Belladonna

Chapter Thirty-one

Rage stormed through her landscapes. Raindrops, thick as pus and stinking of decayed dreams, splatted on ground cracked by desperation. Death rollers choked and drowned when freshwater ponds suddenly changed to the boiling mud of fury—or were frozen by bone-chilling indifference. Bonelovers, pouring out of their mounds in search of prey, found themselves swimming in the acid of disappointment, and even as they climbed over each other in their desperation to get back to safety, the acid ate through their carapaces, dissolving their bodies as they crawled. The Wizards’ Hall was now an island trapped by a piece of sea, and the Dark Guides, who had relished being the whispers that had dimmed the Light in people’s hearts, now prowled the corridors throughout the nights, haunted by the voices of men calling for help, calling for mercy. Just calling. The voices of doomed men, already dead. And in the morning, when there was a morning, the Dark Guides would gather and look at the empty places at the tables. When they checked the rooms of those missing companions, they would find the carpets soaked with seawater—and there would be more voices in the night, calling. Just calling.

She walked these landscapes, folding them into each other, turning them into mazes that celebrated her Dark purity, altering them into labyrinths that offered no peace, no comfort. Those things did not exist in her world. She created out of the brutal beauty that came from the undiluted feelings that lived in the dark side of the human heart. She was sublime madness, magnificent rage, divine indifference.

As the weeks passed, the Light, that part of herself that had been called Glorianna, became nothing more than a wispy dream of a fading memory, a sometimes-aching scar.

Here, now, there was Belladonna.

Only Belladonna.