Deiformity (Part 1)

Book One

Taking a deep breath, you get up from my bed and take a cautious step towards the door. Age, my love, that is the thing that always hits you the hardest, the thing that has made you deny what would make you happy, throughout your life. I stand up next to you, and put my arms around you to help you as you go. I know it must be hard for you, after all this time, to suddenly come to terms it all, so soon before we leave for good. Age, the thing which you picked out as the reason why you and I could never be, that is what is killing you now. I suppose it's a fitting end to a tragic story of unrequited love. I open the door for you and we begin to make our way down the stairs. It's difficult for you I know, but I will help you to the last. You trip up on the third stair down and would've fallen to the bottom, was I not there to help you. Time has taken its toll on me, too, but I am ten years your junior, and still strong. You have been weakened, for all your elvish magic, for all your barbarian strength. The lifeblood of a dragon could not save us now, for my mind and body are ruined, and yours too.

I catch you as you fall. Perhaps I should carry you to the foot of the stairs, cradled in my arms as a mother would hold a baby, or as a Romeo would carry his Juliet. Is that a good idea?

Seeming to agree with me, you lie down, your long black hair rolling down the stairs behind you as you do so. I look at your face. Age may be wearing heavy, but you are still beautiful, striking and seductive, with just a few more wrinkles. In others who seemed the same I would suspect surgery or youth-giving chemicals, but in you I realise that your vitality is purely natural. Perhaps some of it derives from your elvish blood, which in a purebred would keep its owner alive for hundreds, if not thousands of years. But you are half-human, and it shows. It scarcely seems a day since I first saw you, all that long long time ago.

I remember it all so well. It is so clear, even now.

I had gone away to study at a time when it was becoming increasingly common to do so. It was a period of our history when the old ages were drawing to a close, when technology had began to come upon us.

It was the end of my first year at University. Most of my friends from there lived scattered far away, so I knew that I wouldn't be seeing much of them, whilst the few that I had left from school days had started to drift apart from me. I remember a soft, gentle, but also unexciting breeze, which brought be softly back to my hometown after the chaos and madness of it all. It hadn't been a bad year. I'd met some lovely people. I'd been out with a couple of nice women too, but nothing too serious. Just passing flings, which would be forgotten soon after they each ended and, I must admit, that didn't bother me too much, for what did love mean, at such a young age? I always thought to myself that friends were what mattered, and that I would never fall in love.