It was a memory of robing the color of mahogany. And then, as if his mind’s eye was a camera lens that widened, he recalled the clinic with its lineup of empty, precisely made-up beds, and its forest of shelving, and the dust-covered boxes and long-forgotten items and the chipped desk. It was all so makeshift modest, so threadbare and worn. But it had been created by Nadya to care for others with limited supplies, and with that noble purpose, it was a palace.
He had never thought to ask her how she had ended up with the rest of them, for it was impossible to imagine her as a criminal. No one with that good a heart could hurt somebody—
Kane opened his eyes. “I have to go back for her.”
The old female in the red beaded dress smiled at him. As if she had known all along he would change his mind.
“I can’t leave her in that hell,” he said roughly.
“If you choose to stay, you will not be as you are—”
“Hurry.”
“—you will be changed forevermore—”
“Hurry.”
“You will not be the same—”
“Whatever it does to me, I don’t care!” Less than two minutes left, nearly a minute to go. “Just do it!”
The female nodded. “I am so sorry.”
There was no reason to ask what for. Kane didn’t care. He just didn’t want to run out of time—
All at once, the coffin’s walls fell away, and as he looked to the side, he saw the stream that ran through the hut, its rock bed snaking around the fire—surely it was not going under the flames?—the dark gray stones gleaming and mysterious where the water coursed over them. Though nothing struck him as particularly miraculous about the little river, he couldn’t look away, and the longer he stared, the more he realized that there was no bottom to the tributary. In fact… it wasn’t a river at all. That was not water.
It was a metaphysical divide that seemed to penetrate deep into the earth—and the fire suddenly struck him as odd as well. The flames had no kindling or wood to feed their hunger. As with the not-real-water, they seemed to just exist.
“The energy that needs a host is a fundamental and comes from the center of everything,” the old female said as she stepped to the end of the coffin.
No, there was no coffin. He was lying directly on the ground, not even on the handspun rug, the earth underneath him neither hard nor soft. And with the connection between his broken body and the soil, the unnerving charge that vibrated up from beneath him passed directly into his flesh—
The river was suddenly under him, a diversion instantly rerouting its flow, and yet he felt none of the rush nor any dampening. Instead, he was suffused by warmth and an easing of pain that was not drugs, but something far more elemental, as if his nerves were being brushed with compassion and calming as a result.
“It has accepted you,” the old female murmured. “This is good.”
As if her pronouncement started some kind of process, he began sinking, or maybe the level of the energy was rising; either way, as helooked down at his body, he was in the river now, the flow, now dark as night, coming up and over his knees and thighs, his hips, his chest.
“Be not afraid—”
The black rush claimed him, the submersion as if he were drowning, a weight upon him compressing his body under the—
Snakes.
The flow was not water, and it was not raw energy, it was hundreds of black vipers… a thousand of them… an infinite number.
A burst of fear animated him, but as he tried to sit up, he was trapped, held in place by the slick serpents that coursed over him. Instinctively, he struggled to shove them off, kick them free, his body bucking and twisting. The reptiles just continued to slither over him, coating his corporeal form, a teeming blanket that moved against him as if it were trying to find a way inside.
In the midst of his panic, he somehow looked outside of the vipers, and what he saw of the old female made as much sense as the river of snakes. Her face had become youthful, her beauty glowing with an otherworldly beneficence, sure as if that which appeared aged was but a mask, and that which was underneath was the true, infinite essence of her.
And as if she had waited for him to look up, she stepped free of the body she had presented herself to him in, becoming nothing but a glowing shape that had a hazy form and the contours of a female, although no true substance.
As her ghostly hair swirled around her like platinum flames, it was as though a wind source from within the earth was finding her and her alone. “Be not afraid.”
Why was it when someone said that to you, it always made things worse—
Her “arm” extended out five, six, seven feet, until it entered into the flow of serpents, the life-force that was her penetrating the tangle of vipers… and coming back out with something in her grip. The long black snake emerged tail-first from the twisting mass, and as the femalepulled it free, its tremendous length wrapped around her all the way up to her shoulder, the movement so sensuous, so accepted and expected, it was a gesture of familiarity.