A distant arc of something like fear travels through my nervous system, but it is muffled, meaningless, and I ignore it. Before I can reply to this pronouncement, burning up and choking on my disbelief, he begins to change form. His shadowy, undulating body solidifies, and his height diminishes, and suddenly I am facing a man.
Aman, solid, standing amid the ruins. His face is half in shadow, pale white, with angular planes. He is cruelly beautiful, his hair as black as night. His eyes are Hell-red, sparking in the gloom.
Anguish. My shadow.
He steps toward me.
‘What do you mean?’ I ask, and the question feels so small even as I voice it. ‘That you’ve been waiting for me.’
‘I know you’ve heard me calling, Midonia. I know you’ve seen me. I’ve seen you too. I have eagerly awaited your arrival. And now, at last, you are here.’
His answer reveals nothing new. But he speaks the truth. I have notebooks full of him, his eyes, his shape. Notebooks full of evidence that no matter how strange this is, no matter how dreamlike, I have seen him. I have heard him calling. And now I have a chance to know him.
‘If you’re not a god,’ I ask, my voice rough, throat sore as if from crying, ‘then what are you?’
‘How would you define a god?’
‘I don’t know. I thought the point was to be undefined.’
He smiles, a feral shape against the darkness. ‘Indulge me.’
I desperately want to indulge him. ‘An all-powerful being, I guess. Some unseen creature in the sky, pulling an array of strings attached to the living.’
‘What do you believe is the purpose of a god?’
I shiver at the resonance of his voice, still so deep, encircling me as if he speaks from all directions at once. ‘Some gods are creators. Others punish. Some … oversee things, I guess. Like the harvest. Or … I don’t know, war.’
‘What about the most imperative impulses,’ he rumbles. ‘You’ve forgotten the core of what defines life itself. Hunger. Devotion. Love. Rage. Each so strong, so destructive and powerful, that they must be controlled. Kept in line. Quelled, lest they overcome all other thought, all rationality.’
My heart flutters inside my chest. I know some of those feelings well. And I know what it’s like to desperately try to keep them at bay, to pretend that I’m not forever changed, forever warped into something new, something wrong.
It’s all too much, my blood zinging through my veins, my heart fit to burst.
I take a slow step backward.
Anguish closes the distance.
I’m not in control here. I’m alive because he wills it. I’m here because he called me. He revealed himself tome, and no one else. My eyelids feel heavy, my skin too sensitive. I’m not afraid; I’m something worse. ‘And what about lust? Do you rule over that impulse too?’
He emits a low growl, almost a purr. ‘I am everything you desire. If you like, I will rule over your darkest wants, your aching needs, and I will grant you everything. But Midonia …’ he holds out a hand. It is made of dripping shadow, long-fingered, with white-glowing curved claws that seem to melt out of the blackness all around him. ‘In return, you must stay here with me.’
My throat closes.
The words start to feel less enticing, more like a prison. He is in control. The last time I lost control …
I swallow hard.
From desperately far away, I hear a voice. My voice, screaming at the top of her lungs:Run. Run, Midonia. Run away and don’t look back.
I stumble, taking a half-step back.
His red eyes flash, then narrow. Coils of rippling shadow burst up from him like black flames. He advances on me, an apex predator. I have come to his lair and crawled into his grasp, rolled over and revealed my belly to him. Despite the way his presence tastes inthe back of my throat, an acrid smoke, a warning, I let him draw me away from the safety of the village. Am I nothing more than my perverse desires? Am I but a vessel for the twisted impulses of biology, the flicker of nerve endings, the slow sink into a thick mire of feelings and wants, until I drink it up and drown?
Even now, even with the intensity of his presence, the burgeoning terror in my heart, my eyes watering and heart hammering …I want.
I have wanted him all my life.
His shadowy grasp wraps around me, deft and scorching. I’m certain my skin begins to burn.
