The Last Days of Yesteryear: Epilogue

Edmund set down his pen, and closed the book.

“Enough. A good place to stop. Because that’s where things started, you see?”

The soft sound of fabric brushing against porcelain skin drifted from behind him as he stared at the closed book on the table where it rested. Gentle footsteps walked to the back of his chair and pulled gently. The book drifted away as Edmund’s wheelchair was carefully turned and pushed towards the door of the study.

“I thought this was where things should end,” he said. “When I was young. This was where stories ended. Good stories.” He couldn’t remember why.

His gentle benefactor made no sound, but continued to wheel Edmund out into the hallways, pausing only to shut and lock the study doors.

Edmund looked at his hands. When had they become so wrinkled?

The wheels began to turn again.

Edmund turned, wrenching his wrinkled hand around to rest gently on the cool skin of his caretaker. His withered lips struggled to form the protest that had been brewing in his heart.

“You have done so much for me. I cannot ask you to do this too…”

He fell silent as she clasped his hand and gently lay it back on the wool-blanket in his lap. It was the most conversation she had engaged in for some time.

“All right,” he nodded.

How many poems had he written, in his life? How many letters and journals and diaries? How many pieces and scraps of written word had he created in some macabre attempt to convey what was in his heart? None of them were enough. He had practiced, in his one-hundred and three years of life, a thousand ways to say thank you, and none of them were sufficient.

The hallways of Moulde Hall were bare. Over the years, countless purported friends and suspected relatives had come and gone, carting away some cherished memorabilia or nostalgic trinket. Half of them would be sold at flea markets, the other half given to museums and private collectors of antiquity.

“Belamy has done quite well for herself in Cliffside,” Edmund said. “Quite well. I’m proud.”

There was no reply. There was never any reply. He never said anything because he wanted a reply.

Thoughts. So many thoughts, rolling around in his head like avalanches. Like snowflakes in a blizzard. Gradually, fading in from the mists or bubbling up from swampy depths, something solid and reliable. Something that Edmund knew.

He had to say it. Whatever it was, he needed to say it, to make it real. To make it true. To make it exist.

“It was nice,” he said. “to exist.”

He could hear her smile. It was the closest she ever came to agreeing. She understood. She always understood, better than anyone.

At last, they came to the library. With an ease that Edmund had come to admire and envy, two thin arms scooped him out of his chair and held him tightly, cradling him like a newborn.

Was this what it was like, when he was young, to be held by his mother?

Mrs. Mapleberry was long dead. Matron was long dead. Whomever his birth-mother and -father had been, too, must have been long dead. Even Mrs. Kippling had died, seven years after escaping from prison. Ung from old age, Enga from the latest war…All that was left was the love of his life, and there was no telling how much longer she would live.

The poetry welled in his heart.

“I loved four people in my life,” Edmund said, staring at her face, as wrinkled as his. “One had skin of stone and she never truly saw me. One had hair of fire and never really heard me. One had eyes of ice and never really knew me. and you…you…”

The library echoed with her footsteps as she carried him gently to the bottom.

“You were made of flesh and lightning, and I was never anyone but me.”

She looked at him, her pale eyes as sharp and piercing as they had ever been. Since the first day they had met, they had never changed, not one shade. Her wrinkled skin curled and folded deeper still as she smiled.

She continued smiling, until she was certain he could not see her any more.

With the grace of a dancer, she lay Edmund’s body down on the floor, next to the great brass tree in the center of the Library. There is no telling how long she stood, staring at the limp form that was now bereft of the spark that had kindled greatness in so many people with so little notice.

Perhaps she cried a little. Perhaps she spared a glance for the carefully polished and maintained mechanicals: Aoide, Melete, and Mneme. Perhaps she cut their chains and let them escape, running off into the darkness to fulfill their promise. Perhaps she carefully selected a single book from the shelves and tucked it gently under her arm, before she left the library to finally do the last thing she had to do.

Or perhaps she stayed by his side while Moulde Hall burned.

Perhaps the story doesn’t end when the hero dies. Perhaps that is what makes them a hero.

Reports are sketchy of that night. What is known from first hand accounts is as follows: the Brackenburg Fire Marshall came home with his wife after a gala ball sponsored by the Moulde Family, collapsed in his bed, and slept so deeply that he awoke too late when the call for the fire brigade went out. His wife was known to protest reports of his drunken excess, claiming her husband drank only a single glass of wine a tall Spanish waiter had handed to him. Obviously she was lying to protect her husband, as no one recalled being served by a Spainard that night, and it has been proven the caterers had no Spanish waiters in their employ.

The whole of Haggard Hill burned that night, contained by the wrought iron fence that surrounded the estate.

There were no shortages of on-lookers and gawkers. Even then, with electricity making its way into homes, with moving pictures now having sound, with rumors of small Cinemagraphovisions-for-the-modern-home soon on the horizon, it was still difficult for the people to turn away from a show. It was free, after all.

Poems were written about that night; about the pillar of flame that consumed a building that was centuries old, the monstrous fire that spread like an advancing army down Haggard Hill towards the city, clawing and roaring at the iron gates, desperate to be free, to consume…

Poems about the throngs of people — all ages, all colors, all creeds — all staring, aghast at the travesty or perhaps the majesty of the world that they once knew changing forever because of an errant spark, a single flash of flame in the darkness, lit by whose hand no one would, or could, ever really know…

Poems about expectations, about love, and about fear of doing what’s hard. Fear of doing what is right. Poems about change, and hope, and failure. Poems about what we’ve overlooked. Poems about our common humanity, and our individual silent struggles. Poems about the people we forget are people…

Poems about the crackling timber and crumbling stone that boiled in the heat, and the pillar of smoke that rose into the sky, carrying a blizzard of burning shards of paper as they melted away in the moonlit sky, flickering and flashing like stars.