As I sit once again at my writing table, the familiar assembly of stone simulacra surrounds me in quiet attendance. There was a time when their presence unsettled me greatly. Their fixed expressions seemed to possess a dreadful vitality, as though the tincture had robbed them only of movement while leaving intact some dim faculty of observation. I often imagined their unblinking eyes following me as I crossed the chamber or felt that peculiar sensation one experiences upon entering a room where a conversation has only just ended. Such foolish notions have gradually yielded to familiarity. It would seem that time, perhaps more effectively than courage, possesses the remarkable ability to dull even those horrors that first appear wholly unbearable. I no longer shrink from their company. It is this realization, rather than the statues themselves, which now troubles me most.
At the center of the circle stands my sweet Nazli. I have arranged the others around her, though I no longer remember whether this was by deliberate design or merely the quiet guidance of some instinct I failed to recognize at the time. She alone faces outward, her eyes fixed forever upon something beyond the ring of stone that surrounds her. Her expression remains precisely as it was in that final terrible instant when she understood, or perhaps only began to understand, what I had done. Terror rarely lingers upon the living face for more than a heartbeat, yet stone preserves it with an honesty flesh never could. I have often found myself wondering whether stone possesses a memory of the forms it once resembled. Flesh forgets almost immediately. Stone, it would seem, never does.
For many months after bringing her here, I continued speaking to her as though nothing of consequence had changed between us. I would recount the passing seasons; the books I had been studying; curious dreams; trivial observations about birds nesting among the pines above the cave; even the weather beyond the entrance where the morning light first touched the mountain. Often I found myself reminiscing about our walks among the citrus groves of Pazarköy, where the fragrance of the blossoms drifted upon the evening breeze and every conversation seemed capable of lasting until dawn. Inevitably I would apologize once again, each apology differing only slightly from the last, until at length I discovered that repentance, when repeated often enough, becomes indistinguishable from madness. One morning I approached her as I always had, intending to continue our conversation, only to discover that I had exhausted every sentence I possessed. I stood before her for what must have been an hour, unable to summon even a single word worthy of the silence between us.
It is curious how slowly one notices a room becoming full. A single statue scarcely alters the character of the chamber. Two may even pass without remark. By the fifth one, however, one begins choosing routes around them without conscious thought. By the tenth, they have become furniture. By the twentieth, one begins to wonder whether the cave itself has slowly expanded.
The cave has grown increasingly crowded over the passing years, though not with companions in any ordinary sense. Rather, it has gradually become occupied by successive versions of me. Each returned only briefly before surrendering once again to the tincture, joining the silent congregation assembled around Nazli like pilgrims gathered before a forgotten shrine. Some kneel with folded hands. Others bow deeply toward her feet. One reaches toward her outstretched hand, forever halted by no more than the breadth of two fingers. Another gazes upward toward the ceiling as though searching for a mercy that has never found its way into these chambers. I no longer remember arranging several of them, nor the thoughts I intended their postures to preserve. It has occurred to me more than once that memory, when stretched across sufficient centuries, gradually abandons chronology altogether and begins instead to organize itself according to places. The cave remembers better than I do.
My brief acquaintance with the men who first sought to abduct me began and ended upon the lonely road near Gümüşhane in the year 1531. It is strange how entire ages of one's existence may hinge upon a single afternoon whose details remain sharper than those of yesterday. There, beside the road, I first administered the stone tincture to Nazli. The others I shattered without hesitation, their broken remains tumbling into the ravine where the rocks accepted them without ceremony. Yet when I turned my attention to Nazli, my resolve abandoned me entirely. She had become impossibly heavy. Alive, she moved with the effortless grace of a swallow banking upon the wind. Stone grants no such kindness. It took the better part of two days to transport her back to the cave. More than once the crude harness slipped from beneath her shoulders, and each dull impact against the hillside filled me with greater terror than any wound I myself had ever suffered. I feared not for her life—for that had already departed—but for the possibility that one finger, one cheek, or one strand of carved hair might fracture against the mountain and be lost forever. I fashioned a clumsy arrangement of ropes, pine boughs, and pulleys to raise her through the entrance. Looking back, I believe love has accomplished stranger feats than strength ever has.
When at last she stood upright within the sanctuary, I collapsed before her. For many days I neither slept nor sought food. The only nourishment I accepted came from the slow and patient trickle of water descending from a limestone tooth near the cave's entrance. Hour after hour I listened to each droplet strike the shallow basin beneath it until the sound became indistinguishable from the beating of a distant heart. I have often wondered whether it was the cave that sustained me during those days or merely prolonged the inevitable. Eventually the dripping water itself seemed to recede farther and farther away until it became the final sound I heard before surrendering once more to that peculiar darkness that forever refuses to become death. I hesitate to describe the event as starvation. It seemed instead that grief had finally discovered sufficient leverage to separate soul from flesh. The distinction, regrettably, proved temporary.
Vlastimir stays here too. His bones still lie on the ground at Nazli's feet, where they landed after I took back my own strange life from the short time he had it. The flesh is gone now, leaving a light brown mark on the earth and the old pieces of his red clothes, which time has been much nicer to than the man who wore them. It is a thing to stand over the bones of a body I lived in just long enough to get used to. They are my bones. Yet they are completely unfamiliar to me. I don't know if I'm looking at a version of myself or just another sad person whose way crossed mine for a little while. I have stopped believing that a man is who he is because of the body he has. I also don't think the body forgets the man who lived inside it.
Around them all stand the remaining figures, twenty-two in number at the time of this writing, each marking another unsuccessful attempt to rid either me of the world or the world of me. The ritual has acquired a dreadful familiarity. I awaken beneath another name, in another village, another country, perhaps. Gradually the old memories return. I make my way back to this cave as though guided by a compass whose needle points not north but inward. I uncork the vial. I drink. Then I choose my place among the others and wait for stone to claim me once again. It is difficult now to determine whether these statues commemorate failure or perseverance. Perhaps there is no meaningful distinction.
And so I find myself once again seated before these pages, wondering whether all this labor amounts to anything beyond another futile attempt to impose order upon an existence that steadfastly refuses to possess any. There was a time when I begged Heaven to release me from this endless procession of borrowed flesh. I no longer waste either its time or mine. The silence that follows prayer eventually acquires the texture of an answer. Whether that answer is refusal or indifference, I have not yet determined.
My thoughts return instead to the men upon the Gümüşhane road. Whoever they were, they possessed knowledge they ought not to have possessed. They knew enough to seek me. They carried strange artifacts whose purpose I still fail to understand. Among the possessions of Vlastimir, I discovered the small white idol, which now rests beside these pages. I have spent many evenings studying it beneath the lantern, turning it slowly in my hands, wondering whether I observe it or whether it quietly observes me in return. It has become increasingly difficult to dismiss the feeling that this little carving forms one end of a thread whose opposite end remains clenched within the hand of someone waiting patiently for me to tug upon it. If so, then perhaps they too have spent these intervening years searching.
Inside my humble forge I have fashioned a key unlike any I have previously made. Outwardly it is an ordinary object of iron, but I suspect it secures nothing so simple as a door. Stone requires no lock. Rather, I believe it is intended to imprison those remaining fragments of myself still foolish enough to hope for mercy. Compassion has become an extravagance I can no longer afford. Joy even more so. Should either attempt escape, this key shall remind them that they were entombed beneath this mountain long ago.
It occurs to me now that the man who first entered this cave and the one who writes these words are no longer the same individual. My body has changed countless times, yet the greater transformation has taken place elsewhere. Sorrow, when sufficiently distilled, ceases to resemble sorrow at all. It becomes something hotter, cleaner, and infinitely more patient. Henceforth I shall call myself Micaloz the Fire, for grief has burned away everything within me that was not combustible. Let those who once hunted me learn, in time, what becomes of a flame denied the mercy of extinction. Somewhere beyond these mountains there are still men who imagine they interrupted a happy life among the citrus groves of Pazarköy. They cannot yet know that what they truly interrupted was my capacity for forgiveness.