The Choice He Could Not Make

The stillness aboard Captain Walton's expedition ship smelled of cold pitch, stale tea, and the terrified breath of fifty sailors huddled below.

Grizel climbed the port rope ladder without a sound. Her sealskin-shod feet left no trace across the frozen deck. Through the skylight of the captain's great cabin, illuminated by a single hanging whale-oil lantern, drifted a dry, broken sob—the agonized wail of a wounded beast caught in iron jaws.

She entered the cabin.

Upon the timber bunk lay the emaciated corpse of Victor Frankenstein: cheeks sunken, skin clinging to cheekbones like yellow parchment, hands locked upon the woolen counterpane in the final rigidity of death.

At the foot of the bed, the Firstborn knelt in weeping ruin. His vast hands cradled the brow of the man who had created and loathed him with equal demonic fervor.

—Oh, Frankenstein... generous and devoted to thine own terrors —the giant wept, dark tears tracing his scars—. Of what avail was my destruction if the end of thy pilgrimage is this borrowed cot at the rim of the world?

Captain Walton remained pinned against the bulkhead, a discharged flintlock hanging loose in trembling fingers, struck dumb before the colossus.

The Firstborn rose slowly, turning his back upon the berth.

—I shall seek the most distant ice floe —the giant told the English officer—. I shall erect a funeral pyre of my sledge and cast my limbs into the flames, so that no remnant may endure to remind mankind that a creature such as I ever walked the earth.

—Thou shalt not —a voice rang clear from the doorway shadows.

Grizel stepped into the lantern's warm arc.

Walton let out a strangled cry, crossing himself against the timber. The Firstborn looked up, startled to find her standing whole and serene upon the cabin deck.

—He recorded in his journal that thou must burn —Grizel said, her voice resonant and unhurried in the silence—. He wrote that our ordained destiny was to perish so that the commonwealth of men might remain untroubled in their pews and colleges. If thou leaping into the pyre, Firstborn, thou art merely executing the final act of his script.

She approached the deathbed. She looked upon Victor Frankenstein's lifeless features without hatred or tenderness. She drew the calfskin notebook from her breast and laid it upon the scientist's chest.

—Keep thy name and thy honors, Victor —she murmured—. Keep thy tragedy of the spoiled scholar. We are no divine scourge; we are merely those who survived thy shears.

Grizel turned to the Firstborn. She reached out her right hand and laid her fingers firmly upon the giant's scarred wrist.

The touch was an unwritten covenant: two beings brought into being without consent, patched together by force, yet undisputed masters of their breath in this white wilderness where no magistrate sits in judgment.

—Come —she said—. The north is boundless. And it owes nothing to any man.

The Firstborn looked down upon her hand resting against his wrist. For the first time, the trembling across his shoulders ceased. He offered a slow, profound nod.

They descended together down the ship's side onto the vast ice field. Walton watched from the railing as the two solitary silhouettes walked outward across the Arctic pack, shoulder to shoulder beneath the green brilliance of the northern lights, vanishing forever into the clean, untamed silence of the pole.