Shadowbound

Shadowbound: Episode 5

The further North we climb, the more is taken.

The trees become sparse, giving up their dense assembly. Then the grass, until there is nothing on either side of the road but jagged stone and the occasional sheep bone. It rains most of the day yet none of the congregation complain, despite how cold and bleak it is. They walk in a loose ring around me, twenty of them, with more joining at every crossroads we reach. Not one has walked in front of me. I have tried to make them, slowed my pace to allow them to pass, but they always fall back. They prefer to let me lead, then the ring closes again at my back.

They sing while they walk, a chanting hymn of sorts.

It stops the moment I speak and starts again the moment I am finished.

No one has spoken my name in days.

They have another for me, out of their scripture. A name I do not recognise but I answer to simply because it is what they expect from me. It feels wrong, like I am a fraud. Still, a part of me wonders how it would sound coming from your lips, then I am quick to scold myself for the thought. You should not be on my mind. I left you behind at the hospice, and for good reason.

Vivianne: You have all been very kind to me.

Elsbeth: As we should be.

Vivianne: But Elsbeth… some of it I do not understand.

Elsbeth: How so, child?

Vivianne: Yesterday, a woman put her son before me so he could touch my sleeve. Then she thanked me, tear-stricken, as if I had done them a great service.

Elsbeth: You did. It is an honour that he will cherish when he is my age.

Vivianne: Just as you remember?

Elsbeth: Yes. I was seven years old the first time I saw you.

Vivianne: You have told me that.

Elsbeth: But I have not told you what I saw.

She is short of breath on the climb, but she does not slow down.

Elsbeth: I was up on the ridge with my father's sheep, when a man descended down the sanctuary steps with a woman in his arms. He carried her to the flat ground under the tower and dug the hole himself, weeping. It took him most of the day, and not a soul dared go near him. I followed him after, all the way down the valley as fast as my little legs could take me.

He permitted my foolishness, for a while, then gave me his cloak and told me to go home before dusk fell.

Vivianne: And you have been waiting for our return since?

Elsbeth: Yes. My father was the shepherd you followed up this pass, and now it is my turn.

Vivianne: What exactly are you waiting for?

Elsbeth: For you to rise.

There are twenty people on the road behind us who would lie down in the mud and dig for hours if I asked it of them. Not one of them would turn around, no matter how weary.

Vivianne: So you will walk me to my grave on the chance I stand up out of it.

Elsbeth: Yes.

I had a fortnight of your silence and I have hated you for it.

Now… How I would give a great deal to have it back.

Vivianne: Say I walk in willingly and it kills me too, same as the rest of them?

Elsbeth: Then we will bury you with the others and continue waiting and praying. You will not be there to be disappointed.

I do not have anything to say to that.

At night, I can see your fire. The smoke of it curls to the sky, never drawing closer than a mile back.

I have not sent for you, yet I have not told them to stop you.

Somehow, it is comforting knowing you are near. Despite everything.

My mark reaches my collarbone on the fifth day of travel, and it is excruciating, this ache deep in my bones. My eyes, when they turn grey, remain so for the better part of an hour, and twice this week it has come with no vision at all. I struggle to pretend it does not worry me.

We come up over the last pass on the seventh day, and there it is.

Cairnlight Sanctuary.

I had a picture of it in my mind, from four months of the crown's physicians describing a healing spring at the highest point of the North. I had imagined it to be nothing more than a well in a decrepit ruin with a small brook. When we arrive, I see it is a church, quaint and welcoming, set into the shoulder of the mountain. Worn smooth with age, the grey stone looks older than anything I have seen with my own eyes. The bell tower is little more than debris and a stair of forty steps climbs up to the doors. People live here, it is clear. Lamps hang from terraces, smoke wafts out of open windows, carrying with it the scent of baked dough. There is a man breaking ice off a trough and as we approach, he ceases his effortful grunting and falls to his knees in the mud.

The church is one long hall, and light streams through an opening right in the centre of the roof, which does not appear broken, yet not quite man-made either. Perhaps, I wonder, the roof had crumbled so long ago that nature itself sought to heal around it. Beneath it, the midday light seems to dance across a pool of water set right into the floor. Twenty feet across, and endlessly black to the rim.

And, along both walls, in every alcove, on every pillar, there is my face. Sometimes possessing a unique quality, but still, irrevocably me. Carved, painted, and scratched into the stone. Candles under all of them, flowers years dry, and small folded papers.

Tributes and prayers.

You are on the other wall, facing me. Across the water, watching over me for three hundred years.

I am not a woman in this building.

I am an altar.

Vivianne: Why here? Of all the places in the world to put a temple, why around a puddle in the mountains?

Elsbeth: Because this is where you landed.

She points up at the hole in the roof.

Elsbeth: It has never been mended, and it never will be. You came through it, the two of you, and you struck the ground exactly where that water sits. There has been something divine in the ground here ever since.

They bring a black dress to me, folded over both arms, and the girl carrying it is crying. It takes me a moment to realise she is not crying out of grief, or fear, or uncertainty. To her, this is a celebration of faith. A prophecy, fulfilling. But to me it is strange, and uncomfortable. This dress has been folded in a box for longer than I have existed yet it is made for me and me alone.

Vivianne: How long have you had this?

Devotee: Decades. It is a great honour to meet you.

The white of my seer gown has become muddied and damp from the journey, clinging to my skin uncomfortably, so I change. It fits me perfectly, which again, is not a comfort.

Then, when dusk has finally fallen, and against my better judgement, I send for you.

When you arrive, you stop just inside the doors of the sanctuary.

Damion: Vivianne.

The first time in days anyone has said my name.

I am so angry I could put my hands around your throat, yet I am so relieved I wish for nothing more than to wrap them around you.

Vivianne: Damion…

Damion: Can I?

Vivianne: Yes. Please, sit. And then you are going to tell me the rest of it. All of it.

Damion: But you have had days with them.

Vivianne: I have had six days of learning what is written in holy scripture. None of these people were there, but you. You know what happened. I want to know too.

You nod in understanding, lowering yourself onto the pew beside the water.

It takes you a while to start, but I am patient, sitting next to you.

Damion: Where we came from, there were rules about what we were permitted to want.

Who we were permitted to want. And we wanted nothing more than each other.

Vivianne: So we ran?

Damion: We ran until the edge of our realm, but they would not stop hunting us.

Vivianne: They were going to kill us…

Damion: Yes. So we chose to fall together. To escape, here.

Vivianne: And the marks?

Damion: Are from falling. A mark of the journey, of our immortality being fractured.