He Will Make the Face of Heaven so Fine

Galen sat overwhelmed in silence at the ending of tale that was just told to him. The light of the day was falling fast beyond a horizon they could not see. Now he understood so much of everything he saw in her. Everything that seemed unnatural was because she had developed a scar over her damaged parts. Of course she ran away, and no one could or would blame her for what she did given the indescribable abuse. However, Althea did.

She blamed herself in this moment now thinking back on all that had been done as she said it all out loud. It was now, as she was removed from her past in relative safety, that she fully realized the remorse and shame in herself for leaving. She knew the truth of it now, after so long, that she was still letting the darkness win. Choosing to run from it was not fighting it. Turning her back to it was not conquering it; instead she had let it conquer her.

"Maybe you were right, Galen. Maybe I have let that be buried down for too long. Maybe I should have faced these demons long ago. Maybe then the world wouldn't have suffered for so very long…just because I suffered."

"That is a drastic understatement," Galen said finally adding input. "You were mentally abused, you were manipulated cruelly, and you literally gave away parts of your life energy because of the sheer purity of you love and were raped besides." The words seemed to choke within his throat, they were so ugly to speak. His head and his heart started to hurt in full lament of the malice in the world that would seek to tear down the good and virtuous. "'Suffered' doesn't nearly do it justice."

Althea never really thought of the labels of what had happened to her. And yet here they were put forth in front of her in glaring clarity. She wanted to argue with them, downplay them if she could, but it didn't make it any less true. She knew that.

Galen began to reach for her hand, but stopped himself within an instant. He wanted to comfort her, but he dared not touch her. He could tell from the way she was holding herself, the way she seemed to still be physically hiding behind a wall of protection she had erected these long months in solitude, that physical contact would be the last thing she would want. In that moment, he was nearly consumed by his pity for her. Not in any kind of condescension or superiority; far from it, in fact. He admired her strength and resolve so much more now. How many people could say they endured so much and even willed to continue on? And what he felt wasn't sympathy, for that would imply that he felt some form of shared experience to her position. How could he? How could anyone? No, his pity came from a place of compassion with full sorrow for what she had been through.

"At least now," Althea started to say with a desperate need to continue with progress and not fall back into her own darkness, "at least now I will have a chance to make things right. I will do better by those in the world suffering now and those I left behind - those I love. I can do right by Mireya…er, the Queen and Baldrik. I can go back and take care of them."

Baldrik…

The sting of her words and the realization of her innocent ignorance given her time in self-banishment entered into his ears and coursed into him like poison. Galen dared not move a muscle. Her hope was so pure and so tragic that he was frozen where he sat. He couldn't be the one to break her again. How would she be able to hear the truth and bear another defeat? Oh, God.

She sensed the change in him and his retreating presence. She knew something was wrong. In a way, she knew something had been wrong for a very long time. Not like with the Mist and the Immortuos, but something else deeper and more intimately dreadful. Deep down there was a shapeless, terrible burden that had descended and weighed on her soul that she actively ignored over and over. Now it seemed she couldn't ignore it any longer. The specter of some distant calamity that had been haunting her from some unknown place must be known.

"Althea…oh God…" How could Galen even find the words to say it? He knew all too well that he held her still beating heart in his hands, and by his hands would it break. Again.

Althea reached out with her kind words as she sensed his struggle. "I know there is something you have to say that I won't want to hear. But I promise…I mean, I guess I have to know whatever it might be."

He tried with all his gifted soul to be as comforting as he could while he spoke words like daggers even to himself. He must take this woman as vulnerable as she had made herself to him, like a small, trusting bird, and thoroughly destroyed her. He had seen and heard the love she spoke of for the family she left behind, Baldrik probably most of all. But he did has ways of soothing and calming, and there was at least that small amount of comfort he could give to her. If she had to hear it, the alleviating Magic in a Leporem might be the best way to do so.

"A year ago, just before the Mist, we were all…" no use drawing out the truth, he realized. He stopped, recalibrated, and did his very best for better or for worse. "Baldrik has died. It happened just before the Mist. I cannot tell you how utterly sorry I am for your loss. Your loss far more deeply than anyone else besides the Queen." He wanted to cry for her. He watched in awe as she had told the whole story of herself without a tear, and it was a story that would have crumbled the foundation of the most stalwart person alive. But now she was not reliving something she survived, but was being struck with another blow that could be the blow one too many.

Althea sat there somewhere between relief in the certainty of truth and the sorrow of it all. "In a way, I know. In a way, long ago, I had felt an emptiness in this world - in my soul - that I couldn't quite explain. It makes sense to me now. It wasn't the isolation, and it wasn't the running away; it was the breaking of the other part of me, of the heart I left behind in him. I should have known that he wouldn't survive long without care. If he had another attack like I had seen in him before, of course it would claim him in the end. He even said so to me. I shouldn't have left."

"Althea, it wasn't that…" he whispered barely loud enough for even himself to hear. Maybe if she didn't hear it, he wouldn't have to say it. Maybe he didn't have to say it at all.

"It wasn't what?"

Damn.

This time he had to reach out and take her hand. If not for her comfort, then for his own. "Althea, he was not taken in sickness. He died by his own hands." He registered the hands within his harden in a deep terror, and he knew that no gifts of his would be able to make anything he had left to say any less monstrous. "Word spread quickly from the palace down the hill and onwards until everyone knew despite the Queen's wishes that it be kept secret. Something so shocking could not be born in silence, and the servants who had to bear witness to the sight could only find relief in their misery by spreading their grief. Or so I guess. In the end, perhaps the fight was just too much for him to keep at it."

"Then it really is my fault."

.........…..

Althea found herself beside the river again. The same unnatural speed carried the waters down in an unsettling way. The sight of her body was not found at the bottom of the river as it had been before; she had escaped it a year ago when she left, after all. But now more than ever she wanted to jump in with conscious purpose. Even if this was only a dream, as she knew it was, maybe somehow this river would take her away in her sleep. She didn't want the burden of her life anymore.

"Can't go that way," she heard a voice behind her say.

She turned around with tears in her eyes at the sound of his voice. "Baldrik?"

He appeared before her as she had known him in the best of his life. He was not in pain, he was not in doubt or grief; he was whole and perhaps better than she had ever known him to be. He stood beside a tree facing her and seeing deep into her heart. She felt the warmth of him there. And he smiled at her.

She was carried toward him in a whirlwind of tears and sorrow, or so if felt. The swirling feelings of love mixed with pain drowned her as she rushed to hold him. There is something inexplicably tragic in a dream where one sees those loved in life while still being conscious of the fact that holding them, embracing them, seeing and feeling them were unnatural and unreal. That though they were there, they are not. And while the moment is so beautiful and so precious, it is doomed to fail and fall into nothingness upon waking.

But in this moment, this dearest, treasured moment, they were together.

"I'm sorry. It's all my fault, and I'm so sorry!" Althea sobbed as they both fell to their knees still in embrace.

"There is absolutely nothing for you to be sorry about."

"But you're dead because I left. I killed you!" The world became dark in Althea's guilt, and the air became thick in her sobbing. The fog moved around them, and she saw now that the fog in her dreams was actually the Purple Mist. They were one and the same. They always had been. Perhaps that, too, was her fault.

"Don't you do that!" Baldrik chastised firmly as he took her shoulders and looked into her destroyed face. In that moment, the Mist disappeared. The darkness was held at bay. "What I've done, I own the weight of it alone. Just me, and no one else. Least of all you."

Althea heard his words but still couldn't believe in her heart. She had the sorrow and misplaced guild of those left behind in the wake of such acts.

"I came here because of how proud I am of you. I don't blame you for a single thing in life. Not now, not then. You are finally free of the hold the past had on you, and you were strong enough to face it and turn around to fight it. With that the door was opened for me to find you here and now. And I love you, sis, just as much now as I did back then." Even as he spoke the light of love spilled forth from his eyes, and it was a heavenly light.

She poured herself into his arms and embrace again. If she could help it, this moment would last until the stars went cold. She would live forever in a dream to hear his voice again. If this was the only world left that held him, then it was the only world she wanted to have.

"You know there is more to do, and that I can't stay with you. What's left to be done isn't over."

Althea shook her head violently as she felt the veil of sleep slip away from her. She held onto him even more desperately. "No, no, no! Not yet, just a moment more. Please!"

"It's time. But I'm always with you here," and he laid his palm on her heart just as he had before. The ache inside her grew more and more with every second. "I'm proud that you are turning to fight. Just like I always knew you would."

"Baldrik, no yet!"

"But you know this isn't real, and it's time to wake up."

"It's real enough for me!"

The light of the moon was reflected in her eyes as the dream was ripped away from her. Galen had tried so hard to keep a look out, but he had fallen asleep beside her tucked into the hollow of the hill. She didn't move upon waking, and though she knew that she should stay up and keep watch while Galen slept, she shut her eyes hard willing the sleep to return and bring the dream back.

But the dream was gone, and sleep would not lay upon her while she had a duty to protect the sleeping man beside her. In her ears she still heard Baldrik's voice as he disappeared in her waking:

"I believe in you."