The sensation stopped Yves mid-step and dragged his attention away from the path, first inward, and then backward. As he stood, heat bled through the soles of his boots. He had commissioned them heavy-soled for this journey, with all the tedious specifications of a man who preferred his feet unboiled, but the protection failed quickly. The pressure sharpened beneath him, spreading from his soles into the bones of his feet. Still, it was nothing against the pressure he felt from within.
Yves stood and stared back over his shoulder, to where he had come from. There was no path, just a cluster of monoliths, like everywhere. His face stared back at him from every surface. In front of him, behind him, beside him, above and below; wherever he looked, these other versions of him had already found him. They all wore distorted variations of his own anxious expression. Some were too narrow. Some too pale. Some delayed by half a breath, while others seemed to anticipate him, turning before he did, watching before he looked.
Behind every one of them, a single black shadow flickered in waiting.
Yves turned back to the real Midnight.
She had halted a few paces ahead, her silver eyes steady and fixed on him. For a moment, they held each other’s gaze without movement or sound. Then she turned forward and resumed her stalk.
Yves cast one last look behind him and followed, the pendulum now in his left hand. There was no time left for doubt, and none for rest. Everything they had endured over the past nine years led here. All the studying and searching, all the sacrifices and suffering, all the bargaining and bleeding; all the years spent preparing for a thing the Witch Mother had explained only in pieces. They had to reach the centre before the Witching Hour — and then make it back out before daybreak. Daybreak would burn them alive.
The sensation stopped Yves mid-step and dragged his attention away from the path, first inward, and then backward. As he stood, heat bled through the soles of his boots. He had commissioned them heavy-soled for this journey, with all the tedious specifications of a man who preferred his feet unboiled, but the protection failed quickly. The pressure sharpened beneath him, spreading from his soles into the bones of his feet. Still, it was nothing against the pressure he felt from within.
Yves stood and stared back over his shoulder, to where he had come from. There was no path, just a cluster of monoliths, like everywhere. His face stared back at him from every surface. In front of him, behind him, beside him, above and below; wherever he looked, these other versions of him had already found him. They all wore distorted variations of his own anxious expression. Some were too narrow. Some too pale. Some delayed by half a breath, while others seemed to anticipate him, turning before he did, watching before he looked.
Behind every one of them, a single black shadow flickered in waiting.
Yves turned back to the real Midnight.
She had halted a few paces ahead, her silver eyes steady and fixed on him. For a moment, they held each other’s gaze without movement or sound. Then she turned forward and resumed her stalk.
Yves cast one last look behind him and followed, the pendulum now in his left hand. There was no time left for doubt, and none for rest. Everything they had endured over the past nine years led here. All the studying and searching, all the sacrifices and suffering, all the bargaining and bleeding; all the years spent preparing for a thing the Witch Mother had explained only in pieces. They had to reach the centre before the Witching Hour — and then make it back out before daybreak. Daybreak would burn them alive.
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