.”

“What are you saying!”

Andromache snags Yusuf by his shoulder and wheels him back. Yusuf knows now that he is on his feet, that he is yelling, that his fists are clenched. He forces himself loose.

“They held me down and butchered me. Before my very eyes they cut slices off of me and ate it - had taken me in mouthfuls like a delicacy.”

Yusuf looks to Andromache, pleading, pleading. 

Sébastien, however, is ruthlessly unfinished, “For weeks it has been like that, even when I am awake. No fireside or blanket can help. I drink liquor to keep me warm at night. I feel even in the day that the cold of my dreams reaches me. I can’t get the taste out of my mouth. Do you know what it tastes like? What would it take? What would it take for me to eat the flesh off my own body? To encourage others around me to eat, too? Like taking holy sacrament. It was either eat or grow weaker, and I - he, it was him - he had to keep going.”

“Andromache,” Yusuf begs. 

“He is in Russia,” Sébastien says. “Somewhere far, far north and far, far east.”

“Russia,” Yusuf recoils. “We were just in Russia! We left Russia chasing you!”

“I only recognized it recently - when he fled his cage and was spoken to. He was once in a cell and the dreams were unpleasant - they were cold, miserably cold, and lonely. Now they are worse.”

“Worse?”

“This is great, I’m glad you’re back.” Andromache holds him in place with her eyes, “If you make me chase you down again I will destroy you in every possible way but the way you want.”

For a second, she looks like she may turn away. Then she pauses. She worries at her lip. She  thinks for a second and then she comes to a decision.

Andromache finally speaks, her voice absent of all her strength, “What of the coffin?”

“There is no finding her.” Sébastien says. “Do you have any idea how big the ocean is?”

She snarls, “Do you?”

Sébastien snaps his mouth closed.

“I’m sorry I killed you.”

Sébastien has not met Yusuf’s eyes since Marseille and they are well outside of France before this conversation comes. He’s felt this conversation impending since the stutter-stop of Sébastien’s first attempt when they were brushing down the horses together last night. 

Yusuf glances over and laughs.

“You’re not angry?”

“No,” he can’t help but smile. 

‘If you only knew how many times the last new immortals had killed each other - savagely, vengefully, with true and fantastic hatred. What is one gunshot wound? An ant bite.’

Sébastien has put on weight since his return home, since Kiev. It’s nice to see him filled out, gaining muscle, broadening his shoulders, straightening his back. It’s nice to see the confidence building behind his eyes. It’s nice to see him thinking more, despairing less. Andromache has certainly got the run on their new brother faster than Yusuf. She was right that he was a whip crack, for as little as he’s said, Yusuf can see an intelligence in his eyes, in the way that he looks at things. He’s thinking now about Yusuf, sizing him up. 
Watching him, Sébastien says, “I notice that it’s hard to make you angry. I am honestly beginning to fear you.”

“Glad you’re catching on,” says Andromache from the fireside. With that, she turns, she stretches out on the hard ground, and she sleeps like the dead.

They fall into a dinner silence. Sébastien eats quietly, pulling a book out of his bag to have a reason to ignore Yusuf for a longer time. 

‘Are you there, my long lost love. Are you seeing me through his eyes? I am wounded. I was so certain of you that I let you go away. Now I must prove myself worthy. I must navigate this labyrinth and retrace my ignorant footsteps through every winding, trickery aisle and corridor to you.’

“What,” Sébastien says across the fire. “Why are you looking at me like that? I won’t run away. Why are you so afraid? If we are immortal, are you not certain that you will find him again? It’s only a matter of time, right?”

“There was another. His name was Lykon.”

“Where is he? Not in my dreams.”

“Eventually, your wounds stop healing.”

“He died! So there’s a chance,” Sébastien breathes with relief. “There is a chance I will die and I won’t wake up!”

“Not for a long while. You’re too new.”

“I tried to kill myself over and over in Kiev. You probably know that.”

“I do.”

“You saw it all?”

“No, not all of it.”

“I really tried everything. I really didn’t want to go back to my family and show them this monster. I want to spare them. I want her to be proud of me and live off a pension. I want her to know peace and not have to live beside this. I want to die. I want to have died the first time. You must not know what that’s like.”

“How so?”

“You get to experience immortality beside someone else.”

“So do you.”

“It’s not the same.”

“You don’t know what I’ve lost. You don’t know how many faces I’ve forgotten. You don’t know what I’ve had to live with. I don’t know what my sisters look like. I can’t remember a single thing they have ever said to me. I don’t know the sound of their voices. If I passed any one of them on the street today I wouldn’t recognize them. I have Nicolò, or I should have him. He should be here at my side right now telling this all to you better than I can.” 

“To be honest with you,” Sébastien begins slowly, “there are other reasons I stay now. I think, if we live as long as you threaten me with, I will eventually run into your Nicolò and be free of my dreams. I could flee home to my family and hope that one day I will be rid of all thoughts of you together.”

“But you stay.”

“I stay. I’ve found myself rooting for you. Everyone loves a romantic, and everyone loves a romance. Two reunited lovers, a tale as old as time.”

“How did you know?”

“That you were lovers? It’s probably all the heartache, Yusuf. You don’t walk around like you’re missing a friend. I can see straight into your soul and I see a piece missing.”

Yusuf covers his heart with his hands, as if to shield it from scrutiny.

“It’s more than that,” Sébastien reveals with a softer look than Yusuf’s ever seen on the hard man. “I think with him, in my sleep.”

“What does he think?”

Sébastien looks at him like he is rather simple, and then he turns away. 

“There is also,” he pauses. “I feel a sense of duty to help him,” he finally admits. “When I died the very first time it was by hanging. They had caught me and my friends. They were my brothers in arms and we had run together. Me and the two of them. We were close. We shared so much in the months after we left. They told me about their daughters, wives, sisters, parents. One of them was just a kid. He was maybe nineteen and he had gotten married a year before to his childhood sweetheart. Oh, what does that all matter now. They had lined us up when they caught us and they would have shot us if we had any bullets. Instead they hanged us, one at a time. They had to reuse the rope. I watched them kick a big crate out from under my friends. The fall was too short to snap their necks, so it was a long, drawn out thing. It was ugly. They went blue and red, then gray, then white. They were jolting, drooling messes in death.

“I thought of their daughters. Their wives. Their mothers. I thought of angels, I thought, ‘Where are the angels? Where are the angels to take them away?’ . When it was my turn, I thought I would die bravely with my head held high, but I begged. I sobbed. I kissed the boots of the men who killed my brothers. They had to drag me to the crate and I retched in the snow. The noose - I remember it was so fucking coarse. Why couldn’t the thing at least be comfortable, you know? Or at least not so fucking scratchy? And they kicked the crate fast, like they wanted to get it over with, like the novelty wore off after the first two. And I’m choking,” Sébastien’s hand finds his neck. His fingers hook around an invisible rope. His eyes are sliding off to a distant, snowy past. “I’m choking, ready for death and I’m thinking about my boys, my Émilienne, my home, that little doorway and how I would never step back through it. I think, ‘Is this all there is? What? This? Is it? And where are the angels? Where are the goddamned angels?’”

Sébastien’s hand falls away and his eyes link back to Yusuf, pushing away the weight of all irreconcilable things. 

“I saw him first, that’s what I’m getting to. With his face lit by a small hearth, he looked awful. He looked terrifying. I’m thinking, if this is the angel I’m working with, no wonder my life is turning out this way. God has worked this poor thing to the bone.”

“I can’t think of anything so cruel as to know this. I can’t stand the thought.”

Sébastien offers him a drink from his flask, “Take the edge off.”

“No. I can withstand it.”

Sébastien eyes him skeptically, even curiously. 

“I’ve been waiting a hundred years to see sunshine. Poets will always remain faithful even with their hearts shattered in their breast,” Yusuf explains and leaves it at that. 

At the beginning of autumn, Yusuf finds himself in the same country as his love, looking up at the same stars and the same moon and the same sun and sky. He is feeling the same weather as his love and he fears the same winter. This far north, snow has already been falling for months, such is the twelve months a year of Siberian winter. 

There is rarely a good night's sleep between the three of them. Sébastien is shooting up with nightmares and Yusuf is tossing and turning with an absence and Andromache is chronically tormented with pacing. Sébastien looks sick, shallow, and Yusuf has to hold him, physically hold him there, and beg that he stay. Yusuf gives him the biggest helpings of each of their meals, the closest spot to the fire, every blanket in hopes that maybe, in his sleep, Nicolò will feel full-warm-sated, feel Yusuf’s touch. 

When they get to Moscow, Andromache disappears for a night and a day and a night. She is looking for something - some paperwork, some lead, some map, some transcript of a court case. 

While they wait, Sébastien hides away and keeps his French mouth decidedly closed.

Yusuf supplements their packs with new supplies, with thicker boots and coats and extra socks as the nights grow colder again. He trades their horses for fresher mares. He waits eagerly by the door for her word, for her good word.

Andromache arrives and where she points, Yusuf leads.

In the remote parts of the country, hidden among impossible forests, there is a little town of a thousand. This town, in winter, is cold as a ghost. 

Yusuf hides himself in his coats and shivers as his breath hangs in the air. His ears are bee-stung by the cold and he is trying to conjure up the image of Nicolò on the last day in Malta - it was summer, it was sunset, he was blushing the same shade of red - Yusuf cannot see it clearly. There is too much else to think about, too much goings ons. 

The dead of winter has come and it truly is a corpse. 

Townsfolk shake their heads at foreign hubris as three strangers come into town and try to conquer their mountains. They buy what they can to climb, camp, stay warm, but the locals kiss their crosses. 

“You don’t know the cliffs,” they say.

“You don’t know the bowl of mountains and the perennial valley.”

“There is a path revealed in spring,” they promise and Yusuf shakes his head.

As another grand storm rattles the windows of a shop, Yusuf purchases all that is offered. 

“He is stuck in this,” Yusuf says. “He cannot be out in this another night.”

The storm only worsens. As they hike, wind threatens to pull them off the mountain, to shake them off like fleas on a dog, to tear them across the landscape and freeze their bodies through. Snow piles high as men, high as trees and Yusuf does not know if he is walking on mountain or boulder or a great fissure in the earth. Behemoth gales are nothing, the violence of such a tempest holds him to no command.

‘I would rather bow to a shoe! You may raise a storm all you like and I will raise a storm, too. I will raise a hurricane of my own that will crush what’s in my path or destroy me alone! You think this is enough? You think this will stop me? I am a man of waterless deserts, what is snow and ice there?’

But at his back, falling further and further behind, is the despairing Sébastien, the worried Andromache who holds a pace between them. Yusuf stops, mouth open, falling still with shock. His heart, it quakes, it trembles, it’s breaking down into the smaller things that make it up - Nicolò, his Nicolò, his Nicolò out here, Andromache and her reconciliation, Andromache and her surrender, Sébastien, young Sébastien, teeth clattering and skin waxen. 

“We must turn around,” Sébastien clatters. 

“Yes,” Yusuf says. “Yes, I understand! Go back to the city and wait, I will be with you in the next few days and I will have him.”

Sébastien calls, defeated, “We won’t get up this mountain!”

Andromache turns away from Sébastien, up towards Yusuf as the wind tears at them all. She does not try to catch up with him when he comes to a stop. She waits where she’s at for Sébastien, who is stumbling behind her, heaving and freezing and falling down into the snow beds. 

“We don’t have the gear,” she calls over the cresting ice breeze. “We need supplies or we will never make it up this mountain, let alone up and down the next ones. We need to return to the city. Together.”

“I have to get to him,” Yusuf whispers. 

“You heard the townsfolk, Yusuf. We don’t have the right gear. We won’t make it far enough. What are you dying for?”

“Him! I will die endlessly, happily, if it delivers him into my arms. 

“I thought the same,” Andromache calls. 

Yusuf looks back at her, wind freezing his sweat, the wetness of his eyes, his eyelashes. He’s not shivering anymore, he can’t feel the cold.

“I felt the same,” Andromache says again. “When we set sail for Europe before the ship was ready, I felt the same. I feel the same way now, for him. But what did you try to tell me?”

“I told you to wait,” Yusuf’s voice cracks with the cold.

“Why?”

“Because I knew it wasn’t safe!”

Andromache looks back down the mountains at Sébastien, then she returns her weighty gaze to Yusuf.

“Andromache,” Yusuf begs.

“I will follow you if you go,” she says. “So will he.”

“Take him back down the mountain! I will return to you!”

“No,” she says, reaching for him. “I will follow you. Doomed together rather than doomed apart, that’s what he said before the storm. I will honor his wish and stay at your side.”

Yusuf pulls from her comfort, “Did you hear us, Andromache? All those years ago?”

“I heard you,” she admits. “I wish I had listened.”

“I think I have frostbite,” Sébastien frets when he finally catches up. He holds up his pale white fingers with bruised blue fingernails. “If it rots off, will it grow back?”

“If I go back with you I don’t know if I will stay,” says Yusuf.

“When you go, I will go,” she promises.

“Even if I leave tomorrow?”

“Even if you leave tonight.”

Yusuf takes her ice cold hands and she makes him take the hardest step - the first step back down the mountain. He can barely see ten steps away. He can barely make out Sébastien and Andromache in the snow. They are dark shapes, they are stone shadows at his left and right. They are his rocks and anchors, holding him down when, any second, he could float away. 

“I can’t go back down, Andromache!”

“I can carry you on my back.”

Yusuf laughs despite himself. He would cry but his tear ducts are frozen. His soul, too, is frozen and unfeeling, buried under ice with this decision. He will never forgive himself. With each step he takes back down the mountain, he will hate himself forever.

“Come,” Andromache coaxes him. 

And finally he comes. And he will never forgive himself for it.

“We can find shelter from this blizzard in the town,” Andromache promises, leading them down the mountain. 

“Can dead people get shelter from a blizzard?” Sébastien wonders, “Or does it not matter if we freeze to death? Can a dead person get something to eat and drink? Or is it meaningless if a dead person dies all over again of hunger and thirst?”

Andromache trudges away from them both, so Sébastien looks to Yusuf. 

“I’m not asking if a dead person can be brought back to life,” he says. “But if the dead speak, will anyone hear them? Would someone comfort the dead if they weep? Or forgive them if they repent? Are the dead to be condemned for all time or can they be redeemed?*”

“Come,” Yusuf takes Sébastien gently by the shoulder and urges him away from unanswerable questions. He is unable to offer him more comfort than this, “I’m sure the dead can find some warm barn to haunt for tonight.”

It was reported around town that the deplorable pirate Captain Andrómeda and her crew of the damned were a hotbed of anarchy, nihilism, and godlessness. The rumor gained more strength with every year that they evaded the law, with each ship sinking they would survive, and with each war they would wage and win. 

Andromache was a raging, angry storm that hit the ports of pirate coves. She tore their wharfs into splinters. Yusuf had years to learn how to weather her. He learned when and where to take refuge, he learned when to batten down and when to sail for better seas. Now, when they entered the bar as a group of three and watched it drop into timid silence, Yusuf recognized that even strangers who had only heard of her mysticisms understood. It was universally known that she was a hurricane. 

The bar on Île Sainte Marie was in a lively mood before their arrival and even the whispers of Captain Andrómeda could not completely dampen the early summer joy. Men and women were dancing, music was playing, and a rowdy crowd had taken to liquor - had nearly gone swimming in it. At the center of the party was a giant of a man who grabbed at women and, despite their refusals, spun them in his arms and ravaged them with kisses to the face and neck. He was slapped twice before Yusuf made it to the bar and as he was ordering for three he was sure he heard a third.

“I could drag him out of here,” Yusuf had said when he joined Andromache and Nicolò at a table with three pints. “I could teach him manners in the street.”

“I have an eye on him,” Nicolò promised, and committed to just that. He didn’t see, then, the evil eye Andromache had leveled at Yusuf as she took her drink. He didn’t see how she glanced at her pint and tasted it scrupulously before accepting. 

Yusuf had considered watering down her beer, but would not risk being caught doing so. She had been drinking heavily already, which spelled trouble, and these were the days in which she had little patience for Yusuf. 

It was always worse when she was drunk. When she would drink she would see the wicked faces of men that were long dead. She would see their smiles and swear to smell the burning of pyres and swear to feel a slow-coming, screaming iron face on the horizon. At the bottom of her bottle she always found the worst of herself. Her unpredictable violence had gotten them thrown out of every bar in Ambodifotatra today . 

She had looked over Yusuf’s shoulder after that, determined not to look at him again and also surveying. She was considering the crowd. She was wondering if she was here, not in whole, but in pieces. Andromache was looking for her laugh, her smile, her wit, her cunning and beguiling, her eyes in this crowd. After two hundred years, Andromache had begun looking for Quynh’s kiss on other lips. 

There was something unfathomable about her love, something beyond even the understanding of Yusuf, of Nicolò. Their love was until the end of time, this was just a means of getting by. This was a way to subsist off only the idea of her , like a blood sucker bug.

It was then, in her musings of men and women alike, that the big giant of a man spoke up, voice cutting through the crowd, “Now, I have nothing! Nothing! Surely I have money, yes, but I’m not talking about money! What is money to the real treasure, to the treacherous heart of woman! What is life without the fickle heart of a woman!”

Suddenly, Andromache slammed to her feet, rushed forward, and seized the giant from where he was leaning against the bar. With both of her hands in his hair, she pushed him down and began dragging him along with shrieks, shouts, and cries that rippled the bar into silence. The giant was so panic stricken that he did not attempt to defend himself. The whole bar, from the bartender to the very last fiddler, had frozen like grazing animals caught in her light. 

“Holy blood,” Nicolò hauled himself out of his barstool to meet her before the door. 

Pushing men out of his way to arrive at her side, disappointed and discouraging, he diminished her in an instant from frenzied cut-throat to peacekeeper. She dropped her prey and left it convulsing dumbly on the ground, lifting her hands up diplomatically. 

Nicolò helped the drunkard up and patted the dust off of him, “See, I knew the second we walked in here it would be the two of you going at it, but let me get another drink in me before I have to suffer some bare-knuckle fight to the death.”

The drunk giant caught Nicolò in the twist of his shirt and shook him roughly, “You’re an awful skinny fellow to stand between me and her now!” He threw Nicolò back into Yusuf’s waiting arms. 

“You are a puppy,” Nicolò scolded, “Hear me now or I’ll let her teach you! You will keep your hands to yourself! You will mind no one’s business but your own! And you will take this as the final warning it was designed to be!”

Even though the drunk giant set himself to a fighting pose, Nicolò gathered Yusuf and Andromache and turned his back on the whole mess. Nicolò met Yusuf’s eyes and shook his head tiredly. These were the moments Yusuf could see it - the weight of the years, the turn of the era to darker, darker times. They sunk into his Nicolò, they ate him down to the bones. Yusuf offered his hand in comfort and Nicolò just about took it. 

“Turn,” taunted the drunkard, “Or I will strike you down from the back!”

Nicolò spun on his heel, “I would spit you like an olive pit.” 

“Thank you, Master Joker,” Yusuf caught Nicolò by his turning elbow. “What great laughs we’ve had tonight! But off we should be going, to better company and good sleep.”

Nicolò tugged away from Yusuf to meet Andromache at the door. She threw her arm around his shoulder and let him lead her out into fresh air.

“It was never so easy to get under your skin, baby brother,” she said. 

“And it was never so hard to shepherd you, sister.”

Now, because it was Nicolò who had said it, she had the wherewithal to look flustered. She was always so fond of him. Nicolò, in those years, could manage to get all the way to the eye of Andromache’s storm. Around them would be her carnage and there, at her side, would be him - untouchable, untouched.  

“He looked familiar,” she admitted.

“Everyone who took her is dead,” Nicolò said calmly. “Everyone who has ever touched her is dead. There is no one left to chase, Andromache. There is no one left to shoulder all your vengeance.”

“I’ll find someone,” Andromache promised. “Someone deserves it.”

They drank harder and faster in the safety of their cabin aboard their ship. With Andromache asleep on the floor, surrounded by pillows and blankets and food she hardly touched, they talked in whispers and they drank. 

“Please don’t ever leave me alone with her,” Yusuf said in jest. “I don’t think I can manage her with your grace.”

“Everything must die,” Nicolò aggrieved, and never had he said that and inferred the two of them - it was always others, it was always something finite, not the infinity of them.

“No,’’ Yusuf pleaded. “Don’t let the world hear you say it.”

“There is nothing to be said against the truth. Can you shrink the truth? Mold it? Extend it? Condemn it? Fight it off with your sword?”

“Maybe you cannot,” Yusuf stood, drew his scimitar off the floor, and drunkenly spilled their drinks, “I can. I will.”

Nicolò fixed the table. He set their cups back in order and refilled them; he righted the still-burning candle. His eyes - oh, his dangerous eyes - when lifted, were sad, desperate. They were reaching out to Yusuf, entreating. 

He said, “You and the truth, et tu , in a great fight to end all honest things. If you and truth went to war, would you both expect an easy fight? And what of the ending? What would come of it? The end of the world?”

Yusuf dropped back into the chair and maybe his sword clattered back down to the floor, it did not matter, it was gone from his hands. 

“I may be a little drunk,” he said.

“Not drunk enough, truth slayer. Come,” Nicolò placed a warm, steadying hand on Yusuf’s shoulder and passed him his cup. “I have a proposal. It’s an earth shaker, Yusuf.”

Stupefied sat Yusuf, who had never known Nicolò to make much noise at all, let alone aspire to become seismic.

“An earth shaker?”

“Well it's more of an idea and I may have oversold it. It's more of a passing thought. Well, now I don't want to undermine myself either, so let's call it a doozy, or rather a quake. Let’s say, I have a tremor of a proposal.”

“Something to knock the books off the shelves?”

“Something to knock the books off the shelves,” Nicolò leaned forward and Yusuf, bewitched, mirrored him. “You would think the Christians would have invented it sooner, but they took a hard turn with Catholicism. Sure they all preach it, most religions do, but I'm not talking about the preaching Yusuf, I'm talking about practice. I'm talking about the very deed. And I think about it a lot - you are a religious man,” then he glances at the bottle between them and makes an endearingly brash conspiratorial wink ( ‘No alcohol here, God!’ that wink said), “and I am whatever I am now. We share everything: bed, clothes, food, swords, ideas, wine,” he motions to his glass.

“Kisses,” Yusuf said dreamily.

“Oh,” Nicolò melted, “the warmest kisses.”

“You may be a little drunk yourself.”

“I think we should share our very own ceremony, perhaps even a secular thing. The Counting of the Blessings, we can call it - that is my idea. We will sit here together, apart, with God or without - it can be a thing for Him or really none of His business - and we can remember all the things that keep us living.

“I have been feeling ungrateful as of late,” Nicolò admitted. “Maybe that's not the word for it. Maybe there isn't a word for it yet. Now that she’s gone, and Andromache has gone in many ways with her, I feel awfully begrudging of life - a life that has been endlessly patient with me thus far. Here I am, thankless, bitter, jaded, but still having you.”

Yusuf laughed, but Nicolò was very serious. 

He continued insistently, “Once I found you, I found for the first time the feeling of decency. I found resolution, steadfastness, the comfort of not being on the outside. I became a man of inside. I found the sense of being among kindred spirits, of being near people like me. But more than a home, Yusuf, you are my teacher - not just of spelling and writing, and not how Andromache taught me my own sword, not how Quỳnh taught me all manner of patience with the bow - though those two and their gift of home is another to celebrate on this, the day of Counting the Blessings. You taught me to live with myself, you gave me hammers and nails to fix myself - you gave me tools and time and watched me make internal repairs! Maybe in five thousand years alone I would become half the man I am today because of you.

“Sure we are invulnerable men and sure we will live long, long lives, but beyond what any God can reach is your reach, beyond the sight of God is the vision of you! You have made me invulnerable, you have formed me immortal. By virtue of your making, I am beyond the touch of time. You are my very first blessing and come all bitter times, come smallness of me and things I cannot defend for how little I am, I must not forget it.

“What matters more, Yusuf? Cruel, relentless truth? Or love? Whatever wins in the end, whatever is to pass, what does it matter? We are the sort of thing that outlives you or me.”

“You,” Yusuf could think of only one word before the rest hid, blushing.

“Me,” Nicolò acceded, “and you.”

To leave a poet rhymeless, to leave him without stanza or prose, to render a wordsmith wordless - that is the power of Nicolò di Genova. That is the mighty wizardry of him, that is the burn-at-the-stake stupefaction. He is magic; he is cunning, beguiling, and drunk off his ass. 

“We have forever, you and me,” he promised.

Insatiable, Yusuf said, “I want more.”

“More than forever?”

“Endlessly more. Forever and a day.”

“Forever and a day.” Nicolò was red with drink and glee, “ Salute .”

For days the sky had been cloudless. 

Then the last storm of the year comes and comes brutally. 

“The storm is howling for me,” Yusuf says. “I am howling, too.”

She throws a blanket around his shoulders, “Come sit by the fire, Yusuf. A child of seven could knock you on your ass. How are you holding up?”

‘Me? I’m seeing ghosts.’

“I can’t stand another failing year.”

“You won’t have to,” she promises and guides him to the fireplace. 

Andromache stumbles, snow-turned, into their home and wakes Sébastien from a sleep at peace - deceptive, stomach-turning peace, a peace that runs Yusuf through with fever. She has packs, thick coats, new boots for all of them. Gloves are passed out and hats and scarfs. She catches Yusuf’s eye as he looks and she winks - her challenge, her battle cry of a wink. 

“We leave today,” Andromache says. “Now. Spring will come and clear our path.”

Yusuf, empowered by infinite love, rushes to gather everything - his books, his letters, his sketches. He slips into and knots his new boots. Each thing is quickly, lovingly stored into his bag. Sébastien does not move to the door and the way that he looks up at Yusuf - this sudden haunting in his eyes - is like a solar eclipse that sends Yusuf into progressing darkness.

“In the nights after we came back from the mountain I dreamt of a cabin and an ambush,” he admits. “Everyone died. Everyone. I remember behind me, as I was running, a trail of blood. It was blurry after that, I don’t know. A river? A bank? Holding a wound closed? Bodies in the snow.”

“I would know,” Yusuf corrects confidently. “If he wasn’t healing, I would know.”

Sébastien hesitates, but then nods, “Okay.”

“What after? What have you dreamt of since?”

“The ocean.”

“Tell me about the snow.”

Sébastien looks to Andromache and Yusuf moves to block his view.

“Tell me about the snow.”

“I have not dreamt of snow.”

“Tell me the second you do.”

“I will.” 

Yusuf sits across from Sébastien and takes his hands, “I love you.”

Sébastien shoots a mortified glance at Andromache.

“I love you and I’m coming. I love you and I’m coming. Shut up, I’m sending a message. I love you. I miss you. I dream of spring.” He continues to look into Sébastien’s perplexed eyes. “Nobody can stop the thawing of the ice.”

When they reach the valley, Yusuf understands the meaning of perennial. Sparingly, there are trees, there are brooks, there are pits in the earth, there are mountains like teeth all around them but, the horizon is equally sky and flat land. It is all the same numb-white. The distance between the mountains opens and eats them like a mouth. The vastness closes over their bodies. It bites. It chews. It swallows. 

Yusuf feels a little crazy within four days of their straight walk. They keep going east but after day and day of staring at the same whiteness, of the mountains not coming closer, of the snow coming lightly and hiding their footprints away, Yusuf is sure they must be walking in circles or illusioned with the idea they are walking at all. All that walking must have been a dream for they are staring at the exact same beginning, somewhere he has never traveled.

On the fourth day, there are figures. 

When they first spot the line of men coming from over the horizon, Andromache catches Yusuf’s wrist before he takes off at a sprint. She holds him in place, looks at him in warning, and then eyes the coming party. 

“He’s traveling with five,” Andromache conspires and Sébastien nods.

Yusuf counts twelve incoming, shapes distinguishable but not identifiable. They carry guns over their shoulders

“They have someone bound,” Yusuf says, pulling against Andromache’s hold.

“Wait, Yusuf. They are coming this way. Let them pass us by. They have no reason to avoid us, they will be curious and come our way. Relax, Yusuf! They will shoot us dead ten times over before we get a chance to see if you give them cause!”

Andromache steps between Yusuf and all hope, his island in the storm. Steadying him, the hands on him release to soothe and calm.

“How long have you waited, little brother?”

“Too long.”

“How long?”

“A hundred years and more. Too many years.” 

Time suffocates him, makes him sound like he’s choking. 

“Twenty minutes,” she soothes. “Just twenty more minutes. I will get him back for you, just wait for them to pass us by.”

“Let them shoot me down ten times.”

She holds him place when he lurches to run, “Let Sébastien tell us if we are unleashing a bloodbath on the right people.”

She nods, forcing him to nod, too.

“Alright,” he promises.

When he looks at Sébastien, he is watching the incoming group. It is twenty eternity-slow minutes before the walking group is upon them.

The leading man is a man of epaulets and a rat face. He comes empty handed, without a gun or prisoner or body. The other men come slower, some working in pairs to drag two bodies through the snow on a line of rope knotted to feet. Two more soldiers hold a tall prisoner with a sunken, starved look in his eyes. The prisoner, notably, is a filthy man. He is ignoble, with a head dropped so low and defeated that he looks small, even. There is a knot of a careless bandage around a wound at his throat fresh enough to bleed but old enough to yellow the gauze. 

They pass like icebergs in the water, drifting in opposite directions. The Russians do not speak to them, but the younger soldiers adjust their muskets nervously, watching them in turn. The commanding officer looks them over the longest, finding each one of them fascinating and un-belonging in their own right.

Yusuf looks back to Sébastien for a hint or clue, some trigger word, but Sébastien is looking at the snow, avoiding everyone’s gaze. Yusuf digs for clues, trying to justify the existence of another group of people this close to nothing. There is no making sense of innocent men this far out, and there is no way these dead bodies and these guns haven’t run into his Nicolò in these mountains. They must know something, at least. 

But Sébastien hasn’t said anything. Sébastien has been sleeping these faces of the men responsible for so long now that he would know them in a crowd. He would know their faces across a valley.

The silence between their groups is ominous. For all the build up and waiting, it takes only two minutes before they pass one another. Yusuf keeps glancing at their backs, at Sébastien, their backs, Sébastien. 

But the group keeps marching, dragging sleds with bodies and the prisoner behind. Sébastien has not said a word, except now he looks up.

“Andromache.”

She stares at Sébastien.

Yusuf realizes how distant, how silent, how indiscernible Sébastien has been from the moment they had seen the black spotted line of men.

Sébastien points at the disappearing group, hand trembling and eyes hard with fury, “It’s him."

It’s like letting a hunting dog off its leash. 

Andromache has the commanding officer in the snow and he’s screaming, he’s gurgling. He’s seeing demons and he’s not even dead yet. She won’t let him go too soon; half a millennia of pain needs to be felt by someone else for a while. 

He’s a lucky man, for it is Andromache's vengeance that keeps Yusuf’s at bay. 

There is a silence of horror when everyone is dead. Everyone, but the bound man - the prisoner who breathes wild, frantic, fearful breath and does not meet his eyes.

Yusuf stands over him and can’t decide what to do. 

To strangle him? To cut his throat? To beat him under his fists and boots? To twist his idiot fucking neck around? To seize the prisoner by the head and twist, to twist until he screams for fear? To take him by the jaw and snap it apart like a pistachio shell? To sink his teeth into his neck?

‘I only wish I had the strength to cut the flesh off you and show you what it truly means to be devoured… for everything you’ve done to him.’

Yusuf is determined not to let this man see his tears. 

“Was it him?”

“No,” Sébastien says, then points to a corpse in the snow. 

Beaten black and blue with death is a stockier man, not taller, but wide and strong. His eyes are sunken and open. His teeth, exposed by a slacken jaw, are yellow. He is frozen solid, made jointless by the sheer cold. The body is dusted over with ice and discolored blue, unnatural white, giving it a look outside reality. It is as if this stranger were removed from Yusuf's version of a story and supplanted only as a ghost, as a bogeyman tale. 

Yusuf pushes against the unmoving face with his boot.

So this is that man who eats men, this throat slitter, this blade wielder who drags bodies behind him, who knows how to butcher an animal so as not to taint the meat with stress. 

Anger boils in Yusuf and makes even his skin warm, makes his breath come faster. He turns away and finds there still awaits the other man, the living man that crossed the very same mountains and subsisted on the same food.

“Who is this, then?”

“One of the others,” Sébastien says. “He held down his shoulders.”

The prisoner has his hands bound and he’s dropped in the snow, Russian prayers tumbling from his lips as he slams his eyes closed, waiting for Judgment. 

When the drop comes, it startles the prisoner. It is not the sword that falls, it is not the big curtain of death. Instead, maybe better, maybe worse, there is a pack before him. The prisoner reaches out to unfurl it and out spills bread, dried meat, water, mittens. 

“You are what survives,” Yusuf says in Russian. “Do you deserve it?”

The prisoner looks up with Godly suffering, “I don’t think so.”

“What do you deserve?”

“Death. To be hanged by the neck. I have done things to survive that have rendered me unworthy of life. I have stolen. I have made friends with killers. I have abandoned my children to serve penance for a crime I should not have had to commit. I was born into scarcity and I fathered children, that may be my worst crime of all! I have let my children go hungry while I was sentenced to years in prison!”

“What is your name?”

“Yevgeni.”

“Poverty is not a sin, Yevgeni.”

“I have eaten the flesh of a man,” Yevgeni keens. “I have killed a man. I have killed a man who might have been an angel!” He holds the bandages on his neck as they blotch red blood from a reopened wound. “I have betrayed God and become something evil!”

“There are no evil men,” Yusuf declares. “Are you dead, Yevgeni?”

“Am I dead? I don’t think so.”

“Then there is time.”

Yevgeni looks up at him desperately.

“Until the finality of your death, you must prepare to meet those you have forsaken so that you may beg their mercy. You can’t meet your souls of judgment empty handed. Can you do it? Can you live a life worth their consideration? Can you go to your children and love them? Can you be a caring father? Can you be a patient husband? Can you do good, even if it is simply speaking kindness when you feel it in your heart?”

Yevgeni gathers the bag of food at his knees in shock, looking up at Yusuf in quick, fearful glances as if expecting the seconds of his mercy to run suddenly dry. 

“I can,” he says in his panic. “Watch me. Watch me. I can.”

“Go,” Yusuf says and wants to strike him down when he rises. After his running form, Yusuf curses, “You never should have touched him. I will not forgive you. Do not let me find you again. I will be looking.”

The town is surrounded by mountains and set upon a half frozen lake. It lays hidden and untouched in an eggshell of white. 

There is a mill with an unkempt wood wheel stuck in place. Vines, having grown through spring then gone dormant and died in winter, give the east facing wall a look of decay, of mottled skin. There is a church at the center, paint peeling away to reveal softening rot straight through to the inside. The cross on the top is askew, abandoned to teeter in the breeze. The whole town has been run to bones by the white, cheerless winter.

They step around the evidence of a forced evacuation - the gutting of a city they have seen before in the towns far further west. There are open stock animal fences, doors of homes held open by the fall in of snow. A serene absence lays over the town like the thick blanket of snow and the hard edges of houses, farm fences, roads makes the whole area feel divorced from reality. 

Sébastien is entrenched against grief. He is burrowing in himself and vacant, scanning the town for anything besides lifelessness. 

“This is what we truly are. We developed an entire civilization in an attempt to hide it, but without society we are just scared animals. We will tear each other limb from fucking limb.”

Yusuf takes lead into the church, rushing up the quarter staircase to the wooden doors. The door, once kicked off its hinges, falls open with one push. 

‘What tears at the core of me?’ Yusuf thinks wildly, succumbing to a fear borne from anticipation. 

Andromache and Sébastien flank him on either side, entering at his heels with muskets and labrys ready. Yusuf walks without a weapon in his hands, realizing with removed awe that he had forgotten to reach for anything to defend himself.

Darkness spills from the church. It is stuffy, complex, a living shadow. It contains terrors and eons and whispers of a hundred years alone - it is a darkness of which Yusuf is not ready, finding himself shivering like he still feels the cold.

Beautiful mosaic windows splinter the floors with red and yellow. Once his eyes adjust to the darkness, this light is all Yusuf needs.

There is a corpse on the last pew, the pew closest to the pulpit. The body is not forgotten, only left behind. Care has gone into the placement of his hands, the closing of his eyes, the straightening of his clothes. Hair, uneven and short, has been wet and pressed down. His face and his hands have been cleaned. 

Sébastien’s eyes tell what words cannot. Yusuf feels that lacerating sadness that drowns the heart after a final failure.

Yusuf takes the hand at rest, the cold, ice, lifelessness, and kisses it three times. He presses the knuckle to his forehead and for a long time, he kneels there and prays.

‘I will find a way to thank you. I will ask him and whatever he says I will do - I will burn that prison to the ground and I will cut its existence from the pages of history. I will go to your father as he promised. I will spend every last day at his side thinking warmly of you. Your kindness will live on with me, eternal.’

Rest is the only tincture for the weary, love-worn soul. Yusuf allows Andromache to take first watch, wandering around the church, disappearing into shadows far from their warm fire. Yusuf closes his eyes against it, just for a while. There is enough destruction here to break the heart and it can all wait some hours more.

When Yusuf wakes, Sébastien is already up. He looks upon Yusuf softly, mercifully, with good news in his eyes.

“I had a pleasant dream of snow.”

“Nicolò!” Yusuf’s scream is ripped apart by the breeze before it’s airborne. “Come to me! I am here! I am here!”

He steps onwards, he trudges into footprint-less snow, to a faraway southern mountain. Each step he sinks, he unburrows, he trudges his feet on, he sinks, he unburrows, he moves on, on, on. It is like walking through a bog, each step is thicker, dragging him down, heavier. The air is so cold he can feel it freeze inside his throat and lungs

“Nicolò!”

Cracked willows stand like tombstones on either side of him, bark coming off in strips, twigs and branches naked like carrions had cleaned off their flesh. They walk to the point of weariness, followed by a sense of searching, ill-defined foreboding that will not leave their little group. It keeps them all in secret-holding silence. 

A breeze comes and it is not warm, but it is also not cold. There are whispers of spring and, though very rarely, there is green. The low bushes, the grasses, even some of the trees were coming back to color amid the vast, gorging white. Skylarks are singing. Small companies flutter between branches in little, brown flashes. Wild wheat is shooting out into the light of the sun. 

It is the first sunny day, but for Yusuf there is no light. His given task, to live on through everything, is simply too much for him to bear. Anxiety is the disease that festers inside his soul. He thinks too much and is corroded for it.

“Yusuf,” Andromache calls and he shoots his eyes to the safety of her. “We will find him here. We are close. Say it.”

“We are close.”

“I feel him here.”

“I feel him here,” he grasps onto her outstretched hand, her promise. ”I will find him, my island in the storm. I will go swimming in his warm waters, I will run across his meadows and fall, laughing, under his wildflowers again.”

Fate or chance?

Destiny or accident?

Design or designless?

Those who catch destiny's eye will never escape. Her love makes a slave out of them all. And to be victimized by the chaos of no destiny at all is to live a life unmoored, to risk being destroyed by the first wave that takes the ship to sea.

Who is there to hate? What is there, if not fate, to dare tell Yusuf that there is something that can make up for an indeterminate number of these miserable immortal years. How can only one thing make up for even a single moment of his suffering?

There can be so much hope and love packed in life, and love has the characteristic of feeling infinite. Terror, doubt, pain, grief are all finite feelings, and even in the moment of succumbing to them you know they will end. A mortal man stays alive through these feelings because he knows that they will end, else he would kill himself instantly. 

For an immortal man, there is no promised end to his suffering. 

There is only one man who makes it all worth it, that makes his suffering worth it. There is a man who had watched the angels - golden-breasted, gilded-winged, distant. He spent too much time with them and therefore become a man with the innate nature of being on the edge of things, a peripheral man. It was fate or no fate or Yusuf’s destiny or Yusuf on his own who had lassoed and pulled Nicolò down like he was drawing the moon closer. 

If not fate, who was Yusuf to blame for his misery and thank for his blessings.

If not fate, who was Yusuf to thank for this very moment - when Sébastien trips and falls into the snow and comes up gasping, near tears with surprise. 

Yusuf staggers, as if he had been knocked off his feet. He stands there, rooted to the spot like a statue, struck dumb by a true astonishment. The look of dumbness does not leave his face in all that time.

Time finally, finally stops spinning off without him. It stands still and it waits.

He is sure the spell will break and he will rush forward, but he is frozen ten paces away. He is crying. The tears on his cheek freeze; the spell that has him paralyzed cannot go on this way, not in this weather. 

It is Andromache who is strong enough - it is her coat that drapes over his frozen body, it is her whispers in his ear, it is her call for fire and warmth. After Andromache, it is Sébastien - his is the one that can break the bewitchment to race on gathering whatever she asks. It is Sébastien who comes with blankets and wood and a strike. 

Sébastien looks haunted as he gets the first dry bit of wood to spark, “Can he live through this?”

“Of course,” Andromache says unwaveringly. 

She excavates Nicolò like an ancient body. She unearths his head from its resting spot and holds him against her chest, brushing the snow away from his beard, hair, eyelashes, lips. 

Sébastien continues to build a fire, digging it in and bordering the pit with stones. They still have hours until sunset, and when the cold comes it won't be so bad, so unbearable as to be lethal - spring is coming, snow is slowly melting. 

Yusuf sees her reaching out to him, palm open, but there is a great pit opened up under his feet, the ground is shaking, the world is crumbling, it’s judgment day - it’s unlikely he will ever get his feet underneath him again. He is stuck somewhere between fighting and laying down, to never get up again- meeting that razor’s edge of indecision that is just cutting him up. Nicolò was the beginning, middle, and end of every choice he ever made - Yusuf needs him now. More than ever, he needs Nicolò to tell him what to do.

‘It started with you following me,’ thinks Yusuf. ‘ Now, It is your turn to lead. I’ll take the millennia off and follow in your footsteps now. You have to get up. You’ve got decisions to make.”

“Yusuf!”

Andromache snaps him from his roots, from the sinking of his self into the ground beneath his feet. He falls forward, more on instinct to follow her order than anything, for the coldness of such shock has left him unfeeling, unable to move.

His shaking, weak hands push the clothes - gray, thin, awful, ice-caked clothes - from Nicolò stiff shoulders. Andromache helps to pull the jacket, the shirt away, and has to fall into the snow and hold the shirt and see the stains, feel the weight, look at it. She hurls it away from them and returns, tucking Nicolò and Yusuf together into every blanket, lays her coat over their shoulders and tucks them securely. She covers her face, she breathes and presses her fist into her forehead and she looks at Yusuf and holds his gaze with fury.

Yusuf nods, he continues their labors, their beautiful, thankful labors - tuck Nicolò hands against his chest, kiss his stone cold forehead, rub the back of his neck and the softness of his cheeks, thaw him out, thaw him out, sap the cold out of him and fill him with warmth.

The dams break all at once - so unexpected that there is no call of warning, no time to evacuate. Yusuf holds Nicolò’s body frantically, pulling him into his chest, pulling him away to check for color on his face, pull him in, pull him out, ocean tides - and here comes the salt water sea. Big, inconsolable tears come and there is no helping them. 

“Oh, Nicolò! Nicolò, Nicolò! Oh, I want you to live forever! I want to grow old with you and I want us to live forever. Who decides these things? Who's out there? Who are you? Do you hear my prayers? Do you remember I'm here? Please! This is not just. I entreat you on knees by broken heart! Don't take him from me. Don't abandon me here without him, I'll abandon you right back!”

No matter how Yusuf rubs and holds, Nicolò does not warm. No matter how Yusuf clings, the cold is clinging harder. To hold him is to be left shivering, to have every bit of heat in him sapped. Just to touch him is pain, but to pull away is worse. Nicolò is as cold as ice, as ocean deep, as the dead of night. He is as cold as death.

“Destati, Nicolò,” Yusuf whispers and finds Nicolò’s ears too cold. He presses warm kisses there. He lays his cheek there. “Nicolò.”

But Nicolò does not stir. He is a sculpture of unliving marble, of bloodless ice. He is unmoving and unanswering and, worst of all, unknowing.

“I am here,” Yusuf promises. “ Destati. ”

Yusuf weeps against Nicolò’s sleeping form, “Destati, Nicolò! The world cannot go on without you. The reason for it all is you, and the meaning of it all is you, too. None of it will matter if you are not here. The sun can’t burn, the flowers can’t bloom. How can the bees buzz? How can the snow fall and why would the spring come? If it is your light that goes out, one by one, very quietly, the stars will go out, too!” 

Nicolò wakes to the sun in his eyes, to bird song. There is still snow, but not much of it. There is a fire cracking and he can feel the warmth.

Andromache is with him. 

Her brow is furrowed and her eyes are glassy and her lips are taught and stiff. She leans into him and Nicolò closes his eyes to breathe in the scent of her - war, sun softness, sword fighting, agelessness, strength that holds him to helms. 

She has cut her hair. She has softened. She has learned when not to yell and she is sitting in this lesson. 

His voice cracks like ice in spring when he says, “What day is it?”

There is a remorse in Andromache that Nicolò has never seen without that burning fire undercurrent. Never, he thinks, has he seen her look so miserable. He does not want to look at it, does not want to look away and leave her alone with it. 

She sets a forgiving kiss on his temple.

She says, “What do such things as days matter to you and me?”

Her hand reaches out to brush through his hair. There are hands, too, around his middle and warmth pressed to his back. He does not dare to wish. 

“We can't go back out there,” she says. “Not until we have something more. She will forgive us for this, and I hope so will you.”

He is confused at even the thought of it.

“It is for your forgiveness I must beg, Andromache. I have kept you from her search for so long. I think I now have the smallest idea of how she suffers and it fills me with dread.”

“If it were just me, I would search forever, but it's not - it is you two and it's me. I don't think you would let me go alone and I don't think I can take you with me. She'll have to forgive me. She will have to.”

He does not remember her withdrawing or leaving, nor the sun setting, but now it is dark and colder and a fire pops with dry wood. Now, there is a man with golden hair whose back is turned to him. 

The same arms embrace him from behind. Still, no wish or want is risked upon them.

Nicolò stretches a tired, unreliable hand out in a voluntary faith that this man before him may be real. The figure, though, moves quicker than Nicolò may ever again - he turns in a snap and rushes halfway up to his feet and halfway to a crouch-crawl to get to Nicolò’s side. 

“Don’t sit up just yet,” he is winded. “That’s what got you last time.”

Nicolò drops back, towards the warmth that has enclosed around him. A nimble hand tucks Nicolò’s wrist back into the bundle of flesh and blankets. 

“A Frenchman who speaks Italian,” Nicolò says. “I live to see it all.”

“I speak only a little. Yusuf doesn’t speak much else. It was learn or be lost.”

At just the name, Nicolò holds back a cry. His body betrays him. Now, it makes tears and sheds them, “Oh, Yusuf.”

The Frenchman shushes him, “He sleeps still. He has been unwell for so long. I do not know him at your side yet. I wish for him to wake so that I may meet him as a whole man, but now he must rest.”

A desperate prayer bursts from Nicolò, “He is here?”

Hand clasped out, the new immortal pats the strong arms that hold Nicolò. Nicolò heaves himself back into a chest that he feared he would one day forget, into arms he feared he would misremember. 

“Thank you,” he sobs and is certainly quiet - Yusuf must rest and that is the most important. “Thank you, little brother, for being born to us. Thank you for seeing him.”

The Frenchman looks taken aback, and there is a flash of fear in his eyes - but Nicolò knows him now. He has dreamt of his cowardice and fear, of his trepidation and the way he flees, and he is thankful for all of it and more. He loves it all.

“My name is Sébastien,” he says. “I dreamt of you for a long time.”

“I dreamt of you, too. You were my eyes to him. I will forever love you for that.”

Sébastien is afraid of the passion with which this is said. He is afraid of the truth of the words, of their little family. He sits back, unfocused, and lost in his mind, and Nicolò leaves him alone with it. For now, Nicolò is distant too. He is a hundred years of tired and he is in the arms of his lover. 

Begone all thoughts of oceans, seas, and salt. Begone winter boxes and caves and shovels and beasts and ghosts. Begone ice beneath him. Begone fire. The heat of any flame is but a warm stone in summer and the sun itself is pressed, heel to head, against his back.

When the dream comes, it shatters him completely. What a sweet, nefarious image - what a deathly, slightest look. Yusuf closes his eyes against it. Visions like these, somber dreams like these, could easily close him. Crushed closed, he has been secured. One hundred years and more he has been fastened, he has been sealed like letters, sealed like lips. 

When the dream comes, he feels his heart wrench forward - shooting off as if to find some better, safer home. He won’t dare to think such a faraway name. Nobody, not even the moon, has ever been so distant. 

“There you are,” words from the vision are raw, as if raked across mountain sides. “Right under my nose all this time.”

“If I am asleep,” Yusuf begs, “please do not wake me just yet. For too long I have been dreamless; let me lay here now and dream of you.”

Nicolò allows this - as always he is merciful, giving, kind. “Of course,” he says. “As long as you like.”

“Forever?”

“And a day.” 

Bravely, Yusuf reaches out to touch the dream before him - to risk the rippling degradation of a beautiful illusion. He touches softly, with only fingertips, and then dives in a splay of palm across neck, over chest, across shoulder, under chin to lift head up and bring it forward for a kiss. He holds Nicolò there, lips on lips, forehead on forehead, nose crushing nose. With swallowed gasp and fearful shiver, he finally retreats and opens his eyes.

Nicolò is still there. Nicolò is solid before him. There are his eyes, there are his ears, there is his nose and the bridge of it! He could never, never forget such a face! A hundred thousand years could pass without seeing his face and he would know him in a crowd of a million. What did he fear? What was he so afraid of?

This is one more forever. This is a hundred paintings, a thousand sonnets, an army of marble that Yusuf will mold with his bare hands. Time, that fleeting, frugal thing, how it will one day take this moment and the next from him. 

His chest aches. Oh, how his chest aches.

“Everything that happened, all this time that is gone for us,” Yusuf says.

Nicolò runs his fingers through Yusuf’s beard - Yusuf is feeling his fingers, suffering them. Nicolò massages the angle of his jaw, and looks at him. He is searching, wanting, memorizing. 

“I know what you’re thinking,” Yusuf says, “You are thinking that there is no time missing, just time to share. You are thinking that we were apart, but never separate. You are thinking that time is such a small thing to you and me.”

“No,” Nicolò is hoarse. He speaks in Arabic and his voice cracks, shakes, and strengthens as he goes, “I am thinking that it has been a long time since you’ve had your hair trimmed. I can cut it, if you like.”

He kisses tears from the corner of Yusuf’s eyes, one at a time, and then he dips Yusuf’s head down to kiss him on his crown. Yusuf burrows there, nose in crook of shoulder, and draws in deep, needful breaths. 

After the wails and sobs and quiet sniffles, after they have held each other, Nicolò disentangles himself from Yusuf.

He says, “What are you waiting for?”

“The ocean. The end of dreams.”

“It won't come,” Nicolò swears.

Yusuf allows himself, then, to be sat up and maneuvered, to be primed and cared for, to be kissed between draws of razors-edge, to be turned this way and that. As the worst of the knots fall away, he is revealed to still be the glowing young man beneath - a man who smiles, a gardener that grows, a painter, a poet, a sculptor, an author, a lover, a fighter. All are still layered beneath. 

As Nicolò combs, tends, and kisses, Yusuf renders aloud a tale of Spanish ships, of saber duels, of princesses and towers, of corridors and closets, of pea pods, of dust storms, of diamonds, of prayers in cabins, of sprouting from the roots, of the legend of true love and the infinite fight to get back to it. And towards the end, when his epic grows colder in snow, Nicolò lays across his back and holds him around the shoulders to whisper sweet comforts in his ear. 

“It hurts and there is nothing to show for it. I know it is childish to say,” Yusuf admits, “but I wish I had scars on me. I wish that there were ugly wounds to show you. I wish I had cuts and bruises. If you look at my body, you should see it all there - the marks of all others in your absence. I want you to see the fall and the survival of the fall. Years of exile should be written on my body and you should read their tale. At the end of the story you would know the shelter of your arms, the comfort of your gaze, and the burdensome weight of my heart when you are not with me to carry it.”

An unforgettable sadness clouds Nicolò’s eyes. As he looks down at him, he says, “I see them. I can see all of your marks and scars. I see your heart. Let me lift it.”

Then, it is Yusuf’s turn to shave Nicolò, and he rids him of that dreadful beard and tames what little hair he has left into even lengths. 

Nicolò only watches. He inspects all of Yusuf’s non-wounds and he loves him - Yusuf feels it like radiating heat. Nicolò does not speak of anything - not of the blood in his hair, in his beard, in his clothes. He does not reveal answers to questions about four-walled cells or friends and foes or skin hollowed and bones exposed. He says nothing of meat and gore and salt water. As his beard is clipped away, the hollow of his hurting is revealed. The sunken eyes and cheeks of starvation cannot so easily be loved away. 

Nicolò is pensive, he is quiet; he has not changed at all in this way. There is, however, a new way of heaviness - there are dipped shoulders, there are look-away glances. Yusuf, too, sees mortal wounds on indestructible skin and he starts the ageless work of kissing better.