I was still Marius, no matter what had been done to me. I could not realize that I was host to an alien entity. "I revolted against all of it because if I was anything, I was an individual, a particular being, with a strong sense of my own rights and prerogatives. I leapt over the wall and stood alone listening in the empty unpaved street. "My heart was knocking in me uncontrollably. I put my hands out in front of me and tried not to feel mortal fear of the blackness in which I was as blind as an ordinary man. "And he like a stone sentinel in a royal tomb blocked my path. But I wasn't above thinking about it and letting him - if he was the one in the doorway - hear these thoughts. I would say, `So you've come out of loneliness and disillusionment and now you want to tell me more, do you? Why don't you go back and sit in silence to wound your wraithlike companions, the brotherhood of the cinders?' Of course I wouldn't say such a thing to him. And then I would have the upper hand with the Elder. To see this person I had but to turn my head. An immense force emanated from her, an invisible and commanding sense of her presence, her occupation of this small and insignificant room. And not merely a woman, but a magnificent bronze-skinned Egyptian woman as artfully bejeweled and dressed as the old queens, in fine pleated linen, with her black hair down to her shoulders and braided with strands of gold. "And slowly I turned my eyes in the direction of the door, and it was a woman I saw standing there. I spent the next few nights feasting on blood until my miserable thoughts were drowned in it, and then in the early hours I roamed the great library of Alexandria, reading as I had always done. "But I didn't return to the underground temple. And do the very thing the Elder had threatened, sink them so deep into the earth that no mortal could ever find them and expose them to the light. "Now what remained? Go back to the Elder and find out where he had put the Mother and the Father.
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