Hope for a Spring Promise

He promised to return to her after the war (2223 words)

It was nearing sunset. She had waited for him since dawn.

Eryn kept her mind busy all day reliving the brief moments they had shared, even the ones where she silently and sometimes publicly cursed him, unaware of his motives or past at the time. The memories that kept her rooted to this ordinary spot every year on this particular day were the ones where they shared something indefinably intense and beyond even her comprehension of her own soul.    

This one unremarkable bench in this common city park was where she was told to wait for him.

“Meet me March 21st. If I’m not here by sunset, then maybe next year, same day.”

That first year Eryn wondered if he knew that that was two days after her birthday, but the significance of choosing the Vernal Equinox was not lost on her either. She guessed it was mostly because it was the next astronomical calendar event that took place after the war was likely to end.

One chilly February day, the war finally ended. His last words to her before he went on his last mission were, “Wait for me. I will come.”

The first time she waited for him, she sat anxiously all day, hoping to spy his lean silhouette coming over the gentle rise of a knoll. At sunset, she refused to leave, staying until the stroke of midnight before resigning herself to the fact she would have to wait a whole year.

It was a year filled with hope and self-doubt, nearly convincing herself that she had imagined the passion he let her glimpse inside his soul. It was only the physical memory of their last kiss and the tenderness of the slightly abraded skin of her cheek from his stubble that reminded her that it was not all in her head.

The first year of waiting was like a rebirth of everyone’s soul but Eryn’s. People grieved, then fell in love, and come summertime, began to marry. Eryn decided to continue to wait and grieve.

Her best friend, Georgyn, who she had fought alongside during the war had a lavish wedding, and even her stoic commanding officer, Martus, has a whirlwind romance that culminated with an informal, yet intimate wedding at his cottage. Eryn felt the emptiness as she sat in the garden, waiting for her commanding officer’s bride to arrive and for the ceremony to begin. She imagined her spy-almost-lover sitting next to her there and grumble about silly ritualistic sentiment with no basis to them except superstitious rituals. She would have welcomed his terse and cool antisocialism just for the warmth of his company.

Georgyn and Martus, having returned from their respective honeymoon, encouraged her to begin dating, unaware that she was waiting for him. They wouldn’t have understood, even if they knew.

The second time she waited, she forced herself to remain calm, but as the sun reached its zenith, she was already in tears. Various scenarios filled Eryn’s head: he had forgotten her, he had forgotten her and married, he had not forgotten her having never loved her in the first place and was laughing at her as he lived a full and happier life without her, or he lied in order to give her hope. The scenario she reluctantly entertained was that he was dead.

There was no way to confirm if he was dead or not, as he disappeared just before their victory. Some said it was to avoid another trial and certain imprisonment, others said he was a coward who fled before the final outcome, switching sides at the last moment. But those were lies. Headquarters had information to exonerate him, but no further information about him once he left for his final mission. She could have asked Martus to inquire around, but that would eventually lead to questions she wasn’t ready to answer.

An elderly widow spied upon Eryn in her emotional turmoil and offered a kind ear and shoulder. Eryn unburdened her soul as much as she could without names or divulging anything about the world of the Fae or the war to the kindly ordinary mortal. A few hours later, Eryn’s heart felt a bit lighter. The woman shared her own experiences of waiting for her true love after the war, nearly giving up hope, but eventually finding her future husband amid post-war Poland.

Eryn could only hope that she would eventually be reunited with her own love and be blessed with as many wonderful years together and children as the widow.

When the widow finally left, in her wake, Eryn’s hope began to ebb like the tide. Despair set in and was Eryn’s only company for the next year.

That year Georgyn and Martin encouraged Eryn to seek counseling, chalking up Eryn’s increasingly drawn features and lingering depression to post-war stress. Eryn was not the only one to slowly waste away after the war, but most everyone else who was left with an unbearable emptiness had either died, became reclusive hermits who had moved to the fog-shrouded Hills of Oubli, or had enough wealth that they never had to venture into public ever again, as was the case for Eryn’s other friend and war compatriot, Jelone.

The rumor mill churned quite excitedly whenever the vague hint that Jelone might come out of hiding arose, but those were frequently offset by other rumors that the servants had slipped her an endless sleep potion in order to preserve her on the brink of death in hopes that her husband would return from the war one day, bestowing a rejuvenating kiss upon his wife’s lips. Eryn chalked this up to fairytales that had been chopped up and rehashed into modern mortal fairytales, then reconstituted for the Fae world palate.

Georgyn and Martus worried that Eryn was holding some lingering dark and consuming fear that merely took a few years before manifesting itself into some type of post war trauma neurosis.

Eryn dismissed their fear with logic and conviction, even putting on a brave face to make everyone think she had cured herself of her symptoms. All Eryn wanted to do was suffer in silence, bearing the burden in her heart alone like a lone widow. And like a widow’s veil, Eryn masked her grief.

By the time Eryn sat and waited for him the third time, she wondered if he would recognize her. She was painfully thin.

The day was sultry, bordering on stifling, but Eryn felt cold. Her heart felt as cold as her bones. There was nothing left to burn for him. Her soul was spent. Instead of fretting and crying, she sat there devoid of emotion.

By sunset, the chill in her began to fuel her anger. It was a cold rage. The sort of quiet rage that would send chills down anyone’s spine who may have ventured near her.

She was furious at herself for waiting so long, so foolishly for him to come to her, the romanticized version of a long-lost lover returned from the edges of the world. Eryn was furious at him, for making promises he knew he would not keep. She hated Georgyn for her happiness and Martus for his, for the whole world, Fae and mortal, that had moved on when she had not.

Eryn took a sabbatical from work, using the non-specific term of “personal matters” to explain why she was leaving on short notice. Her vitriol didn’t last long, as anger takes too much energy to maintain at the intensity she had felt.

By the third week of her “holiday,” Eryn found herself one morning looking up the ceiling of the flat in some backwater village in a small, remote country. The plaster was blackened with long scorch marks, evidence of her latest temper tantrum. She would erase them, as she did every morning before the mortal owners would come in to make the bed and check to make sure she was still alive after consuming ungodly amounts of alcohol. However, tonight, she would not destroy her flat in another bout of sober or drunken rage. By tonight she would make peace with herself.

One trait Georgyn and Martus always envied about Eryn was the fact she would set her mind to something and then master it. Eryn had decided that she was ready to move on and live her life with the same conviction and focus as she had when undertaking any endeavor.

A hastily scribbled missive arrived at Eryn’s employers carrying a missive that she had decided to extend her sabbatical indefinitely. If they decided to hire her back when she returned, if ever, then she would be most appreciative, but if not, she wished them all well and a happy life.

Georgyn and Martus also received brief letters from Eryn, which was contrary to her usual letters that went on for several feet, explaining she was ready to deal with some matters from her past and would be back once she was ready.

Eryn traveled in mortal and Fae circles, enjoying the comforts, eccentricities, and joys of both. When money ran thin, she offered her services as a guide to Fae who wanted to venture about the mortal world without drawing attention to themselves. This gave her a chance to infuse herself into the local scene before eventually moving onto some other new and exotic locale.

Eventually Eryn did receive therapy, but it was in the form of chance encounters with strangers at an inn, on a train, waiting for a boat or in a wagon drawn by foxes. She would talk with her brief and casual encounters and get their perspective on a particular issue that was troubling her.

No one had an agenda, telling her she had no business with a war spy. Nearly everyone that she had struck up a conversation with had advice for her. Some from the young and optimistic, some from the sage and wizened, some advice was cynical and opinionated, while some was light or philosophical.

By the time it was March again, Eryn found herself back in Wales. She had returned on her birthday and showed up at the Georgyn’s cottage unannounced. The running joke, as word spread of Eryn’s return and old friends arrived by the dozens, was that her return was more of a present for them, instead of them that owed her a birthday present.

No one asked why she had gone away, but everyone knew she had needed the respite, as there was a new and healthy glow about her and an inner peace that shined once more.

As the sun rose on the Vernal Equinox, Eryn walked into the park. The dew darkened her suede shoes, bought after haggling with a wizard in the bazaar in Turkey who kept insisting that they would never need a Charm to remain looking like new, while she countered that all Charms over time needed to be renewed.

She had decided to come one last time, not to wait for him, but to use this day, this ritual to close this part of her life before beginning to live the rest of it.

Any passerby would have thought Eryn was some second generation hippie, with her long, layered skirt, untamed tresses she had finally begun to embrace instead of constrict in her habitual tight chignon, and a very ethnic looking blouse with embroidery of alchemic symbols woven into it. The symbols part of this ritual cleansing of her heart that would culminate today at sundown. It appeared as if she was mediating as she closed her eyes and recalled her first memory of him.

By the time the sun would set, she would have relived her last and most recent memory of him before leaving this park and her memories of him behind.

Shadows grew long. There was no anxiousness, no tears, no rage, just the acceptance that she would not see him again. This was a memorial, putting it all to rest.

Eyes closed, she noticed the light was gone and the sun had set. He had not come.

“I’m surprised you haven’t been arrested for vagrancy, the way you’re dressed,” a sarcastic voice said, breaking Eryn from her meditative state.

Opening her eyes, she looked up at him in disbelief. The sun had not set, she was merely sitting in his shadow and did not hear him approach.

“Sebastian?”

Eryn knew it was silly to question if it was him. Of course it was him, but it was hard to tell by appearance at first. Sebastian’s gaunt frame was leaning heavily on a cane. Scars that rivaled Martus’ battle with a dragon marred the right side of his face and neck. His long, silken raven locks were gone, shorn completely off.

Had not Eryn endured waiting for so many years, she would have recoiled, shocked by the broken, listing skeleton Sebastian had become before firing off a litany of questions asking what had happened to him.

There were no questions. She rose from her seat and embraced him.

The tears came from them both. There would be time later for questions to be answered and tales of grief, pain, anguish, torture, and endless nightmares to be told. Now there was only relief with the knowledge that each had survived.

Stroking his grizzled cheek, Eryn sighed, “Home.”