09-10-2013, 12:05 PM
“But I can definitely count them all on one hand.”
He wasn't lying about that. Years spent with more business associates than friends, a horrific death toll in the last place he'd called home, and a year spent running did leave Kalen in a position to make the kind of statement about his friends.
He wasn't lying about the signing on to fight monsters, either. He can remember his Awakening, that first sharp snap of realization that there is more out there – and that not all of it is angels and benevolent spirits. Much, much sharper and so much more final than the wet cracking sounds the dead thing made on impact with the truck. That one monster staggered up and walked away, but not many Kalen met after that first night did.
He'd met the two friends who led to others that night too. Somewhere, he is certain, you can trace people back into a synthesis of experience and memory and influence, do transcendent calculations with emotion and events as complicated and mysterious and as powerful as the kind that transmute lead to gold. There is power in the making of things, the Naming of things.
And, for all that he may not have many friends, the few he does have have are precious to him. He may not ever bother to say that, but he knows there is value in friendship. In companionship. Even Kalen, who hates dependence and weakness and owing anything to anyone, is not unmoved by the either the experience or the memory of waking up to the sound of constant murmured prayers and knowing someone was there -had been there- watching over him. And so, when Shoshannah makes a request and then forbids him to speak of it, she isn't even asking him for something he doesn't understand.
He does not answer her request that way. The man who spent nights praying at his bedside was given to displaying far more emotion to strangers than Kalen is with even the few friends he has. Those ways are not his. Instead, he remains quiet and present. Shoshannah mentioned sleeping in one of the bedrooms, but he takes up a position first in the spare room; and, once he registers where Sid sleeps, in the bedroom from which he can see the hall that leads to the stairs before anything gets to either of them. He does not sleep, not until they are awake and wandering the house and he asks to be let into the library.
It is possible that they will catch him sleeping there, murmuring and twitching and caught in the same kinds of nightmares as ever. The kind that so often come to be. And when you can count your friends on only one hand, there are only so many people to fill those dreams.
He knows so many ways in which they might die.
He wasn't lying about that. Years spent with more business associates than friends, a horrific death toll in the last place he'd called home, and a year spent running did leave Kalen in a position to make the kind of statement about his friends.
He wasn't lying about the signing on to fight monsters, either. He can remember his Awakening, that first sharp snap of realization that there is more out there – and that not all of it is angels and benevolent spirits. Much, much sharper and so much more final than the wet cracking sounds the dead thing made on impact with the truck. That one monster staggered up and walked away, but not many Kalen met after that first night did.
He'd met the two friends who led to others that night too. Somewhere, he is certain, you can trace people back into a synthesis of experience and memory and influence, do transcendent calculations with emotion and events as complicated and mysterious and as powerful as the kind that transmute lead to gold. There is power in the making of things, the Naming of things.
And, for all that he may not have many friends, the few he does have have are precious to him. He may not ever bother to say that, but he knows there is value in friendship. In companionship. Even Kalen, who hates dependence and weakness and owing anything to anyone, is not unmoved by the either the experience or the memory of waking up to the sound of constant murmured prayers and knowing someone was there -had been there- watching over him. And so, when Shoshannah makes a request and then forbids him to speak of it, she isn't even asking him for something he doesn't understand.
He does not answer her request that way. The man who spent nights praying at his bedside was given to displaying far more emotion to strangers than Kalen is with even the few friends he has. Those ways are not his. Instead, he remains quiet and present. Shoshannah mentioned sleeping in one of the bedrooms, but he takes up a position first in the spare room; and, once he registers where Sid sleeps, in the bedroom from which he can see the hall that leads to the stairs before anything gets to either of them. He does not sleep, not until they are awake and wandering the house and he asks to be let into the library.
It is possible that they will catch him sleeping there, murmuring and twitching and caught in the same kinds of nightmares as ever. The kind that so often come to be. And when you can count your friends on only one hand, there are only so many people to fill those dreams.
He knows so many ways in which they might die.