La Ballade du Temps

Trigger Warnings: Implied sexual content, suicide, physical violence, attempted murder, obsessive/toxic relationship

an unknown age

Paris, France

Immortality, they say, has always wrought more woe than gain.

He looks upon the fresh morning, twinkling beyond his window in the lavender-ruffling breeze and the chatter of the buoyant children at the nearby school, and ponders, even now, about the chosen ones. Eternal youth, every ancient tome describes, is what transformed their hearts, stone-cold and unmoving, as they watch eras fly by.

Cautionary tales have been hammered into his mind since he was little—stories of the multicultural l’ailé, Irori and Mudrost, and even further back, la Muerte, the very first one of them all. 

Long ago, even the gods were mortals, peasants kneeling before a king, until they turned their backs on humanity, ascending to their heavens to drink and laugh with their golden goblets, dancing in their gilded halls, completely ignoring the suffering below them. Then, when they desire it so, drifting down to the earth, plucking mundanes from their loved ones as though they were merely frivolous toys, forever replaceable, to be played with a single epoch, then discarded the next. 

Once before, even the l’ailé were just as fragile, pleading and begging for their lives . . . and others’ . . . accomplishing impossible feats in the name of love. 

Now, they are gods. Gods, but monsters. 

He isn’t sure if he believes the narratives, but he hates the deities anyway.

He pulls down the window shades, shutters the curtains closed. If he were gifted immortality, he thinks, he would never abandon his people. 

---

He dreams, every night, of her. Though her features are blurred, indistinct and hazy, he sees her silver-spun hair, as fine and liquid as moonlight, cutting a crisp shape against the gray sky; he sees her firefly-amber eyes, her graceful back to him, chin tipped to look at the swirling mist thickening the ether. She then glances out at the angry ocean roaring far below her feet, bookended by rocks and outcroppings . . . a cliff at the end of the world.

Like always, an inexplicable, ineffable pull compels him to her, a bond that twines and writhes with crackles of lightning, engulfing his senses, and tonight, he finally dares to run toward her—his voice lodged in his throat as he, frightened that she will disappear from him, attempts to call, “Wait!”—the terrain shaking from his footfalls as he pounds closer, feet tripping across the flora, stumbling to a stop at the edge of the cliff, only feet away from her.

He reaches out, aching to bridge the gap between their worlds. But, like always, she vanishes before his hand can brush hers—as though she’s a happy ending he can’t quite catch, a fairy tale just shy of his grasp.

And then he jolts awake, wiping the sweat from his brow. Metallic light filters into his bedroom, soft and scintillating, and he cannot stop thinking about her: an inexorable plague insidiously haunting his every waking moment—a plague that, more than anything else, he cannot be ridden of. 

His bones creak as he stretches. He misses the days of his youth—recklessly climbing trees, challenging teenage girls, sauntering into a room and having all attention on him. Now he is a more reserved man, like paint reused and replastered, its quality incrementally degrading with each stroke. Each year is sand trickling through his fingers, something he can’t—no matter how much he tries—hold on to. He strides into the kitchen of his lonely residence, a unit nestled above an alley of idle shops. As he sips his drink, he watches out the window of the little boys and girls, swinging off boards and tackling one another; fleeting bitterness makes its way into his heart for a moment. 

Everyone else his age has a job, a family, someone to grow old with. A life to look forward to, even after death.

Maybe it isn’t just solitude that he despises.  

Perhaps it is Death he fears more.

---

He drapes a jacket around the attractive woman’s shoulders as the wind settles a chill into their bones. She smiles up at him gratefully, dark eyes nothing but adoring, and he feels a twinge of sadness that he cannot give his whole heart to her.

When night streaks the sky, she pulls him into her bedroom, kisses making their way hard and fast down his neck. He knows he shouldn’t be deceiving her like this, but the sensations overpower him—it drowns out everything else, everyone else. Only for one night, he thinks. Then he submits to her desires, as well as his own.

And after it all, he forces himself to walk away.

Her heart ends up broken, just like all the other girls.

---

One day, he catches a glimpse of her, in the crowd, a figure so familiar his heart races with hope. He tries to get closer, tries to push his way past the throng of people and see past the heads. But when he approaches, finally free of the mob, she is no longer there. 

Maybe she ran. Or maybe she was never real.

---

The years slip away, until he thinks that perhaps he should concede his search. Quit playing and succumb to the ticking clock of his mortality, for perhaps she was really just a figment of his imagination—a creation of his mind, a mere mirage embodying his longing for a perfect love. Perhaps she never truly existed the way he thought she did. But how can that be? He is convinced that she is a tangible person he can touch and hold, simply waiting to be found.

“You seem tired,” a voice says abruptly, and he glances up from his position on the bench. “Are you all right?”

His eyes widen.

Sunlight surrounds her face in a halo of otherworldly radiance as she leans down toward him, hand extended. Only when he straightens, taking her hand and standing, do the girl’s features gradually sharpen into clarity.

She is smiling softly at him in the way that he imagined, a thousand occasions over. “Hi. I’m Thyme.” Her face is new, but her platinum hair and molten-gold eyes are not.

I’ve found you …

---

For months, it seems like impossible bliss, when she kisses him or he reverently wraps an arm around her waist. When they go out for ice cream or fancy dinner. When, at night, his hands memorize the map of her body, tracing patterns up her back. And just maybe, he thinks, he has attained fulfillment. 

---

He wakes, grinning before he even leaps out of bed. A nervous smile is fixed on his face for the entirety of the day; when night falls, he clambers out of the door, instantly prepared, having waited anxiously for twelve hours. The diminutive jewelry box in his back pocket weighs much heavier than it should. He steps off his porch, across his lawn, adjusting his tie, passing the rollicking schoolchildren as he does. He doesn’t glance once at them, instead bounding into a taxi carriage.

“Take me to Le Dîner de Deux,” he says to the driver, who nods before jerking on the reins of the horses.

When he arrives, he expects Thyme to be already there.

When the waiter guides him to their candle-lit table, he puts on a smile, knowing she’s not always punctual. Instead, he picks up the menu. 

When thirty minutes pass, he sets the menu down, wiping his glasses on his shirt. “Are you ready, monsieur?” a servant asks, sweeping by, but he waves him away. He wonders if Thyme’s landlady is giving her trouble. 

When an hour flies by, he worries that she’s gotten into a carriage accident. He stands from his seat, the chair scraping the ground. “Are you all right, monsieur?” the waiter questions tentatively, but he is already out of the door, the bell tinkling behind him.

He staggers onto the darkened streets, horse-drawn carriages clopping by in the distance. The stars, folded within the firmament, glitter above him relentlessly. A myriad of scenarios race through his mind, each more implausible than the last. Thyme’s body, dead in a closet; her head awkwardly angled as she lies on the ground, unmoving; blood splattered by her feet; bereft of her usual warmth—

As he rounds the corner, he stops short.

A dark-haired man is pressed up against Thyme, kissing her as if his life depended on it. His elbows rest on the wall on either side of her as her hands travel down his body, dig into the fabric of his shirt—

He, standing by the wall, feels his fists curl, feels unspeakable fury wash through him like a tidal wave, incinerating everything in its path.

The man with Thyme inhales a breath, pulling away for a single second. As he does, his eyes flash red: ruby and gold mingling in the irises, sparks of power clinging to his pupils.

Reeling backwards, the realization strikes hard: la Muerte.

With a guttural roar, he charges out of the darkness, a primal instinct within him ready to tear the god to pieces. Unbridled rage tunnels his vision, constricts his lungs, and his entire body is seizing, trembles wracking through him.  Still, he forces his legs forward, toward the entangled pair. Thyme’s eyes flick momentarily to him—she looks shocked—before the god wraps his arms around her, Thyme’s strawberry-balmed lips parting to form a single phrase, and they both disappear in a blinding flash of carnelian smoke.

He crumples to his knees, sinking to the very spot they stood mere moments ago.

Tears drip down his chin, and he clenches his fist, torment exuding from every fiber of his being. 

I’m sorry, Thyme mouthed to him. 

He draws the jewelry box into his hand and flips it open. A resplendent rose-cut diamond glimmers on the slender band. A ring. He removes it from its stand, and screams to the heavens—a terrible wrench of his chest. He’s so blind with pulsating grief he cannot see as he smashes the ring towards the ground. The recoil reverberates through him as the diamond tumbles and ricochets off the weathered, grime-woven pavement; fissures snake through the concrete in poetic whorls at the unadulterated impact.

This whole situation is sickeningly poetic, he thinks. He cannot comprehend how the floor of this chimera unraveled beneath him so suddenly. Everything was supposed to be perfect once he found her, she was supposed to be perfect just like she was in his dreams, and now—

With a renewed sense of feral anger, he hurls the ring down again and again, each throw only succeeding in fragmenting the ground further. The diamond infuriatingly remains intact. Only the quiet night is there to bear witness to the thrall of his unending sorrow. 

And when his arm gradually grows tired, and he’s exhausted his tears, he stands. Cobbles together a semblance of a sneer. Pastes on his façade, arranging his countenance into the epitome of indolence. 

And leaves the ring, cast with insouciant abandon on the floor, when he eventually departs.

---

He finds her standing at a cliff, wind and waves tossing down below, the sky clouded by a canvas of star-riveted galaxy—oddly reminiscent of his dreamscape. The dreams that never really stopped, even after he met her.

Some deeply submerged part of him understands. Thyme is beautiful and kind enough to catch even a god’s eye; and no one would ever be foolish enough to reject la Muerte’s affection. But he wishes he doesn’t feel this way. He wishes that they can restart, erase that night from both of their memories.

Thyme doesn’t face him. 

It is he who grabs her face and yanks her chin toward him. She makes a terrified noise as she is whirled sharply to him. Mine, he thinks, stroking her cheek—so exquisite, a celestial muse, even now. She flinches but remains firmly in his grasp. No one else’s.

Especially not la Muerte’s.

“I didn’t mean to,” she stammers out, the timorous cadence of her tone melding with the cacophony of the sea’s crashing tides. “You know that—you know that I love you—”

He hisses. “Don’t you dare say that word.” Already, a wildfire is blistering into his heart, seething and splintering. He ignores the pain, forges on. “You are not worthy of it.”

Instead of arguing back, she looks down at her feet. “I know.” She takes a step back, away from him. Toward the precipice, toward the sea. “I know.” Another step.  

He knows what she is trying to do, and he will not let her flee, jump into the darkness. He will not let her purposeful demise liberate her. 

For she is mine.

And if she is to die, it will be at my hand. 

With a frenzied shriek, he lunges forward. Her delicate hands come up to instinctually defend herself as he winds a garrote around her throat. A strangled gasp escapes her, and oh, how he loves it so. The feeling of possession—the knowledge that even in death, she is perpetually his. She kicks and fights, struggles and calls for help, but he is too strong; his wrists grip her in an iron-clad vise, holding her away from the cliff, crushing her to his chest. 

“Don’t worry, my love,” he whispers, “I will join you.”

“You are insane!” she spits out as he chokes her, and she slams a fist to his chest, but he doesn’t wince or relinquish his bind. He is certain she will thank him, once they are both dead and free to love each other; ensconced from la Muerte.

She screeches and punches his arms, his legs, raining blows down everywhere she can see, half sobbing, half-delirious with panic and desperation. 

He realizes too late that in her toil, she’s led them to the edge, the maw of the abyss miles beneath. With one final effort, she shoves him away and surges toward the edge, and then, as the distress unexpectedly melts from her, into the fathomless darkness—soundlessly slicing wind and light and cold, as unearthly and ethereal as a falling angel. 

His feet are dragging him forward as he kneels at the precipice, looking down frantically. “NO!” His voice cracks as he stretches out a hand for her, a vain attempt to rescue a shattered fantasy. 

But she’s already gone, her small form plummeting through the air, then fading into nothing as she splashes into the water, blood staining the blue and black, flayed by the jutting rocks . . . the same way he lost her in his dreams.

He is semi-aware of the silent tears that stream down his cheeks, carving rivulets through the dust coating his skin, then swallowed by the unforgiving earth.

He collapses to the ground. The grass tickles his fingers, but he does not understand. He doesn’t want to. Thyme was intended to die by him. Now, she will never be his, never again.

His fist collides with the dirt, a flock of birds startling into the air overhead, and he screams.

It feels like losing her to the death god all over again.

Except . . . perhaps he doesn’t have to feel this.

There is a way.

---

He prays at Mudrost’s altar, candlewicks blazing around his silhouette. The statue of the goddess gazes imperiously down at him, and for a moment, he loathes what he is doing. What he has lowered himself to. Then he recalls the old stories. I must do this. 

When he opens his eyes, it is to a purview of churning violet haze.

The warrior goddess materializes before him then, wearing armor plated over her blue dress. Her eyes are stormy gray, an impending turmoil on the horizon. Icy and unfeeling. “I know what you thirst for, mortal. And I will assist you in achieving it—for a price.”

“There can be no price greater than what I am willing to pay for,” he vows.

Mudrost smiles, her mouth forming acute corners. He contemplates briefly if he’s made a mistake. Never trust the l’ailé, the voices of the books whisper to him. For everything they do is for themselves. His stomach curdles, and he banishes the thought, pivoting his attention to the goddess, who says, “And I believe this is something that aligns with both of our interests.”

---

When he ascends, he feels nothing.

When he meets the council of six, now seven, he feels nothing.

When Mudrost’s eyes meet his from across the room, only then does a spike of vengeance—a promise—floods him.

He recalls their bargain: You will transcend into one of the l’ailé, as you wish. And in turn . . . you will be forever condemned to hunt la Muerte—our mutual enemy—for eternity, over and over again, locked in an endless battle until the end of the cosmos. 

“What is your name?” Irori asks from her throne. 

He grins; his name? His mortal one—whatever it used to be, as he can suddenly no longer remember it—is irrelevant, now. 

Over eons, it is his godly name that becomes legend, myth, and then reality; his name that comes to instill an unparalleled fear within mundanes—even greater than what la Muerte’s invokes—as he mercilessly steals their futures from them, robbing them of what he always needed—what was always taken from him. He speeds and stops eons at will, taking the breaths of humans from their very lungs. 

He thinks back to when he turned and faced the six other l’ailé in that grand chamber, Mudrost impassive, calm and composed, and then . . . la Muerte’s scarlet eyes burning, fires and disasters and cataclysm all quaking within the contours of his face, even as their stares latched onto each other. Her smile seared into his brain. And he almost wanted to laugh at the irony, if it weren’t so macabre. Perchance, he thinks now, the stories are true after all. 

“I am Time.”