A Cold Cry

A Flower

Will you regret?

Will you waver?

Will you fall into the nearer void, or the further?

The voice hissed hatefully all about him.

There is no escape from them both. 'Twould be better that you yielded.

Was it of him, or apart from him? He knew not.

He opened his eyes, and walls of grey spun blurrily around him, sharpening and coagulating slowly into a face framed in stones of veiling shadows. A face of such terrible calm that he shut his eyes from it, afraid of that calm that knew no pity, overturning all restraints of law and order in its inexorable tide. And he wondered how he had not seen it.

Naught moved the man, and naught would ever move him.

"What a weakling you are," Culathan said softly above him. "I could make you strong."

Carras' eyes opened sharply, and he stared up into Culathan's dark gaze.

"I could make you a byword among your kind – a legend."

"At a price," answered Carras. His voice rasped in his own ears, as though weight still rested on his chest. "There is a price, and I will not pay it." He directed all the scorn he had in the glance he gave to Culathan.

"Will you not?" The mockery assailed him like the thrust of spears. "Why should you resist? Where is your honour? You have failed your king."

"Cada!" The anguished cry burst from his lips.

"What worth is there left in you, and what reason to hold to an upright life?"

"Cada, ilevae!"

"Stop?" Culathan surveyed him with a deathly smile. "Why should I stop? It is my only desire to ruin you, to stamp out all the light and hope in your life and replace it with vileness and hate. I will make you a deader winter than myself."

"Not all in winter is evil," said Carras.

"No? I say that it is."

And Culathan leaned over him, and his hard fingers gripped his throat. "You were a fair thing, once. A proud flower among the world of men, and I trembled at the thought of you, and feared your coming. Now you are nothing. Ice is becoming the flower; it hardens and cracks, and is ugly with pits and yellowed dirt. There is no escape for you, Carras, no escape but death – and you do not want death. Nay, though you speak very prettily, it is but a gloss.

"You call yourself a brave man in your heart, but you are not so. Do you not fear me? Do you not secretly desire to submit? You were mine once, and you long to return to me. You will never be free of my hand, Carras."

_

He dreamed in the night of a tree, tall and beautiful, and it bore a single blossom of incomparable purity. But as he watched, the sky grew yellow and sick, and a wind of filth blew across the tree. The leaves trembled, and a dull translucence crept across the gleaming petals.