Chapter Text
I celebrate the silent kiss that ends short life or long.
W.B. Yeats
+
Prelude
The light of a dying sun is always wondrous. It is a magical spell that shines down upon people and changes them, a burnishing caress that exposes all the dark recesses and remakes shadow into a more perfect reflection of the light. This has never been truer than on this cold November day in Seacouver where people are wading through their horizontal lives in the hazy glow of the setting sun. They drift by anxiously, hurrying past those temporary moments when they might have changed it all. This is Seacouver–a city of the dead as well as the living, of the undead and the deathless–a place where death . . . is only the beginning. It is here I have brought you on this late afternoon, to walk around, to experience and witness, if you wish, a crossroad.
We have come at an opportune moment, too. Over there, by the DeSalvo Dojo, are the players, and both are wearing their torturous masks of death. Follow me closely and listen. We will watch them from the lengthening shadows for they are both special, both unique to this world. However, I caution you: walk softly as we follow them; speak quietly during the telling. For this is the time of day when mysterious ephemera tease the corners of the eyes. We would not want to betray ourselves, to interfere in any way with what may come to be.
Walk softly, my friends. Speak quietly on this day of beginnings . . . and of endings. Bear witness to a sacrifice to the Powers That Be of a matchless thing. Watch and listen. Learn how unconditional love begets life from the bitter dregs of death.
Come. Let me show you how it was on that first day–the day that Methos, the world's oldest Immortal man, first met Angel, the vampire with the Immortal soul.