“The same as you.” The voice was everywhere, deep and sonorous, running right through me and stealing my breath.
“Where are you?” I managed, hoping that my voice held firm.
A snort of derision. “I am everywhere, Eve, haven’t you worked that out yet?” Each word sounded as if it had come from a different corner of the chamber, and I spun around trying to keep up with them until I realised the futility of my efforts.
‘If you want me to reduce myself to something you can simply see, if that would give you a false sense of some parity, then I can, but I had hoped for better from you.” That voice, so honeyed and rich. As it spoke it seemed to create harmonies with itself, pitching each word at myriad different notes simultaneously, chiming so melodically.
“I’m not afraid of you!” I shouted into the gloom, and the force of it sent the candles closest to me flickered madly.
A deep chuckle followed, and then a silent pause.
“Oh Eve, you do amuse. Of course you fear me. How can you not – when you don’t understand what I am? And the amusement continues; because if you did fully understand what I was, you would be even more afraid!
“You are afraid of some things that you know – but above all, you fear those things that you know are out there, but you don’t understand. Out there in the dark. That is me, Eve, the one that is out there in the dark, always there, and waiting.”
“Waiting for what?” I asked.
“For you.”
My heart ran cold as I heard the truth in his words. “What do you want from me?” I asked on a whisper.
“I want all of you Eve, your strength, your heart. I want your soul.” These last words were whispered, but they reverberated around and around the room, like an echo that had been trapped underground.
I shivered violently from the frost in his words.
“Look around this chamber. See all these candles? You were wondering what creatures from this land would be commemorating, yearning for. Oh, we yearn, Eve, believe me. The power of our longings would leave you appalled. I know what yearning is – just as you do. Yes, I know how much you yearn, Eve; it rolls off you in waves. And I can help you. All you need to do is surrender to those feelings, give into them, and come back to me. Come back home.
“With me, you would satisfy those longings, you would take vengeance on those who have wronged you, you could rain fire down on your enemies. Wouldn’t you like to see them writhe in agony? I know that you have fought those feelings, but I also know they have been there. And I can show you such dark magic that your family would live again.”
I could feel myself leaning into the seduction in his voice, wanting the release that he hinted at. His voice was warm, delicious, spreading through my body. I shook.
“Eve, Eve,” he breathed. “I am unbridled power, I can answer all your heart’s desires. You have become very powerful, but this is nothing compared to what I can give you. You have always thought that darkness was simply the absence of light, haven’t you? Oh, Eve! That was never true – there is a whole world out here in the darkness, seething with life. The shadows are where the real power lies. The true passions of mankind lie here, waiting to be harnessed. I can show you worlds.”
“What of Alette?” I demanded.
“She is mine. You will never have her. And soon you will be mine, too.”
As he spoke, a vast darkness entered the room. I can’t explain it fully, but it felt as if it misted down from above and made the very air heavy and hard to breathe. Some of the dark mist even seemed to flow out of me, or through me. The candles all flickered and bobbed, throwing crazy patterns on the nearby stones. As I struggled to drag in enough air, the darkness seemed to collect in one area, swirling around with a deep vortex at its centre. As I watched, it became denser and denser, until it finally took the rough shape of a creature – a massive horned Beast that walked on four legs. Its lizard-like tail dragged along the ground behind it as it prowled along a line of seating several metres above me.
“Perhaps you can only cope with seeing me in this form,” chided the Beast, as he stalked along the stones. “Disappointing.”
I felt a pang of shame. I wanted him to be impressed with me for some reason. I wasn’t sure now whether that was because I wanted him to fear me, or a simple need for him to find me special, worthy.
“I can cope with a lot,” I spat back at him. “And I am not the person I was when you first started to stalk my dreams. “We have fought with your armies, and we have cut you back in many places. I can fly now, and I can sense things that I couldn’t before.”
“Yes, you have pushed back my armies, but Eve, can’t you see? The Fears are infinite. There will always be new recruits to my ranks, there will always be an army in your way. You can’t win! It was all engineered so, so that you would be standing here, as you now are, talking with me. At my mercy.
“And oh, Eve, I want to be merciful! Yes – you have grown, and you are wonderful, just wonderful!” He spoke as if to a young child who had just produced a rather adorable drawing.
I smarted under his honey laced with disdain. Without a conscious thought from me, my wings unfurled, and spread around me.
The Beast threw back his head and laughed. Black ash and smoke whirled to keep the edges of his form intact as he moved.
He looked me dead in the eye then – at least, insofar as something without true form can stare. His eyes were devastating. Pools of darkness that were ancient and knowing, that spoke of malicious rage, unbounded lust, manipulation and secrets. They swirled and thrashed; bottomless chasms that pulled you in.
“You don’t need wings to fly, Eve. That’s a truth that none of The Craven realise – so they are bound to me.
“Now, you will know. You will see the truth, and you will know. And after you have seen, you will not reject me. I see them in you: shame, guilt, sexual longing, the desire for vengeance – and the rest. You think you are so different from me?”
He opened up wings of his own, dark and eternal. The chamber felt too small to contain him. It had always been too small. He rose above me, his form now becoming less distinct around the edges, his eyes pinning me where I stood. His wings grew and stretched, and then they reached for me. They drew around me, and I was lifted off the ground. I crossed that threshold of consciousness. In his wings, I was in free fall. I fell past stars and galaxies, my mind unable to take in all that was shown. I tumbled past palaces that were simultaneously filled with life and joy, but also death and despair. I saw images of the Shadow Beast copulating furiously with prone members of The Craven and writhing members of the Riven, and I saw worlds cracking apart and colliding together, taking new forms, in the blink of an eye. Time had no place here, place had no time. I was in a different Realm altogether. I drifted down.
His voice reached me in this abyss.
“And here I will keep you, until you know – until you realise that you are mine. You will see the truth of everything, Eve – see it well. And you will know that you are mine. In a while, I will call to you and you will give your answer.
“You will let me touch you; you will ask for it. And the funny thing is, that is all you needed to do to get Alette back – just get close enough to touch her. And you were always just too far away.”
The voice rocked me, seduced, tempted. The beauty I found in his wings was mesmerising. The possibilities were infinite. I could feel his presence moving through me, making me restless, making me ache for him. His wings caressed me, held me. Everything else seemed so distant, so remote from here. I had lost my footing.
I may have drifted for a thousand years – it didn’t matter; nothing seemed to matter. I had the sensation of falling lower, but I had no way of telling in the density of darkness that surrounded me. If he had only held me in a dark prison with damp walls and a bone-deep chill, I may have stood a chance. But it was warm here in the da
rkness, velvety and rich. I wanted to stay.
I saw lost worlds, dying worlds, worlds made again, and still I kept falling. Visions of my parents appeared in front of me – my sister and my brother. Their smiles told me that they were glad I had come. I was returning to a ship I had once abandoned. I had left them there in their grave of rubble and I had walked away. I had betrayed them. I felt as if I now walked in communion with them once more; they were not lost to me. I knew that I had found the world that Claire had spoken of: the mythical land of the dead. I felt I understood this world. I had to stay.
I saw paths shooting off in all directions, millions of paths, millions of possibilities. On some of them were small, unformed beings, some more developed than others. They all turned to look at me in turn, and in each case I stared back into my own eyes. I felt revulsion and compulsion battling within me.
“Don’t fight,” murmured that voice of ages all around me. They are all versions of you; you can’t fight that. Nascent beings that you wouldn’t allow to be fully born; the unfulfilled. You can bring them to fruition, Eve – you have that power.”
I looked again; some revolted me, twisted and deformed. Others were strong and lithe, and I was drawn to them, rather proud. I watched as one of them, sensual and magnetic, drew someone in for a kiss. Deepening the kiss, she rubbed herself against the faceless man, and he sank helplessly to the ground with her. I felt a surge of female sexual power within, and revelled in it.
On another path I saw myself again, powerful, with a drawn sword. In front of me stood the soldiers who had taken my life away. This version of me grinned back at me, powerful in her vengeance, then turned and cut the soldiers down, one after the other, with sadistic glee. I was shocked that a thrill of exultation went through me.
So many pathways, so many versions of me that I saw. I watched them all, saw myself in every possible constellation.
When my hand brushed past my hip, I felt it. The small nugget in my pouch, that I took with me everywhere. My sea glass. My hand went to it instinctively, and I drew it out. A piece of light from above. It glowed in my hand, soft and gentle. Not a blinding light, but a soothing one. If someone had shone a torch through this inky darkness, I would have turned away, averted my eyes. But this was the right amount of light. It spoke to me of stormy skies, crashing waves and the world above. It called to me, calling me back to the sea and the free air. I gasped a breath in. I hadn’t realised how cloying the air was down here, how it seemed to drug as much as it maintained life. I started to push against the velvet air, feeling trapped in the swathes of material. It was strangling me like jungle creepers.
As I thought this, I felt my feet touch the bottom. There was a limit here, and that relieved me. The words of the Shadow Beast leapt into my mind: “You have always thought that darkness was simply the absence of light, haven’t you? Oh, Eve! That was never true – there is a whole world out here in the darkness, seething with life.”
I now knew that to be true; I had seen what power lives in the darkness. There are things that live and breathe there – and they ooze with potential. Simply keeping the light on will never keep them at bay. They just move backwards, out of the way of the beam, and then regroup behind you. You need to walk out into the darkness, and meet with them. Only once you have done that can you walk through the night without fear. I had lived long enough to see the same things with different eyes.
And a torch will only help you so much – what you really need to develop is night vision. I remembered back to a flash of my childhood; my father teaching us to see better in the dark. He would make us close our eyes, then turn off the light suddenly. After counting slowly to ten, we could open our eyes, and they really had adjusted to the dark. It was like a magic trick, and we made him do it night after night when he came up to kiss us goodnight.
I recalled the words that Claire and I had shared, a different world ago: that both the darkness of the night, and the glare of the sun can blind you. You need a careful balance of the two to see clearly.
But the Beast had also got it wrong. I could never live down here in this velvet lair. It was as much of a prison as the one that I had been trying to escape; seducing you into captivity. I could never live without the sky arching over me, the waves crashing into me. The bracing of one’s feet to withstand the impact was a simple testament to life. Without Raul to love, explore life with, without my friends, without my Marni. They had grounded me as much as they had given me flight – giving me an anchor point to return to again and again. A home. They were my counterpoint to this dark inner world. From the pouch, I also withdrew Sula’s words.
But I could see parts of the darkness that had a home in me, too – had a place there. This wasn’t a strange dark land; this was me. My inner lands. It was intimidating, but it was the truth. The sensual pleasure I had felt with Raul had scared me, but I accepted it now. The anger in me for what my family had suffered, what I had suffered, was part of me, too. I had met with these parts of myself down there: the desire for revenge, the desire to kill, the cowardice, the guilt, all of them – and I had spoken with them. Some of them weren’t pretty; some were tortured and disgusting, hard to look upon. But they were there. My darks to my lights. Shame, such a potent foe, seemed to step away from me now, and I was able to look him in the eye.
I had been so taken up with the parts of myself that I thought I had lost, that I had been unaware of how many parts of myself I had voluntarily hidden away, stuffed under the carpet of my shame.
This is why Raul survived The Riving! I suddenly understood. Like a dream that I had had an eternity ago - before I had come here, before I had grown wings, before I had ever encountered the Shadow Beast – I had seen him in my dreams. Only those who allowed it could be Riven. I felt a rush of power surge through me. It was true; it must be true! Only those who allowed it could be Riven! The Shadow Beast’s power lay in suggestion, manipulation, temptation and seduction. He played expertly on fears, pulling you in. But if you didn’t want to fragment into a thousand pieces, you couldn’t be made to. It really was that simple. Raul had held firm and survived, not because they had let him go, as he had assumed, but because the very core of his being rejected any idea of fragmentation. He knew who he was, right down to the darker parts of him. He would also have held firm in the furnace. He hadn’t been allowed to ‘escape’ for a more twisted purpose. They were not planning to use his love against him; they simply couldn’t. The Shadow Beast had seen it there, and realised that he could do nothing to Raul. The Beast had had no choice but to let him go; Raul wasn’t his prisoner any more.
When his voice came down to me through the ages, I was ready.
“Eve, I have come for your answer. I am waiting for you.”
I was instantly back in the candle-lit arena. As the darkness began once again to coalesce in one area, I waited for the Shadow Beast to show himself. My hands were fisted, and in my right hand, I clutched my sea glass; in my left, Sula’s note. I marvelled at the power of this little frosted fragment and this tiny paper scrap. My wings were out, but unopened, relaxed and folded.
I had surfaced with a different understanding of reincarnation. I myself was an embodiment of past lives, each one stacked within me as an infinite series of Russian dolls. I myself had died many deaths, but those parts were still in there, still essential parts of self. I felt as if I had uncovered a treasure; taken gold from this time of Shadow.
I could sense immediately that I was not as the Shadow Beast had expected. He prowled along the stone lines, stepping down a few rows towards me until I struggled to keep him fully in the limits of my vision. I somehow knew without a glimmer of doubt that he could attempt to eviscerate me, and he would fail. The knowledge thrilled through my body.
“My answer is no.” My voice rang strong and true through the chamber. In it I heard the chiming chords that The Beast had used on me yesterday. My voice was richer, more multi-layered a
nd tonal.
“You sought to take me, heart and soul. You have failed. I know now that you can’t take me. You can’t take anything. You can’t take anything until people choose it. All you have the power to do is to trick people into choosing it.
“Oh, I so nearly chose it all. It was so beautiful...” I paused as I remembered the worlds I had seen in his arms, the pleasures hinted at.
“You work through deception and temptation. I don’t want that. But there is some truth in what you showed me. Rather than you taking me, I saw to take parts of you. All you are is parts of me. Nothing more.”
At this, the Beast hissed violently, and retreated rapidly up several lines of stones. I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed as if I could begin to see the candles that flickered behind him, the vapour of his form thinning. He appeared angry and unstable. The inky density of him in this form started to look patchy and ethereal. More like smoke than form. He hissed again, baring his teeth, and the dark cloud started to break up and dissipate.
“You will have all of me or nothing!” he screamed, as he vanished from view.
Dream
Flower
I was in a huge room, and there were flowers all along the sides of the walls. As I looked closer, I saw they were all sewn on to long long pieces of fabric that stretched off into the distance. These pieces of fabric were as tall as a small hedge. They were an expression of grief. Rather than a story, or an explanation, they symbolised the reality of living with grief. Each flower or decoration was an approximation of each time you had thought of the person you had lost. A floral mind-map, building up into a thing of such beauty. It was more poignant than I can say. A real, living memorial of the best kind. It was simply an account of when that lost person was thought of. Sometimes it was clear how they were thought of – that is, a happy memory, or a painful one, a scar or hole in the material with a different-looking flower.
The Shifting Pools Page 23