Page 84 of The Source of Storms

She stood to leave, and I asked after her, “Where am I?”

“The Temple of Enos, Lord of Light.” She swept out the door and closed it promptly behind her. I heard the lock click into place.

Tears burned, and my dry throat ached with the threat of crying. Fury bubbled in my empty stomach, roiling like a black, waiting storm.

The curt woman returned some time later, and I ate a bland meal of bread and stale goat’s cheese. I found a bucket in the corner meant to serve as my toilet, and then collapsed back into my cot. I felt wrong, sluggish, like I’d drunk too much ale orhad been drugged with a heavy dose of magic mushrooms, just without the light, pleasant part of those experiences. I began to drift back into sleep.

Yet just before it consumed me, I saw a face. A young woman’s face, wide blue eyes staring into mine from above, blood dripping from her mouth. One final, rasping, shuddering breath as she died, impaled on an ice blade of my making. I slept fitfully.

∞∞∞

I came to consciousness in the darkness. It was not as complete as what I had woken up in hours ago. I could see details now. A space filled with swirling fog, or black smoke. I couldn’t smell it, couldn’t discern what it was, couldn’t see walls or the ceiling through it.

“You poor thing. Sweet morning lamb.” A deep voice, reverberant and hollow, permeated the darkness.

I froze in the silence that followed.

A swirl of black, of ash and smoke. Thick enough that it should have made me cough, but I did not feel it as I breathed in this void space. I waited, listening, held in stasis by instinctual fear.

“There’s nothing you can do. It has already been done,” the voice murmured.

It struck something primal in me, a deep, remembered terror of what it was to be hunted, of the eternal dance of predator and prey. The tense, quivering, coiled legs of the hare, waiting to spring away as the wolf approached. But where was the wolf?

Something in that voice was wrong. So very wrong.

“Who’s there?” I spoke into the dark.

“You know me,” the deep voice answered. “I was there.”

“You were where?” I said, fighting the shake that crept into my vocal cords.

“With you, when you did it. When you spilled blood.”

I summoned my courage, rose and stepped forward, searching for the candles that had been there, anything to light this darkness. But there was nothing. Only blackness filled with dark, swirling fog.

“You don’t need to see. We can speak here in the dark like this,” the voice said. Sourceless, directionless. But clearly it could see me.

“Show yourself. Speak to me face to face.”

“Oh, but we are, we are. I’ve seen your face, and I think you’ve seen mine. I was there with you, with them, in death.” The deep voice carried through the fog.

“You were in Rhyanaes?” I asked into the void.

“Yes. I saw you. You didn’t see me?”

“Show me your face and I’ll tell you.”

A low, rumbling laugh. Humorless and empty. “You know me. I saw you know me. I saw you,” it repeated.

“How will I know if I can’t see your face?” I searched the fog, turning and scanning.

The voice resonated from behind me then. “You do not need to see to know. You only need to trust.”

“It’s difficult to trust those who won’t look me in the eye.” I turned in the direction of the voice, but saw only drifting fog.

I heard it from behind me again, closer, just over my shoulder. “That’s why they call it faith, child.”

“Get away from me,” I said, turning and backing up, trying to find the cot behind me. I reached for my power but nothing answered. No Source, no life. Nothing. The stillness of the world around me was horrifying. All dead, all empty.

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