The Goblin's Crown

Chapter Fifty Nine: Hammer and Flame

"How many more riddles do you intend on asking?" I scowled at the lovely woman flying about my head on moon silver wings. Each riddle seemed to show me darker and darker truths, truths I would much rather have remained hidden. I shuttered to even imagine what else she wished to show me.

"Just a few more. These are the last. I swear it." She landed before me without sound. Her long hair fell slowly around her, cascading about her shoulders and trailing in a stream behind her. "What's wrong? Are you not enjoying yourself?"

I rubbed circles into my brow in an effort to clear away the heartbeat pounding in my skull. "Just get on with it," I muttered.

"I am greater than God and more evil than the devil. The poor have me. The rich need me and if you eat me you shall die." She said. She swooped around me, drawing ever closer. Her feathers brushed my cheeks and her breath stirred my hair. Her pale face filled my vision and her dark eyes drew my gaze like a moth to a flame. In them, I saw all and I saw nothing, the world, all of existence itself and nothing but utter darkness. Those eyes were pieces of the void, prisons unto themselves.

The answer came to me like a lightning strike. "Nothing," I answered.

She surged forward with a piercing laugh. I felt her move through me, her power dragging through my muscles and shaking my bones. The world around me flickered and dimmed in quick succession. Then, slowly, shadowy forms took shape amidst my world of gray until finally, I was clearly standing in the middle of a crowd on a London street. The people around me shouted and snarled venomous words of hate and disgust, calling for someone's death. Their eyes were wild and spittle foamed at the corners of their rabid, horrid mouths.

I shuttered in my skin. "No." I breathed raggedly. I staggered on my feet, backing away from the gallows looming ahead of me. It cast a long shadow. I could feel its darkness touching my skin, felt its evil twisting my guts. When a broad-shouldered man with dark, thinning hair was karted up onto the platform to meet the hangman, I could do nothing but turn my face away. "Not this." I pleaded, glaring up at Athane through my lashes. I grabbed Athane's pale skirt, clawed at it with my trembling fingers, barely registering the sickening feeling of warm flesh they were met with. It was as if her clothes were not made of fabric or thread but of flesh and blood. "I do not want to see this again. I don't care what it is you wanted to show me. I will not watch him die all over again."

"You don't have to." She smiled almost warmly. "You already saw what happened to him this day. The truths I show, are things you did not." In an eerily motherly way, she stroked my head, brushing my golden locks. "Look closely." Gently, she touched my shoulder, coaxing me into turning around.

My eyes scanned the crowd, passing over the murderers' disgusting faces. My eye was drawn to a familiar figure near the back of the crowd. A man clad all in gray. A noise shook its way out of my lungs, something between a drowning person's first gasp of air, and a happy sob. I know not which it was.

That noise was followed swiftly by his name. It rushed from my lungs like a song over and over again as I ran as fast as I could towards him, giving not a care to all the spirits through which I passed.

I knew I wouldn't be able to touch him or speak to him, yet my hand reached for him all the same, the fingers aching with the want to run through his mousy hair and stroke his sunken cheek. Just to feel his familiar cool skin, to lay my palm against his chest and feel his heart beating beneath it.

He was standing just beneath the awning of a fruit vendors' stall. His back was against one of the poles holding up the scrap of shabby cloth. His arms and ankles were crossed nonchalantly, his entire being relaxed and at ease amidst the crowd of blood-thirsty heathens. He plucked an apple from the stall's counter and took a bite of the shiny, red fruit. His teeth gave an audible snap as they pierced the fruit's skin and sank into juicy flesh. He smiled as he ate, watching the festivities with the same joy as a child playing a game. Just as I was a breath apart from him, he turned his head.