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He hears the toll of the terce bells and the swell of mingled voices. Deus Deus meus respice me: quare me dereliquisti? It seems they must still recite the psalm on Good Fridays if there remain Good Fridays upon which a man might pray.
He remains still, half-wondering if there is even animating force left to bid his bones to move. It occurs to him that perhaps he has finally died to his own body--that he is nothing more but thoughts floating near the ground. He tries, painfully, to pull upon the sinews of his hand and hears the dull clack of his sword as his grip on it shifts. He does not think he will test himself further. He does not want to go mad.
Anthony of Laon, the last faithful retainer to serve the Emperor: that is who he remains. He tells himself that if the humors have dried out of his brain, it cannot falter on that point--that He will not seep in. He tells himself there are some places He cannot enter. He tells himself that he has found the chamber that shuts Him out.
The monks keep up their lamentations somewhere else in the cathedral. ...in limum mortis deduxisti me . He does not--cannot--close his eyes, but he lets his vision wander, dipping inward until it fades to black. He is there now, back within that stone hall perched above a sea of souls. He steps down from his pedestal, like a shadow broken free of the form that casts it.
Lighter than thought, Anthony moves. He comes to rest before her statue: the woman of stone. Through the centuries that twist and intermingle between them, through whatever path time has taken such that he has died or she has been born, throughout all of this, she remains here.
He has no hands to touch her nor voice to give her greeting. He wonders if it is an idolatry to love a graven image. Still, in that empty space where they can meet--two motes of light within the void--there is something almost like solace.
***
When the shadows still hounded her, there was an escape in running. Her limbs could remember the life once within them. Being a dancer means knowing how to move without thought, how to press yourself into the soles of your feet and live there. Even after they’d killed her, Ellia still ran. She told herself madness couldn’t catch at her if she simply fled from it.
Now, however--now that she is hiding--what is to be done? How long is she to remain here, a still and silent husk with the heart of a God beneath her ribs? How can she persist for however long it will be, deep in this wounded belly of the earth?
She has wondered, from time to time, if this is how the great beast feels: its own rot collapsing in upon it as it suffocates amidst its own immobility. She tries to lie even stiller when she thinks that she might be in sympathy with it. She needs to remain sane. Ellia is herself, and she will never be Mantorok, even if she lies a million years within its entrails.
In the long lapses of space between anything that might draw her attention, she discovers that the dead can dream. There is a warmth to the blackness beyond her vision at times: a sense that even in this living Nakara, the world had not abandoned her.
When the violet light of the Ancient's power drains from her eyes--when there is nothing in this abyss for her to see--faces float by her. She sees those who must come after and those who already came before. She sees the man who will force his way into the heart of the pit someday and take the treasure that lives inside of her. She imagines what it will be like to be hollowed out and left to fall: to have the dark weight pressing against her dried lungs removed.
At other times though, she sees a pale-skinned youth. The suffering is cut deep into his decaying features, and he gazes at her through one brilliant, bright lit eye. In the black of the unending night that’s swallowed her, she takes some comfort in the glow of his gaze
She thinks, at times, that he must take some comfort in her gazing back.
***
It seems like twilight, but then again, the twilight over Ehn'gha is eternal. The stars that saw that final battle persist where Gods do not. As they linger--all those souls with nothing left to bind them--two wraiths move past one another in the dark of the city's marble halls. One is a youth, two-handed sword dragging silently on the ground behind him. One is a woman, the gold bracelets on her wrists making no clatter as they did in the days of Paramavishnuloka.
They stop to look at one another, two shades amidst the shadows. There is a moment of stillness, where if they lived, they would feel the beating of their hearts.
Then, at the end of so many things, when both the quick and the dead are eager to say their farewells, the two of them greet one another in languages the other cannot know.
They find no surprise thereafter in being immediately understood.