[SE] Torn Like a Sail in a Storm (Open)

It was too warm, too wet, too… different. The snows should have covered the ground for this, the world sleeping in the embrace of winter, silent and cold as the grave. To light a candle while surrounded by greenery was almost sacrilegious in Kel’s mind, but he had attended the festival of Caido’s dead and knew that this was the time for it, on this strange, distant world.

He had no siblings by blood, none that he knew of, but the dryads of the Grove had raised him while his mother wandered, and they had been a true family to him. Aunts and grandmothers, cousins and friends, and even a rare few uncles and brothers had played with him, taught him, admonished him, hugged him. He missed them all, but on this night of Lights throughout Caido he lit the Ghost Queen’s candle for one in particular, even though she was a world away.

The dark-haired young man with the sun-kissed brown skin looked up at the alien sky with its alien stars, seeking some rhyme or reason among them, but his eye kept returning to a bright star to the east, twinkling blue-violet against the sable dome, and as he lit his small white candle with flint and steel – too poor and small an offering, but all he had this year – he leaned back against the lighthouse and faced away from the ocean, letting the crash of surf beat in his blood.

”Mhamo Rowan, I miss you so much,” he whispered to the candle, and the flame that burned with a flickering light even sheltered by the lighthouse’s bulk as it was from the ocean breeze. ”Now, more than ever. I bet in all your centuries you never heard a tale like this one. I could really use your wisdom right now. I bet you’d know what to do…”

No bets were taken, and no comforting grandmotherly arm extended out of the dark to wrap his shoulders in a fragile embrace or wrap him in the old blue shawl that always smelled of hyacinths, even in the winter. The lighthouse lamp burned above, and the candle burned below, and Kel did his best to protect his little memory-light as he gave offering to the Ghost Queen and the souls that had gone to her care.

But there was no Ghost Queen here, no goddess who held safe the souls of his mhamo, his elder aunts and uncle of the Grove who had returned to the earth. A different god by a different name held souls he had no connection to, and there was no longer any comfort in knowing that at least after death, however quick or lingering, far distant in time or near and cruel it might be, that he would be reunited with his family once more.

Still he sat his vigil, holding himself against the chill of the deepening night as midnight came and went and the blue-purple star moved across the heavens. He sat against the lighthouse mourning quietly but freely, remembering the woman who had meant so much to him until the candle burned down to a stub and finally guttered out, and only then did he gather it into cold fingers, rising to stiff knees to cradle it close.

There were still a few hours before dawn when he trudged down the hill, away from the great stone tower and back into the jungle, feeling more alone than he had since arriving on this strange, alien world.

{Fin}