The shadow’s voice dripped with irony-laced joy, its words battered with equal parts honey and poison. “Do you really think that such a thing is possible? The ritual of key and coin is a farce, a trap! You came willingly to the down below, as have many before you, seeking the impossible, only to find yourself in the same trap as those you would rescue.”

“That’s not true!” Ellis growled between teeth clenched against the chill of the down below. It was no only a cold that knew no warmth, it was a cold that suggested warmth was a lie, that it had never been, that it was a pleasant dream scattered upon the winds of wakefulness.

“It howls at you, doesn’t it? Tears at your very soul, ribbons it into threadbare rags, this idea of yours that there’s something that can be done for your lover, your brat,” continued the shadow, ever in the periphery of Ellis’s vision and never in the center. “But every lead, every whisper, every ley line you followed was just a way to bring you into the down below. To rip at you with ice and rock unending, to cut at you with wind that will bear no warmth and light that is neither day nor darkness.”

“You would have me lay down in the snow and subject myself to this forever?” spat Ellis, the moisture condensing to ice upon his very lips.

“I would have you face reality. It was all just a way to bring you to the despair that never would have been yours had you allowed things to proceed as they were, to take your rest as it came. In trying to reach beyond it and break the order of things, you have condemned yourself as surely as those you seek to save.”

“I still have hope.”

The shadow laughed gleefully amidst the flurries and driving snow. “And that, that false and misguided hope, is as the sweetest of rare wines to me, to mine. Do you not see? Whether you suffer, whether you hope, or whether you do both, it matters not. You are but a battery, a soul in chains, and every move you might make will only bring us pleasures untold.”

  • Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!