Page 35 of Her Shadow so Dark and Lovely
“Are you alright?” she whispers. I nod. “I’m sorry. I should have warned you. I did not realise your thoughts ran so dark, little mouse.”
When I lean back to see her face, her eyes are normal again, the darkness confined to the irises. Worry written stark across her features. The shadows— Sila’s shadows— release me.
What was that?
“The Heart, playing its games,” she says. “It is a dark and lovely thing, but it is dangerous, too.”
Like you.
Sila stares at me, a soft smile playing at the corners of her mouth as I realise what I’ve signed. Warmth flares across my face for the second time.
“You are a wondrous thing,” she says. She grimaces, her fingers gently touching where they had dug into my skin. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t let you make a noise. Otherwise, you would be lost to me.”
I shiver at what I have narrowly avoided.
Don’t apologise for saving my life. Again.
The corner of her mouth tips in a grim smile. “Come, there is a branch up ahead.”
How she knows that, I’ll never know. Outside the circle of light, there is no ahead, no behind, only deep impenetrable darkness.
Sila pulls me up from the ground as she stands. “Try not to think too long on anything,” she says, smiling.
Will it try it again?
“Only at the edges. It will ease as we go further in,” she says. “Of course, then it will be replaced by other things.” She does not elaborate on what those other things are. I shiver, wrap my arms around myself and follow as she walks on.
The points where her fingers had dug in sting, but they keep me grounded in the dark. They aren’t nearly as bad as the cuts my own nails had made. Those I still had scars from.
Sila’s definition of up ahead and mine must differ, or perhaps it is only that time seems meaningless in the endless dark. The stone walls, an imitation of the Library’s halls, turn to rows and rows of shelves, packed to bursting with books and papers and scrolls. It isn’t so different from how Sila organises her own shelves. I keep my mind carefully blank, focused on putting one foot in front of the other. There are brief surges of feelings again, but they no longer take me by surprise and I turn them aside easily. They lessen as we walk, just as Sila had said, until they no longer come.
We continue to walk in silence. I’m grateful for the small bit of light I have, otherwise I think it would be easy to become lost. Both in body and in mind.
Occasionally we pass a door, or an arch between the shelves. There are ghosts of things at the edge of my sight. A room of dancers, a pale imitation of the Dawn King’s courtiers in the hall of mirrors. Children sitting on a rug in front of a hearth, the sigil light making them shadows as they play.
Hacking coughs rattling out of an open door. Children crying.
Even in the Heart they haunt me.
Sila comes to a stop beside me, holding out an arm to stop me from walking headlong into a wall. Here the corridor finally branches in an intersection that leads left or right. The corridor has grown larger as we’ve walked, no longer narrow, crowding tunnels. Instead, the ceiling is vaulted, arching high, meeting the tops of the shelves that stand more than twice my height. As if in answer to my thought, when I turn to look the other way, there is a ladder that I am certain wasn’t there before.
Sila looks amused when I look up at her. “It likes you,” she says. “Don’t let it distract you.” Her fingers find mine, threading through them tightly.
First Sila’s attention, now the Library’s. I had hoped to disappear into obscurity in the Library. What had I done to deserve this kind of torment?
Sila turns left, pulling me along as I cling to her. Everything is quite ordinary for a moment, and then at the edge of my vision, the shelves begin to shift as the other corridorfollowsus. I can feel a headache coming on as my mind tries to make sense of it. It tries to convince me that the corridor had always been there. No, not there— there. I keep my lantern cast on the ground, so that I can focus on putting one step in front of the other.
The curse shifts and settles again, a soothing kind of presence brushing against my senses. For once it puts me at ease, and it isn’t much longer until the second corridor gives up its pursuit.
The monotony of the hallway winds on as Sila follows this turn and that. I keep a tight grip on her hand to keep me anchored. I’m terrified that if I let go, I’ll be left adrift. If I were to get lost here, I doubt I would ever find my way out again. Which I am sure is the Heart’s intention.
There’s nothing to mark the passing of time. Objectively I am tired, and growing hungry, but I’m also not. As if time is suspended and me with it.
The air shifts ever so slightly, and my heart skips with it. As if it doesn’t care what change is coming because it will take anything at this point. It changes as swiftly as everything else has, the shadows opening up into high, towering ceilings like the Library proper. Wide sweeping staircases lead up to shelf lined rooms. Balconies similar to the common area open up onto the open space and high above our heads hangs a dimly lit chandelier. Beyond the rooms and archways, the dark fog sits thick. I have no doubt that it would open on to more halls, more rooms, more corridors.
Sila brings us to a stop at the foot of the main staircase. She untangles her fingers from mine and I try to ignore how tightly I’d been clinging to her. It’s hard to do so, what with how they’re cramping.
I collapse onto the stairs, my feet aching now that we’ve stopped moving. Tired right through to my bones. I press my palms against my eyes and try to suppress the yawn that follows. I feel so very small, and we’ve walked so far already and I’ve no doubt we have so much further to go.
