Weekly Writing – November 16 2024

“I survived only by luck,” the guest recalled. “The path had broadened just then – or else our attacker wouldn’t have been able to stand on it – and my horse reared in terror. It nearly tossed me into the abyss, but avoided the blow that struck exactly where it had been standing.”
“That must have been terrible,” Trina said. It seemed all she could say, all the words from her limited experience that fit such a catastrophe. Death, to her, had always been just a brilliant colour in paintings. “I’ve never heard of anything living closer to the summit than we do, though. My mistress says it’s a barren place, useless to anyone.”
From the vale where the manor stood, it couldn’t even be seen. It was an early shadow on summer evenings, an iron-hard darkness in winter nights. It sheltered them from all of nature’s worst blows and greatest radiance. The path that led to the manor led nowhere else on that punishing road, and so, no one came there.
“She is very nearly right,” the guest said. “The thing that attacked us was not alive in the same sense as you or I. It was a guardian carved from stone. Are you familiar with how such things are animated?”
Yes. No, but- yes. The knowledge was there, like a box she had always somehow avoided stumbling over in a dark room. But even as she reached for that box in her mind, to see what might be inside, it vanished, pulled back out of her reach.
She was not the one who knew. It was her mistress who knew, who was watching through her, and had let her touch that knowledge just for a moment, perhaps even by accident.
“I’m…not sure,” she said. “Why don’t you tell me?”
If her mistress didn’t want her to know, it might be dangerous to ask. But if so- if so, her mistress could stop her somehow. Otherwise, she was going to keep moving within the new, wider bounds of that singular night, learning what she could from it. If punishment came in the morning, she would bear it, in exchange for that singular chance to become slightly more than the thing that dusted the mantels.