Death Owl

If not for the aching of my heart, I would have thought myself dead. It surprised me that others did not feel the same when they lost someone close to them. Perhaps my heart had latched onto his more than anyone’s had latched onto anyone else’s ever.

The path I walked was one we had walked at each rising and falling of the sun. Two rows of trees guarding our flanks as we talked for a lifetime. We walked so often that the leaves had begun falling into a pattern around where our feet would kiss the earth. They did not wish to be crushed to dust, and who could blame them? Who would want to lose the chance to watch as we bounded in our overflowing happiness?

That happiness felt as far away now as the moon when the sun was at its highest point, eternally longing to reunite with their eternally-distant lover. Once every hundred years, despite their distance, the moon's perpetual pursuit would land them but a moment’s embrace. An embrace so brilliant that all light would cease and the whole world would watch. Even though it lasted an instant, it was enough to keep the moon in its endless chase.

I had hoped that an embrace like that would come for me. I told myself I would gladly throw away the rest of my life just for that one moment but now I know that moment would never come. He was the sun but I was no moon. I did not have the patience the moon did.

I walked with an empty pair of footsteps beside me that I was still not used to seeing. I was afraid I never would be. It had been a hundred walks since I opened my door to his lifeless corpse at my feet. A hundred walks since I saw his beautiful brown eyes like pools of honey under the dawning sunlight staring back at me before heading into the forest to chop wood for the fire.

His eyes had always shown his true emotions no matter how much he tried to hide them with the rest of his body. I would tease him for it and his cheeks would fail his façade and shine bright like a tomato. That morning I stared into a sea of love that grew each day since our meeting. That night I stared into a sea of nothingness.

I had held his limp body in my weak arms and wept rivers of tears into his chest. I held his hand of ice and dragged him to the end of the path with nothing but the sound of my own sobbing to accompany us. No one watched for there was no happiness to see.

I dug his grave in the small field with my hands. I lifted him down as gently as my frail body allowed. I remember my grip failing and him falling awkwardly into the hole with several crunches of snapped bones but I could not hear them. I buried him myself and searched the clearing for a rock I used as his headstone.

“Chariton. Death found you before I could give you all the love you deserved.”

I wrote it on the stone in blood I had drawn from my wrist. I knew even if I had all of my lifetime to give him my love, I would not have given him what he deserved.

The night was the first time I walked on the path alone. It was dark and silent as the moon stayed hidden. The trees stared. Giant sentinels judging my every movement. Where was the light, they would ask, but I had no answer.

When I had gotten home I found a note on my writing desk. It was from her. She had snuck in while I was gone.

“Apologies for the inconvenience but he was in my way. Cheers, Circe.”

I knew who she was. The Witch of the Woods. Cursed never to leave her section of the forest. This was not the first time she had done this but I had never expected her to take a soul as pure as his. She had no use for purity.

Everything she touched was corrupted. Everything but him. How dare she lay a hand on him!

The rage I felt was beyond any other feeling I had felt. So much anger that it silenced me. It stole my other emotions. It stole my motivation, my energy, my life. Death comes to all, even the gods, and I would prove that.

Chariton had a habit of straying from the path, mesmerized by the beauties of the flowers. He would bend down and smell their sweet aroma, feel their soft petals between his calloused fingers, pick them from their homes in the earth, careful not to tear any of the roots, and gently place them in his pocket. Each day our garden grew more vibrant, but that day he had picked his last flower. A flower born from the blood of the gods. A flower Circe saved only for herself.

I kept the note in my pocket now, wrinkled from the thousand times it had been unfolded and refolded, beside a small knife that had one purpose. I neared the end of the path and approached his grave. Perched upon the stone, as he always had since I first erected the stela, sat Otis.

He was a death owl. Pitch black in all of his feathers, his beak, talons, and eyes. An unnatural looking creature who appeared to mourn along with everyone else. If there was anyone else. Many think that their kind can smell death and seek it out but I think that it is something else that drives them, for it is something else that drives me.

Otis cocked his head at my entrance, asking the same question he asked every time he saw me: Was today the day?

Yes, yes it finally was, I answered in my head.

I lifted my hand toward his beak. He pecked and tore my skin, allowing me to write once again. Another vertical line on the back of the stone, and another day without vengeance. This would be the last, I told myself.

I left the clearing in the direction away from my house, further into the forest, and towards hers. The canopy of leaves blocked the bits of sun that made their way through the veil of clouds. A cold wind blew through the forest. My body wanted to shiver but I did not let it. I was done being dictated by any other than myself, even mother nature.

The further in I went, the more the animals watched. Swine, lions, wolves and avians, her own sentinels, stared as I walked through their territory, not taking a second to acknowledge the many flowers and herbs that littered the ground and clung to the trees. Aromas of all sorts stung my tongue and nostrils. Sweet and sour, fetid and fresh, heavy and faint. It was an assault on my senses but I ignored it all.

Her house was not a hut like I had imagined but more of a cabin of logs. Great oak doors blocked the entrance. Smoke billowed out of the chimney until it was lost in the sea of leaves above. Most would stand in awe and wonder at how a frail old woman such as Circe had been able to achieve a feat as magnificent as this house but I knew that her spells were far more powerful than she led on. More than just turning lecherous men into pigs.

I knocked on the door. It echoed through a moment of silence before the doors flung inwards and she stood before me draped in her dread. A black dress torn and frayed at the ends flowed down her skeletal body. Hair the color of the many tree trunks that made up her cabin frizzled about and a gold necklace with the sun at its heart hung from her neck.

She waited for me to bow but I did not. Her eyes showed her surprise but the rest of her kept it a secret.

“Daughter of the sun.” I said.

“Make yourself welcome.” She replied, waving me further into her home with her dying hand.

The inside was more magnificent than the outside. Each cupboard was filled with gold and silver lined bowls and cutlery. Herbs swung from the ceiling and various alchemical tools and glass vials coated the counters. The furniture’s inlaid precious metals reflected the dynamic light of the fire. Tapestries depicting everything from feasts to fights hung on the walls and in the center of the room sat her fabled loom and beneath it laid her loyal lion.

I stood in the room and spoke, “I demand to know why you killed my husband.”

“I already gave you the answer. Would you like some wine? It would help to calm you down.” Her voice was hideous. It scratched the very air that loomed between us.

“In your way of what?”

She sat at her loom and answered, “In the way of my spells. For so long I let him pick my flowers, but that day he had gotten too close to the ones I reserved only for myself. If anything, I did him a favor. One touch from those flowers and he would have been changed. His true self would have made itself known to the world.”

“He already was his true self.” I did not look at her. It was hard to find something to look at that did not reflect her gaze. My will was beginning to slip.

I felt I had walked into a trap. It felt like eons since Chariton had died. Eons I spent conceiving the perfect plan. I had assured myself that it was fool proof but now, in the middle of her lair, I could not even remember the first step. Were her spells already working against me? Was the wine just a trick? Did they not need a medium after all?

“You must understand that I am helping you, dear. Chariton’s death will give you all the time you could ever want for yourself.” Each of her words were precise and each sliced through the air to the center of my brain. They echoed in my head, threatening to drive me mad.

“There is nothing that I must do for you! And I would never be content to live as a lonely hag surrounded by the silent pleas of my prisoners like you are! You know nothing of me yet you act like your head contains everything there is to know of me! Your father may be the god of the sun and you may bear it on your chest but I know who the real sun is! You pale in his light!”

“I have never met one like you. So passionate in your love. Your emotions flowing out of you like the tea of an overboiled kettle. You want my death. You want to exact vengeance, to appease the owl of death. Then I will give it to you, but for a price.”

I could no longer avoid her gaze. The room pulled me in like a whirlpool to where she sat leaning on the arms of the loom.

“Name your price.”

“I die and in turn you take my immortality. You have your vengeance but are cursed to live alone forever.” A wry smile broke her stoic expression. She had thought this a difficult decision for me but I already had my answer.

“You insult me with such an easy trade, witch. I accept your conditions.” Now it was my turn to smile, but she was the one who laughed.

“Foolish girl. You have freed me and in turn trapped yourself for eternity.”

As the words died in the air, so did she. She left no chance for hesitation or second thoughts. Her body turned to wisps and drifted up the chimney and towards the sun.

I did not know what she meant. ‘Trapped.’ How was I trapped? I would have been alone whether I faced her or not so what makes this so much worse. Nothing else had changed. The lion remained, silently watching me, the birds and swine outside the windows continued making their noise. What was so different?

I left out the great oak doors and back towards the path. For the first time since Chariton’s death I could feel a budding inside of myself. A sense of something other than anger. It was almost foreign to me. Happiness.

I bound through the trees, stepping all over the various flowers and herbs. I ran at the animals, scaring them away. I found the sources of the aromas and threw them further into the wilderness so I no longer had to smell their obnoxious scents. I did as I pleased and it felt glorious.

The clearing came into view and I burst into a run. Pain erupted in my face as I collided with an invisible force. A wall between the forest and clearing. I could not enter.

I got up and pushed, slamming my fists into its unyielding face.

“Let me through!” I screamed, now scratching at it with my nails. I kicked and punched but it was all futile. I was trapped.

I wailed and streams of tears fell. How could I have been so foolish? Of course it would not have been that easy.

I could see the headstone. Otis no longer sat upon it and I had thought this would bring me joy but I was unable to feel it. It meant nothing to me if I could not touch the stone for myself.

I had felt a moment of joy, of pure elation, and that witch tore it all away from me. I could not even bring myself to be angry for there was no one who still existed to be angry at. There was no one who still existed to love either. I had nothing but the silent pleas of the prisoners who were now mine and who I had no knowledge of how to turn back.

It was midday but the sky had begun the fade to black. I looked to the heavens to find the moon coming to its destination. All dark and all silent as they embraced. An embrace I would never get again.