Julius Rosenthal will make candy no more and other short stories by Nicholas Russell (tools of titans ebook .txt) 📕

courage and stole his heart when he wasn’t looking. Even after all this time, when in the quiet moments, when he dared think of her, he lent her grace.

“Gatekeeper, may I come in?” The voice slipped through the room like the tide across a beach and pulled his dismal surroundings to a field of joy. Standing there basking in the luminous field he watched a cool breeze run its path across the field rustling the stalks along the way.

When the breeze overtook him he was reminded of the autumns of his youth. The air warmer than the frosts of winter, but still cooler then the heat of summer. It moved across his arm pushing each hair into the next and sending a shiver across his body. It was a simple sensation but he tried to hold it none the less. Most people would let it slip from their conscious thought. Not the gatekeeper; he held it as long as he could, sadly you can’t keep a feeling like that longer than it wants to be kept. No they slip from all of us leaving behind only the residual shiver of their passing.

With the sensation gone he turned his attention to the form before him, his beloved Liandra. Standing there she was more beautiful than the day he last laid eyes on her. “My love, I have missed you so.”

Unhindered by time or distance her voice was sweeter still; “My heart was fractured, seeing how they treated you.” She moved to her left and began to slowly circle behind him, her arm stretched out. Her hand comes within a whispers breath of his shoulder before she pulls back. The gatekeeper holds his stance, his mind going back to the final hours before his crossing, “That is in the distant past, we need not worry about that now.”

“I have arranged for us to be together.” With this the Gatekeeper began to turn, and for the faintest moment, time showed upon Liandra’s face. But only a moment as she keeps pace with him and does what she can to keep his back to her.

With sorrow in his voice he stops and lowers his head, “He would never release me from this realm. Once a soul is in his grasp, he is resolute.”

“He will release us I have his word, and once we are free of the pallor this place has cast upon us no one and nothing can keep us apart.” The pitch of her voice increased and her tempo quickened. With only the slightest falter she continued “Please I cannot stay in this place.”

He turned and cast his eyes away, despite the pains he had endured and the horrors witnessed. A simple tremble of fear in her voice blossomed fear in him. But fear was dangerous in this place; it quickly crossed the line to anger and anger held more power here than it did in the world before. Its strength could cloud the most pious of minds. “I have walked beside Death, and watched his sorrowed eyes as the fallen begged for him to undo his touch. Not with all the force of heaven could he undo it.”

She flinched at the word; no one here spoke of the other place. Not for fear it would garner the fiend’s wrath. “We would not need him too,” Her voice brightened the fear she felt before Gone replaced with the tiniest hope, for she thought she had found a hold to strengthen her position “He is bound by the rules as are we. Besides our bodies are long since returned to dust. But soon we will not be free of those rules.”

“All are bound by the rule of the light and the dark.”

“Not all my love.”

His voice thundered, and he lunged toward her, “You wish to become a Free Fallen?” Anger began to take control clouding his eyes and his mind. Liandra pulled away keeping herself just from his grasp “The Free Fallen are monsters that feast on souls to keep the strength.”

Her voice is frantic again, seeing her hope slip from her grasp, “They are monsters only as they are consumed by their hate. There would be no hate to destroy us; we can go where we please.”

“You’ve never seen one have you? They skirt the rifts between this world and the one before.” His eyes turned from the field, turned inward as memories flooded his mind. “You find them mostly in hospitals, they feast on souls of the dying. Occasionally they find their way to a battle field.”

“As I have told you we have no hate to consume us; we will be free.” In a panic she steps toward him, her hand reaching out and before she can pull it back the cuff of her sleeve brushes his back. She pulls it away but is not quick enough. The fabric begins to darken and crumble to ash. She grabs the sleeve and rubs it between two fingers as if she can will it to return.

“They are not monsters consumed or created by hate, but from the unbinding.” He turns back to her. He doesn’t see the sleeve she grasps only the eyes he has longed for. Eye’s that countless lie’s had taught her to mask. “Liandra, all things are bound by rules; they gain their strength from those rules. When a being separates itself from those rules, from that power, it has no strength to contain its form.”

Her voice snaps back in anger “You are wrong, he has told me the truth. They have great power.” Her voice begins to falter at the end. She turned from her lover and allowed her mind to wander for a moment. She thought back to the worlds she had seen and the truths she had learned. The truths were harder to remember when your mind was masked by the lies we all tell ourselves.

That mask was beginning to slip, and she could see him clearly now in her memories standing before her,