I sat down. I looked up. Before me the Bright Queen in the Dark Hall sat upon her throne of shadows.
I was thankful I was here in spirit, because I surely would have shat my pants upon realizing where I was if here physically.
“Your Grace…” I bowed, still seated on the glass polished floor.
The red spot on her lips moved as she smiled. Her brilliance was such that the spot was the only thing I could see clearly. Everything else about her, her clothes, her crown, her skin, was disturbingly white, as it always is when I am viewing her in the Dark Hall.
This has always bothered me, but only at this moment did I realize why.
She read my thoughts as if I had shouted them in her ear. The spot jostled in her mirth.
“Does it matter? You have accepted cruder lies before from cruder things.”
Ouch. I winced from the sting of the half-truth, and wondered if I could use that statement against the being I know as Malphas to get a half-ounce of truth out of him.
“Ignorance only works as a leash when the bound has no desire to learn the truth. The question has been made, your Grace, and your leash has been weakened for it. That you are a being of power is no lie, but are you the being I had been led to perceive?”
The spot on her lips thinned as her mirth exited. “Speak my name, then, if you feel it is not mine to have.”
That’s a trap. “I am forbidden to speak a name, true. Whether that name is yours or not is irrelevant to the commandment.” More fucking games. I sighed in sudden exhaustion. “Your Grace… I have been lied to as acts of sympathy, acts of mercy, acts of coercion, and acts of brutality. I have been chained for my own good, chained for innocents’ sake, and chained for other people’s pleasures. My suffering and agony, physical and mental, is the candy upon which you and those like you feast. And I’m done.”
She could blink, and shatter my mind back into the unfitting shards of screaming and lunacy my current self emerged from. She could nod, and hordes of spirits could invade my spirit and soul, devouring me from the inside and leaving another comatose body on the floor. She could glance at her husband (her beloved husband) and so ends my life.
Let her.
I’m done.
“You do not present to me the way the stories say you present to other mortals and gods. There is a mystery there, but I am not initiated into it. It is my supposition you are wearing the mask of a later god, that you are something older and that if you were to show yourself to me in your fullest, my brain would melt and by the following day, my organs would be harvested because it’s more profitable that way. You would not be the first of [older gods] to do that to me. [This guy] and [that gal] do the same, but they don’t play fucking games.”
I shifted my seating position to a kneeling one. The silence wrapped around the throne, so I continued my impudence. “You know… of course you know… I came to you to die. Whether it was a literal death I was seeking, or the death of my emotions, I’m not sure. But I came to you, to become your Scarlet Wolf, to become the embodiment of destruction, because I knew it would result in my own. You stopped me at a critical moment, put the knife to my throat, and my hand on the hilt.”
“I chose to put the knife down and walk away.”
“I learned a lot after I left.”
“I had no intention of ever coming back here, of ever becoming your Scarlet Wolf again. Regaining the doll from Esse woke me to other leashes I had been voluntarily holding on to.”
“I don’t know if you are… her… or not. I don’t know if I’m being shown a Kerian specific visage because I’m a fucking special snowflake that makes good entertainment when kicked. I know I’m tired of fucking games. I know that everything I thought I knew about my spirituality, about the gods I interact with, about how I fit in the worlds, has been shattered in a cosmic gutter and now here comes the rain.”
I didn’t realize I was staring at the floor until I looked up in her face. “I know that you are the Bright Queen in the Dark Hall, that you are a goddess of the underworld and you are feared by the living and the dead. I know your husband is armored in shadows and [the absence of light], and that for all his fearsome visage, he is gentle and kind. I know that I am too far removed from the peoples you once ruled over to have any right of knowing the truth.”
“I know I am not afraid of you. Yes, I have fear of you, the way living flesh fears sharp teeth… but I am not afraid of you.”
“Your Grace…” I ran out of words. I didn’t realize I was angry and crying until I heard a teardrop hit the floor and sizzle in its heat. I relaxed my posture and sat on my heels, lowering my gaze to study the indistinctly glossy floor. I could not leave under my will. I could not advance upon the throne under my will. All I could do was abide and be.
Abide and wait.
My anger spent, I closed my eyes and felt the last tear declare my emotions spent.
I felt the air from my fan embrace me. I looked up. I was seated in my room. I had been dismissed.