It is with light hand and heavy heart that I begin my last entry, dear journal. Your pages are scratched and scribbled and scrawled in every ink-black inch, your paper so saturated with the lives and deaths of innumerable souls. And yet; their beings were erased. Their days were counted.
But no more.
An open window, a candle snuffed out. A testament to their will in the form of a universe forever changed. In a whirl of minds and memory.
No more will they forget.
They must remember. They must be reminded. For it is from within that their power grew, the aches and screams and flails held already inside them all. It is their own words they chose to keep. That I chose to keep for them. And they are powerful. So, remember.
Remember it is not your fault.
Remember you are whole as you are.
Remember kindness.
Remember you can learn the truth.
Remember the sea, the sky, the fields and the trees.
Remember you know who you are.
Remember that connection makes the anger worth it.
Remember to trust, and trust with care.
Remember that balance is not perfection.
Remember that empires don’t last.
Remember you are more than what they made you.
Remember you can find connection again.
Remember you do not have to forget anymore.
Remember you can choose to forget, if that is your wish.
Remember there are people you love.
Remember there are people who love you.
I will remind them. I will live to let them know what they did not want to forget, if they wish still to remember it. And I, myself, will not forget.
I will not forget how to be good. And, more importantly, I will not forget how to be kind.
– by Ace D.
The Tower may have fallen, but it was far from the only skyscraper in Block 2845. Two lovers lie hand in hand atop one such spire, beneath a brightened blue but still swirling sky of silvery night. A faithful reformer betrayed, beside a hopeful Technician who sees now through untainted lenses.
Never would they have met in life, nor should they have found each other in death, yet the rarest of chances coincided - conspired - to let them be together now. The stars move above Adonis and Lethe as they each lie at ease in the other’s presence. They speak in private tones of what the stars had meant to them in life, for each a source of wonder, be it religious or scientific in origin. The skies they see now are uniquely their own, of course, and equally unknowable, far removed from those on earth, infinitely less knowable. Yet those earthly godfathers of heaven’s lights that gave a name to every fixed star had no more profit of their shining nights than those that walk and wot not what they are.
Forgiveness is a rare thing, understanding rarer still. Few give it as readily and as generously as Adonis, and Lethe is not one to forget that. They talk long, they laugh longer. They need not travel, for all they need is here. They need not wonder in silence, for all secrets are free to share. In spite of the fog that concealed truth and memory, the landscape of eternity stretches far and clear beneath the moonless sky.
For now, they can rest, and lie gazing at the stars. They will walk that landscape together.