Shadowfever
Page 90
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I loved him with all my heart for the childhood hed given me. Hed anchored me with the day-to-day routines of a simple life, crammed it full of sunshine and bike rides, music lessons and baking with Mom in our bright, warm kitchen. Perhaps hed let me be too frivolous, in an effort to counter the pain of those nightmares. But I couldnt say Id have done any differently as a parent.
The inability to breathe had been only the first of many things my childs mind had found so terrifying. As Id gotten older, strengthened by the cocoon of parental love, Id learned to suppress those nocturnal images and the bleak emotions the Cold Place engendered. By my teens, the recurring nightmare had been buried deep in my subconscious, leaving me burdened with an intense dislike of the cold and a vague sense of bipolarity I was finally beginning to understand. If occasionally images that made no sense to me slipped through a crack, I attributed them to some horror movie Id flipped through on TV.
Do not be frightened. I chose you because you could.
I remembered that now, too. The voice that had demanded I come had tried to comfort me and promised I was capable of the taskwhatever it was.
Id never believed it. If I was capable, I wouldnt have dreaded it so much.
I shook myself hard, cracking the ice. It dropped away, but I immediately re-iced.
I repeated the shaking, the re-icing. I did it four or five more times, terrified all the while that if I didnt keep cracking it, it would build up so thick that I would end up staying right here where I stood forever, a statue of a woman, frozen and forgotten, in the Unseelie Kings bedchamber.
When Barrons came back to life, he would stand and stare through the mirror at me and try to roar me back to my senses and into motion, but there Id beright in front of his eyes, eternally out of his reach, because nobody but me and the Unseelie races mysterious creator could enter the kings boudoir. And who knew where the king was?
For that matter, who knew who the king was?
And I really wanted to, which meant I had to find a way to move around in his natural habitat. Id done it before, long ago, in another life, as his lover, so surely I could figure out how to do it again. It seemed Id left clues for myself.
Fear, not fact, impedes you.
I was supposed to alter my expectations and do without breath.
When I re-iced again, I remained still and let the ice cover me, instead of resisting and struggling to breathe. I tried to imagine it as a comfort, a soothing coolness to a high fever. I made it all of thirty seconds before I panicked. Silvery sheets rained from me and shattered on the obsidian floor as I moved jerkily.
I made it an entire minute the second time.
By my third try, it dawned on me that I hadnt actually drawn a breath since Id passed through the mirror. Id been so busy fighting the ice that I hadntrealized I was no longer breathing. I would have snorted but I couldnt. There literally was no breath on this side of the Silver. My physicality was a different thing here.
Here I stood, fighting for something I didnt even need, driven by a life of conditioning.
Could I talk on this side? Wasnt voice comprised of breath to drive it?
Hello. I flinched.
Id chimed like one of the dark princes, only on a different scale, high and feminine. Although my greeting had been comprised of English syllables, without breath to drive it the notes sounded as if slide-hammered on a hellish xylophone.
Is anyone here? I iced again, frozen in place by sheer astonishment at the bizarre sound. I spoke in shades of tubular bells.
Assured that I wasnt going to suffocate, that I could talk, sort of, and that, as long as I kept moving, the ice would keep cracking, I began to jog in place and took a look around.
The kings bedchamber was the size of a football stadium. Walls of black ice towered overhead to a ceiling too high to see. Spicy black petals from some exquisite, otherworldly rose garden swirled at my feet as I bounced lightly from foot to foot. Clusters of frost that were trying to form on my skin rained down to join them. I was mesmerized a moment by the sparkling crystals against the black floor and flowers.
Falling back, laughing, ice in her hair, a handful of velvety petals fluttering down to land on her bare breasts
Never cold here.
Always together.
Sadness overwhelmed me. I nearly choked on it.
He had so many ambitions.
She had one. To love.
Could have learned from her.
The tiny diamonds from the concubinesI couldnt bring myself to say my, especially not standing so close to the kings bedside of the bedchamber hadnt been extinguished at all. Theyd become something else when they passed through and now shimmered on the dark air, midnight fireflies winking with blue flame.
The bed was draped with black curtains that fluttered around piles of silky black furs and filled up a third of the chamber, the portion visible from the other side. I moved to it, slid my hand over the furs. They were sleek, sensual. I wanted to stretch out naked and never leave.
It wasnt the white warm place I found so comforting and familiar, but there was beauty here, too, on the far side of the mirror. Her world was the bright, glorious summer day that held no secrets, but his was the dark, glittering night where anything was possible. I tipped my head back. Was that a black ceiling painted with stars so high above me or a night sky sliced from another world and brought here for my pleasure?
I was in his bedchamber. I remembered this place. Id come. Would he? Would I finally see the face of my long-lost lover? If he was my beloved king, why was I so afraid?
The inability to breathe had been only the first of many things my childs mind had found so terrifying. As Id gotten older, strengthened by the cocoon of parental love, Id learned to suppress those nocturnal images and the bleak emotions the Cold Place engendered. By my teens, the recurring nightmare had been buried deep in my subconscious, leaving me burdened with an intense dislike of the cold and a vague sense of bipolarity I was finally beginning to understand. If occasionally images that made no sense to me slipped through a crack, I attributed them to some horror movie Id flipped through on TV.
Do not be frightened. I chose you because you could.
I remembered that now, too. The voice that had demanded I come had tried to comfort me and promised I was capable of the taskwhatever it was.
Id never believed it. If I was capable, I wouldnt have dreaded it so much.
I shook myself hard, cracking the ice. It dropped away, but I immediately re-iced.
I repeated the shaking, the re-icing. I did it four or five more times, terrified all the while that if I didnt keep cracking it, it would build up so thick that I would end up staying right here where I stood forever, a statue of a woman, frozen and forgotten, in the Unseelie Kings bedchamber.
When Barrons came back to life, he would stand and stare through the mirror at me and try to roar me back to my senses and into motion, but there Id beright in front of his eyes, eternally out of his reach, because nobody but me and the Unseelie races mysterious creator could enter the kings boudoir. And who knew where the king was?
For that matter, who knew who the king was?
And I really wanted to, which meant I had to find a way to move around in his natural habitat. Id done it before, long ago, in another life, as his lover, so surely I could figure out how to do it again. It seemed Id left clues for myself.
Fear, not fact, impedes you.
I was supposed to alter my expectations and do without breath.
When I re-iced again, I remained still and let the ice cover me, instead of resisting and struggling to breathe. I tried to imagine it as a comfort, a soothing coolness to a high fever. I made it all of thirty seconds before I panicked. Silvery sheets rained from me and shattered on the obsidian floor as I moved jerkily.
I made it an entire minute the second time.
By my third try, it dawned on me that I hadnt actually drawn a breath since Id passed through the mirror. Id been so busy fighting the ice that I hadntrealized I was no longer breathing. I would have snorted but I couldnt. There literally was no breath on this side of the Silver. My physicality was a different thing here.
Here I stood, fighting for something I didnt even need, driven by a life of conditioning.
Could I talk on this side? Wasnt voice comprised of breath to drive it?
Hello. I flinched.
Id chimed like one of the dark princes, only on a different scale, high and feminine. Although my greeting had been comprised of English syllables, without breath to drive it the notes sounded as if slide-hammered on a hellish xylophone.
Is anyone here? I iced again, frozen in place by sheer astonishment at the bizarre sound. I spoke in shades of tubular bells.
Assured that I wasnt going to suffocate, that I could talk, sort of, and that, as long as I kept moving, the ice would keep cracking, I began to jog in place and took a look around.
The kings bedchamber was the size of a football stadium. Walls of black ice towered overhead to a ceiling too high to see. Spicy black petals from some exquisite, otherworldly rose garden swirled at my feet as I bounced lightly from foot to foot. Clusters of frost that were trying to form on my skin rained down to join them. I was mesmerized a moment by the sparkling crystals against the black floor and flowers.
Falling back, laughing, ice in her hair, a handful of velvety petals fluttering down to land on her bare breasts
Never cold here.
Always together.
Sadness overwhelmed me. I nearly choked on it.
He had so many ambitions.
She had one. To love.
Could have learned from her.
The tiny diamonds from the concubinesI couldnt bring myself to say my, especially not standing so close to the kings bedside of the bedchamber hadnt been extinguished at all. Theyd become something else when they passed through and now shimmered on the dark air, midnight fireflies winking with blue flame.
The bed was draped with black curtains that fluttered around piles of silky black furs and filled up a third of the chamber, the portion visible from the other side. I moved to it, slid my hand over the furs. They were sleek, sensual. I wanted to stretch out naked and never leave.
It wasnt the white warm place I found so comforting and familiar, but there was beauty here, too, on the far side of the mirror. Her world was the bright, glorious summer day that held no secrets, but his was the dark, glittering night where anything was possible. I tipped my head back. Was that a black ceiling painted with stars so high above me or a night sky sliced from another world and brought here for my pleasure?
I was in his bedchamber. I remembered this place. Id come. Would he? Would I finally see the face of my long-lost lover? If he was my beloved king, why was I so afraid?
