Lucien Mortis's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

The voice came from the water again, and it spoke Lucien's name in the way only his dead love had. He stood at the edge of the bayou with a lantern and no plan for grief. Six months he had lived in the stone tomb he built for her, sleeping beside her silver coffin. His skin had gone gray. His orange eyes ached from watching for her. Now something in the black water called him, and he wanted to believe. "Lucien." The word slid across the reeds. "Come to me." He took one step into the mud. Cold slime closed over his boot. He wanted to keep walking until the water swallowed him. But he had learned, in these long nights, that the dead do not always tell the truth. So he had brought a test. In his fist he held a braid of red hair, capped in silver. She had given it to him before the sickness took her. Only she knew the small song they had woven while making it. A trick in the water could steal her voice. It could not steal that. "Sing the braiding song," Lucien called. His breath shook. "Sing it, and I will come." The bayou went quiet. Frogs stopped. Then the voice answered, sweet and eager. "Come first, my love. Come, come, come." It did not sing. It only pulled. The water near his knees bulged. A shape rose, and it was not a woman. A hound broke the surface, black-bodied, its head a red maw of teeth like a snapping flower. It had worn her voice as a lure. It lunged for his throat. Lucien fell back into the reeds. The jaws snapped shut on empty air. He scrambled up the bank, heart slamming, and swung the lantern. Glass shattered against the beast's flower-head. Oil caught. Fire ran across its skull, and the thing shrieked in a voice that was almost hers. That sound nearly broke him. He forced himself to turn and run. He did not stop until he reached the mausoleum. He slammed the iron door and pressed his back to it, gasping. On the peak above him the stone gargoyle kept its watch. Inside, her carved face slept on the silver lid, one side of the stone hollow where a braid should curl. Lucien slid to the floor and opened his fist. The red braid was still whole. He held the proof of what he had almost lost. The thing in the water had not been her. She was not calling him to drown. She was still gone, truly gone, and no easy voice would bring her back. He pressed the braid to the hollow in the stone. It fit. And in fitting, it showed him the way forward. If a lie could rise from the water wearing her voice, then something real of her still lingered here. He would not chase phantoms again. He would find where she truly waited.