So they walk. He doesn't mind, but
that will pass. So will the minding, so will
the awareness of how long they've been walking,
or where they were,
or where they are going,
or why,
or why it matters,
or why anything matters.
--
The torch given from Sunitha to Eleanor and to Richard still burns, though, and it is a source of memory. When his eyes catch the flame and its movement, its life, he'll remember. When Eleanor squeezes his hand. They are walking up the shoreline beside that black, endless ocean, and perhaps he sees boats out there, perhaps he thinks he sees boats out there, but they are as ghostly as anything else.
They come into town again, pass through a quiet place. The buildings are dim and the wood is rotting. Paint peels. Signs move though they feel no breeze. They walk along a boardwalk. They hear things, and they move quickly before they see the things they hear. Eleanor pulls him in between two shops once, suddenly, as something wanders past. Something caught in webs, dragging them. It looks human-formed but confused, the eyes wide and blank but were once blue, the hair thin, the face constantly turning toward an ocean, hoping to see -- but no.
That sea is gone. That memory is violated here, ruined. Every time he dares remember the ocean and all its shining, monstrous power, he forgets that what he will really see is dark and black and dead. He keeps walking along the boardwalk, shuffling, and down the way, they can hear him weeping. At the end of the boardwalk he just turns around. He just paces again, trying to recapture some moment long past, long forgotten, trying to regain something he has no hope of ever reaching.
Eleanor takes him a different way. They cannot help him without drawing attention they cannot deal with, she tells him quietly, as they walk on, though he can see in her eyes a brief flicker of her own passion: grief can be a passion. Loss, agony, terrible pain... these things can keep one alive, keep one tethered, keep one burning. Of course she relates, though she also takes strength from it. That wraith's hope is pointless. He will never find what he looks for.
All she has to do, one day, is die. All she has to do is stay alive long enough to break the curse. All she has to do is wait until Henrik's rebirth has made him old enough that she can find him, age-separated as they might be, and nurture him a while until she is reborn again. She has hope, still. She has died many times. She has been reborn many times. She will escape this, and so will Richard.
Her hand is tight on his as they go forward. There is some life in that, some fervor, that is a precious resource in this place.
--
Soon, the hospital. It is massive and its walls are thick. They stand across the street from it, watching from darkness, as ghosts move past, as they move in and out of the hospital, but the truth is, this place is mostly deserted. It is not as though hospitals, particularly hospitals in resort towns, are just constantly churning out new dead people. They mostly try to avoid that, in hospitals.
But all the same. It's autumn, and there is a wet chill. They wait, and watch. Eleanor is quiet. They do not want to draw attention. She almost tells him to snuff the torch, but it is how Sunitha keeps a hold of them with her Will. They dare not lose that light.
Eventually, they cross the street. They slip through the doors and enter the hospital, which is mostly deserted. A few places, here and there, are the unliving. Not all doctors and nurses but people who were once patients here. Some look as they did when they died, and they are grisly. Others look as they did twenty, thirty years before they died, and they are confused, they are not sure what is happening, even if they have been here for decades. One that walks by is very clearly a doctor.
And here she had her most passionate moments, her highest highs, her lowest lows. Here she was exhausted to the point of death, here she was exalted to moments of profound meaning. She did not die here. She died very far from here, in retirement. But she found her way back, yes she did, and she clipped on her badge again and wears her white coat and checks on everyone, but
like the man on the boardwalk,
she is waiting for something to happen. Something to give her that high, or even that low. That exultation of saving someone's life. The profound intimacy of being there when someone dies, being the one to watch their life leave them. She checks on everyone, over and over and over and over and over, waiting for a code, waiting for a seizure, a flatline, anything, please, Christ, anything to make her feel again. She'll wait forever if she has to.
Her heels click-clack softly on the floor as she walks. She always hated wearing heels, the work wasn't made for heels, but they didn't take her seriously in flats. She holds onto that, too.
--
Eleanor finds a space where they can talk, where they aren't sneaking, where they aren't holding their breath even though they don't need to breathe. She doesn't dare use Entropy here to sense impending death; Oblivion will zero in on them, and every ancient wraith that can feel that call.
"There," she whispers, pointing to a corner of a shadowy, light-dark room where everything stands in sharp contrast. There is something on the bed, something unseen but growing more substantial as they watch.
She has let go of his hand by now, but she reaches down to hold it.
She doesn't tell him what they're watching.
She doesn't need to.
Someone is dying.
Richard LevasseurRichard stays close in Eleanor's wake as they walk these hollow streets. His hand in hers, his head turning this way and that. He looks at the ghosts they pass. The little girl skipping down the pavement, avoiding cracks, hop-scotching. Getting to the end of the sidewalk and not looking, not looking up, not looking both ways, hopping off the curb and stepping into the street and --
-- there the record skips. The tape loops. Suddenly she's back where she started, she's hopscotching down the sidewalk again, but if you look very very very very close you'd see, just for an instant, right in that split-second before she's back on the pavement,
the grotesque twist of her body, her small hands flung sideways by momentum and her pretty hair lashing out; that horrible impact. Just for an instant.
Then she's skipping down the sidewalk again. She never knows where she's going. Or what awaits her there. Or that she has been here before.
--
Eleanor pulls Richard between buildings at one point. He keeps close to the walls, scarcely daring to breathe, afraid to draw attention to himself. But the truth is perhaps that thing-that-was-once-a-man, web-bound and lost, cannot see them at all. Richard watches him go, watches him look at the ocean that has no waves, no whitecaps, no tide, no motion.
Dead endless black. As dead and endless and black as the sky: as though all the cosmos had ceased to exist. As though they truly were alone here, a night without day, a world without time.
Richard shudders again. And they move on.
--
The hospital then. Where they step out of the way of that phantom physician. Where Eleanor is searching and seeking; where Richard is trailing behind, looking into some of the rooms, peering in until he sees something he never ever wants to see ever again. Then he is simply following her, his eyes on her back, his hand reaching for hers again even as she reaches for his.
She has stopped. There, she says. And he looks. The light is different in there. Sharper. Bright-dark. The edges of the shadows crisp. Something is coming through. Something is coming across. A soul reaped by the reaper, one might say. Someone passing into the night.
Richard discovers he is holding his breath, and he lets it out. "Can we ... is there anything we can do to help?"
acaryaIt is bright. Only it is lightless. It is hard to look at but it draws everything toward it, it sucks at the air and pulls at the body. Someone is being born, not into the world of color and motion and sensation but into this bleakness. Maybe they will become a drone like those poor ghosts Richard and Eleanor keep passing by. Maybe they will stir, maybe they will be conscious, know they are dead, like the doctor does. Maybe they will grow powerful here. There are reasons to hold on, for some. Eternity is long; you may speak of friendship and of love lasting forever, but here those things really can exist.
Not many think it is worth the cost. A few, though. And it is antithesis to everything the Euthanatoi stand for, to see such wanton, hedonistic, selfish stagnation.
She aches a little. Shakes her head, her brows drawn, as the white core they are looking at recedes to reveal a shape lying now on the bed. A shape, because it is not a person. They are in some sort of sac, milk-white but dry-looking, soft and draping but not exactly a web. The shape is humanoid, but does not breathe. It twitches but does not rise.
"What do you mean, 'help'?" she asks him, in a whisper.
Richard Levasseur"Help... help it move on."
His eyes are fixed on that bizarre not-person. On that ash-white, ash-dry sac; like the very antithesis of birth, of amnion and chorion.
"Help whoever that is not be stuck here like the others. I know I can't help most of them. They've been here too long and I'm not strong enough. But maybe someone new, someone who hasn't ... stagnated yet."
acaryaThe sac moves, but it's not fluid. It's something else, something joked about in Ghostbusters, but it's real. It's not green slime. Here, at least, ectoplasm is just... difficult to describe.
Eleanor looks at Richard. She's still holding his hand. "Chances are," she says quietly, "if he's here... that will be very difficult indeed. But if you would like to try --"
Heels clipping on lineoleum tile. Close by. But she drifts so softly, too. She comes in, ignoring Eleanor and Richard, examining a chart in her hand. The clipboard is black, the paper blank. "Mister Smith, how are we feeling today?" she is asking. In the skinlands her voice would be clear, alert, but here it is slowed down, tired-sounding, every breath a sigh. She doesn't even glance at the two magi; Eleanor has gone very still and has stopped speaking.
The doctor goes to the bedside of the twitching but otherwise motionless creature who has just died. She sucks on a tooth, a hollow sound that echoes in the hospital room, and flicks through some more blank paper, going through sheets that have nothing but heavy black scribbles all over them, some words: KILL YOURSELF, BITCH. KILL YOURSELF.
ROOF.
SPLAT SPLAT SPLAT FUCKING CUNT BITCH.
FUCK YOU. FUCKING DIE.
She doesn't seem to read a word of the large, enraged letters. She just flicks the pages down, back to a blank one, and sets the clipboard aside. "Not very talkative today, I see," she sighs, turning to face him. For a moment she stands, arms spread in an A to either side of her, resting on the edge of the mattress, lifeless eyes looking over her patient. In case he moves, in case he speaks, Eleanor squeezes Richard's hand hard. They do not know what this wraith can do.
"I can't hear you," the doctor says, shaking her head, almost tsking. She draws her hands together, reaching for the sac right where a person's throat might be. "I can't hear you when you mumble," she adds, with irritation,
digging her fingers in, poking holes, tearing at the sac. Fluid rushes out, or something like fluid. It moves like liquid but leaves nothing behind, no stain, no darkening of fabric, no residue on her hands. If water could be dry, this would be it. Well: cloudy, white-gray water. The doctor keeps tearing, with surprisingly forceful, savage tearing, like she is ripping up a bedsheet. For a moment, dark fury blackens her gaze, freezes in her features as though rigor mortis caught her in the midst of a screaming rage. Her face is frozen like that for a moment, just a flicker of a second, while she tears and tears and opens up the caul covering the enfant ghost. It is tough work; the caul does not want to be removed, the child does not want to be born.
Richard LevasseurEven here she is his acarya: always blunt, always pragmatic, always truthful; never discouraging. It's not that she lies. It's not that she tells him it will be easy or even possible. But she doesn't tell him no, either. He's an adult. He's a grown man. He's an Awakened mage, no matter how small his power. She does not ever give him the impression that he needs her permission to do anything. She does not ever give him the impression, either, that something he does and does without malice will result in her turning away from him. That she will not, if need be, protect him.
And perhaps he's on the verge of trying -- something. Perhaps he's about to step forward, away from the wall where they've all but plastered themselves, but then:
oh, then.
Then the doctor comes. She comes with her chart of blank paper, only it's not all blank, no, it's not all blank at all. Richard, from his prodigious height, can look over her shoulder. Can see the words, black and angry, hateful, rageful, scrawled so heavy and dark that they seem almost to beat with an intensity of their own. He catches his breath. It's nearly a gasp,
but oh, he doesn't make a sound. Not when his acarya grips his hand like that. Pulls him back. He doesn't move, he doesn't speak. His jaw is tense and his teeth set, his eyes so wide. He watches. Fluid splashes, but it leaves no stain. No wetness. No shine on the floor. The ghost tears and tears and tears and this, this too is work. A labor on the other side of the shroud. His heart is beating in his chest, or is that only what he imagines to be his heart? Is the very imagining dangerous, a sign that he is an impostor, the living amongst the dead? He puts his hand over his breastbone, but that hammering cannot be muffled.
acaryaHe still has the torch. It burns. It moves. It almost seems warm, it almost has color. He is not alone here. He and Eleanor are not alone. A mage greater than she is knows where they are and can come to them, can find them, can pull them out if need be. They did not come to the shadowlands to truly die. Or be lost. He still has the torch. He still has that, and holding it is a reminder: they are not alone. He is alive. His heart beats, even if right now, in his body across the shroud, it beats almost not at all.
The caul splits open, torn and shredded, and the new wraith is born. He is thin, very thin, though he has not lost his hair. He sits up sharply, suddenly, gasping. He is unclothed and barely seems real for a moment, his form shifting and akimbo, askew somehow. Wild-eyed he searches, searches, finds the doctor, begins to scramble away, but he can barely move; his legs are still in the caul. The doctor grabs both of his wrists, pins him down to the bed with a shocking strength.
"There," she says. "Now --"
"Tom!" he wails, the voice sounding like it comes from down the hall and not this room, carried on wind. "Tom! Tom, help me! Tom!"
"-- Mister Smith, you must stay --"
"My name's not Smith! My name is --" he struggles a moment, pants, struggling against her grasp. "My name is Kevin, my husband's name is Tom, he said he wouldn't leave my side! He said he wouldn't --"
"-- calm, you've been very weakeened by the --"
"-- leave me. Tom! TOM!" he's screaming now, hollering toward the door, thrashing weakly, impotently. But there's such anger in it, such ... bitterness. Tom left his side. Tom left him alone here, while he was dying. He broke his promise. His vow.
"-- treatment," the doctor finishes firmly, ignoring him almost entirely. She is holding him down still, but something awful is growing in his voice and his eyes, something broken by waking up to find Tom gone. Tom was all he had left. These kids these days, they don't know what it was really like. Everyone he knew in the scene was homeless or crashing on couches. No one talked about their families if they could help it. No one talked about getting found out, getting kicked out, or getting abandoned when the beatings and the electroshock and whatever else didn't work. Tom was everything. And he was so scared, and he was so sick. He could be okay, he thought, if Tom just stayed there and held his hand. He wouldn't be scared to --
Eleanor and Richard both see the word blossom in his mind, though they do not know his story. The word die. The loneliness of it. The rage at being left. The bitterness, the surging resentment, the betrayal. They see the horror insinuating into his mind as the doctor is calmly, though not patiently, trying to make him be still. The room's shadows are growing darker.
She exhales beside him. The two wraiths are fighting now, wrestling, but the newborn is filling with something, some power, something so new and so fresh from life that it is taking him completely. "Richard," Eleanor says, and the prophecy of motion is in her body, the promise of movement, quickly, "Richard we need to go."
Richard LevasseurRichard.
He doesn't want to go. That which is bright in him, that which believes in what is good and right and proper in him: it wants to stay. He wants to stay, he wants to do something, he wants to -- help. Help the doctor, help Kevin, help them both. Help them move on. Move them out of here before it's too late, before they lose their way entirely, before an eternity of horror comes to pass, before they are crushed by something more powerful, before they become something more terrible,
before Oblivion takes them. Something. He resists when Eleanor tells him he must leave, not consciously but simply because he is rooted in place, caught between wanting to stay and wanting to do something.
She speaks again:
Richard, we need to go.
He pants a short gasp of an exhale out. He tears his eyes from the tableau. Finds Eleanor's eyes. He nods, once, hastily. "Okay." He's moving. He is. "Okay. Let's go."
acaryaThey go. Very quickly, then, for Eleanor is lithe and smooth and sliding past him, gripping his hand, pulling him after her, while something erupts behind them, its voice guttural and angry, resounding off the walls, filling this already awful place.
DYKE BITCH.
They do not see what happens. Blackness coats the room, and maybe it is violence, and maybe it is just despair, and maybe it is anger and pain. It is, strangely, a pure emotion, and there is a surprising amount of lively energy to that much hatred, that much loathing turned both inward and outward, that howling angst and pain. Maybe Kevin will hold onto it. Maybe it will keep him here, in one existence instead of another. Maybe it will draw Oblivion, and he will surrender to it, maybe he will become Unmade, maybe he will carry some of that sorrow into a new life, maybe he will be cleansed.
Even the Awakened do not know everything about what happens across the shroud.
--
They run down the hospital hallway, and out of the hospital, before Eleanor slows down. They heard that booming, sepulchural voice behind them a few more times, saying horrific things, and it was unclear if it was the doctor or the man, if the voice was speaking to the self or to someone else. If they were even in a struggle against each other, or simply against themselves.
Outside she slows. She is holding his hand, and looks at him with something like apology.
"I'm so sorry," Eleanor tells him, quietly. "I wish --" what does she wish. "I wish there were more hope here." Which she finishes, saying it with dim awareness of just how ironic it is. How the fact that there is so little hope, so little to wish for, is sort of the point. How showing him this, its horrors and its sights which cannot be unseen, is the whole goddamn point.
Richard LevasseurThey run.
They run, and they run the way people do in dreams: fleet, tireless, so very fast. The world streaks by. The shadowy corridors and the dank halls. The stairwells with their strange shadows. All the way out to the street, which does not smell of the sea, does not smell of anything at all. Flatness all around. A black motionless ocean. A black land, a black sky, a grey street.
Here they stop. Here Richard bends to prop hands on knees, automatically, reflexively, before he realizes he doesn't need to. He is not out of breath. He does not even need to breathe, really.
Slowly he straightens. He looks over his shoulder, back at that place. Then at her.
"What was that? That ... voice. That thing that was gaining power in that room."
acarya"The voice?" she exhales. She is not winded; there is no breath here. But she exhales nonetheless, out of habit. She is tight-shouldered, anxious, and has not let him go, even when his knees bend. She doesn't dare, right now. She shakes her head.
"I don't know. The darkness they carry, maybe. Maybe what keeps them here."
Richard Levasseur"And if they listen to it?"
acaryaEleanor looks back at him, up at him, her brows still drawn, her forehead wrinkled. She just shakes her head. She doesn't know. She's not sure she wishes she did.
Richard LevasseurHis brow furrows too. He looks again at that hospital. Endlessly tall, endlessly dark in this realm. A citadel of new souls.
"You told me," he says, "everyone who dies comes here." His eyes come back to her. "How many make it out?"
acaryaThis time Eleanor does not shake her head. Does not nod. Does not shrug. She just looks at him, because the answer is the same. She does not know. There is no way to know, no census of the Underworld, unless the restless dead themselves take it.
But eventually, thinking on it, she has an answer, though paltry answer it is. A reminder, because they two stand here. Because Henrik and she have been reborn so many times, because Sunitha, because his parents, because every living person he knows who is not in their first incarnation has passed through here and not been held.
"Enough."
Richard LevasseurHe gives that thought too. Mulls it, chews it, internalizes it. This time, he is the one to reach out to her, wrapping his warmthless fingers around hers.
Squeezes. After a long moment:
"I'm glad you made it out."
acaryaEleanor huffs. It's a dry sound. And she nods. She doesn't know what to say. But she nods.
"Let's go back to Sunitha's house. This side of it, at least."
Richard LevasseurRichard nods, casting a glance around. Nods again, firmer. "Okay."
--
So they walk again. And this time, he doesn't look around. He keeps his eyes straight ahead. Averts his gaze from those ghosts and those phantoms, those wraiths and those shades. Doesn't look at that web-caught man by the sea. That little girl replaying, over and over, the last few moments of her life. Doesn't look at the dead ocean or the dead sky.
Looks at his own hand a few times, though. Looks at the flatness of his skin, which goes beyond mere pallor. It's like he's grown two-dimensional here. Like if he didn't hold that torch, if that torch didn't cast shadows and dancing light, he would not have depth or volume at all.
acaryaThey walk quietly. There's no attempt to try and see a sunset over the sea; the sea is not a sea, the life-giving sea is dead here, and there is no sun. Eleanor doesn't wax poetic about an eternity in the same mind that you got to live in; she is a Euthanatos, and she is lost in her own thoughts of not-letting-go as it is. There is nothing to turn around what they've seen -- the new ghost in the caul, the empty-minded little girl forever playing, forever dying, her afterlife an endless loop of a few moments until some greater being comes to harvest her somehow. The man looking for the beauty of the sea, because he has been cut off from every other tether and he fears Oblivion still. The doctor, perhaps most tragic of all, trying to save lives when everyone is already lost.
How do you turn that around? What do you make of this? There's no silver lining. There's no hope here. There's nothing beautiful about it, nothing uplifting, nothing really to take from it other than, well,
perhaps what the point of all this is. That no soul should be confined to an afterlife such as this. That Euthantoi exist in part to save souls from this non-existence. That it is better to end than to stagnate. But about this place, itself, there is no redeeming quality. There isn't meant to be one.
--
Sunitha's house still seems strong, seems firm. Protected. Here there are no wandering restless; the area is scarcely populated as it is, and the few that exist here stay away from the southern tip of Seaside's shadowy reflection. Away from its wards, its walls. Or perhaps it's simply hidden from them.
They cannot see her; they walk along the beach, between the wall of black trees and the endless black sea. That must be where they came out. Eleanor walks with him towards that treeline, into that darkness. She has not spoken. He sees her beside him, clad in white, hair still covered, but then she takes her hand from his for a moment, reaching up to draw the hood back, for what reason --
and she is gone.
Richard LevasseurGone.
Gone.
For an instant Richard is simply stunned. Staring, disbelieving. It is so sudden and so complete that he thinks surely he imagined it. Maybe he's dreaming.
Then he turns in place. Pivots, wildly, this way and that. The torch in his hand billows; the sound is almost angry. "Eleanor!" His voice falls flat into the distance. "Eleanor!"
And then shouting, shouting his throat raw:
"ACARYA!"
Richard Levasseur-- and nothing. Nothing but his voice racing away into the distance, swallowed by the flatness. No echo. No reverberation. No Acarya.
Richard is breathing now. He is breathing in short, shallow pants, very nearly gasps. Very nearly a panic. His hand clutches the torch. He still has the torch. It still burns. Surely that means something. Surely it's just a test. Surely he can do something. He can do something. He is not entirely helpless. He has not learned nothing. He digs his free hand into his pocket, and for a moment he realizes he doesn't even know what he's wearing, if he's dressed; is afraid for a second that this will be one of those dreams when he looks down and sees he is naked.
But no. His fingers jam into the bottom of a pocket. He looks down. He is wearing shorts. Longish shorts, shorts that cover the knee, comfortably loose. Beach attire. It's not what he was wearing when he succumbed to the ritual, but he doesn't remember that right now. His mind creates for him the shorts, the t-shirt, the car keys and house keys inexplicably in his pocket, even though he left both in his luggage. His mind creates for him, too, a thin wallet, which he fumbles out. Fumbles open. A credit card flaps to the ground, disregarded. He finds no dice, but he does find a single quarter, which he maneuvers onto his thumb
and flips.
Once, glittering through the night. Games of chance. An errant thought: he wonders if even this would be dangerous, if even this is a subtle weaving of Entropy, if this will draw Oblivion. He puts it out of mind. Flips the coin again, again, again, and as he does,
pulls his senses in. In, in, in. In, until all the world draws in with his senses. Like wormholes and curved timespace, see. All of reality compressing to a pinpoint. A singularity. All places as one, and from that one single axis, if he tries hard enough,
he can sense all.
acarya[1. What are you trying to do?
2. How are you trying to do it? (paradigm-wise)
3. Calculate the difficulty.
3a. Coincidental: highest sphere + 3
3b. Vulgar without witnesses: highest sphere + 4
3c. Vulgar with witnesses: highest sphere + 5
4. Add/subtract modifiers
4a. -1 for using a specialized focus
4b. -1 (on top of 4a) for using a unique focus
4c. -1 if you take your time casting
4d. -1 for each point of Quintessence channeled (up to your Avatar rating)
4e. -1 for appropriate resonance (see ST)
5. Roll Arete vs. your difficulty! Which can only go down to 3.]
Richard LevasseurDice: 6 d10 TN6 (4, 4, 4, 5, 9, 10) ( success x 2 )
Richard Levasseur[ARETAAAYYY. wif WP.]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (3, 9) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
acaryaShe has been at his side since they came here. She gave him the lantern that became the torch he still holds. And she held his hand, kept reaching for him. She brought him out of the screaming, storm shroud. She held onto him, ran with him, walked for miles with him, and then she's just gone. She wouldn't just leave him. He has to know that. She wouldn't abandon him,
would she?
Not here.
--
He calls and there is no answer. His voice does not echo. He is terrified. He thinks: surely it's a test. He thinks, immediately and powerfully, of what he can do. Just as he did back at the hospital, just as he always has. He is action and creation. He does things. He is, like all of them,
a will-worker.
--
He focuses. He flips a coin, which has no care for him or his panic. He flips a coin, which does not care for his relationship with his mentor or his longing for life. The coin doesn't care about him at all. The coin exists outside of him. It rises in the non-air, spinning and twisting, and though the connection between a game of chance and the arts of Prime and Correspondence is a thin one, he makes it work for him. He just needs something to take his mind into that space, that reaching, that grasping of the threads of reality and brushing them aside so he can see further, clearer, see more than any human ever hopes to see while they Sleep.
The torch in his hand flares with Sunitha's magic. He senses that powerfully, can even know that he could figure out the exact spells cast on it, realizes -- a touch later -- that the torch itself is a spell, nothing more. But he is not looking for Sunitha. He is looking for the drowned one, the endless winter, the sword that was broken. And he can feel her, sense her somewhere out there, but he knows brutally that he cannot reach her.
She is on the other side. That he can sense her at all, dimly, far away, is a feat. They are not in the same space. All he can feel is the after-image of her magic, her presence. He is alone here. He knows that now for sure.
--
There is an end to the woods. He can find Sunitha's house even in the pitch darkness, there is such power to it, such magic, even if it's not the magic he's looking for. He can almost see it, before
the torch goes out. Nothing but darkness, now.
And something cold enters his veins.
And consciousness begins to leave him.
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