Shadow

I saw her several days ago. Only I refused to accept what I was seeing. She was careful, but not so careful that I wouldn’t be afforded the sight of her. Some of that care added something to her steps. She was slowed by her caution. 

I didn’t have such a burden, and so I closed the distance between us over those days. That was when I had to do something about the sight of her. Think about what it was that I was seeing. 

She was older than me. Something in her gait spoke of those years and there was a weariness in every movement. I felt sorry for her, translating her age and pain into each and every laboured step she had taken along this path. Assuming that all the years she had over me had been spent out here in pursuit of something that continued to elude us both.

I couldn’t work out whether there was hope in the sight of her, or the lack thereof. Surely she should be so much further ahead of me, if not already at her destination? I chose an unfounded optimism. I was quicker than her. I had travelled a greater distance and now I had caught up with her. I would get to where I was going sooner.

But now I hung back. I didn’t want to alert her to my presence. Truth be told, I didn’t know what to do about her. I was excited by her presence, but also frightened. I was also appalled by my constant isolation. I hadn’t seen a single soul for longer than I could recall and I was unsure as to how I should act were we to meet. I had ceased talking to myself some while back and I didn’t know whether my voice would work again. In its redundancy, it may have decayed and wasted away.

I began to hum quietly to myself. An act of reassurance I hadn’t deployed in an age. The silence of this place had suddenly become noisy to me and I had to drown it out. Before me was a constant question and I feared the answers that awaited me. 

My pace matched hers now. I was in no rush. I doubted she could lose me. I wouldn’t be denied my prize. I needed to think and to plan. I couldn’t rush this. I had one chance and one chance only.

I think there may have been hope in this. An attempt to imbue her with magic. In waiting, I would witness that magic. A change of great portent. Something to break the monotony of the journey on this seemingly endless path. An end to herald a true beginning.

She was the only change though. This dark figure that plodded along before me. Not once did she turn to look back along the path. But then, neither did I. What was the point? I’d left what lay behind me and it was of no use to me now. You went where your eyes gazed, I was never going back. To head back would be to die. That was the certainty of the path.

Now I was looking upon her. Following her. Her eyes were upon the way ahead. Our path. I could derive that much from her, but little else. Old, slow and walking the path.

There was something disconcerting about staring at her back. There was something off about what we were doing here. I doubted she was unaware of my presence. No one walked this place and missed something as obvious as another person. As I thought upon this, I understood the potential for danger. That she was dangerous. Confident in herself and her capabilities to an extent that meant I was no risk to her. I consoled myself with a twisted logic; if she’s wanted me dead, I would no longer be walking the path.

There was the lie of safety in the distance that remained between us. At some point that buffer would cease to exist and there would be a meeting. Perhaps a confrontation. I wrapped my fingers more tightly around the handle of my knife. There was comfort in that. I was quick with the blade. I’d be quicker than her. 

“I lost patience…”

The voice startled me awake. My hand shot to the hilt of my knife, but it wasn’t there. I looked up at the dark figure in a panic. She was dangling my belt betwixt gnarled forefinger and thumb, “I didn’t want things getting unpleasant,” she explained.

“How?” I asked her as I scrabbled backwards and into a sitting position. I had intended finding my feet, but that no longer seemed to be a good idea. I didn’t want to confront her. Not unarmed. Not at all if I could help it. She’d got the drop on me and proved herself to be a dangerous adversary.

“Let’s just say I’ve had practice,” she smiled a dry smile. All of her was dry. Her face like parchment. Thin cracked lips. She tossed me my belt, “here, it looks better on you.”

She sat as I threw off my blankets and buckled the belt. My eyes settled on the belt at her waist, similar to mine, but older. There was no knife though. She had a gun. She saw me looking, “it’s a rare and precious thing. The bullets are rarer still.”

I nodded. I’d only ever seen guns at the hips of rangers, and she didn’t look like a ranger to me. But then I thought I’d seen it all, especially now there was so little left to see.

“So many questions…” she trailed off and I couldn’t fathom whether she was referring to my questions or hers. Could’ve been both. In this place, there were questions aplenty. It was the answers that were in short supply.

We sat for a while. Silence and stillness was easy. There was that or walking the path. The ebb and flow of life.

“Have you seen anyone else on your travels?” I eventually asked her.

She shook her head, “not here. Not of late.”

“Me neither,” I replied. “Do you think…” I began.

“Doesn’t pay to think that way,” she replied, running roughshod over my words, “there’s no point in it.”

More silence. There was a pregnancy in this silence. Something that had been ever present, but was growing such that it couldn’t be ignored any longer, “are we well met?” I asked her.

“Only time will tell,” she said sadly, “and time isn’t reliable. Not here, and not now. Even the now of things is no longer a given.”

“You speak in riddles,” I told her.

“Riddles are all I have left,” she shrugged, “riddles are all we have left.”

“I feel like we’ve met before,” I said the words before I’d measured them. They fell from me and to the dry and barren ground between us, and only then could I discern the truth of them.

She nodded slowly, her expression mournful, “in a way we have, many times. But this is the first time you and I have met.”

More riddles, but a growing feeling of certainty tinged with dread.

“We’re connected, aren’t we?” I watched closely for her reaction to this. She was adept at controlling her expression. She existed deep within. There was a strength in that. A deep and constant strength.

She stared back at me, “astute. We’re not all like this. Not all of us.”

“Us?” I seized the word and turned it this way and that. The approaching certainty was readable, but I didn’t understand the words. They were placed in all the wrong places, “are you me?”

She nodded and then followed that nod with a shrug to negate the affirmation, “I’m not you, but we are the same.”

I should have become angry at yet another side step. The words were a game, and yet she was no game player. There was no artifice to her. There was her and only her. She changed everything. I studied her anew. Looking for our commonality. Imagining the journey from the now of me, to the future of her. Once again, my eyes fell upon the pistol at her hip. There were many stories and more from the girl I was to the woman that sat before me. She didn’t wear that gun, it was a part of her. Maybe she was a ranger after all, but I still didn’t think that was right.

“You know things that I would hear,” I said to her.

“And I know things that you would rather not hear,” she countered.

“That is the way of the path,” I told her, “the truth and nothing but the truth. It is not for us to pretend otherwise.”

Now she smiled, “in this respect, we are well met.” She placed her palm to her mouth and then to her heart. An old ritual that was as much a part of me as it was of her. 

I mirrored her movement, “long and fruitful days,” I said as I placed my palm to my heart.

She cocked her head to one side, “long days and fruitful nights,” she said in return.

“I’ve never heard that variant on the words,” I told her.

“If you would listen to me and listen well, variation is something that you will hear,” she got to her feet, “but first, I would eat. Long days give rise to a hungry belly.”

I stilled myself and watched as she prepared a fire and cooked fresh meat upon it. I didn’t question where she’d found the animal she’d trapped, nor how she’d gone about hunting it. I had heard no shots and there were no apparent wounds to the animal. There was much to learn from this woman, but first we ate and I remembered myself, savouring the food and enjoying the taste of it. I was hungrier than I realised. I could’ve eaten the same again. Possibly third helpings. I’d learnt to eat whilst I could. Balancing that with conserving meagre supplies. After we’d eaten, she boiled water and added leaves, pouring it into two tin mugs.

“What’s this?” I asked as she handed me one of the mugs. There was a fragrance rising up from the liquid, but it was an aroma I couldn’t place.

“Tea,” she answered, then seeing my blank expression, “you haven’t tried tea before now? No, of course you haven’t.”

I tasted it, “it’s good,” I told her.

“It’s even better with milk,” she replied, “some would add sugar, but I never sullied my brew with such things.”

I nodded at this. I was aware of both milk and sugar. I didn’t want her to think otherwise.

“Tea is one of the variations, isn’t it?” I asked after taking another taste of the fragrant brew.

“It could well be,” she replied, “or you just haven’t encountered it in your travels. There is that. The limitations of experience.”

“If it’s a variation, how is it?” I thought for a moment, “why would you know of tea and I don’t?”

She drank some of her tea and took a while to answer, “there are worlds other than this,” she said eventuality.

“The worlds in the sky?” I said pointing upwards.

“Other than those,” she replied, “there are other versions of this world. The universe is ceaseless and unending. It repeats itself over and over, but each time the flaws and imperfections that it contains give rise to different outcomes.”

“So you are me, but from a different world?” I asked.

“Or you are me from a different world,” she countered.

I let that sink in, “what if we’re each other and we are both from different worlds?”

She laughed at this, “there is that variation also.” She drank again, eyed me, then spoke, “do you know that there was a time before this when we wouldn’t have met? When all those worlds were apart and never met?”

“The Time Before?” I knew she was referring to this, but then this could also have been a variation, and so I trod carefully with my words.

“The Time Before,” she echoed, “that was when time itself worked and there were no… anomalies. Of course, we’d both have been long dead if we’d lived back then.”

“How do you mean?” I asked the question, but I had an uneasy feeling that I knew the answer to this one. That I knew a lot more than I allowed myself to acknowledge.

“Think about it,” she said, sipping at her tea and watching me as I did just that.

I didn’t have the words. Not at first. Then I had a question, “how old are you?”

She grinned, “I’ve stopped counting. I don’t trust the numbers anymore. I think I’m centuries old.”

“But you could be older?” I guessed.

“Much older,” she said with a finality that shocked.

“So I’m…?” I began, doing some basic maths that didn’t fit in the framework she had begun painting for me.

She saw the change in me as my numbers failed, “there are no referent points. You could guess that I’m thirty years older than you, but time stopped working a long, long time ago. Then you have to consider the way the worlds now overlap. What do you think happens to us when we transition from one path to the next?”

I wanted to repeat that word. Transition. But I saw her watching for that and so I didn’t oblige. Instead I sought the experience that word denoted. Cast my eye back along the path. The never ending path, “that strange feeling when you think you’ve been on that stretch of path before?”

“They call it de ja vu,” she told me as she filled the pan once more, sprinkled more leaves in it and stoked the fire so flames licked the metal base of the pan.

I looked beyond the woman then. Over her shoulder at the path that snaked out to the horizon. Often I thought of it as a serpent. An eternal dragon devouring its own tail. I sometimes wondered whether my journey would end before I reached that hungry maw.

“You’re looking at the snake and thinking of it anew,” observed the woman.

I nodded. She called it the snake too. Of course she did. “In all the worlds the path is constant,” I said these words and needed no confirmation of them from her. There was something right about that. That and our being on the path. “You’ve met other versions of yourself before,” another statement I didn’t need her to affirm, “why haven’t I?”

“Who says you haven’t?” she answered.

Everything changed in that instant. That was when I knew. Only the knowing came back to me from a faraway place and it echoed in the very centre of me. A whispered secret that was chanted over and over and over. Under it were other words. Words that I’d heard before and would hear again.

Close, and closer still.

I’d heard those words so often. They’d urged me on when I thought I’d got nothing left. Told me that there was something awaiting me. Something that I needed to do. Something that had to happen. I was a part of it, and this here was a part of it. Maybe not the very end, but a pivot point. A place where the fabric of the universe was so badly torn that everything was possible.

Or not.

The change was slow and clumsy, and yet it was lightening fast. Elemental. I knew and part of knowing was that she had known for far, far longer than I had. 

One path.

There could only ever be one of us on this path.

I was right.

She was dangerous.

Dangerous as they came.

But then, so was I.

We were after all one and the same.

We both moved at the same time.

Then there was an eerie calm that matched the stillness of our surroundings.

“That’s a new one on me,” she said, that cold smile painting one side of her face. The other half a livid red from the boiling water I’d thrown at her, “always a variation, but always the same outcome. You’re fast, but not fast enough.” She was clutching at the wound in her belly, the hilt of my knife rising out of it wickedly, “I’ll heal,” she said, “whereas…”

I looked down at my chest. Beautiful red petals bloomed across my shirt. I hadn’t even heard the shot. Soon, I wouldn’t hear a thing. I nodded. Then I grinned as I saw something up along the path. I grinned and raised my arm, but could only get it half way to where I had wanted it to go. Blood gurgled in my throat as I said one word…

“Again.”

I saw her and this time I didn’t hesitate in accepting what I saw. She was me. And she was hope. There was only the path. There was only me. I knew that with a certainty now.

And maybe the next time I met her on the path I would see her for what she was. I’d gaze upon that burnt face and know what it was that she represented and what it was that I must do. 

Next time.

We’d do this again.

I slumped sideways and my last sight was of the path. Not through my dying eyes, but through the eyes that saw the path well enough up ahead. 

Close, and closer still, whispered the serpent path.