Strolling Through Starlight – 225

Scene: The city’s lamps fade into starlight as their world begins to fold back into Molly’s unseen realm.

Dearest Mary,

The evening ended as gently as it began. Claire and I left the tavern beneath a sky that seemed older than the stones of Edinburgh. The air had that peculiar stillness that belongs only to the hours between history and dream.

She took my arm—not from affection alone, but from a sense that the world itself might tip beneath us if we walked apart. The cobblestones glistened with the day’s rain, reflecting the lamps like fragments of a broken constellation. Every sound—the wind through the wynds, the clatter of a distant coach—seemed to echo twice, once in this century and once in ours.

I remember quoting a line I had written long ago, half to myself:

The desire of the moth for the star, of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar from the sphere of our sorrow.

Claire smiled and said the stars here seemed nearer than sorrow.

Then came the tremor—the faintest hum, as if the very air had drawn breath. The street tilted, the lamps dimmed, and the edges of things began to unmake themselves. I saw her face lit for an instant by a light that was not of this age—soft, colorless, forgiving. She whispered my name, and the word stretched like silk through a wind that was no wind at all.

And then—silence. The world folded shut.

When next I opened my eyes, we were home.

Ever yours,
Percy Shelley