LOVE IN THE TIME OF TWILIGHT

Like most of them, this king too had three sons.  


The first was the heir to the throne, his destiny assured, his path chosen well before even he knew it--what of these things, the motivations, the guideposts of destiny, where did they come from?  Was his rebellion part of the path, required reading, say, in the lesson to become a man "just like what married me ma?"  Maybe he rebelled and fell so he could be redeemed; so he could return and make good what was bad, to make whole what was torn, to carry on the life's work of the master of us all.


The second son was the mystic, destined, as always, for the priestly arts.  He was the reader of leaves, the diviner of prophesy and of totems and harbingers.  He saw the clouds move in the sky and the ants move the earth below and saw too the connection.  He sat on a rock in the field and laughed at the rain and conjured spirits from smoke and grass.  He could watch patiently as the stars themselves spun in the heavens and saw there in the constellations the father and son and the spirit of theirs before them and of those too yet to come and he saw that life and the throne with the armies of all the nations and those of God Himself were at work and at rest all at once and forever.


The third was set aside and adrift to make his own way, provided for all but the path he might walk, let out the backdoor where the road never came into first the garden and then to the fields and beyond only wilderlands.  


In the garden was the flower tended by mothers, sisters and aunts, a single blossom of color and scent enticing but long ago forbidden, they fretted over it and revolved around it and he sensed there something of a source and of a beginning but forgotten.  It both called and repelled, inviting and careening him off with a message of both experience and of want, a desire to go and to find.  


In the fields nature flooded over a tide of gathering and release, an ebb and a flow, a sun and a moon.  Bug and bee like vapor on drafts of wind rivering through the air around him and hidden creatures scattering away from each footfall scurrying and teeming the brush like a pond wave concentrically.  


Then all life fell away as bush became tree and the sun clouded her face and the dark forest enclosed him.  Here his journey became months-long and monotonous and all-consuming.  His hunger a lust that overcame him as the ground bogged dead to mud and to mire.  Then, in the darkest part of the forest itself an ancient man was found submerged to the chest in the dark snaky waters praying in the olden tongue.  The trees all around inclined as if to hear the words he spoke and the man then turned and the third of three saw his own fathers face.


"The power of the throne derives from this unwholesome place and is delivered, you should know, by me to my own self in the palace-luminousa, back beyond the trees and fields and flower from whence you have come.  This...this is the dark secret that must never be known and can only be held proxy by the son of no consequence.  You must carry the burden as I have done before you and by doing so you will sink too in this place but take all the black to yourself.  See, I sink in the mud, my days are numbered down to single digits here, where the night comes every few hours."  


"I want to leave, I cannot watch you go nor do I want to take your place.  It is all to painful for me, I have not the strength."


"You have that and more.  You are the one truly me, can't you see?  I am not your father and I am not your brother.  I am you and you are me.  Our destiny is one as it always will be.  One day you yourself will again come down this path and you will again greet yourself not recognizing you as you do not recognize me.  And we, you and the I in you, will look upon him and tell him as I have told you.  But for now, take my hand, son, brother, and my own true self, and embrace me for I am finally fearful of the twilight,  afraid the mystery must consume me."


The third son held him and all was lost.  All of it.  He was son no more.