Ezra: Sleep of an immortal

Imagine waking for a fifty years long sleep only to find out that someone you lived has died on that same day.Well, this story was supposed to go something like that

EZRA

 

 

’You are a fool’ somebody whispered into his ear, a soft, brittle voice uttering the first words he had heard in years, as he woke slowly from his years long sleep. ’Such a fool’ the same voice whispered again, gently, seeming soft, yet still shaking with some kind of deeply concealed ire. ‘Couldn’t you’ it asked, growing stronger as it spoke, the ire boiling over the gentle tone. ‘Couldn’t you have, just a bit sooner…’ it never finished the question, this angry yet gentle voice, for suddenly, it broke, without any warning or sign, the whispers turning into tears as it repeated once more, overwhelmed with hurt: ‘Just a bit…just a bit sooner’

 

He didn’t recognize the voice or the pattern of the quiet sobs coming from his side, which only confirmed what he had already known from the moment he rose from his dream: he had slept for a long, long time.

 

The stiffness of his body had told him as much. His arms felt heavy, heavier than they had ever felt before, his legs no different from the stone: cold and unwilling to move, even though his mind was aware of itself once more. His throat was dry, the state of his mouth reminding him of heavy southern sand he had once walked on, and he feared that if he should try to speak now, as he wanted to do, it would all turn to ash.    

 

Thus he let nothing but a soft grunt escape his still tightly shut mouth, deciding to wait just a bit longer, just until he was completely awake. Instead he tried to open his eyes, wanting to see the bearer of the voice whose words he had heard. Once more he failed, however, his body refusing to listen, to move, and just as a crippling fear caused by a thought that this was the time he had slept for just a moment too long started to overwhelm him, a hand reached out for his shoulder, calming him down.

 

            ‘Relax’ spoke the same hoarse voice from before, both its softness and tears now completely gone. His body suddenly tensed even more at both voice and the touch, for he was suddenly aware that both belonged to a stranger, but he soon wielded it to do as it was told, if nothing more.

 

            The hand didn’t leave his shoulder. Instead, the stranger’s grip grew even stronger, rapidly turning from comforting to painful, until he suddenly found himself blinking at the ceiling. Slowly, he turned his head, his body still stiff but no longer stone cold and unwilling to move. His throat now hurt however, and each time he tried to open his mouth in speak he would only find himself trembling with pain again. Thus he was still unable to ask who the stranger by his side was. His eyes were heavy from the cries and red where they should have been white, his whole body trembling as well. It was only when he turned, disappearing through the door on his left all the while muttering something about ones sense of time, that the man lying on the bed noticed that his attire had been completely black.

 

***

 

            Five months later he still could not speak even though the rest of his body had grown much stronger, allowing him to walk slowly around the Shallow Creek without tiring by the time he reached the end of the bed.

 

The house, he had learned, belonged to the boy now, the same stranger who had healed him when he first woke up and was still healing him now, strengthening his body with magic every few days despite refusing to tell him his name.  He couldn’t think of it as his though, for in his mind the Creek could never been anyone’s but Iuno’s.

 

‘She’s dead’ the boy had told him some four months ago when he had finally managed to spell out her name with his then still shaking hands. ‘She had died the same day you woke up, you fool’ he said, his voice and eyes growing dead as he spoke, looking at him once more with so much anger and grief. Only he could understand it now, the look, why the first words he had heard upon waking up were ‘you fool’. He could understand more than well now.

 

 ‘Had you woke up an hour earlier you could have seen her one last time’ the boy said, his voice dripping with bitterness and loss. ‘Why couldn’t you have done that? Was that too much to do for her?’ his voice broke in the end, tears falling down his face again.

 

‘No’ he wanted to say, it was not too much. He didn’t know, however, how to explain it to the boy that he was unable to control the longevity of his sleep, always has been. Always will be, probably. It was more than he could make himself write at the time subject transcended by far the few simple hand signs that have managed to establish in order to communicate when it had become clear that his voice wasn’t coming back for a while.

 

‘What did you expect?’ the boy had been in one of hid darker moods that days when he had managed to ask why was it that he couldn’t speak yet. ‘You had had your whole throat ripped out. You are lucky to be alive’

 

He wasn’t, though. Or at least he didn’t think he was, not any more. It had become normal for him, at some point, to be able to survive the wounds that would kill most men simply by falling into a deep, dreamless sleep. Sometimes, it would last only for a few hours. Other times, it would be a few months. This was a first time it had taken him more than fifty years to heal and the boy took bitter pleasure in pointing that out to him. The strength of his hatred had shocked him into even deeper silence that day.

 

The boy, however, still come to find him the next day, however, sitting beside him in the library, almost apologizing in quiet words he obviously had trouble saying. The man forgave him by staying silent, without moving his hands, without reaching for the paper. The boy seemed to appreciate that somewhat.

 

A year and a half later he still didn’t know the boy’s name, thinking of him simply as the boy, though recently, he had started to wonder, could the brown haired youth still be considered a boy? He refused to tell him his age as well as his name, but he did not look much younger, or older, than Iuno had been when they had first met.

 

He was hoping to come to know it soon now that he was once more able to speak. ‘Thank you’ he had whispered in a ragged, broken voice as soon as the young man’s hands left his throat once more, having finally figured out a way around whatever it was that was stopping the man from healing before.

 

‘It is nothing’ the brown-haired youth answered, seemingly warm, though his voice was cold. He left the room swiftly, before the man could say anything more.

 

‘Please try to understand’ one of the old men sitting by the garden wall whispered as he fought to take one more breath. ‘He loved his grandmother so very much’ the man said with a smile, passing away that very night. Having known the wrinkled old man when he was nothing more but a fresh hand at the stable, the man finally felt the weight of the time past fall down on his shoulders.

‘Took you long enough’ the young man scoffed as he searched for a more comfortable position than the one he was currently sitting in. The man wanted to get angry as well, to ask the young man if he could imagine sleeping for more than fifty years, something which was abnormal even to him, strange as he was, only to find your love dead, your friends old and dying themselves. All that he did, however, was take one look at the boy and say: ‘The chair in the corner of the next room is much more comfortable than that one’ He remembered Iuno’s father doing the same things the young man was doing now. He was also unable to sit for too long behind that desk ever since Iuno had stolen his chair. It was a small comfort that, the fact that some things, at least, have stayed the same.

 

‘That’s my grandmother’s favourite reading chair’ the young man answered with a deep frown on his face. ‘I know’ the man nodded, a smile never leaving his face as he thought back on those years. ‘That’s why your grandfather never dared take it back’ he said softly, laughing under his breath. ‘Take it back?’ the young man asked, suddenly curious. ‘You didn’t know?’ the man asked softly all the while remembering a young scowling face framed by the locks of red hair, huffing as she dragged the chair, scolding him for not wanting to help. ‘It originally came with that desk…’ and as he told him the story he felt something in the young man change.

 

Five days later he had helped him move the desk. It was difficult, but with the young man’s magic and his strength they have somehow managed to do it. He didn’t understand it but he thought it had helped the brown-haired man anyway, in some way.

 

‘I still don’t understand’ the young man said holding a glass of a strong brown drink in his hand. ‘What?’ he asked, even though he knew. Well, guessed.

 

‘Why did you have to sleep for so long?’ he looked at him with those bright green-blue eyes that Iuno had as well, and he can still see hurt there, even after all this time; the same hurt that Iuno must have felt when he had fell in the attack, unable to wake up. And yet she had still kept his body safe and warm, still told stories of him to his grandchild, urging him to feel for him what she once had felt, just in case he someday woke up… Just as he did. He knew now that that was what the boy had resented him the most, so long ago, when they were still both mostly silent and more than a bit lost.

 

‘I don’t know’ he whispered into his hand, which held no glass, biting into the skin there as he thought. He had wondered, trying to find an answer for so long, and he had found none so far. He doubted he would find one now, in this drunken night.

 

‘I really don’t know’ he repeated once more. There was hurt in him as well, though it is mostly dulled now, mostly by guilt. He really didn’t mean to take so long to heal.

 

‘My grandfather was an out-right b*****d, you know’ the young man had never spoke before of the man Iuno must have married for him to be here. ‘Hated her, my father told me, hated her from the start because he knew she loved someone else. Hated my father later as well, said he reminded him of you. I don’t know how he knew about you. I don’t know how he thought that was possible’ the brown-haired man laughed and a moment later carefully let go of his now empty glass.

 

‘Even though he had only married her for her money. Quite literary at that, she had shown me the contract once’ he whispered, looking towards the window and the dark sky beyond it. ‘It’s a good think he had died before her’ he whispered.

 

‘I’m sorry’ he said softly for right now he didn’t know what else to say. A thousand thoughts came and went through his mind but this one was probably the only one the other man wanted to hear right now. ‘Yeah, well…’ came the answer, half-finished at best as the silence fell between them once more.

 

‘Ey’ he called some weeks after that, when the tension of that night had finally cleared out of the air. ‘Yes?’ the brown-haired man answered, once again sitting behind the desk, though much more comfortably now.

 

‘What is your name?’ he asked, hopping that he had earned the right to know it after all these years. ‘Why do you ask?’ the man seemed surprised. Indeed, he had never asked before. He felt the need to do so now, though, having accidently found something he thought it had been lost forever long ago.

 

‘I want to add it to a list’ he answered honestly, raising the parchment he had been using to write down the names of all the people he had met, Iuno’s being last on the very long list of names. He had lived for centuries, after all. This seemed to confuse the boy, but the man wasn’t letting this chance get away.

 

For a moment, the man behind the desk sat silent, then, finally he sighed. ‘Just sign yourself on whatever it is, Ezra’ he said, waiting for the sound of an inevitable smile.

 

‘Ezra’ the man called him and the brown-haired man turn towards him with a frown. ‘Don’t you feel strange calling me that?’ he asked as he raised his head.

 

‘No’ the man answered with a smile, the same one he always wore in situations like these. ‘Why should I? It is your name’ he said, forming the last sentence like a question even though it wasn’t while also raising his left eyebrow, and the man behind the desk had to chuckle. Iuno used to do that too, only she would follow it with a comment about his face.

 

‘It suits you better’ he concluded, smiling happily like he had no care in the world and there was nothing that the man could do at that but shake his head. Next morning, he was gone.

 

***

 

‘I don’t understand’ Ezra found himself speaking these words yet again, only this time they weren’t directed at the other man.

 

‘You are getting married next month, are you not?’ one of his grandmother’s old friends asked, sipping on her tea as she looked through the window.

 

‘Well, yes, but what does that have to do with anything?’ he asked, frowning at her, willing her to look his way as she spoke.

 

‘I was thinking that maybe he had gone away because he didn’t want to be in the way’ the old woman said, wrinkling her nose in disapproval of something.

 

‘That makes no sense’ the man’s frown grew even deeper as he thought of what the old woman had just said.

 

‘That man had never made much sense’ she offered in return. ‘I always found him to…fickle for that’ she added, as the trees outside started to fall and rise under the sudden blow from the sea. ‘Kind of like this wind’ she finished, finally turning towards the man sitting opposite her.

 

‘My grandmother couldn’t have thought so’ he said, clenching his fists at the edge of his seat. He didn’t know what he had hoped to gain, speaking with this old bat, the only one of the several close friends his grandmother kept who was still alive, but he knew that it was not someone speaking ill of the man after whom he was named. ‘She loved him, after all, didn’t she?’ he asked, just a bit uncertain of that. He had always thought so, ever since he was old enough to understand just a bit more of what was going on in the empty old house in which his grandmother lived, but somehow, he thought, he had never heard the words spoken. Not from her, not from Ezra, and everyone else who had known them back then was dead, except this old bat.

 

‘Well’ the woman said, focusing her beady black eyes on him ‘she was also kind of like that, don’t you agree?’ He didn’t, not really, but that didn’t seem to matter. Nodding his head, he stood up, bowing yet again before turning to the door.

 

‘Knowing that man’ the old woman called after him again, suddenly, just as he was about to leave the room and never return ‘he will be back at some point. Do not forget to leave some sort of warning for your children about him, should you die early’ He nodded his head yet again, without turning back, barely resisting the urge to slam the door behind himself as he exited the room. Getting back in the carriage, he swore he would carry with himself nothing that this bitter woman told.

 

***

 

Years passed, and from the house placed upon a gentle hill, right beside a shallow creak, a small girl ran through the high, undisturbed grass, falling on her knees as she ran, picking flowers as she went, laughing, joyous and unafraid. From her behind her, her mother called sternly: ‘Iuno! Be careful! You shall break your neck!’

 

‘But it’s Ezra, Mama!’ the little girl laughed even harder as she yelled her answer to her mother. ‘Ezra’s coming back!’

 

Author's Note

Not really much to say. I wrote the concept for this story almost a year ago and having accidentally found it today decided to actually write it, so here it is.