Shadows of the Night (Kingdom Key Book 2)

by TylerRose.

  “What do you mean exploring the instances of an emotion?” she asked.

  “My memories. I would remember something that had happened. Let the memory play out in my mind, sometimes a thousand times over the years. When I no longer felt emotions for that memory, I dismissed that memory to work on another. When there were no more troubled memories around that emotion, there was nothing to feel that emotion about anymore. I released it from my mind entirely.”

  She stared hard at him. “That can’t be all.”

  “It is all.”

  “No. That’s too simple. That can’t be it,” she said.

  “It?” he questioned back. “It took me many decades to do, Madam. I assure that it was no simple thing. More, it was an arduous journey. I almost gave up many times. My Dastoor helped me keep faith in myself when I thought I was at my weakest confidence. Then one day, it finally happened. What I learned was the harder I tried, the less I accomplished. The more I forced it, the less ground I covered. When I stopped trying so hard was when I made the most progress. I took the path of least resistance.”

  Left arm over her chest, propping up her right arm, she rest her forefinger aside her temple, thumb stretched down under her jaw and fingers curled around her cheekbone. Her thinking posture. She left him silent a moment and he did not try to fill the quiet with unnecessary words.

  “I don’t know if that’s helpful or not. I have often found that when things are at their most difficult is when I know I’m on the right track. If a thing was easy, it was because someone else wanted me to follow that path and made it easy for me. Now here you are telling me to take the easy route.”

  She left the bench.

  “Thank you for your information,” she muttered, head already churning in that familiar hurricane of confusion and self-doubt. She passed Rengaard on her way into her apartment. “Send him back home. I need to walk.”

  She went out the front door, through the courtyard and into the vast openness. There were no paths. An open space of cement and foliage beds but no clear paths. She picked a direction and started to walk.

  “What do we do?” Rengaard asked, watching her head in the opposite direction of the sun. “The Mother didn’t do this.”

  “No, but Piran on Gethis does when she rebirths. It is not unprecedented,” Jiogaard replied. “Let her walk herself to exhaustion. She can’t go anywhere.”

  “I will accompany her,” Yoshgaard said, approaching from the side. “She may be in no danger but she should still be monitored while in the process of Expending.”

  Jiogaard nodded his approval and his peer started his walk. The wide cement slabs seemed to go in a straight line. In reality, they all looped back into the community. She could walk for three days and would never leave the area.

  She walked hard and fast, angry and conflicted. What should she believe? What could she believe? When so many things had been so very difficult and complicated, could she trust being told to take the easy way?

  How long she marched, she couldn’t say. The sun rose and set, but there really was no sense of time in this place. They did not measure hours and minutes. Before a meal, after a meal, before sunset, after sunrise.

  She halted, the misty confusion shattering to fall to the ground around her. She was standing in front of an unmarked building, and went inside. The first room was lit by the open doorway. Another doorway beckoned her, the next room darker.

  Her head tilted to see a tightly closed door. There were no doors to be opened here except for closets.

  She went to it, lifted the old-style latch and pulled the door. Inside was a bright swirling mass illuminating the entire space. Walls to the right were plain. The ceiling was tall. She pulled the door open enough to go in, and halted short. Suspended in the air was the Milky Way. Not a projected image, but a small galaxy in perfect form, revolving around a black sphere in the center.

  The spinning galaxy pulled inward to form a face, then a torso, and a band of the galaxy stretched down. The entire thing floated downward to hover closer to Tyler’s eye level. A person, a woman, but…not. The galaxy continued to swirl within her shape, forming her hair, her gown. It filled her black eyes. She was three times the size of a person, solid but ghostly, present but eternal.

  She smiled at Tyler with the most loving expression Tyler had ever seen.

  “My doubting daughter.”

  Words sounding like the twinkling of stars.

  Tyler felt the welling up of emotions. Her eyes misted over with a particular hotness, a tear gathering in the outer corner of her right eye as her forehead puckered into a hardness she felt race down her head to her shoulders and spine. Stress manifesting itself.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Tyler said, feeling very much like that lost five year old she had once been, having been separated from her mother in a big store.

  “Of course you don’t. You have been badly handled in this current life. You have been made to flounder rather than given good and firm guidance. I have been very displeased with most of the handlers assigned to watch over and guide you.”

  “Is that why they keep dying?” Tyler asked.

  “I do not interfere with events. Things happen because they happen.”

  “What should I do?”

  That smile. So warm and accepting. Tyler realized she’d dreamt of it a thousand times in her life.

  “Do as you choose. There is no one correct course or right answer anymore. Do what your deepest instinct says you must. You have outgrown those who have sought to have authority over you or possess you. There is no one to judge you but my own Caretakers. Only they can dictate your rules anymore. Only they can hold you to account. Be wary of vengeance. All things will finish in their own time. I task you this one thing: Create your own place of solace and solitude. Create it in your mind and bring it to be across all equivalents. When you have done that, you will be ready to move forward.”

  The swirling female form spread out and floated upward to again fill most of the top portion of the room.

  Tyler turned around to see Jiogaard standing inside the door. At once she was furious. Mouth clamped tightly closed, she exited with him close behind. She held her tongue until they were outside in the bright sunlight.

  “You should not have come here,” he said.

  She turned on him, the full Immaculate in her eyes. “You will cease telling me what I should or should not do if it does not fall within the rules that you’ve already given me for restarting my life. I’m so angry I don’t even know what I want to say right now.”

  She stomped on to pick up her walking path, tossing a hot glare to the one who had been following her. “If you’re going to follow, keep at least fifty feet back. Your presence irritates me.”

  Off she went. Yoshgaard’s head tilted to watch her go, eyes widening with acceptance of the change in her. He looked to Jiogaard, whose expression was more one of displeased resignation.

  “You thought we had a dragon by the tail before?” he said before following her.

  Chapter Twenty One

  Create your place of solitude and sanctuary.

  The phrase rolled over in her head continually as she walked. What, exactly, did that mean? She could go to Voran and take up residence and her home would be her place of solitude, her sanctuary.

  Or did The Mother mean something more literal? she finally asked herself.

  She stopped walking and looked up to the sky. The sun was setting. She turned to see the darkened section of sky, saw there were no stars.

  In that room, there had been a solid darkness in the middle of the galaxy.

  Her eyes came down to search for Yoshgaard, finding he had stopped as well and was keeping his distance.

  “Come here,” she said.

  He teleported next to her.

  “Create my own sanctuary. The Mother created this place when she evolved, yes?”

  “Created this place, yes; but not when she evolved. She created it many thousands of year
s before she took her final form. She lived on it for many centuries and it became the center of her galaxy.”

  “I don’t see any stars. Why?” she asked, blunt and flat.

  “Because there aren’t any. When she brought her galaxy into being, she shrouded her Sanctuary with an enclosing sphere to protect it. There is a sun,” he nodded to it nearing the horizon. “But there are no moons or any other bodies.”

  “Enclosing sphere? A solar system of one sun and one planet, encapsulated together, being the place where all the parallel timelines of this galaxy intersect. Meaning that time here in the Milky Way is not time in those other galaxies. It couldn’t be,” she said more to herself, starting a much more leisurely walk to converse. “They may exist within the same universe but they operate completely independently from one another in every way. We can look at each other across the chasm of space but not interact in any meaningful way. Meaning if I make a galaxy of my own and bring it into being, there’s no turning back for anyone who comes with me. What galaxy did The Mother come from?”

  “Earth scientists know it as the Pinwheel Galaxy. It is above the handle of Ursa Major when viewed from your home city.”

  “Ursa Major? The Big Dipper?” she asked. Her favorite of the constellations she knew.

  “Yes. Those who live in it call it Ara Oru, meaning spinning shell. When viewed from some angles, it looks very much like a Nautilus shell. Not to be confused with the galaxy Earth scientists call the Nautilus. They are different galaxies.”

  “Yeah, I get that.”

  Jiogaard, Rengaard, Yoshgaard…

  “You were part of her pentagon, weren’t you?” she suddenly asked. “One of the top three? Which of you was the Apogee?”

  “Our Apogee is not here. He is part of her galaxy and resides within its heart with her. We did not have a pentagon. We had a diamond. The Apogee, who went with her. Rengaard was her Conduit. Jiogaard was the Critical Companion, as we called it. I was the daily guard who happened to be on duty that day.”

  Daily guard.

  She kept on walking at the slower pace, saying nothing. He did not offer more, walking with her and waiting for her to bring up the next idea or question. Hands gently clasped behind herself, she walked through the community. She stopped. There were several buildings and they all looked the same to her. She’d been in too much distress to pay attention to what building she’d entered on arrival.

  “Which is mine?” she asked.

  He gestured to the right. She went through the arch and found the square courtyard with three doors. Into the rear door hidden behind a shrub wall and she recognized her garden. Without a word, she used her toilet and climbed into bed. She had exhausted herself. Anything more would have to wait until she’d slept on it.

  Things could almost always wait for a night’s sleep, she’d learned. Someone had said something like that to her once. She couldn’t remember who.

  Waking, catching sight of the color she was wearing, she realized she hadn’t bathed since she’d come here. Showered and wearing a dark purple version of the same dress, she got a blank journal out and started writing. The sky outside was still dark. Over the course of the hours she wrote, it became lighter. With its rising, she realized she was hungry.

  Jiogaard arrived only a moment later, two other men setting her table for a meal. She lifted the domes to find waffles, sausage, and fruit.

  “You have been very busy with your journaling,” Jiogaard said. “I will leave you to it and not intrude this meal.”

  After her very slow meal, she took the journal outside and found a small table under a shade tree in the left corner near the building, neither of which had been there before. She sat with her back to the corner, to look out over her garden whenever she was thinking, and packed her pipe. When the pipe was finished, she put her pen down and went inside to find the music player she wanted now existed right where she wanted it.

  She queued up a string of sixty songs and started singing. With so much time away from her music (so long she just now realized how long), she found new meanings and perspectives in almost every stanza. When she was done, some three hours later, she sat in the silence for a long while. Thinking, feeling.

  It was like all the songs she’d loved so much over the last decade were telling the story of her life, her love life, her own struggles and trials. Like someone had put them out there in the Universe to guide her, to help her figure out how to feel about those things. Some songs were clearly her own self. Some clearly meant her relationship, such as it was, with Jerome. And Solomon.

  The epiphany of it left her breathless with her heart pounding. She had a further realization.

  “If I make my own place of sanctuary and solitude while I’m here, it would be here, wouldn’t it?” she asked aloud as if someone was there to hear her. “Inside this encapsulated solar system.”

  “Correct,” she heard from behind herself, and looked to see Zamren working on a flower bed just outside her patio doorway.

  “So before I create it, I need to leave here. Were you there while I was singing?” she asked, and left the seat to stand in the doorway and watch him plant another new flower she didn’t recognize.

  “For some of it, yes. Your voice is beautiful. Very powerful. Do you recognize the power contained within it that your audience connects with?” he asked.

  “I’ve noticed that my audience seems particularly attentive while I’m singing. More so than when Mickey is singing, or one of the other girls.”

  “Your voice, the words, they are how you best speak to your people.”

  “My people?” she questioned.

  “Ones who might follow and worship you.”

  “I don’t want to be worshiped,” she denied.

  “Perhaps not, but that is what happens. People will admire. They will worship. They will want to serve. They will long to be near you, your power, your grace.”

  She laughed. “Grace?”

  Flower finished, he leaned back to stand on his knee and looked up to her. He was tall enough that he looked her in the chest until he tilted his head upwards.

  “You do that a lot, you know,” he said.

  “Do what?”

  “Deny that you have some quality that you possess in abundance.”

  “Maybe because I’m all of twenty three years old and have never seen any of those things in myself.”

  “You are twenty seven.”

  “I’m twenty three ,” she said.

  “You are not aware of how long you have slept. All told, among the few times that you have lain down to rest, you have slept four years of your own time.”

  She stared and blinked hard, mind unable to accept this information.

  “Look at your hands. You had two damaged fingernails, yes?”

  Hands out, she saw both of her half-grown nails were even with the others.

  “Damage heals while the rest of the body remains as is,” he said. “It is one of the properties of The Mother’s Sanctuary.”

  The promise that injuries would be healed in heaven. This was the humanoid version of heaven. All things return to the mother, the Tao said. When someone died, their energy returned to The Mother to be released back into the galaxy again.

  “You have a device for telling time on your vidpad, yes? Look at it,” he told her.

  She stomped over to her messenger bag on the table in the corner, snatched out the vidpad and turned it on, ready to show him and…

  January 7, 2002, five and a half months before her 28th birthday. She had to sit down, struggled to grasp the concept. He had walked with her, sat with her.

  “That is how much you have hurt yourself in confining your emotions,” he said.

  “I was told I’d be inserted back into my time at the point where I left it,” she finally managed to say.

  “You can be inserted anyplace you want between the moment you left and the date and time you see on your vidpad,” he told her. “When it was only a few days, it would
not have mattered. Now that it has been literally years, you have the choice.”

  “No wonder I needed a shower,” she said offhand. “I want sex. Do I tell one of you who to bring?”

  “If I will not do,” he said.

  “Oh, I think you’ll do; but I have what we call special needs?”

  “I’m sure my two hands will be sufficient to administer anything you need.”

  A statement that turned her on more than almost anything could have. When she’d first arrived, she had no desire for intimate contact. In this moment, she could not think of anything she wanted more than a long, hard, thorough fucking.

  He stood, reaching out a hand to her. He’d already taken his gloves off. She’d not seen when, but there they were on his tool box by the door as they passed. He took her into the bathroom and started to undress.

  “I don’t need a shower,” she said.

  “I do. You have always enjoyed water with your lover,” he replied. “So I am certain you will not really object.”

  His physique was magnificent. Large with muscles well-defined by his work. Strong thighs, eight pack abs. She let her eyes wander while he prepared the water. He stepped in first before bringing her into the large rectangle. He put her under the water first.

  “Close your eyes and imagine this is a waterfall. Make the water as warm or cold as you want. As much water as you want. Picture how it cascades over us both. Picture the mountain wall,” he instructed, and gave her a few seconds before pulling her against his body for a kiss.

  He was nearly a complete stranger beyond these few interactions in her garden. She needed out of town strange now like she’d needed Demitrius for those few weeks.

  She could see the waterfall in her mind, feel the force of the cool water, smell the forest around it. When he turned and lifted her to put her back against the wall, she felt the slick roughness of natural stone rather than the smoothness of tile wall. His cock was thick and long and filled her with a crack of pain like when Nails had taken her virginity. A fullness so good she melted with her arms around him to place her head on his shoulder.