A
s the cloud of dust cleared on top of the mountain, Anna pushed back her own hood. The mist swirled about her, and mixed with the tears cascading down her cheeks. It was only a short while since the interference of the psychic, Tox, had unwittingly released her from half a millennia of imprisonment in her grave, and she had suffered a whirlwind of events that had taken her from one crisis to the next. When she looked back, she realised that everything had been pointing her towards the inevitable conclusion: Tox had taken the place of her long-dead husband, Richard. She had killed Richard five-hundred years ago, and scarcely had she found him again, when she discovered that only one of them could exist in this time and place. There was no way they could ever be together again. To Anna, her long journey and wait had been in vain. She had been through all the torment for nothing.
The mountain mist soaked the girl’s hair. Previously, she had felt almost immune to the elements, but the ghosts of the past had deserted her, and she was now totally human, prey to human frailties. Before she finally discovered this truth of her rebirth, she had been able to see the spirits and demons that inhabit the shadowy worlds between life and death; now they were all gone. She was bereft: no purpose, no reason to live.
Her sobs were replaced by shivers of cold, as the mist tendrils forced their way under her cloak. It was a cloak Anna had made for her in the style of her former life; thick wool, to keep the elements from her body. Underneath she wore a long dress. Her clothing was warm on the way up, but the sweat had cooled and the material clung to her body, draining what remained of the warmth.
“What is there for me, Richard?” she wailed at the grey mist, the dust of Richard’s body, flowing around her, seemingly reluctant to disperse. “Why could you not stay?”
Anna already knew the answer. She had been frozen in time by sorcery. Richard had been called across the ages by the potency of the song still ebbing and flowing around her head, ‘Seasons lost in Time’. She knew there was magic there; music is the voice of power, perhaps even the voice of God. She also knew that was why the chants in the abbey, she had been buried in, were so potent. But ‘God’ had deserted the monks when King Henry destroyed the authority of the monasteries, and now he had deserted her. The monks had deserved it; their opulence and arrogance had swamped them. Anna had been made to atone for Richard’s death by becoming an anchoress, locked in a cell for the rest of her life; she had changed her name. She could not remember her birth name, but only her given name, Ankerita.
“Yes, I shall die here as Ankerita,” she said, “Ankerita Leighton-Mynde shall be inscribed on my new tomb.”
“If I get a tomb,” she thought wryly. “Who is to know what lady lies atop this rise? I shall lay down and die here; life, for me, is over.”