The Man Who Fought the Dawn They thought him drunk, the drunken man by the lot on Amfort street where four story homes loomed upwards like skyscrapers. He sang like a drunken man. He danced like a drunken man. They told us to keep away. Keep away. Stay away. Yet there was a glimmering sense of soberness in his eye; a touch of something– something that seemed so real, so earnest, so alive and conscious that in no way could he be of the half-living. His air– what was it? He left no mark but the air that he breathed, yet he sang for the world to hear him, sang as if his father had come home from Lahmorse untouched, as if there were a steady drum beating the dawn out of every day of life– as if his singing would stop it. He danced as if he were on a stage, but that was only on good days. On bad days he was silent. Silent. Like the factons in the meadow, the ones who were too silent for you to see. The ones we hunted after when we were young, the ones we never caught. The man himself. He was a facton. Nothing more. Just a smudge. A smudge of jubilant darkness in the world. He gloated in his darkness. He gloated in the shadows. They fought to remove him. Remove him from the light. One day I looked down and saw his shadow. His shadow, not far away. They said to run. Run, run, run to your mother. What would she do? Sing me to sleep? Sing you to wake? What is a mother when youth ceases to be? But there was he, glaring at the light, at the dawn with such arton in his eyes that I feared not. I was a shadow. The other. The phrygian speck of something else. He was nothing, nothing more than a man who longed to sing the double thirds of a g sharp minor scale with only one voice. He wanted to fly without wings, to dance without a stage. There was nothing more. The shadow remained. And then, when all was silent, he began to speak. He spoke. I thought him mad then. His mind seemed a void to me, a void of nonsensical words. Then what were mine? And then– I listened. His drunken slurs, his gibberish, maybe, was it something? He spoke. Spoke of crayfots and linetesses on summer evenings. ​Aline, ajorish thon glydis, ​he mumbled, then sang. Sang. What were those words? They were shadows. Shadows on a summer evening. I listened. Then I feared. And then, when all was silent, I walked away. When I returned the lot was empty. They took him on a Friday, or perhaps it was a night. Or perhaps at dawn, when he glared at the sunrise, when his eyes were a void of darkness. Darkness in the dark. Then he was nothing. Nothing but a shadow in the night. I awoke that night. I could hear his words. His words, echoing through the streets, through the hills, the words of the crazy man on Amfort street… or was it us who were the ones with no mind? ​Aline, ​he had said. What had he meant? ​Aline, ajorish thon glydis. ​Nothing more. Simply… words. Words of drink, they had said. Or were we the ones who were drunk, not from drink but drunk on war, on life? I could hear his voice, floating through the dawn. I raced to the lot. It was empty. Somehow I knew it would be. But even when the man was gone, even when he was nothing but a blur, a blur between reality and something more, even then, I heard his voice. What were those words? The truth? They said you could not grasp it. Not ever, not more than a moment. But sometimes, when I heard sinetus in the breeze, when I heard the ahmrots cursing below the ground for a land that never came to be, sometimes, when the sunlight came and shook us out of the darkness, the glydis we could never ajorish, sometimes when the dawn came… I glared too.