“We know you do not understand and that you do not seek to. You turn away rather than face. You prefer to seek rather than find. We know you want others to help you, so you do not need to help yourself,” the sparks all answered at once, their voices not entirely in sync as their words were repeated throughout the cavern and room. “You know the way out; you don’t want to take it. Asking for another will not get you one.”

  It was like being psychoanalyzed by a, well, group of lights from a ruined city. The point was, they were judging her, but not actually telling her what she needed to know.

  Ebony let out a frustrated sigh. As she did, she had to clutch her hands into tight fists, her fingers probably turning white under her clasp. “Look, I just need his name. Please. This just isn’t fair.”

  “Fair?” the lights said, their voices sparking like crackling electricity. “We declined. We were great. We knew the feeling of elation at growth. Then we stopped. We withdrew into nothingness. We didn’t choose it. It happened to us. We could not stop it.”

  Ebony half closed her eyes. Maybe she shouldn’t have brought up the word fair. Still, she was different from these creatures. She didn’t know their whole story, but she could guess from the fact they were classed as dark creatures that they were out of balance with the good. Maybe they preyed upon people at night, sucking them down to their ruins to put them to work shining the stone or something. Ebony didn’t know.

  They were dark, and that was a fact sufficient to justify her reaction.

  A funny thing happened as Ebony made her conclusion; if, by funny, you find horrifying life-threatening situations hilarious.

  The light started to pour. Light, on its own, in an ordinary everyday situation, never poured. Light was not water; it was not liquid; it was, well, darn light. Then and there, it changed. The sparks being emitted by the strange creatures morphed together until they were a great big ocean, one that was spreading out and traveling straight toward Ebony.

  If she’d had the breath, which she technically didn’t, considering she was a ghost, she would have screamed.

  It wouldn’t have mattered.

  Now they were flowing right through her.

  It didn’t hurt. Not technically. It wasn’t as if she could feel her flesh being torn from her bones, and neither could she feel her skin blistering and boiling as the heat of those creatures thrust their way through her.

  There’s a funny thing about pain, the mind, and perception. Ebony had been alive a lot longer than she’d been dead, and right now her mind registered the incredible power flowing toward her and the threat felt just the same.

  Though she was still weighed down by the force of the creatures, somehow she managed to move, and she started to claw at her face, batting at her throat, trying to rip the things off her skin.

  Of course she couldn’t. Of course that didn’t stop her from trying, though.

  Over the years, Ebony Bell had experienced fear. Fear that would turn any witch or magical creature into a sobbing puddle on the floor. Fear that would curl the toes of any hardened wizard – fear that would probably send a black-blooded demon quaking to its knees.

  No matter how much fear she had faced in the past, that didn’t make this experience any easier. It didn’t mean that she would never face it again. It wasn’t like fright was some kind of well you could drink from until you dried the whole thing up so you would never have to face the prospect of panic again.

  Life didn’t work like that. As soon as you conquered one fear, another was born and would raise its ugly head from the shadows you’d pushed to the side.

  The same thing was happening to Ebony right now.

  So she was dead, technically, so she couldn’t feel pain, technically, but that wasn’t enough.

  Uncertainty.

  It just boiled within her, rising, peaking, threatening to consume her.

  She had no idea what would happen next, no idea what the creatures would do to her, and no idea how long this could continue for… that was the true force behind her fright.

  Time.

  An ordinary person would be dead by now. A witch may have lasted five more minutes and an extremely powerful magical creature a little longer. But in this state, Ebony could last and last and last. Which meant that she could be consumed by the creatures for the rest of time.

  No end.

  Like Sisyphus pushing the stone up the mountain, there would be no respite.

  No matter how hard she clawed, nothing would stop the creatures. Yet no matter how much they amassed over and into her, they would not harm her, they would not completely consume her, and they would not put an end to her screaming.

  A no-through road. An impasse.

  It was agony. Agony the likes of which Ebony had never realized existed.

  It just kept on going. Seconds, minutes, hours? She had no idea.

  Eventually, she stopped clutching at her throat, though not because the desperation had finally peaked and dwindled, but because she began to bat frantically at her chest instead.

  Nothing would work. Without her magic, her creativity was limited, her powers gone, so the only way to fight the creatures was through the ineffective moves of her own arms and body.

  She couldn’t go on.

  She began to collapse to her knees, but as she did, her knees began to descend through the floor.

  The incredible fear that was burning through her somehow spiked even higher.

  With that feeling of sinking, no, of being pulled down, Ebony descended into a pit of near-perfect hopelessness. Overwhelmed by gravity, tugged toward some layer of Hell that no human, no living creature ought to face, she let out a constricted, pitching scream that shook right through her.

  It was the darkest moment of her life, and yet, paradoxically, was probably the lightest.

  The illumination the sparks provided was stronger than the very center of the sun. Every creature that inhabited this city was now in the room with her, and if it wasn’t for the fact Ebony’s eyes could not be hurt, they would have been burnt away long ago.

  Light and dark.

  Some part of her mind, a distant reflection that was somehow cut off from the fear that consumed the rest of her, latched onto that fact. How could you be consumed by the dark and yet burnt by the light at the exact same moment?

  If Ebony spoke through her screams, if she begged, if she pleaded, if she shouted at the creatures to stop, she was not aware of her attempts and she could not hear her voice. Her mind rang. Yet, still, somehow, she remained. Still there, still sinking, yes, but still alive.

  It made her want to fight. To try.

  Light and dark.

  Light and dark. Night and day. Witches were meant to be close to both. Rejoice in the giving up of one to the other.

  It didn’t work like that in practice, though. No matter how objective she tried to be about the night, Ebony could not forget what it produced: the dark, evil.

  She was a good witch, and she was the city’s prominent witch detective consultant. It was up to her to ensure all those nasty little critters that certainly did go bump in the night didn’t go bumping into the innocent, the young, the old, and the good.

  While Ebony tried to convince herself she was good, not bad – she was light, not dark – as she sank through the floor, she was both. There was no more denying that fact. There was no hiding from it; dark surrounded her as light consumed her.

  Yet she still existed. She was still here. The paradox of being stuck between the two didn’t somehow pop her brain and cause reality to twist in on itself and erase her from the universe.

  If she ever wanted to get out of here, she wasn’t going to do it by fighting; she needed to come to some kind of agreement with these creatures. She could understand that now. In fact, just as the rest of her head disappeared under the floor, she realized it with a full-bodied twitch.

  God, it was happening again – she was being forced to mellow. Just as had occurred with the ghosts and the possessed, she needed to understand the Ruin Dwellers. To get out of their clutches, she had to come to some kind of heartfelt, genuine middle ground.

  It was the demon. That blasted creature. It was doing it to her again. Trying to manipulate her, trying to make her forget herself and accept its own brand of dark reality.

  Even though she still felt, deep within herself, that she would fight its desires right until the end, she had to admit that the end would be startlingly close if she didn’t give a little ground right now.

  So she closed her eyes.

  With her eyes closed, even though the light of those sparking creatures had amassed over her body, she could no longer see them.

  She returned to the dark.

  It was a curious fact that, over the years, the dark had become so associated with evil. In essence, evil had nothing to do with the dark itself. Darkness was just the absence of light, or maybe light was the absence of darkness. Any good witch could realize that the two, while opposites, were in fact just the same. They occurred along a gradient, not as two distinct states. At dawn and dusk, you could see the merging of light and dark. Closing your eyes to the sunlight above would cut the brightness, and once again you would see light upon dark. The two states reflected in precisely the same moment.

  A good witch knows that while opposites appear to be two distinct states, no such thing can exist in nature. Everything will meld in the middle in the end. No matter how much you love something or how much you loathe it, your feelings will change over time, mixing, mashing together, sometimes becoming so blurred that you can’t tell the difference anymore.

  This wasn’t a lesson that Ebony should have to be re-teaching herself. Over the years, she had often repeated to herself the illusory nature of absolutes.

  Yet, here she was, sinking through the ground while covered in light that belonged to some kind of dead civilization, having to do just that.

  “I’ll do what you want,” she tried, finally forcing the words out, finally ready to negotiate, if that’s what they wanted. “You don’t have to do this. What do you want? How can I help you?” Her offer came out of the blue. The words bursting through her mind and bypassing her reason as she uttered them.

  Ebony Bell didn’t usually offer a helping hand to the dark creatures of this world, then again, she wasn’t usually a dark creature herself.

  ….

  She really was dark right now, wasn’t she? It was a startling realization to make, and it was one she couldn’t hide from while being yanked through the floor of a deserted underground nation.

  Right now, Ebony was dark – she was a ghost. It was why she could be seen by the dark. Yet within herself, she knew she was still light; the demon had been unable to steal her soul, only conceal it. So, couldn’t the same be the case for these dark creatures? Couldn’t they be just like her: half-light, half-dark? It was a conclusion she hated to make, yet one she could not deny.

  Suddenly, she stopped sinking. The cold and damp that collected around her legs and knees started to abate.

  Taking a breath, she forced her eyes open. Her face was still half under the floor, and she could see in exquisite detail the texture along its surface.

  As for the creatures, she started to see them properly too. Desperate, lost, alone. Once they’d been great, now they were completely and utterly unknown and lost to history.

  “What can I do for you? What do you need?”

  One of the sparks rose up through the floor to face her.

  Just one. She could see it, the contrast perfect as her body half floated in the thick concrete before her eyes.

  “We want to be known. Just like you, we don’t want to be forgotten.”

  That caused Ebony to shake, convulse even. If she hadn’t been neck-deep in concrete, she would have fallen to her knees.

  She didn’t want to be forgotten.

  Nate, her family, all her friends. This was about being forgotten, wasn’t it? Watching them grieve, watching her mother at the funeral, trying to make Avery see her. Ebony could not face the prospect of being forgotten. Not only would it serve to condemn her, but she knew that even if she lost and never saw the rest of her family and Nate again, one day they too would just forget her. The name of Ebony Bell would be lost to time. All her exploits, all her memories, all her experiences – they would simply dwindle into nothingness. All her dreams – they would lose their meaning and float away like a spark on the wind. Exactly like the creature just before her.

  Okay, even though she was still thoroughly resistant to seeing dark creatures as anything other than dark, she felt a good measure of sympathy now. There was something terrifying about being forgotten – in achieving great things only to have those great things ground into the dust and erased from history.

  “How… how do you do it? How do you stop them from forgetting you?” Ebony stuttered. Technically she had only just asked the creatures how she could help them, but as realizations flooded through her mind, she blurted out her question. If there was any one creature in all of Vale that she should ask about the process of forgetting and dwindling into nothingness, it was the Ruin Dwellers.

  The spark of light moved before her as if it was trying to look at her from a new angle. It reflected what was happening with Ebony. It had taken her to sink right through the floor before she’d decided to view the Ruin Dwellers from a new perspective.

  She waited.

  “You can’t. You can’t stop them from forgetting you.” The creature replied. Whereas seconds before the Ruin Dwellers had amassed over her in a great tidal wave of rage, now this single spark, all on its own, darting to and fro, looking just as lost and lonely as you expected of an entity banished from the tomes of history.

  There was even a wavering, fragile tone to the creature’s voice.

  It affected her. She couldn’t help but feel compassion for the Ruin Dwellers. The emotion built in her chest, like the first crackles of a warm flame.

  So she reached a hand out. It was just a gentle, spontaneous move, and it was one she wouldn’t have been capable of merely minutes before when the fear of being suffocated by those sparks had been at its height.

  Things had now changed.

  This was reality, after all, and nothing ever stayed the same – including her.

  She reached a hand out to it. At first the spark was hesitant but finally shifted forward and surprisingly hopped on top of her finger.

  “There is no way,” the creature repeated. “There is no way to stop them from forgetting you. There is no way to stop the decline. Once you reach your peak, there is no way to bring it back. You will climb down the Mountain – into ruin, into disrepair, into nothingness.

  Ebony wanted to cry, and maybe if her face weren’t currently stuck in a thick section of concrete, she would. “There must be,” she said, mostly for her own benefit. Now she’d opened up to this creature, she couldn’t ignore its loneliness and loss of hope. “Not everything gets forgotten. Some things last forever.”

  “That is no solace to something that has been forgotten,” the spark replied.

  It was a very good point. While some things did last forever, nearly everything else didn’t, and at some point would be forgotten completely.

  A cold, harsh realization was starting to dawn on Ebony. It was one she hadn’t faced yet – one she had specifically turned from ever since this horrible situation had begun.

  What if she did fail? No, worse than that, what if she died? What if the demon no longer decided it would embody her? What if, in possessing her soul, her personality would be extinguished? What if she would be forgotten? Or worse, she would forget herself?

  Wasn’t that the real fear behind death? Not so much that you would lose your life, your body, and your loved ones, but that you would forget yourself? You would no longer be able to remember all of the things that made you you.

  Now Ebony rallied. Though that realization was harsh, she could still feel the loneliness and loss rippling off the creature in front of her. Despite the fact she didn’t want to succumb to the demon’s demands, she decided she had to do something.

  It was rather an odd situation to be in: stuck between two floors of an old underground building, trying to wrack her brains to come up with a statement that would make the depressed, dark creature in front of her a little bit happier.

  She cleared her throat. She knew what she had to do. “It doesn’t matter if the rest of them forget you, it doesn’t matter if history no longer talks about your exploits. It doesn’t matter if the ground your buildings once stood upon becomes nothing but rubble, dust, and ruin. If you still exist, and you can remember yourself, then that’s all you need.” Though her voice shook, and a great deal of authority backed up her words, she didn’t speak as strongly as she hoped. Her statement didn’t echo with the magic she knew had once been at her fingertips. She could not crack the walls with the force of her tone, she could only speak out against the silence.

  The flickering spark on her finger didn’t react. Then it shifted back, almost as if it had been jolted by a great force, before disappearing entirely. Which just left Ebony with her face stuck inside a giant slab of concrete.

  She waited there, wondering whether the creature would come back. She spent several rather frantic seconds wondering whether she’d angered it again or whether it would come back with all of its mates to smother her once more.

  It did not.

  Neither did it return.

  It took a while for Ebony to pull herself from the concrete.

  As she rose through the floor, her face finally rising above ground level, she saw the spark. It was alone with her in the room. The rest of them – all of those shining, shimmering, flickering lights – had obviously returned outside to whatever business they got up to now that their city was in disrepair and forgotten by all but themselves.

  The spark, the one she had talked to only moments before, was darting to and fro through the room, its movements erratic and sharp, almost as if it was pacing, waiting for some kind of resolution or salvation.

 

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