Page 95 of The Reveal
Or it is more accurate to say that I’mawareof him and the fact he’s made this happen, if deeply uninterested in it at the moment. Immortal or not, he is still only a man.
Meanwhile, I am made of galaxies old and new, dancing to and fro. Solar systems glide in and around me.
I feel no draw to ever go back. No need to ever return to the confines of blood and bone and all that useless flesh.
I am made of stars. I am kin to the moon. There are tides at my disposal, and in my fingertips I feel the pulsing power of too many lives to count, mine to play with as if they are nothing but random little thoughts.
Thoughts that scry across my consciousness and disappear as easily, leaving no ripples behind, no rearranging of the universe, no sign they ever were.
What I crave is an immensity, a life so large it can never be taken without planets collapsing all around it, like bowling pins, like scattering insects, all consciousness and matter an afterthought next to my incomprehensible glory—
Wait,some small voice inside me protests, sounding tinny and far away.That’s not me. That’s not who I am at all—
And when I turn, I see her.
Ibeholdher.
She is wondrous and fearsome beyond measure.
One moment the universe is only me. Then she is there, and she puts me and my universe to shame. I am instantly aware that I am nothing more than the head of a discarded pin she cannot be bothered to pick up.
That is how small and insignificant I am.
She changes as I look at her, too vast to settle on one thing. One face. One enormity.
Instead, I see a flicker of a woman, round and fertile, her features a complicated mix of deep beauty one moment ... then something slithery and rotten the next.
And I know her.
She has been in my nightmares for a long time. Last night she stopped being a nightmare and became something else, something that very nearly killed me on Mount McLoughlin.
I am in the presence of the Goddess of Filth, the death goddess of old, at last.
Vinca,I think. But I am an immensity all my own, however puny next to her. Maybe I make my tiny heavens shake with such a thought. Maybe I roar her name until new constellations form.
Here, it is all the same.
There’s another flicker and then she has a new head, this time that of some kind of bird. A bird of prey, I know without having to ask, or having ever seen something like it before—because I have felt what this bird can do. It has rent me apart more times than I can count, night after night. There’s that long, malicious-looking beak and that round body of hers wrapped in something that looks like feathers, with a glossy sheen on the wing tips. As if she is made of colors so impossible and blinding that my mind can’t process them or even identify them.
Yet I understand at the same time that none of this is the truth of her.
I’m seeing only what little I can comprehend.
My mortal eyes might imagine themselves whole universes, but in the end, it’s simply the blissed-out and blood-high eyes of a twenty-five-year-old barista who might have let herself be eaten whole by a vampire king.
I can’t be expected to approach the vastness of who she is. That part is abundantly clear.
And yet . . .
“Hey, Vinca,” I say. “Nice to finally meet you.”
I think of that woman on the altar in those cold, high woods. I think of that bloody-toothed smile and the way she gripped my hands too hard. Much too hard.
How she looked for a moment as if she were laughing.
I felt this—her, Vinca, this immensity before me—then. She brushed me, and the world went dark.
I understand immediately what Ariel was trying to tell me.
