Memory Weave: The Lightless Prophecy, #3

By Kel E Fox

Finally, Gabby gets what she's always wanted: proof that not only is magic real, it's her destiny. But there's something deeply wrong with the world, and before she can explore her newfound talents, she has to fix it.  
 
Donovan is certain the Netica Project is part of the problem with Earth's magic. With help from Gabby and the Darkhaven team, she must close it down. But she can't think or function while Johann, her childhood torturer, is still alive, and her need for vengeance might cost her everything.
 
Keraun has found Gabby after years of searching for his prophesied partner, and their relationship is more than he ever dared to hope for. Together, they might save the world – if he can face the demons in his troubled past before everything falls apart.

 

Memory Weave is the third book in the Lightless Prophecy, a galaxy-spanning adventure of magic and gods, love and betrayal, and a quest to find out what holds the stars together in the dark.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kel E Fox
• Release date: Jul 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781922731043

Book preview

Memory Weave

Book 3 of the Lightless Prophecy

Kel E Fox

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Outfoxed Media

Copyright © 2023 by Kel E Fox

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by the Australian Copyright Act 1968. Quotes may be extracted for review purposes.

This publication is a work of fiction. Names, places and events described in this book are products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, locales and events (except for satirical purposes) is entirely coincidental.

Outfoxed Media

Perth, Western Australia

Contents

Content Warning & Spelling Note

Previously in The Lightless Prophecy

1.A Quick, Clean Death

2.The Burning Path

3.Imprint

4.The Killing Light

5.Escaping Nowhere

6.Pamavianda

7.Space and Time

8.The Vi Magician

9.Dematerialising Shirts

10.A Thousand Years

11.Starflight

12.Come Fly With Me

13.Rescue Mission

14.Smash and Run

15.Personal Project

16.How Embarrassment

17.Ambush

18.You Don’t Remember

19.Still Need to Eat

20.Better with Time

21.Common Factor

22.Pancakes and Boyfriends

23.Head Game

24.Altered Reality

25.Weak

26.Confined Space

27.Fallout

28.A New Kind of Overwhelm

29.The Weight of Lifetimes

30.Harmonic House

31.Post-Trauma

32.Burning Love

33.Puzzles

34.The Black Files Kids

35.Hidden

36.Tough Bridges

37.Better Grins

38.Best Done Alone

39.A Natural Pilot

40.The Number to Beat

41.Welcome Home

42.Sia

43.Shards and Dust

44.Clever Tricks

45.Time and Days

46.Make a Fuss For Me

47.Remarkable Potential

48.Broken Bedrock

49.Ascension

50.The Horizon Fountain

51.Stripped

52.I Dare You

53.The Khomic Key

54.Overspin

55.Co-Location

56.Requisition

57.Cacophony

58.Holes in the Universe

59.Stale Peppermint

60.In the Broken Dark

61.Unstable Wreckage

62.Dust Falling Upwards

63.Teetering

64.Family

65.Blood Runs Clean

Thank you!

Acknowledgements

Also By

About the Author

Content Warning & Spelling Note

If this book was a film, it’d be rated something like M15 in Australia – recommended for mature audiences 15 years or older. PG-13 in America, maybe? All that’s presumptuous about age and relative maturity anyway and doesn’t take personal experience into account, so here it is: there’s some violence, mental health themes and infrequent coarse language. Please visit my website kelefox.com for full details if you are concerned. Wishing you safe and enjoyable reading!

A note on Aussies:

This story is set in Australia (mostly) and follows Aussie spelling, punctuation and grammar conventions. We say ‘maths’, mate, as opposed to ‘math,’ bro, sprinkle vowels around like ‘u’ in ‘flavour’ and use ‘s’ for ‘z’ in words you might recognise. Ya get the idea!

Pronunciation & Glossary:

Yes, yes, I’m one of those terrible authors who mashes up old Latin and other bits of deceased language to make new, unpronounceable words. Honestly, if you prefer to skim over such words, make up your own pronunciation, or replace ‘Husaeanism’ with ‘Humbug’ in your head, that’s fine by me. Reading is meant to be for your enjoyment, and you get to decide how that works! But if you’d like to know how I pronounce some of these things, I have a guide on my website. And a list of characters, in case that helps too!

Previously in The Lightless Prophecy

Memory Weave is book three in this saga, and it follows closely on from Darkhaven and Everfire. There will be a lot that doesn’t make sense if you haven’t read books one and two! If you haven’t already, I strongly recommend reading Darkhaven first, then Everfire. If you’d like a refresher, here’s what went down:

DARKHAVEN

Gabby Whitehall is sitting on top of a kids’ playground, pondering her future after high school and not thinking about the strange boy she met earlier that day, when a thunderstorm rolls in. Not her best decision, but in her defence, she didn’t know she was magically attractive to lightning. The inevitable happens, and she comes to on the pavement to find a cat trying to get her attention and two suspicious men in suits from the Taskforce telling her to get in their car.

After an exciting car chase and rescue from the suits by a rogue group called Darkhaven, Gabby finds out her mother (Luci, dead for sixteen years) is a magical geneticist who subjected Gabby to the Praegressus program as an infant as part of the Taskforce operations, an obviously dodgy organisation. Gabby becomes superhuman: enhanced healing, strength, memory and special skills. Gabby trains at Darkhaven with Stephen (stern but well-meaning guy who can talk to animals), Liam (kind and encouraging clairvoyant who enjoys drinking tea) and Donovan (a mean bitch), and she discovers a talent for heightened intuition.

Meanwhile, she’s flirting with the strange boy, who turns out to be an alien god called Keraun Thephyeu, and he tells her magic is not only real – he uses it to control Earth’s weather – but that Earth humans should have magic too. And she’s trying to keep up with her schoolwork and her friendships with Cecelia and Zenna; Zenna’s having a tough time of her own.

Gabby discovers that Luci is very much alive and is continuing her unethical experiments on children with the Taskforce. Gabby joins Darkhaven in a plot to infiltrate the Taskforce, which her father, Jon, seems to have ties to as well. They fail, and Gabby makes an enemy of Sean, one of the Taskforce higher-ups. Sean tracks her back to Darkhaven, where he shoots and kills Stephen, has Liam injected with Viciretro (a magical reversal serum that is supposed to undo the Praegressus program) and sets the Darkhaven building on fire. Luci and Jon arrive, and the Darkhaven crew realise that Jon is not only connected to the Taskforce: he set it up twenty years earlier, working under the name Jan Whitehall.

Jan shoots Sean at the same moment Keraun strikes Sean with lightning. Sean dies. Jan and Luci flee. Keraun is arrested by the Uzrun, an intergalactic authority for ‘stage fives’ (advanced humans from older star systems). Meanwhile, Zenna has ended up in hospital and has been referred to a wellness retreat for mental health rehabilitation.

Gabby gets a puppy, a German Shepherd/Alaskan Malamute called Salt, and joins Darkhaven to hunt down Luci and find out more about this elusive magic business.

EVERFIRE

Gabby joined Darkhaven to learn magic and hunt down her mother, but so far, none of that is happening. Admittedly, she spent the first half of summer mooning over Keraun, who is still gone, and avoiding Hope, a new and annoying addition to the Darkhaven team. Liam is still sick from the Viciretro. Donovan is still a bitch.

Then a massive storm hits Perth, and everything changes. A new cohort of Eventers joins Darkhaven, including a boy from an even nastier experiment than usual called the Black Files. Jan won’t say what they’re for, but it’s something horrible because everything he’s involved with is.

Liam, Donovan and Catherine turn Darkhaven into a school to train the new Eventers. That would be super cool, almost like magic school, but Gabby is miffed that she’s put in the with the newbies as if she had her Event yesterday. Still, it’s not boring: she discovers she can read anyone’s DNA (which we later learn is actually their Khoma, a record of all their past lives) through skin contact, finds a macabre scene involving dead rabbits arranged in a strange circular pattern, and learns that the new cohort Eventers grew up on another planet.

Donovan gets a lead about the Taskforce. Gabby joins the team, but things go wrong. They blow up the Taskforce and barely escape with their lives. To save Donovan from capture, Gabby reads Donovan’s Khoma. It’s so awful, Gabby falls into a magical stasis that persists for three weeks.

Gabby finds Zenna at a circus (figures) full of Eventers (okay then) and learns that she’s also become tangled in the Netica Project.

The team go on a mission to the Archive, the first Netica Project lab, following another lead on Luci and a possible cure for Liam. Success! Luci says she can save him … but they’re set up. Whoever Sebastien, the Black Files kid, was working for is after the contents of the Archive’s vault. The heist succeeds. Gabby kills Sebastien. With Zenna’s help, the Darkhaven team salvage Liam’s cure.

While Gabby and Donovan take a trip down Donovan’s memory lane, Keraun appears literally out of nowhere to warn them about a trap, but he’s too late. Zenna has betrayed them. Jon/Jan shows up, but in a twist eerily reminiscent of the last time we saw him, he’s not Jan. Or Jon. He’s Johann, the originator of the Netica Project, who kidnapped Donovan as a child. He takes Donovan again, leaving Gabby behind. Donovan says something about ‘Moore’ as she’s taken away.

Gabby and Keraun follow the ‘Moore’ lead and find Andrew Moore, the journalist, in California. He gives them a list of possible locations to look for Donovan, but before they can get away, his house explodes in everfire. Gabby and Keraun are caught in the flames.

I apologise for that terrible cliffhanger and promise the Memory Weave ending isn’t quite as traumatic.

Chapter 1

A Quick, Clean Death

The floor was awash with blood, and Donovan didn’t know if she was awake or dreaming. Nightmaring. There were moments she felt like she was three years old again, trapped, burning, utterly lost, convinced she must be in a dream because reality couldn’t be so …

It hadn’t been a dream then. She supposed that meant it wasn’t now. But there was so much blood. Even for her.

She could bleed forever. It was a cruel way to evolve. Keraun had said the Praegressus program would work, that it would advance humans beyond their current evolutionary stage in a sudden sprint. Donovan was grateful for the strength Praegressus gave her, and she supposed the program had given her other things too. A place where she was safe, one she’d helped build. People she loved. People she hadn’t loved enough.

But she’d lost those things, thrown them aside for a silly notion about reconnecting with her past. A past that was better left buried. She might have talked about it with Liam over a coffee, might have – maybe – sat with Gabby and let her bring up the memories with her magic. Instead, Donovan went running after ghosts long moved on and straight into Johann’s snare. She hadn’t known he couldn’t find her at Darkhaven, and she still didn’t know why. She’d believed he was dead all these years.

Donovan coughed. A dry, bitter sound to cover her need to cry. She didn’t have enough left in her to cry. A door banged down the hall, and she uncrumpled herself, pulling her body one limb at a time back onto the bed. She wouldn’t let Johann have the satisfaction, even if he wasn’t here.

Footsteps sounded in the hall. Three sets: two guards’ heavy boots and a prisoner’s shuffling slippers. Muffled whimpers. Keys jangled, metal slid between pins and tumblers, bolts turned.

Donovan lay back, face blank, white – it was too soon, even for her – and stared at the plasterboard ceiling. It was the only thing in this room that wasn’t flecked or streaked or flooded with blood.

The door swung open, the footsteps advanced, the door closed. There was no time to escape. She’d tried fleeing on the first day.

The whimpering increased. Slippered feet minced in the corner while the guards stood, resolute, in front of the door.

‘Maintenant!’ someone growled. Now. Donovan had figured they were in France on her second day. She’d lost track of time, but it had been summer at the Battle of Silence. Judging by the dropping temperatures, they were approaching winter. Or in it.

A man shuffled to Donovan’s bed, trying to suppress his cries. Infrequent barking sobs cracked the room apart like lightning, leaving a quivering shudder of thunder in the air. The ones who let their emotion out did better, but most of the outcomes were the same. This one wouldn’t make it.

The scalpel pressed against her throat. He probably thought hesitating was a kindness. Donovan flicked her eyes right and locked on to a familiar brown pair. Each face bore something similar to the last: eyes, chin, angle of cheekbones. All related. All male.

Just do it. Better that we both get this over with.

If he read the message in her gaze, he didn’t heed it. The blade trembled against Donovan’s skin, tickling her collarbone as his grip slipped.

‘Celui-là est fichu,’ a second voice said. This one’s gone. Such compassion. Donovan repressed the urge to reach out, seize the man’s wrist and plunge the scalpel in herself. But she’d tried that too.

Johann had cut off her hands. Well, the guards did the deed, but Donovan figured everything that happened here had but one name attached.

Donovan had repaired shattered bones, missing muscles, severed nerves; she’d even replaced half a lung when a shotgun blast had torn a pitted hole in her chest. It never took more than a day. Perhaps hands were more complicated, or maybe it was just that the idea was so abhorrent. It had taken them a month to regrow, and they were still weak.

The trembling man pushed on the scalpel. The blade scrabbled around, gouging into subcutaneous tissue, muddling Donovan’s skin as her body tried to reassert itself over the damage, until, with a wilting scream, he found an artery and twisted the blade into it.

She was slower to heal now. Doing this every day, sometimes many times a day, was too much. Warm blood tumbled across her neck, splashing to the floor. The man dropped the scalpel with a clatter and backed into the corner of the room, weeping.

Each time, the guards left her with her would-be murderers while the men begged her to kill them. Some took their own lives. Most just cried or wailed or shook until Donovan gritted her teeth, took up their knife and sliced their throats. She no longer believed in a quick, clean death, but it was the best she could do.

Every one was another mark on her soul.

The wound in her neck closed, feeble strength creeping back into her veins. For Keraun’s ilk, injury like this didn’t even happen, and Donovan wondered if he, or his kind at least, had gone through a period of similar horror, of being unkillable but not un-injurable, or if the Praegressus was a perversion of evolution. Of course, she wasn’t entirely unkillable; Johann could decapitate her or have the right bullet fired into her skull.

After a time, she pushed herself up to sit. Her head wobbled on her neck. Donovan took up the scalpel, her fingers slick with her blood, and, too dizzy to stand, crawled to the man hunched in the corner. She reached one hand to his chin, turning his face to meet her gaze. That familiar face, every time, variations on a theme. Donovan looked into his brown eyes and saw pleading. Permission. He glanced at the scalpel in her other hand, and, between sobs, he gave the tiniest of nods.

Donovan plunged the scalpel into his carotid. His eyes faded and his face paled, leaving a crude tattoo standing out on his cheek: TSD-1079. They were all tattooed, TSD and a number, ascending one at a time. Before 1079’s body had time to slump, the door opened again. Hands grabbed the corpse out of her arms, leaving Donovan crumpled on the floor, awash with her own blood.

Chapter 2

The Burning Path

Keraun had joked once that he would burn in everfire before he went dancing at the Vi Academy student ball. He and his best friend Seren had spent lunchtime in the library, hurrying to complete an assignment due in the next class.

‘Is it because it’s Ursa, and she’s a friend, so you want to let her down easy?’ Seren had asked, a wicked glint in his strawberry eyes. A natural colour for his home system in Zone Three; almost unheard of on Cyrea.

Keraun pouted. ‘It’s not because it’s Ursa.’

Seren leered, a cascade of flyaway red hair falling across his face. ‘What if I ask? You can wear black. I’ll go in cerise and cream. We’ll be the handsomest couple on the floor.’

‘I’m not going to the ball. Ever.’

‘Come on. It’s the biggest night of the year, and you’ve ducked out of the last two. Everyone says third year is the best. The three of us’ – he included Ursa – ‘can go together, and you won’t even have to dance, although you break my heart.’

‘No.’

‘Please? For me?’

‘No.’

‘Are you afraid of upsetting your Tarnen mistress?’

Stuff the assignment. Keraun scrawled a hasty conclusion and packed up his books, glowering. ‘You know, they’re right about Zone Threes being jerks.’

Seren whistled to himself, a smug expression on his face as if to prove Keraun’s point.

‘You make an empty threat. Everfire is a myth,’ Seren said as they walked to the lecture hall.

‘So is the idea of me enjoying myself at the ball. You and Ursa go. I’ll catch up on homework.’ He might eke Seren out for top of the class.

Seren had sighed dramatically, but he had let the matter go.

Now Keraun wished he could take the original careless comment back and spend every night for an Academy year pretending to dance while spilling dama wine on an over-polished floor and bumping shoulders with drunken friends.

He had been burning in everfire for two days.

Forty-eight Earth hours. Keraun was dying, and there was nothing he could do about it.

Everfire wasn’t supposed to be real. It was a myth, a story told to scare precocious stage four children from exploiting their own invincibility. Beware the edges of the universe. Be careful when playing with magic or flying for the first time. If something happens, come and find help.

Why? It’s not like I’ll die.

Because mistakes can start everfire, and that’s worse than death.

A simple lie, meant to frighten until the child was old enough to remember and understand the real nuances and risks of Pamavianda. A stage four human might not die of physical illness or injury, but magical injury was a whole other matter.

Only everfire wasn’t a lie. No one knew it wasn’t a lie.

On the fourth day, with what remained of his mind, Keraun wondered if the black flames would ever end. Maybe that was why it was called everfire. He seemed to be in two places now: Moore’s ruined home – a patch of grey wasteland, the trimmed lawns and flourishing rose bushes long since turned to ash – and another grey space, intangible, something he knew only as death, a maw hovering around him, waiting to close. And everywhere fire. Black fire.

But fire needed fuel. The inferno finally burned out on day five. One grey space resolved into another, and Keraun found himself in the Transition Plane, cloven from his body like a tangled kite cut from its string.

For a time – maybe minutes, maybe months – he lay in grey nothingness, pushing back the feelings. He had no idea what to do with this. Being killed was something Cyreans hadn’t experienced for generations.

Of course he’d be the one to break the rules. That thought almost made him laugh, causing a painful jab in his side, and he sat up in the grey space, massaging his ribs.

He spent some time folding up the everfire experience – the black burning, the acerbic smell of flamed sugar, the utter helplessness as his body fell to ash – so it took up less room in his mind. Fold it in half and half again. Half again, and now it was less than a day. Half and half again. A piece of paper would only fold so many times, but a memory could be folded forever, an exponential decay that never quite got to zero.

It would get close enough.

Keraun kept folding, making a tiny cube of horror and shoving it way back in a distant mental corner where he’d never have to think about it again. Eftychi would be mad. She worked with Pa, one of the emotional magics, and said it was better to face things, deal with the trauma. Too bad.

He stood and took in his flat, grey surroundings. It was like being in a bubble, if a bubble was also an endless expanse. No floor, no ceiling; no soil or sky. Darkness hovered at the edges, a different darkness than the black flames. Gentler.

Keraun didn’t recall any of his previous visits here. The Transition Plane experience wasn’t recorded in the Khoma. Someone must have remembered at some point for there to be any lore or teaching about the process at all. An Abellite master magician, perhaps. Maybe the master of masters, Husa himself. That, or people read stories, developed ideas and intuited a mythology that felt right.

So Keraun knew the mechanics of the Transition Plane from theory. There was always a choice.

The Leoch Arch would take him back to Cyrea as a newborn, connected to his current Khoma, a new chapter to be lived in this cycle. He could pursue Vi magic again.

The Tarnen Path would return him to the Source, the home of all souls, to deep rest in darkness. Peace, outside time and space. From there, he could choose to start a fresh Khomic journey, a new cycle. Follow a different branch of magic or another pursuit. His old Khoma would remain as memories stored in the collective Historic Khoma, which a Ma magician might access, but which he wouldn’t recall.

Keraun paused in the grey expanse, as rooted to the spot as he’d been in the fire. A far-off white glow might have been the Arch, but there was no hint of the Tarnen Path, just darkness winding around the edges like a receding fog. It wasn’t that his mythology was wrong. He’d met the Tarnens themselves – not that anyone believed him about that.

Nope, it was this place. The Transition Plane felt wrong.

Keraun supposed an atheist might not be so sure. The people of Earth, with their scattered doctrines, might not challenge what was wrong here. All nine zones in the universe had their own connections to the Transition Plane, like gates at an Earth air terminal. The Transition Plane was everywhere, but each zone had its own Leoch Arch and Tarnen Path. Zone seven, Cyrea’s zone, was fine.

Fine.

The little cube rattled in the back of Keraun’s mind. He shoved the memory deeper and smiled just to spite it. Feeling more himself, he pushed his awareness out into the boundless grey space, turning on the spot, straining his senses.

A tendril of black flame curled in the distance, and the aroma of burnt confectionery tickled his nose. Dread filled Keraun’s being. He stumbled. It couldn’t be.

The everfire was here, scorching across the Zone Nine Transition Plane, obliterating the Tarnen Path.

For one mad moment, he thought the fire had followed him. Impossible. Everfire couldn’t cross planes of existence.

Until recently, he hadn’t believed everfire existed at all.

Keraun ran. He wanted to stir up a storm, to throw lightning and roll in the thunderclaps, but magic didn’t work here, so he ran through the grey instead, imagining it was a canvas of clouds, the rataplan of his feet thunder in some far-off world.

He ran until the everfire was a distant memory, reduced again to a myth in his mind, and when he glanced back, still running, he wondered if he’d imagined the wisp of black fire. Finally, he stopped running from and started running to. It wasn’t distance in this no-place. It was a thought.

Gabby.

Chapter 3

Imprint

Ididn’t feel dead. My eyes opened to uniform greyness, like an overcast sky. As I became more aware of myself, the space around me expanded. It still had no shape – if I stood in a room, there was no way to see where the floor ended and the walls began, or if the walls met with a ceiling.

‘Am I dead?’ I asked the greyness, just to know if I had ears.

‘We have such black-and-white ideas about death on Earth,’ a familiar, forgotten voice said. ‘Death is a process. All of living is dying. But then, all of dying is living too.’

I spun, the unmoving greyness dizzying. ‘Stephen!’

A presence surrounded me, as if someone had draped a warm blanket over my shoulders when I hadn’t realised I was cold.

‘I’m here,’ he said.

I stopped whirling and squinted into the grey instead. ‘You’re here? Where?’

A rueful smile. ‘And yet, not here.’

‘Oh.’ I sagged a little on the inside, but it was still nice to hear his voice, even if this was some death-process hallucination of my own design.

My squinting didn’t give Stephen any visible form, but it yielded something. An archway of white light grew in the distance, seemingly several metres away. Or several hundred. It was hard to tell. Smudges of darker grey clouded beyond it.

‘The whole go-to-the-light thing is real?’ I asked. A thought nudged the back of my memory.

Stephen frowned in my mind. ‘Yes and no. Something is wrong here.’

I walked towards the archway for a better look. There were markings etched above it, a symbol, but I couldn’t make it out. I shuffled closer. A T-shape? Or a cross, perhaps. My intuition squirmed, and an invisible pressure squeezed my arm. ‘Be careful,’ Stephen warned.

Don’t go through the light when you get there. Now Melarie’s words made sense.

‘Did you go through it?’ I asked. A silly question. How would Stephen be here if he’d gone through?

He seemed to feel my chagrin. ‘Not silly. I went through.’

‘What happened?’ The thought still scratched at my mind, the itch of forgetting something important. I had to get close enough to see the symbol. The light archway glowed invitingly. I took a step closer to it.

‘I’m not sure,’ Stephen said, wistfulness tracing his voice like fog on the bathroom mirror. ‘Here, now, I am an imprint. Stephen as he was just before he went through the archway. His soul is now someone else, I expect. He’s reincarnated on Earth.’

‘Mei tried to find you. Him.’

‘I know.’ Stephen paused, and I imagined him stroking Savah’s fur as he considered. ‘I think my being here stopped her from reaching his new incarnation.’

‘You’ve been here all this time?’

A smile. ‘Stephen wanted to wait for you, but a soul can’t stay in this place forever. Even I’m already fading.’ A frown. ‘There was something I was supposed to remember.’

I found I’d taken another step towards the light and checked myself. I wasn’t ready to be reborn as a new human being yet. Unbidden, memories flashed through my mind. As I drew nearer to the archway, they pushed more insistently. Memories from my life, things I hadn’t known. Hadn’t wanted to know, perhaps.

Like what kind of person my mother was.

I’d been reluctant to read my own Khoma, like I had secrets to hide. Maybe they weren’t my secrets at all, but Luci’s. I’d learned from reading Darcy that her parents’ histories were connected to her Khoma. My mother’s would be connected to mine.

I shivered and shuffled closer still.

Stephen’s presence diminished. He’d told me something, something interesting, but it was hard to maintain thoughts here, with memories pressing into my mind.

I was three months old, wide-eyed, watching a woman with a familiar braid of red hair as she fussed above me. I gurgled and kicked my feet, my belly full, my chest light. This woman was love. My world.

She stroked my cheek with a nitrile-gloved finger, her eyes bright. Then she clasped my leg and pressed something sharp into the muscle. Closing her eyes, she moved her hands above me, muttering words. As infant-me watched, a cry climbing my throat, her expression changed.

It wasn’t love anymore. Anger bloomed in my body. I squeezed my eyes shut, closed to her horrible face, closed to the void in my tiny chest where so much love had been moments before. I wailed.

‘Gabby?’

I opened my eyes and was back in the grey, silent space. The archway was closer, and Stephen’s imprint, wherever he’d been to begin with, further away. Part of me knew I shouldn’t venture near the archway, even without Melarie’s warning echoing in my head. I should turn and run. But there was nowhere else to go. Ghosts of shadows hovered around the archway, and whenever one passed through it, the portal flared and glowed brighter, flickering and twinkling in the half light. Souls passing through to reincarnate?

I frowned, thinking back to the last thing Stephen’s imprint had said. It felt as if a month had passed since he’d spoken, but focusing on something happening in the present seemed to help with the pull of the archway.

‘What were you meant to remember?’ I took a step closer to the light. Another silly question. But talking aloud gave me a concrete anchor in this strange grey place.

‘A word,’ Stephen said, voice distant. ‘Or several words. I had them when I first came here, but things …’

‘Slip out of your mind?’ I was starting to get the same sensation. Had I been walking for days?

‘It was something to do with Darkhaven, I think.’

For a moment, gravity pulled, holding me in place, stopping my inexorable march. Had I forgotten Darkhaven? ‘Why can’t we remember things here?’

‘What happens here doesn’t get recorded into the Khoma. Perhaps being in a dimension that is disconnected from the Khoma means that we don’t have access to our memories either.’

His voice was faint, and I wasn’t sure if it was because he was fading, as he’d said, or if he had a fixed location in the grey plane while I was moving further away. I found myself gazing at the archway again. The etching above was sharpening, growing bigger.

Or I was getting closer.

But the flaring rays still obscured it. I needed a better angle. I stepped sideways, my toe dipping into the faint edge of the glow. The light fingered out towards me, pulling, greedy.

Wrong.

I lost all sense of Stephen’s presence. I was a baby again, four months old, and a man cooed over me. This face elicited the warm love feeling still, but it didn’t quite ease the void in my heart space. He had soft grey eyes and dark brown hair just long enough to curl over his forehead.