“I don’t fear death,” said Polypherous, “I fear not being able to say something original about it.”
As he sauntered across the freshly blackened road, its newly laid tar still odorous, to Quinit’s bakery on the corner of Beach Street, where the paving stones were still reddened by the blood of martyrs, and overflowing flowers in iron baskets bedecking the sills of tiny apartments filled with shouting boat-wives, hung like curtains, affording cool in the midday heat, he turned to Archegoron walking alongside, and asked him, “Do you fear death, Arch?”
“I do not,” replied his companion, “because death is unknown. You could draw your sword and fell me now. Or, and I say this with some justification, I could die in the arms of a temporally distant lover, my straining efforts too much for an ancient heart.”
“And that is the problem,” Polypherous said. “I have certainty, yet you have wonder. Does that wonder not stir an element of fear? Aren’t you scared of casting your line into a falling tide, and instead of pulling a full harvest of fish, you reel in slavering death?”
“For humans, that is the way,” Archegoron stepped to one side to avoid a pile of comarca-horse dung, and in so doing, stepped on a loose cobble, causing him to stumble to his knees. He looked up at Polypherous whose inhumanly quick reactions allowed him to snake out an arm and grasp Archegoron’s loosely flapping gown. “And that is my point. I could have pitched forward and struck my head on the kerb, dashing what little sense I have over Quinit’s clean forecourt. He would never have forgiven me and had I not received a fatal blow from the kerb-stone, I most certainly would have from the baker’s cutting board.”
“I suppose,” Polypherous said pulling a tentacle from the lower boundary of his third mouth, “that is our curse. Life is an adventure for humans. For we Freyd, standing outside the three dimensions in which you exist, we know from birth our destiny and our end. We have certainty and you have doubt.”
“It’s a blessing too, old friend,” Archegoron replied. His face fell into dripping sadness. Polypherous’s time was drawing near. “Without our urge to fill our lives with adventure, I would never have come here, never have crossed the stars, and I would never have found you, my love.”
“Enough of your sentiment,” Polypherous gargled warmly, an analogue to a human laugh. “We have bread to eat before I die.”
They bought their fill of Quinit’s best, and sat on the stones lining the dockyard, watching the pebble skiffs sail with their empty holds across glassy seas.
“I could tell you of your death,” Polypherous offered tentatively.
“I would rather not know.”
“Very well,” said Polypherous, reaching for his sword to end the life of his lover as was the secret custom of the Freyd, “that sadly, is MY curse.”
“I know,” Archegoron replied as he unknotted his breastplate.
