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They meet in the place where morning and evening converge.
“At last,” she says, smiling a waning moon where teeth should be. Larvae crawl beneath his skin, sending an icy chill that he has never quite experienced. She should not be here—even though he has never met her before, has never seen her myriad of faces, he knows that something has gone terribly wrong for her to stand just two arms’ lengths away.
Hiver fights the compulsion to draw closer to her, to caress the milky peach of her cheeks and wrap the silken threads of her hair around his fingers. With a shuddering breath, he plants himself firmly where he is and asks, “What have you done?”
He can see multitudes in her: men and women, children and elderly, divinity and depravity. She is everything and nothing all at once, life and death held together in a tight-knit cocoon not unlike a certain box where an observer resides. She is above reality, above denials of realities, above spoken myth and written word. She is simply Michele Malebranche and to open one’s mind to encapsulate what that entails is to open oneself to entropy.
“I seized a stroke of good fortune,” Michele replies. “A payment from a songbird trying to be a hawk.”
The larvae burst into thorns, his breath stopping for an eternity of a moment. Had actual blood coursed through his veins, it would have frozen over in an instant. Frozen and shattered and piercing and melting into bubbles of confusion and anger and resentment—and he can slowly feel himself becoming more like her and less like himself.
She takes a step forward. The scales are tipping to one side. There is a ringing in his ears that tell him to resist, to keep order. There is a heart telling him to remember Noel, who has connected them and shown them all a way forward despite the adversity. Noel, whose robust earnestness and naivete had drawn misfortune.
But Michele is beautiful and he is drawn to her.
Her siren song continues, gentle and venomous and rich like mulled wine. “Mon chéri, did you not know? About how the little winter doves hold the keys to you? Do you not remember our last meeting?”
Have they met before?
“I was more beautiful then. Back when I was a jewel.”
A dull pulse of desperation, a vice grip on his chest, the scent of dirt and ore and fresh blood. Visions dance and overlap the woman in front of him and the space around them: a mine, a museum, a red diamond in his grasp.
Ah, my cute little sister, Noelle—
“We cannot meet,” Michele says. The three words resonate through him like a perfect harmonic, a truth he knows inherently. Hiver cannot claim ignorance on this matter like he can with worldly, human things. “That is the law of the world, for whatever purpose it serves. We are part of one coin, made up of conflicting ideals. Yet, I continue to look for you. You continue to look for me. We yearn for each other, regardless of the impossibility.”
His stillness. Her motion. Cycles of observation. Cycles of action. Life. Death. Morning. Evening. His limited worldview, laid out in dichotomies, is one he shares with her: the expanse of human knowledge he seeks all lay within her changing forms and ever-present smile.
“It is only whenever ‘Noel’ is around that I find you. So, I merely acted within my own restrictions.”
Among the spider lily lashes, black ink hair, and shifting faces are ones similar to his own. Downy white tufts, sometimes in braids while other times in a ponytail, and muted embers behind steel gray eyes. Another horrifying duality: Noel and Noelle.
“Why have you done this to them?” Hiver asks.
Michele responds, “It is nothing you would not have done yourself. The boy took from me, so I took from him. As for the girl? Balance must be kept, no?”
It sounds like a farce when she spins the silk, touting balance and order.
Yet, a new warmth blooms in his chest, a subtle and frightening rose among thorns. A warmth almost like glee—as if Hiver is actually happy for these lives taken because it means that he is remembered, acknowledged, desired. Hiver knows in his core that she has murdered in the name of finding him, has been murdered for the sake of his safety. For the safety of the universe.
Perhaps, in the drive to immerse himself in stories, he has also been looking for Michele. Perhaps this whole entire time as he deploys his two princesses, his two eyes peering into the revolving world of mornings and evenings and lives and deaths and truths and lies, he searches for the wisps of her laugh.
There is illusion and there is enlightenment.
The one he thinks he possesses is not his reality.
Just how far has he deluded himself?
The scales fall to her favor. The illusion of his transcendence from a world defined by cycles crumbles. The enlightenment of the decaying horizon dawns and sets on him. Where she stands, impulse takes root and creates the barren truth around him.
He wants.
He craves.
He was meant to be human.
He is human.
Hiver slowly closes the gap between them. He takes Michele’s hand and kisses her knuckles in reverence. She is everything he is and everything he is not. She is beautiful: undeniably, irrevocably beautiful. Surpassing red diamonds. Surpassing human comprehension. Surpassing life and death.
“Ma chérie,” he whispers, falling into the unknown abyss as he kisses her hand, her neck, her cheek. She wraps her arms around his shoulders, pulling him closer. The search is finished. They have each other now and they will not let go. “At last.”
Slowly, their lips meet. As they feel themselves becoming one—feel morning and evening start to bleed into a new and unthinkable taboo—they know that the end has arrived.