Wildalone
Page 39
“Elza and I are sisters. How different can we be?”
Without an answer, he headed back into the tunnel, turning every now and then to make sure I followed.
“Is this really a death oracle?” I touched the cold, grainy walls. “It can’t possibly be real. We are thousands of miles away from Greece!”
“Real? Only if you want it to be, remember?” A smile spread its ambivalence through his face. “The Necromanteion is now a jewel of the tourist brochures, but little else. The very notion of a path to Hades—an actual passageway into the Underworld that one could step in and out of—is considered a myth, a curious invention of the ancient mind. And maybe it is better that way.”
I expected to see the vine-leaf door. Instead, a patch of sky led us out on a barren hill overlooking an ocean. Or a sea.
“Where are we?”
“At the threshold between two worlds.”
“Land and water?”
“No. Past and present.”
“What about the future?”
“The future is here—” He pointed at my heart. “You aren’t afraid of it, are you?”
I hesitated, and his laughter rolled its hollow echo over the hill:
“The future has many more reasons to be afraid of you than the other way around.”
Far below us, waves crashed against the rocks, depositing their last wishes safely on the shore.
“How can I win him back, Silen?”
“If you think of love as a win, you will always lose. Such is the mysterious way of the universe. As for how or when—this I cannot tell you.”
“You’re the only one who can. You have the gift of prophecy.”
“Clairvoyance and prophecy are not the same thing. One is to see the future; the other—to understand it. The last time I presumed to interpret what I saw, my guess turned out to be terribly wrong.”
“Then don’t interpret. Just tell me what you see.”
He kept looking at the sky. In the distance, the sun was starting to rise above the water.
You helped my sister kill him, yet now refuse to help me? I didn’t say it out loud, but with him that was just as well.
“My help wouldn’t change the outcome for you any more than it did for her. When there’s a will, there’s a way. Isn’t this what you humans say?”
I thought he would leave it at that—vague, as usual. But he added:
“The thing about mankind’s wisdom is, it often misses the point. Your sister, for example, had more will than anyone could hope for. And yet she failed to achieve what she wanted.”
With that, he turned me around. I saw a familiar building against the silhouettes of trees and distant hills. The same haphazard arrangement of stones, the terrace overlooking the sea: a replica of the Tsarevo church, but older.
“I shall be seeing you again soon, Theia Nymph of the Moon and the Sun . . .”
He held the door open for me. Inside, a familiar table stretched all the way to a stone fireplace from where the vastness of Procter Hall extended out toward the vestibule.
“So this really is a church! Only nobody knows it—”
But he was gone. Through the door behind me, all I could see was the golf course, the fence of Wyman House, and . . . night! Everything outside was now dark. How could it not be? While the morning sun was already rising over Greece, here—on a college campus that had become my home halfway across the globe—the night was just beginning.
About the Author
A natural-born storyteller, KRASSI ZOURKOVA grew up in Bulgaria and moved to the United States to study art history at Princeton. After college, she graduated from Harvard Law School and has been practicing finance law in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, where she currently lives. Her poems have appeared in various literary journals, and her essay “Book Collecting in the Absence of Books,” about compiling a personal library under Communist censorship, won first prize in essay contests at Princeton and Harvard. Wildalone is her first novel.
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Credits
Cover design by Amanda Kain
Cover photographs © by Vic Pigula/Getty Images
Map by Danae Blackburn
Excerpt in Chapter 14. from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Ian Johnston (Arlington, VA: Richer Resources Publications, 2009), accessed online August 22, 2014. https://archive.org/stream/BirthOfTragedy/bitrad_djvu.txt.
Art used throughout by Marina99/Shutterstock, Inc.
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
WILDALONE. Copyright © 2015 by Krassi Zourkova. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-232802-1
EPub Edition January 2015 ISBN 9780062328045
1516171819OV/RRD10987654321
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