Until the Sun Sets Again

Revenir Short Story | A man finds purpose again after separating from his partner

Hello and welcome to the Fiction Section of Notes from the Town Hermit. 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. Subscribe for free to enjoy more stories.

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.

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The autumn breeze drifted through willow trees tinged with gold, rustling the swaying leaves and sending a cascade drifting lazily to the ground. Under the canopy's fading glow, two young men huddled close, their fingers intertwined.

Kyren’s head rested lightly upon Aster’s shoulder, his chestnut curls grazing Aster's cheek, an earthy scent of windswept hair mingled with harsh soap still lingering on his skin.

“I’ve never encountered this with anyone else,” Aster said in a hushed tone.

Kyren squeezed Aster’s hand, thumb tracing light circles. “I’m here. I will always be here.”

“As will I.”

Kyren nestled closer into the crook of Aster’s arm, feeling his body sag against him as if all tension had been released.

Where others saw an enigma, Aster perceived the clear portrait of a tender soul behind Kyren’s reserved exterior. And with Kyren, Aster found a haven in which to reveal his hidden fragilities.

“This is enough,” Aster said.

In their hallowed space, where only outcasts dared to dream, they had nurtured the timid blossom of new love from hardened earth—fragile, yet fresh in its newness and hope. Together, anchored in shared solace, Aster reached metaphorical hands toward Kyren in hopes this love would take root for a season and shelter them from life’s storms.

Aster traced the sharp line of Kyren’s jaw, calloused thumb coming to rest on his lower lip.

Kyren smiled up at him. “We are enough,” he said.

The spring witnessed Aster's joy as Kyren invited him to live together in a small abode he’d found in the heart of the town. The solitary room rested above a bakery owned by a stout man whose back ached too much for him to continue climbing the stairs.

“If you would be so good as to make deliveries now and again, I’d be happy to let the room to you at a pittance,” the baker had told Kyren.

Mornings carried rich scents of warm cranberry buns and powdered white rolls through the window Kyren insisted on leaving open, always.

“The mosquitos enjoy more of us than we do of the fresh air,” Aster grumbled one morning, scratching at the red bumps blemishing his skin.

Kyren only chuckled. “I like the sounds of town life below. It’s real life.”

Though the work kept Kyren busy, Aster relished the in-between moments when Kyren returned for brief reprieves, his face flushed from exertion. Once restrained by timidity, Kyren now regaled him with tales of old Madame Lorelai, who insisted he bore an exact resemblance to her late husband, of little Podrick, who giggled with delight at the sweet potato bread he brought to his door each morn.

Evenings, however, belonged solely to them. They walked under the light of a fading sun to the lake at the edge of town. The hour passed quickly for Aster, fingers twisted around Kyren’s, in a time all their own.

An old wooden bench, bathed in a pool of lamplight, became their resting place, where they reaffirmed their bond, promising forever.

“Won’t you accompany me this time?” Kyren would ask.

Aster would bury his face in Kyren’s hair, breathing in the scent of his miracle. “You know all those people terrify me.”

And Kyren would sigh, then smile. “Perhaps someday.”

“Yes, someday.”

As spring gave in to summer, long walks and evenings to the lake grew scarce. The once-cosy room now felt too large for just one. Aster’s thoughts now circled back to Kyren and the unknown world he was now exploring without him. They invaded even when he tried to occupy his mind with the books he once loved.

Tension between them grew like string pulled taut, strained by mounting resentment during increasing moments when Kyren would rush in, flushed and distracted, before placing hurried kisses on Aster’s lips and cheeks and running out again.

“Off to have a drink with some friends,” Kyren told Aster. “Come, make merry with us.”

Aster waved away the invitations. Tightness grew around his throat and in his temples. They are enough, just the two of them. What did other people matter? Was he not enough?

The question burst forth one day after yet another late return home.

Kyren froze, his arms dropping before reaching for Aster in an embrace. “Why do you say so?” he said, with a trace of coldness Aster had never heard directed toward himself before.

“You said we were enough,” Aster mumbled. A familiar restlessness crept into his stomach and circled, waiting for a gap in his defenses. “You said.”

“Can I not form bonds with others?” Kyren said. “It does not lessen my love for you. You know, the baker said…”

The restlessness charged in. “What about the baker? What did he say?”

“Nothing. The hour is late. We will talk tomorrow.”

Aster warded Kyren’s way to their bedroom. A frenzy was taking hold, and he could not let words go unsaid. A sleepless night would ensue. Kyren knew this about him. How was it possible for him to dismiss it ? “Talk to me now,” he said, despising the tremor in his voice. “Why do you listen to outside voices that do not know or understand us? ”

“They do not know you.” Now Kyren’s voice shook, too. “You hide in this room and hardly leave it save when I accompany you.”

“Then I am a burden to you?”

Kyren sighed. “I did not say so.”

“You didn’t have to.” Still Aster would not move, even as Kyren’s hands pushed against him, then more insistently. “You tire of me, and so you spend less and less time with me. You are leaving me, as did all others I dared to trust.”

Kyren stepped back, a storm gathering on his brow. “Aster, you are speaking madness. I am here, and I will always be here.”

“Yet you are gone.”

“You will not join me in the world!” Kyren paced around the home they had made, his arms swinging in agitation. “I have asked and asked you, yet you will not come. Not every person is so wicked as we once believed. To hide as you do is no longer safety for me, but a prison.”

The words hung pregnant in the air between them, creating an invisible barrier where none had before existed.

“I’m sorry,” Kyren said haltingly in an attempt to infuse gentleness into his tone.

Aster was left staring at him, his eyes wide in silent accusation.

Under skies that bore no sign of fatigued clouds, they promised to return, the edges near the other side of the lake pink, brightly merging into the blue, putting on a show by the parting sun.

They decided to venture on to their own paths, living hundreds of lives between now and then—choosing to let the world fill them to the brim with stories of new friends and foes, and tales of heartbreak and deliverance—in order to meet one day and be persons closer to who they aspired to be.

They’d someday pick a quill and scribble a letter, send it far off, and return to the same spot under the same dim yellow lamppost, whose black grill coiled around the flame like a dove about to leave its perch, and settle upon a soaked bench with the prettily colored wood to release the lives they had lived in absence of each other.

It was mutual—a decision they had both agreed upon.

“It’s not right. I don’t feel right for us right now.”

Aster creased his brows, wondering how any passage of time would change that.

“Aster,” said Kyren. “Aster, I can’t right now. I can’t.”

“I’m not making you,” he replied. “I’m not. I said okay.”

Kyren had looked frustrated; Aster remembered thinking there was nothing to be frustrated about. He had said okay. He had given Kyren his space; Kyren didn’t think he was ready, and Aster had respected that. He did. But his partner could always pick out the unease and fear that lay under his blanket of indifference.

He could still be bitter about it, though—bitter about how he wasn’t enough security for the other to stay together for. Bitter that they couldn’t stick together for each other when they needed each other the most. But he had agreed just as readily as Kyren had, because there was no use at all in holding on to someone who had already left.

So they parted ways. And didn’t look back.

The first foe Aster made was Kyren himself. It wasn’t decided on the spot, of course. He had just found his reserves for love diminishing as the bitterness grew slowly and steadily.

By the end of three months, Kyren’s absence had crumbled the walls keeping all of Aster’s resentment inside. And all Aster had left for his former friend was a deep dislike and a sense of betrayal. He knew he was wrong; he felt that way nonetheless. He couldn’t help it. He couldn’t.

So what if they’d meet again in the future and reunite when they were ready? So what if waiting for the right circumstance was safer?

He had needed Kyren right there and then the most. And now—now it wouldn’t matter if Kyren came back, if he turned around from the dirt road he’d decided to walk and reached for Aster where he stood in quicksand to pull him out.

Aster traveled far from the lamppost and bench and the pink-blue sunsets of their origin, to settle near tall towers that hid the sun and busy roads drowning the songs of the few birds perched on scarce trees.

He let the crowded, cluttered roads and noisy strongholds cover up his existence and hide him as he wallowed. For months. He tried remaining consistent; he had to support himself, after all.

But for whatever reason, his heart didn’t feel like it had any rhythm left to it, and with no rhythm of his own mixing into the rhythm of so many others, he felt excluded. Alien.

It wasn’t as though Kyren had been all Aster held dear, yet he felt his absence so strongly, as if everyone he knew and cared for were solid living bodies, while he was a wisp of fog lurking in the cold corners of their lives.

Amidst the clamor and the throng, Aster drifted like a specter, a soul adrift in a sea of life. He clung to remnants of routine, working in a bookshop where musty pages whispered tales of lives unlived, returning each night to a room that echoed with the silence of Kyren's absence.

Memories of his lost love danced on the edges of his days, in the honeyed scent of baking bread, the silvery peal of distant laughter, the flash of chestnut in a crowd.

Aster sought solace in the pages of books and the quiet corners of the city, yet the solitude that had once been his refuge now felt like a hollow embrace. He joined circles of words and verse, but each fresh face only cast Kyren's absence into sharper relief. He poured his soul onto paper, weaving tales of love and loss with his pen.

As the seasons turned, gilding the city in their hues, Aster started to feel a new rhythm in his step. He began to recognize faces that turned up more than once or thrice at the bookshop where he stocked shelves.

Other lovers of books sought him out, asking his thoughts, trusting in his expertise. “Who would you consider the highest authority on the subject of Seren’s seers?” they might ask, or, “What do the histories tell of the wars between fairies and demons?” or, “Do you know anything of modern herb lore?”

And Aster would answer.

Somewhere, he knew, Kyren walked his own path, facing trials and triumphs all his own. And though their futures stretched out like uncharted seas, Aster clung to the hope that one day, when the time was ripe, their paths would intertwine once more, and they would trade tales of the lives they had lived apart. For now, Aster turned his face to the sun, letting its warmth suffuse him with the promise of new beginnings.

“Do you carry books on the town of Lud?” Someone asked him one day when snow had begun to drift from the heavens. The words transported him to the room above the bakery as though he could catch the scent of sweet potato buns with his next breath.

Beneath the glow of golden autumn leaves, he would return to the little town with the bakery and the lake, and wait for his former lover—the town that no longer held only memories of bitterness. He wished to rewrite the scenes and find his own melody in between its lines. He would walk on beneath a sky painted in the colors of a fading sun.