The Dark Court by Vyvyan Evans

Author:Vyvyan Evans [Evans, Vyvyan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781739996253
Publisher: Nephilim Publishing

Chapter 24

I was up early after a fitful night. My bioclock showed just before five a.m. I tossed and turned but couldn’t sleep anymore—remorse was stabbing me, quite literally. My chest was throbbing—a strange tightness was gripping my heart, so that it felt as if it might stop beating. That was new.

I had killed. Of course, I hadn’t wanted to, or maybe part of me did, in the moment. But I had caused Balladur’s death. It would have happened anyway, but not for another thirty years. Those were years I had burned, stolen from him. I sat up, naked in my hotel bed, and draped the sheets around my shoulders as sobs slowly wracked me. Am I in fact a monster? I glanced through the murk of the early morning gloom, across the room at the mirror on the wall opposite. My face was puffy, my hair a mess, and I felt suddenly despicable as sobs heaved my chest. Tears flowed down my cheeks. What have I done?

As I reflected on events, my thoughts returned to Selaphiel and the revelations I had barely had time to process since arriving in Paris two days before. I was still feeling resentment that I was snared by the Mind Chant, the outrageous claim that I had to serve the Sage. That I might be someone’s experiment incensed me.

My brooding reflections wandered back to my past. I realized I had grown up with the absurd idea that we were all born as blank slates. That was teenage me, the cry for help of an existentialist misfit. I had once naïvely believed I possessed existence before essence, that I was flesh and blood before I had a purpose. That my essence, who I was and my raison d’être, was defined in terms of the unique experiences that befell me, the things that happened to me. That I had no agency. But the thing about agency is you don’t get given it. That, in fact, is the precise opposite of what it’s meant to be. Restriction of choices—that is exactly not what agency is.

The Monster happened. But it and he did not define me. My mother did not define me. I refused to visit her in the asylum in Moesia—I always had. She would die alone. Even my father’s death didn’t define me. I was scarred, sure. Quite literally. I even bore his handprint around my ankle, the mark that itched, from the day he saved me when I was still an infant. I often despised myself. And I suffered. But I never suffered fools, nor did I suffer gladly. And being a blank slate was never my cup of tea.

So, in my teens, more or less an orphan, with only Kaye Wilbur to care whether I lived or died, I rejected the whole charade. I would seize control, be myself. And in my darkest agonies of teenage crisis, when I felt myself to be the most unloved, lonely, and misunderstood creature that had ever existed, I stumbled upon the dawning realization that there was no one else I would rather be.

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