A bone-jarring crack sounded as the front of the house splintered, plaster and brick tumbling into the encroaching black hole.
Mama leapt off the bench, sweeping Cassandra into her arms and backing away, her hand tangled in Cassandra’s hair as she pressed Cassandra’s face against her chest.
“Don’t look,” she whispered. “Don’t look.”
Cassandra pinched her eyes shut and clapped her hands over her ears, but it wasn’t enough to drown out the sounds of the house falling to pieces around her.
The floor beneath them trembled violently and disjointed screams from the piano tumbled away, echoing as the instrument was swallowed by the pulsing darkness.
Cassandra opened her eyes, could barely breathe as tendrils of black oozed up the splintered walls.
The ground beneath them cracked, and Mama threw Cassandra onto the intact portion of the floor as she plummeted into the pit, reaching out with a hand to grab a cracked floorboard. It barely held her weight, bending as she struggled to pull herself out.
“Mama!” Cassandra screamed, laying flat on the floor and gripping her mother’s wrist, trying to pull her to safety.
She pulled, grunting and gritting her teeth with the effort but Mama was too heavy and Cassandra was too little, too weak.
The floorboard cracked further, her mother slipping from her grip.
Frantic, she gazed down at Mama, but her mother’s expression had changed.
“Find her,” she said, her voice coated in steel.
“Find who?” Cassandra wailed.
Her mother’s dark eyes shifted to an opaque white and the voice that parted her lips was not one voice, but thousands. Millions. Every voice that had ever existed and would ever exist in the whole of time, yet it held a hint of feminine softness in its terrible echo.
“I see without seeing. I know without knowing. I live without living. I am the beginning and the end of eternity.”
“Mama,” Cassandra whimpered, scrabbling for her mother’s slipping fingers.
Mama’s dark eyes returned and her voice was her own once again.
“Don’t cry, my bravest girl in Ethyrios.” A smile of pure peace and contentment bloomed on her mother’s lovely face.
Mama’s fingers slipped away with a pop and Cassandra screamed as her mother fell away, her words fading as the darkness consumed them both.
“I’ll be waiting for you.”
* * *
A needleof sunlight pierced her eyelids as she reached across the bed—empty, yet still warm from his body.
Satin sheets slid from her naked form as she sat upright and surveyed her surroundings, a room crafted entirely of white rock glistening like milky ice in the morning light. Throughout the floor and walls, rainbow-colored sparks shimmered like distant galaxies.
Beyond the bed, an arched double door opened onto a balcony crafted of the same glowing rock.
She plucked up her black silk robe, a spill of ink against the pale floor, and a heaviness at her back strained against the fabric before slipping through. The unfamiliar weight dragged as she stepped onto the warm floor, the rock heated by some inner fire.
Through the doors, monumental, snow-topped peaks speared for the sky like a row of fangs.
She strode onto the balcony, the weight at her back lifting, spreading, soaking in the sun’s rays.
A rumbling roar rose from a sea of people stretched across a plain of lilies, white bell-shaped petals cupping yellow spikes nestled in a field of green.
The roar morphed into a word, chanted relentlessly with a reverence that caused the weight at her back to climb higher.
The word tickled her ears, sent shivers through her soul.
