Star Cross Lovers 2

They were in love, but you already knew that. For a moment, their life together was sweetness and bliss and joy unrivaled across the ages.

Then came the war.

Every battle, all the bombardments, each incarceration, the physical brutality, the events that led to death after death after death, were like a vise around their hearts, squeezing the innocence from their young lives. Yet somehow they persevered; they endured. Were they anyone else, they surely would have surrendered and groveled for mercy from their tormentors. And it would have been understandable. The evil that encompassed that time was incomprehensible, so much so that people dared not speak of it. Even those who were firsthand witnesses to the madness either became blind to the truth or were willfully ignorant of it.

But not so for Miriam and Dante.

They were one with the other, always and forever. Never, though, would they forsake others in crisis, and so many were in crisis. Both, according to their peculiar circumstances, pledged to help save the helpless from the oppression. And they did, time and time again.

You already know about Dante. He entered the war as a nascent scout aligned with the Allied forces to identify the buildup of enemy forces that would threaten his town and its people. He later became a soldier fighting in the mountains to bring freedom to trapped villagers. As the fighting escalated, he lost his mother in the caves of Ardeatine and discovered his brother and his best friend lying in the ashes at Sant’Anna di Stazzema. He was taken prisoner and suffered in captivity for months on end. When escape beckoned, he unknowingly became ensnarled in the rampage of Salussola, where two more close friends perished. Ultimately, he found himself in the company of those wanting to end the war by killing the Fascist dictator who began it.

Through it all, he remained devoted to his one true love. When Miriam was taken from him, Dante never relented in pursuing her freedom. He traveled alone across the countryside, navigating the slopes and the valleys, surviving on the fruit in the fields and the warmth of the trees. Once he found her, he begged her to go with him that very same moment and, oh, how she wanted to. But despite her love for Dante, she would not leave; she could not leave, because the lives of many others depended on her. Her going free would bring their dying day. Which brings us to the second book of this wartime duology.

In the first book, the romance and tragedy of our Star Cross Lovers was told from Dante’s eyes. We spoke sparingly of Miriam and the persecuted souls with whom she was imprisoned. Their excruciating suffering, their valiant attempts to live humanely, their desperate pleas for help, all seemed too much to grasp. And it is too much for no one should have to bear such agony. Yet in defiance of that understanding, this story—her story—demands to be told because it’s worth knowing what happened to Miriam; it’s worth knowing most of all.

So here now, dear reader, is Miriam’s tale. The story you haven’t heard and the things you thought you knew, but didn’t really.

Greetings and grace to our Star Cross Lovers!

Remember them so innocent and sweet?

Here you will hear, if allowed my druthers,

Miriam’s tale to reveal and repeat.

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Compelled to comply with hate’s ghoulish goals,

She feared her fate should she foil their foray.

‘Til she solved the secret and saved the souls

Of those due to die at dawn the next day.

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She schemed and she dreamed and she risked it all,

To undo the doings of the depraved.

And when Dante came to fetch her ‘fore Fall,

She demurred to procure all still enslaved.

-

A girl with a star, a boy and the cross,

Cast adrift in an abyss vast across.