The Dawn of Julian
Bellamy Blackwell Journal Entry
December 1st1821
When a great love dies, a billion hearts stall.
It amazes me that every single one of those hearts live within my own. It feels as if I have an endless number of lifetimes pressed into every pulse. Every second without her, an excruciating reminder. Some may say I have even become melodramatic in my misery. However, this is my misery and my misery alone. How dare anyone tell me the extent of my pain. How I should feel or continue to go on when going on feels like torture to me. Any thoughts you spend on your beloved, for I spend a thousand times more on mine. Tell me I am wrong, and I will offer my chest for you to rip my heart from my bones so you can see. While you have it, go on and cut into it, grant me the freedom of this heartache. I dare you, and then be gone with your self-righteous notions about how I should feel during a time I wish to feel nothing.
Half of me has filled with hatred toward my father. I can hardly stand to look at him, and I cannot leave either, as I have tried. The other half of me is gone. Nothing is there anymore. All I can do is waste my sleepless nights lying at her grave, where her ashes are all that remain. From dusk to dawn, I am awake and talking to the moon like a madman. And my days, I am the very monster her death has made me become.
My love for her is unconditional, and I hold on to it for as long as I can so that the darkness cannot take me completely, but I feel as if I am losing myself. I am slipping into the comfort of the dark and shadows and the blackest depths of the earth. Nothing can warm me, not even the sun. The regret I live with is for not trying harder, not fighting harder. Oh, if I could go back in time, choose her over everything! If I could reverse time, I would have seen our love from an artist’s point of view as I should have all along.
Father says her last words were of a curse, and to that, I say, I am already cursed! I am cursed for the rest of my days because I should have broken every chain to get to her! I should have burned with her at her side! To know she died believing I have given up on us or have chosen a different path haunts me and will only continue to do so past this lifetime and in every single one hereafter. If only she knew, the entire world could not love as much in eternity as I could in a day.
It is deep down inside me where the curse lives. I can feel it woven in with my shadow-blood. It will live there and pass along to every son, I am sure. The only way to rid us of our curse is to choose love, yet how can it be when my love is not here? You are not given love, for it is not a right! Love is a privilege, and what have any of us done to deserve it? It is my hope the curse is as real as my pain, and it inflicts on every Heathen hereafter, and I want no one to escape it.
They are of formidable beauty, both of them, love and death. Within them lies their immortality. Therefore, there will be no cure for the curse, none that a loveless creature can see. They do not know that the moon in my black sky has died all alone, and the only way was for us to exist as one, or decease together.
They do not know that the answer also lies within me.
Chapter 50
Julian
Twenty feet away,Fallon was standing there, facing the sunrise at the cliff’s edge, looking at it differently than all the other times I’d seen her look at it. And the sun was rising differently this morning too. Its pale purple and pink shades spilled into the sky and bathed us in its colors.
In Weeping Hollow, no two sunrises were the same. No two sunsets either. But this morning, it seemed to be three sunrises in the same sky. A lavender and pink one out in front of her, and then just below it, another with a heartbeat—one that was alive and breathing and bleeding across the horizon, covering the town in its bloodshed. The sky was so big and forever changing that sometimes it was hard to believe it was real at all. That it wasn’t a painting. That she—my third sunrise—wasn’t a painting.
I stood behind her, off to the side, looking at her the same way she was looking at the sky. White hair. Pearly skin. Dusty pink lips. The winter season in her eyes. She was cold-blooded, but,my god, she was a nocturnal rainbow.
Above us, gulls circled, searching for scraps. Around us, the wind whistled in our ears. I kept my attention on her, my throat thick with fear, and my heart going a million miles per second.
Fallon took a step forward, and my muscles jerked under my skin.
I took a step forward, too, calling out to stop her. “A bitch-bitch?” I asked, trying to keep my nerves at bay, this intruding emotion building in my chest.
Fallon whipped around, her eyes wide. I wanted to take another step to her, but I didn’t want to press her further.
Keeping our twenty-foot separation between us, I continued, “That’s what you were going to leave me with? Do you realize the lengths I’ve gone to get here? I went against my coven, broke into someone else’s chamber, was de-monsterized—not de-humanized—de-monsterized!Then I had to be locked in a cell for six days to find out you couldn’t just let it go, could you? You’re so damn stubborn, you couldn’t let me do this for you! You have to take that away from me too, huh?”
Fallon stood frozen at the edge of the cliff. Seconds stretched out with the sound of the waves crashing against the rock at the bottom. I wanted to run to her, but I was so afraid of what she would do.
Instead, I held my arms up at my sides. “If I knew it was going to come to this, I would have just told you everything to avoid all the shit I’ve been through. We could have ended up here together days ago, Fallon!” I was screaming now, my chest aching at the thought of her willing to sacrifice herself for me! A monster!
And she still hadn’t moved. She just stood there, staring at me as her white hair blew around her. I dropped my arms, gripped my sides, gathered a breath. I ran my agitated fingers through my hair, unable to think straight, trying to hold back these tears threatening to explode. All my senses were on fire, and I didn’t know how much I could bear.
I pointed at her, taking another hesitant step forward. “You’re the only thing I’m good at. And protecting you was theonething I could do to show you—” I stopped, words caught in my throat. Saying them felt like a goodbye. I never wanted to say goodbye. My hand dropped, my arm now hanging at my side. I was looking at her, terrified.
She was looking at me, still surprised I was here. “To show me what?” she asked in a shaky whisper.
Our glances battled back and forth, until tears arose, and we found ourselves crying. “To show you that Ichoseyou. That I fucking loveyou!” I snapped, a blur in my gaze as I latched on to her glassy eyes. My chest was heaving, feeling the end near, the pressure weighing heavier. I slapped the back of my hand with my other palm. “My god, Fallon, I’m in love with you. Always have been! And I’m certain that I loved you a thousand times before as I do now, and I hope to love you a thousand times again. That’s it! That’s all there is to it.” I threw my hands up at my sides, taking another step forward. “Because that’s the point of us, isn’t it?!”
“No, Julian, stay back.” Her tear-streaked face shook back and forth.
I took another step forward. “You don’t have to do this. It’s not the way.”
“Yes, I do,” she cried, nodding and sniffling. “I have to end this. Me! They’re going to burn you! And even if they still burn you, if this is not enough, the Heathens will always be seen as monsters! The town will always live in fear! It will never end, Julian. Never! Not unless I do something about it, and after you’re gone, I have nothing left to lose. Let me fix this! I have to fix this!”
