Mary's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

The book grows heavier in Mary's arms as she walks. By the time she reaches the east wing's far door, it shudders against her ribs. Void follows a step behind. Neither of them speaks. The pages are pulling at something, and Mary can feel the pull in her own chest, like a hook set behind the bone. They end up in a stone chamber she has not seen before. An archway stands at its center, swirling with dark light, fragments of mirror set into its frame. Each shard shows a different sliver of them — her hand, his wing, her eye, his mouth. The book wants to be opened here. Mary knows it the way she knows her own reflection. She sets the book on a flat dark tablet near the arch. The tablet's surface catches starlight that isn't there. The pages flip themselves. Her portrait surfaces on the left. Void's surfaces on the right. Between them, lines begin to draw — thin black threads reaching from her image to his, from his to hers, knotting in the middle of the spine. Mary feels it then. Something she has not named, even to herself, lifts in her throat and tries to climb onto the page. She sees Void's jaw tighten. Whatever he refuses to want is being dragged up beside her secret. Across the chamber, a pale statue of two shadowed figures locked in an embrace begins to crack along its seams. The strain is not in the stone. The strain is in them. "Close it," Void says. His voice is quieter than usual. "Mary. Close it now." She slams the book shut. The threads snap. The statue settles with a long, low sound, fracture lines stopped halfway through. Mary lifts the book from the tablet and feels how it has changed — lighter by exactly what it almost took. She did not master it. She stopped it. That is not the same thing. Void does not look at her, and she does not look at him, and the space between them now has a shape it did not have before.