Paula's Prompts: Wednesday Words

On October 4, 2017, P.T. Wyant posted this picture as her Wednesday Words prompt at ptwyant.com.

I came up with this Tale of the Navel/The Shadow Forest in response. It goes a little further of answering a question posted over at inspirationcauldron.wordpress.com. What does Damian want?

The light was only just ahead. Cool and sweet, he could almost hear it whisper with the hushed innocence of a boy’s voice. 

No. Two boys’s voices. They giggled, mocking him with stolen vitality, an essence which didn’t belong to them. 

That essence should have been safe within another, safe in a reality he’d left behind. Not here. 

The owner of that vitality would have denied it was rightfully his. 

“I’m a creature of shadow. Nothing I am belongs to me.” He could almost see that bright, coppery head, capturing and reflecting the sun’s glow overhead as it shook. “You’re the one that’s filled with light. I wouldn’t be standing in this garden if you hadn’t brought me here.”

“Ah, Christopher, why didn’t you realize the truth?” He stretched out a hand toward the giggling. “Any light I possessed came from my memories of you!”

It was impossible to reach the light, the ones giggling. A monstrous dark shadow of a trees blocked his way with its skeletal blackness.

“Don’t touch my brothers.” The tree whispered on the breeze with a young man’s voice, soft and menacing. “I’ve done you a great wrong, Damian Ashelocke, but you’re not allowed to go near them. Neither you nor Christopher shall ever get past me.”

Damian Ashelocke. 

For one moment, the name struck him, awakening his memories in a painful cacophany. He heard a woman laughing. He saw her expose her fangs, using one of her eight arms to seize Christopher. 

“No,” he whispered, closing his eyes. 

Before Christopher had been a shadow, he’d been a boy. Just a boy, but for one night, a marriage feast. 

It didn’t matter that Christopher had been the most precious thing in Damian Ashelocke’s life. Damian Ashelocke was just a boy himself. 

No mere boy could stand against the will of the Lady Duessa Ashelocke, arachnocrat among arachnocrats. 

What the lady wanted, she took. No one was strong enough to stand against her. 

“Gabrielle, ‘Brie, I’d hoped you were the answer to my prayers, my wish incarnate.” Love and sour disappointment curdled the inside of his mouth at the thought of his former master. “You had no desire to fight Duessa, no matter how I wanted you to. You played the fool and welcomed her into the Navel as a friend!”

Oh, he knew only too well what ‘Brie’s reply would be. The Navel was neutral ground. Gabrielle would protect her own there, but she’d make no moves against Duessa. 

Not as long as Duessa did no harm within the Navel. The harm she’d done in other places didn’t matter. 

Rage rushed through Damian Ashelocke, remembered purpose strong enough to create a Door. He’d needed power, enough power to keep Duessa Ashelocke from ever taking what was precious away from him. 

Gabrielle wouldn’t understand. After all, Christopher and himself were safe enough in the Navel.

She didn’t understand the twisted way Duessa’s mind worked, exactly how she planned to exploit the gaps in ‘Brie’s protection. 

The moment Christopher or Duessa stepped outside ‘Brie’s shop, they were fair game. Duessa already had a spy watching the Navel, posing as a regular customer. 

In order for Christopher to be safe, for Damian to be truly free, Duessa would have to be dealth with. 

Damian needed the power to deal with her. It didn’t matter if Gabrielle never understood this need. It didn’t matter if the shadows ripped him apart and ate him! Pah, what did such a threat matter to an arachnocat? He lived with the promise of being devoured as Christopher had been! 

It didn’t matter if he had to turn his back on Christopher’s tear-streaked face…

Christopher. The memory of those glistening eyes, the last thing he’d seen in the Navel made him fumble with the name and identity of Damian Ashelocke. 

Damian Ashelocke had been the sort of person who’d make Christopher cry. 

Once, he’d never have done that, not ever if he could help it. Disregarding the feelings of someone he loved…Damian Ashelocke had take a step closer to being as ruthless as Duessa. 

“No,” he whispered, allowing the name and purpose to slip from his mind. 

They took the form of tiny rose seeds falling to the earth. 

“You are weak.” The tree’s roots claimed the seeds of identity, sucking them into the soil. “Your lack of resolution allows me to feed on you, again. I will not make the same mistake.” No trace of them remained on the ground. “No one in this or any other world will disturb my brothers’s existence.”

“Leiwell, isn’t it?” Nameless and purposeless once more, he recalled the hungry house Dyvian wished to feed. 

The same innocent hunger exuded from the tree in a soft scent of a green and damp things. Only there was more a sense of purpose and awareness. 

“It is you, isn’t it?” He tilted his head to regard the tree. “Or part of you.”

“It doesn’t matter.” The branches trembled a little. “You shall not come near my brothers. I’ll destroy you if you do.”

“Beware of your own resolution, Leiwell.” He nodded his head in the direction of the light the tree guarded. “Resolution can rebound on the ones you want most to protect.”

The guardian didn’t respond to this, although its branches creaked a little.