I had all the symptoms. Not only the
constant darkness, but I fell back inside myself. The world retreated.
Sometimes I’d have to ask Ash to repeat something three or four times, his
voice all tinny and remote. Like he spoke through water. I didn’t taste food. I
didn’t feel the famous ocean wind at all, it became a kind of series of
whispers I couldn’t quite make out. I lay awake trying to puzzle out what they
were. The names of all the men I’d commanded to their deaths. My dead husband’s
name, endearments, promises I had not kept. Reminders of every time I’d gotten
it all wrong.
Because I
couldn’t sleep at night, I nodded off constantly during the day. Sometimes Ash
would make me get up and walk about the encampment. I leaned on his arm. I told
him it was so my army of the dead would see that I was only sick. I would not
lead them to despair.
But truth
was, it felt like I was always falling. That’s what I would think, sitting out
there on the cliff in the hours just before the sickly light of dawn. You
bastards, I would say to the waves and all the fish beneath them. Truth is I couldn’t
fall far enough. Stripped to the
bone, all awareness gone, I’d still bear responsibility. My husband wouldn’t
live. The crewmen of the broken, burning hulls of ships would not climb back up
out of Thaeron’s atmosphere. They didn’t get an exit. Why should I? Who did I
think I was?
Still, I
would lean forward. Mesmerized, I watched the waves churn, imagined my body crashing
there, on those rocks, or there, on that sandy spit, or there, among those
waves. Would I hit the cliffs on the way down? Or would I make it out far
enough to just plunge below the surface? Would I scream? In my mind the whole
thing happened without any sound at all, just a smooth and silent plummeting,
elegant like the divers in the Academy gymnasium. Then slip, and I would go.
Forever.
Suriel came
to visit me, of course. Sometimes he was his familiar golden self. Other times
he was dark, matte black, devoid of light, polluted by swirling, corrupting
clouds of nightwind – or was it blackbrain? – or worse? Those were the times when
I would not speak to him.
“You
must/go down,” he said one night, when he was his usual shining self. “They/will/have
been coming soon.”
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