The Shifting Pools

by The Shifting Pools (epub)

  “I would never be attracted to you. Why would you even think that? You’re not my type – you have no finesse, no charm, you don’t know the rules of the game. I thought you were my friend – and all the while you just wanted something else. Something so much more basic. How could you see me that way! How could you! I thought we were friends.”

  “So sex is just something you do with people you care nothing for?” he asked.

  “Yes! Of course! It is easier that way. Easier all around. Why would I want a friend to think of me that way? It’s disgusting!”

  “Disgusting! Is that what you really think?”

  “I thought you were better than that!” I threw at him, sobs lurching through me now. I felt so angry, so betrayed and, yes, so frightened. I was scared of losing him, his friendship, the solidity of him next to me, helping me find my way.

  And I knew that I did find it disgusting. I was disgusted in myself when I went looking for sexual relief – and disgusted with the man: disgusted that he would want my body in that way. I found the male sexual appetite overwhelming, but my own even more troubling. It was something that was a means to an end, and I always wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible afterwards, ashamed. And it was never with anyone overtly curious about me. Or trying to be too intimate. Or hoping for more than sex. And never a friend.

  “What rules of the game? This isn’t a game, Eve. Life isn’t some board game where you can control all the pieces. That’s not living.”

  I tried to get my words out through my tears – mortified that he was seeing me like this.

  “I mean that if I am having sex with someone, they know the rules, they know the score –they don’t try to get too close. I don’t want that; I’ve never wanted that! It is what it is, and I don’t want ever to confuse it with anything else.”

  “Confuse it with…? Shit, what happened to you..? No, shit… I’m sorry I asked that. Sorry.”

  I didn’t want him ever to see that I had been cut too deeply – cut down to where it can be too painful to pull out the knife.

  “I don’t need, or want, your pity! I want nothing from you – nothing! I don’t need anything from anyone, and if I did, it wouldn’t be from you!” I spat the words out, almost choking on their venom. Unable to stop the tears.

  “Why did you do this? Why did you have to do this?” And I didn’t know if I was saying it to him or to myself.

  “Message received.” Raul spoke quietly, his face taut. He looked at me, directly in the eye, and his eyes were charged with emotion. I couldn’t place whether he looked at me with sadness for himself, or pity for me – but either way I didn’t want any part of it, didn’t want to feel any connection to it at all. I looked away. I heard the soft crunch of leaves underfoot, and when I turned back, he had gone.

  Enanti: the present

  Talking to the Shadow Beast

  I stayed a long time in that tangle of trees, feeling sick. This wasn’t what I wanted, wasn’t why I was here. I couldn’t stay. Not now. If some believed I played a key role here, then I wanted to go to do that. Alone. I knew what I would do. Over the next few days, as we moved along the coast, hoping to have our numbers swelled with reinforcements, I would keep my eyes open for some form of Shifting Pool. And when I found one, I would ask with all my being to be taken straight to the Shadow Beast himself. And that is what I did.

  * * *

  The dense darkness swirled loosely into Beast form, sending wafts of black smoke off into different directions every time it swung its vast head from side to side. These tendrils of smoke would then start to return to the Beast’s body, groping back towards their kind; a powerful gravity pulling them back to the centre of darkness.

  “What do you want?’ I managed to get out.

  The Beast looked at me with ancient eyes, his huge head hung low between his shoulder blades like a creature that had just stalked out of the primordial jungle. His brow was heavy and ridged, and a row of horns ran up the centre of his face, gaining in height as they reached the dome of his head. His eyes flashed with a black fire, and he opened his jaws on a sneer.

  “Why, you, of course. Your heart and soul. And I will have them. Some day, very soon, I will have them.” He leered at me, salivating ribbons of black smoke from his grotesque muzzle. Drops of this hit the floor, sizzled loudly, and then started to waft back up to join with the rest of him again.

  He laughed, and then continued.

  “But that can be another day. Everything is unfolding just as it should. Soon, you will come to me.”

  “Never. You are not conducting this orchestra – you don’t get to plan my every move. I don’t believe in fate.”

  The Shadow Beast stalked closer. “Ahh, you think you get to choose? How sweet. How touching. Ahh…that’s lovely…really. I don’t get to see that very often.

  “Very well, I will let you choose then: I have a couple of options for you today.”

  My skin prickled at his words, sensing great danger, and ancient cruelty, perfected down millennia.

  “What do you mean?” I asked carefully.

  “Well, if you are so keen on choice, then I will give you one. I will give you a glimpse of the enormous responsibility that can entail, and then see if you like it so much.”

  I didn’t reply, as my mouth had run dry and I could feel my pulse pumping too hard though my head. I dreaded his next words.

  “So, today, Miss Free Will, I give you this choice: the choice over two different lives. I have Alette – ahh – I can see how much you want her. You believe she is important in all this; you believe that she can somehow provide an answer here. You believe wrong. She is nothing – just a child. I took her to amuse. Your friends are wrong; they have filled your head with ideas of her wonder, but they are deluded. She is a child! Like any other. But it does amuse me to see them flinging themselves at me to try to get her back! And I am getting so many wonderful new recruits because of it!

  “Anyway… They believe if they have her back then the war will be over, that somehow I will be magicked away.”

  He swung his head back towards me now and caught me full in the face with his glare.

  “Let me tell you now that that will never happen, Eve. Never. Believe it if you want. But I thought you were smarter than that. You’ve seen my armies – do you really believe a simple child could stop them from sweeping all before them?

  “Well, you can have her, if you want. If you believe that she is that vital, then you can have her. But in return, I get to keep a prisoner that I have wanted for some time now. A token of this pitiful land, a nobody. But, before you decide, I want you to remember that although he is a nobody, he is a person, with family, people who love him, maybe children that depend on him. By choosing Alette, you would be sentencing this other man to death. Everything has a price, Eve – you see? With any luck he might survive the Riving, and then he could be another member of My Craven, flying again on borrowed wings. Or one of my exalted Riven, sworn to protect me. Either way, he would be mine.”

  The laugh that came from him made me stumble backwards, like the wave of an aftershock.

  “How can you do that? That is no choice at all! You have set up the two options, and you want to pretend that that is free choice?” My hands were bunched by my sides, my voice rising.

  “That’s how life works, Eve. That’s how it goes in politics. Ahhh, of course, you can go into it with such lofty ideals – ridiculous, really – but when it comes down to it, it is all about snap decisions like this, made on a warped board of compromise. This player here, or that player there? Sometimes life conspires to focus down to tipping points like this. You sometimes only get one move. What’s yours going to be?”

  I didn’t want to choose. Saving Alette was so precious to me, had become so much of a sacred mission to me that I started to doubt my own reasons for wanting to do it. It wa
s almost too convenient that my own need to assuage my guilt over Laila coincided so perfectly with my friends’ belief in the importance of recovering Alette. Was that too simple? Was the Beast correct that she would have no influence over events?

  And how could I condemn this stranger to The Riving? Another free man, snatched by the Shadow Beast, to fall into darkness. My mind revolted at the thought. I couldn’t live with that on my conscience. I knew what failing Laila had done to me all these years, and I knew his faceless form would also haunt my dreams. And he was an innocent in all this, a pawn being used to push me – and I would be treating him with the same lack of humanity and respect as the Shadow Beast was doing now. I would be accepting that he was a pawn, and, by extension, that we all were.

  But my heart screamed at me to save Alette. Here was a chance – the fruit of what we had fought for, for what many had died for. Who was I to take their sacrifice in vain? If this man was part of The Free, then it would have been what he had been fighting for, too. He would have already chosen to lay down his life for this end.

  As I stood there struggling, lost in my confusion and moral crisis, I saw plumes of dark smoke leaving the Beast’s form and flowing over the ground towards me. They nuzzled around my ankles, as if they were sniffing prey, then crept up my legs, swirling gently around me, under my arms, around my chest, mocking me.

  I recalled the conversation where Raul had counselled me urgently to save Alette at any cost. Her safety outranked any other concern, he had said, even if that meant great pain and sacrifice. He had spoken directly, plainly, as was his way. He had made it clear that every one of The Free would die willingly for that end; that I mustn’t lose that focus.

  God, Raul. What I wouldn’t give for him to be standing beside me now, helping to untangle this thicket that was clutching me. I winced as I thought back to the last words we had exchanged, two days ago now. I had succeeded in driving him away. That knowledge was raw pain. I thought I would bury that loss down inside me, and carry on as I had before, but I had found it impossible. I felt like a wounded animal, desperate and in agony.

  Although I had seen him on the march the next day, I had refused to make eye contact, even as new fighters arrived to join our cause, and I had kept myself at some distance from him for the entire day. He had eaten off to one side of the main group in the evening, speaking low and urgently with his band, and then they had all stood and left the glow of the fire and moved towards the edge of the camp to set up lookout posts for the evening. I hadn’t bothered to look for him as I ate my early breakfast this morning, as I knew he would still be out at the perimeter, guarding. But I would. I had felt devastated since our fight, and I was appalled at some of the things I had said to him. I wanted to explain to him, wanted him to see that what he was asking was impossible. But more than anything, I wanted him back, I needed his friendship in these dark times. I wanted his quiet strength and his unwavering acceptance. I thought I could survive alone, and I could. But, as Raul would say, surviving is not living. And I was ready to live now.

  What would he do here? I thought to myself. He would surely save Alette. I knew that without a shadow of a doubt. But I also heard his voice in my head urging me to be true to myself. What would I do? That was so much harder to answer. How could it be easier to know someone else’s mind more than your own?

  “Maybe because you don’t have one...” purred the Beast in my ear. “Maybe you just always do what you think you are meant to, what you’re told to do – never wanting to stick your head above the parapet...”

  I knew he was goading me, but it struck home. I felt furious with myself, rage at this situation. What would I do? Who was I now? What did I believe in? When the Shadows ravaged all around me, what values would I hold tight to?

  And I knew then what I could, and couldn’t live with. I couldn’t live with knowing I had sent an innocent man to his death. And I couldn’t live with failing Alette. I didn’t want to play this game, and I realised that I didn’t have to. I didn’t want to take part. I had enough awareness to realise that the Beast was in charge of this game – and that he could change the rules any time he wanted to, regardless of anything I said. He would destroy that man, or not, on his own whim. He was just enjoying watching me tear myself apart.

  I also knew that he had not harmed Alette up until this point – that something kept him from doing that – and I gambled that this meant we would have another chance.

  “I choose neither,” I whispered to him.

  “What!” It wasn’t the answer he had been expecting.

  “I choose neither. They are not mine to choose, they are in your power, not mine.”

  “You can say that? When I was willing to cede some of that power to you? Their lives were in your hands, Eve, and you let them both down! Both!”

  “That isn’t power. That is seduction. You were ceding nothing to me.”

  “You are a fool, Eve. And now they will both be mine anyway. I mean, they always were, weren’t they?”

  He swept past me, scattering his dark tendrils. They hummed and throbbed as they slowly made their way back to him, rippling over the floor. I was reminded of a flight of cockroaches, teeming across a surface.

  “Show her what she has done,” he spoke to The Craven posted at the doors.

  He gestured with his foot towards the door. The Craven turned, and opened one side each of the double doors in unison. There, standing just beyond the threshold, was a little girl, flanked by several more Craven: Alette. My heart thudded painfully, and I heard myself cry out – a strangled, anguished call. She looked so small there, flanked by such an insurmountable barrier. The doorway was such a distance away that I could only really make out her stature and her youth – I couldn’t tell how old she was, or whether she looked scared or numb… No…I could, I could. I could tell in the way she stood that she was alive inside. I could feel from the blast of emotion that tore through me as I opened my sensors to her, that she was not afraid.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered to myself – she was far too far away to hear me. “Alette – I’m so so sorry. I’m so sorry, Laila.”

  The guards then grabbed her arms roughly, and she was stolen from my view.

  I turned my anguish back towards the Shadow Beast. I didn’t try to hide any of it. It seemed somehow acutely important to me that I hide none of it – that there was something sacred in allowing it space to be seen, heard, felt. Not hidden away. Alette deserved that simple respect. So had Laila, I thought now.

  “You think that is it?” sneered the Beast. “You think you have this all worked out, nice and simple?”

  My body iced in dread as his snigger reverberated around the Hall.

  “Bring in the condemned man,” he ordered then, staring at my face the whole time with unconcealed glee.

  Another figure flanked by guards was presented at the doorway, and this time he was marched over the threshold, and up the Hall towards us. But I didn’t need him to come any closer for the arrow to pierce my heart. It was Raul.

  The sound that came out of me was like nothing I had ever heard before. I had nothing left, and I sank to my knees in the middle of that Hall. I thought I had lost everything that I ever could, that nothing could ever hurt me in that way again, that I had made myself impregnable. Lies, lies, lies!

  I couldn’t do this; I couldn’t live through this pain. I started to feel myself drifting away. I saw myself as if from above, heard the strange chokes that came out of my mouth, and then I was slammed back into my body with full force, back into the midst of all that pain. This was where I belonged – here, within this body, feeling these rip-tides of despair. How could I ever have thought I could escape this?

  I covered my face with my hands as Raul was marched closer, rocking there on my knees.

  “Look at me,” Raul prompted, gently. His gentleness only served to fuel my agony, stick the blade in d
eeper.

  “Look at me, Eve,” he appealed to me again.

  I raised my head from my hands and looked at him, at his beautiful face. A livid cut ran down his left cheek, blood still oozing out from where the edges were failing to knot together. His left eye was partially swollen over, and was horribly purple and red.

  “What have they done to you?” I whispered.

  “Nothing in comparison to what you’ve now done to him,” gloated the Shadow Beast, revelling in the moment, switching his gaze between the two of us constantly, drinking up the pain in thirsty gulps.

  “I’m OK, Eve. I’m OK. This isn’t your fault. Don’t let him do this to you – it is what he wants. I’m OK.” He spoke low, softly, and I knew he was trying to soothe me, take away some of the pain. “Please, get off your knees; you don’t belong on your knees. Please, get up.”

  “I’m so sorry. I could have saved you. He said I could have chosen one of you – I could have saved you.” I was devastated, having to force my air over my vocal chords to form any noise at all.

  “And I let you down; I didn’t save you, but I didn’t save her either. I let you both down.”

  “No, you didn’t Eve. Don’t think that. Yes, I would have saved Alette; you know that. But who is to say that would have been right? If it had been putting myself in her place, I’d have done it a thousand times. But, if it had been a choice between her and you – god, Eve, I can’t imagine ever being in that position. I’m so sorry. Please get up off your knees.”

  “I let you down. I let you down.”

  My sensors open full blast now, I let the swarming emotions in the room pound into me, smash through my protection and punch through me. Malevolence, horror, respect, rage, anguish, forgiveness, love, revenge, pride, terror, joy – they were all there in the room. I drank them down, and I rose to my feet.

  “What you did was right, Eve. You were true to yourself. Do you remember that I told you once that you could never let me down, if you were being true to yourself?” He gave me such a brilliant smile.