Release(52)

“Or maybe he’s a liar and a coward,” Angela said.

“I don’t even know,” Adam said. “And I’m kind of okay with that.”

He started walking back down the pier to get his friends some water.

“Hey,” Angela called after him. “You coming back?”

He turned to them and smiled. “Always,” he said. “Until the end of the world.”





The faun leads her to the water. Her hand feels warm, soft, like a human hand, not the hand of his Queen, yet it is indubitably that as well. He can feel the power of her, even entwined in the spirit.

They reach the water’s edge. She hesitates.

“This is where I left the lake,” she says.

“I know, my Queen.”

“This is where I began to die.”

“Not all of you.”

She looks him in the eye. “This is where I shall die now.”

He has no answer for that. She still holds his hand. “The spirit wishes to leave me. She does not know how. I do not know how to release her. We are bound.”

She looks to him, seeing him, her servant since time immemorial. She peers beyond his eyes, past the shape of the faun, to the spirit-shape that has always attended her.

“You have followed me,” she says. “You have been at my side even when I couldn’t see you.”

“Yes, my Queen.”

“You followed me when I was not your Queen.”

“My Queen was always there. I followed her, as is my duty. And my will.”

“Your will.”

“Yes, my Queen.”

She regards the hand she still holds. “You searched for me when I was lost.”

“A Queen is never lost. She is always exactly where she needs to be.”

She glances up at this and he can see a glimmer of the playful smile every Queen holds in reserve, the smile that is the doorway to her private self, the one who wears the role of Queen.

He feels a pressure on his hand and is astonished to realize she is pulling him closer, compounding the crime of contact with one of a proximity no spirit is ever allowed. “Is it not a shame,” she says, “that we must wait until the end of the world for all boundaries to fall?”

“My Queen?” he asks, for the desire to move into her embrace is overwhelming to the point of extinguishment. He will perish there, but the perishing will be a bliss he has never even–

“Oh, hello,” says a voice. “I didn’t know anyone was on these paths.”

They look over. A human creature, man-sized, the faun notes, but not perhaps all the way to being a man just yet. Close, though. Very close indeed.

The Queen no longer looks like the Queen. She looks again like the girl who rose out of the lake, the one put there still alive, the one that reached out in confusion and bound his Queen to her, to the doom of the world entire.

The boy frowns. “Do I know you?”

And then the spirit, not the Queen, but the spirit herself reaches out and asks of the boy, simply, “How do I let go?”

The boy pauses, surprised. His eyes flit to the faun, accepting him simply, with a glance, as the sun makes its first kiss of the horizon. The doom begins. The doom begins but–

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” says the boy. “For everyone.”

“Everyone,” the spirit agrees.

The boy takes a breath. “Today was a day I had to let go of a lot of stuff. Like everything that was tying me down suddenly got untied.”

“And I the same,” the spirit says. “Today is the day my destiny changed.”

“So did mine.”

“I know,” the spirit says. “I heard it coming. I followed the longing for it.”

She looks at the rose he twirls in his hand. There is one thorn that he idly pricks at with his thumb, and the faun can feel the Queen’s thumb move in kind. The boy looks up to her again.

“I think I know who you are,” he says.

“How do I let go?” the spirit merely asks again.

“I don’t know,” the boy says, “but I think this is for you.”

He holds out the rose.

And the spirit steps away from the Queen to take it.





It is, in the end, that simple.





“Oh,” says the spirit, with a surprised laugh. “Yes. I have found my release…”

Her words and continued laughter surround them as a breeze, turning petals of a rose on it, twisting and spiralling, until finally fading to nothing as the spirit makes her final passage, leaving only a scent of late summer in her wake, as if the world has let out a sigh, one of relief, one of renewal, and carries on spinning.

“Well,” says the boy, “that was weird.”

He gives one last look to the place where the faun stands, then back out to the setting sun, now halfway down. “I have found my release,” he whispers to himself. “Into what, though?”

But then he smiles. He turns and, hands in his pockets, leaves the faun there, at the water’s edge. The faun feels a tremendous freedom as his physical form dissipates, moving once more into pure spirit, into a world saved, a world released. He feels her beside him, feels the warmth of her happiness at her freedom and the continuing surprising warmth of her regard. The embrace still awaits him. Perhaps it won’t extinguish him. Perhaps the freedom can arrive before the world itself ends.