A Darkness in My Soul

climbed the few small peaks and surveyed this sector of the world, looked for caves and came back down again. In time, when it was apparent there was no blue-floored room and no exit to Child's conscious mind, we reached the curtain of mist to another climate, another segment of the fractured reality that constituted Child's mind.
        I was forced to say goodbye to Kas the centaur, though I longed to stay here and enjoy the horseman form a while longer. He lectured me about disassociating from my centaur form upon leaving this plane, and I listened and made my promises.
        In the next landscape, I returned to my human analogue, though shedding the horseman form was painful and filled me with a sad need to feel my hooves striking stone.
        There was no life here to imitate, so I did not have to worry about becoming inextricably meshed with a myth figure. This was the land of the broken black mountains which jagged up in slabs as big as houses, some even larger than that, like a world of broken crockery and shattered bottles. The sunlight was discolored by the refracting stone and became a depressing brown. The air was flat, as if it had been bottled for a long while, and no breeze moved in it. There were no sounds, no movements.
        The sky was an even, ugly yellow, like dark mustard, and not a single cloud marked its expanse.
        I walked forward.
        The onyx rocks were smooth and cold against my bare feet.
        As I scrabbled up the terrain, my fingers squeaked on the shiny surfaces. Those sounds seemed unendurably long in the ghostly silence. I did not like this place at all, wanted out of it as fast as I could move to the next veil of mist. But it was here that I found Child, found the place where he was trapped in his own madness…
        

    IV
        
        As I made my way over the ebony land, I reached a chasm in the shattered rocks, perhaps a thousand yards long and three yards wide at the top, narrowing to two feet at the bottom. Down there, some three hundred feet below, a soft blue light glowed. It seemed to be the gentle blue of shallow water, but even this slight color branded my eyes in contrast to the sameness of the terrain I had been struggling across for some minutes.
        I called down, listened to the flat echo, but received no answer. If this was the place where Child waited, bound by his own insanity, circled by unnamed demons, he was unable to speak.
        I swung over the jagged edge, looked to the bottom, then grew wings like those I had seen on the batlike creatures of the mountain. I descended gently, pulled the wings in and absorbed them as the way grew too narrow to glide. I dropped the last few feet onto the blue floor, found it was made of ice.
        To the right, the rock wall cut off three feet above the ice, and the passage this created seemed to go on for some distance. Lying on my stomach, I slid along the shimmering ice; I was cold but not uncomfortable, exhilarated by the freshness of the air here. A hundred feet further on, the ceiling of black rock thrust suddenly upward, and I found myself in a full-sized cavern where I could stand.
        On my feet again, I crossed the barren room to the far side where the ice-encrusted rock seemed to warp downward. There, I discovered steps roughly chiseled in the ice.
        I went down them, cautiously, eventually came out in a shadowy chamber with another blue floor, though this one was not empty: Child sat in the center of it in an analogue version of his real body.
        And…
        And: the things crawled around him, circling in mindlessness, yet with a certain uncompromising evil that terrified me even though I knew they could not do me any physical harm. They were much like scorpions though somewhat longer than a man's arm, with flared, knifeedged carapaces shielding their backs, and twenty spindly legs on either side. Their stinging tails forked at the end, each of the two prongs tipped with a trio of wicked spurs as long as my little finger and tapered to needle points.
        They did riot look at me, nor did their sensory cilia, bursting like whiskers around their beaked mouths, in any way indicate that they realized my presence.
        Their legs hissed on the ice, and their constant parade had worn shallow grooves in the cold floor.
        There were different numbers of them at different moments. Now there might be as few as a dozen describing the wide