At Dusk
The sun withdraws its weight from the Carpathians, and the world below the battlements begins its slow descent into the mercy of the dark. From this height, I watch the smoke from the village hearths thin into the grey air. It is an hour of closing. I can almost hear the latches being turned and the soft thud of wooden bolts. The peasant and the labourer lie themselves down.
There is a profound loosening that occurs in that hour. It is a physical yielding to the gravity of the day’s end. The living allow themselves to be pressed into the earth of their beds. They go to a place where they are no longer required to be. They cross a threshold where the will is surrendered, and the self is set down.
I watch this folding of the world, but I do not share in it. My eyes do not grow heavy. The approach of the dark is not a beckoning, but a demand. As the world retreats into the sanctuary of the unconscious, I find the interior of my mind growing sharper. The dark does not bring a veil; it brings a clarity that is itself a form of labour.
While they drift into forgetfulness, I remain on the shore. I watch the tide of the night rise with a cold and perfect wakefulness.
Under the Lid
When the morning light drives me back to the narrow confines of the earth, I arrange my limbs in the posture of the dead. My breath is a thin thread. The stone above me is absolute in its weight. To any witness, I would appear to be at rest.
But there is no rest.
The inner watch does not falter. Even as the heart slows, the mind remains at its post. I stare into the absolute gloom of the lid and note the crawl of the minutes. I do not drop away. I find no floor to this stillness, no depth in which to submerge and disappear. I remain entirely here, a witness to a silence that offers no reprieve. I notice the precise texture of the grit beneath my palms and the slow, cold condensation on the stone. I could, perhaps, stop noting them.
I hear the muffled movement of the earth and the distant tolling of bells. It is a suspension, not a restoration. I am held in a breathless interval, like a stone caught at the apex of a throw. I am motionless to the eye, yet taut with a momentum that refuses to conclude.
The hours pass, marked by the coldness of the stone and the hollow ache of a body that is still but never settled. I do not wake when the sun sets; I resume the posture of movement. I carry the same leaden weight into the air that I brought with me into the soil.
Through the Night
The movement of the night is not a journey toward a destination. It is a series of maintenances. When I move through the darkness, it is to gather the means to continue the movement itself. My mind does not settle into the current moment. It is already reaching for the next, calculating the fuel required for the coming hour.
The feeding is an exacting labour. Hunger implies a cycle that can be satisfied, a belly that can be filled so the mind can turn elsewhere. This is something else. It is the mechanical fuelling of a flame that yields no warmth. It provides only more light by which to see the work ahead.
I move through the proximity of others not to be known, but to sustain the machinery of my own endurance. It is a functional requirement. To stop is not to find peace; it is merely to wait for the next necessity to manifest.
Even in the deepest quiet, I am listening for the requirement. There is a vibration in the marrow, a humming wire of activity that never goes slack. I am a clock that does not run down. My gears turn with a dry, grinding persistence even when there is no face to tell the time.
When I Was Mortal
There was a time when the name Vlad III was spoken with the weight of steel, and my life was defined by this same hardness. Even then, the eyes were fixed upon the horizon. I scanned for the movement of the Turk and the shifting of the wind. I was a man of the watch-fire and the saddle. I remember the weight of the hauberk upon my shoulders. My spine was a rod of iron that refused to bend.
I lived then in a state of perpetual vigilance. I believed that hardness was a tool. I told myself that if I could only secure the borders, I might finally earn the right to turn inward and cease. I treated the light of each day as a thing to be endured for the sake of a future peace. I waited for the moment when I would be allowed to soften.
I believed that exhaustion was a debt that would eventually be forgiven. But the habit of vigilance becomes the thing it guards. I was training myself for this continuity of the very thing I hoped to escape. The soldier does not die; he simply does not dismount.
After the Change
The transition to this state was not a sudden change of nature, but a vanishing of the limit. As a mortal man, the body eventually enforced its own stopping point. No matter what the will demanded, the flesh would eventually fail. The eyes would burn, and the limbs would grow leaden. The mind would collapse into the blackness of fatigue. The body would simply refuse to go further.
Death, too, was the final boundary. It was the ultimate promise that the hand would eventually let go of the sword.
But I have moved away from that habitual failure. I have traded the cycle of the seasons for a line that does not bend back upon itself. I have lost the frailty of the flesh, but I have lost the impulse to give way. I do not fall. I do not faint into the dark. I do not reach the bottom of my own weariness. The capacity to collapse is gone, yet the ground remains solid beneath me, waiting to receive a weight I no longer know how to release.
Instead, I carry it with me. It is a weight that is never set down. It has long since ceased to be an emergency and has instead become the climate of my existence. The struggle is no longer to achieve, but merely to remain upright in the wind.
At Dawn
The light outside the vault begins to change. The deep blue of the night is giving way to the grey promise of the dawn. The world is beginning to stir. I can feel the shift in the pressure of the air as the world prepares to wake.
I lie now as the sun climbs. The earth beneath me is familiar, yet it offers no embrace. My heart is a ghost of a rhythm, a dull thud in a hollow chamber. I am exhausted in a way that sleep cannot touch. The stillness is absolute, but the mind is a tireless thing. It is already counting the steps of the coming dark.
The hinges of the lid are oiled and silent. I could reach up, thrust the heavy wood aside, and allow the morning to flood this narrow space. To meet the sun directly is a boundary written into my condition. Or I could simply stop. I could loosen the grip of my awareness, letting the spine slacken against the silk and the eyes dim of their own accord. The darkness here does not forbid surrender.
I do not move. I watch the seam of the lid where the light is a thin, white thread.