The hooded figure in the doorway stands out of reach of the candle’s flame, its face completely concealed in shadow, its eyes obscured as they wander shrewdly over the room and its sole occupant. For a moment it remains there, looking more like a reaper than the Goddess herself, heavy with watchfulness, with expectation.
Then she steps into the room, and the dim light falls across the soft smile on her face, the hands offered in a supplicating gesture.
She is a beauty who died on the cusp of middle age, and it is impossible not to mourn for her. Her bones are so fine it is as if they were artist-carved, her lips so plush they must have been designed for kissing. But it is her eyes that are the most remarkable, glittering even in the silver of death, rimmed with thick eyelashes darker than the far corners of the room. The are wide with hope and vulnerability as she takes him in, darting eagerly over his face, his hands, the stack of books and papers on his desk.
“You are the scribe?” She inquires warmly, her English faintly accented by some otherworldly tongue, so diminished by her time in the afterworld that it is impossible to place it. She moves closer to the desk, places her fingers on it so lightly, it is as if she touches a holy relic. “I have searched everywhere for you, everywhere! Your magic was a lighthouse in this wasteland. I have waited so long, so long…” her beautiful lips are trembling, her words breaking over emotion like river water on the rocks. She is in such pain, such pain, and relief is there within his grasp to give. A tiny sob escapes her, as she collapses into the chair before him.
“They tell me you are able to initiate contact with a medium in the living world. I have never met a man who could do this. Please, please–” both her hands are on the table now, palms facing up, a begger-woman wanting only the barest scrap upon which to survive, “teach me how. I am cut off, here, from the ancestors that should have welcomed me. There was no time for the rituals that would have saved me. I am alone, alone…”
Upon her arms, there is a word carved in a foreign alphabet. It is written over and over again, sometimes in careful, elegant script…others in haste, in sorrow, or rage. Without blood or change, they neither fester nor heal, remain eerie slivers taken from the flesh. It is impossible to tell which ones are old, which new, or whether they were all inflicted in the same frantic moment.
“Please. I have to reach my daughter.”
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