The Shifting Pools

by The Shifting Pools (epub)

  “You were right not to condemn a man to death, however anonymous. Don’t let that change, now that you know that it is me. Whatever you had said, The Beast would have taken me anyway.”

  “Ahh – don’t let her think that, and ruin my little game!” The Beast now returned to me.

  “You don’t know that to be true.” He laughed again, the smoke swirling more rapidly in his centre, stimulated by all the pain in the room.

  “Eve, please, listen to me. You did the right thing. You did the right thing.”

  “But he is going to take you to The Riving,” I sobbed.

  Then I knew what I should do. I whipped my head around to the Beast. “Take me instead. Take me in his place.”

  “No!” shouted Raul. “No!” He strained at the Craven holding his arms, his whole body rejecting the idea.

  “Please!” I cried, “please take me instead.” I was frantic now. It was so clear in my head. I had a way to save Raul, and it was all I could think of.

  “You said you wanted me, heart and soul – so take me instead!” I was screaming at the Beast now.

  His pitch eyes flashed with pleasure, and He stalked near enough to draw His ragged tongue up my side, from thigh to face. I shuddered at the contact, dark spirals swirling on my skin where he had been.

  “Stop it!” Raul shouted. “Get off her!”

  The Beast roared, shattering the glass in the mirrors that lined the Hall, sending shards flying inwards at us. A few caught my side and I winced. The fragments simply shot through the amorphous form of the Beast, tinkling harmlessly to the floor on the other side of him. He laughed again.

  “You have no sway here, human.”

  He turned back to me. “It’s a lovely offer Eve, really it is. You don’t know how excited it makes me. You don’t know how much it turns me on to hear you offer yourself to me like that.” He sniffed close to me again, and I shrank back.

  “But the timing isn’t quite right, yet. I will have you, but I don’t like to be rushed into these things. Let me play the suitor a little longer, won’t you? I haven’t even got warmed up yet. There is so much more fun to be had.

  “And I think you’ll agree that one of the first things I need to do is get rid of any other suitors that may distract you; clear the field, if you like. Mark out my territory.”

  He sneered back at Raul, then. “Get the stench of the losers off the pitch, eh? Didn’t you hear her the other day, Hero? She can’t bear the thought of you touching her.” His raven form shook with mirth. “But she will accept my touch. Be sure of that, Hero, as you die a thousand deaths at The Riving.

  “Take him away,” he snapped at the guards.

  “No!” I screamed as they started to pull Raul away. “Raul, I didn’t mean what I said. I’m so sorry.”

  “I know, I know. It’s OK, Eve. It’s OK.” His last urgent words to reassure me died away as he was marched further and further down the Hall to the doors. He was taken through them, and they clanged shut, making my ears ring.

  I whirled back to the Beast, but he had gone too. I was standing alone on the clifftop.

  * * *

  I made my way back to the camp a different person from the one who had set out that morning. I had lived a thousand lives since then. Pain lanced through me every time I recalled Raul’s damaged face; the way he had tried to smile to reassure me. And I was haunted by that flash of Alette – so tiny in the distance, so vulnerable. And I pictured Laila, too. Her warm chubbiness in my arms, clinging to me as her last hope. And what a life-raft she had put her faith into. One small eddy out on the water, and I had let her drown. And now I had condemned Alette and Raul to the same. I raged at my own impotence.

  I couldn’t accept that Raul was gone; lost. I had heard about the horror of The Riving too many times to find any shred of comfort. I felt as if my entire being was on fire. I’m not sure I was even sane. The enormity of what I had lost, what Enanti had lost in Raul, was too much for me to bear. And he hadn’t fallen in battle, but was about to be torn apart – torn from himself, lost into oblivion. I screamed and screamed, and I didn’t care who could hear.

  And I couldn’t forget the way I had rejected him, hurt him, tried to make him believe that I thought he was some base creature that disgusted me. How far from the truth. The man made me come alive. If I had thought that trying to keep some distance from people made the loss of them hurt less, I had been so terribly wrong.

  In the midst of my grief, I felt hands shaking me, gently at first, and then more urgently, their voices swelling in my head.

  “Eve, Eve, wake up. Please, wake up.”

  I opened my eyes, blinking a few times to try to comprehend what was real.

  “Eve, there’s been a raid in the night. We don’t know how it happened, but The Craven flew down in the night to our lookout posts – we have no idea how they made it through undetected. They held onto Silas and the others, and made them watch as they took Raul. He’s gone, Eve.” Lara started to cry: “He’s gone. He’s been taken. And they didn’t even take any of the others. They only wanted to make them watch. They’ve taken him.”

  I sat in the bed, stunned. The Shadow Beast had come to me in the night, found me in my dreams to test me. And I knew what had happened to Raul. I haltingly began to tell Lara what had happened that night.

  Enanti: the present

  Reaching out

  Our focus gone, our camp in disarray, we sat together for long hours over the next few days, talking urgently about what we should do. Although so many fighters had joined us by that point, we felt rudderless with Raul gone, and utterly undone by grief.

  As the others sat around on the fourth evening, knowing we had to make a decision either to attempt an attack, or retreat from these barren lands, I walked off alone. I spotted a figure walking towards me, right along the cliff edge. I knew him immediately.

  I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t even have time to think. I threw myself at him, desperate for contact. I clutched at him and felt his arms band around me, gently at first, and then with increasing pressure. I didn’t care, I needed that pressure. Rather than making me feel trapped, I needed it to feel safe – as if I had found some unexpected source of refuge in the storm. And it was a storm that crashed through me. I clung on as it whipped around my entire being, catching me up in the vortex. I clung on as he found my face and took my lips in his. I had never felt this urgency, never this need to get closer, get deeper. I didn’t understand it, but I allowed myself to trust it. I gasped as I felt his wings enfold me, marvelling at the little sacred space that he had created around us, within me. I felt his hands moving across my body, and I shuddered, then kissed him back with a hunger that I hadn’t known was there.

  In the dark of that night, as we lay gazing at each other, I asked him how he could be here, how he had survived The Riving.

  ‘How did you get away? How are you still whole? What happened?”

  “I’m not exactly sure. It was pure agony. I could feel myself being pulled into a thousand pieces; about to split apart. I could start to feel where the crack lines were going to open up along my body. It was so dark there, I couldn’t see where I was, or what else was there. I started to think of all the things I love, have loved, through my whole life. I thought of my parents, my brothers, my friends. And I thought of you. I held you all in my mind, and it felt like some kind of sacred rite. I just held you all there, and loved you. And I felt so glad – so glad that I had known all that, whatever was to come now. So grateful. I thought of your face when I’d been taken out of the Hall, and I felt so moved that you had tried to save me – that my life had meant that much to you. It gave me more comfort than you can imagine.

  “I didn’t want my life to be over – I wanted to stay so much. But I also felt so grateful for all that had been in my life. My parents are long gone, but I held them in that space, and I wa
s honouring them. I don’t know how to describe it, really – it was as if I was more fully connected to the whole of my life, than I had ever consciously been – both now, reaching back into the past, but also beaming out into the future.

  “And just as I was drifting in that feeling – almost a moment of bliss – I dropped suddenly. The density of the darkness lifted around me, and I was just crouched on the clifftop, completely alone. No great Hall, no Craven, no Beast.

  “I guess they let me go. I’m not sure why. I don’t know what else they have planned. But they let me go for now.”

  “What?” I asked. Raul looked unsure.

  “No, nothing, I don’t want to think about it now. I just have an uneasy feeling that it was too easy – that they let me go for a reason – that maybe by holding those things I loved so strongly in my mind, I gave them some ideas I don’t want even to think about.”

  He shuddered, and dragged me closer to him, taking care to tuck the cloaks in around me to protect me from the night air. I reached for him. It was enough for him. His eyes smiled, then he closed them, buried his face in my hair and breathed me in.

  When we rose to dress and get ready to move on, there was no sense of the shame I had always felt before with men. There was no defiance, no aggression in me – I felt calm and even joyful. But I also felt shy, and tried to cover my nakedness as I dressed. I’d never felt shy before, because no one had ever actually seen me – only my body. Now I felt a new sense of identity with my actual body and it felt a little confusing.

  Raul smiled at me, before snaking his arms inside the cloak I was trying miserably to use as cover.

  “I’m not going to look unless you want me to. Ever. OK?”

  “Ok.” I smiled back, feeling faintly ridiculous. But he didn’t force the issue, just kissed me gently on the mouth, and then stood to go.

  “I’ll wait for you by the fire, with the others. Hell, I’d have waited for you forever!” He grinned at me, and left me to get dressed.

  Enanti: the present

  The many paths we have

  “What happens to us if I leave this place, and can never get back?” I was almost too afraid to voice the concern that had been eating away at me since Raul returned. “Will I lose you? I can’t lose you.” I bent my head into his chest, feeling the warmth there.

  “You’ll never lose me. Not if you don’t want to. I can be anywhere you are. I can be a part of anything that you can be a part of. Don’t let yourself be limited by place or time – not when you’ve seen all this.”

  “But I don’t mean in some weird, cerebral ‘we’ll always have each other in here…’ [I struck myself in the heart] bullshit. I mean really with you.”

  Raul laughed. “I know exactly what you meant! And I mean it – you’ll never lose me if you don’t want to. I can be anywhere with you. And you can be anywhere.”

  But I can’t imagine you out of the woods. What about your wings? What about this life?”

  “So many questions. Stop worrying about it. The woods are everywhere, the earth is everywhere. I can be at home anywhere because of it. These clothes, and these woods don’t define me. I can be anywhere – I am just me. And you can be anywhere; you are just you.

  “You won’t see my wings in your world. But they’ll still be there. You just use them in a different way. Yours have been there too – when you went back there.” He smiled at me as I shook my head and started to contradict him.

  “No, they…”

  “They have, Eve. But they stay unseen, and you can’t use them as you use them here.”

  “Then what is the point of them?”

  “There are so many different ways to fly.”

  “What?”

  “It is only when we can’t do the obvious with them, that our trust can be shaken. Don’t let that happen. Once we trust in them, it opens us up to so many other ways to fly. If you trust in them here, you should trust in them there also. Never think they are gone. We are all born with wings, Eve, and don’t believe the fairytales of childhood. Wings are what we grow into, not grow out of. This is no Puff the Magic Dragon. Worlds are not closed off to us as we get older – they are opened up. But only if we allow them to be.”

  “OK.” I didn’t fully get what he was talking about, but I knew him well enough now to know that he was telling me the truth, and that he was sharing something important with me.

  “Enanti can show you the extreme of a sensory way to live – how to live fully realised. And once you have tasted it, you will know how to seek those paths wherever you are, use those gifts. You may not be able to breathe underwater there, but you will remember how that feels – and you will find new things you can do that you never believed you could.”

  He stroked the side of my face.

  “But I have to stay here until we have Alette. You understand that? I would love you to stay until then too. Still, that is your choice. It is a choice we each have to make for ourselves.”

  I nodded, knowing the importance of his having chosen this path, and needing to see it through. And I knew I would stay here to fight for Alette, too, for my friends, for this beautiful man, for this strange land, for myself.

  To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

  To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

  and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

  and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

  Wendell Berry

  Enanti: the present

  Summoned

  That night I went to dark places in my dreams. A shadowed figure approached through the gloom, and as it came nearer I recognised the dark blood red of one of The Craven. It was silently holding something out to me; words burned into parchment. A summons from the Shadow Beast. I was to come alone, and we would talk. This way, hundreds would not have to die.

  As soon as I woke, I told Raul. We were sleeping alone, outside, protected slightly from the elements by the thorny grove of stunted trees by the camp.

  “Are you sure? Is this what you want to do?” Raul asked.

  I nodded, feeling the quickening, the pull towards this crisis. I couldn’t explain it, even to myself, but I knew it was everything – it would decide all. But for that evening, I still had the security of Raul’s arms. I needed it that night. I didn’t know who I would be the next day, or if I would even survive it.

  “Hold me?” I asked. He let out a breath, and gathered me in close. His arms were so tight that they allowed my body to sag, and I relaxed into him.

  “You don’t need to do this you know. There will be another way, a more straightforward one. This is too risky. This is...uhh, fuck this, I can’t lose you, Eve.”

  “This is as straightforward as it gets. The Beast has given us a chance to meet – to discuss terms – to see Alette. We can’t pass up this opportunity.”

  “But why just you? It is too risky, far too risky. You’ll be in there alone, entirely at his mercy. And I won’t be able to protect you.”

  “You can’t always protect me, Raul; you know that. And you also know that I can protect myself. I learned from the best.” I smiled into his chest, and heard the snort of acknowledgment from inside him.

  I continued: “What you’ve given me will always protect me, because you’ve given me back parts of myself. Some parts of me were still functioning, but others were starved of oxygen; still there, but stunted and gasping. I know I have further to go – but, for the first time, I’ve started to believe that I can. That is an incredible gift – and you helped me to unwrap it.

  “But I am scared to cross this water. I sense something. Night is coming, and it is an older night, a longer one, with no certainty of the sun rising again.”

  I sent my soul through the Invisible,

  Some letter of that After-life to spell:

  And by and by my Soul retur
n’d to me,

  And answer’d: ‘I myself am Heav’n and Hell.

  Omar Khayyam

  Enanti: the present

  Adrift in the darkness

  I needed to trust in myself. When the Shadow Beast visited me in my dreams that night, he knew he had my acceptance. He had told me to come alone. Told me what would happen to the others if I did not. His voice was silky, seductive – I was tumbling through the night. He held me in my bed and opened his vast wings around me. In them I saw a million worlds. There was the sensation of flying, being carried off, and then I was dumped abruptly on a cold stone floor. In front of me was a heavy wooden door, which was open to reveal stone steps leading down into the earth.

  I climbed down and down the steps, spiralling down into the darkness. As my legs started to burn with the effort, I reached the gates at the bottom. They were incongruous here, down this deep under the earth. They could have graced any palace with their grandeur. They appeared to be made of metal, but were so smooth that they could not have been beaten into shape. Around the edge, and down the centre, precious stones nestled in intricate settings, as if a thousand rings had been set here, suggesting promises made. As I pushed on them, the gates swung open.

  Light flickered around me in the gloom of the chamber I had entered. It was vast, and I couldn’t properly see across to the other side. It was built in the design of a full gladiatorial arena. No pillars were in evidence, to hold up the ceiling that I knew must be there. From the number of steps I estimated I was at least half a kilometre underground. The aisle led gently down to the circular area in the centre. Around this, terraced stone seating sloped upwards, staggered up the slope. Set at exact intervals along the stone seats were stubby, lit candles, thousands upon thousands of them. The light they gave off flickered and wavered, sending an eerie glow throughout the chamber. They reminded me of the stands of candles in church, remembering the dead. It should have been beautiful, and in a way it was, but the room felt numbingly cold. I wondered what the creatures that dwelt here would have to commemorate: what peace they were searching for.