Nimue's Confession — Part Seven

By Lorraine Schein

The front door is open and all the other doors flung open too for the first time, an explosion of doors sticking out of the building like quills. Inside all is dark, as if engulfed by a black hole. I rush through shouting “Myrr? Where are you? What’s happened?”

No answer.

I run to the telescope in the central room, decrease its magnification, and peer out at the path with it. There he is, a blur in the distance, following a bright light that is rising up, up, up.... And he is rising too, imperceptibly at first, until he is hovering level with the treetops.

I run back out and hear him shouting, “Wait for me!”

The light stops and pulses at the top of a pine tree’s branches, under a bright star. I hear Merlin call out to it, “My Lord, is that you?”

Then I hear women’s voices singing and water lapping along an astral boat, and the light swoops toward a new constellation in Andromeda.

I guess Merlin was wrong. Arthur didn’t want to come back here now. He wants to guide humanity’s future home.

I look up at the stars, where he’ll be king once more.

My dear prisoner had finally escaped. I brush the tears from my cheek and head back through the forest to the campus, while overhead the singing continues.

A crown of light falls over the trees.

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Lorraine Schein is a New York writer and poet. Her work has appeared in VICE Terraform, Strange Horizons, Scientific American, and Michigan Quarterly, and in the anthologies The Unbearables, Wild Women and Tragedy Queens: Stories Inspired by Lana del Rey & Sylvia Plath. The Futurist’s Mistress, her poetry book, is available from Mayapple Press. Her newest book, The Lady Anarchist Cafe, was published by Autonomedia and available on Amazon.

Copyright © 2025 Lorraine Schein

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