Green tried to will peace into all that endless winter of agonized hunger.
Yet, he knew he couldn’t make that choice for the outsider.
He could choose only for himself.
V. Blackwood: Journal 516, PG 64
It has taken me two months to write this entry. As a best practice, I prefer to write these accounts when the event is fresher in my memory. Still, I needed the time I needed.
I suspect no one who reads this will have met my apprentice, Mr. Green. I myself knew him a terribly short time and that time was marked by a string of tragedies. I have detailed those events in previous entries.
A tragic loss is like a lightning strike. In the moment, it is too fast to process with anything beyond instinctual reaction. It is too bright and sudden and absolute. It is a flash and then an emptiness. The real tragedy comes home to us as thunder, rumbling across the distance, that terrible roar of expanding air that shakes the world. The crack. The flash. These are just the birth of a new sorrow. The aftermath is what haunts and harms most acutely. That thunder can roll on for a lifetime. Sometimes, more than one.
I shall say that it speaks well of Mr. Green that the first rumble which followed his loss was, most of all, the rumble of kindness.
There was an outcry of grief from those few here who knew him.
There was a deluge of support from the cryptonaturalist community.
Seven colleagues responded to Ms. Rodriguez’s thoughtful and presumptuous broadcast asking for help on my behalf. They arrived early the next morning.
They were:
Juniper Gray
Max Dean
Laksha Patel
Angela Hall
Cat Stone
Jake Threepwood
Willow Armstrong
It was a large gathering by cryptonaturalist standards, though I was hardly in any condition to receive them. They were well-meaning and I was not hospitable. Max Dean broke the lock on my crawler tunnel shed when he arrived from Chicago and Jake Threepwood infuriated me by being both far too ill to travel and utterly unwilling to explain how he got here, but all of that aside, it was still good to see them. In retrospect, if not in the moment.
My injuries were grim. The past two months have been a painful process of sloughing skin and endless wound care. My face, hands, and feet are still a patchwork of raw pink and something resembling reptile molt. Still, I am sensible enough to feel fortunate. My body is healing faster and more completely than I had any right to expect. The Tree of Swans continues to shape my physiology in unpredictable ways. Though on the morning I limped back into camp with the aid of three teenagers, I was not ready to feel fortunate.
The end of the glass fawn’s influence made healing possible. Yet, in theshort term, the victory seemed primarily to make space for physical and emotional agony. The dead remained dead. The lost remained lost. Injuries were still injuries. Even so, our world continued intact, and I thought it a miracle that the young people who accompanied me sustained only superficial damage. Their psychological burdens may be a different matter.
Ms. Dancer was kind enough to summon an ambulance and deal with questions. I shunned medical care and the complications that would have accompanied it, but I paid a high price of pain and doubt for that decision.
The community members who arrived did the circuitous things people do to show support for a person in a time of suffering and mourning. They cleaned. They made too much food. They endured strained silences to keep me in close proximity to warm bodies.
At some point in my long life, I acquired the ability to shut down sadness when I chose.
At some point later, I acquired the wisdom to realize that sadness has its place and purpose.
What is there to say about Mr. Green?
What is there to say about his actions?
He sacrificed himself to save others. To save me. To save a knot of locals he barely knew and an untold number of strangers he would never meet.
His principles were stronger than his instinct for self-preservation. He picked up the glass fawn, stepped through the Hole in Nothing, and was gone.
