“You’re going to have to face him eventually.”
It’s meditation time. Head is still too hyper for stillness, but a mantra keeps my focus well enough.
A cold hand grips my right arm and pulls me to the side before I remember I’m physically alone in the room. I pull back. My arm slides through the cold grip. The chill closes around my hand that closes in response and the tension lifts our combined handshake between us.
The petasus glows softly in the darkness. He is holding it over his face with two fingers of his left hand causing the strange hued caduceus rod to press against the hat. Behind him a deeper darkness reveals the opening to a passageway that doesn’t exist.
The chill sinks deeper into imagined flesh and I start shivering in my made-up body. I have seen him this way once. From a great (and safe) distance. “I don’t have the time right now.” He doesn’t respond.
I open my hand but he does not reciprocate. “This is not something that is going to be dealt with in minutes. And I haven’t the hours I’m going to need to recuperate after whatever happens. I know the days for this is limited, but this is not the time.”
He shifts his head but his face remains hidden. A cloak made of woven shadows gathered from the bottoms of unclosed graves slipped from around him, over the bridge made by our arms, and tucked itself around my shoulders securely.
He nods. Releasing my hand, he turns away and drops his own from his face only after I am unable to see it. The rod becomes a staff as he walks naked into the vertical pool of deeper darkness.
The room is empty again, save for me and this chill about my shoulders I can not shake off.
“I know.”