Chapter 13 The Abyss Gazes Back #2
“Each judgment,” Nanay Rosita said, her gaze sharp and pitiless, “strengthens the demon. It weaves him more tightly into the fabric of this world. But that power must be drawn from somewhere. It diminishes the woman who calls for it.” The old woman took a slow sip from her cup before continuing.
“It hollows you out, piece by piece. It eats your connections to this life, your pity, your joy, your fear. It replaces them with a craving for the power itself. You become less a woman and more a conduit. A gate. You save him, perhaps. But you lose yourself.”
The words landed like stones in the pit of Lina’s stomach. This was the part of the bargain Maruz had not explained. The hidden cost, the fine print written in a language of souls. To keep him was to slowly erase herself.
Nanay Rosita watched her, her ancient eyes seeing every flicker of horror and doubt that crossed Lina’s face. She gave a small, humorless smile. “He is not the only monster in this bargain.” She gestured with her cup toward Lina. “Choose carefully, anak.”
Lina held the cup of bitter tea, the rising steam caressing her face like a ghostly hand. The choice was still hers, but the scales had shifted. It was no longer one man’s life against her happiness. It was his continued existence against the slow, deliberate suicide of her own soul.
The moon was a raw, silver wound in the black skin of the sky.
Its light was not gentle; it was a cold, absolute illumination that stripped the color from the world, leaving only stark shapes of silver and shadow.
It laid a shimmering, tremulous path across the surface of the sea, a road to nowhere that beckoned the eye.
The waves broke against the shore with a steady, percussive rhythm, a sound like a great heart beating in the chest of the world.
Each exhalation of surf hissed as it slid across the sand, leaving the shore dark and slick like wet glass.
Lina stood where the water met the land, the retreating foam swirling around her bare ankles, cold and alive.
The sand was cool and firm beneath her feet.
In her right hand, she cupped the blood-dark talisman.
It was a familiar weight, its strange, organic warmth a stark contrast to the chill of the night air.
The warmth pulsed in time with her own frantic heartbeat, a secret rhythm shared between them.
This was the source of her power, the key to his cage, the anchor of her impossible new life.
And tonight, its lease was set to expire.
She had walked out of the perfect, conjured house, leaving its enchanted lights and impossible comforts behind, and followed the pull of the tide.
Here, at the edge of the world, she had to make a choice.
The salt spray misted her face and she tasted it on her lips - the flavor of bitterness and the deep.
A column of air beside her seemed to buckle. The steady rhythm of the waves stuttered in her ear, and a sudden, unnatural cold sank into her skin, raising gooseflesh along her arms. The moonlight warped, bending around a point of absolute nothingness that rapidly coalesced into form. He was there.
Maruz materialized not with a sound, but with a smothering of it.
He stood beside her, a monument of shadow and fading light, his sheer presence a weight that seemed to dent reality.
He was both more and less than she had ever seen him.
The handsome human mask was in place - the broad shoulders, the powerful frame, the inhumanly perfect features cast in silver and black by the moonlight.
But it was a failing illusion. His form flickered, a constant, agonizing instability.
The edges of his silhouette blurred into smoke before snapping back into focus.
Through the solid bronze of his arm, she saw a momentary, horrifying glimpse of the moonlit waves behind him.
His skin, a landscape she had come to know with an intimacy that frightened her, shimmered and dissolved.
For a horrifying second, the ancient script beneath its surface blazed with an infernal light, and then his flesh became a translucent pane of obsidian shadow, revealing a core of burning amber embers where his heart should be.
He was coming apart. The sight was a physical blow, a pain that lanced through her more sharply than any her husband had ever inflicted.
She wanted to reach out, to press her hands against him and hold him together through sheer will, but she knew it was useless.
He was anchored to this world by a thread, and the moon was a silver knife poised to cut it.
“It is time to decide,” he said. His voice was a strange harmony, the resonant baritone she knew layered with the echoes of something vast and inhuman.
It carried over the percussive crash of the surf, not by being louder, but by simply existing on a different frequency, a vibration that slid past her ears and bloomed directly in her mind. “Does our pact continue?”
Lina turned her head to look at him fully.
The moonlight caught in her dark hair and traced the delicate line of her jaw.
There was no fear in her face now. The haunted, hunted look had been burned away, replaced by a profound, sorrowful stillness.
She had power now. She had stood in Nanay Rosita’s hut, a place steeped in the knowledge of centuries, and had not flinched.
She had faced her own monstrous reflection in a dream and had not shattered.
She met his gaze, her own eyes dark and deep as the water before them.
Down the curve of the beach, perhaps half a kilometer away, she could see other figures.
They were small and insignificant from this distance, their movements unreal.
A pair of tourists were trying to capture the moon with a camera on a tripod, their pale foreign skin glowing under its light.
A young couple walked hand-in-hand, their laughter a faint, tinny sound carried on the wind, their concerns as mundane and distant as another star.
They were living in a different world, a world of simple pains and simple pleasures, a world Lina had been brutally ejected from.
They saw a beautiful night. She stood beside a dying god, debating the cost of a human soul.
Nanay Rosita’s words echoed in her mind, dry and sharp as bone dust. *It hollows you out, piece by piece… You become less a woman and more a conduit. A gate.*
She looked at Maruz, at the agony of his unmaking, at the being who had saved her, taught her, and remade her.
The being who had shown her the echoes of a world before men and the truth of his own tragic creation.
Could she let him go? Could she condemn him to that eternal, nethermost hall, all to preserve a self she barely recognized anymore?
The pulsing of the talisman against her palm was a steady, insistent question.
It was a part of her now, its rhythm as familiar as the beat of her own blood.
She tore her gaze away from Maruz’s dissolving form and looked down the long, silvered stretch of beach.
The distant figures, laughing and living in their simple, sunlit world, seemed impossibly far away, like figures in a painted diorama.
She considered her first option: to let him go.
She could simply do nothing. The moon would reach its zenith, the final grain of sand would fall in the hourglass of their pact, and he would be gone.
She would be left with the house, a fortress of marble and glass, with the wealth that had appeared in an account under a name she had never used, with a life of absolute safety.
She tried to picture it. Waking up in the vast, silent bed.
The scent of salt and jasmine in the air, but not the undercurrent of incense.
The quiet halls echoing with nothing but the sound of her own footsteps.
A life free from fear. A life utterly, completely empty.
The safety he offered was meaningless without the one thing she needed to be safe from: his absence.
The world of those tourists was no longer hers to reclaim.
He had shown her its echoes, its ghosts, its hidden currents of power and pain.
He had ruined her for the mundane, and for that, she could not let him go.
Her mind, a traitor, conjured the image of the American.
Michael Richardson. The name fell into her thoughts with the weight of a stone.
She remembered his easy confidence, the proprietary way his green eyes had roamed over her body, the casual dismissal of Maruz, the assumption that she, her story, her culture, were all things for him to consume.
Maruz was right. He was a poison, a small, insidious one, but a poison nonetheless.
The memory of her dream returned, a rush of dark, ecstatic heat.
The feeling of speaking a name and watching a universe unmake a man who deserved it.
The sheer, intoxicating power of it. It was a craving, a dark hunger she hadn’t known she possessed until he awoke it in her.
She could have that again. She could have *him* again.
For another season. All it would cost was the life of a man she did not know, a man whose soul was a shallow, grasping thing.