My first meeting with the Ancient was also my last.
 
It was in a private reading room in the library of the small university where I serve as an adjunct professor of English. My specialty is in medieval studies; but, as the call for such “archaic” disciplines in the days of this story is negligible, I often find myself teaching courses in communication, technical writing, and research. Still, I occasionally feel the call to revisit my medieval roots—particularly at the end of a semester, when my hopes for the future of English as a discipline and humanity as a species are at their lowest ebb.
 
I had just finished giving an exam in “Intro to Communications”: the second of three that week. Stepping outside, weary and defeated, I was confronted once again by the bleakness of the world and the futility of my place in it. Then, as I often did in such moments of quiet yet profound turmoil, I turned my steps toward the library.
 
Libraries have always been a refuge for me, but this university library was an especial haven. I had made the wondrous discovery on my first day of employment that the library housed a small collection of manuscripts, treatises, and anthologies from or related to the Middle Ages. On that particular day, I selected a few volumes and retired to my favorite of the library’s private reading rooms. It was not until I had my hand on the knob that I looked through the window in the door and saw the room was occupied.
 
That was my first glimpse of the Ancient.
 
He appeared to be a middle-aged man with a dark but luminous complexion. His features were clean, almost boyish, and his long silver hair was pulled loosely back from his lean and softly lined face. Even seated, he was remarkably tall; but, by far, the most striking feature of his appearance was the fact that, despite the dim indoor lighting of the library, his eyes were completely obscured by large, dark sunglasses.
 
My first thought was that he must be blind, and I looked down at the open book on the table in front of him, expecting to see a braille text. To my surprise, I recognized one of the treatises from my treasured collection: a bestiary, detailing the origins, characteristics, and mythos of imaginary creatures found in the medieval lore of diverse cultures.
 
I am usually a private person. On any other day, disturbing the restorative solitude of a fellow sojourner in the wasteland of academia would be unthinkable. However, so deep and heavy lay my end-of-term despondency upon me—so desperate was I for the barest hint of kinship in the ever-burgeoning desert, that I opened the door without knocking and entered.
 
“I beg your pardon,” I ventured politely, “but I thought I was the only person at this school who even knew about that book.”
 
Glancing down, I saw the section he had been perusing and smiled.
 
“Ah, Griffins. They’ve always been a favorite of mine. Are you partial to any particular region’s lore?”
 
He lifted his head. Though his eyes were hidden, the sorrow emanating from them was so palpable—so profoundly inconsolable—that I stepped backwards, my hand still on the handle of the open door.
 
He gazed at me from behind his glasses for a long moment. Then, he spoke:
 
“My friend is gone.”
 
His voice was higher than I would have expected for so large a man, and yet rich: sonorous and void of affectation, like the ocean’s eternal breaking of its own heart against the shore. The grief in it drew me in, towards that shore, and I stepped forward, closing the door behind me.
 
I remember a sense of reverent unease that was, simultaneously, disconcerting and exhilarating, like a man who trespasses on hallowed ground only to find himself both welcome and expected.
 
“I am sorry,” I said, unsure of the decorum in this new world into which I seemed to have stumbled. “When . . . did he pass?”
 
A sharp intake of breath—almost a gasp—and then the lapping tide of sorrow became a wave of anger, sweeping towards me and yet not directed at me.
 
“Pass?” The voice, still high and resonant, was riven now by bitterness. “He did not Pass. Had he Passed, he would be blessed. Had he Passed, I would be content.”
 
The wave reached its pitch, and I was borne up on it, suddenly afraid that it would sweep me away, depositing me back on the bleak sands of reality.
 
“He did not Pass.” The voice was almost a cry. “He Died—cruelly, and senselessly, and alone.”
 
The wave receded. It had not cast me ashore, but rather drawn me even further out, into the tides of my companion’s desolation. I took another step into the room.
 
“When?” The voice was quiet now, its force turned inward. “That, like any inquiry that deals with time, is an impossible question. For you? Long, long ago; many lives of Humankind. For me?”
 
His voice grew even softer, and I took another step in, leaning forward to catch the next word —just above a whisper:
 
“Yesterday.”
 
A tear slipped from behind the glasses and lay glimmering on his dark cheek. It was a strange, unearthly tear, like a liquid diamond, multi-faceted and illuminating the room with its own radiance. I held my breath lest it shatter. Then—whether compelled by some sacred instinct or merely by old habit, I know not—I reached into my pocket, pulled out my handkerchief, and offered it to him, stretching my hand across the table like a pilgrim seeking pardon from a saint.
 
For a moment, he hesitated, as if holding some internal debate. Then, he reached out one long arm and took the handkerchief. His hands were what one might call “artistic”: thin and delicate, yet strong, made for fine detailed work. His suit was linen, of a dark cream color. His shirt was un-collared. He wore no tie.
 
Holding the handkerchief in his hand, he looked down at it, hesitating for one more moment. Then, he raised his other hand—I saw it was trembling—and removed his glasses. He held the handkerchief to his eyes, soaking up more scintillating tears. His shoulders shook slightly. I stood still, willing my presence to emanate both respectful distance and compassionate nearness.
 
Finally, he lowered the handkerchief. Holding it in one hand and his glasses in the other, he lifted his head.
 
He looked at me.
 
And, at last, I was certain of what I somehow felt I had known all along: this man, seated at the table in front of me, was no man at all. For these were not the eyes of a human.
 
They were light: solid white light, as if the sun had folded itself into his skull and could only escape through these two small openings. It was a burning light, but not scorching; designed to penetrate and illuminate, but not to destroy. The light came from him—it was itself him, his very essence, laying bare both his soul and the souls of all he looked upon.
 
Confronted with such imperative revelation, one must make an immediate choice: to stay, receiving and reciprocating the enlightening, or to flee.
 
I sat down across from him.
 
“Who are you?” I asked, my mouth suddenly dry.
 
He smiled, faintly and wryly.
 
“My name, I am afraid, would mean little to you. It is in the language of my people, which is spoken only through visions in the mind. Very few of your race have thoughts quiet enough to receive such speech, especially in . . . recent times.”
 
He paused, half in renewed sorrow and half in consideration.
 
“Still,” he went on, “if you are willing, I could try to share it with you.”
 
“I would be honored,” I said, suddenly conscious of the frantic noise inside my head —the relentless cataract of my perceptions pouring endlessly down into a roaring whirlpool of thought. I squared my shoulders against the internal onslaught and faced him.
 
He nodded solemnly and placed his hands flat on the table, palms facing up. Slowly—reverentially—I reached my own hands across the table, placed them in his, and looked into his eyes.
 
My mind went as dark as an empty stage. A hush fell over the thought-torrent, like the expectant silence that grips a full theatre in the moment between the curtain speech and the curtain rising. Then, unfolding on the void like an iris in bloom, an image blossomed: a long line of figures scattered over a plain landscape, reaching to the horizon in every direction. Each figure—as far as I could tell from the vague outlines—was bestial and even fantastical in shape. Some forms I recognized from my beloved medieval treatises; some were unknown.
 
All the figures seemed to be carved out of light, reverse silhouettes in a scene of growing darkness. Indeed, as I watched, the lights began to go out. Figures disappeared from my mental stage—slowly at first, but then more rapidly, and even in groups. Whether they were disappearing of their own accord or being snuffed out by the swelling void around them, I could not tell, but one thing was certain: the disappearance of any figure concentrated the light more powerfully in those remaining. The amount of present light would never change, regardless of the number of vessels.
 
As I found myself wondering what the potency of such compacted light might do to those remaining vessels, I realized suddenly that there was only one left. One solitary figure of light, surrounded by darkness—drowning in darkness—pushing back with its very existence against the darkness.
 
It was my companion.
 
At least, I knew it was my companion, as one knows the unknowable in a dream, but his appearance was strange. The figure was not that of a man, but something birdlike. What’s more, he was burning—burning with an inner flame, the source of which was akin to yet other than the light that had compressed itself into his form.
 
This light blazed from him and reached out to me, boring into me, passing through me and out beyond me and yet filling me, filling me until I was sure I could not contain it, certain I would shatter.
 
Abruptly, the stage of my mind went blank once more, replaced instantaneously with the constant, thunderous tumult of thought of which I had never before been conscious. My companion released my hands and lowered his eyes, gazing again at the book on the table.
 
“That is your name?” I said, finally, after several long moments during which I tried to quiet the tumult and remember each detail of the vision.
 
He nodded, but did not look up.
 
“Is there a word for it in . . . my tongue?”
 
He kept his eyes on the manuscript, but I knew he was pondering. Then:
 
“Perhaps,” he said, and returned his full attention to the text.
 
“Perhaps . . .” I mused over the vision, searching for the defining characteristics and words that might match them. One came immediately, but I pushed it away, searching for a term both grander and more subtle. Finally, when nothing else seemed to fit, and my companion had turned the page and was studying an artist’s illuminated rendering of a Griffin, I ventured,
 
“It feels like . . . ‘The Last’.”
 
He looked up, so quickly and so intensely that I faltered.
 
“Could that be . . . close?”
 
He gazed at me in silence, light from his eyes flooding the room, overpowering the dim weariness of the fluorescent ceiling tiles and infusing even their garish parody with true radiance.
 
Finally, he spoke in a voice both weary and wistful, like the ghost of a man reading the etching on his own tombstone:
 
When all that cannot last at last is shaken
 
And life is made a burden, yours to rue
 
Then watch, and wait, and will your hope to waken
 
’Til comes a hand that reaches out to you
 
When all that can be lost has long been taken
 
Preserve through grief the only tale that’s true
 
’Til all that once was ancient and forsaken
 
Is found, redeemed, and made forever new.
 
He paused, regarding me. I had the distinct sense that I was being “sized up”—that he was weighing me, debating the dangers of some great disclosure.
 
“That verse was spoken over me at my Making.”
 
He smiled—a trifle sardonically, I thought—and went on:
 
“Many believed it to be an omen, and my existence has certainly seen all their fears come to fruition. Others thought it was meant as a comfort and an instruction. In my younger days, and even at the beginning of the Wasting, I tried to embrace the comfort and comprehend the instruction; but, my strength withered long ago, and the Wasting still goes on, as indefatigable as it is execrable, and I have failed at both the embracing and the comprehension.”
 
Though he gazed at me still, I sensed now that he did not see me, but rather looked through me and the walls and time itself, searching endlessly and fruitlessly for something that could not be found.
 
“But you are here,” he mused suddenly. “And you have stayed. Perhaps . . . if you are willing, I could tell you my story, and we can decide together if I have failed.”
 
I nodded, unable now to speak. Nodding gravely in return, he placed his hands once more upon the table, palms up. I reached out, put my hands in his, and looked into his eyes.
 
His light burned steadily into me, and he began, unfolding the vision on the stage of my mind.
 
 

© R.A. Nelson 2018