Chapter Twelve

I felt the fear of it.

I trembled as if I knew the true terror of it.

Then I froze: I was ice, all ice. My blood drained into it.

From Phoebus was gone, all gone, his journey over –

Anonymous

Translated from the Latin by Eavan Boland

So much for escaping unscathed, I thought, looking up from the floor of my grandmother’s chamber room, boulders, dust and a dark, sooty haze falling all around me. I had an ache the size of the rock that lay next to me pulsating in my temples, and I had no idea where Gimlit, Jade or Drae were, or what the hell had just happened.

Every bone in my body had felt like I’d been put through a meat grinder, but my flesh was still intact. Or was it? Cautiously I sat up, feeling each and every ache that coursed through my body while I scanned the room for the others. What I saw disturbed me more than words.

Lady Arwin was floating above the still and obviously wounded body of Xavier Drae. There was a pool of crimson oozing out from around his head and a sword, his sword, stuck through his shoulder. But that’s not what bothered me. No, it was the sight of Drae’s corporeal soul wafting forward like a puppet on strings between his still living form and that of my grandmother.

Drae was screaming; ranting over and over about the pain while Lady Arwin seemed to toy with his soul. She made it dance in and out of his flesh with a mere wiggle of her fingers.

The dark delight that shone in her eyes, the crease of her smiling lips filled me with utter disgust. This was not power. This was a vile atrocity. Pure, undeniable evil that knew no bounds. Evil that would be stopped.

True, I didn’t have the greatest respect for Drae; he was a puppet. But that did not give her the right to play with his soul the way she did. It did not give her the right to steal from him what did not belong to her. She had been tried for her crimes and found guilty. Drae deserved the same fate, if the fates so decreed it. She was not Judge and Executioner.

“You dare judge me?” Her voice was the sound of thunder bounding its way inside my flesh to toil against my bones. Her empty eyes found mine in the darkness and never before had I felt such a vast emptiness, a cold so immeasurable, nor a Darkness so complete staring back at me.

Lady Arwin had become the Darkness. And the Darkness was well pleased.

I blinked at her, unsure how to answer. I still had no idea where Gimlit and Jade were, and now Drae’s very soul hung in the balance.

I quickly tried to put the pieces of the last few minutes back together: She had only been partially through the Vortex, sending weird glowing opalescent black spheres of power ricocheting around the chamber. We had been dodging them like eighth grade geeks in some prepubescent dodgeball game of ‘blast the Other World nerds’.

Every time a ball would hit its mark, power cascaded over us; Darkness slathered our bodies as if we’d been dipped in electrified oil. Our limbs would pulsate with shock, extremities contorting, muscles constricting and convulsing before paralysis set in. You couldn’t help but watch, slack-jawed, while lungs seized—a last gasp for what seemed to be the dying—certain that eyes were about to pop out of heads in a gushing white flow. Then, the moment would pass and finally, we’d move again.

None of it had seemed real. It was like I had just dream-walked through the entire thing in this darkening corporeal hell. I sat on the floor, watching wordlessly while my grandmother sucked the soul out of Xavier Drae and felt like nothing more than a bag of bones subsiding of withered hopes.

“You’ll never stop me,” she laughed as another black ball of power slammed into my chest.

It was the same feeling of imminent death by drowning in the paralyzing sludge felt by all of us. I’d watched the terror ride the faces of those I cared for. Knew that they, unlike me, could not ride the full wave of Darkness.

I recalled seeing my Ogre, Gimlit, rife with agony and it tore at my heart. Seeing him, the most powerful and elite of his kind, grow stone-faced and fearful while the Darkness rode him like a thief—immortality and character its possession of choice—it sparked my ire as most other things could not.

Then there was Jade. His pale, pale eyes so round with fright, so horror-stricken that I wasn’t quite certain where the illustrious sheen ended and the theft of his spirit began. When his body convulsed, I felt it. When his wolf had howled internally, mine perked up her ears.

I knew how to stop this, but the Darkness rode my uncertainty. It filled me with fear and insecurity. Sure, I had taken the Sphere of Knowing, but that didn’t give me some internal mojo of exuberant ability to forget my shortcomings. I am, after all, still part human. And the Darkness, I knew, was using my uncertainty as my weakness.

Another black ball of power slammed into me and this time, I opened myself to it. I let the rot, the suffering and the madness fill me up and bowl me over. Darkness swam before my eyes, a thousand crying, whimpering voices rang out in sadness like a suffering, hollow wind echoing in my ears. It was there, amidst all those wee, sad voices that I heard one soul stutter in the Shadows of them all.

It was her voice. Soft and lonely, rich and melodic. Crying out against the tyranny and the madness of it all. It was the voice of a wee, frightened child of the Light, wandering, adrift and alone in the Darkness.

I knew who she was. And I knew how to save her. The question was, could I do it? Did I want to do it? Did I really have a choice?

“You will all die here tonight!” Lady Arwin shrieked.

She let loose another ball of power and I moved, stood up and stepped into it, only to crumple backwards against the dirt-covered floor, pain running in searing spikes through all of my limbs. This time, my scream echoed with Drae’s. I gasped and the moment the pain and pressure touched my bones, slithered up my muscles and found a home in the fear of my heart, I knew what it dwelt on. Knew what it dwelt on, and how to defeat it.

“You pathetic bitch!” I bellowed, and Lady Arwin sent another ball of power my way.

“You’re nothing! Nothing but a has-been Pixie who will never see the Light,” I told her. Her growl of annoyance and the wavering of Drae’s soul told me that what I was doing was working. And I dared not think about it for she would hear my thoughts.

“You don’t have the wings to be both a Child of Light and a Child of Darkness, you pathetic castoff Pixie bitch,” I told her. “You’re even more pathetic than my mother.”

I think it was the mother comment that did it, for she turned away from Xavier and focused the full force of her dark power directly at me. She sent all of her dark, vile hatefulness towards me in one large black sphere of angst.

The instant that power rolled from her fingers, I opened my mind and did what no one in my family had ever done before me. I did what none of them had ever had the courage, will or sheer determination to do, and would never understand.

I took the Darkness inside of me. I accepted it and her. All of it. I took it deep inside of me, where those wandering voices cried. Absorbed it down into the well of my being and using my Tell of Calling, I called Lady Arwin’s Darkness.

I called her Darkness to me like the deranged calling home an errant madness. I reached with my mind, into the Shadow Lands, shoveling past layers and layers of grime, film and filth. I delved past wandering souls, muttering fools and disgruntled poltergeist. I barreled my way through the Darkness with one purpose and one purpose alone...To find the child of her soul. To seek out her misplaced and misguided child of Light.

It was with this absurd will and certainty that I called her Darkness to me. Called to it and claimed it like it was my own. Then, and only then, did I call her Light.

With a burning ray of forgotten hope, a force filled me like a switch had been thrown and lightning ripped up my spine. It was spellbinding, body-numbing and ferocious. A brilliant red haze erupted through my mind, blinding in a moment of uncertainty before it washed over my limbs like hot lava and jammed all the air I had left in my lungs.

It felt as though my body were being ripped in two. Part of me dunked in a boiling cauldron of tar then set aflame while a million screaming voices raged against me, the other half drifting aimlessly. Shuffling around in an icy, fog-filled storm. I wasn’t quite sure where the Darkness of Lady Arwin resided and the lost child of Light wandered. My head was a wreck, my body on fire.

For a moment I thought this might be easy. Yeah, right.

I stumbled forward, my legs too wobbly to hold me. The force of power rippling through my body, staggered me. Tore at my mind. My eyes swam with crimson patches. With outstretched hands I blindly searched through the fog, seeking her beleaguered child. Seeking the power I hoped was right.

Lady Arwin’s cackling laughter echoed through the chamber just before she slammed me with yet another bolt of Darkness. The instant the sludgy stain flowed over me, I suddenly knew which side was up, where I was headed and what I needed to do.

I could feel the rot sloughing off my flesh like melting skin. Hear the cries of whimpering souls that filled the fog; each one piercing my soul with sadness. I stumbled again and felt the slickness of the Vortex trickle over my fingers like soapy rain. I knew then that I had tottered far and was once again inside the Vortex. This time, we were on even ground.

I knew when she was sending the next ball of Darkness at me and again, I accepted it, wholly. I took it into me and made it my own. Her anger pierced the chamber and she rallied another ball, then another. I took these as well.

Her Darkness was nothing to me. Just a place for the Darkness to enter and exit. A portal to slide into and through. I wondered what she would do if the tables were turned.

Her screams grew frantic with each ineffective volley she threw at me. Her power limited, as it was, within this realm. Now that I was inside her world with her there was even less she could do without fear of hurting herself. Without worry that the chaos she reigned would be turned in her direction. Hell was, after all, Hell. And it was time to see if she could suffer the recumbence of her pain.

With half of my mind entrenched in the Shadow Lands, feeling my way through the madness, searching for the shunned spirit of who she used to be, I opened myself, just that little bit more, to the Light. It was a whisper among a million screaming voices. A tiny, miniscule breath in the storm of a murky darkness. With all the power and control that I could muster, I slowly, softly Called to her child of Light. Like the innocence of a childhood lost, her Light came to me, filled me up and slammed closed the door to the Darkness.

Lady Arwin lay on the middle of the chamber floor thrashing and screaming. Her arms flailed as she beat the ground with rounded fists, her no, no, no’s of hysteria ricocheting off the stone edifice of the room. Around us the grandeur of the room had been stripped away, leaving nothing in its place but a barren room of stone and a simple cot, her magic and her glamour stripped away with the taking of what little Light remained to her.

It was now time to take her Darkness.

Kneeling at her side, I placed my palm on her heart and one on her head. Wide-eyed, body now rigged with her own vexing fear, she looked on me…me, with horror.

“Soul stealer,” she coarsely whispered.

These same words had been uttered by my Queen the night I’d taken her Light. Maybe they were true. At the moment, I didn’t have the time to worry about it. Lady Arwin’s madness needed to end. Before she hurt herself or anyone else.

With a deep sigh holding something close to regret I bowed my head and whispered, “I’m sorry.” Then I closed my eyes and Called her Darkness into myself. I let it cascade through me like a deep, dark wave from a black and endless ocean. I let it roll me like a lover lost. Like a vagabond in the forgotten Shadow Lands that finally found its soul.

Quietly, and softly, like the rising of the sun the Darkness rolled away. And like a dark and distant dream, it slithered over and through me before settling like a waiting stain against my bones.