"nulan"

She tells me her name is Draco Torre. I ask her about the masculinity, and she says it’s backward, given name last. Draco, taken later in life, she likes to think of it as more of a title. Names are titles we earn, often early in life, but sometimes later. Torre is her name, Draco her position.

Imprisoned in darkness, chased by a nightmare, lost to time, her story is cold and dark. She is the last of her kind. Nulan, the moon, is her eternal companion. The stars, her enemy, slip across the sky leaving holes in her memory. She tells me her tale is old, some of it recorded in a lost language within the pages of a withering journal she gave away. Much of the rest might be lost with her memory struggling to find the light. She does not want her story told, she tells me. It needs to be told. Somewhere buried within her struggle, among the ghosts, resides the meaning of time itself.

I ask her about time.

“I had to die,” Torre says, “more than once, it seems. To realize. Time is a myth, an ever changing beast.”

Within Torre’s tale resides the history of her lost people, the sacrifices, the struggles, the knowledge. Pulling me in, she shows me her world, memories imprinted on the fabric of the universe. And I recognize it, familiarity growing with each visit. She never found me. In my search for time, I found her within the twisting of her world and mine. Apparently I was there all along, caught in the myth of time.

I write for Torre.