tain was theirs. They made it hell. Hell for us all. Their blood is mine, but I am not theirs. I am who I lead behind me. Vermin. Scum. Traitors to the factory. They danced, and I joined them. Doom came, and I saved them. I will keep them alive. The pinhole grows in diameter. The crevice narrows in turn. The heat from the damnation we escape dies away. There is no return. We have to survive. Our love must survive. Let it fade. We remain. Breathe. No space. Breathe. Crawl. Bleed. Crawl. Close. Wet. Cold. Crawl. Crawl. Crawl. Soon. Light. Growing. It grows. Rocks part. Water trickles. Moonlight shines. Wonder. I have to keep going. I have to keep going. I have to keep going. I HAVE TO KEEP GOING.
Snowfall. Blinding, pale moonlight against ice. It was a blur. First, the light grew faster than eyes could comprehend. Wind escaping the lungs, organs shoved to the roof of the spine, then replaced – into the cold I had fallen. Weight on one arm, then the other, faces nuzzled into my shoulder as they fell onto me. The lights in the great abyss above blurred in the flurry of ice. I breathed once, then again. Clouds of life drifted into the air, then vanished into the frenzy. Something tugged me to the right. Wolfram. He was hugging me, trembling. At first, I thought it was blood, and then I started shaking too. It was unbearable, the cold. It almost felt like hell, that cold, but hell was hot with coal and smoke, so heaven must have been mountain air. With my elbows behind me, I rose to sit. There was woodsmoke in the distance. I turned to it. The glow of warm flames blurs the squalls. They built it to hide the foundry inside the mountain, the only bit of the world I had ever seen. Pools of water heated by the excess fire from below. Were they still warm?
“ There, the hot springs,” I said,“ We made it, let’ s go.” No motion. They stood behind me, frozen.“ What are those?” Wolfram asked.“ What?” He pointed to the skies.“ Those, up there.” I looked up, my heart dropped.“ Those are stars, Wolfram.”“ Stars?”“ Yes. You’ ve never heard of stars?”“ No. I think they’ re rather lovely, though.” An inhuman tightness grabbed my chest.
Even I knew the stars. Grief. Relief, joy, and grief.
“ You can look at them all you want when we get warmed up. The springs are outside. Let’ s go.”
14 TEMPO MAGAZINE— SPRING 2025