Page 105 of Wild Reverence

I continued to trace the Gatekeeper’s words in my mind.

Are you certain he will wait for you?

Time continued to spin like an eddy, even if I could not feel its pull. And the Gatekeeper, while pleased with my scribing, seemed to be waiting for something else.

It took me a while to grasp what she was offering, but there came a moment when it struck me like a bolt of lightning.

She had the power to weigh lives for the mists, but I had the power to weigh lives and return them if I thought fit.

She and I were our own golden scales; we stood side by side, a fearsome pairing to all who gazed upon us.

We listened, we wrote, and we weighed life. We banished, we welcomed, we carried souls to their appointed place.

Hugh had begged me to bear him back to the mortal realm, but most of the dead did not even know what to ask of me when they arrived at the gate, thirsty and—more often than not—bewildered. They spilled their life out in panicked fragments.

I soon realized I could thwart both Orphia and Rowena.

I could unravel these warps and wefts of Death and Fate by bringing back souls, but it was not as simple as I had first believed.

There were consequences for pulling threads loose from the tapestry, for bringing someone back who had been appointed to die.

Not long into my service, a young mortal woman arrived at the gate, weeping.

When the Gatekeeper found her lacking for the mists, I chose to bear her back to the living realm.

“Take my hand,” I told her. “Do not let go of me until I tell you it is safe.” But when we trod through the thickest, darkest portion of her nightmare, she let go of my hand.

I lost her, watching as she turned into a shadow, doomed to haunt her own nightmare for eternity.

I was sick from the memory of it; I did not attempt to bear another soul again for some time.

But then one day a mortal man arrived and knelt before us at the gate.

His sorrow was tangible, his heartache was vivid as the blood that dripped from his neck.

He reminded me of Vincent in a way, and when he told us that he had been killed and separated from his one true love on their wedding night, I was moved by compassion.

“Take care, Matilda,” the Gatekeeper murmured to me when I offered him the chance to return. “There are some things that are doomed to be, no matter what divinity believes.”

“This is his decision to return, should he take my offer,” I said. “Not mine.”

When I held out my hand to him, he brightened.

He took it, and I drew him through his nightmare, all the way to the wasted door.

But imagine my surprise when he arrived at the misty gate again the day after.

He had been murdered a second time, and his desperation and anguish were only heightened to have endured the pain of separation and the shock of Death twice.

I did not bear his soul again.

I suppose you could say that I was also waiting for something more. I just never expected it to come in the shape of a little boy with blue-gray eyes and dark hair. A child who babbled for a moment before he looked directly at me and said a familiar name at the gate.

“Vincent?”

As a child, the boy did not have much to tell about his life. He did not speak in sentences. He spoke in words and jumbled thoughts and names. Vincent’s continued to bubble up, as if the child was looking for him.

I did not know if this boy was his son or not, but they were connected, somehow.

I was suddenly so overcome that I set down my quill and walked away.

I strode through the iridescent creek and beneath tangled tree boughs.

There was no breath for me to draw, no heart to thrum in my chest. The hole was still there; I could trace its jagged edge with my fingertip, the cold shine of my own bone.

And I unraveled beneath the stars of the wastes.

I gasped and fell to my knees. I crawled, swallowing the salt of my tears, trying to dull my agony.

I remembered, then, what it felt like to be alive after being dead for so many years.

My mind was like quicksilver. It darted through endless possibilities, trying to make sense of this encounter.

I had been gone for close to six years now. This child could be his, and I sought to imagine the woman Vincent might have created such life with. Something I could never give him; divinity could not twine with mortal blood, and we both knew it.

I did not want him to be alone. I could not bear to think of him lonely, and yet it was a blade in my throat when I envisioned him taking another in his arms. If this was where his life had brought him—if something good had come from my death—then should I let him go?

Why should I return once the seven years ended if he was content, loved by another?

Why cause us both disruption, grief, and regret?

Perhaps I should stay at the Gatekeeper’s side, weighing souls. Perhaps I should finally walk the mists.

I returned to the gate, my face betraying nothing. The boy still waited, solemnly, as well as the Gatekeeper.

“Hold my hand,” I said to him. “I will take you home, back to Vincent.”

I carried this child through his worst nightmare.

When he cried, I drew him up into my arms. I walked him to the wasted door, and not once did he let go of me.

His trust in me was implicit, and I could have wept to feel such faith.

It was a flame that kindled in the coldest part of me.

Once he was gone, returned to his mortal life, I sat for a long moment, staring at the threshold I could not cross.

A year might have passed.

I was lost within my own thoughts, memories of my old life.

But then I took a sheet of parchment from my belt. The ink, the quill.

Dear Vincent, I wrote.

His name was dark; it gleamed across the page. The words were stilted at first. I had never written something for myself. I hardly knew where to begin until I imagined us sitting before his hearth fire in the castle tower, speaking as we once had done, late into the night.

I wrote him a letter.

When I was finished, I folded the parchment and approached the wasted door. My soul could not pass over it, but perhaps my words could. I had once thought my magic could only flow one way, until Vincent had challenged me.

Have you ever tried?

I had not, and I closed my eyes, thinking of where I wanted this letter to go. How I could deliver it not with my hands or my swift feet or even my breath, but by magic alone.

I envisioned windows first, welcoming streams of light, then doorways with thresholds that shifted.

The ley lines of the under realm that ran like hidden creeks beneath the mortal world, glittering with gemstones.

I needed to connect this wasted door to another.

At first, I thought of the wasted door of Fury Tower.

The one I had passed through to find Nathaniel’s soul.

But that door was not on a ley line. I could not find its light, its magical pulse, and so I let my mind drift further, until it fixated on Maiden Tower.

This is where magic gathered. A place where two realms overlapped.

There was also a door to the under realm here, in the abandoned bedchamber; I had used it to come and go. But when I envisioned the passage in the wall and the stairs that led downward, I felt an unexpected coldness. This threshold opened to somewhere, and I needed a door that led to nowhere.

I turned my inner eye over that bedchamber, remembering its every detail. The stone walls, the bed, the cobwebs, the candle tapers. My attention eventually riveted on the wardrobe. Those doors were wasted. And my magic flared warm and bright, eager to open them.

Trembling, I knelt before the door in the wasteland. At first, I wondered if I should open it, but I worried it would sense my presence. The threshold would bar itself to me again, as it had with Bade.

I swallowed and slid the folded parchment beneath the door instead.

I watched as my letter vanished.