What Walks Alone.
“There are no old gods,” he said, “only young worshippers.” The room smelled of chalk dust; pale motes simmered in the meagre beams of sunlight struggling through the blinds. He left his words in the air, as if expectant of applause. The thin timbre of his voice echoed into silence within the walls. Someone in the back row coughed lightly into their fist, and papers shuffled like brittle wings. Far away, past the gardens and through the trees, the bell in the tower tolled languidly. Somewhere, it was time.
He snapped the thin wood of his cane against the top of his desk. A sharp, painful crack, like the touch of a razor.
No one jumped at it. The bell sounded again and again, like a strengthening echo of itself, a great iron heartbeat.
The walls ate up the silence in the room.
In a few seconds he would continue, breaking the fragile air with more rhetoric, more facts. His hair blazed in a halo, wisps drifting like undersea grass, though there was no breeze in the warm and airless room.
The air behind him moved faintly, like a melting mirror, as if the air had become liquid. He opened his mouth to speak as the bell in the tower fell mute.
Beyond that moment, in that final silence when all possibilities collapsed in upon themselves, I never speak of what happened that day.
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