IGNIS E TENEBRAE
(or, Fire and Darkness, which this pseudo-first chapter discusses much, but not as tamely as the term "discuss" would suggest)
It starts with that crack of light, snaking across the door.
It's something that only decades will scour from memory, I immediately know. The crack, like an exploding planet, slowly giving way to a sudden flash of torches that brands white-hot lines across the backs of my eyes. Shadows beginning to dart through the half-lit room, turning vases to lighthouse beacons, orange shapes between curling shadows.
I wait for the scream to erupt from where it sits in my throat.
In a hazy blur, my parents are suddenly there too, conjuring themselves from dooming dark doorways. No longer brave like I remember them being. The wood is crashing inwards now, and they are raiding their wardrobe for the weapons. Something like a straight gleam of steel.
"Who?" I croak instead, dry, dried by fire, but my voice is too thin against that crackling light.
I've seen Ma's eyes flash with admonishment. Today they flash with terror; it's all somewhat different, trembles a little, not so piercing, the difference between a spear and a shadow. "Hide—" she breathes— "you know why they're here, where I told you to hide, we'll come when we can—"
Yes. I know you will. I have to lie to myself sometimes. If I can't lie for myself, I could never lie for Cat. And she needs both.
My sister's sleeping in the living room, curled around cushions, mouth gaping wide—I dart back into the shadows, leaving the glow of the breaking door behind and the immense pounding and the pop of wood that threatens the snapping of the entire thing—over to where she dozes, so at peace it's hard to think she's the little warrior I am not.
She's woken by the clamping of my fingers about her shoulders.
"Huh—"
"Shush! Shut up!" I'm surprised I can whisper so angrily.
And as my sweaty grip relinquishes her and as she springs upright like a doll with her eyes pulled wide, whites showing—the tide breaks behind me. Gushes of torch-armed men, flooding down the stairs, through the door and into the gaps left by the darkness. Firebrands flashing so near I can feel their scorching rage beating against my face. Funny that it is the sun they embossed in their armour, all dressed in lies and the pleasance of purity; funny that it is the name of Light that they cite as their cause.
The one true thing I know: they are thirsting for blood.
My blood.
"Cat! Follow!"
We sink down cracked basement steps, her hand slippery and vice-like in mine. I hear Catalina sobbing for me behind as her knees are scraped by stone, but there is no time to ease this blow. It is like descending the mountains to hell, one outcrop at a time. Bump, bump, bump—down, down, and who knows when it ends.
I drag her forth; she is too mortified to walk—the gasp for life leaves me as the dank, sturdy basement rises to meet us, familiar and yet alien in this shivering livid darkness the torches haven't yet torn to shreds. It smells of rats and old carpets, thinks better left forgotten—forgotten forever, now—now that they're here. My eyes shift across the shadows among the wardrobes and tables—the oil lamp whose wick never once caught the first spark—the dry porcelain sink where we washed our red paints and where they spiraled down in swirls almost bloodlike.
Behind the books.
With a cry I fly across the room, and kick the bookcase down, twenty thousand pages fluttering, bird-like, scattering across the floor, books breaking at their spines. My heart feels as if it were being ripped from its rightful place in my chest—but again, no time to care for the books. I will never see them again.
A black passageway roars in the wall where the grand bookcase stood. Has this been here for all the time we have lived here? Its shadows are forbiddingly solid, and there seems to me a cloud of unknown things, tentacles, snakes, writhing within.
But Catalina is already dancing into the shadow of the tunnel. "Wait!" I snatch the lamp off the sideboard, a box of matches from the groaning drawer beneath.
Where is my staff? My wizard staff—I quickly realise that it will have to be lost too, lost forever. Perhaps lost to whatever flame might come.
I can always buy a new staff once the torches are no longer chasing us.
The timbers catch and the rafters are blazing cannibals bleeding smoke, great jaws chomping themselves to splinters, and the door that once held faithfully against the knocking knuckles of postmen and delivery boys is a stack of ready lacquered firewood, and the house is Hell as it is described: the lake which burns with fire and brimstone. The second death. Of brimstone it stinks, and char on bones, and things that want to be dead, and raw phosphorous vileness.
It is all dark, sleepy, breathless, the street outside. The cobblestones gleam odes to the moon.
Then it no longer is, for the house rises in flame. Rises like the sun. Rises like a revolution. Rises like the bloom of spring, twisting lily flames swallowing the butterflies whole.
And dead ash wafts everywhere, softer than snow. And the furnace begins to melt the windows, so the frames and muntins crack and collapse into the fuel pit, stirring the monster higher. And everyone, everything, in its black confines burns alive—some sobbing, shattering like ceramics, some clutching at blazing maces—mock heroes—some grinning like skulls at the infernal deed, the tangles of hardened ideology.
A/N 2, which is significantly shorter: It looks like the start of a chapterfic, and I have a good mind to continue it once I've decided what's going on. A hero? A member of the Resistance? Someone allied with evil? For now, I only have sketches of an idea what it concerns, but no true idea of a plot. It could also do well as a the prompt of a co-written piece. Anyone interested?
The title is to be changed, by the way.
Also, does anyone want my deleted Phantom fic back up?