I first saw you in dreams after I’d stolen an apple from the market. You chided me then, in a way that no one had. You warned of a doomed future, should I not change my ways. Despite those ominous words I had never felt such peace. Nor would I, in all the years after. I promised to adhere to justice to see your smile. But you turned away, your wings burning inseparably from ethereal sunlight.
I kept this promise for so long. Or tried to. But you never returned.
I became a soldier believing, like so many, that it was the path to heroism. I found war’s truth in pain and pestilence and piles of bodies. When I came home, I imagined a family in my future. But I failed to make a courtship. I blamed my scarred face. But I knew always that it was my lack of confidence with words; my fear of what would come when I said the wrong thing. I resolved then to be a man of action. I would earn everything by working to meet my ambitions.
By then, you were only a memory of an imagining. My greatest hope was for my future wife to be someone like you, convinced as I was that you, yourself, were not real.
After my post-war idleness, I became the guard of the Fort of the Forbidden Library. Four crumbling stone walls surrounded a tower full of books that no man was to enter. Not that anyone would, with the Fort placed atop a mountain and surrounded by a forest said to be haunted. It was the slow, boring work that ex-soldiers with cooled bloodlust craved.
And it was where I saw you again.
I stood atop the wall one night, drifting into unconsciousness, as the glow of foxfire caught on the shape of a winged woman. I remembered all at once that you had been more than a dream. But before I could approach, the light faded, and you were gone. I had seen nothing but your shape, and your presence in memory was that of a half-formed dream. That night, I slept on my cramped barracks cot wondering whether I’d been enchanted by an angel or a succubus.
The next day, knowing full well that the penalty for such betrayal was death, I snuck into the Library.