Grief forgotten. Shay’s younger self, still dressed for the funeral, had halted far behind them. Running her hand along the wall, coating it as she went with some dust or powder. Her finger struck it as though with a match and a patch of flame there sparked, serving as a torch. Less experienced than our Shay, she could not see so well in utter darkness. She was gripped - looking at a certain spot on the curving wall now illuminated close to her, and she muttered under her breath as if there written was a message for her alone that we from here cannot see.
“You are me?” She called down with a raw voice from her dancing shadow, still very much in grief.
“And I am you.” Shay replied to her younger self, keeping Serib near.
∞
“Girl… you and your Lay’d…” Young Shay spoke as she read the wall. “…can make Death different and no longer indifferent?”
Serib nodded, replying to the younger Shay whose eyes were to tears now condemned, condemned against hope as she said, smiling strangely:
“What is Death without Time?”
Serib had not yet seen Shay’s true face until now, always shrouded with distance or disguise. Here now no masks of props or hardiness, as shone true Grief in the dark. Grief or Shame or both.
∞
Younger Shay unsheathed there the swords of her parents, dropping them and slumping with them to her knees, and rang forever the clanging steel in all present hearts. She spoke to her older self:
“It says here you have forgotten what this feels like, using syringes to siphon the swell. The swelling. I would do anything for it all to stay the same. For them to come home. Didn't she always promise she would never leave...”
“Time will help you understand.” Shay took a step closer to herself, both distraught, unsure what else to say or if she believed at all.
“This wall tells me you still avoid The Prince’s heart as I do. Mother’s wish was that we let go, but you and I know we can’t move onwards from this. Not to that place where Time severs all, and Death awaits indifferently.” She read now from the wall: “’But Time is dead…’ so maybe… can we? Please…”
Young Shay grieved quietly. Between extremes of hope and despair, both feeling like the other.
∞
Shay could not take another step forward nor say a word. Her throat was swollen with her own extremes as she walked away from the sobbing flame with Serib in hand, away - from the quietly sobbing flame. Shay picked Serib up and carried her quickly into darkness few eyes can chart.
∞
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
Sleeping gravity. The tunnel led on as tunnels do. Shay had picked Serib up wanting to escape that Grief returned quickly as possible. And oddly it was her first that asked, fearing the oily grief would touch her little shamanic friend:
“Are you alright?”
“You shouldn’t ask me…” Serib flared her tusks, annoyed.
“I need to focus. Getting into the club won’t be as easy now without weapons.” going back for the swords of her younger self was not an option she could bear.
Her footing was still trembly, and her mind murky with injected, rejected dreams.
∞
Serib felt a rumbling in the earth some while before Shay:
“That’s bad.”
"What is?"
Gravity upturned itself, as though rolling in a restless sleep. The tunnel’s ceiling was now the floor, and Shay warned a moment earlier by Serib, managed to spin and maintain her footing, keeping the girl in her arms safe. Shay ruffled Serib’s lightning hood by way of congratulation, taking then a deep breath.
“Getting weirder…” she muttered. Her fake eyes still with tears, much as she tried to bury such envenomed things. Looking back, her younger self was gone, the shuddering fire had surrendered to shadow and Serib scrambled to get down.
∞
She jumped at the grating noise of fighting suddenly ahead, dark as the narrow caverns were around her. Shay heard the guards of the club were in some melee ahead; killing and being killed, a racket of echoes for her to pick up on. A proper, scholarly voice she did not recognise was interspersed by grunts and fighting louder, saying:
“I know she has been this way for I have read the pages that are as ages! Though two tales are converging, a story and a Tayl, and here we are - lost between Fate or Payn.”
Someone else was gasping for breath. Shay and Serib held still as settled ash or snow, and then they heard the scholar ask whoever they were hurting:
“Where is Serib?”
∞
Shay waited for the fighting to resume and rushed forward with every quietness, leading Serib behind her. The girl alas was clumsier, almost too much so - it simply was too dark in these stagnant depths under the world. Shay picked her up again despite her shoulder, weighed also by the numbing medicine strapped to her harness, intending to veer off soon as the path allowed. Dead assassins known as Shadows of The Dam’e’s allegiance were soon found with open wounds - that Shay feared - were made by fists, knees, elbows and feet rather than weapons.
‘Monks?’ she considered.
∞
Serib was relieved and squirmed to finally get down from Shay’s arms, for flickering bulbs shone ahead as stars through windy leaves, and finally she could see an outline of direction. Their pace was quickened and posture crouching low, steering eventually into a tunnel leading away from the fighting sounds. Dead heaps laid motionless under bulbs that struggled to stay alight; slain Shadows of The Dam’e and other bodies here lay strewn among, dressed in monastic robes, their faces sloped and cyclopean, having but one central eye in their horned skulls.
“These are scholars of Courtdom, Truthdom and Heirarchy.” Shay kept her voice low as her stance. “They show tourists and visitors around museums across the river, in further Townships than Imirka. I do not know how they would have found, or would want to find, the entrances to our-”
Shay was interrupted, as a cold hand grabbed her.