Chapter 22 #2
I walked around the far side of the Geatgrima so I could get a better look at what Ambrose was doing.
He had pulled a mortar and pestle from his bag, along with several small bundles wrapped in cheesecloth.
As I watched, he unwrapped each bundle, and began adding ingredients together to be crushed.
As he worked, he muttered almost continuously under his breath, no doubt setting the intention for whatever magic he was now seeking to perform.
Blood began to thunder in my ears, my stomach clenched with anxiety as I looked at the Geatgrima.
Would this be the moment it crumbled to rubble?
There were souls on the far side of that archway.
Would they be harmed in any way by whatever Ambrose was about to do?
Would Isabel be among them? My imagination conjured her, hovering just out of sight on the other side of an impenetrable veil.
Could she see what Ambrose had become in his quest to regain her?
A flash of silver and the sound of a pained gasp dragged my attention back to Ambrose in time to see him cradle his hand against his chest. Blood was welling up in the palm of his hand from a deep gash he had just inflicted on himself with the silver knife, which he cast aside, sending it clattering away across the rocks.
He raised his hand over the mortar and clenched it into a fist, squeezing a steady dripping of blood into the contents of the bowl.
It hit the bowl with a sizzling sound, and a thready tendril of smoke rose into the air.
Ambrose sniffed at it tentatively. He nodded with a grunt of approval, evidently happy with the result.
Then he rose to his feet, the bowl in his hands, and began to circle the plinth, pouring out the contents of the bowl as he walked.
He walked around the Geatgrima three times, and when he had finished, he tossed the bowl aside and dropped to his knees on the outside of the Circle he had created.
He began to chant in a language I could not understand, and yet as the words poured forth in a steady stream, I began to feel strange.
Lightheaded. Disoriented. Could the spell be affecting me, even though I was only witnessing it in a vision?
I didn’t want to risk it, and so flung my hands up to clap them over my ears, blocking out Ambrose’s incantation.
But I couldn’t block out his screams.
Ambrose’s body had gone rigid. His back arched, his muscles strained and bulged.
His veins stood out like ropes beneath his skin, and then, as I watched, they turned an inky black, like his heart had begun pumping shadows instead of blood.
As my mind repelled the image, my body responded, and I floated backward.
I wanted to keep floating, to float right back up out of this vision, to not have to witness what would happen next because I knew, instinctively, that it would be horrifying.
The moment that thought crossed my mind was the very moment the Gray Man appeared.
It began almost like a shadow, a blurred outline around Ambrose’s body that pulsed and rippled as he screamed.
It was as though the Darkness pulsing through his veins was seeping out, encasing him.
He gritted his teeth, the gasps hissing through them as his body convulsed.
I could see the shadow pouring like the thickest smoke from his nose, his mouth, from beneath his tightly closed eyelids.
It seeped from his pores and clung to his form like a second skin.
Ambrose’s voice rose to a shriek and then, suddenly, shuddered and died.
He looked down at his own hands, his torso, his legs, all now encased in a pulsating aura of shadow. And somehow, I understood.
It was his soul. His maimed and tattered soul was wrapped around the outside of his body.
I looked from Ambrose to the Geatgrima, and realized what he was about to attempt. The Geatgrima was for the crossing of souls. Somehow, with a spell born of the most malevolent magic, he was trying to disguise himself as a spirit. Was it possible… would he try to…
Even as I decided it must be impossible, too reckless, too mad, he stepped forward.
His feet didn’t seem to want to obey as he shuffled and stumbled closer and closer to the plinth.
The Geatgrima towered before him, imposing and surely impenetrable, and yet he moved closer, determined to defy the most basic laws of life and death.
When Jess had been in Sedgwick Cove, I’d had a million questions about the Geatgrima, about how it worked, about how the Durupinen guarded them, about ghosts and communication, and those ephemeral places that lay on the other side.
But one question I had never thought to ask was what would happen to a living person if they tried to Cross through a Geatgrima.
Such a possibility had never even occurred to me, and now I was watching it happen.
Everything inside me was telling me that it would end in disaster, that Ambrose was messing with things he did not fully understand, and that would have dire consequences for him.
I swallowed the warning I wanted to shout to him.
It would not matter. What was about to happen had happened already.
Still, Ambrose seemed to share a shred of my doubt. He hesitated, one foot resting on the plinth, and stared at the Geatgrima.
“Isabel,” he murmured. Then louder, “Isabel!”
There was no pain in his voice. No longing.
It was such a different cry from the one he had uttered that first night in the clearing, though the name he spoke was the very same.
Such a terrible change had been wrought in him, that her name on his tongue was no longer a lament, but a command.
He was angry. He was demanding she come to him, or else he was demanding the Geatgrima release her, dropping her like a gift into his palm.
I could tell from his expression that he knew such demands were fruitless, but it did not stop him from making them, a final desperate attempt before trying the impossible.
He shouted her name once more. It shattered into echoes, and reverberated around the cave until every rock sang with her name, and still she did not appear.
The Geatgrima stood before him, as silent and inscrutable as ever.
And so he did the only thing that was left for him to do.
Ambrose stepped forward onto the plinth, up to the very threshold of that archway.
His chest heaved with fear and anticipation.
His eyes gleamed with something mad and reckless.
His spirit pulsed around him like a shield, but I knew it would not be enough.
He stepped through.
For a fraction of a second, he thought his spell had worked.
I watched his expression twist into a wild, triumphant smile.
And then, just as quickly, that smile expanded into sheer panic.
Before he could process what was happening, Ambrose was caught in a storm of energy.
His limbs jerked and twitched as he was thrown backward from the archway.
His head snapped back, his face raised to the sky as the shadow around his body seemed caught in a battle of tug of war.
The Geatgrima at once accepted and rejected the dark aura that pulsated around him.
It tugged at and then flung it away; drew it in and then rejected it, and all the while Ambrose himself was tossed about like a rag doll, utterly unable to take control of himself amidst the storm of forces that now had him in its grasp.
I was torn between awe and terror as I watched him, so powerful and yet so powerless.
I’m not sure I had ever grasped the true might of the Geatgrima and the worlds it divided, but I did now as I watched Ambrose caught in its grip.
The struggle probably only lasted less than a minute, but the agony in Ambrose’s howls seemed to go on forever.
I slapped my hands over my ears, but I could not block out the sound.
I started to wonder if the echoes of it would ever fade, or if I’d hear them for the rest of my life, the refrain of a song my brain would never release.
And then, just when I thought I couldn’t take it anymore, Ambrose went suddenly and completely silent, though his mouth remained open in a scream I could no longer hear.
The shadowy form of his spirit pulled away from him, stretching toward the Geatgrima, warping and twisting from the form of a human to a series of tendrils, wrapping around the stones, sliding along the plinth, as though it was trying to engulf the entirety of the structure, to overwhelm it.
The Geatgrima, in response, began to glow with an ever-brightening golden light, until it was so bright I had to squint against its intensity.
For one endless moment, the light and the shadow grappled, locked in a battle for dominance.
And then the world came apart.
If I’d been there for real, I would have been killed.
Stones flew like shrapnel as the light expanded to fill every crevice of the cave.
I had no choice but to shut my eyes against it, but before I did, I saw the shadowy form blasted into a shapeless cloud as Ambrose was sent sailing through the air, limbs flailing and limp, his body slung forcefully against the far wall with a sickening thud.
Everything went still. Silent. Dread kept my eyelids clenched tightly shut. I was cold. So cold. I couldn’t breathe.
When I forced my eyes open, I saw that Ambrose was in trouble.
The shadowy form of his soul was swirling around him, but now there were others—cloudy, pale spirits attached to it, like they had all gotten tangled together and couldn’t separate.
The whole writhing mess was now seeping back into his body like poison, running like a river under his skin, pulsing through his veins once again.
And Ambrose screamed with an agony I couldn’t comprehend as souls that were not his own forced their way into a body they did not belong in.
The screams and the pain and the biting spirit cold enveloped the whole of the cave, the whole of the vision, until I felt like I was drowning…
Drowning…
Drowning in someone else’s despair…