The Tunnels Below by Nadine Wild-Palmer (best short novels of all time .TXT) 📕

Lydia wanted to hear every second of the Goddess’s musing. Anything she could learn about Sil she would devour. Even if it took centuries.

She walked toward the railing and froze when Sil looked directly at her. Lydia blinked. There wasn’t a chance that the Goddess was actually looking at her. She wasn’t even there.

But Sil saw her because Sil was the Goddess of Time.

“You will have to make hard decisions. You will lose things you love and find new ones. Don’t end up like me. Don’t make the wrong decisions and end up alone, unable to feel because there are so many voices screaming in your memories. Time, although warped, is still linear in your world.”

“Sil,” Lydia whispered. “Can you hear me?”

“I trust you,” Sil continued. Lydia realized that this was all planned. Sil could not hear her, nor had she seen the future to know what Lydia would say. She had simply planned the impossible.

“I trust you,” Sil repeated. “My magic will change. It will become yours until I am no longer there. And I know you will make the right decisions because my magic would not choose you otherwise. All I beg of you is to take care of him. In another lifetime, I would have been able to love him as he should be loved. I am kind. I am giving. But I am not capable of devoting myself to one person alone.

“I am the people’s Goddess,” a tear trailed down Sil’s cheek. “I was never created to love a single man. You can love him as he deserves. To give him peace, clarity, soften his edges which so desperately need to be worn. And I need you to save the world while somehow saving him.”

Lydia leaned back against the railing of the balcony. “It’s a lot to ask.”

“I know it’s a lot to ask,” Sil responded. “But it is not impossible if you put your mind to the task. And I know you will do the best you can.”

Lydia rubbed her chest. The words made the weight of her task all the more real and all the more heavy. Save the world. Love the man. Be the good woman.

They were all things that sounded wonderful in theory. But they were so difficult to bring to life.

Sil smoothed a hand down the moving metal of her dress. She pulled herself together in mere seconds. The expression upon her face became her mask and her body a weapon.

Her feet made no sound as she strode from the balcony. Lydia leaned to the side to glimpse delicately arched toes.

“Barefoot?” she whispered.

Of course. What else would someone like Sil wear? She wasn’t the kind of woman to be confined by the tight ache of heels. Of all things, bare feet were her way to hold onto freedom for a little while longer.

Lydia should have stopped the memory there. She should have pulled herself from the thread of the past and gone back to Pitch’s study. She wanted to remember every bit of what Sil had told her and pore over the words for hidden meaning within them.

If she left, she would remember each moment perfectly.

She didn’t leave. Like an addict, she wanted to see just a tiny bit more.

Lydia ran into the ballroom, bursting through the shadows and blinking in the bright golden light. She searched for the only two people in the room she cared for.

Where was the dark man with his moonlight woman?

Her eyes scanned the crowd frantically until she found them. Dancing in the center of the ballroom, they glided as though they were flying. Everyone else dimmed in comparison.

Despite how nervous Sil had professed to be, she held herself regally while the other dancers stared. Her head held high and her posture stiff, she was pulling it off.

A stranger among wolves.

Lydia crossed her arms over her chest and leaned against the wall. They were beautiful. Two sides of the same coin, they glimmered like the night sky and exploded like a dying sun.

She stood in the corner of the ballroom for hours. Just watching them. No one seemed to tire here, the dancers did not pause, the musicians did not stop playing. Fabric continued to swirl in great swaths of color and false smiles on dancer’s faces.

Pitch and Sil never paused. Their bodies intertwined until the music stopped. Even then, they held on for a few moments longer, as though they could not bear to let each other go.

She wanted something like that. Lydia had never considered whether she would get married or have a partner. Her life had been fine without either. Independence was important to her.

Her heart now wanted what they had. She wanted someone to stare at her with the same tenderness with which Pitch looked at Sil. His hand ghosted over her shoulder and lingered to tangle his fingers with hers. The heat between them was a raging forest fire Lydia could feel from across the room.

A voice boomed through the ballroom. “Who have you brought to our gathering, brother?”

Shadows behind Lydia coalesced into a being. Across the ballroom more shadows gathered from the door. Others slid away from the edges of other people’s shadows and from underneath the instruments.

Four beings created themselves. Tall and unyielding, they had no physical form. They were the shadow of people with no expression nor faces.

Lydia shivered. So these were the Five that were lost to them? Or rather, she supposed, the Four. Pitch stood apart from his siblings in such stark contrast she could not consider him to be among their ranks.

“I have brought a woman!” Pitch called back to them. “I would have you welcome her into our home.”

The shadow beings rushed to the couple and circled them. “She appears to be lacking.”

“How so?”

“She is weak.”

“She is not.”

The shadows grew taller as they argued. “She is not darkness. Darkness is what we have become. Shall we explain again, brother, why we are the way we are?”

“No.”

“Nevertheless,