“What do you need to show me? I’ve already agreed to help you. Not that I had much choice,” Callum snarls as Sionna lead him down the corridor. He still feels queasy from travelling between.

“You have every choice,” Sionna says with her infuriatingly calm voice.

“Showing up in my kitchen in the middle of the night with your spooky doom and gloom is hardly giving me a choice,” he retorts.
“If you had told me to leave I would have had no choice but to leave you alone.”

“And just how do you propose I could have ignored the rest of it?”

“The dreams? The creatures haunting you? That would have been none of my concern if you had refused me. “

“That’s cold,” he mutters. The corridor is cold and the walls seem to seeps moisture, but it does not smell like water. It smells sickly sweet, and it unsettles Callums stomach further.

“Cold perhaps, but practical.”

“Practical.”

“As I said, we are fighting a war,” Sionna sighs and turns a corner. Light filters into the corridor but it is not the clean white light from the moon they left behind. Instead it is a strange blue light, slightly sickly and even oily – it makes his flesh crawl when it moves over his skin. Sionna pauses at a doorway and produces a key which she slides into a keyhole. The light seeps under the door, and between the pieces of frame. Callum rubs his hands over his arms absently, trying to ease the trembling that has spread from his gut.

The hinges scream as the door swings open and Callums eyes tear. The light fills the room and it takes several seconds for Callum to deduce that the light is coming from chains. There are thousands of them it seems, coming from every point in the room and converging in the center. Something hangs in the center and Callum squints into the sickly blue glare.
Sionna’s eyes glitter in the strange light cast by the chains that bind the woman; for it is a woman, wrapped like a fly in a spider’s web. Her head hangs forward, ropes of ebony hair catching the blue light as they fell almost to the floor.

“This is the one who is the heir to the Seelie throne.”

“Why is she chained this way?” Callum asks, his skin crawling with the energy in the room.

“She has been cursed; possessed by a demon of the dark vastness. This is the only way we can bind her soul to this world and control the creature. Sometimes she is lucid, but most times she is lost to us.”

“What’s her name?”

“Nieve,” Sionna whispers and the figure in the center of the chains raises her head. Callum is struck by her ghostly, terrible beauty.

“Sionna,” the woman whispers, her voice seeming to echo and be echoed by a thousand other voices. Callum shudders at the sound, but he cannot look away. “I can see you today,” she says.

“I am pleased,” Sionna answers, and looks away.

“Can you unbind me?” Nieve asks, her voice sibilant with thousands of other voices.

“You know we cannot, Lady.”

There is a pause, but Callum can still hear the voices whispering to each other in languages that he cannot understand.

“He will unbind me,” Nieve says, only Callum knows with every fiber of his being that it is not the lady speaking. His chest suddenly feels tight and before he realizes what’s happening Sionna is shoving him backwards into the corridor and slamming the door shut. “Fools!” the voices hiss from beyond the door, echoed by the eerie rattle of the thousand chains.

Callum takes a deep and shaky breath and looks down to see Sionna gazing up at him, pressing him to the wall, fingers digging into his arm.

“You are well?”

“Fine, I think,” he gasps. She pushes herself away from his body and he suddenly feels cold. “What happened?”

“What I feared,” she says. “The demon knows you.”

“Of course it does, you just introduced us,” Callum hisses back.

“Hardly. Nieve was lucid when we entered, but the demon took power so quickly. You felt it, did you not?”

“Yes,” Callum says, and cannot suppress a shudder.

“We must hurry,” Sionna says and starts back the way they came. Callum does not hesitate to follow her.

From behind them, Callum hears the Lady scream, echoed over and over again my a million echoing voices.

listening to: Glass Tiger - Don’t Forget Me

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 4th, 2010 at 11:22 am and is filed under Fiction, Sidhe, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.