The hallways twisted and folded into themselves. I looked at her, and we were the sun and moon ourselves, mirrored bodies floating in space and art.
The first part of this story can be found here.
The words dripped and spiraled in my mind that wasn’t my mind, but merely an extension of her fingertips and the rhythm of her voice as it fell from her lips.
At his feet.
He gives me very little choice.
I thought about that, as I stood with her, with her hand in mine, that wasn’t mine and wasn’t hers.
It was His. He was everything, and everything belonged to Him.
Thought forms bubbled up through my consciousness, unprovoked. The shape of them stretched into a long thread, weaving itself in around the crevices of my mind. The insidious and wonderful blue mist fell away from the threads in achingly slow waves, a gentle tide that slowly engulfed my psyche, dissolving my ego from the inside. The edges were left ragged and weak, like metal that had corroded in a wash of salt water.
That should have worried me, but it didn’t. The woman in front of me was not worried, and I was her and she was me, and so I was not worried. The thought of Him floated through my veins like the blue mist, but I was not afraid.
You will love Him. He gives me very little choice.
I wondered, briefly — or maybe for a thousand years, it was impossible to tell — what would be left, once the mist had corrupted every part of my mind, made it fragile and eager to shatter.
The thought fell away at once, and lingered for a lifetime, as a thing of the future, an anxiety shaped like a comfort. I would find out at the appointed time, no sooner and no later. Everything would be helplessly, hopelessly, finally, out of my control.
Finally?
There was a truth in the comfort of that thought.
Finally.
“So let’s go,” I repeated back to her who was me, in her voice that was my voice.
She smiled at me, and it was like the sun breaking through the clouds, and my chest ached for the need to weep at the beauty of her. “Let’s go.”
There were stairs, but I had no memory of walking to them, only the undeniable rightness of descending, as she pulled me along, ductile and shining, her red not-dress fluttering with the movement of the deepening tide. Each step down was cold on my bare feet, and I couldn’t help but imagine that each new foot fall became danker, darker. Each step pulled us further down the rabbit hole, underneath the majestic, ancient house and into something that smelled like damp rock.
There was precious little light when we reached the landing. A single flickering hurricane lamp hung above us, casting weak yellow shadows around us like jaundiced dreams. The hallway continued further in front of us, but it was nothing but a black void. Weak terror crawled along the blue mist wires in my mind, as they continued to work themselves deeper, branching into fractals of corrosive joy. The terror felt wrong in my body, new and unwelcome. I stopped.
She looked back at me, and I could see myself through her eyes, even in the dimness around us. Concern blanketed her features. “We’re running out of time, I’m afraid. We need to hurry.” She tugged at my arm, and it stretched like taffy. “Let’s go, Katarina. He doesn’t want you to be afraid. Yet.”
Yet?
My fear arced along the wires, spitting and drooling blue sparks. I started to shake my head, but she pulled and started walking again, until we were both engulfed in darkness.
“Slave.” His voice carried through the space around us, seeming to magnify the dark and make the air heavier.
I didn’t know how I knew it was Him, but there was no doubt in my mind. His presence was a real, tangible thing, so soft I might run my fingers through it, and so sharp that I’d come back bleeding. He was like nothing else I had ever experienced. If she was Escher in curves, He was beyond the human capacity for art; He was something that needed to be rendered in five dimensions.
“Master,” she replied, dropping to her knees and pulling me with her.
The connection between us pulsed. The air heaved like waves of the creeping tide, and I knew, without knowing how I knew, and the Master stood in front of us as we knelt. I felt His fingers tousle her hair, before dragging themselves along the curve of her cheekbone.
There was a click that might have been a roll of thunder or the crunch of dry bones, and the room around us was illuminated with dozens of candelabras, each individual tipped with a meager orange flame. Taken together, they cast an unworldly light that refracted every cut stone that surrounded us.
I looked up at Him.
My curiosity was greater than my fear.
I squinted at the tall figure before me, trying to make sense of the shape of Him. He wore darkness like a suffocating ocean, achingly soft and incalculably immense, a living, breathing monster made of horror itself. I tried to follow the lines of His body, but every second that I failed made the blood scraping along the inside of my veins into an icier, slushier trap under my skin.
I knew at that moment why she worshiped Him.
Why His words would dictate the shape of reality itself. He could bend time and space and the primal terror of our — her, my — mind into any twisting nightmare.
It is only right to serve Him.
He is everything.
The truth of her – my – words crashed over me, and I felt my body begin to quiver, and I could no longer stay simply kneeling. He was too much, too vast, like kneeling in front of God himself.
I dropped my head to the cold stone floor, because there was nothing else I could do.
He gives me very little choice.
I felt His smile, and the air around us became colder.
“Well done, slave. You have succeeded in your task.” His voice was like the sprawling blackness of space, drowned in the pressure of the deepest ocean; something primeval and original to the universe. It both calmed and incited, soothed and terrified.
He moved the cloak of black fog around him until He stood in front of me. “You are afraid. Weak.”
Truth. His words became truth.
I was weak. Prostrating myself on the cold stone floor in front of this beautiful monster, I was weak and afraid. And I was absolutely choiceless in the matter.
“Yes,” I said. There was a pull on that word, like there should have been something else to follow it, but my lips and my brain could not comprehend, would not cooperate. I tried to think, as the shape of my thoughts straightened and realigned in accordance with the power of His words. The blue mist of the drug dissipated, only to be replaced by the aching desire to submit.
Submit.
Every desire in my body dimmed, except the overwhelming need to submit to this… creature. Monster. God, demon, myth, truth.
He laughed, and my body moved out of instinct to plaster myself against the ground, to lower myself in the face of such evil power.
“I can see your thoughts. You broadcast them like a whore, screaming in the night.” He moved so that the edge of His darkness brushed against the tips of my shoulder blades, and the air in my lungs evaporated.
Choking fear ran through my limbs, and I saw death behind my own eyes. There was no sound, no action, nothing. He stole my strength, made me weak for HIm.
“You are not wrong,” He said.
My voice came in ragged bursts, like it had been dragged along the edges of my battered ego. “What… are You?”
“I am everything. I am the thought in your head, the emotion aching in your heart, the memories you hold dear to your soul. Everything. I am the monster you have always feared you would find, and the nightmare you have always wished to live. Your words are the key, your body the keyhole. I am the space that holds the moon and sun aloft in your universe, and you will serve me, to deepen my power.” His words rumbled along my skin, a violent sedative whose each syllable stole another drop of my will.
Gravity shifted, and spacetime warped around us, as the spell of His voice reworked reality.
I was weak, but my weakness would serve Him. I was choiceless, but my choicelessness would solidify His power. The truth wound itself inexorably through my mind, creating and sundering thoughts as easily as I would have written words on a page.
I reached to the woman kneeling silently beside me, the same. Her blood boiled in my veins, and I was her and she was me. I wrapped my fingers in hers, and she squeezed my hand.
Weak, submissive, owned for His benefit.
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