Preludes & Elegies by M.S. Hund

Author:M.S. Hund [Hund, M.S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jebesyl Press

Ynys Graig

The Dreambetween, 1802

Maria leans against the stone frame of the narrow window and stares out over the ranked masses of brown hills. The pile of blasted rock that is Ynys Graig places her above the Desolation, giving her a clear view to the distant horizon.

So much the better to spot the approach of an enemy. An enemy like the demon that still impersonates her lost love. She can feel its presence with the expanded dreaming senses granted to her by the mothering spirit. She knows as well that it is aware of her, that it knows she seeks refuge in the castle atop Ynys Graig.

So why does it stay away now that she has returned to the dream after years of exile? After years of coming to terms with what the demon has done to her? After years of surviving fits and visions, doctors and chemicals?

And the birth of her son.

The demon’s reticence is both pleasure and pain. She does not want to see it, does not want to be reminded of what she has lost. And yet the same dreaming senses that tell her of its presence let her see it more clearly than she ever has in the waking or in the dream. There is more than just a surface resemblance between the demon and Francis. It bears his shape, but it also bears something of his soul. Though she knows that it cannot be her beloved Francis, she still longs to be near this echo of his presence.

She misses him. Misses him more each day that the child Frederick grows before her eyes in the waking world.

Their child. Hers and the demon’s.

It is probably not right that she is raising Frederick in the lunatic confines of Padmore Lodge, but where else would the child go? Doctor Gibson—the kind doctor—might take him in, but Maria cannot bear to be parted with him. Though she hated and feared the child at first, there is too much of Francis—of the real Francis—in the child for her to continue hating him. Nor is leaving the asylum an option. Not with a bastard child in tow. Not with the fits and visions that continue to plague her waking life.

If life it can truly be called.

Though Maria suspects that she is permanently broken, things have been better in both waking and the dream of late. Less fraught. More stable. Doctor Gibson has managed to persuade his fellows that she need not always be bound to her bed or have her mind reduced to a chemical fog by the apothecary’s art. And with the resulting stability, Maria has been able to dream more.

In the dream she has found something like solace.

In the castle on the hill, watched over by the mothering spirit.

Despite the presence of the demon that wears Francis’s shape.

She feels him out there.

Hunting.

Pursuing girls. Young, so young. He binds and fascinates them with song, a song Maria catches echoes and fragments of. It reminds her of Francis. Poor, lost Francis.

And those poor, lost girls.

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