Sweet Edna

Sweet Edna, I miss you so, says Alastair as he wakes up.

He’d been dreaming of her. Again. The heartache was fresh, as it always was whenever he dreamt of her. But he was grateful for the dreams. They were all he had of his dear Edna.

Alastair rises, washes his face, checks his guns… He goes through all the tasks of waking up and becoming presentable. He’d been in the Obsidian Citadel for some weeks now, but already felt the urge to move on. Edna-dreams were a sure way of getting his blood running and making him feel he had to move.

He goes down to break his fast and changes his mind when he takes a look at the porridge. It wasn’t bad porridge here at The Fiendish Chambers. He’ll regret not eating later but now he is too full of Edna to have anything else in him. He just has to move a bit.

He walks until he finds a pretty tree, far from people, from noise, from disruption. He can’t tell why but his Edna won’t leave him be today. He grins, there were some days when she’d do that, just latch herself to him, whether he wanted her to or not… She’d keep the darkness at bay. He’d tell her that was her power - to feel the darkness coming on to him and then making it clear away. She’d laugh and call him dramatic, she had no powers. ‘I’m just a simple woman’, she’d say. But he’d see her with a smug smile for hours afterwards. She always liked it when he told her she was that much of light, that she did have powers… Well, she did. At least for him, she did.
Alastair lowers himself with a resigned grunt to the ground. He isn’t in pain really. He’s just used to complaining a bit about his age. That’s what Edna would say.
He sits against the trunk and closes his eyes. He can’t shake his dream away. He can still smell his sweet, sweet Edna. He closes his eyes and is taken back in…

‘Bluey, why not?’
It was an old argument. Alastair, in his prime years, has a scowl on his face and sits quietly on their kitchen chair. A mug of ale on the table, untouched.
Edna, wearing her billowing white skirts and blouse, comes closer and hugs him from the back.
‘Talk to me, Bluey.’
‘Why? You have an argument for whatever I say, woman. I’ll just sit quietly here then.’
‘Well, if that’s the case, shall we skip to the end and celebrate you coming to your senses with a good tumble?’ Alastair, much against his wishes, feels his blood running with her laughing voice by his ear.
‘Edna, stop. I have every right to worry’, he says as he hears her take a deep breath, move across from him and sit down.
‘You do, Bluey. You do. I don’t think you’re wrong in being worried, you know? I love you for worrying. I just have to do it, Bluey. I have to. You know that. It’s not just because of my heritage. It is not, and you know that too. It is who I am. I have to help. I have to help even if it is risky sometimes. I just have to’, she says softly while extending her hand to hold his over the table.
He knows all she is saying is true. Just simple, plain true. Damn, it is why he loves her. When he got to Crossroads he was a mean old bastard, though he was still 30. He had a perpetual scowl to his face, an aloneness in his heart and a darkness on his shoulders. He had no friends, he came alone. To this day, he doesn’t know what moved him to spend more than a day there. He thought he was just passing through. Something held him though. Something made him stay on the outskirts of this community for 3 whole days. He didn’t really want to admit it back then but this place felt different. All of Zandor was devastation, emptiness, ruins, sorrow… even after centuries of the Calamity. Rebuilding was hard and made people harder. But Crossroads had a different quality to it. People laughed more freely and moved as if they were happy. He was not barred from coming in, just politely questioned by the outskirt keepers. ‘Just on my way somewhere else’, he’d said and was let through. Day after day he’d camp closer and closer to their own lodgings. People were so helpful it irked him a bit. By day 3, he’d decided he’d had enough of it. This was a strange place and surely these people had something to hide behind all this air of respect.
And then he saw her.
It was early morning, the skies were grey and dew was still on the grass around. There was a chill in the air. He was packed and ready to move. Just a quick stop to the well and he’d go. That must have been her chore as well as she had a bucket by her feet. She was not gathering water however. A single ray of sun had broken through and she’d risen her face to it. She was still, looking up, eyes closed and an enormous smile on her lips as she drank that light in. Slowly she opened her arms and it looked as if she held the world in an embrace. Alastair’s heart seemed to have stopped in wonder at this slip of a girl dressed all in white with a flash of red, a handkerchief, tucked to the waist of her skirts. He gasped as it felt that she’d stolen his very breath. Until she started singing.
In soft tones she sang a tune in a language he couldn’t understand. It was beyond beautiful. It was miraculous. Her voice, that song, it easyed some of his weariness and in that moment he loved her. He didn’t know her, but he loved her.
It turns out he never left on day 3. He approached her and must have done something right somewhere, some time in his life… because she did not shy away from him. No. She loved him back. With intensity, with joy, with peace. She loved him even when his blue moods came on. She loved getting him out of those. She called him ‘her Bluey’. He called her ‘sweet Edna’, his love, his life. A life that was completely changed around once he met her.
Edna’s family had founded Crossroads. Centuries ago. Their purpose, back then and to this day, was to have a safe space for those that wanted to find their path, wanted to grow in peace and rebuild. She took her heritage seriously. Her life’s mission was to help people better themselves, help people who were lost, hurting, who had nothing to eat and nowhere to go, teach people the way of the Three Moons… She left from time to time and ventured in the wilds looking for people who needed a safe haven. That was the exact reason for his current blue mood. He was worried she’d be hurt one day.
‘It’s so dangerous, Edna. Cannot you help all those that are already here?’
‘I do, Alastair. But the lost don’t even know there is a place to be found. I have to help them.’
Blast, he loved her for it. For this unbent view that people could still be saved, that the world could be saved.
‘I’m afraid I’ll lose you’. They went together when venturing out, but he couldn’t always guard her. Today they had been separated by some bandits on the road closest to Crossroads. Edna held her own and didn’t have a scratch on her but he could not shake the feeling that one day he’d be taken from her in a squirmish and she’d be lost to him.
‘You will’, she says firmly now, ‘If I am stuck here and my life’s purpose is not fulfilled I’ll most certainly shrivel up and die. You’ll lose me because all you love in me is intertwined with what I do. And all I love in me is too! You know that, Bluey.’
When Alastair doesn't reply she sighs and stands up. She shakes him up and hugs his waist. Looking up to him she says, ‘Let’s not waste the time we do have with this argument anymore, Alastair. I’m not stopping. You do not need to go with me, though I love sleeping rough with you by my side. I’d rather continue doing it, but without this fight every time we get back. I’ll die one day, you know? Maybe on the road, maybe on my bed, but I will. Let’s not waste time till then.’
They didn’t. His sweet Edna had her way. As always. He didn’t have it in him to say no to her. It helped that the woman was so selfless that “her way” never felt as being enslaved to her, rather it felt as becoming someone worthy of her.
They had 40 years together.
One day, almost a year ago, she went to the well by the end of the day to get some water. He had been with the orphaned children till then (he would never tell anyone but it was his favourite “project” of Edna’s, they never had children of their own and he enjoyed being with them) and thought he’d meet her by the well. Coming close to it he witnessed a perfect rendering from his memories: his sweet Edna, still in white, a flash of red by her waist, looking up despite her bent back to a ray of light that broke through the clouds. She inhaled deeply. And then his world ended.
Edna put her hand to her heart, moved her lips, and fell to the floor. He ran to her and the wind brought her voice to him, ‘Bluey’, she’d said. A lost word, he already knew… His Edna was no more.

A tear rolled from his right eye as he awoke. His heart wrenching again with the sound of that last “Bluey” he’d heard in the dream. He shook himself up, straightened his clothes and huffed to himself.

He lived for 40 years in Crossroads but it didn’t feel as home after Edna passed. He had always known that Edna was his home, she was his whole world and it was gone. So he burned her and let the wind take her ashes to the stars. He packed essentials and oiled his guns for the first time in many years. He said his farewells to baffled friends. And he left.
For nearly a year now he’d been wandering, lost within himself, not alive but unable to end his own existence. Edna would never forgive him if he did that. It was also because of her that he helped people along the way. He couldn’t help but feel her nudge his shoulder and whisper to him ‘Go on, Bluey. Be kind and help them out. It’ll do you good.’
Actually, he constantly felt her around and heard her talking to him. He figured that was the real reason he hadn’t just dropped dead yet - part of her was still in him.
‘Get a grip, Alastair’, he murmurs out loud.
Maybe it is the new year that is making him reminisce. He better shake himself out of it. Hmm, a visit to priest Iemera. That will do him good. And as he walks he hears Edna’s song in the wind.