Light was the thing that burned its eyes and showed it the perverse twist of its own being; the hated ooze of its horror; the vileness of its nature.
It hated light more than it hated anything in all creation.
It wanted to destroy it. It wanted to make the whole world dark. It wanted to taste pain and create horror and let the world sink into the wretchedness of despair.
The darkness wanted to spread so far and so wide it would swallow every flicker, every pulse of light in the entire universe.
I knew the darkness.
I recognized it.
It had devoured me when I was a child, and it had fed me its fear and its terror ever since.
There’d always been darkness in me. We come into this world and are corrupted with its seeds. They may stay dormant, roots stretching deep, seeking the depths of hell, so they can spring up full-grown and terrifying. Or they might crop up as weeds, only to be mowed down again and again. Or they could grow and be scorched by our own blazing summer sun.
Because we all have light too.
It’s a battle.
People forget.
They only think about the great wars of history or the heroic mythical battles between good and evil. They don’t think this same battle is taking place every day, every second of every person’s life. The battle started at the beginning of time, and it’s been raging ever since.
One of the greatest feats the horrors, the leggerocks, and even the conjurers accomplished was convincing humans evil doesn’t exist. That right and wrong are relative. That truth is subjective. That there is no evil, only varying shades of gray.
It is very easy to win a war when you’ve convinced your enemy you aren’t real and that cavorting with you is all in good fun. They will dance with you all the way to the grave, and only when it’s too late will they see that they were dancing in the dark, with evil masked as a harmless companion.
I’ve never had that illusion.
Growing up in Hell Gate meant I saw the face of evil every day. But with the knowledge that absolute evil existed came the conviction that absolute good existed as well.
And then, just as quickly, I realized that while darkness might swallow an entire world, it only took a tiny candle to set the entire thing alight.
The darker the night became, the brighter a candle would glow.
So I held onto my light and hoped.
I had faith in good.
I held onto love.
I held onto Finn. To Luvic. To Justice and Griff. To myself.
But now, they were floating beneath me, smothered in darkness.
They were all dead.
All of them.
Celia too. Ragnor. The Smiths. Last and Primus. Every one of them was gone. The horror had consumed us all, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it.
In the past, when I was a nine, I’d always flown into a new body. Now, I wasn’t flying anywhere. I was smothered by the darkness.
Then another being stepped close and looked down at me.
“Mari,” it said.
I peered up, trying to see through the darkness.
