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Only one man saw the figure on the ledge, high up on the building. Only one man happened
to be looking up at that exact time. Donny had been a drunk of most of his life, and he had
every intention of staying a drunk until the day he died, and that was one of the reasons he
saw the man.
He was leaning back at the mouth of an alley, leaning on his backpack and sleeping bag. He
had stolen them from a naïve college student about a week ago and had had to fight three
times to keep the treasures - but at the same time they allowed him to sleep where other
bums could not. With the super thick sleeping bag he could stay warm on the coldest of
nights, in the remotest of areas.
So he was reclining back catching a good buzz on the mad dog and a joint he had shared with
a hooker he knew on Jameson Avenue, not yet ready to go find someplace to crash but still
at that part of the buzz where he was deliciously alert - and he suddenly saw a slim man in
preppy clothes standing on the ledge of the big apartment building diagonally across the
block from him, eight, maybe ten floors up. Now, here was the odd thing - the man had not
been there just a second before when Donny's glance had last rested upon the building - but
now he was standing there just as casually as though he was on the sidewalk.
Donny would have sworn the man was not there before, and he was afraid even to blink now
for fear the fellow would disappear. He had heard of people having hallucinations and prayed
that this was not the case.
He did blink as the man stepped casually off, and cried out involuntarily, but the man was
still plummeting, gaining speed. Donny cried out again, and pointed, but he was the only one
that saw the slim man become cloudy, and almost . . . transparent, and he blinked again as
suddenly there was just the slightest trace of fog, whipped away by the wind. Other people
were looking at where he was pointing, but Donny knew - he knew he would be the only one
to have seen that, though he could not say why.
He got up and staggered away into the night, leaving behind his precious backpack and
sleeping bag, and he did not stop walking for three days.
Break
Thonos always breathed easier when he was in his library - he had books there that would
have made scholars have heart attacks, books preserved by ways that Thonos himself had
invented. Had he not, after all, been one of the original paper barons? What they used for
paper nowadays almost made him gag, and it was a bittersweet relief that almost nothing was
printed or published now that had any redeeming value. A gem here and there, but for the
most part dross, not worth his time or consideration.
Thonos smiled - of course he knew he was being judgmental, but he did not care. His opinion
affected no one but himself, and he had long since quit trying to talk people into his way of
thinking. He had learned that early in his long, long life.
He stopped in front of one book; it had a different look to it, and there was no writing on the
binding. If anything could be said to be magical in this world, it would surely be books; and
this particular book radiated the quiet power of age.
Were he to reach out and open it, were he to pull it from the shelves he would find the finest
hemp paper, the best paper that money could buy. The words were not standard type, but
rather copies of diary pages; the hand that the thin letters were penned in would be the
embodiment of grace.
Thonos touched the binding of that book briefly, but did not pull it from the shelves as he
often did. He was not in the mood tonight, and he knew the contents by heart anyway - the
pages, page after page of flowing script in a language long dead, were pages penned by his
first wife.
Shenna had been her name, twenty years before Idriates, twenty years before he had
fathered his children. He had come to love Idriates dearly, had loved her, he often thought,
as much as he had loved Shenna.
But she had not been Shenna, and he would never put the memory of his first wife aside. She
had died in childbirth, and she had taken with her to heaven the companionship of his unborn
son. A strange smile played itself across Thonos' lips as he thought of how many names he
had considered for his first child, and those not even girl's names. If his son had been a girl
Shenna would have named her.
But no name had been necessary, none of the hundreds he and Shenna had tried out on each
other, shouting them across the yard as though the unborn child were already playing past
dinnertime.
None of them necessary - no name, no child and no Shenna.
Idriates had been the next woman he slept with, the next woman he had fallen in love with,
and in the end the result had been the same but worse - for there was not tied up the love of
one person, but of three, Idriates and son and daughter. Not a mere mental image of what a
child would be, but the laughing, sweet faces of his children, named Shenna after his first
wife and Benote after his uncle, his children had been fully developing little minds, people
that he knew, and had not just imagined.
Thonos turned from the bookshelf, and went to sit at the window. He looked out at the
darkened back yard. The yard was a work in progress; for the eighty years that Thonos had
owned this house he had kept planting trees and bushes, kept installing fountains and
statues and flagstone walkways; small bridges spanned manmade streams, and trellis' hung
heavy with climbing roses and ivy, with the dark purple blooms of the morning glory. The
yard looked at times much larger or smaller than its two-acre expanse.
All in the expansive back yard was covered in shade of varying degrees - there were no
lights on in the back yard and the starlight was fitful, the moonlight almost nonexistent - but
Thonos could see all nearly as well at night as he could during the day.
Even the colors, even in the velvet grip of night were remarkably close, just not as vibrant.
There was none of the washed out grays that most people see when the cloak of night falls,
but colors that pulsed with just a bit less life than if the sun were shining upon them.
Thonos did not know how that was so, just as he did not know how the Malavide did many of
the things they did - but it was an immutable fact nonetheless. A fact that the few scientists
who numbered among the Malavide had not studied to any great degree.
Thonos' dark eyes were depthless. He saw everything that was in the garden, but at the
same time he saw none of it. He shut his eyes, and imagined once again what it would be like
to see darkness - true darkness, where you can see more with your eyes closed than with
them open, when your open hand cannot be seen a foot from your face, for that balm was
denied him when he had never even thought about it before.
It was just one more example of Thonos' humanity, long since dead. He could not remember
when he first felt that he missed the sensation of darkness. It was something that had been
taken from him, and now it was one of his biggest regrets.
He remembered the last night he saw the denseness of shadow, the washed out colors of a
moonlit evening.
He remembered the night he met ahk'Tabur.
Break
The glow of his house behind him lit his steps ahead, his house that he had built with his own
hands, with the help of his neighbors. Built with his own hands, his own spirit - the house
represented a new beginning for Thonos, a beginning that Shenna had promised him to make.
But now the house was burning, and had been for over an hour. It was a big house, and
burned all the longer because of that. Thonos no longer cared. On that night, when he was
thirty-eight years old, Thonos cared for nothing.
As he sat in his expensive leather chair, thousands of years later and thousands of miles
away Thonos remembered everything about that night in horrifying detail.
He had arrived home from Tenestia, a town where he had business dealings. He had left his
house as always under the care of his dearest friend, Sorba Lentenin. His wife, his two
children - they were Thonos' world, and Sorba knew this. Sorba would do anything for
Thonos - they had saved each other's lives more times than either cared to count
Thonos found Sorba that afternoon lying a half a league from his house - the nearest
neighbor was almost three leagues further away, and for a long time he did not realize what
the pile of rags lying in the road was - then realization came like a hammer blow, and he
turned his dearest friend over.
Sorba was almost unrecognizable. Thonos had seen enough of war to know that his friend
had been ridden down, by horse and chariot; that he had been mutilated beyond that.
Thonos laid his friend by the side of the road, and steeled himself for what he knew he would
find. A great blackness welled up inside the breast of Thonos as he traveled the last distance
to his house, to Idriates and his children.
A great blackness, so that he could do what he had to do.
He ignored the wounds on his family as best he could; he arranged them in the great room
that had been Idriates favorite room because of the afternoon sun, and then he had set the
house on fire - and the brighter the flames burned the darker his despair became, the darker
the blackness that was gripping his soul and his heart.
He set his back to the blaze, wandered away in the gathering dusk. The long fall grasses
brushed his legs, but he paid no attention to where he walked - he only knew that he walked
uphill, that as the darkness took over he could see the glow of the fire reflecting off the
grasses and trees which lay before him.
The reflections became dimmer, and dimmer, and Thonos fingered the knife at his belt. He
wished he had the strength, or the weakness perhaps to end his own life. But as much as he
wanted to sink the slim blade into his vessels, as much as he wanted to join his Idriates and
his children he could not; he could not even seriously consider it.
With what seemed like the last of the glow from the burning house behind him he saw a
short, stooped but somehow graceful figure step from behind a clump of Joshua trees. The
man was dressed strangely, in a short coat and breeches instead of the normal toga or
flowing robes.
He had light colored hair and a pale face. As the moonlight took over the man stepped
closer, and Thonos wondered as he drew his knife whether this was one of the bandits.
He put that thought aside almost immediately. Whatever this man was, he had not come to
kill Thonos. He spread his arms out, and his old, lined face gazed solemnly at the grief
stricken man.
"Do you want the ones that did this, Thonos?" the old man asked. "I tried to stop them - I
killed three of them, but there were to many, and trained well as soldiers. Your friend killed
one, which is better than most could have done. I can show you where they are, though" the
old man said. "I can show you where they are, and I can give you the power to kill them and
their kind. We can both go through them with not much problem now."
Thonos looked up at the old man out of wide, dead eyes. His soul, his heart was swallowed
by the darkness that had first overtaken him when he saw his friend lying in the road. That
darkness demanded sacrifice of heart, sacrifice of soul and happiness. That darkness
demanded of Thonos everything.
"I will do anything," Thonos said, and his fate was sealed.
ahk'Tabur, the oldest of the Malavide, ahk'Tabur, who had been old almost beyond
reckoning when the idea of Greece was still not founded, stepped forward through the
darkness; he stepped forward to tear apart and rebuild. He would do as he had said; he
would allow Thonos to find and kill those that had taken his family, them and those like
them. He had not told Thonos everything yet, and he would not for years to come.
He stepped forward, and ripped from Thonos the thin shred of humanity.
He stepped forward, and another Malavide was born; and thereafter Thonos would never
know what it was like to walk uncertainly in the dark.
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| The Malavide - Chapter Two |