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Now, she knew that to be nothing but an illusion. All it had taken was a few sips of rum to send her moral fiber shrieking into the abyss. She had very nearly thrown herself at a man whom she had only known for a matter of days.
A few minutes later, Ellie felt the shelter shift with Adam’s weight as he joined her. She kept carefully silent, curled up into a ball on her side of the platform. He didn’t try to speak to her. He simply lay down beside her, decently arranged with his head at her feet. A reasonable few inches of space kept them separate.
Ellie didn’t move. She barely breathed as that coiled, ravenous beast inside of her hissed its low demands until she was finally graced with oblivion.
?
Twenty
Ellie moved blindlythrough the trees, brushing through the smooth, damp leaves. Vines caught at her feet. She pushed past them as she coughed on the acrid taste of the smoke that filled the air.
Someone was crying nearby. The sound carried to her like a ghost through the still, hot air.
She ought to go find whoever it was. They needed help.
The leaves parted, and she stepped into the city.
It rose before her in gleaming white tiers and columns. The shapes were softened by the ever-present haze of the smoke.
A buzzing rose into her awareness. The hum came from somewhere nearby. Ellie turned to look for it—and realized that she was standing at the edge of a pit full of the dead.
The bodies that had not yet rotted displayed the terrible scars of a disease she knew through books and public health notices.
Ellie staggered back from the pile. She turned instead to the pale facade of an enormous pyramid. It loomed over an alabaster courtyard framed by rows of night-dark stelae.
Someone waited for her in the center of that open space. It was the small, scarred woman whom Ellie had dreamed of before.
The woman was dressed in a spectacular gown of feathers, which mingled bright hues of red, green, blue, gold, and black. The feathers rose behind her head, framing her noble face like the halo of a saint.
“Can you hear it?” she demanded. Her voice was rich and strong.
“Hear what?” Ellie replied.
“The voice of the god.”
Ellie listened.
Silence pressed in around her, as thick as the humid air.
Something slid through it. It crept along the space between words, whispering with a hush like the murmur of a thousand long-dead dreams.
The hairs rose on the skin of Ellie’s arms as an uncanny fear crawled through her.
“I don’t think that’s what God sounds like,” she slowly replied.
The space around her shuddered. The pale ghosts of the palaces and temples lining the courtyard jolted and shivered behind the smoke, flickering like the flame of a candle on the verge of guttering.
Shadows twisted in the corners of Ellie’s vision. The way they moved reminded her of the beating of black wings.
“It is waiting for you,” the woman continued. “You must prepare yourself.”
The color of her eyes spoke of earth and trees. Her slight figure was still and resolute.
“How?” Ellie asked.
It began to snow. Pale flakes spun gently down onto the courtyard, forming little drifts and eddies. A few of them landed on the woman’s warm brown skin.
The skin burned, turning to red, and then a crackling black like the lizard Ellie had eaten the night before.
