Free Hold the Light by Ryan Sherwood Page B

before him was the man who dragged him through the streets, dangling from the noose, all those years ago. Mural licked his lips and tasted his own power. This was a gift indeed. Mural's melancholy lifted and he loved the gift.
    "This is a far better purpose than the whispers ever provided," Mural thought, vowing then and there to follow the gift's internal guidance, which had to lead to Veronica, as well as to the occasional smiting of his enemies.

    The final fluttering of the man's soul beat within his ears and Mural was forced to leave, not under his own power.

    "I am the keeper again!" Mural exclaimed. "Wiping away the unholy...but this time I work with the direct purpose of Death itself."

    He returned to his house and was revitalized. Time had passed as normal; it seemed that only a few seconds had elapsed. His smile grew larger and he, as if the last two months didn't occur, grew back into his old self. Murdering returned as his way of life and the means to keep things in place, only this time, it was not out of spite for his wife, but in her favor. His old role had suited him for years, but this was grandiose. Never once did he contest or complain, rather he became significantly caught up in his tasks, never thinking he would be bound for this.

    The gift snapped him back into full alertness.

    "This is amazing, how could someone like me be given this honor? Everyone that is and ever will be is now under my decision as to when they expire. I will retire all that I am commanded to and with each breath I take, I will come closer to Veronica."

    Decades passed, but Mural did not age. His neighbors grew suspicious since he rarely left the house. Mural never visited the printing press that was passed to him when he was twenty, and his employees grew just as suspicious. So he sold the business at high profits and developed the habit of moving around the city whenever people's misgivings arose. The thought of leaving Boston never entered his head.

    As more decades tore away, he was left the same, in feeling and appearance, as he was the night he lost Veronica. Mural's hair never ripened into gray or white and not a wrinkle dared to cross his skin, but beneath his face was cold solitude that only age can bring. Time elapsed, but the gift made the cycles smaller and tolerable even as his past friends and neighbors grew old and died, while he stay suspended in time, taking them to their demise. Everything around had an end except for him.

    Everything would wilt, but he was outside the rotation of life and didn't have to pay its highest price.

    But as people do, he began to question.

    "I can't bear the notion of Veronica suffering as I lose myself in these excursions. Maybe I should refocus my ..."
    Before his tongue could carry any more words, the gift stirred inside him. Confused and curious Mural egged the light within him on with questions, but it was never to speak to him. And he felt insulted.

    "I've been played a fool, a patsy in some arcane game. I will not sit idly by and have no knowledge or control over Veronica's fate."

    But he had no choice. He would experience only what his convulsions would allow, leaving his own self a shell yet again.

    Mural watched the coming of the twentieth century. He had spent well over a hundred years obediently working for his unseen demon, all the while hoping for answers. Any vestige of his previous life was so old and desiccated that it was out of memory. Seasons and lifetimes blew past him as if they were the wind. He watched the winter of everyone's life pass and carried them from this life and knew that his own humanity had wilted and withered.

    There was only one thing left to do when hope abandoned...he took up an old practice and prayed. He begged for an absolution to the only power left more powerful than his own and still received nothing. God had abandoned him so long ago he had forgotten the warmth of faith and knew only the frigidity of death. For a soul, if he could