Page 17 of Outside the Veil
“Is it all like this?” Finn whispered. “These machine-plagued, overcrowded places? Dead boxes of steel and stone. The poisoned air. Is it all in ruins?”
He sounded so broken, so sick with grief, Diego’s confusion and misery evaporated. “There are wild places left. Beautiful places.”Probably even in Ireland.
“Are there? I wish I could see them…”
“You could fly away,” Diego suggested softly. “If I showed you on a map, could you find a place?”
Finn wiped his eyes, his laugh edging toward hysterical. “But that’s just what I tried to do. To fly away. I’m so weak. Every small effort exhausts me. I fell out of the sky. And crawled back to you.”
“I don’t understand. If you can’t even leave the city, how did you cross the ocean? Did you swim?”
“Not a bit of it. Saltwater doesn’t agree with me. I… What’s the expression? I stowed away.”
Diego considered this as he fetched a towel and knelt behind Finn to dry his hair. “Wasn’t the ship made mostly of steel?”
Finn shrugged. “Yes. If I were something small, a mouse perhaps, I thought I could hide among the wooden crates and do well enough. So much iron bearing down around me, day after day, crushing, stifling, choking the life spark from me.” He trailed off, fists clenched, breath shuddering. “Mother of waters, it was an idiotic thing to do. I don’t know how I survived, or why I tried so hard to after the first week. But I was desperate.”
“Desperate? Why?”
To Diego’s chagrin, Finn buried his face in his hands, his long frame wracked by sobs.
“Please… Oh, don’t do that…”
“I’m lost,” Finn wailed. “Exiled in this cursed, blighted world.” He whirled about to hide his face against Diego’s shoulder.
With a queasy feeling of borrowing trouble, Diego wrapped his arms tight around him and held on until the earthquake of sobs subsided.
“Now.” Diego tried to sound stern while stroking his back. “You’ve been ducking the question for days. What the hell happened when you came back to the world?”
Rather than answer, Finn pulled him down to lie beside him on the air mattress and settled his head on Diego’s chest. The physical contact seemed to calm him and his voice held steady when he spoke again.
“I woke to a draining feeling, as if the life bled from me. It was day, but something blocked the sunlight. Surfacing brought me through a layer of reeking black spread on the water’s surface. In my sleep, I had drifted to the river’s mouth, near the sea. Gulls and fish floundered in this inky horror, which clung to everything. I tried to save the ones I could reach but most were already dead, and I felt as if I were dying as well. A huge ship hove into sight, a long pipe hung from its side sucking up the black muck with no regard for what lay in its path. Gods only know how, but I gained the shore.
“By shifting smaller and smaller, I managed to roll in the sand to rid myself of most of the reeking mess. But I was terribly ill and lay there in the refuse and the reeds until the sun set. When I could move again, I tried the Veil. But the passage was closed, the human world cut off from the Otherworld. I called and called through the night but no one came. No one. Not even someone come to gloat.
“They are gone. I am all that is left.”
The theory, at least, was familiar to Diego. Celtic legends held numerous descriptions of the thin line between the world of humans and magical beings, which in the age of heroes seemed to have been permeable and easy to cross.
“Maybe they just changed the rules,” he ventured. “While you slept.”
“Perhaps.” Finn flung an arm around his waist and drew him closer. “There were those in the court who wanted to remove the passage entirely ever since the last retreat of the ice when it became clear humans would thrive and multiply. The Veil has become less and less…accessible over the centuries.”
“Hold on.” Diego stilled his hand, realizing he’d been combing his fingers through Finn’s hair. “Are you saying you’ve been around since the last Ice Age?”
Finn lifted his head and kissed Diego’s jaw. “Of course I have. You have as well, my hero, though I know you don’t recall now.”
No, he couldn’t be saying… Diego dismissed that line of thinking, able to deal with only so much in one afternoon.
“But someone should have come. To close the boundary and leave one of the Folk stranded…is unthinkable. But perhaps they were forced. Or thought me dead. I don’t know.” Finn heaved a shaky breath.
“So you got to shore and then what happened?” Diego prompted, to distract him.
“The fishermen’s huts were gone, replaced by huge blocks of steel and glass. Some of these spewed noxious vapors. I was stranded in a purely human world where, unchecked, the human tendencies to conquer and control had run rampant. Two choices, I told myself—lie down and die, or find out if truly all lay in ruins. I wasn’t ready to die. And unlike some, I have never held that humans are all senseless, evil savages.”
“Um, thanks for that.”
“You are more than welcome.”
