Creusus's Arc

Chapter 10 of 21

The knight stopped walking. Creusus almost bumped the plate before he caught himself. The little flame in the gauntlet was still too small. It showed the knight's hand and the front of the helm and nothing past that. Creusus could hear something moving beyond the light. Not footsteps. A slow drag, like cloth pulled over stone, circling wide. He put his back near the knight's back and set his weight low. He waited for the knight to lift the flame higher. The knight did not. Instead the knight drew the sword. The knight slammed the blade point-first into the ground. The ring went out from the steel in a long clean note, louder than any hum Creusus had matched before. The dark answered. It gathered. Creusus watched the black around them pull inward like water finding a drain, thickening, taking on edges, until a shape stood a few paces off. It had a head and shoulders and a long trailing body that never finished. It was not lit by the flame. It was lit by nothing. It was there the way a hole is there. Creusus wondered why the knight had waited so long to strike the ground, and had no answer, and let the question go. His fists came up on their own. The bandages pulled tight across his knuckles. The shape tilted its head. When it spoke, the sound arrived inside Creusus's chest, not his ears. "My knight. You have returned. And you have brought the true king." Creusus looked at the knight. The knight stared straight ahead at the shape and said nothing. Creusus's mouth went dry. He was no king. He was a man with wrapped hands who had followed a stranger into a room without walls. He opened his mouth to say so and closed it. The shape had not asked him a question. It had named him. The knight lowered his head one small degree, the way a man bows who does not want to bow. The flame in the gauntlet guttered and held. Creusus understood two things at once. The knight had brought him here on purpose. And whatever waited in this place had been waiting for him, not for the knight. He set his feet. He did not lower his fists. He said, "I'm not your king." His voice sounded flat in the dead air. The shape did not move. The knight did not move. The ringing from the sword faded out of the ground and left only the sound of Creusus breathing. He had followed the light this far. The light had brought him to a door he did not choose to open, and the door was open now, and he stood inside it with nothing but his hands.