Dani'el

What do you remember about Dani'el?

I wrote this a long time ago. My memories were incomplete but it still serves well enough.


When I was a child I would wait on the dirt road at the edge of the village. Whenever I had spare time, and sometimes when the time was not so spare and I was neglecting other duties, I would sit and wait for the whistle. The whistle was a tuneful one, sometimes a bright bouncing tune, and sometimes more introspective. In those days I could not tell the difference, I could just tell that it was my Daniel.

Daniel was mine, my own special friend. No one else in the village had someone such as he to wait for and to dream of. He was an angel, from the City of Angels. He would come just for me and when I heard the whistle I would run up the road and throw myself at him and he would scoop me up and put me on his shoulders and we would walk through the fields of swaying crops whilst I told him all my childish dreams and fears and innermost secrets.

In return he would tell me of his journeys in far lands and snippets of news from the great white city and the lands beyond my home. He was mine, all mine.

As I grew older and I was too big to sit on his shoulder we would walk, hand in hand. My dreams became more muted, my fears more pressing but he was always light and bright and he was always mine.

And then a day came when I was fifteen. I was sitting, not in the road but on the steps of the Grove House as befitted a priestess of the sacred order and I heard the whistling and, for the first time I heard the tone, the note of melancholy in its execution and in that instant I was pierced to the core. Call in pre sentience if you will, as a priestess I will not contradict you, but for me at that time it was simply and completely this…. the knowledge that my Daniel was no longer mine.

He was smiling when he came round the corner and I was shocked by how much he had changed even though he had not changed at all. His hair, as warm as honey was shorter, less wild, no longer a tumble of waves crashing over his narrow shoulders and frothing where they broke on the shores of his hips. Streaked with light from many hours walking in the eye of the sun it was…contained, and so was he.

His eyes as wide and green as the deep ocean were still bright and clear and still smiled at me but in their heart there was a weariness, a sadness that tugged at me and poured from him to stir the dust at his feet and the unquiet in my heart. I frowned as he smiled at me but it only made him laugh as, grabbing my hand he made me run to keep up as we took our accustomed path through the fields to the tree.

This time he stopped before we got to the meeting place and stopped, instead at a rock which stuck, like a finger making a rude gesture at the sun, from the swaying crops and formed a natural resting place. Sitting on the rock, staring out over the sea of green, waving in the breeze, his eyes were lost and I was suddenly afraid.

“Who is it?” I asked and he turned to me and laughed, although the laughter did not reach his eyes which only questioned. “Who is it who has stolen you from me?” I replied.

“Ah little sister. You were always the intuitive one. Do you see then? Do you see the dark flame in me, the one who has stolen my heart?” and I saw. I sat at his feet looking up as the sun lit him and surrounded him in a halo of fire, and the fire was around him and in him and it did not consume him, only fed the fire within.

Words flowed from his lips and I understood so very few. What I did understand burned me and tore away my innocence so that I wanted to cover my ears and flee from him but I could not, I could only stare up at the flaming angel that he was and listen.

“He is… he is… oh how can I begin to describe what he is? He is so much more than words, so much more than I. He is Grigori… only Grigori they say. Fools. Only… Only? They know nothing. He is smoke and fire. He is darkness on dark wings. He is fire and flame searing scoring burning clean. He thinks that he is less, so much less than he is. He dances hand in hand with fear and believes that this defines him but it does not, it limits him.

“His eyes are dark, black like the lake in winter and, like the lake there is so much hidden beneath the surface. Break the ice and you find the quick darting silver fish of intelligence and wit, the deep black waters of melancholy and the shifting tides of emotion.

“He thinks that he is dark and that the darkness defines him but this is not so. He is so much… so much more. He thinks that I fear the darkness but I do not, I crave it. There are so many in the White City and throughout the worlds I walk who have no darkness in them but are hollow men with hollow souls. Light blinds and they walk in ignorance of shade. In their presence colour is bleached, there is no room for compromise, all is as it is or not at all.

“I have grown so weary of those who would be good. In their presence life is leeched from me and from everyone who falls under their spell. It is a powerful one little sister, let not the taint of absolute goodness blight your life for in it there is no balance and without balance there is no life only existence.

“For many years I have walked among people who exist. They are pure and good and to them life is simple and borders are clear. In the first instant that I looked into his eyes I knew that he does not exist… he lives. In him I saw colour, black and red and gold and I saw fear and anger. I saw boundaries blur and become indistinct, I saw death and corruption and decay and I welcomed it. That which does not decay cannot grow.

“When he laid his hand upon me I felt warmth such as I have never known. He believes himself to be cold, frozen, devoid of feeling and yet, to me he was fire and flame so hot it burned away the layers of goodness in which I have been cocooned for so long. The stifling purity that was atrophying my soul were burned away in one look and in one touch I was alight and burning as I have never been before.

“He laid his hand upon my head and all breath left me. I could not remember why I had come or who I was or who he was. I was lost in an ocean of immeasurable depth and width. His lips touched mine and my body was gone, dissolved in a thousand miles of dark sea. In his breath I tasted the sweetness of corruption and it made me whole. Until that moment I had never lived, never experienced life.

“There had been others who had tasted my lips, enjoyed my body but none who had possessed me in the way that he did. When we were joined he took me on a journey from which I have never returned. We touched the stars and were burned by their icy touch.

“And now I am lost, lost forever in a world of darkness but I love it, and I love him.”

“Don’t you love me any more?” I asked, and I knew I was petulant and I didn’t care.

“Of course I do little one, I will always love you, though the soul be torn from my body and my heart be encased in stone I will always love you…. but there are many ways to love and the one of whom I speak has touched parts of me that no one else will even know of let alone share. One day one will come who will touch you in that way and then you will understand, then you will know.”

At the time I mourned for the loss of my friend and I swore that there would never be anyone whom I loved more, that no one would touch me in the way he had spoken of, that I would never understand, that I did not want to because it was cruel and harsh to come between friends so.

But He did and I did.

Thank you for this Ishtahar. It means a lot to me.

That is a beautiful memory, Ish.

~Fibreya