Unraveled Strings

There’s a story the stars guard within their bright light, blinding you to its existence far before your time. It strings together the gold and silver to light a vow made for forever, to rot forever.

It starts as the sun sinks, its strings of color dying, giving way to the black to blanket your home.

We were a story, and our story ended unfulfilled, like many others akin to ours.

When the stars birthed our vows to keep your silver tied to my gold, I knew only a sinking heaviness dragging at my heart, of treachery woven into the minds of our fellow people, to come.

I knew they’d frown at your pale hands holding mine, and I knew they’d stone us for my hands holding yours back.

They’d tell us that the stars would never approve of a bond where you and I could live the way we wanted, meld together, and form the sparks of something that was ours only.

If only we’d been given in ignorance, where love wasn’t reserved for only black and white, for only man and woman, but for all to share as it was meant to be. After all, in stories told to children, monsters were meant to be slain, not loved. Silver eyes mark those touched by moonlight madness, they say, while gold brands the cursed ones. We were both marked from birth—you by your silver gaze that saw too much, and I by the golden scars I couldn’t hide.

Yet who would approve of love between monsters? When you visited the cells and looked upon me with pity, and I, starved of it, found in you a love I’d sought for a lifetime. The light from your lantern cast dancing shadows through my bars, and I tried to shrink away, to hide the marks crawling across my skin. But you—you simply set your light down and knelt beside my cell, as though the stone floor was a garden and I something worth tending to.

“How long have they kept you here?” you asked me. Your silver eyes traced the weathered grooves in the cell walls, marks I’d made counting endless days.

“Since they learned I was different. My whole life.” The words tasted bitter, like the iron bars between us.

You touched me with compassion and wrapped your purple scarf around my neck.

Each day after, you came with small offerings—a book, a small piece of bread hidden in your sleeve, a wooden bird you’d carved yourself. You brought me an Autumn leaf, yellow tinged with red—a thing I’d not seen with my own eyes. I caught the scent of the outside world in your hair as you sat beside my cell, and you told me of your dreams, of a world where silver and gold could intertwine without shame.

“I’m a monster,” I said. They’d never let our love be.

Your hands reached for mine through the iron bars. I turned my face away, but let them touch the marks upon my skin—scars I’d scratched into them. I let you thread your fingers, weathered from woodcarving, through my beard and pull me to you. I let you guide my scarred hand with yours to your broad chest where your heart thumped in time with mine, then traced my fingers to the stubble on your own cheek.

“Beautiful.”

And I was lost, then, forever, to your liquid silver.

But gods, how could the gods have made you mine, only for us to never stay as we’d like, live as we’d like, and reap what we’d sown in each other’s names? To only allow me to thread my fingers between yours, whisper promises through iron bars, and watch those whispers dissipate with our breaths.

How could the stars have shown me your silver eyes and your moonlit smile, only to keep you from being mine?

I asked you why you spent your nights with me when there was a world beyond my prison. You’d told me of the children you taught how to read, as you taught me, and your sister and brothers who liked to dance at the winter festivals as snow drifted from the heavens. From you, I could imagine calls for eggs and corn across dusty streets, and chatter between townspeople. My mind created images of your hand in mine as we passed others in the morning, invisible.

“I am a monster too,” you said.

I clutched you closer, bars cutting between our bodies. My fingers twined into your hair, and your tears fell hot down my neck.

My moon, my love, my everything, I have to say goodbye. I have to say goodbye.

I cannot watch anymore as they pelt you with misery and break that smooth skin. As your family denies you entrance to the home where your mother once cradled you. I cannot watch as children pull at your silver strands and scratch at your eyes, simply for having loved me.

I wanted you safe and I wanted you near. And the world denied me both.

I saw how they changed around you—the townsfolk who once smiled now turned their faces away, you said. Children who used to wave as you passed now hid behind their mothers’ skirts, whispering of sorcery and monsters.

Each slight cut you deeper than any physical wound. Still, you came, though your steps grew heavier and your eyes dimmed each time. Still, you brought me pieces of the world outside, though your hands shook more with each offering. White snaked its way through your hair and beard. The days grew longer between your visits.

Your last visit was different. You stood farther from the bars than ever before. Your eyes were clouded with unshed tears, and your hands were empty of their usual gifts. I knew before you spoke—had known, perhaps, since the first time your pale fingers touched the marks upon my skin through these cursed bars.

Some loves are too bright for this shadowed world to bear.

“One day, we will find a way,” you said, but your voice held none of the warmth I had clung to. The words fell between us like dead leaves, empty promises scattered by an Autumn wind.

You returned to your mother’s home, and soon, murmurs of how I had bewitched you snaked through the drains into my cell.

I cannot live any longer knowing we’ve lost our touch, lost our love to the beasts that come from mankind—that you lacked the strength to stay.

And it ends with a man accepting treason as his lover leaves him in the suffocating nothing.

The day you left, the day you could bear no more of what it took to be us, you took the rays of light that filtered through my cell. You took away the warm solace of my will and soundness.

I tried sunshine; I tried so hard to understand the oppression only I suffered for being lesser in their eyes, to bear the lesson for both of us. I tried to understand how you could have taken away my light, when you knew I was afraid of a world without your glow.

You wrote to me about how we could not be because of who we were, and that you would now bind yourself to a maiden who blushed at you from behind her books. But you had once said yourself that my gold was tied to your silver. Yet you spoke of how your honey eyes and sun-kissed skin were never meant to be mine.

My Sun, my gold eyes now have black taint under them, and my skin is forever marred with the hate of my existence. My Sun, as you ran from who we were meant to be, you left them to tear more ferociously at my skin, now forever marked with bitter, silver blood.

Your presence, which was once a strong enough ray to stop them from burning me too much, is now gone with the warm winds and the shining sun. Could you have forgotten what was ours for the sake of hiding in the shadows once more? Could you let them destroy me a little more, and just a little less every day, for being yours? For the darkness is deeper now, having seen your light.

Only now, I can’t even tell anyone you left me. You have scorned me to live every day without the choice to fade as you did, without the relief of it stopping.

In my darkest hours, I trace the wall markings that once counted days until your next visit, constellations marking only fading memories. Now they count only the endless moments since you left. The purple scarf still carries your scent, though it fades more with each passing day, like the memory of your silver eyes and the warmth of your touch through iron bars. My fingers follow them in the night, reading stories of what might have been, until the lines blur and break like the promises we gave.

I press my hands against the walls and imagine the pulse of the stars above.

The other prisoners whisper that I’ve gone mad, talking to shadows as though they were you. Perhaps they’re right. Perhaps madness would be kinder than this half-life, this endless twilight between what was and what can never be.

I rot a little more as I know we’re both lost, lost in the darkness, our love, our everything.

And I will continue to rot forever, knowing you left me to them.

They say the stars hold the memory of everything that was or might have been.

Perhaps somewhere in their ancient light, there exists a world where monsters are not caged and silver and gold can intertwine without shame—where our love was enough.

The star guarding the tale collapses today. It gives the seers the story and tells them of the silver man still rotting in a dark cell for a lover who could not bear him.