Locked in Shadow

The glittering silver chain slithered over Moira’s shoulder and between her breasts. Beloved in the life that came before, her necklace dug tight where it bound her from neck to thigh before lashing around the waist. Snug around her neck back then, the necklace now stretched long enough to chain her to the edge of the glowing blue pool.

The pool where the beast slept.

The metal links shivered on the currents of the beast’s long, sighing breath. The necklace rattled whisper-quiet, the links joined so perfectly that it moved like warm butter. Of course it would be this necklace—the only gift he ever gave her.

The one and single gift from the one she’d failed most.

Her dear, sweet boy.

Each link of the chain held a memory. An echo, as she’d come to think of them. When she touched the links, she relived them. Some were comforting and some terrible. They came coupled with a strange euphoria that rode the chain like an aqueduct from the magic of the beast.

The good memories were a balm. For more than a decade, Moira had fondled the chain to milk those memories.

They made it not only bearable. They made this prison a paradise.

But the bad assailed her every fiber, splintering her self-control and bloodletting her immortal sanity. They cataloged her every loss and failure on the road to this abhorrent fate. Her son had been struck down, consigned to a magical sleep that encompassed the entire village. Isolated, forgotten. Moira had crossed the skies and found the beast. She could have saved them all.

This hell was her punishment for failure.

The good memories, meager rewards to raise her hopes; the bad, to break her—defeat her. All the while, a calming euphoria milked from the great serpent’s otherworldly influence eased the sting.

Moira had no other reprieve. To add insult, the bad echoes had increased in both frequency and intensity. She rarely found a good echo anymore, regardless how compulsively she grasped for some half-joyful recollection in the piles of horrors. She had handled every joint in the chain a hundred times. All but the biggest. The most important.

The locket.

The beast stirred, rippling hundreds of similar chains around Moira. The other prisoners shuddered involuntarily, as if connected by nerves to the beast’s long, lithe form. The necklaces jingled, their harmonies a counterpoint to the ratatat-tat of condensation, underscored by the muted murmur of the ocean.

Roused by the noise, Moira unfurled the long-faded novelty of ivory wings from around herself.

Hundreds lay naked and vulnerable on the rocky floor, many shut away behind their wings. The feathers reminded Moira of sea-faring birds, maybe gulls. Their skin was unnaturally pale, their hair universally black. Even her own hair, once blond and brown, now ran as dark as a tomb against her milky flesh.

Their eyes were the worst: jet black. Not just for lack of light—they were blank from corner to corner, interrupted by neither white nor pupil. They were bottomless, uniform. Empty.

They had tried, too, these fallen souls. Tried to save a loved one and failed.

Why they were bound, Moira didn’t know. She knew only her horror, her ecstasy. Her echoes. It was a paradise, and a torment.

In the soul-shattering memories of the life that was, Moira had known fear. She had known desperation and hunger. She had slept beneath a tree with only a rotten apple’s core within her guts. She had airship-hiked and walked and stumbled from one end of the continent to another. She had killed three men, three women, and even a small child in her struggle for the cure.

She had known suffering and pain.

In contrast to the worst of her echoes, and despite the inherent imprisonment, this place was a balm for her aching soul and her weary mind. Moira did not hunger or thirst. She spent her time nestled into a smooth hollow, lulled to sleep by the rhythmic spell of the sleeping beast’s hissing breath and the smell of the ocean.

In the worst of times, the beast’s presence sang in her mind. She provided for Moira’s every need with ethereal sustenance, which poured into her blood with just a thought. When sadness rocked her core at the horror of what she had lost, comfort flooded her body through the very silver links that kept her enslaved. Though Moira failed in her quest, neglected to collect the cure at the foot of the beast, she wanted for nothing.

And yet, the heart shaped façade of the locket beckoned.

Somehow, she knew that it held the key. Knew that it would open that one last chapter of her life, the chapter that would end her fears and misgivings, set them free, that she might know the oblivion of mindlessness.

For the prisoners closest to the pool, presumably the first to be imprisoned, had clearly unleashed the final echoes from their lockets.

They never worried at the links of their chains, never strained their balding and spindly wings against their chains. They lay nearly lifeless, heavy-lidded as they watched water drip from stalactites or greedily suckled at the spiritual milk of the great beast. They hardly moved, except to twitch a withered cheek or scratch at a skeletal itch.

They had suffered death. Whether spiritual or mental, Moira did not know.

Those closest to her—the newest after herself—still felt the links of their chains, relived those moments from their lives and their equally tragic quests.

She had seen another succumb to the charm, not long after arriving. She had wanted to call out, to stop him. But they had no voices in this shape. She could sigh, or moan. When she tried to shape words, however, it seemed the very physics of sound were stolen from her lips.

She had watched in horror as the light dispelled from his otherwise black eyes, leaving a bemused husk in its wake. At the last instant, though, she spied something she would never have expected. Joy, relief.

So it was that she feared the locket, the transformation it promised, and craved it. Pined for that fragment of hope she witnessed—however fleeting.

For Moira knew it was her salvation, just as she knew it was her doom. She’d binged relentlessly on every other significant moment, gorged upon the good echoes until only the bad remained. Abstained from the final memory.

She couldn’t help but admit it; she already knew what it contained.

A sob clutched at her throat, tears gathering unbidden. The euphoria swelled at the thought of him, her sweet and beautiful boy. Strangely, thoughts of him betrayed it for what it was: anesthetic.

His dark curls and piercing gray eyes, large with inquisition and round with wonder. His simple sweet words and his misunderstood charm—they were a balm to Moira, and a crop against her back. Thoughts of him invariably reminded her of the sin she’d committed and the price she paid, even now. The valor with which she’d acted, and the folly.

She wore the only gift he’d ever bought with his own coin, and it now served as shackle to her hell and tether to her paradise.

It was said, after all, that violence drew the eye of the Witgeist.

If only they knew how wrong they were. If only they understood what it truly meant to draw the eye of the Witgeist, the very shadow of creation. He would never have been struck down, had she truly understood that violence was not the draw; it was valor.

But to see him again, if just in echo. It was worth spirit death. It was worth more than that. Wasn’t it?

Her heart ached, and her fingers twitched toward the heart. Tears leaked silently from the corners of her eyes. His small picture peaked from the corner of the locket, bumped askew when she’d intentionally drawn her husband’s ire—hoping to let the Witgeist take him for his aggression.

It has seemed so right. It had seemed so clear.

But her boy—her sweet, dear child—simply couldn’t stand idly by. His loyalty had doomed them both—her, to this unending half-paradise of torment and pleasure; him, to an eternity of sleep.

The locket would be her end, she knew. She could no longer save him. But this memory, this echo, would be the dissolution of her very self. Like the others, sympathetically flung into this unending state of purgatory, their suffering finally ended.

If she could not face this end, she could never know that last sweet sight of him.

The echo beckoned.

Moira reached for the locket. As always before, her fingers spasmed wildly, her knuckles bending involuntarily around it. Could she take this final step? Should she?

The cave seemed suddenly quiet, and it took a moment for Moira to realize the comfort from the beast had trickled to a stop. Moira turned confused eyes silently up and gasped, surprised to find one great eye fixed upon her—Moira’s reflection fit neatly inside Her pupil.

The beast had roused, for the first time in memory.

“Leviathon,” she choked.

That serpentine gaze blinked sideways, Moira’s ivory reflection rippling as if within a pond. As she stared into that vast, inhuman gaze, she knew.

Every drop of euphoria the serpent gave had been preparing her for this moment, leading her toward the locket. To prepare her for this last and final blow.

Breathless and equally surprised to have actually found her voice, Moira stood straighter, unfurling her wings.

“I…” she whispered, her voice like broken glass. “I didn’t fail at all.”

The beast stared, Her silence as loud as any answer.

“None of us failed,” she sobbed, looking around. “The quest is death. Failure saves my son.”

Leviathon sucked a long, deep breath and exhaled it with an enduring sigh that might have toppled trees.

“You lead us to this death. Time and time again. My death, so he… can live.” Her voice broke at the last, and she crumbled. Tears pattered across her ghostly hands as she convulsed in violent sobs.

She could have surrendered at any moment, spent herself to give him back to the world.

The time he’d lost. The time she’d endured.

“Is this mercy!?” she cried, pounding a fist on the floor. “It’s just a trap!”

The serpent looked on in silence.

“You have me, you get me,” she hissed. “But he’ll beat you. He’ll overcome this sham you’ve made of the afterlife. He’ll defeat you!”

The great beast’s eye drew narrow—not with malevolence, but inquisition, challenge.

As if voicing a dare.

“The water will rejoin the land one day,” she hissed, “and that always ends the same for you.”

Staring daggers at the beast, Moira snatched the locket with a hard fist. The echo crashed through her in a brilliant wash of blue-white light, and the human spirit of Moira transformed.

Before fellow angels and bound mythological monsters, she transformed.

There was joy in the sensation. And knowledge—pure, unadulterated knowledge of what came before and what could yet be.

In that instant, far away and in a forgotten corner of a forgotten town, a fae wind burst open the doors to a shopkeeper’s hovel, startling a young boy suddenly awake.

Like ripples on a pond, the town around him roused in response. The innkeeper stumbled to his feet, surprised to find his apron so moth-bitten that it fell to tatters over his vast midriff. The assistant pig keepers picked themselves off the grass, which had grown wild and gone to seed.

And an abashed shopkeeper straightened his spectacled eyes with bleeding knuckles to wonder where she’d gone.

The light around Moira winked out as quickly as it came, and the newest angel lay gently down. Chained by a beast, locked in shadow.

She knew no more, except the loving embrace of stone, and the sweet succor of the serpent’s milk.