My breaths grow shallow as I ascend. My heart slams hard against my ribs. The closer I get, the more eager I am, so eager that my sore legs carry me up and up without tiring. I am bolstered by certainty. He waits for me there, in the teeth of a crumbling castle.
When at last I reach the decaying edifice, my chest is heaving. Sweat pools in the groove of my back, between my breasts, on my upper lip. I’m thirsty, spent, and hungry. I haven’t eaten since breakfast, but I’m here. There’s no turning back now.
A sense of calm begins to fall over me, arightness. A soothing air, a pulse on the wind.You are safe. You were called here. It is all as it was meant to be.
The ruin is impossibly tall, grandiose. I step into its shadows, my leather shoes soft against cold black stone. I move forward slowly until the darkness enfolds me, and I am finallyinsidethis towering structure, the remains of some great stronghold, an ancient castle. How could it exist here? Who built it? If Irena is correct, a once-grand civilization, now extinct and unremembered but for this single behemoth against the mountainside.
My footsteps echo in the gloom.
The sun has set, though there is a dusky haze of purple over the landscape. I squint into the darkness. Under normal circumstances, I would turn and run back down the mountain. The shadows are too deep, the silence too loud. But I’m drawn forward, that spark inside me still demanding to be stoked.
‘Hello?’ The air is thick with anticipation, my voice small in that grand space.
I feel a heavy gaze upon me. I can almost feel himbreathing, a chest rising and falling. I imagine claws raking against my flesh.
YOU CAME TO ME AT LAST.
The spark inside me flares to life.
His voice is deep and all-consuming, both in my ears and in my brain, ancient and horrible, as if the mountain itself were speaking to me. And as the voice reverberates through my bones, I know that there is no hiding from this; there is no lying here, no smokescreen through which I might portray myself in the way I want to be seen.
I am already seen. I’m known. I’ve come to my shadow’s citadel.
He called, and I answered.
My mouth is bone dry, my gut clenching with sudden insatiable hunger. ‘Who are you?’
There is a scrape like claws on stone. A shift in the darkness, a shape moving toward me from within the depths of the ruin. ‘You call me Anguish.’
My stomach freefalls.
Anguish.
All this time. All this time, it was him.
I should be shocked, but I knew. When I heard his voice in my head at worship, I knew. When he came to me last night, I knew. In my bones and blood, I knew. I can taste his voice like acrid smoke in the back of my throat. Anguish’s voice.
I take a slow step forward. I still can’t see him; he is nothing but sensation and heat; he is the fire that burns me from within, the prick of need at the tip of my tongue.
‘What are you?’
He, my shadow, a god, whatever is with me in the darkness, begins to circle me. I feel his hot gaze rove over me as I stand frozen, trapped within myself, eager and shaking. I’m not afraid.
‘Do you believe in God?’ he asks, voice like a licking tendril of smoke along my neck, down my back.
‘No.’ But in this moment, in his presence, it feels like a lie.
‘Good.’
‘Why?’
‘There is no God in this world. No greater power watching over you. There is only me.’ And then he moves into the light.
My heart stops.
He is made of shadow and darkness. He fills the massive room with his presence, and a pressure builds in my sinuses, as if the very air is thick with his power. Humanoid, sculpted from darkness but for his glowing coal-bright eyes, he looms above me. Even though I know I should feel small and helpless before him, I feel the opposite. His power imbues me with hectic energy. My breaths begin to deepen. My sight clears. The pressure against my skull abates.
‘Midonia,’ he says. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’
