Fervor

Chapter 8

Back in the village, Irena leaves me to stare dolefully at my ship.

I’ve given up on breaking in by force. Given up on changing into sensible clothes.

I consider asking Sister Cadence how long these solar flares usually last, and if there’s a way to monitor them, but decide against it.

How could Sister Cadence possibly guess how long the solar storms will last?

There’s one pretty solid way to determine when they’ve ended: My ship will work again.

I feel eyes on me as I wander aimlessly through the village. Sharp eyes. Curious eyes. I hear whispers, murmured behind my back. The sisters seem fascinated by me, their gazes following me wherever I go, though they make no attempt to strike up a conversation.

They must wonder about the outside world. Many of these women have been here for decades, and might not know about the rest of humanity’s wars and famines and political maneuvering. I am a novelty to them.

Their gazes follow me like an unwanted shadow, and despite myself I feel an all-consuming desire to get away. To hide myself somewhere they won’t find me, somewhere they won’t follow. A place that tugs at my subconscious, whispering my name in the silence.

MIDONIA.

When the bell rings for evening meal, I am in my hut, elbows braced on the windowsill.

The shutters are flung open, and I gaze up at the tree-thick mountainside.

Fog swirls and drifts. It’s impossible to see what I know is there.

But just as the bell’s final toll fades, the clouds break apart, and I see it: the jagged edges of the ruin, jutting out from the fog.

Irena will be here in a moment no doubt, eager to herd me toward the dining hall, eager to subject me to another bout of worship.

The thought of it burns in my throat, my eyes pricked with unshed tears.

I can’t bear to endure those memories again, the smell of death so vivid it’s like I’m reliving that day all over again.

But I can’t stop thinking of the way he appeared to me during the worship, his hands all too real in the heat, his voice drifting against my mind like a phantom.

I hate that I lean into it. That I want to see him again.

That as much as his presence in my room last night unmoored me, it also lit a fire deep within that needs to be stoked.

I can’t endure those prayers again.

But I want to see him.

The thought, a sudden truth, grips me at the back of my neck and holds me tight: I am going to the ruin.

I’m out the door before I have time to properly think. And as the sisters trail toward the dining hall, I slip away into the shadows of falling dusk, toward the trees, and up.

There is a trail leading up into the darkening forest. I stumble upon it behind the bell tower.

Keeping to the shadows, I hug the walls of buildings until I’m safely out of the village, enveloped by the trees.

The trail is narrow, irregular, and difficult to follow.

Most likely it was formed by the repetitive passage of some small creature, maybe the lambs.

I pick my way along the path, aided by no light but the pale remains of day. My shadow’s presence grows louder in my head, his voice a low hum that’s almost a purr, and I know that I am on the right track.

The trail curves sharply, hugging the slope, a zigzag of ascension.

My white dress snags on a tree as I pass.

I kick pinecones out of the way, listening to their clatter as they roll steeply downward.

Once, at a break in the trees, I pause to stare out over the village.

From here it looks like a scattering of toys, a child’s diorama.

Something fleeting and tiny, easily trampled.

I shiver and continue onward.

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, a rightness. 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 finally inside this 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 him breathing, 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.’

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.

A man, 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 to me, 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 in the 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.

Run, Midonia. Run.

I do not run.

I don’t want to.

He is no longer a shape before me, no longer the vision of a man. He is all around me. He is the thick, stinging air. He is the wind outside this ruined citadel. He is the night. He touches me in ways that should be impossible. I have never been more held.

He coils around me, caressing my skin as if my clothes are not there, as if I have come to him naked and willing.

In some way, I have.

I don’t resist.

I allow him, this darkness all around me, the shadow that consumes me, to go where he will. To touch me as he will. To use me. Molten desire pours down my spine as unseen teeth graze my neck. As unseen fingers glide across my skin.

I fall to my knees as pleasure engulfs me, crying out there in the ruin, alone but for the shadows that seem to drown me.

STAY WITH ME.

His voice rings out from the gullet of the mountain itself.

My breaths are ragged. Scorching tears stream from my eyes. I lower my forehead to the floor, overcome.

DON’T GO BACK TO THEM.

The words echo inside my head. He can reach me even here, this inescapable darkness, the shadow that haunts this planet.

MIDONIA.

My throat burns. I’m still shaking, still wanting, when a cool touch startles me.

Skin against skin. A knuckle, dragging along my exposed jaw.

I jerk up, heart in my throat. He crouches before me, a man again.

He’s so beautiful that to look at him feels like a knife in the quivering muscle of my heart.

‘Midonia.’ DON’T GO BACK. YOU ARE NOT SAFE THERE.

I almost relent. I almost give in. I nearly allow him to have all of me, right here, forever. But a spark of coherent thought ignites in me. And for a brief instant, I know with the utmost surety that I’m a lamb led to slaughter. And he’s the one who holds the knife.

I grab that flash of clarity with frenzied fingers and drag myself to my feet.

He reaches for me with claws of bone and shadow.

But I’m already running, stumbling, falling – getting up again, the scraped skin of my knees ignored. I feel him at my heels, the heat of his gaze, the icy burn of his presence. I don’t know if it is the man or the shadow or both who chase me.