Altar de muertos
Today is November 2.It has been four years since the final battle. Four years since the fifth age started.
It is New Year’s day.
I have built a small altar out of a stool and colourful paper. I hung ribbons on it, splashed it with confetti. I placed his picture on it.
I have prepared his favourite food and served it on a plate before the altar.
Listening to the merry music outside, I kneel down and begin praying.
It took me months to absorb that he was not coming back. “He can’t be gone. Everyone else is back. He must be somewhere else.”
“He can’t have left me. Not him.”
I travelled with Nike and Klogg, torn: hopeful and broken, manic and depressed, up and below. I would see every edge of the klay universe before I admitted that he had left us.
Three candles burn on the altar: one yellow, one orange, one red. I pray to Quater, and I pray to Father. I pray that his journey is safe, that wherever he is, he is happy. Even without us.
Sometimes I manage to recall a strand of my conversation with Father. It was otherworldly, and it is difficult to remember. But I know exactly what I said.
“Yes, I want to come back, but only if my brothers are there, too.”
Nike is adamant that he insisted on the same thing.
Every year, on November 2, I build an altar of death, place a weasel sandwich on it, and I pray with my eyes closed, waiting until it disappears.
It never does.
I have changed, that much I can tell. I am different; broken, maybe. But I am not the only one.
Klogg is beyond mending. When he came back, his two halves were fused and aching. He is a strange mash of the Klogg we knew, the Klogg he once was, and the Emperor. Nike is having an incredibly hard time with him.
Just like Klogg changed, and I changed, Nike changed, too. We are all different than we used to be.
One night during the journey, I stumbled out of our camp into the cold and empty desert. I went so far that no one but Father could hear me. And I cried into the night: “Has he abandoned me?”
It dawned on me then, sudden like an anvil, powerful like the tide.
It was my fate. To always be abandoned, no matter what I did, no matter what and who I clung to. Abandoned and lonely again, empty, full of void.
I cried into the night.
Daylight fades away. My legs are wooden. I shift and get up.
I tip the plate into the trash can.
The night called back at me, then. I heard a booming thought in my head, I saw evaporated images.
Krevel sitting above a book. Many books, a library. He is the librarian. Dead of the night. An old book, a forgotten book, a powerful book.
A thought, like a whiplash. “He has forsaken us.”
Another one. “He can’t hear our cries. Someone must go and shout into his ear!”
Krevel turning a page. Krevel staring at a sentence, the sentence. “He is above the cycle; therefore, no one within the cycle can reach him.” Krevel realising, in cold sweat, that he would have to give up everything; us, his life, his love. Krevel knowing: he is the only one who can do it.
He is so close that I can touch him, and the vision fades. I can only smell mulberries.
And I realise that, for the good of the universe, he sacrificed his chance to come back.
In the cold, empty desert, I realise that he will never come back.
Every year, on November 2, I will build an altar of death, place a weasel sandwich before it, and pray. I will pray to Quater, who is anew, and I will pray to Father, who heard out my brother’s desperate plea for his world.
I will thank Father for the answer he didn’t have to give me. I will thank fate, as cold as it is, that it didn’t leave me wondering.
I will thank Krevel for having been in my life.
And I will hope that on the next November 2, the food will disappear.
