15
I’ve been searching for hours and hours, with no success, finding nothing but pebbles. My breath starts to increase, my chest rising and falling as I realise that this must be yet another trick, a trick to keep me in here forever.
I turn abruptly to face the middle, where I feel the energy of this thing must be coming from.
“There’s nothing in here!” I scream.
“But there is.”
“I have searched for hours and still you keep me here. There is nothing, you have to let me go.” I almost break on my last word.
“There are multiple things buried in this room. You will not be allowed to leave until you uncover what is needed.”
“There is nowhere else to look!” I shout, desperation rising in my voice.
“Except inwards.”
I stumble backwards, my hands clutch my head and then move to cover my pounding heart. I fall backwards, sliding down the rocks, slamming my head.
She can’t mean, she doesn’t mean—
I can’t do this.
But I won’t be able to leave, I can’t stay here forever but if this thing means to go there— I don’t know if I can.
I can’t access those parts of me, what this thing wants.
They’re so far underneath it all now, I would simply break.
Tears start to fall down my face and for the first time in over a decade, I let them.
“Why are you doing this?” I sob and it doesn’t respond.
For the first time since walking into this chamber, I’m alone. It has left me here to fall apart.
Fall apart and surely die.
Hours pass before I’m able to bring myself to start thinking again. My hot tears are now falling less violently.
I slam my head against the rock wall behind me in defeat.
“You want me to tell you about her.” I say definitively, my voice tired, my eyes closing.
It doesn’t respond, I can’t be certain I’m right but this is the only thing I’ve kept buried for so long. The only thing I haven’t been able to bring myself to think about for years.
I hesitated for hours because if this isn’t it, then I am ruined. This is what will break me and if I am wrong, it will have been for nothing.
But what choice do I have?
“Her name is Abigail.” I say, my voice struggling to keep even.
“I was five, my parents killed by assassins, Abigail had just been born. We were shoved into an orphanage with the god of deaths spawn running the place. It was cruel, horrible and ironically no place for children. I looked after her, did what I could to keep her away from everyone.
From all those who would hurt her.”
My sobs break through me, ripping me apart as surely as my soul was once ripped from me, all those years ago.
“I couldn’t save her from it all. As much as I tried. The orphanage was too horrible.”
I fist my hands in my hair and rip hard, begging for some sort of distraction from the memories that threaten to creep even further.
“Until one day, I decided it was too much, we had gone through so much in the last four years, that it was unbearable. When I was nine, I took four year old Abigail and ran.”
I bite my lip, the memories of us running are too raw, having not reached the surface in years. I hadn’t healed from them and I’m not sure I ever will.
“It was damn near impossible to survive, we almost starved to death over the course of the year but it was better than the orphanage. Anything would have been, there was a time where I thought even death would have been. But not for her, that was never an option for her.”
I take a moment to draw in an unsteady breath, willing myself to continue so I can leave.
“That’s when Erix found us, one night we were so close to the end, the god of death looming over our shoulders. When Erix offered me a better life, one where I could earn money and have a bed. But the things he wanted were something I could never let Abigail endure.
I made him promise to take her to a family. If I was to go with him, be the person he wanted me to be, he had to promise to make sure Abigail was safe.”
My nails bite my palms as I recall that I had put Abigail’s life in his hands. The hands of a man that I had not known to be the monster I know all too well today.
I slam my head back into the wall. I wish there had been another way, I wish I could have done it over again, so differently.
But I was young and out of options.
Even as I replayed the memories in my head those first few years, I had known there was no other way.
“Erix said yes but it meant that I could never see her again. For a whole year, I cried my eyes out, earning me almost more pain than that of losing her. Erix told me she was safe, but I had left her and I had no one. And no way to know if she was really safe,
no way of finding out what her life was like, or if she still had one.”
My cries echo through the room as I sob out the last words.
“Gods I miss her so much.”
I’m sobbing uncontrollably now, laying face first in the stone. I buried the memories of Abigail to keep me moving forward, to stop me crying, to stop Erix from punishing me, not that it had worked.
In doing so, I lost the part of me that cared, I became ruthless. There are things I did in the years that followed leaving her, that I could never forgive myself for.
But every death, every person hurt, was all in the name of giving Abigail a life that I could never live. Allowing her to become everything she ever wanted and yet to this day, I don’t even know if she’s still alive or where she is.
I sit up, tears still streaming down my face.
“Is this what you wanted!” I scream at the thing.
It doesn’t answer.
I force myself to stand up. My eyes burning behind the tears, hands shaking, body so tense it could cut through stone.
“You piece of shit!” I scream at it.
“You made me uncover all of that, you made me dig up the memories of Abigail just to ignore me!”
I turn around and punch the wall so hard it leaves a dent and I hear the rocks fall to the ground. I look down, my hand is bleeding but I don’t care, it doesn’t compare in the slightest to the pain I’m feeling.
I turn around again.
“Say something!” I scream.
I punch through one of the standing rocks, grab the debris and scream out as I throw it as hard as I can towards the centre, where I think this thing originates from.
“Answer me!”
“You have successfully completed my task.” It says, the voice changed from the little girl it once was. It’s now a woman's voice, older, much bolder and realisation hits me like a knife in my heart.
“Abigail.” I say softly as I drop to my knees and fall apart once more.
I am ruined.
I stay like that on the ground, unable to move, unable to do anything at all.