Count Not the Years

Wind swept the hilltop, stirring the leaves. He reached for a leaf and his hand passed through it without disturbing its path. He snatched for another and it, too, sailed through his hand. It was autumn but not of the year that had claimed his family. How long had it been?

"It takes time for a new spirit to master a physical form," Flete said.

Aelfric spun about. His old companion stood beside him, as young as the day the two had met, clad now as then in a traveler's cloak, embroidered with green and gold thread.

"Assassin," Aelfric said but there was no fire in his words.

"I killed you, I did not betray you. I would not let a whelp princeling rip your lungs from your ribs. You deserved a cleaner end."

"You are..." Dare he say it even now? But if the man spoke true, Aelfric was beyond the anger of the gods. "You are a god?"

"Yes, my friend, known as Lor in this part of the world. I would have given you a place of honor in my hall."

"My wife and son?"

"Cherished and safe among my company."

"May I see them?"

Lor shook his head, bitter years of wisdom on his taut lips. "When you pursued Kastric's spawn beyond the grave, you forged a fate that bars your ever meeting."

"Then they are lost to me as I to them."

"Parted, not forgotten."

Lor took a small wooden case from his belt pouch and set it on a flat stone. Carved with scenes of a king and his family at ease in a hall, it raised an anguish in Aelfric that manifest as a rumbling in the stony bones of the crag.

Lor opened the lid. Within was an ivory horse lying atop an embroidered cloth.

"A carving from your son." Flete set the statuette upon the stone and pulled out the cloth to show a depiction of Aelfric and his wife side by side on their thrones, hand-in-hand. "And this from your wife."

The thrum in the crag grew to a pounding before it ebbed. "I can't make tears," Aelfric said.

"For a spirit, you are but a child. Tears will come to you."

"And they will remain my company in all the ages of the world."

"You are this crag, Aelfric. The only way to reunite is to walk your very stones into the high mountains."

The hill shook once more, then lurched. It had moved not more than the thickness of a blade of grass. But it had moved.

"It is a long way to my hall," Lor said.

"I shall not count the years."