The Tattooed Heart (Messenger of Fear 2)

I would see. I would see whether Messenger’s lost love was there.

I would go to the Shoals.

I closed my eyes. And when I opened them again I was enveloped in the vile yellow mist that had from the first been my unwelcome companion. I heard nothing, touched nothing, saw nothing but that swirling, somehow aware mist. I felt its curiosity. I felt its contempt.

“I will see the Shoals,” I said in a reedy voice, and with a silent sneer the mist withdrew from me.

I don’t know what I expected, perhaps some Dante’s pit, perhaps some slasher movie’s dungeon, but what I saw as the mist cleared was like nothing I had imagined, at once more terrible by far, and yet, more beautiful.

I stood on a featureless desert plain of cracked, parched mud, like a drought-emptied reservoir. But this plain had no boundaries that I could see, but rather seemed to extend forever in every direction at once, as if it covered the entire earth—if any of this even was the earth that mortals know. My eyes were drawn irresistibly away from that soul-crushing emptiness to a singular feature that rose from the dry mud ocean.

A temple? Perhaps, but unlike anything built by human hands. A mountain rose from the plain, ten thousand feet of basalt so massive it seemed impossible that it did not sink of its own gigantic weight into the plain of cracked mud. The black mountain might almost have been a massive meteorite plopped down from orbit, so unlikely was its location. No rule of earthly geography could account for its overwhelming size in that otherwise featureless emptiness.

Atop this mountain sat a pyramid. It seemed to grow organically from the black rock, without clear boundaries, but as it rose it grew lighter in color, as though altitude had bleached away the black. Black faded to gray, which faded to white, and at the very point glittered like a jewel. The totality of it, the mountain and its pyramid, looked like all the coal ever mined, compressed with increasing heat and pressure until it formed a diamond at the top.

It was impossible for me to judge the distance with no point of reference; it might be a mile away, it might be a hundred, but however far the distance, I felt crushed by the size of that terrible edifice. Gazing at it I found breath a strain to draw, and my heart thudded with ominous heaviness in my chest. My every instinct warned me away from it, and yet, where else was I to go? I could return to my abode, or I could approach.

“I am not condemned to this place,” I reminded myself. “I come freely, as a Messenger’s apprentice, to see what I must eventually see.” I said it aloud, as if whatever malign power that watched over this place would hear and be bound by my logic and good intentions.

I began to walk, but soon intuited that walking at normal speed would take a very long time. I had to reach the place and still search out Ariadne, all before Messenger realized I had gone. I felt like I was skipping school, but skipping school only to take the day off in a place even worse than high school.

I accelerated my pace, something I now do with ease, and soon the parched earth was flying by beneath feet that still seemed to be walking normally, as if each step was a hundred feet long while never requiring a stretch. As fast as I was moving, the basalt mountain and its diamond peak still grew but slowly. And so I hurried still faster, steps that covered hundreds of feet, then thousands of feet, a half mile at a time.

As I approached, the mountain filled more and more of my field of view, spreading left and right, towering ever higher over me, blotting out the cloudless, wanly blue sky, pushing the horizon aside, and still it grew. After what felt like a long time I began to see details of the rock, creases and bulges, boulders that barely resisted gravity’s pull and stone pillars like defensive towers placed here and there in a mad and irrational scheme. And then, closer still, I made out a meandering ribbon of red that began in the mud and rose, appearing and disappearing in the texture of the basalt. At first I imagined it to be volcanic, a red stream of molten lava, but no, the red color lacked the light of heat. It was a cold red, a dark red, a red like dried blood.

Someone had come into view, a solitary figure, and I knew who it was. I slowed but did not stop or turn away, and in time came to Daniel. And there, I stopped.

“Mara,” Daniel said.

“Daniel.”

“You should turn back, apprentice. This is a terrible place.”

I nodded. “I know.” I noted his choice of verb: should, not must. It was my choice.

He looked at me, not unkindly, but perhaps a bit puzzled or maybe merely amused. He had not asked me why I was there.

“Are you not afraid?”

“You know I am.”

“Then why?”

I took a while to answer. I thought I knew what I would say, I thought I knew what I felt, but I wanted to choose the words carefully, to eschew anything false or unnecessary. In doing this I forced myself to see clearly my own motivations.

“I love him,” I said at last.

“No,” Daniel said. “You wish to love him, and you wish him to love you. And there is an impediment.”

How I longed to sit down, for I was suddenly weary. Hearing the truth spoken so directly had drained the energy from me. I had convinced myself that I was on a mission of mercy, that I was going to learn the truth about Ariadne and with that truth I would stop Messenger from continuing his doomed search for her. This, I had told myself, would free him. Putting his agonies of doubt to rest would be my act of devotion and his liberation and then . . .

And then he would tell me everything about himself. I would learn his true name. I would learn what kind of person he had been and might be again. And then, yes, somehow that would make the beautiful boy in black love me, and I would love him, and Ariadne would be forgotten.

And my own loneliness and emptiness would be gone. I would have my own love to sustain me as Messenger’s love for Ariadne sustained him.

“It’s not just selfishness,” I said to Daniel. “Not every motive is so clear.”

“Of course not,” he allowed. “Life is complicated, humans are complicated. You do genuinely care for Messenger, and in time that could even become love. But you are here today to find a way to remove an impediment to your own happiness.”