A flame sprung up, a piercing, blinding pinprick of a candle to his right. Then another, and another, going on and on in a wide circle until every inch of the cavern was bathed in warm, yellow light. It took a moment for Wulfstan's eyes to adjust to the suddenness of the candlelight. Blinking, he began to look around, the antechamber now bared to him.
There was nobody else with him; Wulfstan knew now he'd imagined it, stemming from his fear. That didn't explain the spontaneous candle lighting, but more peculiar things had happened to him in recent times that he didn't care. Considering what was before his eyes, that was the smallest piece of the puzzle of this mysterious cavern. Turning around, gazing at the walls, he was captivated by what he saw.
Highlighted by the flames, carvings and paintings danced across the walls, from the very floor to the ceiling metres above his head, impossibly intricate, beautifully lifelike. They couldn't be things from the imagination even though what he was looking at were fantastical. Animals that he had never seen before – something like a knife-toothed feline, a shaggy bull with horns bigger than its body, what looked like a buck but with antlers that were webbed together like frogs' feet. Humans, intentionally painted with dark pigments and taut with muscles, wore clothes that were incredibly primitive, animal skins with strange patterns, and held jagged spears and crude bows. They looked nothing like people that he had ever seen before, nothing like people that lived in the area now. Wulfstan followed the walls, going from the left, nearest where he'd come in, following along it.
The people changed, as if a timeline was painted on the wall. In each area, distinct despite the way they all flowed together, there seemed to be detailed figures painted repeatedly, surrounded by faceless ones. Those repeated ones were the only ones that had obvious features – they changed every time the painting style changed but it always looked like a man who'd been documented by undeniably talented artists.
It had to be multiple artists, the changes in style were severe and, if the changes in styles denoted time periods, they were far too different to have just be one human lifetime.
Most of the wall was taken up by these unfeasible animals and unfamiliar humans. However, he realised that, on the far-right side, the dress of the people and the sparse animals that did appear on the walls became more familiar. They looked more like the people on the tapestries illustrated within his old manuscripts, the dress worn a few centuries ago. Further through the antechamber he followed until he got to the last half-painting, half-carving of a delicate, beautiful portrait of an unknown man all alone on an otherwise naked expanse of rock when the cave wall fell away into another dark tunnel. It was tucked away on the right side of the slope he'd slid down, so he'd missed it in his wonderment.
Itching desire surged through him, that tether that had appeared when he first discovered the cave mouth screaming at him that he had to go down that tunnel. Comforted, for some reason, by the beautiful art that seemed to sing to his soul – did something like him have one? – he strode into the tunnel, old candles bursting alight as he walked. It didn't bother him.
He knew this place. He'd been here before. The answer to something, anything, would be at the end of this tunnel. Maybe not everything, but there would be an answer. Wulfstan felt it in his bones.
Light flowed around him as he went until he finally found himself in a much smaller chamber. More art covered the walls, but it was incomprehensible, dancing, entangled figures in poses that he couldn't make sense of. Faces distorted and warped into unreadable expressions. There seemed to be a replicated character within the art again, the same tightly curled, brown hair and tawny skin following in every painting. The other was always different, though there seemed to be a faded greyish splotch on all of them, spread messily and disfiguring the faces that had once been there. It was strange, not quite sensical enough for Wulfstan to figure out.
The art felt more personal, forbidden, and private than what had been in the first chamber. Intimate in a way Wulfstan couldn't understand, apart from in the far recesses of his mind. He could almost put together what it was, but he dared not to guess, dared not to let his mind wander there.
There was a rock in the centre, long, wider than a person, with a clean crack – a seam? – running around it about halfway. Wulfstan strode forward and, with confidence he couldn't find the origin of, pushed at the top of the rock, sending it clean from the base.
This rock was hollow. Wulfstan was reminded of the box's bodies were put in before they were lowered to the ground. A coffin carved from the cavern itself, the bottom melting into the rock ground. If he looked, he could see the remains of chisel marks across the stone. Just like the rest of the cavern, this was not natural. What strange person made this hideaway, free of sunlight, damp and desolate?
Staring at it the inside of it, fur lined all the edges, some shaggy, some short. None that seemed like they came from a familiar animal. Wulfstan reached his hand in, rubbing along the pelts, finding a thick lump of them at the wider end of the coffin-rock. A pillow, perhaps. He huffed, amused.
That familiarity was still there. This bed, that's what it
was, welcomed him, like Ita's arms, a motherly, loving embrace. An urge to climb in surged through him and he had no reason to ignore it, so he lifted his long legs over the wall of the coffin. Laying down, it fit him perfectly, his feet left with just enough room to relax, the pillow curved exactly to the shape of his skull.
A hard, sharp corner jabbed into his side. Wulfstan sat back up and fingered the edge of the pelts, tugging at them until they peeled away from the rock as if they had been hammered in with some kind of adhesive. Falling away from the impossibly smooth surface, Wulfstan's eyes fell on the newly revealed, slightly ajar, hidden compartment.
Unthinkingly, he yanked it open, and several things tumbled out. Rock slates with carved scribbles that seemed like words, leather-bound tomes, loose sheaves of aged paper and scrolls. Frowning, his brows knitting together, he uncurled the least yellowed scroll, the thing that looked the most recent. The words were written in an older version of the English he could read but it was similar enough he could decipher it after some time. It was much like the Bible – language flowery, complicated, ancient. Reading it made him feel as if he was back at a church sermon.
Flicking his eyes over the page, he did everything he could not to clench his hands into fists and destroy the fragile paper. Wulfstan could hardly fathom what he was reading.
Many centuries have passed me by, leaving me unscathed. I've watched these lands change and flourish. I've witnessed humans become what they are now – how incredible they are, so innovative and motivated to survive. What a wonderful species, yet they still insist on violence and wars to get their way. Well, it's how they got to be the only species like them left, apart from me, so it did work for a long while.
They are in such great decline now, their idiocy unable to get them out of the horrors they've inflicted upon themselves. Violent fools. I hope they don't kill themselves off, even if it is for my own selfish wants.
One time. Just once, I was weak, and I've lost everything. Completely and utterly lost it all. The finality of it is so wretchedly foreign. There is no 'next time' now.
I have been, despite all odds, mortally wounded. I believe I must have been weakened, further than I already was, when my soul's other half perished from his own wounds two days ago. Foolish me, to think those barbarians would give me the mercy of mourning. With his body in my arms, and they still attacked me and forced me to leave him to their desecration.
I fear there is not much time left for me in the land of the living – I do not know what is to come next. Maybe I'll be able to follow him this time, to wherever humans get to go. Rest sounds nice, a new adventure.
It's a shame I never got to finish that painting of him. That was going to be my masterpiece. Worthless now. No one else will remember his face for much longer.
Arrows have pierced too much of me. It hurts. Finally, I know what pain is. How marvellous this sensation is – is this what humans feel every day? Beautiful. I would not give this up for anything. I've become human, in a way.
Regardless, no one will find this. No one will ever know I existed, despite all the years I've persisted on the world.
That is the purpose of this place – only I know that it is here. A safe haven, a sanctuary, for my centuries of rest. How pitiful it is to be immortal in life but so painfully mortal in the memory of the world. No roots tether me here. My art tells my story better than my words ever will and that, too, will remain obscured for eternity as well. Nevertheless, there is only one person who I care for the thoughts of, and he has already left this wretched world. How cruel of him to leave me behind over and over and over again. I'd despise him if I didn't yearn for him every moment of every day.
If, somehow, I have another life and it is me, another me, a different me, that is reading this final, ridiculous lamenting ramble, I wish for you to know that the day I, you, we finally perished was in the cold, snowy December of the 631st year of the Church's calendar. Who knows what day it is. Not that it matters. I felt the snow on my face. It was cold in a way that I didn't know something could be – it made me feel as if my flesh had blood pumping through it. There is no blood there, of course. I would know, considering I've become a seamstresses' pin cushion. But still, I feel warm, somehow.
May you know our Heart as I have. Every life with him was worth the misery and alienation I've suffered since humans, as they are now, first learned to walk the Earth.
Do not let yourself wallow, me in who knows how many centuries. Don't hang on for thousands of years again. When he comes back – he will, he always does – you'll know which life will be the pinnacle of your existence. I did and I ignored it those thousands of years ago out of selfishness. I hid from my natural end; this is the consequence.
Please, I beg, don't persist after that perfect life. End whatever cycle it is his soul and ours live in. Let us all rest.
I forced our suffering for too long. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
It no longer hurts.
Whatever was written afterwards was a muddy scrawl of dried ink splotches. The author had clearly become too weak to continue and hastily stuffed his final words into the secret compartment moments before passing. It hardly occurred to him to wonder where the body had gone, but suspicion and fear were weighing heavily towards the idea that he already knew.
Wulfstan read that short diary – he didn't really know if there was a better word for it – repeatedly. It didn't make sense to him. These words were written nearly four hundred years ago and yet…
He knew he had written them. The swoops of that lettering, the wording, the yearning with which they spoke of this 'soul's other half', there was no doubt about it. The pain and suffering within those lamentations of grief were mirror images of his own heart.
Somehow, almost half a millennium ago, he – another him – had met his demise. Wulfstan's memory did not exist of that time, yet as he ran his fingers across the incomprehensible squiggles and shapes on the stone tablets, the ancient ink on the near-crumbling scrolls, every word came back to him. That black hole, though it remained a black hole in terms of actual memory, became filled with the tales that he had once experienced and written. Or, really, the him who once was, that dark-haired, tan-skinned figured on the walls above him; was that other figure his 'soul's other half'? Every one of them looked so different, how could they be?
His answer was soon answered.
Each of the fragments in his hands told a story of another life. Of lives he had lived through time. It went back so far that written words became mere pictures, those stone tablets painstakingly chiselled by unknown means – these were relics of a time before everything. A time history didn't speak of, nor did humanity remember. Wulfstan held those stones and knew they spoke of stories that happened millennia before the Church proclaimed the world even existed. Everything he knew was crumbling yet he was being filled with so much more. Every single one, each tale separated by roughly a hundred years, when dates began to be added, mentioned the existence of a 'soulmate'. A name was never written, the descriptors of faces, hair colour, and body types all varied. Some held incredibly crude drawings of the men, some so amateurish to the point the inked details had blurred together through time. They were clearly, though, from the same hands that had crafted those impossibly elegant art pieces on the walls. Tens of thousands of sleepless hours were used to hone the craftwork that Wulfstan could see all around him.
But in every single one, two things remained the same despite all of the time passed.
Always a man, every time – the yearning scriptures spoke of another man. A magnetic, handsome man one that pursued many trades, many talents. It spoke of the hopes and dreams of these men long gone. Wulfstan thought of that beautiful rendition of a man's face that adorned the wall beside the entrance of this small annexe. The man who had died only two days before that last diary had been written.
The other chilled Wulfstan to his bones but set fire to his stomach, his heart nearly wrenched free of his chest through the back of his ribs.
A left eye of vibrant flax. No, not flax. Not hazel. A word that emerged late in the texts, clearly the word having not been known for the vast majority of his previous self's life.
Gold.
That faded greyish spot on the writhing figures on the wall made sense. Time had warped the yellow pigment and made it wrong. The nature of the relationship of that 'soulmate' and he was clear.
It was the same as the sinful way he feared he felt for Leofric.
Scooping all the writings into his cloth bag, thankfully practically empty to begin with as he had not needed food nor water, only a spare set of clothes, Wulfstan scrambled out of the coffin-bed and barrelled through the cave. On his hands and knees, he felt flesh being torn from his body as his clothes became ragged, but he just scrambled up the sheer drop and burst into the dark, dark forest.
He had to get back to Leofric. He couldn't bear to be parted for another moment longer. If Wulfstan didn't see the man, safe and happy and beautifully handsome, by the time the sun was barely winking over the horizon, he felt like he would go mad.
Never again would he allow them to part.