The Visitor

I don’t know how long I stared out the window, still dressed in my clothes of mourning, still trying to make sense of a senseless situation. The map I hadn’t gotten a chance to show Castor was spread out in front of me, but I couldn’t bear to look at it, my thoughts too troubled, too restless, too weary. Finally, unable to stare at unmoving shadows any longer, I crawled into bed and closed my eyes. Sleep came in splintered escape, the needles of dreams prickling at my conscience, I lost in my loneliness.

I don’t know how long I slept, whether it was ehns or ahns, but when wakefulness pulled at my eyes, forcing them to open, I noted someone had made a fire in my room. And someone was sitting in the chair near my bed, cloaked in darkness. Even though my eyes blurred with sleep and half lidded reality, my reaction was immediate. My hand slipped beneath the empty pillow beside me, a dagger soon held between me and the shadow I wasn't so sure wasn't there to kill me. Of course I knew he could have killed me in my sleep, but some preferred the taste of terror in their victims beforehand.

My voice was iced with fright when I asked him who he was in what he was doing in my room, resisting the urge to scream. I wasn’t really sure I wanted to scream at all. Maybe I wanted it all to end tonight. Perhaps I wanted to embrace death, before I had a chance to change my mind.

The shadow told me that he had come to deliver a message from the High Initiate Phelps, a name that drew a rasping sound from the back of my throat. A man I had never met, but was no less terrified of. He told me to undress, I refused, and the next thing I realized was his dagger had whispered across the strap of my shift, baring a breast from the fallen flap of fabric, I completely caught in the silvery dust of moonlight.

But in the end I was not raped as I had presumed. No brutal touches as I expected. And the message he delivered was not from Phelps as I had feared, but Castor himself, a specter of my past.

I now hold all of his monies, his possessions and his real estate. Everything was left to me, the will written in his own hand.

I am a rich woman, many times over.

He bid me goodnight and disappeared via the courtyard.

And I know I will see him again.