Revenir | Unraveled Strings

Some loves are too bright for this shadowed world to bear

Hello and welcome to the Fiction Section of The Untangling. Just like in my main publication, these stories centre on themes of identity and what it means to be human. Main genres are literary and slipstream fiction and fantasy written with a lyrical and poetic writing style.

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You are reading a standalone story from Revenir, an anthology I co-wrote with my son, who died in 2021. The stories explore the human experience and delve deep into themes of love, loss, and the search for meaning. Written in a haunting, lyrical style and set in a single fantasy world, this collection is for readers looking for character-driven stories with strong emotional resonance.

There’s a story the stars guard within their bright light, blinding you to its existence far before your time. It strings together the gold and silver to light a vow made for forever, to rot forever.

It starts as the sun sinks, its strings of color dying, giving way for the black to blanket your home.

We were a story, and stories are meant to end just as any other, only this one ended unfulfilled, like many akin to ours.

When the stars birthed our vows to keep your silver tied to my gold, I knew only dread, of treachery woven into the minds of our fellow people, to come.

I knew they’d frown at your pale hands as they held mine, and I knew they’d stone us for my hands holding yours back.

They’d tell us that the stars would never approve of such a bond where you and I could live the way we wanted, to meld together and form the sparks of something that was ours only.

If only we’d been given in ignorance, where love wasn’t yet a norm for only black and white, for only man and woman, but for all to share as it was meant to be.

But God, how could God have made you mine, only for us to never stay as we’d like, live as we’d like, and reap from what we’d sown in each other’s names?

How could the stars have shown me your silver eyes and your moonlit smile, only to not make you mine?

My moon, my love, my everything, I have to say goodbye. I have to say goodbye.

I cannot watch anymore as they pelt you with misery and break that smooth skin. I cannot watch as they pull at your silver strands and scratch at your eyes only for having loved me.

I cannot live any longer, knowing we’ve lost our touch, lost our love to the beasts that come from mankind.

And it ends with a man accepting the treason as his lover leaves him in the suffocating nothing.

The day you left, the day you could bear no more of what it took to be us, you took the rays of light that filtered through my cell. You took away the warm solace of my will and soundness.

I tried sunshine; I tried so hard to understand the oppression only I was given for being the lesser in their eyes, to bear the lesson for both of us. I tried to understand how you could have taken away my light when you knew I was afraid of a world without your glow.

You wrote to me of how we could not be because of who we were. You said yourself that my silver was tied to your gold. Yet you spoke of how your honey eyes and sun kissed skin were never meant to be mine regardless.

My sun, my silver eyes now have black taint under them, and my pale skin is marred with the hate of my existence. My sun, as you ran from who we were meant to be, you left them to tear at my skin, now permanently marked with bitter, silver blood more ferociously.

Your presence that was once a strong enough ray to have stopped them from burning me too much is now gone. Gone with the warm winds and the shining sun. And they destroy me a little more, and just a little less every day for being yours.

Only you’ve made it so that I can’t even tell them you left me, just as they told me you would. That you have scorned me to live every day without the choice of fading as you did, without the relief of having it stop.

I rot a little more as I know we’re both lost, lost in the darkness, lost to our touch, our love, our everything.

And I will continue to rot for forever, knowing you left me to them.

The star guarding the tale collapses today. It gives you the story and tells you of the silver man still rotting in a dark cell for a lover who could not bear him.

The Story Behind the Story

Ren wrote this story. I did not change this one, though I am expanding it for the final version.