There is no journey back. Before you embark on your quest, you are tied up in the things of other people. Gifts. A borrowed sword, a dull-tongued bell, a favor. A glittering green sash, a loyal horse, a curse. These things wrap you warmly, they whisper, I know you will come back to me, whole and safe.
There is no journey back. Understand: It is most crucial that these things be stripped from you, one by one, painfully. This is the quest -- Not your destination nor your destiny, but this rack-stretched humiliation, this practicing of loss. Feel it over and over, prepare yourself for the last and largest.
It is essential that you lose everything, the earlier the better.
There is no journey back, and you start to realize this when you are laying in the mud, cold and soaked, your bright cloak dirty and heavy with water, you start to realize this when you picture the wind whistling through your skull right in this very spot a hundred years from now. You were pretending to be a knight, weren’t you? You were riding with your head held high on your quest, isn’t that right? And now you’ve cut your hand on your own sword, and you are hungry, and bleeding, and you want a drink, but you can’t go home like this. You walked away too proud to turn back now.
There is no journey back, and you feel this in your very marrow when you hoist the cursed axe again atop your shoulder and stumble through the night in a land stranger than any you had ever dreamed. It’s so heavy. It weighs exactly as much as your quest, and try as you might, you cannot rid yourself of it.
There is no journey back… It begins to feel familiar. You come to a place that is almost like home, but strange. You meet a woman who is almost like your lover, almost like your mother, if you just tilt your head. She needs nothing from you and will take you as she wants you, which makes her terrifying. In this house you are fed and safe and provided every comfort, which serves to remind you how unused to comfort you have become. Every lavish meal makes you feel like a lamb being fattened for slaughter. And you’re right. That’s exactly what you are.
There is no journey back. When you’ve practiced enough, you’ll know. Nothing will be taken from you. You’ll give it away, hands raised and head lowered, and it will feel like prayer.
There is no journey back. You are not the person you were before, the person who could afford to be careless and callow. If only you had known, before you left, that you would not be returning. Maybe there was something you could have said, someone you could have held more tightly, a little kindness you could have left to the world. But no, even if someone had told you, you wouldn’t have understood the way you understand now.
There is no journey back. You die here with your neck out, with your green sash stripped from you by your own hand. If anyone makes their way back home, it will not be the same person they all kissed goodbye. You wonder if anyone will notice.
Take a deep breath, knight, and see your quest completed.
