“No.” His mouth did something at the corner that was almost a smile and was not. “No, of course you do not. Allow me.”
He took one half-step forward. Not a full pace. A consideration. A courtesy.
“I was born with pride,” he said.
He said it flatly. As though he were reading out a charge against himself in a court of law.
“I have never had to earn it. I have never had to choose it. I have never been required to summon it from any difficult place in my body, because I have not, in the long age of my existence, been in a difficult place. I sit on a throne I did not build. I rule a domain that bends to my mood without my consent. I am the presumptive heir of the Obsidian seat and I have never, in all my years, woken in the morning uncertain of my own worth. I was made this way. And yet, I have Pride—for I am it. I am the sin, and I am the lord of the sin, and the sin is my whole inheritance.”
He let the words sit on the marble between us. The hall did not echo. Halls like this one knew better than to echo over a man like him.
“You,” he said, “are my opposite.”
The eyes shifted, the gold of them moving in those slow rings, and they held my face the way they had held it from the throne—steady, unblinking, without measurement.
“You were born with something I have never had. You were born with talent. You were born with grace. You were born witha determination so absolute that it made you, by the age of twenty-one, the finest skater alive on your world. You earned every inch of your magnificence. Every inch. You were the truest version of pride that has ever existed, precious one, because yours was made and mine was given.”
He let that one sit too. I felt my knee click. Nobody heard. Nobody ever heard.
“And then,” he said, very quietly, “you lost it. But you shouldn’t have. It should burn in you still.”
The cold under my sternum became something else. Something hotter. Something worse.
“Don’t,” I said.
“The Veil opens,” he continued, as though I had not spoken, as though don’t was a word he had decided long ago not to recognise from me, “to the woman who is my opposite in the precise place I am most hollow. You are the only being in any of the seven realms who has earned what I was given, and the only one who has lost what I cannot ever lose. Do you understand me, Maria. You are not here by accident. The Veil does not lift accidentally. There is no other woman it could have called.”
I made a sound.
It was supposed to be a laugh. It came out of me wrong—too high, too thin, a sound I did not recognise from my own throat. I put my left hand over my mouth and the right hand stayed in the kangaroo pocket. The cougar’s loose paw moved against my sternum in the small wind.
“This is a hallucination,” I said.
I said it into my own hand.
“I haven’t eaten since six.” My voice was the rink-coach voice, on autopilot, the bright competent voice I used to tell parents about their kids. “I’ve been low-blood-sugar before, I know what it feels like, I—I drove the Zamboni, I—the diesel fumes, sometimes the diesel fumes, in a closed building, with the chilleroff—I’m having an episode, I’m, I’m on the rubber matting at center ice and I’m—I’m going to wake up, I’m going to wake up in a minute, this isn’t—”
“You are not hallucinating, and you know this.”
So simply put.
“You are in the realm beneath your own. You are in Infernum. You are, in the language of your people, in hell.”
The word landed in my chest.
It landed in a small bright awful way. It was true, I knew it.
Hell.
I had been a churchgoer once. Not for years. But long enough.
“No,” I said.
“Yes.”
“No, I—”
“Yes, precious one. But not the hell you are afraid of.” He said it gently. “There are no souls in agony here. There is no fire of damnation. There is no judgement of your life waiting at the end of this hall. The word your people use is a translation, and it is a poor one. This is the underworld. A shadow realm beside the one you lived in. Older than your world, parallel to it, lit by no sun. Beautiful. Mostly. We are not what your scriptures say we are. We are something else, and you are not in any danger from any of it.”
