Eleanor's Memoirs, Chapter I

I thought I knew death. I thought I had tasted its cold, smelled its rot, felt the moment the last breath slips away and vanishes into nothing. I had walked with it. I had watched its majesty, its inevitability, the way it paralyzes every muscle just before the end. I knew death. I had survived it. But now… only now I understand it.

This nightmare refuses to release me. My eyes open, but it persists. The white door lies shattered, ripped from its hinges. The courtyard is a labyrinth of stone and shadow. Footsteps echo - mine, yours, theirs, long dead, long forgotten - and I cannot tell which are real. Nothing is certain. Nothing exists but this fragile, trembling moment.

I cross the threshold. The mirror in the hall greets me with disbelief. That creature staring back cannot be me. And yet… somehow, it is.

Dark, long hair falls in greasy curtains. Skin stretched tight over brittle bones. Eyes like storm clouds at dusk, wild, desperate, alive with fear and rage. Blood drips from colorless lips. Fangs glint. I scream. My voice drowns in a river of guilt and fury.

This is no dream.

My hands clench. I open them. A ring. White gold. Yours. Inside, my name rests like a fragile promise, like a secret I have carried for centuries.

“Eleanor…”, I read it. Your voice rises from the shadows, echoing in my mind, soft, insistent, unreachable. Your last words pierce my heart like molten nails:

“Please… just this once… I want to hear you say it.”

Before I can answer, you are gone. I whisper into the mirror, into the hollow of centuries:

“I love you.”

I had imagined this confession of mine countless times. In every scenario, you had answered: with some joke, or a smile. With a kiss. There was always something. In reality though, there is always nothing.

Silence is all I ever receive. A silence I have learned to hate. A silence that makes me want to claw my own skin, to scrape myself raw, to atone for centuries of delay. Nine centuries to speak. Nine centuries to say it. And yet… I was too late.

I touched death when I brushed the ashes of your body. I saw it retreat, laughing. Its frost tore through me. I was left suspended, trapped in that eternal instant. Like a grain of sand frozen in an hourglass, I hang there; voiceless, haunted, aching.

I thought I had cheated death. I was wrong. Death never forgets. Death only waits. And when it finally came, it gave me what I was dued: my own private hell, my own infinite torment.

Forever caught in that trembling, final moment.

Forever hunting for the words I cannot speak.

Forever searching for a voice that has vanished into eternity.

Forever trying to tell you what the abundance of time had made me forget.

All in vain now.