Until the Sun Sets Again

The Autumn breeze drifted through willow trees tinged with gold, rustling the swaying leaves and sending a cascade drifting lazily to the ground. Under the canopy’s fading glow, two young men huddled close, their fingers intertwined.

In their hallowed space, where only outcasts dared to dream, Kyren and Aster had nurtured the timid blossom of new love from hardened earth—fragile and fresh in its newness and hope. Together, anchored in shared solace, Aster reached with metaphorical hands toward Kyren in the hope that this love would take root for a season and shelter them from life’s storms.

They had found each other in the bitter cold of rejection—Aster, cast out by a family who couldn’t bear his difference; Kyren, who had fled whispers that followed him like shadows through narrow village streets. Broken pieces found wholeness, their jagged edges fitting together.

Kyren’s head rested lightly upon Aster’s shoulder, his chestnut curls grazing Aster’s cheek. An earthy scent of windswept hair mingled with the harsh soap that lingered on his skin.

“I’ve never encountered this with anyone else,” Aster said in a hushed tone.

Words are inadequate vessels for the vastness within him. How to say: you are the first person who has ever truly seen me?

Kyren squeezed Aster’s hand, thumb tracing light circles. “I’m here. I will always be here.”

“As will I.”

They made promises like prayers into the coming dark. Aster breathed them in and let them settle in his lungs and blood. He felt permanence in a world that had offered him none.

Kyren nestled closer into the crook of Aster’s arm, feeling his body sag against him, as if all tension had been released.

Where others saw an enigma, Aster perceived a clear portrait of a tender soul behind Kyren’s reserved exterior. And with Kyren, Aster found a haven where he could reveal his hidden fragilities.

“This is enough,” Aster said.

Aster traced the sharp line of Kyren’s jaw, his calloused thumb coming to rest on his lower lip.

Kyren smiled up at him. “We are enough,” he said.

Spring witnessed Aster’s joy as Kyren invited him to live together in a small abode he’d found, in the heart of the town called Lud. The solitary dwelling rested above a bakery owned by a stout man, whose aching back kept him from climbing the stairs.

“If you would be so good as to make deliveries now and again, I’d be happy to let the room to you at a pittance,” the baker had told Kyren.

Mornings carried rich scents of warm cranberry buns and powdered white rolls through the window, which Kyren insisted on leaving open, always.

“The mosquitoes enjoy more of us than we do of the fresh air,” Aster grumbled one morning, scratching at the red bumps that blemished his skin.

Kyren only chuckled. “I like the sounds of town life below. It’s real life.”

Although the work kept Kyren busy, Aster relished it when Kyren returned for brief reprieves, his face flushed from exertion. While Kyren ran errands for the baker, Aster spent the days in their small room, scribbling imaginary worlds and people into his stacks of notebooks. Once restrained by timidity, Kyren now regaled him with tales of old Madame Lorelai, who insisted that he bore an exact resemblance to her late husband, and of little Patrick, who giggled with delight at the sweet potato bread he brought to his door each morning.

Evenings, however, belonged solely to them. They walked under the light of a fading sun to the lake at the edge of town. The hour passed quickly for Aster, fingers twisted around Kyren’s, in a time all their own.

An old wooden bench, bathed in a pool of lamplight, became their resting place where they reaffirmed their bond, promising forever.

“Won’t you accompany me to meet my friends this time?” Kyren would ask.

Aster would bury his face in Kyren’s hair, breathing in the scent of his miracle. “You know all those people terrify me.”

And Kyren would sigh, then smile. “Perhaps someday.”

“Yes, someday.”

As Spring gave in to Summer, long walks and evenings to the lake grew scarce. The once-cozy room now felt too large for just one. Aster’s thoughts circled back to Kyren and the unknown world Kyren was now exploring without him. The thoughts invaded, even when Aster tried to occupy his mind with the books he once loved.

Tension between them grew like a string, pulled taut and strained by mounting resentment. Increasingly, Kyren would rush in, flushed and distracted, before placing hurried kisses on Aster’s lips and cheeks and running out again.

“Off to have a drink with some friends,” Kyren told Aster. “Come, make merry with us.”

Aster waved away the invitations. Tightness grew around his throat and in his temples. They are enough, just the two of them. What did other people matter? Was he not enough?

The question burst forth one day, after yet another late return home.

Kyren froze, and then his arms dropped before reaching for Aster in an embrace.

“Why do you say so?” he asked, with a trace of coldness that Aster had never heard directed toward himself before.

“You said we were enough,” Aster mumbled. A familiar restlessness crept into his stomach and circled, waiting for a gap in his defenses. “You said.”

“Can I not form bonds with others?” Kyren said. “It does not lessen my love for you. You know, the baker said…”

The restlessness charged in. “What about the baker? What did he say?”

“Nothing. The hour is late. We will talk tomorrow.”

Aster blocked Kyren’s way to their bedroom. A frenzy was taking hold, and he could not let words go unsaid. A sleepless night would ensue. Kyren knew this about him, so how could he dismiss it?

“Talk to me now,” he said, despising the tremor in his voice. “Why do you listen to outside voices that do not know or understand us?”

“They do not know you.” Now Kyren’s voice shook too. “You hide in this room and hardly leave it, save when I accompany you.”

“Then I am a burden to you?”

Kyren sighed. “I did not say so.”

“You didn’t have to.” Still, Aster would not move, even as Kyren’s hands pushed against him, and then again more insistently. “You tire of me, and so you spend less and less time with me. You are leaving me, as did all others I dared to trust.”

Kyren stepped back, a storm gathering on his brow. “Aster, you are speaking madness. I am here, and I will always be here.”

“Yet you are gone.”

“You will not join me in the world!” Kyren paced around the home they had made, his arms swinging in agitation. “I have asked and asked you, yet you will not come. Not every person is so wicked as we once believed. To hide as you do is no longer safety for me, but a prison.”

The words hung pregnant in the air between them, creating an invisible barrier where none had existed before.

“I’m sorry,” Kyren said haltingly, attempting to infuse gentleness into his tone.

Aster stared at him, his eyes wide in silent accusation.

That night, they slept apart; Kyren curled on their narrow bed, Aster rigid in the chair by the window. Dawn found them exhausted, hollow-eyed, and staring at each other across the unbridgeable distance of their small room.

Under skies that bore no sign of fatigued clouds, they promised to return. The edges near the other side of the lake were pink, merging into the blue, putting on a show by the parting sun.

They decided to venture on their own paths, living hundreds of lives between now and then. They chose to let the world fill them to the brim with stories of new friends and foes, and tales of heartbreak and deliverance, to meet one day as people closer to who they aspired to be.

They’d someday pick up a quill, scribble a letter, send it far off, and return to the same spot under the same dim yellow lamppost, with its black grill coiled around the flame like a dove about to leave its perch, and settle upon a light-soaked bench with prettily colored wood to release the lives they had lived in the absence of each other.

It was a mutual decision.

“It’s not right. I don’t feel right for us right now.”

Aster creased his brows, wondering how any passage of time would change that.

“Aster,” said Kyren. “Aster, I can’t right now. I can’t.”

“I’m not making you,” he replied. “I’m not. I said okay.”

Kyren had looked frustrated; Aster remembered thinking there was nothing to be frustrated about. He had said okay. He had given Kyren his space. Kyren didn’t think he was ready, and Aster had respected that. He did. But his partner could always pick out the unease and fear that lay beneath his blanket of indifference.

He could still be bitter about it, though—bitter that he wasn’t enough security for the other to stay for, and that they couldn’t stick together for each other when they needed it most. But he had agreed just as readily as Kyren had, because there was no use at all in holding on to someone who had already left.

So, they parted ways and didn’t look back.

Looking back would have shattered the fragile peace of their ending and revealed the truth: that Aster had watched Kyren retreat until he disappeared from view. That he stayed at the lake until stars emerged, hoping Kyren would return. That he spoke Kyren’s name into the darkness until his voice gave out.

The first foe Aster made was Kyren himself. It wasn’t decided on the spot, of course. He had simply found that his reserves of love diminished as the bitterness grew slowly and steadily.

By the end of three months, Kyren’s absence had crumbled the walls that kept Aster’s resentment inside. And all Aster had left for his former lover was a deep dislike and a sense of betrayal. He knew he was wrong; he felt that way, nonetheless. He couldn’t help it. He couldn’t.

So what if they met again in the future and reunited when they were ready? So what if waiting for the right circumstance was better?

He had needed Kyren right there and then the most. And now—now it wouldn’t matter if Kyren came back, if he turned around from the dirt road he’d decided to walk and reached for Aster—who floundered in quicksand—to pull him out.

Aster traveled far from the lamppost and bench and the pink-blue sunsets of their origin to settle near the tall towers of Seren’s capital that hid the sun, and busy roads that drowned the songs of the few birds perched on scarce trees.

He let the crowded, cluttered roads and noisy strongholds cover up his existence and hide him as he wallowed. For months. He tried to remain consistent; he had to support himself, after all.

But for whatever reason, his heart didn’t feel like it had any rhythm left to it, and with no rhythm of his own mixing into the rhythm of others, he felt excluded. Alien.

It wasn’t as though Kyren had been all Aster held dear, yet he felt his absence so strongly, as if everyone he knew and cared for were solid, living bodies, while he was a wisp of fog lurking in the cold corners of their lives.

Amidst the clamor and the throng, Aster drifted like a specter, a soul adrift in a sea of life. He clung to remnants of routine, working in a bookshop where musty pages whispered tales of lives unlived, and returning each night to a room that echoed with the silence of Kyren’s absence.

Memories of his lost love danced on the edges of his days in the honeyed scent of baking bread, the silvery peal of distant laughter, and flashes of chestnut in the crowds.

Aster sought solace in the pages of books and the quiet corners of the city. But the solitude that had once been his refuge now felt like a hollow embrace. He joined circles of words and verse, but each fresh face only cast Kyren’s absence into sharper relief. He poured his soul onto paper, weaving tales of love and loss with his pen.

But as the seasons turned, gilding the city in their hues, Aster started to feel a new rhythm in his step. He began to recognize faces that turned up more than once or thrice at the bookshop where he stocked shelves.

Other book lovers sought him out, asked for his thoughts, and trusted his expertise.

“Who would you consider the highest authority on the subject of Seren’s past kings? I’d like to learn more of our great kingdom’s history,” they might ask. Or, “What do the histories tell of the wars between Memory Keepers and forces of Oblivion from the Void?” Or, “Do you know anything of modern herb lore?”

And Aster would answer.

Somewhere, he knew, Kyren walked his own path, facing trials and triumphs all his own. Although their futures stretched out like uncharted seas, Aster clung to the hope that one day, when the time was ripe, their paths would intertwine once more, and they would trade tales of the lives they had lived apart. For now, Aster turned his face to the sun and let its warmth suffuse him with the promise of new beginnings.

“Do you carry books on the town of Lud?” someone asked him one day, when the summer heat had begun to waver at last. The words transported him to the room above the bakery, and he could almost catch the scent of sweet potato buns with his next breath.

The question lingered in the air between Aster and the stranger, innocent yet profound in its effect. Aster’s fingers trembled as he directed the curious patron to a modest collection of historical texts. That night, sleep eluded him, as memories once carefully stored away flooded back with relentless force.

In the morning light, Aster penned his resignation. The city had served its purpose: a sanctuary of anonymity and a place to heal wounds in shadow. But the mention of Lud had awakened something dormant within him—a longing not just for Kyren but for closure, and a narrative ending that he would write.

Three weeks later, Aster stood on the outskirts of the town that had witnessed the blooming and withering of his first love. The bakery still stood, though the sign had been repainted. New faces peered from windows that had once framed familiar ones. The town had continued without him, as indifferent to his absence as it was now to his return.

He took a room at a modest inn, not above the bakery—that would have been too much—but close enough that the morning scents of baking bread still reached him. Each day, he walked the streets, reacquainting himself with corners and alleyways featured in his and Kyren’s shared story. Some shopkeepers remembered him with vague smiles. None mentioned Kyren.

For a fortnight, Aster circled the lake, approaching but never quite reaching their bench beneath the lamppost. He was preparing himself, gathering courage for what might be their final scene together—reunion or permanent farewell.

On the seventeenth day, as the copper leaves spiraled down to meet their reflections on the lake’s still surface, Aster finally seated himself on the weathered bench. He came at the hour when day surrendered to evening, when the lamppost’s glow emerged to battle the dying light.

Beneath the glow of Autumn’s golden leaves, he had returned to the little town with the bakery and the lake and waited for his former lover. The town no longer held only bitter memories. He wished to rewrite the scenes and find his own story between its lines.

Days passed. Then weeks. The bench remained his alone.

As Autumn deepened toward Winter, Aster’s visits to the bench grew shorter. The evening chill drove him back to his rented room earlier each day. Yet he persisted, a solitary figure beneath the lamppost, a living monument to what had been and what might yet be.

On the first day of true Winter, when frost rimed the edges of fallen leaves and breath hung visible in the air, Aster arrived at the bench to find a letter tucked beneath a small stone, with his name written in a hand he would have recognized blind.

He didn’t open it at once. Instead, he sat with it pressed between his palms, eyes closed, feeling the weight of it—so light, yet containing a whole world Aster once inhabited. The last light faded from the sky before he finally broke the seal.

Inside, words sprawled across the page in Kyren’s distinctive hand. Some were crossed out, others underlined, and the margins were filled with afterthoughts. It was not a tidy letter, but one written in stages, put aside, returned to, wrestled with.

Aster read it once, then again, then a third time, as snowflakes descended and melted against the warm paper. When he finally tucked it inside his coat, close to his heart, his eyes were clear and his breathing steady.

He stood, brushed snow from his shoulders, and cast one last glance at the bench before turning toward the town’s lights, which glistened through the gentle snowfall.

Whether Kyren would come tomorrow, or next week, or never, Aster now walked with the certainty that his own story continued, with or without the reunion they had once promised each other. He had found his own melody in the spaces between their shared verses. And it was enough.

He would walk on, beneath a sky painted in the colors of a fading sun.