CHAPTER 3
Behold, I send an Angel before thee, to keep thee in the way.
- Exodus 23:20
Slowly,
Siverelle drifted from the darkness of her unconscious state and into the even
greater darkness of awareness. She
tried to focus her sight, but the blackness that enveloped her was too thick
for her drowsy eyes to penetrate, yielding no definable subjects to center
on. The icy, inky blackness of this
place enveloped her like a suffocating shroud.
The place smelled strange. An
unnatural, antiseptic stink filled the thick air. There was a chemical sterility about the atmosphere and it left
an acrid taste on her tongue she longed to spit out.
But
there was another aroma here also.
Foul. Fetid. Musky.
The odor reopened a long dormant memory of hers, when as a child she and
some friends had accidentally disturbed a rat's nest in an old barn. The hideous little creatures quickly
vanished into holes, but they left behind the stench of dank hair, matted with
their feces and moistened with their urine.
Siverelle never forgot the smell and the similar reek that commanded
this air made her feel as unclean now as she felt all those years ago.
Because
her sight failed her in this shadowy place, her mind instinctively switched its
attention to her ears, which she realized were receiving the strangest of
sounds. It seemed organized, like some
sort of speech, but nothing like Siverelle had ever heard before. She had been an accomplished student of
language at the university, so the sounds intrigued her as much as it
frightened her. She couldn't even begin
to guess what it was she was hearing.
It seemed to be coming from both her left and her right, as if two
persons standing on each side of her were speaking this insane chatter between
themselves. It made her shiver with
apprehension.
She
tried to turn her head to look, but as soon as she moved, she felt a wave of
nausea sweep through her. She laid her
head back down and immediately felt a little better. She decided she had better rest a little more before trying to
move her head again. She vaguely
recalled that she had suffered a head injury somehow and that was probably the
cause of her vertigo.
She
tried to lift her hand, but found she could not. She then tried the other but found it equally immovable. For a moment, she though she was paralyzed,
but she quickly realized she was bodily restrained. She struggled, weakly, to move her torso and legs, but discovered
them to be firmly bound also. The
bindings felt very secure, so much so that she was certain they would hold her
fast, even if she could muster her full strength.
Siverelle
suddenly grasped that her shaking was caused by more than just anxiety. She was physically chilly. In a realization that made her flush with
shame, Siverelle realized that she had been stripped completely naked. The bizarre voices prattled on in the
darkness.
Fighting
to keep calm, Siverelle tried to think back to how she came to be in this
predicament, but found only a tangled mass of murky images where she had hoped
to find coherent memories. The last
clear recollection she could pull into the spotlight of lucid thought was her
mad dash to ram Etyiam's renegade craft.
After that, the memories were as twisted as her ship after the
collision.
She
remembered being flung about like one of her daughter's old rag dolls, before
being overcome by the unmistakably unnatural sensation of the chronoleap. When the jump terminated and her ship
reentered normal space, she fought to regain control of the spiraling saucer,
only to find she was on a very steep, and very unstoppable, decent into
atmosphere. The ship's damaged navigation
controls had just enough life left in them to allow her to flatten the angle of
reentry enough to prevent her from burning up, but not enough to allow a
controlled landing.
Siverelle
had done what she could to arrest the plummet, but it was still a rough
impact. She guessed it was somewhere
around the craft's third bounce that she began to lose consciousness. By the time the ship's inertia was fully
spent and it finally came to rest, she was completely cataleptic.
So now here she was; bound, naked, cold and terrified; strapped to a table while unseen monsters jabbered to each other in a hellish dialect. Siverelle forced her own tongue into action.
"Where
am I?" she inquired out into the darkness, "Who is there? I cannot see you."
As
if in answer, the voices fell silent.
Suddenly, Siverelle wished she had remained silent. To her left, a small but very bright light
flashed on, making her wince at the sudden glare. Now she could see a silhouette hidden behind the artificial aura,
holding the light, as a tall figure drew over her. She strained to see, but the tiny lamp was too bright and
eclipsed anything beyond it. The figure
spoke. This time, Siverelle was sure it
was speaking directly to her, though she could not possibly understand.
"Please... help me..." she pleaded to the
apparition, "What do you want from me?"
The
light dropped down a bit just then and unintentionally illuminated the face of
her inquisitor from below, casting harsh shadows upward on a visage so hellish
it did not require the peculiar lighting to invoke terror. Menacing blue eyes peered out from a flat,
pallid, mammalian face almost completely covered with rusty fur.
Siverelle's
horrified shriek drove the demon back.
She struggled mindlessly and fruitlessly in her restraints. Vartyiar!
No wonder she couldn't remember anything after the crash! She had not survived it! She was dead! And what was far worse, she was damned! Her soul had been cast into the icy depths of Scoggast, awaiting
an eternity of torment at the hairy hands of the dreaded Vartyiar.
"T'Chen..."
she gasped, "T'Chen, why have you forsaken me?"
She
gazed heavenward, up into the comforting darkness above, away from the hirsute
demons that hemmed about her. She
screamed until her lungs where empty and her voice gave out. Then quietly and mercifully, Siverelle slid
slowly back into the embracing shadows of blessed unconsciousness.