IGMS Issue 9 Page 16

  No.

  It would not stop at a touch. She could never be with him, truly be with him, because eventually she would devour him just as she had devoured Molly. His soul was not bright enough for her to survive alone outside it, nor was it strong enough to sustain him once she had consumed it. If she stayed beside him, it would mean his death.

  She was a monster.

  She forced her hand back to herself and placed it over her heart. She hoped that it spoke enough in the silence for him to hear it, to feel how much she loved him. If it had been water and not air between them, she knew he would have felt it.

  A tear fell from her cheek to his.

  He stirred and opened his eyes.

  She gave herself one moment, one tiny, blessed moment of looking into his soul before she turned and ran.

  She tripped down the stairs and cut her feet on the stones. The cloak caught on something and she unfastened it. She was sure that soon they would come for her. They would hunt her like the beast she was. She tasted the tears that streamed down her face and knew there was only one refuge. She ran to it.

  The cold beach sand kissed her feet like a prayer. The salty spray mixed with her tears, chasing them away. The first tiny wave reached up and licked her toes. Waves rumbled in a cadence she had almost forgotten how to translate.

  Come, they pulled.

  Home, they crashed.

  She took small steps forward. The sand slipped out from beneath her if she stayed too long. The force of the waves pushed her backwards in opposition to the call she felt.

  Come, they pulled.

  She stumbled, and the tide ripped her sideways along the beach. Gasping, she managed to regain her footing and continue walking out to sea. The current grabbed at her clothes, and she tore them off. The tips of her hair mingled with the foam. Flotsam swirled around her waist.

  Home, they crashed.

  She walked until a riptide took her and dragged her out to sea.

  My link to her was severed at that point. But I didn't have to live inside her anymore to know where she was headed.

  She would grab the first sharp object she found - maybe a crab's claw or a clam's shell - and tear into herself so that the water could flow through her again. The first gash might have been straight, but the rest would be ragged and flawed. She would make her way to the Deep, her body drawn to the never-ending call of the soul of the world. She would make a home there among the bloodworms and the warm vents and the other predators.

  She would take her love and regret with her. She would heal in the balm of the ocean, away from the complexities of mortal life. She would tell herself that if the day came, if the words were spoken and the magic came to her, she would turn them away. She would be brave and righteous. She would not let evil back into the world. The suffering would end with her. She would stew in the self-affliction until it became a dim memory, tucked away in the recesses of her mind like sight and sound, air and fire. Time would fade her lover's face, his name into nothing, and then time itself would melt into darkness. She would ebb and flow and never die.

  But when that day did come, as it would, ages and ages from now, she would choose the light. She would choose the escape. She would let the evil out one last time just to feel it all again, to live, even if it meant stealing someone else's destiny.

  As I had.

  Strong arms wrapped around me, brushing my satin bedclothes against the small jagged scars on either side of my torso. I leaned back against him, feeling his heartbeat through his chest.

  "I just had the strangest dream," he said. I felt his deep voice rumble through the skin of my back. "You came to me while I lay in bed, only your hair was red and your skin was different. You stared at me like you wanted to say something, and then you ran. You looked so . . . sad."

  He turned me around to face him. "The day you saved me was the happiest day of my life. And this day should be the happiest day of yours. Don't be sad."

  I smiled and shook my head.

  "Good." He kissed me then, long and slow and deep. He hugged me tightly before pulling away. "Come back to bed?"

  "Yeth," I whispered, the words still foreign to my tongue. He kissed me again and left me. I looked out over the moonlit water once more and said my goodbyes before following him, my prince, my soulmate, my stolen love.

  Love.

  It was the reason I lived.

  The God-Voices of Settler's Rest

  by Ken Scholes

  Artwork by Emily Tolson

  * * *

  Mother Holton grieved when the god-voices returned because she remembered what it had cost Settler's Rest the last time, when she was a little girl. It made her weep.

  But they were tears of sorrow, not fear. No, she was not afraid. She knew that the voices came around like Gussuf's Wheel and that after the god-voices quieted, they would have peace for a season. But this was the second visitation in a century. They would visit sooner and sooner until eventually they ushered in the next Age of Unknowing.

  The Seventeenth age, if the Book spake true. "So many," she heard a dry reed-rattle voice whisper into the darkened bedroom. Her own voice, she realized.

  The room bell chimed and she sat up from the blankets. With each year, they'd piled more of them onto her. "These winters are growing colder," she would say. "What do you think of that?" And they would heat the blankets near the fire that night and her bones wouldn't ache from the cold nearly as much.

  The door opened and a wedge of light pushed into the room. A girl stepped into it.

  "Mother, they have started," the girl said. Mother Holton couldn't tell who it was. Perhaps one of the younger, newer converts. Was that a hint of the Northern Coasts in her voice?

  "I know they have," the old woman said. "Help me to prayer, girl."

  The girl shook her head. "I am not permitted, Mother."

  Mother Holton laughed. "Them that's told you not to answer the voices are already on their knees, I'll wager." She coughed and tasted copper in her mouth. "Whether or not we answer is irrelevant, regardless of what you've been taught."

  The girl stepped forward, uncertainty in her voice. "Why do we want it so badly?"

  For a moment, Mother Holton allowed herself to hear the whispering god-voices. Comehomecomehomecomehome, they whispered, toaplacewhereyouwillbeloved. Only the whispers, when they blended, were a choir that balanced perfectly between chant and song. Mother Holton forced the voices back down. "Because we cannot bear to be alone in the Universe," she finally said. "Now help me to my knees, girl."

  The girl came to her side and helped her up. There was a time when Mother Holton would have pretended to accept the assistance without resting any weight on her helper. But now, she knew she needed all the help she could get. The girl gently lowered her to the floor. Mother Holton folded her hands and bowed her head.

  "Now pray with me," she said.

  The girl shook her head more vigorously. "I can not, Mother."

  Mother Holton smiled. "This is your first time, child. You do not know it yet, but before they pass, you will bend your knee to them that's bidding. It's better to do it now. It makes what comes later more easy to swallow."

  Trembling, the girl knelt beside her.

  Then Mother Holton, Settler Priestess of the First Home Temple, answered the voices from her childhood so long ago.

  "Oh," she said, feeling the lump grow in her throat, "I've missed you."

  When she was thirteen, Abigail Holton loved Enoch Bentley and knew with a teenaged certainty that she would marry that farm boy and give herself to corn and babies. Her grandmother had raised her on the Book and she knew her part in the Settler's Promise. Grandmother was a seamstress with gnarled hands, doing the best she could by the baby that came into her care in the sunset of her life. Abigail's mother had died following a visitation. And though her grandmother did not speak of it, the other girls in town did.

  But Abigail listened to the Book. She would not hate them for repeating the words thei
r mothers whispered among themselves when they thought their children weren't listening. Her mother had taken her own life because the voices never stopped for her.

  Abigail was walking in Farmer Bentley's fields, wondering what Enoch looked like with his shirt off, when she heard the voice that changed her life. Come home, it whispered and a choir joined in around it. All her life she'd felt empty and alone, until that afternoon as the day stars set hours ahead of the sun. But when the god-voices started up on the edge of her womanhood, Abigail Holton knew that regardless what she'd been taught, she was not alone in the universe.

  The voices abated and Mother Holton opened her eyes. She could feel the girl beside her shaking, and she looked over at her. Head in hands, she sobbed into the edge of the bed. Mother Holton reached out put her hand on the girl's shoulder.

  "What is your name, child?"

  The girl sniffed. "Esther Hopewell," she said. "I am Sister Elizabeth Hopewell's daughter."

  Mother Holton nodded. "I remember you." Sister Elizabeth was one of the seven Settler's Daughters who had disappeared exploring the ruins in the southern deserts fifteen years ago. At Mother Holton's insistence, the Temple had been the young orphan's caretaker. "Do not be alarmed at the voices, Daughter Hopewell. Their power is in perception alone. They will pass in time. Go, talk with Sister McDougall about it. She can teach you prayers and meditations that will help you."

  The girl helped her back into bed and tucked the blankets around her. "I will speak to her, Mother Holton. Thank you."

  She could see the shame on the girl's face. Shame for having wept, or for having prayed? It mattered little. Mother Holton reached a gnarled hand up and patted the girl's cheek.

  "Remember what I told you," she said. "The voices will pass."

  But she fell asleep hoping that they wouldn't, that somehow this time it would be different.

  Maybe they will not change this time, she thought, and the good voices will stay with us. But she knew from the Book -- from a thousand of years of recorded Settlement history -- that they would follow the same pattern they always had. And the Settler's Daughters would write the words down, study them, and try as they had for centuries to understand the god-voices. They had given up on silencing them long ago.

  Maybe they will not change this time.

  But she knew they would.

  The day after the voices changed, Abigail Holton snuck into the Temple and sought out Mother Cassel in her meditation vault.

  Her grandmother was a childhood friend of the priestess and she'd grown up in the shadows of the Temple's massive laser-etched cornerstones. At one time, the First Home Temple had been the center of Settler's Rest. But at some point, trade and education had become equally important. Still, her grandmother's friend recognized the need for both and gave her friend regular mending business, paying the high end of fair wages for her skill.

  The Book told them that the change would come, but she'd hoped it would be different. When they changed, she spent the day crying, lost and hopeless.

  When the voices finally quieted enough for her grandmother to sleep, Abigail slipped into the night to find Mother Cassel.

  "Abigail Holton," Mother Cassel said. "Does your grandmother know you're out in the middle of the night?"

  Abigail swallowed. "She's asleep."

  The old woman smiled. "The change was difficult this time, wasn't it?" she said. "Of course it was, this was your first."

  She hung her head. "I was faithless, Mother. I didn't believe the Book. I didn't believe they would change." Her eyes came up slowly to meet the old woman's. "I prayed."

  Mother Cassel clicked her tongue. "Of course you did. How could you not? The voices are beguiling at first, promising you something better. They gain your trust. But they always turn, Abigail, they always turn. They cajole, and then they loathe."

  "But why?" she asked.

  Mother Cassel shrugged. "We do not know. It's always been this way." She smiled. "But with each visitation, we learn more about the voices . . . and more about the world. We will write it down in the Book, and we will take what clues we can from the words between their promises, pleas, and threats. We will do what we can while we can. And someday," she continued, "the voices will win out for a spell and we will hide our work in the ground until reason comes back into focus again."

  Abigail thought about the voices, both earlier and today. When they changed and became angry, she had not known what to do. She had felt betrayal, yet she had felt love, too. She'd known in that instant that she was made for more than Enoch Bentley's corn and babies.

  "I want to help," Abigail Holton told her grandmother's friend. "I want to join the Settler's Daughters."

  "I know, child," Mother Cassel said, and the next morning she came to Abigail's grandmother and extended her invitation.

  Mother Holton took her tea into the Looking Glass room when the voices changed. Her cup rattled as she put it down and she was certain it was from being startled by the angry words that whispered at her.

  She knew from the Book and from experience that when the voices changed, they said more in their anger. She had ordered her sisters to listen for this and to double the Scrivener's Watch. It was the only comfort she could take from the change.

  The last visitation, during her girlhood, had pointed them to the ruins in the southern deserts. It had taken nearly seventy years to find them and they'd lost many Daughters to the searching. But for the last fourteen years, their excavation there taught them much about the home their foremothers had forged for them so long ago.

  She listened to the voices until they passed. She had forgotten how bitter they were. Time will do that, she thought.

  She looked up. "Sister Abernathy?"

  Her plump, middle-aged day nurse bustled over. "Yes, Mother Holton?"

  "Fetch Sister McDougall for me. I would speak with her in my sitting room."

  Sister Abernathy nodded and waddled off to find the woman. Mother Holton finished her tea and tried not to feel sad at the loss. She knew it was an expected response. The voices affected most that way. The change usually disrupted commerce and sometimes even led to violence.

  As they occur more and more frequently, she thought, they will become more adept at handling them. Until the new Age of Unknowing comes to pass. She said 'they' because she knew she would not live to see it. The frequency between visitations increased, but not in a way that could be measured and predicted. Hundreds of years of silence; then a smattering that became more regular until finally, the voices did not leave. Teachers would rise up, imparting divinity and destiny to any who would listen. And slowly, mysticism would consume reason. It was easier than resisting. And, according to the Book, it would eventually undo the work of the Settler's Daughters over decades -- even centuries -- until the voices finally faded again and the cycle began anew.

  Of course, all of that would be years and years beyond her lifetime. By then, Esther Hopewell's granddaughter, if she were to have one, would be an old woman. And that granddaughter's great grandchildren would be old by time the world was put right again.

  Sister McDougall was perhaps a dozen years younger than Mother Holton. Like the other Daughters, she'd given her life to studying the Book, learning the nuances of the god-voices. Now that they had changed, this would be her busiest time. But she sat across from Mother Holton now and didn't look distracted or annoyed by the interruption.

  "Hello, Mother," she said, folding her hands in her lap.

  "Hello, Sister. Is your Scrivener's Watch ready?"

  Sister McDougall nodded. "It is. We'll get what we can. The change came faster than we expected."

  "Yes," she said. Then she changed the subject. "I sent Sister Hopewell's daughter to you."

  "I spoke with her," Sister McDougall said. "I've had talking-to's with several of the Daughters. The voices are harder on the younger girls."

  Mother Holton remembered. "They were hard on me when I was young. But they brought me to the Daughters." S
he chuckled. "Before I heard the voices, my highest aim was to be a farm boy's nervous bride." For the first time in years she wondered what had become of Enoch Bentley. Dead by now most likely, but it wouldn't be hard to find out of a certainty . . . if she remembered to ask someone to look into it.

  Enough lolligagging in yester-year, woman, she scolded herself.

  Fixing her eye on Sister McDougall, she asked the question she dreaded. "How many of them do you think we will lose?"

  Sister McDougall shrugged. "None if I can help it. Our coping techniques get better each time."

  Mother Holton felt a chill and shivered. "Thank you, Sister McDougall. Please tell Sister Abernathy that I will sit here a spell and then ring for her when I'm ready."

  The woman inclined her head slightly. "Yes, Mother."

  Mother Holton pulled at the quilt that covered her lap and Sister McDougall stooped to lift the heavy cotton patchwork up over her chest and then tuck it in behind her. She smiled her appreciation and the Sister returned it.

  After the woman left her, Mother Holton sat alone in the sitting room and tried to remember what Enoch Bentley had looked like.

  He had whispered beneath her window the night she was to leave her grandmother's home to take up studies in the Temple. The voices had quieted some time ago, but Enoch Bentley couldn't understand. He was a man -- or at least very nearly so -- and the god-voices passed over most of them. Less than understanding the voices, he couldn't understand her choice to join the Settler's Daughters.

  She heard his voice and went to the window. "Enoch Bentley," she said in the angriest whisper she could manage, "you mustn't be here at this hour."

  She was fifteen now; he was seventeen. The silver moon lit his blond hair and his eyes were red. "I don't want you to go," he said.