Creusus's Arc

Chapter 12 of 21

Creusus turned to face the shape. He kept his fists loose at his sides now. The knight stood a pace behind with the small flame. "You called me king," Creusus said. "Tell me what that means. Tell me how I stand in your dark and breathe." The shape did not answer with sound. It answered inside him. A weight pressed behind his eyes and set words there without asking. He saw a place ruled by a man. He saw the man on a seat. He saw the face and it was his own. He stepped back. "No." He said it to the shape and to the pressure and to the picture it had put in him. "Say it plain. Not in my head. Out here." The shape gave nothing more. The knowledge stopped where it stopped, like a bucket run dry. Creusus pressed. "How did I come here. Why me. What am I to you." The dark held. The flame in the gauntlet bent once and steadied. Whatever the shape had to give, it had given. Then the floor became a floor. Stone rose under his bare feet without sound. Walls climbed on four sides in black and grey. A long room opened around them with pillars he had not seen laid. At the far end a seat stood on a low step. A man sat on the seat. The man had no hair and no beard. The man was thick through the shoulders. The man had his hands wrapped in clean linen at the knuckles. Creusus stopped walking. His breath went shallow. The knight stood where he had stood, flame still lit, as if the room had grown around him and left him untouched. "That is not me," Creusus said. He spoke to the room. He spoke to the shape he could no longer see. "That is your dark wearing my face. Nothing more." The man on the seat lifted his head. He looked at Creusus with Creusus's own eyes. He shook his head once, slow, the way a father corrects a child who has counted wrong. "I am you," the man said. His voice was Creusus's voice. "I have been here the whole time." Creusus's hands came up on their own. The linen at his knuckles felt suddenly tight. Behind him the knight said nothing. The flame did not move. Creusus stared at the seated man and could not make his mouth work to answer.