By and by the path led into an orchard of plums and I saw the pink and white lights dance across my cloak as the sun filtered through the blossoms. I heard the call of songbirds and turned my head up but could not see them through the flowers. Instead I saw only the briefest flashes of gold as I strode along the path. It’s marbled cobbles brought me onto a neater avenue where the trees were grown in lines and the path was edged with white stones and flower beds lush with peonies and the lazy bees that bumbled around them.
I walked for a time. The path led to a circular clearing, ringed with plum trees, and a marble altar stood at its centre, decorated with smoking incense and around its base laid gifts in copper bowls, from coins of silver and gold to collections of plump fruits or piles of vivid spices. At the altar knelt an old lady, her skin creased like fine paper and her hair a searing white. She seemed to be softly lost in contemplation and I stood for a while watching her, as the birds sang in the trees above us.
‘Come to offer?’ she said, though she did not turn her head. Though I was surprised by her voice, I found my words.
‘Come to seek,’ I said. ‘You shouldn’t linger here, good lady. I am told a most vicious creature haunts these fields of plum. An oppressor. A thief. Something that hates the beauty in others, that which itself cannot obtain.’
The birds began to chatter, an agitated sound unlike their singing a moment before. All along the boughs that ring the clearing, I saw the birds hung in gilded cages. They squawked their fury and fear at the bars, rattling their golden prisons.
‘What is it you seek?’ the old woman said.
‘Passage,’ I said, returning my gaze to her back. I placed my hand on Extinction’s hilt.
‘Then make me an offering,’ the old woman said. ‘Something I cannot obtain.’
Still kneeling, she turned her head to me. Her maw extended from one cheek to another, running across her forehead, and the tiny spikes of crystal teeth glistened in the pink light. The two black pits she took for eyes fixed me with a thirsting glare from where a mouth should be.
I drew Extinction.
‘Oh you’re exceptional,’ she gurgled. ‘Oh, so very beautiful. Come here.’
Paddy Dobson
30th June 2021