Seeing the familiar face of the woman pulled an impossible flood of memories through Wendell's mind. They did not come neatly. They overlapped, fractured glimpses of other moments nested within each other, pressing against the walls of his consciousness. Names, voices, shapes, fleeting scents, pieces of lives he had lived and barely remembered swirled through him. Amid the chaos of recollection, one thread was unmistakable. She was important. More than important. She was essential. She was his daughter.
The realization carried with it a strange weight. It pressed against him softly at first, then relentlessly, leaving his chest hollow in a way that the bar's dusty floorboards could not absorb. He looked at her. The woman before him appeared younger than the memory had suggested, yet the sharpness in her purple-hued eyes betrayed the hardships she had endured. Despite her appearance, her presence demanded attention.
A small smile tugged at the corners of his lips. A tear slipped down his cheek, tracing a path over skin that still bore the faint scars of imprisonment. Then recognition sharpened and memory settled with a slow, deliberate click. The fleeting tenderness faded. His expression straightened.
"Hi Lilian," Wendell said gently, his voice carrying a quiet authority that had been eroded over years of imprisonment, yet somehow remained intact. "It's been a while, hasn't it?"
Lilian's gaze did not falter. The purple haze in her eyes deepened with shock, and for a suspended moment they merely stared at one another. The bar around them, with its crooked shelves and dust-heavy air seemed to pause with them. Wendell's mind, fragile and frayed from the years of confinement, clung to her presence as if she were a tether to reality itself.
"How long has it been?" he asked after a pause, his words trembling with the eagerness of a man who had already calculated the span of his entrapment but needed confirmation. He needed to hear it spoken.
She remained quiet, the cold indifference in her demeanor contrasting with the recognition she did not yet fully show. Her expression was listless, a mask that had been honed over years of survival.
"How long has it been?" Lilian muttered to herself, her voice low and pensive. She let the moment stretch, measuring the distance between the man before her and the man she had once known. "It'll be ten years tomorrow since I last saw you," she finally said.
Wendell inhaled slowly, letting the stale, sharp air of the bar fill his lungs. He exhaled a pitiful sigh. "I see," he whispered. His expression softened, a longing sadness settling over him. "Ten years. So it really has been that long." The words carried a quiet validation of the fragmented predictions his mind had made in the emptiness of the bar.
Her own sigh matched his, almost mournfully. "It really has been a while," she admitted.
The storm outside shifted. Wind whistled faintly beneath the door and a strange calm replaced the chaos of the tempest. The air inside the bar changed subtly, carrying a quietness that settled in the dust and shadows. Wendell's attention shifted downward. A body lay at his feet, still and forgotten amid the turmoil of the past hours.
"What's up with him?" Wendell asked, his tone neutral but edged with curiosity, as if he were discussing the weather rather than life and death. He waited a moment, but no answer came.
He bent down, nose wrinkling at the pungent mingling of fresh and old blood. A rag emerged from his coat pocket. He knelt and methodically wiped at the crimson, each pass deliberate, each motion soothing to the mind he feared was slipping further from him. "I better clean this up before the next customer comes in," he murmured, humming a bitter, low tune that only he seemed to hear.
Lilian's eyes, violet and dim now in the shadowed light, traced his movements. Her hand lifted, brushing against his shoulder. "That's enough," she whispered. Her voice was soft but unyielding, a reminder that she had survived things far more dangerous than spilled blood on the floor.
Wendell slightly startled, tilting his head slowly to meet her gaze. Those eyes bore into him, luminous and unreadable, carrying centuries of untold knowledge despite her apparent youth. "What was I doing?" he muttered, the recognition of the rag in his hand striking him as oddly unfamiliar.
The faint humming of the dim light overhead seemed to fill the space between them, a quiet pulse of time that stretched the room and their attention. The chain holding the fixture swayed once more before resting.
His gaze fell back to the rag. The question echoed silently. Had he always been holding this rag, or was it simply the bar's prison making him forget the passage of moments, the sequence of actions, the shape of reality itself?
A small tap at his shoulder pulled him from his thoughts. "Shall we leave this place?" Lilian asked, her voice firm now, though still measured and soft.
He looked at her. He understood. Her authority was not overt. It was earned through experience, through survival, through intelligence that equaled his own. He nodded and allowed himself to trust her.
Lilian extended her hand. It appeared small and fragile, but the moment he accepted it, he felt the weight of its purpose. Her fingers gripped his with quiet strength, pulling him upright. In that moment, the hand seemed larger than it was, almost impossibly so, for what it managed to do. It anchored him back to the present, tethering him to a reality that had been deliberately obscured.
As they turned toward the door, Lilian paused. "Wait a second. I need to grab something."
Wendell watched her movements carefully. In the quiet, his mind traced the possibilities. The bar had contained nothing worth notice, yet her eyes held intention. He knew she would not act without reason.
A second later, she returned with a rucksack. It contained an array of unusual devices, glinting faintly in the muted lantern light. Atop the pile rested a small briefcase, its golden clasps gleaming. There was a familiarity to it that gnawed at his mind. In her other hand she held an unpolished glass, stained faintly red by an unknown source. She offered it to him with careful reverence.
"Is it for me?" Wendell asked, uncertainty threading his tone.
She simply nodded.
Wendell took the glass, holding it with both hands. The dull, chipped edges caught the light in ways that reminded him of something long forgotten. His mind stirred at the touch. This was no ordinary glass. It had been a conduit, a vessel for memory. The act of polishing it, of running his hands across its surface, brought fragments of time back to him. Faces, words, long-forgotten sounds. Each stroke reminded him of the person he had been before the bar became a prison.
He removed a fresh rag and began to polish it slowly. The sound of the cloth sliding over glass became a rhythm, a heartbeat connecting him to the past and the present simultaneously. Memories formed in clearer shapes, but never completely. A city, perhaps the capital, stretched before him. Faces of strangers that felt like kin. Decisions made and unmade. And always, Lilian, running through each vision, always near yet somehow unreachable.
The act of polishing was not just a mechanical motion. It was a ritual. It reminded him of who he was, who he had been, and who he might become once the bar's confinement no longer held sway over his mind.
"We can go now," Lilian said softly, her voice carrying the faint urgency of someone who had lived on the edge for far too long. She wanted to leave the bar, its stale air and confined shadows pressing against them like the invisible bars of a cage.
Wendell followed. His steps were careful, deliberate, as if each movement might dislodge the fragile memory he had just recovered. He exited the building. Smiling as he stepped out into the forgotten night. The bar receded behind them, its secrets and the echoes of its victims left behind in the dust and silence.
Lilian walked ahead, the rucksack secured against her back. Wendell held the glass carefully, a small act of reverence to the past he still carried. The moment was quiet, charged with unspoken understanding. Both knew the road ahead would be difficult, filled with uncertainty. Both knew the shadows of their pasts would trail them like silent witnesses. Both knew that together, for now, they were a temporary alignment of purpose, fragile but necessary.
As the night stretched on, a city's distant lights flickered through the haze. The wind carried whispers of long-forgotten streets and abandoned structures. Wendell adjusted the glasses on his face once more. A memory sparked briefly at the corner of his vision, a fragment of the bar, a patron, a laugh long since silenced. He remembered a lesson he had once learned about patience, observation, and the quiet strength of holding knowledge. He breathed it in and exhaled slowly, letting the memory anchor him against the uncertainty that lay ahead.
And in that moment, the bar ceased to be a prison. It became a point in a larger story, a chapter to be acknowledged but not to be relived. He turned to Lilian, and for the first time in what felt like decades, allowed a faint, knowing smile to pass between them.
The past was fragmented, dangerous, and uncertain. But in their silence, and in the careful ritual of glass and memory, Wendell felt a thread of continuity. A small, stubborn spark of life carried forward. He would hold it, polish it, and step into the unknown with Lilian at his side.