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Love’s merciless: the way it travels in
and keeps emitting light.
(Kim Addonizio, “Stolen Moments”)
Last week it was the parapet. One quirk of living with an ancient shapeshifter was that nothing could technically contain her. Nimona had crashed through it in one of her accidents, while turning into a rat phasing up into a tapir and then a small wyvern.
Since her return to the land of the living, she’d liked exploring and playing with the bounds of her ability, transmogrifying herself into new lifeforms, in what she called her Animal of the Week demonstrations. She was still the only known shapeshifter in the world, and revelled in that power. But she sometimes got carried away.
Ballister had moved in with Ambrosius by then. It was going smoothly—Ballister was priding himself on repairing and restoring the old summer house and grounds they received—and he was taken aback when he discovered a small pile of rubble and an animal-shaped hole in its perimeter one drowsy afternoon.
“Nimona! What are we going to tell Ambrosius?”
Ballister pointed at the pile of broken bricks, which looked more sorry for themselves than Nimona herself did. Nimona had been lounging nearby, proud-sultry, grooming her scales and claws in the gold-coin sun as if nothing had happened.
“Uh-uh. Don't worry your pretty little head about it.”
“I don’t suppose there’s been a new creature scurrying around our home.”
“For the record, I think it was a fireball from the sky.” Nimona flashed a grin at him. Two perfect rows of serpentine teeth. “Ambrosius’s friends at the old Institute have been getting, shall we say, jumpy.”
Her creative deflection didn’t work. “Nimona. I know you well enough.”
“Fine.” Nimona drew out the word, sighing long and deep. Her body undulated with the slow wave of her mock exasperation. “I might have forgotten that your homes are built for humans, not creatures like me. Please forgive my sin of having fun.”
“Oh Nimona, that’s not what I meant.” Ballister softened. “You’re free to roam and take any shape you like. Houses can be rebuilt. You just have to tell me if something’s broken.”
A pause stretched between them, ripe with meaning and unsaid history; Nimona blinked for a few seconds, wide-eyed, her pupils shining in the hay-gentle light. “You’re not mad?”
“No. Why would I be?” Ballister raised a brow and smiled; his voice turned conspiring. “What’s the fun if none of your accidents happen? I just need to know what to say to Ambrosius. It can stay our secret.”
“Right, boss,” Nimona agreed, “Ambrosius’s your problem to handle anyway,” and dipped down from her perch, walking up to Ballister’s side.
Ballister had stood with his two feet spaced apart on the untidy grass, prosthetic hand reaching out for a shake with Nimona’s paws. A cloud came over, and drifted past again. When the sun surfaced again, benevolent fingers climbing and parting through the brief gloom, Ballister stood in its spotlight, looking for a moment like a figure of the new age, the routes of change unfurling across the valleys and rivers and lush forests beyond their home. Nimona’s throat caught, briefly, with a jangle of emotion.
Then Nimona shook herself free of sentimentality, and gave him a head-bump against his back. They headed back into the house together: a disagreement patched without violence, their equilibrium restored. All was well with the ties between humans and a shapeshifter in their humble abode.
The old kingdom was now a republic.
After the downfall of the Institute—after the dust of the Director’s old rule had cleared, with new veins of exchange and commerce and open-mindedness sprouting forth in its place—the old status quo of hatred for monsters and the outside world no longer had a place.
So Ambrosius tracked down Ballister, with a search radar and several eloquent apologies in hand. They had much to talk about.
The last time they’d spoken, down in that off-street pub, the poisonous reach of rumour and the Director’s prevailing monster bounty had marred Ambrosius’s trust in Ballister. Snapped away all space for dialogue. But now Ambrosius sent Ballister letters, cards, even flower bouquets, right to the various inns and hideouts Ballister rotated himself around.
Ballister was now dodging the enthusiastic arrow-falls of attention from journalists and newfound groups of anti-Institute fans, and wary of rejoining the knights to boot. But every note and message repeated the same two lines at the end. Please hear me out, I’m sorry, and more plaintively: I’ve missed you.
Ballister, to his annoyance but also secret relief, was more forgiving of Ambrosius’s persistence than he thought, as he grasped those notes and letters. He read over Ambrosius’s familiar penmanship every time, sifting out the dark ink-spots that told him of where Ambrosius had hesitated as he wrote his sentences, his budding regret making itself known in a shaken pointillist cipher only Ballister would have understood by heart.
His resentment turned out to be more finite, temporary, easy to let go of than he ever imagined: more a brief blip, a stab or pang, than a long-burning ember. So Ballister penned a reply to the tenth letter he got, agreeing to see Ambrosius.
They met again at a cafe, sitting this time outside beside a trellis with a bursting riot of daffodils and violets, on two patio chairs. Once in a while a waiter or gangly teenager strolled past, did a double take at the republic’s two famous men of the moment having tea together, and promptly hurried on again, apparently deciding to grant them the mercy of privacy.
Ambrosius was still the handsomest man he knew, as Ballister feared, with his glossy hair and refined posture. His swordsman’s hands wore hard-earned callouses from a hundred sparring sessions but stayed ever gentle and steady for cradling a fresh cup of tea, despite their deftness with a blade. Ambrosius was penitent, and patient. Ambrosius still had the breathless rise of optimism behind his warm dark eyes, which Ballister fell in love with in a more uncomplicated age. Ambrosius was more sorry than he could ever say for Ballister’s missing arm.
It occurred to Ballister: he was willing to let go of their bad blood.
Not as a forgettance of history, a ruthless effacing of old pains, but the desire to make something new of them. He had taken many long thoughtful walks after Nimona’s disappearance, which helped thaw the coldness that’d gathered in his chest around the time the Director kicked him out.
Besides, here was something Ambrosius didn't know: Ballister had been plagued by many sorrowful dreams—bad dreams—where Ambrosius spurned him forever, and they never made up. The worst case scenario in every instance.
It was impossible, if Ballister thought about it—which he had in his many hours spent hiding from society—for him to overstate how much he’d missed Ambrosius, much like a ship left moored on a rocky island, all direction and purpose suddenly uprooted. Ambrosius had rooted himself in his soul for a long time, and left a longing he could never satisfy, deep in the throes of his irrepressible heart, his once-innocent anatomy. At the height of their separation that longing felt like an open crack in his coalstone and iron-scrubbed armour he was doomed to carry like a fatal—fated—flaw until he could make amends with Ambrosius again.
Perhaps it was natural then that, halfway through Ambrosius’s second explanation of how Ballister owed him nothing, Ballister reached across the table to stop him with a gloved hand on his palm.
“You don't have to say any more.” Ballister breathed. “It’s just good to see you again, Ambrosius.” He meant it.
Ambrosius’s face cracked open in surprise, mouth parted and laughter lines around his eyes curling up—with pensive relief, guilt, happiness, gratitude, an entire kaleidoscope of emotion reeling across his features. Ballister’s whole gaze narrowed to the details of his expression, for a second.
“Ballister,” he breathed.
Ballister nodded, and didn’t remove his hand, in that harbour of silence on that honey-glowing afternoon.
Neither of them spoke for a while, letting their eyes meet and communicate everything for them. Quietly, Ballister felt his heart-strings mending.
Ballister had assumed that Ambrosius didn’t miss him while they were apart. There was too much going on, with the Director’s plot, and Ballister was an outcast, a vagabond. Ambrosius must have been contented, up in the ivory tower of the Institute, without the thorn of Ballister’s presence in his side. Ballister told himself this and many other self-immolating lies, back at the very start when things went wrong, and then he tried to distance himself from his feelings while seeking refuge at Nimona’s hideout.
But he could see now he was wrong. “I couldn’t eat or sleep a wink without you,” Ambrosius told him on their first night back together, brows furrowing.
They had a lot to catch up on, a great expanse of memories both fond and morose to retrace. They whiled away the hours together that night resting under the night-sky’s tapestry of stars, holding each other’s secrets in the intimate breadth between their arms, the comforting bedrock of their chests and shoulders. Ballister soon reminisced: it was as if they had snuck out from their dormitories in the past again, stealing moments to watch the sky and ponder a life together.
“I asked myself countless times: what if the Director was wrong?” Ambrosius confessed, resting with his face next to Ballister’s, conviction shining in his eyes. “I thought—you wouldn’t have done something like that. You couldn’t.”
“But what if I had?” Ballister challenged gently. What if I wasn’t innocent?
Ambrosius contemplated this, humming a thoughtful tune. At last he said: “I’d find a way to understand you again.”
I can accept that, Ballister thought.
Their lives had been uprooted, Ambrosius’s more than his in some ways. Ballister was conscious of this. Gloreth’s grand story of monster-hunting had been revealed for what it was: exactly that, just a story for her descendants. But there was no sense in comparing their pains. They were both orphans, Ambrosius a spiritual one and Ballister one in the material sense.
But Ambrosius was adapting well to the reshuffling and dismantling of the knights’ order, pioneering part of the change himself at the old Institute.
Ballister touched his hands to Ambrosius’s face, and beyond, over and over again. Nothing broke; nothing was soured; and there was only wonder left over afterwards, in Ambrosius’s hopeful grin, his reverent eyes glancing up at him.
Soon after, Ambrosius’s contacts at the old Institute gave him a house.
They agreed to share a room together without hesitation. They planned together how to split an armoury, a library, and a digital smithery. It was something Ballister hadn't had before—a space of his own.
He liked developing a routine at home with Ambrosius. But most of all, he liked being able to come home to Ambrosius every single day, and talk to each other about their days, spinning new jokes and tales of their mundane lives passed in steady splendour.
To Ballister’s secret delight, Ambrosius could still be persuaded into a good cuddle. Some things had stayed the same.
Their favourite days for it were those long and pitiless ones spent training in the public courtyards or testing out the Institute’s new non-lethal tranquilisers. No more anti-monster weapons, the latest city campaign had announced. A new age is coming. Like Ballister remembered, Ambrosius’s muscles could get tender when he forgot to rest, and Ballister spent evenings at Ambrosius’s place rubbing healing salves into his shoulders.
“I’m lucky that you’re—ow!—so good at this,” Ambrosius told him once, as Ballister attacked a stubborn knot around the junction between his neck and shoulders.
“I had to diversify my talents while in hiding,” Ballister quipped back.
He loved tracing his hands gently over Ambrosius’s collarbones and touching his palm to his steady heartbeat, that unshakeable core of him. What his body still recalled in muscle memory, in affection and their language of kindness. But of course. If he and Ambrosius had it once, they could find it again.
Always, his boyfriend’s hair took on a pleasing quick-golden hue in the moonlight, not unlike a stream of luminous leaves under the stars. He would close his own eyes, intertwine their hands together as they slept in cotton shirts, unself-conscious again at dressing down before each other, and doze off to peaceful sleep. Their past ease with each other slowly being restored through the nightly ritual of falling asleep together.
Their bed wasn't designed for two people to sleep in, and it was a little creaky, but Ballister was happy with it. He coached himself to sleep on the left side, so that Ambrosius could have the lion’s share of the bed. Ambrosius, in turn, always gave him a generous space under the blanket and pulled him close against him, rebelling against strict divisions of space.
Back when he was a recruit, Ballister had wanted to be one of the kingdom’s best knights, wanted to prove himself to Ambrosius and the world over that commoners could be just as great as their noble counterparts. He was always busy, always chasing the next new goal. Now that Ambrosius was here, firm and solid in his grasp and not simply a pale phantasm, he wanted less to do for once.
Nothing could be better than this, he would often think as his last conscious thought before Ambrosius’s warm embrace and the comfort of their shared bed.
Ballister did, of course, miss Nimona.
Though his home was complete with Ambrosius there, the nagging question stuck to the back of his mind like pocket lint. Where had Nimona gone?
Then Nimona fell back into his life, all smiles and without a scratch on her, and Ballister’s world cracked wide open. Sparks of colour and chaos wove their way in again.
There were growing pains in the early days. Nimona didn't trust Ambrosius. Ambrosius was suspicious of Nimona. But Ballister could play the mediator.
And they had something in common: a love for making fun of Ballister.
“He totally sucks at board games,” Nimona whispered to Ambrosius once, within Ballister’s earshot. “He doesn’t have a bone of cunning inside him.”
Ambrosius only let out a chuckle. “It’s his eyes. They give away too much.”
“Hey,” Ballister protested. He whipped his head around, from where he was drying the dishes at the sink. “What’s with the slander?”
“Just bein’ honest,” Nimona drawled, a smirk plastered on her face. She shuffled her poker cards on the table. “So, remind me why you’re together again?”
“Okay, now you’re on thin ice. Attacking my taste?”
Ballister never remembered how that conversation ended, because Nimona said something else, and they all devolved into a pique of laughter afterwards, laughing with each other, personalities nearly harmonising in tune. Right then, he felt something new entirely: he felt like he was free.
Mornings passed, each one bringing new reasons for joy. Ambrosius turned out to be a skilled cook, with a sharpness and talent that’d been stifled within the confines of the Institute and the life of knighthood.
In his days spent traversing the undergrowth of society with Nimona, Ballister remembered the thrill of being resourceful, of scavenging together riches from back alleys and still-perfectly-good dishes from restaurant bins. He recalled, also, the suspension and precarity of those days, of safety becoming a distant concept; of never knowing if the world could provide for you or simply turn against you on an elemental level, deny survival to your very atoms. That had been his turning point for understanding why Nimona had become the Great Black Monster.
Now in the free and widening world, Ambrosius cooked him and Nimona delectable dishes every day, endeavouring to impress them with little plating flourishes or innovations in taste, his kitchen his hearth and oyster. He cooked with tiger-striped carrots and made wine reductions for butterfly mussels, gave both of them a taste of crystalline noodles seasoned with prawn chilis and earthy herbs.
Nimona, so distrusting of human food and sustenance once, warmed right up to his food, and began cleaning her plates at meals.
In time, Ballister picked up a sword again. The weight was familiar and comforting in his hands. But he never used it to slay any creatures.
He took it down from its display cabinet in their living room only to spar with Ambrosius, an old hobby of his. He’d settle into an alert, nimble stance in the meadows, smiling at him, gazes locked together, and try to disarm him.
Nimona’s eyes once hardened and went flinty with fear when she saw the sword out in the open, and Ballister tried not to spar when she was out and about there too; but in time she relaxed around him.
“It’s been a long time,” she told him, back turned towards him. “I should rewrite how I remember Gloreth.”
Ambrosius brought home a stack of letters and documents one day, fresh from the safe they'd been locked up in in the Institute’s once-cloistered archives.
Nimona sat atop that stack for an entire day, rifling through them in sombre silence, rummaging for closure.
At the end of her reading, she pinned a note up on the wall of her room.
In Gloreth's ancient prim cursive, it read:
I’m beginning to have doubts about the narrative of the monstrous shapeshifter. I know what happened that very first night in the village, and men have convinced me she was a monster out to get me; that she was dangerous uncontrolled, a force that could set our settlements ablaze. But I think this is a piece of fiction we’ve wrapped around our heads and built the pedestals of our society upon because we’re afraid to look beyond easy ideas and traditional assumptions.
I would suggest we stop hunting monsters, and try researching them.
- G.
ARCHIVIST NOTE: written in 1087, a few years before Gloreth’s death. The Sedition Act for Falsehoods and Other Sayings of Positive Intent about Monsters was eventually passed in 1098.
Through the seasons, spring turning into midsummer’s sweet abundance and autumn’s delicate chilly inferno, Ballister had the constant of Ambrosius’s presence with him: Ambrosius’s smile, his back pressed to his front all night beneath the rafters, his comforting fresh gold-sleek scent, his words of solace whispered into Ballister’s ears, his long hair that Ballister loved grooming and styling into braids for him. Ambrosius, every day and always.
Ballister had a small box of hair-styling tools, and Nimona changed her shape with every season, happy and untethered, and the ground beneath their feet is solid at last. Ballister couldn't wish for anything more.