Episode 118: Heartache (Drey)

It was an exquisite day, the sort of day that made being dead feel more like being alive than life itself ever had.

Life was still overall preferable, but if one had to be dead, it didn’t get much better than this.

They left his bedroom hand-in-hand, heart-in-heart, all the trust and love in the world caught between them in this place that was meant to instill fear in the living. Really, it was just home.

Their children – Edyn and Ellysn, came to them in the little corridor between their bedroom and the main living space. Dying space? The portion of the multiverse in which Drey currently resided.

“Dads?” Edyn asked, far too uncertain to ever be the daughter of the Konrad Drey knew. “I finished my…this.” She held up a stained glass mosaic with a wolf and sheep and a little boy on it. Drey assumed that was what the various blobs were, given the story they’d based the art off of.

“Mine too!” Ellysn called, elbowing Edyn out of the way.

The two girls presented their tissue-paper stained-glass art blobs to Khale, who knelt down and studied them both with the critical eye of a father. “Already?” he asked. “You two are fast.”

“They’re well-done,” Drey said, from behind Khale.

“Did we get it right?” Edyn asked him.

The assignment had been to read a story and interpret it through art. “There was no way to get it wrong except to lie,” Drey explained. “We wanted to know what it meant to you.”

“So is it right?” Edyn asked again.

Drey was not meant for small children.

Khale, on the other hand, laughed and hugged Edyn. “It appears you read the book, yes.”

She beamed, an ear-to-ear smile spread across her face as her body rose to tiptoes. “May I do another one?”

“If you like,” Drey agreed. He began compiling a mental list of stories they could create interpretive art for.

After the girls ran off, Khale carried their artwork over to a window and hung it where the sunlight would catch the tissue paper just so. They spun on their strings, creating a slowly-moving array of colors on the walls of the room.

When he finished, he drew Drey into a hug-kiss ensemble of sorts, and tugged against him slightly. “Kendall?” he nudged.

“Kendall,” Drey agreed. They found the man just off the north face of the house, in his own room full of animals and wild things.

“Kendall?” Khale called to him. “We have a favor to ask.”

Kendall, as Nell’s father, also possessed the pixie ability to read minds. At the moment he passed his eyes between them and stood from the stool, setting a baby falcon on a tree he grew beside himself. “I don’t know that I’m the best choice,” he warned.

That sounded like a yes to Drey.

“It’s more trust than skill,” Khale pressed. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

“You don’t mind the pain?” Kendall asked, to make certain. Drey suspected that Kendall would have minded the pain a great deal.

“It will be easier than the pain of being separated,” Drey explained.

“And you?” Kendall asked Khale.

It was a tad absurd, given that all of them had died before. None of them was inexperienced in the matter of pain.

“I feel the same,” Khale assured him. He met Kendall’s eyes. “Will the pain bother you?”

“If it isn’t bothering you, it won’t bother me. Can I have some time to learn about it?”

Drey called in, from his massive library in the other room, his medical surgery book.

“I’d like to learn too,” Khale asked, so the three of them sat at a table they grew out of the ground, and studied the pages of the book.

With luck, Drey hadn’t misremembered anything when he made the chapter about hearts.

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