Page 22 of Where the Light No Longer Follows

Then lights in the theatre suddenly went out entirely, enshrouding them in darkness, and Silene jolted a little, looking around the abyss surrounding her hoping for even a small flash of glow from under a door or a keyhole.

Darkness did not scare her much, but what rested inside it did. Her father had often used it to his advantage. He’d acted as if the darkness would hide his sins. That if no one could see what was happening to her, it would not count. That her screams and cries would be drowned by the abyss, taken away once light would rise in the morning. That the darkness could hide the blood better, and that it would make her bruised, thin body more desirable to the ones who he was selling it to.

“Gabriel?” she asked, feeling a lick of fear on her spine that had her shaking after so long. There, seeking him, she felt so human again.

“I’m here.”

A long breath of relief left her lips as his voice wrapped her back in warmth.

A cracking sound came from the stage ahead, as if a glass or a plate had broken, and she waited, suddenly feeling something like a pulse grow under her skin. But it couldn’t be. Silene had no heart. She had no need for it.

A gleam widened from the stage. Candlelight began growing brighter, forming a halo of light around the table it was perched on top and the girl sat on a lone chair beside it, her knees pulled to her chest, long dark hair falling around her like a blanket while she stared at the candle without blinking. Everyone else was gone but her.

Silene sat up straight when a heavy feeling settled on her chest at the image before her. An image that struck so familiar to her. The table. The chair. The candle. The girl. Her blood-stained night dress.

There were times she’d spent sat just like that, in front of a flickering flame after the horrors that had been committed to her had ended, confessing every one of her secrets to the light in the pitch of night when everything but her nightmares had gone to sleep. That very same light had eventually started speaking back to her, bringing her comfort nothing had ever given her before.

The flame flickered, growing brighter, showering the girl with light and warmth until she stopped shivering.

“Thank you,” she offered.

“Maybe I should thank you,” the candle spoke, “for summoning me, for lighting me and letting me burn.”

“But you will waste, you will melt and smoulder.”

“A victorious end for a candle.”

The girl showed a smile, and Silene’s heart clutched in a tight grip when that smile reminded her of her own. One that looked more like a scar than a smile. “I want a victorious end, too.”

A single tear beaded in Silene’s eye at those words. Familiar words. Words she’d heard before.

“You have to burn first,” the candle said. “Such lovely light and warmth you will give. Though no one will deserve it, no one can ever earn it from you. You will shine like a miracle.”

“There is no one to light me,” the girl sighed. “Nothing and no one at all. If I let my brother, I’m afraid I might burn his hands. If I let my father, he will smother me.”

A choked sob ripped from Silen’s throat, and she put a hand over her mouth to stifle a cry. Her words were just broken syllables as her head slowly turned to Gabriel. “What is this?”

“A play,” he answered, his voice like gravel.

The candle flame asked, “Why do you cry?”

And the girl answered, “Because I am an unhappy person.”

Silene could almost hear the timekeeper in her pocket stop ticking and time slowly freezing over, the air turning an odd colour tinted with a shade of the past—a past where she’d uttered those very same words back to a strange candle that talked. A mirage of sorts she thought her mind had called to soothe her loneliness, her hopelessness.

Her attention whipped in Gabriel’s direction, staring at his stony face as he watched the play ahead with a vacant set of eyes filled almost with depths of stormy, blue water. Silene could almost swear somewhere in there he was drowning, just as she was. No one would be able to survive the depths of loss his eyes had caved into.

“An odd thing to do,” he said without looking at her, “talking to candles. You did that a lot. Night after night. It was the closest you’ve ever let me get to you.”

Memories rushed to flood her mind, and chill spread down her spine when she recalled the voice that had talked back to her back then. The familiarity of it. The warmth.

No.

No.

He couldn’t know her most vulnerable moments, when she had laid her heart bare to the only thing that would listen to her. It had been her imagination. The candlelight had been only something her mind had made up out of desperation. It couldn’t have been real.

“How?” she asked, her voice breaking.