Bereft: Foretold

17 | A Wishful Purpose

I was provided a scant meal of cold chicken and microwaved peas when the witches sat down to their own dinners. I didn't care for the quality but ate regardless, having expected nothing better from a group of renegade witches in the middle of an inhospitable desert. Once I ate, I shoved aside the chipped plate and laid upon the cot, too tired to think but too anxious to sleep. My mind was caught in the middle ground, a terrain of muddled incoherency and exhausted half-thoughts.

I found rest in time, lulled by the rattle of a fan next door and the weight of the room's dark, stuffy heat, but instead of falling into sleep's oblivion, I once more walked the crumbling paths of my mind's endless halls. In those untended passes, I lost myself to the snatches of color and light that proliferated the area behind each threshold.

Much of my life was awful. It was a menagerie of events testifying the very worst of creation's nature, an array of wars, massacres, nights spent hungry and hunted, lies, machinations, and the murders they entailed. I considered those rooms, if only because they were familiar, and because their ability to inspire horror had dulled long ago. 

I liked to search those hideous places for spots of redemption. I saw beauty in the evening after a battle, when both the sky and the earth had glowed red like a ruby in sunlight. I saw morality in the eyes of a barghest pup I'd released from captivity after slaughtering his abusive master. I savored the first bite of charred meat I'd swallowed after crawling free of the Baal's Pit. 

There were other brighter, precious places within my memory's manor I sought only on the rarest of occasions, unwilling to taint those recollections with my morose affliction. I remembered an aged philosopher in Rome and his raspy voice telling me Mithras could be so much more than a harbinger of war. I remembered Strombar as he sat on the banks of a tranquil river with a fishing rod in hand, waiting for a bite. I remembered Sara's laughter, rare and ephemeral as it had been, like bolts of lightning hitting the sky and disappearing before I knew they were there.

I passed through the corridors and saw snatches of many things and many places, and always I moved on until I crossed one threshold and felt myself being drawn into its intricate folds....

My footfalls sounded through the foyer with the vigor of Sunday church bells. Those who heard the pealing of my stride took notice, peering from beneath the brim of their hats or from behind flared fans. Aos Sí men gathered at the foot of the marble steps turned away, careful to hide their attention, while their women were more brazen.

"Who is that?" one asked her friend, tugging upon her lace sleeve. The friend shushed her, hand going to her coiffed hair. 

"Tis' Lord Pride," she whispered. "You shouldn't look at him, Delilah." 

I walked on, unmoved by their gossip as my boots sounded with confidence upon the stone floor. The gray cape at my shoulder fluttered, the edge caught beneath the baldric too tightly bound around my crimson doublet. 

"Bloody thing," I muttered as I fit my thumb beneath the buckle and tugged. The smell of perspiration and horse reached my nose, the byproducts of an exhausting two weeks spent on horseback at the behest of my host. I'd been forced to escort his retainer from port to port along the southern coast, playing the stoic guard. Ten minutes more with the sniveling man and I would have been obligated to kill him on principle.

I knew the halls of Crow's End well, as if they were my own—though I had never claimed a place in this realm, and doubted I ever would. I moved with speed and didn't hide my nature, knowing all those who sought asylum in this manor had inhuman natures of their own. Those who knew of me maintained a careful, respectful distance, while those who didn't know felt the bite of my passage's bitter chill.