In which Elyoner Dare and the baby enter...
41
She came out of the shadows, Virginia in her arms. She was tired, absolutely exhausted and the cold had aged her, done things to her skin that not even a year long sea voyage could have, but she was still the most beautiful creature Ananias Dare had ever seen.
“What happened out here? What was all that, Ananias? Did that man truly come with word from my father?” Elyoner Dare, his wife, asked him, her voice still strong, still the only one that mattered, hers and Virginia’s.
He sat, his head spinning, the images imparted into it by that Blackmoon creature searing themselves into his consciousness.
He nodded. “Yes, I believe he was sent by him. By the governor and Raleigh both.”
“How is that possible if they are not here right behind him? I listened, Ananias, I listened well and his words made no sense nor did your reactions to them. Why did you not question him further or that awful Viccars woman? Why? Where is my father?”
“Because Elyoner,” and he sighed deeply before continuing. “Because as he spoke I saw other things, images, visions in my head. He told me one thing and he showed me another. I saw the rot that has entered Roanoke. I swear I do not understand it, I am merely a bricklayer but though I understood nothing I still knew it to be naught but evil incarnate the moment he showed me it.”
His eyes focused on the oak table before him, the one he’d built himself barely a year before. He saw it’s imperfections, the holes in the wood, the signs of age it showed already, the rot.
When he noticed how silent Elyoner had become he looked up, his attention off the designs in the wood. He found her wearing an expression that he’d not expected, one he found difficult to read.
Her eyes were not only wide with fright but with something else as well, some immense weight that had suddenly dropped itself mercilessly onto her soul.
“What is it, my love? Why do you look at me so?”
“Did you say that he put thoughts into your mind?”
He turned away from her and there they were again. The face of Elizabeth Viccars still glared at him, not the beautiful ethereal creature she appeared to be but the monstrous demon he’d seen for that brief instance. He’d seen the death of Roanoke as well, the entire colony lost and forgotten, White and Raleigh returning to find nothing whatsoever. The lands around them covered in darkness, the trees dead, the animals nothing more than walking skeletons, the shadow of Lucifer over all.
“Not thoughts, my love,” he told her as he reached out one hand for the nearest branch of a skeletal tree, trying to rip it off so he could show it to her. “Visions, like paintings in my head. As real as you or I but untouchable, unreachable. He showed me our future Elyoner and our present as it truly is and will be.”
One more time he tried to reach for the tree branch and one more time he failed as it faded away into the warm dimly lit interior of his home.
He turned back to his wife and found her collapsed on the hard wood floor, unconscious, with the babe sprawled out next to her.
Virginia cried louder than she ever had before.
End Part 41
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