Convalescence

"Is it raining?"

His rough murmur was cast disembodied, unfamiliar. The girl had cosseted him up in what rags she had, and cuddled in with him by the torfire, stoked for his convalescence.

"Not since Hyuri stole the last of it."

His head felt thick, his vision promiscuous, but even her voice betrayed how shrunken and lone she had become. Not the girl of his dream, no. The bereaved dam, apposed with her strange cognate.

"I can hear it. Its insane susurrus, the stink of the firmament."

She tightened their filthy coverlet, "You're still sick with delusions," but it was she shivering. "Tell me what you've seen."

"I walked a long road. The Lady made the stones hot, I felt her sweet tongue on my bare feet. I stood at a bridge over a ruddy confluence, in it I saw the implicit taction of our multiplexed destinies. Athwart the river's progress was Iylum, the weir of the eschaton.

"I beheld myself, in autumn's beaming, as the hand of death. I beheld myself in winter's retreat as the last man. I beheld myself, in spring's chaos, as the tree of life."