In the Deep

In the pitch black, focused only on finding each new stair without tripping, all sound was reduced to her and Chelle's feet sliding against the wood, then stepping down. Slide, step. Slide, step.

Not so bad, she thought optimistically, letting herself cling to the security of Chelle's presence at her back, all the better to ignore her fear of not knowing what lay ahead.

As if summoned to contradict her thoughts, just to prove her wrong, there came the soft shuffle and scrape of a third presence moving nearby. It sounded almost like vermin skittering about her feet, and then a soft whimper sounded through the dark.

Evaine and Chelle froze at the same time, holding deathly still as they listened together. The noises continued, moving around them almost in a circle, a pitter patter here, a quick dash there, and another whimper. The unsettling ambiguity caused the fine hairs at the back of Evaine's neck to rise, along with the sickening sensation that she'd heard the sound before, like bait before a trap, like a puppy crying for help.

"Sorry, my bad," she said to break the spell of stillness, forcing herself to use a normal volume as if she could drown out the sounds which had lured her into this whole mess in the first place. She shook out her hands the way she had seen Chelle doing before they began the spirit walk, and she took a few deep breaths until she could feel the comforting presence of her own body at the back of her mind, reminding her of what was real and what was just a memory.

The whimpering noises faded and disappeared, and while it brought no comfort to the darkness, it was one less thing to be afraid of.

"What the hell kind of monsters do you have hiding down here?" Chelle ground out, rhetorical but irritated.

"I guess we're about to find out." Evaine exhaled some tension as she prepared to refocus, thinking again of that voice, gently reaching out for it.

She moved her foot forward, feeling for the next stair, but there was no edge or drop to be found, just the ongoing smoothness of a floor that felt like hardwood. Just as soon as she realized that they had come to the deepest corner of her memory, the air began to shift around them, becoming heavy with moist heat that was broken by an occasional light breeze.

The darkness around them flickered with a faint, half-remembered glow of firelight. It didn't bring the scene of her memory as it had before, but shapes and images began to form as the light struggled to spread. It came from above, below, and all around, surrounding them like an embrace, yet flickering so feebly that it seemed exhausted to be summoned.

There, in the focal point of the memory, there came the shape of a woman. Her face was lost to the unclear haze of the memory, but as she watched, rigid and desperate for clarity, Evaine made out the details of deep red hair and skin so ashen that she appeared sickly.

"Eyes of glass, ears of cotton," she was saying, her voice heavy with unfathomable emotion. "Once beheld, and then forgotten."

The voice shuddered with a single, broken sob, and the entire space of memory flickered like the flame was just about ready to be blown out.

"Sweet girl...my sweet angel..."

"Is that...?" Chelle's voice came from somewhere nearby, and although Evaine couldn't tear her eyes from the memory for fear of losing her grip on it, just knowing that she wasn't alone in this was enough.

"It can't be," she answered, watching that shadowy outline in a complete trance. "I was an infant, adopted at birth. It's impossible to remember that far."

"Magic has memory, Evaine," Chelle said surprisingly gently. "What she did left an impression on you, something deeper than base memory. She could have done this before letting you go."

Evaine wanted to reach out to the woman who had cast such mystery over her life, the one she had always wondered about, yet never been able to seek out. She wanted to blow away the haze that obscured the vision, to call out to her, anything to get her attention. She just wanted to see her, but just as soon as she felt it, the vision began to fade, tearing itself away from her.

As the memory disappeared, it took more than just the light. It took the air, it took the sound, and any sense of self that had been keeping Evaine grounded. In its place was nothing but silent, suffocating emptiness. All thought of mothers, of magic and monsters, began to slip from her focus, like the darkness was a vacuum of energy and spirit. She couldn't even summon a word of thought that wasn't immediately engulfed by the void. It seeped into her mind, dissolving everything that made her real.

"Evaine!" Chelle's voice cut through like a blade, but even that shrill sound could barely scrape her as she seemed to float further and further down. "Your body is starting to slip, you're too far away!"

She could understand the words, but the meaning behind them was lost on her. She didn't feel like she had gone anywhere, or that there was any kind of body that belonged to her. She had always been this formless, shapeless thing, lost to the void and a part of it all at once.

"Please, you have to come back or you'll be lost forever," Chelle was saying, but Evaine couldn't understand why she sounded so urgent. "Think of a memory, something solid, something that makes you glad to be in your own skin. Evaine, hurry."

Skin.

She remembered that word, and something about it brought a tingle of sensation back to her.

Cold skin, like it had just touched ice, pressing fingers across her neck, circling her waist until their bodies were in a tight embrace. Pale lips skirting her own, the sharp scrape of a vampire's fang over her tongue.

She felt her fingers twitch, and her blood rushed to her head as she righted her posture once more. The grass beneath her legs was bitingly cold, poking through the fabric of her dress. The soft crunch of Jesse's footsteps continued, and she heard Chelle breathe a sigh of relief.

She blinked once, twice, slowly coming back to herself. It took a long, sluggish moment, but her mind soon put names and labels to the colors and shapes around her. Stones, grass, moon, garden. She was still in this strange land of spirit, but at last back in the stone garden, right where they had begun. Chelle's body, glowing with that network of magic under her skin, the dark creature of shadow and hellfire that was Jesse, still pacing the circle with the smoldering herbs in his hand.

The projection of Chelle was kneeling beside her on the grass, her almond eyes gone wide with alarm, her chest heaving as though she had been shouting.

"What just happened?" Evaine asked, flexing her fingers and toes, feeling for her true body in the back of her mind.

"You got lost for a minute, there," Chelle explained, her expression returning to its usual sternness before it could betray her concern. "You were so focused on her that you forgot yourself. You weren't ready to go that deep, and that's my fault. We won't be doing that again."

"So that's it?" Evaine asked, crestfallen that she could have screwed up her chances so badly. "We can't see anything else?"

"Evaine, we just found more answers than we could have ever hoped for," Chelle pointed out chastisingly. "We know that the caster is likely your birth mother, and the easiest way for you to find her is to ask your adopted mother. Now that you're aware of the magic and what it's doing to you, you might actually be able to ask her without spewing your guts."

"I guess...you're right," Evaine nodded, still itching to dive back in for more answers, but knowing she should be satisfied with what they'd found so far. "I know what I need to do now."

"I don't envy this conversation ahead of you, but if she can help you find the answers you seek, it'll be worth the effort." Chelle stood up and turned away from Evaine, making to walk back across the circle toward her own body. "Let's begin the procedure to wake up; we've been in here long enough."

Before she had gotten halfway, Chelle froze in her steps as a light breeze drifted through the garden. It came with a shock of freezing air and the scent of a wildflower that Evaine didn't recognize. Chelle turned over her shoulder, her eyes locking on something behind Evaine, and her mouth fell open with surprise.

"Are you doing this?"

Evaine turned around to see that another door had appeared in the arched pathway of the garden. It was her own bedroom door, painted the same lilac shade to match her curtains, the same "Hang in there!" cat poster taped to the surface. And just as it had been in her nightmare, it was standing ajar.

"What were you thinking just now?" Chelle asked when Evaine didn't answer her first question. Her soft footfalls approached until they were side by side once more.

"I...I was thinking I wasn't ready to go back," Evaine admitted. "I was thinking that I wanted to know more."

"You reached for more...and now something is reaching back." Chelle began to step forward, her arm lifting to push the door open further, but Evaine scrambled to her feet to stop her.

"No, no, not that one," she said, grasping Chelle by the hand to hold her back. "That's not a memory."

"You were just saying you wanted to know more, well there it is!" Chelle pointed out incredulously. "What could it be if not the answers you seek?"

"A nightmare," Evaine said gravely, unwilling to shift her eyes away from that crack in the door lest the face of a dead man make an appearance.

"Evaine, if the curse has been steering you away from the truth all this time, affecting even your thoughts and impulses, it would make sense that your dreams are the only place safe from its influence. I think, if you really want to know the truth, we should go through. You may never get another chance like this."

"See the unseen..." Evaine thought out loud, an echo of an older version of the same nightmare, the words of a woman with no eyes. She knew she was right, but Evaine couldn't ignore the tingle of warning she felt at the back of her spine, the gooseflesh that rose across her body as it sat in the real world.

"What's that mean?" Chelle asked her, but Evaine was beyond hearing anything aside from her own rushing pulse.

"Try not to make a sound," she said as she began to step toward the door, her limbs feeling numb with both cold and a blood-chilling dread. "Do not wake her."