Mareld

"You're my last chance at happiness," she said before she left. "I'm coming back for you."

From anyone else ... -to- anyone else, that'd have been an insult. But considering that I systematically destroyed her life--considering that in a way, all of this is my fault--it was both the most terrible and beautiful thing I ever heard.

I can't stay in Hartfordshire anymore--not since they realized who I am and what I did. Maybe I didn't really bring all this about, but I do deserve the blame for it.

So I roam the seaside. I get tired of waiting in that factory where we hid together--I feel too much like a caged animal. But there's a kind of stark, surreal beauty to the apocalypse--they've cleaned up most of the debris--the corpses are gone, the dead cities razed--and the wilderness is coming back. I see more plants, more animals--both from Earth and elsewhere--than I had ever imagined. And lights, so many lights. Strange, blinding golden lights from underground, part of whatever subterranean process they use to tunnel through the earth, turning the sand almost transparent where they pulse, highlighting the outlines of the mammoth, black forms of alien beings in the distance.

I gaze out across the sea and see what in my childhood native tongue, they called "Mareld", and in Point of Rocks, "sea sparkle." The sea is aglow, the glassy surface a clear, luminous green, darkened only by patches of kelp floating beneath the waves. Bands of silver moonlight play across the darkness beyond. Then the light flashes out. Pulses again in the distance. Flashes out.

It is not the deep blue light of Mareld, bioluminesced by algae--this is a light shining -through- the water, from some other alien process beneath. Overhead, lights arc through the sky, heralding the arrival of more and more colonizing ships.

I have a front row seat to the end of the human world, and I should be enjoying the light show. But I'm not--I can't look long at the lights before my gaze is drawn up past the ships, between the stars, and into the blackness where -she- went.

I'm out there too, in that blackness--the blackness of uncertainty, regret, and hope. Waiting and wondering ... if she's really coming back.

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