A Place of Beauty and Darkness

*trigger warning* child abuse and violence against LGBTQ+

In a place of beauty and darkness, there sits a throne which is made up of all the time that ever was. Seated upon it is the Old Year and every soul who leaves their life must pass through these midnight halls on their way to the next. The Old Year does not judge, it is now and forever and exists simply to ease the passing and hear the tales of what went before from those that wish to tell them.

A young woman approaches the throne, painfully thin with hair shorn short to her head, the memory of fire and ice in her veins still from the drugs they pumped into her, thick ropes of scars where they cut her and tried to save her. Slowly, haltingly, she tells her tale of the pain and fear she hid from her family and how in the end she just wanted it to be over but clung desperately to the tiny threads of life that remained just to see her children’s faces one last time and whisper through cracked lips how sorry she was to her mother that she would be the first to go.

In a voice like the shush of the wind through the trees, the Old Year tells her that her family saw her pain and her bravery, and that eventually they made their way through their sorrow to find peace in her passing and comfort in one another. Old Year raises a slender hand and the young woman feels the pain seep from her bones and relief settles around her like a blanket on a cold evening. She bows her head and moves aside, for another is arriving.

This one is old, and moves with halting steps out of the crushed velvet dark and up to the throne. She stops and straightens her bent back a little as the weight of her life begins to lighten. Confusion still clouds her eyes and she reaches out a hand to the figure before her but Old Year gives a regretful shake of the head as the memories start to return. Memories of the sons she could not recognise and the husband she no longer knew but who had stayed beside her until the end, singing the songs they first listened to as teenagers, washing her and feeding her with hands knotted and swollen from arthritis, murmuring patiently to her when she didn’t even know her own self. Tears well up in her eyes and spill down cheeks lined with so many memories. She nods at the remembering, grateful and regretful and full of love for her family.

The next is bruised and bloodied and cradles the memory of a broken arm although here all of their scars and wounds and bruises are nothing but phantoms of the world they’ve left behind. He spits out the story of a public bathroom with the stick figure on the door that matches his insides, and the men within who saw only his outside. He had crawled away in a haze of pain and shame but they’d found him again and the flashing blue lights that are the last thing in the world that he remembers were too late. The three of them standing before the throne in the endless deepest darkness feel the pained fury of the Old Year as a promise is given that no more harm will befall the young man here.

Two children arrive, tiny and terrified with nervous eyes darting from right to left. The older of the two, a boy no older than seven clasps his sister’s tiny hand with a ferocious anger spilling from his stuttering heart which in truth beats no longer but still hammers against his chest in remembered fear. He flinches from the adults before him and clenches his spare fist tight, bracing for a blow but stepping in front of his sister all the same. She clings tight to him, not old enough to fully understand but knowing that he means safety. Old Year leaves the throne and kneels before them, eyes blazing with compassion. The boy softens a little and unclenches his balled up fist, realising that here is not there and no one means them any harm. He mumbles the tale of the father who left and the fear that moved into the house in his place, of his little sister who could not stop crying from the cold and the hunger tight in her belly, too tiny to defend herself from a mother who blamed them both. The ferocity and pride and fear all leave his body as Old Year rocks him and his baby sister softly and sings a lullaby of forgetting.

More join them, some spilling their tales to the unfathomable night and the gathered company, some simply standing and listening until Old Year finally stands and faces the throng, still cradling the sleeping children in a gentle embrace.

You are all warriors who have fought and died in battle. With iron-forged wills and spirits bright as stars it is for you to choose your path onward. You each had your own beliefs in the life you have left behind; you may call this place Valhalla or Heaven, to you it might be paradise or the underworld, or a transitory place where you rest before you return to the world once more. This can be a place of feasting and joy, or it can be a quiet place for you to mend and move on; you may stay, or you may go. I am the Old Year, I am everything that has gone before and I am everything yet to come; you and I and we are eternal and here we forget what has already passed and make ourselves new in this place outside of the world.

And so it is that sometimes slowly and sometimes in a flood, more and more souls join the band of warriors and they all stand together in that place of beauty and darkness, in the midnight halls where the Old Year sits on a throne of time and they hear one another's stories and they help each other to remember, and to forget.