Agnosis – Ch. 22

<– Chapter 21 / Chapter 23 –>

In the twilight landscape between dreams that are not dreams, and pure data that is neither foam, nor network, nor seenop fancy, Dorian finds himself on a low ridge above a sea of tall brown grass. There are no trees, no rocks, only an endless plain as far as he can see. Blue sky stretches overhead, without clouds, without sun, just an empty blue ocean running to purple and black where it meets the distant horizon and a few brave stars have come out. A steady wind blows across the grass, tossing the stalks in waves that roll and break against one another and sound in his ears like the grate of a rasp against soft wood. The dream smells of dirt and sweet, growing things.

Beside him is a tree stump, the victim of some long ago thunderstorm. It is flat as a table top, so old and weather-rotten that its base has begun to crumble. Sitting atop the stump, knees drawn up to his chest, is a boy. He has dark hair and wide, liquid eyes, a pale face and small, child-like hands. He’s wearing a tee shirt and short pants that are neither shorts nor pants, precisely. Dorian realizes with a start that the boy is wearing knickers. He’s never seen a pair of knickers in real life, but he’s fairly certain that this is exactly what they are.

The boy gazes out across the sea of billowing grass, looking lost and forlorn, a tiny creature alone at the edge of the world. There are bruises beneath his eyes, dark and ugly like gathering thunderheads, as though he has not slept in days, in years.

“Hello,” Dorian says to him, aware that he is dreaming, but still uncomfortable despite that fact. The child makes no response.

He tries again: “What is this place?”

The boy does not look up, does not acknowledge him at first, then quietly, with the sarcastic insouciance of youth, states, “It’s the place where I wait.”

“That seems pretty obvious.”

Shrug. “It seemed an obvious question.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Waiting.”

The boy’s voice is flat, monotone, like the drone of a machine. His weary slouch says that he has been at it for a long time, just as the firm lift of his chin says that he is determined to wait that long again, if need be. He will wait until the world burns itself up in fire.

“So, what are you waiting for?”

“I’m waiting for my–” He speaks a word that Dorian does not understand. It passes through his mind like scented oil, leaving behind a soft fragrance that comforts him and troubles him at once.

“Where is your family? Your mother and father?”

“I have no family.”

“You’re alone?”

“I’ve always been alone, for as long as I can remember.”

This admission fills Dorian with an immense feeling of sadness that he cannot adequately explain. “I’m sorry.”

And for the first time, the boy looks up at him. His expression is wry, disbelieving, as though Dorian has just told him a blatant leg-puller. “You’re not,” he says, “but that’s okay. You don’t know any better.”

Then, after a slight hesitation: “Would you like to sit down? There’s room here for both of us.”

The boy scoots over to one side, and Dorian sits beside him. The stump is just big enough to hold them, and the boy leans his small body against Dorian’s side.

“I’m so tired,” the boy says. It is the whine of all small children up past their bed time, but unwilling to admit it.

Dorian pats his shoulder in an awkward gesture. He’s never been good with children. “You can sleep if you want. I’ll watch for you.”

“No. You won’t wake me.” It is a statement of fact, but without recrimination. It simply is. “You would try to hide her from me, because you don’t understand.”

Dorian realizes that he is talking about Amara, about the pearl.

“What don’t I understand?”

“You don’t know what she is.”

He chews the inside of his lip. This is not a point he can really argue. Words flash in his mind: woman, Exousiai, goddess, beloved. None of them suffice.

In turn, he asks, “What’s your name?”

“Michael.”

“Michael Raville?”

The boy nods his head. “You’re dreaming.”

He knows this, feels its truth. For a time, they sit in silence, watching the wind snake through the grass and waiting.

“You’re going to destroy the universe if you attack the Exousiai,” Dorian says at last. “When they come for the pearl, for Amara, if you resist them, they’ll kill us all.”

“It doesn’t know about the pearl,” the boy responds. “That isn’t why it’s coming.”

“It isn’t? Then why?”

“It’s coming because I called it. I opened the doors for it, and it comes–what is that phrase?–slouching toward Bethlehem.” The child, Michael Raville, sighs. “It’s funny. That wasn’t particularly good poetry even when it was written, and like most bad poetry, it has embedded itself in the human consciousness, eroding a cognitive trough of perception into our collective synaptic matrix. It has become like the far border of an event horizon, drawing us to an inarguable belief in a nonsense existence narrative. It has become an archetype of our expectation for the human experience, as entrenched as Armageddon, black helicopters and the indelible belief that we see only through a glass darkly. All metaphors for distrust and the silent, lurking evil that we cannot see.”

The boy is gone, seamlessly transmogrified by dream logic into the man Dorian recognizes as Michael Raville, a mirror image of the code fragment he met in the memory palace. Dorian can still see traces of the boy in the man’s face. The same eyes, the same weary bags beneath, but the mouth is firmer, less forgiving. No longer petulant, child-like, but grim. “This is what it is to be human,” the adult Michael Raville continues, “to function with embarrassingly limited senses, to be dependent on fire and light and second hand experiences passed from one person to another through the clumsy mediation of language, while trusting that one day we will see with completeness and truth. We doubt. Our senses lie. Our fellow humans lie, make mistakes, add false memes to the communal pool of comprehensive experience. In turn, survival becomes a function of cynicism. We cannot believe all that we see, hear, experience, because our senses, as we’ve seen time and again, fail us with alarming regularity. Our own bodies, the tools we use to manipulate and comprehend the universe, are prone to error and ultimately inadequate for the task. So we pass this survival mechanism, genetically predisposed cynicism, to our children and erect social structures about them that reward cynicism and irony, then we feign shock when our children do not believe what we tell them is true. We are a limited, pathetic species. Unworthy and unbelieving, we must each prove all things for ourselves, and what we have not proven, we do not, cannot, trust.

“We have fashioned a culture that secretly worships the meme of a lurking, intangible evil. A world in which, dare I say it, conspiracies abound!” Raville shakes his head. “Except this time, the conspiracies are true, and no one dares to believe it.”

“You called them,” Dorian reminds him. “You set this conspiracy into motion, and now you would have us believe that you’re preparing to fight a private war to preserve the future of humanity. In order to keep us free, I suppose was your reasoning. You’re going to wage this war to keep us free.” He remembers his last dream. “Because the Exousiai are hungry, right? Maybe if we strike them first and strike hard enough, they won’t mess with us again. But you’re wrong. The Exousiai will blot us from existence.”

Michael Raville makes a face, as though he has suggested something repugnant. “Humans are a backward and intransigent people, always caught on the horns between the rugged individualism of discrete experience and the incessant hope that one day we will know, just as we are known. The tension between those two poles, our eternal ambivalence, is the key to our vitality.”

“The Exousiai have promised to give us an escape from that ambivalence, remember? They say they’re going to make us into gods.”

“To our destruction, yes.” Raville laughs, a dry and bitter sound. “We are a one trick pony. Take away that trick, and we have no future, no vision for what we are supposed to be. Without vision, the people perish.”

“And yet you still called the Exousiai?”

“Indeed.”

“Why? What is it that you want?”

“I’ve learned that I like being free. I like being backward and intransigent. I want to be blind and deaf and full of doubt. It makes me happy.”

Dorian does not understand. He cares even less what Michael Raville wants. “What about Amara? Where does she fit into all of this?”

Raville frowns, the lines on his face folding into grief-worn defiles. “All good and true things, all worthwhile things, require sacrifice. The pearl was sent to be that sacrifice so that we might live. That which was loved above all else must be placed upon the altar as a burnt offering so that in exchange, we might receive eternal life.”

Sacrificed. The word echoes in Dorian’s ears with a clang of iron, but he does not react. It isn’t even a surprise. He has expected nothing better all along. The simulacrum of Michael Raville is simply the only one with the courage to give voice to his worst fears.

“I don’t know what that means,” he says.

“You fail to understand because you have chosen to believe. Belief and knowing are mutually exclusive states. Either one believes and accepts belief blindly and on its own merits, or one knows, and knowing, gives harbor to doubt.”

“If we can’t believe without being blind, how can we ever know what is true? Facts, experience, everything we can understand phenomenally lies. You said so yourself.”

Raville smiles. “We can’t. That’s what makes life glorious.” It occurs to Dorian that he has heard this line of reasoning before, but he doesn’t remember where. “It was true when we huddled in caves, clustered around the new technology that was fire, to protect ourselves from the storm gods and the night predators. It is still true today. Doubt makes us strong. Doubt of our future; doubt of our survival; doubt of what our place is in this universe. What we do not know makes us wise.”

Michael Raville climbs to his feet, dusting off the long trousers he now wore. He walks a few paces away from Dorian to the edge of the broad, eternal sea of grass and stands for a moment, breathing in its cool, sweet fragrance. With his gaze fixed on the distant horizon, darker now than it had been and fading on into full twilight, he says, “Once upon a time, a man told me a story. It was a story that I believed for many years, too many years. It was only when I stopped believing that I began to understand what it really meant. I will not say truly meant, because in order for it to be true, I must believe the opposite of what I was told. It may not be true, one way or the other, and that ambivalence pleases me. Would you like to hear my story?”

He turns back and waits for Dorian to nod. There is a twinkle in Raville’s eyes, and an ironic twist on his lips that Dorian does not trust.

As though he is repeating a long rehearsed catechism, Raville tells him: “When I was a little child and dwelling in my father’s house, content with the communion of my people, my parents equipped me and sent me forth. Of the wealth of our treasury they took abundantly, and tied up for me a load large but light, which I myself could carry: great knowledge, secrets of time and space, maps for navigating the Void Between. And they took off from me the glittering robe which in their affection they made for me and which had been measured and woven to my stature, and in exchange, they gave me a robe of rags and the constriction of flesh and an existence that was no longer limitless and without end. They made me into the form of a man. And they made a compact with me, and wrote it in my heart, that it might not be forgotten: ‘If thou goest down into the darkling lands, and bringest the one pearl which is in the midst of the sea away from the serpent, thou shalt put on thy glittering robe and thou shalt be content, and with thy brethren, thou shalt be heir in our kingdom. Bring back to us our lost pearl, that we might live.’”

“So I quitted the land of my father and went down with my guardians, for the way was dangerous and difficult, and I was very young to travel it. I went down into darkling lands and my companions, covered over also in rags of flesh, forgot who they were, forgot our own people, and parted from me. But I went straight to the serpent; I dwelt in his abode, waiting till he should slumber and sleep and I could take the pearl from him. Single and alone, I embraced the guise of the serpent’s people that they might not hold me in abhorrence and arouse the serpent against me because I had come to take the pearl. I found myself beguiled with their strange arts and alien ways. I ate from their tables and drank from their cellars of wine, and I forgot that I was a son of kings. I forgot the pearl for which my parents had sent me, and for many years, I lay in a deep sleep. But all these things that befell me my parents perceived, and were grieved for me, and proclamation was made in our kingdom, that one should go forth from our gate and rescue me, that I might not be left in the darkling lands.

“’Thus, they sent to me these words: “Call to mind that thou art a son of kings! See the slavery–whom thou serve! Remember the pearl for which thou was sent! Think of thy splendid robe which thou shalt wear and with which thou shalt be adorned when thy name hath been read out in the list of the valiant.” Thus came the messenger, bearing these tidings across the lands of the wicked ones, the children of strange signs and symbols, and their savage demons. His voice startled me and I arose from my sleep, and I heard the words of my father and inscribed them upon my heart. I remembered that I was a son of royal parents, and the child of noble birth. I remembered the pearl for which I had been sent, and I began to charm him, the terrible loud breathing serpent. I hushed him asleep with gifts of data streams and zap technology and toys to delight the mind, ease the burden of life and open the gates to a future he had not dared to dream. By these arts, I lulled him into slumber, and I snatched away the pearl and turned to go back to my father’s house.

“And their filthy and unclean dress I stripped off and left it in their country. I took my way straight to come to the light of our home. And the messenger, my awakener, went before me on the road to lead me with the light of his form and the guidance of his voice, encouraging me to hasten and drawing me on with his love. And when I had come again to my father’s house, I put on my bright robe which I had stripped off, but I remembered not its fashion–for in my childhood I had left it in my father’s house. Yet on a sudden, when I received it, the garment seemed to me to become like a mirror of myself. I saw it all in all, and I too received all in it, for we were two in distinction and yet again one in one likeness. And I saw that all over my robe the instincts of knowledge were working, and I remembered at last the spark that was within me, and the true nature of myself.’”

Raville pauses, and a troubled look crosses his face. “The problem with that story, of course, at least as it was told to me, is that it is wrong.”

Dorian croaks, “Wrong?”

“It is a lie. I believed for much of my life that I had been sent to retrieve the pearl. But after a time, I asked myself, why was the pearl sent in the first place? Who sent her to this reality and what was the reason for her coming? And it occurred to me as I delved into the technology I had developed, of zap and template and the mathematical codification of all reality into stagnant data representations that could be more readily absorbed, that the pearl was not sent to prepare mankind for the coming of benevolent gods whose sole altruistic interest would be to uplift the children of mud to a deathless life amongst the stars. I realized that to name a thing, to describe it in the pure language of numbers, is to pin it down, to make it one thing and never any other thing for all time. To name a thing is to kill its potentiality, so that it becomes frozen and dead. When it is dead, only then can it be devoured, and while dead flesh sustains for a time, eventually its energy is burned up, consumed, and hunger returns.

“And so I came to know that the pearl is the ring of the dinner bell, calling the Exousiai to come and eat. The awakening of the pearl is the signal that mankind is ripe for absorption into the All in All and the slow strangulation of entropy. The story, as I believed it, was supposed to end with me, recalled to true knowledge, stripping off the false illusion of myself and returning to my true home to be showered with adulation for extending the dominion of my people. The wild, fiery self-realization of who I truly am will then wash over me, and I will be whole and content once more.

“But I have been asleep for many years. I have drunk the wine and eaten the sustenance of the darkling lands, and now that I have moved toward awakening, I find that I prefer the strange and wondrous dreams of sleep. I have learned that I don’t like the ending of the story that was written for me, and I have dreamed that I am not irrevocably bound to the truth perceived by the All in All; that I might, if I choose, defy the all-knowingness and make a future life for myself that cannot be known and cannot be guessed. I like what I have become. I like being human. That is what I am fighting to preserve.”

Raville falls silent. He returns to his seat on the stump and leans forward with his elbows on his knees, then, child-like, picks up a stone from between the stump’s roots and heaves it out into the grass.

“What happens to Amara?” Dorian whispers. “What happens to the pearl?”

“Who sent the pearl? And for what reason did she come?” Raville muses, mostly to himself. “Has she awakened because I am awakening, or is it the other way around?”

“Why have you been searching for her?” Dorian lurches to his feet, his fists clenched. Part of him understands that he is being foolish. You can’t beat answers out of a dream. The answers either come or they don’t. “What do you need her for? What do they need her for?”

Raville looks up, a small grin playing across his lips. “Nothing I have told you is completely true. Some of it may be true in part, but even those portions are incomplete. You must choose what you will believe and what you will know. I can’t help you make those decisions.”

The dream ends.

Dorian came sharply awake to darkness. His eyelids fluttered, and he stirred muzzily. Some part of his mind registered that it was a sound that had disturbed him, a gasp, most probably his own. Then he realized that his fists were still clenched, just as they had been as the dream ended, and he was coated with sheen of feverish sweat.

It was not a good waking. He felt partially absent, as though he had left an important part of himself behind in the dreamscape. His jaws ached from grinding his teeth, and for a few breathless moments, he struggled through the customary and wrenching disorientation of waking in a strange bed. It completely failed to comfort him to remember where he was and what he was supposed to be doing. It was not just a strange bed, after all, but a strange bed, strange room, strange entire planet. He was at the uttermost edges of the human frontier, at the mercy of men who were trying to kill him.

Always a comforting situation to wake up in, that.

Dorian blinked into the darkness, wondering how long he had been asleep. Not long enough, however long it had been. His head still roared.

He dragged himself into a sitting position and discovered that he was naked. Cool air blew across his bare chest, raising pimples of gooseflesh and puckering his nipples. Silk sheets rasped against his thighs and clung to the sweat on his skin. He shivered, feeling all at once alone and empty in the strange stillness.

The room’s sensors detected his movement and brought the ambient lighting up to a candlelight glow. The lamps in the adjoining bathroom kicked on, anticipating his needs, and cast a warm and welcoming parallelogram of brightness across the crimson rug.

He thought about it. He could pee, but it wasn’t pressing.

Next to him, the mattress shifted in a subtle, but unmistakable fashion, and in the dark, a pair of small, warm hands patted his thigh through the sheets. A foot, a calf, snaked out across the bed and curled around his leg.

“You were dreaming,” Amara said, her voice sleep-dulled and soft. “It was a dream. You’re safe. Come back to bed.”

Dorian glanced over at her, still mostly asleep in her oversized, dress-up soldier’s outfit. He didn’t know how long she had been there, spooning him as he slept, doing her best to soothe his anger with the simple balm of touch and trust. He swallowed thickly, his throat suddenly dry.

“It wasn’t just a dream,” he said. “It felt like a dream, but it was–” What? More chaotically seeded bits from Raville’s datacore? A substratum of fact related in the language of sleep? It felt more intimate than that somehow, more personal, like he had been inside Raville’s head, or Raville had been inside his. He didn’t know which it was. “It wasn’t only a dream.”

“No.”

The slight lift in her voice hinted that she meant to say more, but she stopped. The quiet hung between them, stretched out until it filled the room, a brooding presence pregnant with all of the things they could have said, but chose not to. Dorian did not ask if she had read his thoughts while he dreamed. He honestly, truly did not want to know. Perhaps he didn’t even care.

He wondered once more what time it must be, and felt a pang of loss once again when he remembered that his array was gone. “How long have I–have we–been asleep?”

“Only a few hours. It’s late rather than early,” she said. She sounded more alert now. “It won’t be morning for a while yet.”

“Did Raville send word about when he would meet with us?”

“Tomorrow.”

“He sent word, then?”

“No.”

He didn’t ask how she knew. It was better to just believe her. “Did anything happen while I was asleep?”

“I reheated a stunning casserole, listened to some jazz in the library and polished off the evening with some of the best ice cream I’ve ever tasted. I was lonely, so I came to bed.”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

“You’re worried about the others? Ray and the Misfit Toys are fine. They’ve found a place to hole up for the night.”

It wasn’t exactly what he had meant, either, though he was relieved to hear it. Amara must have known it, because she giggled. Dorian was uncomfortably aware of his nakedness once again and tugged the sheets more tightly about his waist.

“We didn’t have sex, if that’s what you’re implying. You crashed hard enough that I doubt you would have been able to hold up your end, so to speak,” she said, teasingly. “If it ever comes up, I’d like to think it would be something you’d wish to recall, but I certainly wouldn’t just take it from you without your consent, John.”

“Not having my consent didn’t seem to stop you from taking my clothes.”

“I’ve seen you naked before, if you’ll remember. I didn’t think that helping you rest more comfortably would be such a big deal. I didn’t realize you were a prude as well as a Luddite.” She started to laugh, but squelched it, then sighed like someone whose good intentions have been misconstrued and doesn’t see any elegant way to get out of it. “I’m sorry if I offended you.”

Her bleak formality made him wince. He didn’t have the energy to be upset with her. He didn’t even want to sound angry with her, but he couldn’t seem to help himself. Misunderstanding seemed to be the only language in which they could communicate.

“It isn’t that. I just–look, it’s been a long day, a hard day. Too many new experiences, too much stress. Too much of everything. I don’t know what I’m doing half the time. And if we were to–you know, share something like that–I’d just—I’d want it to be something special.” He could feel a flush creeping onto his cheeks and was glad the lights were dim. “Not something I would sleep through.”

Her relief was palpable. Amara pulled snug against him, pressing the length of her body to his, so that her arms were around his waist and her cheek resting on his back, just below his shoulder

“Are you still angry with me?” she whispered.

He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“I’m sorry I hurt you.”

“Don’t be sorry.”

“I hurt you. I should be sorry.”

“No, you shouldn’t. Because you don’t mean it, for one. You’re sorry I felt hurt, not because you believe that what you did, withholding your plans from me, might have been wrong.” Those were hurtful words too, he thought, but they had to be spoken. It was the only way he knew to cut through the fog of misunderstandings. “But more importantly, I don’t want you to be sorry because you were right. I know that now. The only reason I was hurt was because I didn’t understand.”

“But you understand now?”

“No, not totally, but the things that I don’t understand are becoming fewer. I think–” He paused, shaking his head again. That wasn’t right. He didn’t think. He felt, on some subliminal level of consciousness, but he was certain of nothing. He didn’t really know anything. Dorian chose his words carefully. “Michael Raville is not what he seems to be.”

“Not human, you mean.”

“Not merely human. He’s like you.”

“He told you this in your dream?”

“Yes.”

Amara took a deep breath. “I had begun to wonder. It explains a great number of mysteries.” She was quiet for a moment, grappling with her own private thoughts, then asked, “Do you think Raville knew? The one we met, I mean. The package in the Archive.”

“I don’t think he did. He had too much faith in the things he said to have known the truth.”

She nodded. “I don’t think Raville himself knew until relatively recently, probably not more than a few years. I think I would have known otherwise. The other part of me, the alien-ness, would have responded to another of our kind declaring itself in this same branch of the metaverse.”

“In my dream, he asked if he was awakening because you had, or if it was the other way around.” Dorian tried to imagine what the implications were of this synchronicity between them, but could come up with nothing that seemed particularly telling. “He also asked who sent you here in the first place. He seemed to think it was important.”

“He’s feeling his way, just like the rest of us. He has begun to guess what he is, but he is still a long way from coming into his full power. He only knows that something is amiss, and that he doesn’t belong here. He is a pilgrim sojourning by the way.”

“You think his plan to attack to Exousiai is some sort of existential crisis?”

Amara shrugged. “He knows that something is wrong with his life, with himself, and he perceives that wrongness as a threat, so he has constructed an elaborate fantasy of persecution to explain to his human mind the troubling discontinuity that it has glimpsed.”

The problem with that story, of course, at least as it was told to me, is that it is wrong,

“Okay, let’s parse this, then.” He found it difficult to collect his thoughts, to separate realtime from the dreamscape. He wasn’t sure which facts belonged where. “If we stipulate that Michael Raville, the living, breathing, Michael Raville, is an Exousian rather than just a man, and if we assume that he is awakening even now, just as you are, where does that leave us? Do we go on believing that he is just mistaken about the threat of the Exousiai? That he’s behind the learning curve and needs a little jolt to get him thinking straight? And if that’s true, is it our job to give him that jolt, or will the Exousiai recognize him, just as they recognized you, and set him straight for us?”

“What are you saying?” Amara lifted her chin off of his shoulder and tilted her head so that she could look him in the eyes. “That we came for nothing?”

“No. Not at all. If our Michael Raville was right, then they’re still coming for you. You’re the pearl, and it was—is—Raville’s job to return you to your own people. I’m just wondering if the reason we had to come isn’t the one we were given. He told me that he was the one who called the Exousiai. They didn’t become aware that humanity was ready to be redeemed. That was supposed to be your duty, to awaken at the moment that we ascended to some lofty Omega Point, and make them aware, right? Then Raville would retrieve you and show you how to lead us into the great beyond.

“But you were awakened by a package of Raville who didn’t have the benefit of his later knowledge. The package reacted because it believed that the actual Raville was making a mistake, trying to start a war because he didn’t understand. What if it isn’t time, Amara? What if we’re not ready, and this whole series of events was set into motion only by Raville attempting to oppose himself?”

“The Exousiai aren’t coming to destroy humanity,” she reminded him, “whatever mistakes Raville might have made. They want to help us become as they are.”

“That isn’t what Raville believes.”

“Then Michael Raville is wrong,” she said, flat and final.

“How can you know that? He’s one of you. He’s got just as much a claim on this godhood business as you do.”

“Because I feel it to be true. I feel the thoughts and memory and essence of the Exousiai beating within me. Even here, in this prison of flesh, I am one with them. Raville has allowed himself to be poisoned by ephemeral illusions.”

It wasn’t really an answer, but Dorian couldn’t pick it apart without challenging his newly converted status as a True Believer™, so he let it pass. “Say you’re right. What are we supposed to do? Do we just go along? Do we proceed as we have and see what happens, assuming that the Exousiai know where we all stand regardless of what Raville does?”

“We can’t sit by while he attempts to destroy the Exousiai. It may be that there are weapons that could be forged against my kind that would do us harm. No one would know better how to create such a weapon than one of our own. That would be a terrible evil, John, to kill a god. It mustn’t be allowed. Perhaps my people foresaw this, that Michael would attempt to harm them and used his purer copy to send me to oppose him at the critical juncture. A male and female pair, yin and yang, one force to balance out the other.”

Dorian shook his head. “That’s too mystical for me.”

“Gods are mystical. They do mystical things.”

He couldn’t tell if she was poking fun at him. The light was too dim, and her face was mostly shadowed, a suggestion of teeth and the pale, glinting beauty of her eyes. She talked about gods like she understood exactly what she was saying. He wondered if gods ever managed to be ineffable to one another, or if ineffability was reserved for the merely mortal.

“What if you’re wrong?” he said at last, his voice barely audible. “What if Raville is right and you’re wrong? What if the Exousiai are coming to us not as helpers, but as devourers?”

She squeezed him close then, hugging him with her entire body in a grip that was fierce and hungry and almost, it seemed to him, desperate in its longing.

“I won’t let them hurt you.” Her whisper was as fierce as her embrace. “Whatever happens, whatever tomorrow might bring, whatever must be done, I won’t let any harm come to you. Believe that if you can believe nothing else.”

Dorian rolled in her arms until they faced one another. He folded his arms around her and together, they lay back with their heads on the pillows. He stroked her long, golden hair.

I love you, he thought, unbidden and unexpected, but knew at once that it was true. Whatever happens, whatever tomorrow brings, whatever must be done.

<And I love you.>

She smiled, and he smiled in return, and the light filled her eyes like the glow of stars.

<– Chapter 21 / Chapter 23 –>