Settling A Count

In which our Hero finds himself not so much enjoying the passage of unreal time

I pulled out the latest book in a personally loved series and read to the end of the story, and then onward as the book played out what seemed to be a gentle denouement. And so when I ran out of that, I let the book close, just stopped without reading the afterword.

And paused thinking, “It certainly implies a whole new story starting up for a next book.”

And then, “There was something wrong with that last line.”

So I opened it up and reread the last line of the text.

“Oh.”

And then I blinked and tried not to be caught fighting tears over the loss of a secondary character I’d grown to love.

In a way, it was a brilliant piece of prose. It’s a incidental bit of protocol, but it’s also an unnoticed keel to the entire series of now fourteen books, “It works thus.” And fourteen books, guess wildly at a million plus words, and in the end, in the end, it came down to a single word at odds with all the rest.

I was thinking as I started the book, as the main character reflected on the changes that age had wrought, that this was someone else I’d somewhat grown up with. When I first met him in The Warrior’s Apprentice, I was 20 and he was 17, I think. I loved the character, but I don’t think I identified with him that much. This book was where I considered that he’d caught up with me in years and moved well past me in life, and I appreciated the chance to see the man the boy had become, even if he isn’t real.

It’s strange to have had such a close affinity and yet only now realize how personal the connection was. Then again, it’s a much more dramatic and showy lifestyle and I don’t claim to be any of the things that this character is. It’s not the strict parallels that draw me.

And it was the combination of duty, and honour and also the byzantine ties of blood that resonated, because the character is not me, but rather some kind of archetype or, gingerly used here, apotheosis. I’m not him, but his fictional example inspired me.

It doesn’t matter really. The main point is that sense of grief and loss. For the character who passed, for his surviving loved ones, glimpsed in that gently stark afterword, for myself and my real-life losses yet to come.