It was in a jar in a little secret room. I had lost none of my skills with searching and locks, and I was nearly insulted by the simplicity of the safeguards around this artifact. The heart of Darkness turned out to be a black gemstone the size of my fist and cut to resemble a heart. I thought it might be obsidian at first, but it contained deep, smoke facets that made me realize it was something else. Everyone looked at me, expecting me to be the one to grab it. “It’s your mansion,” Qual shrugged.
It was cold to the touch. A chilly numbness shot up my arm to my spine when I touched it, and I felt my heart straining to beat. I felt suspended in time, which I might very well had been, since the others said I opened my eyes after a few seconds. To me, it felt like I was in darkness for an hour. When under the gem’s influence, I could feel the soul of the house calling me, telling me to embrace the darkness. My sanity was under assault, and I could hear the tormented cries of the Rump family going back dozens of generations. Now, it wanted me to join them, to enter the world of undead horror that had trapped the mansion for centuries.
Obviously, that wasn’t an option, but my mind was so clouded with the tormented wailing of the Rumps that I nearly surrendered. But there, in the back of my mind, was another voice. It was a faint little whisper, but it called me back from the abyss. It was not warm, or kind, or reassuring, but it gave me strength nonetheless. It reminded me that I am the master of Tegel Manor, and that the house is mine to command and not the other way around.
Then I opened my eyes. Seconds, they said, but I felt exhausted. We all agreed it was time to go upstairs. No-one wanted to return to the lich. We all knew that the stone should not fall into his hands. Instead, we made our way to the surface, to the little outbuilding where we made our camp. We decided to have a meeting in the morning, when we were all good and healed, to decide what to do with it.
I went for a walk to clear my head, the gem still clutched in my first. Sorel found me on the Cliffside, near where we had kissed.
“Why don’t you just throw it in the ocean?” she asked.
I told her that that would only postpone the problem, and given what had happened to the two of us, we need to look for much longer-term solutions to our problems.
“That’s so unlike you,” she remarked.
“Long term solutions?”
“That, and the fact that you’ve resigned yourself to staying like you are now. The Quinn I knew a week ago would fight tooth and nail to hold on to his masculinity. You would treat this condition like it was the enemy, and you would not rest until you were back to normal.”
I took a deep breath. “Sorel, I didn’t tell you and the others everything.”
“Oh, really?”
“When I touched the gem, I heard the soul of the house calling to me, trying to keep things as they are forever. But there was another voice, one that offered me power. I think it was the voice of whatever changed us into this form.”
“Changed me, you mean. You’re an angel by accident.”
“I don’t think so. Somehow, this feels like there’s a higher power behind it. And while I don’t think that power is good in a good-versus-evil sense, I don’t think it means to harm us.”
“So now you’re an expert?”
“I have a feeling. And I’m more sure about this feeling than I have been about anything else in my life.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“We end the curse tomorrow. But I think I know how it has to be done.”
No comments:
Post a Comment