The darkness insisted on its own finality. It didn’t so much close around me as it devoured even the memory of light. It was as though darkness was all I had ever known.
It insisted I give up, lie down, and accept this ending.
Truthfully, I never did know how to do that.
My shoes soaked through and my toes going numb, I took one sloshing step at a time. I kept my balance with my right hand pressed against the wall, believing that as long as I kept going, something would have to change. No fetid hole can continue forever.
My knee bumped something, and I heard a splash as a tower of assorted garbage toppled over.
A groan of dismay escaped my throat. I’d stacked those pieces blindly into an unsteady pile some time ago after I suspected I’d been going in circles, and this was my confirnation.
What else was there to do?
I bent and groped through heaps of refuse for materials with which to start another stack, unsure what other options I had.
I could wander away from the wall I’d been using to guide myself so far. Maybe the next one wouldn’t lead me in a loop?
My hand touched something—a texture I recognized—a soft, waxy knob bearing a remnant of string.
This last little end of a candle that was almost completely exhausted. It was just enough that, if the wick weren’t soaked through, it might shine a few precious minutes of light.
If I could light it.
If.
Unfortunately I had nothing to light the candle with but myself. I set my jaw, summoning my most determined self. If I was too much for the coven, I should be more than enough for this.
I just needed to find a spark.
The sun was my accustomed pick, no matter how it frightened the old witches when I plucked a flame right from the sky.But now, well… they lost the right to object to my methods when they cast me down here to rot with the rest of the garbage.
I recalled the sun’s generous tongue and reached for my memory of its voice, that it might sing me a song of heat and light.
Nothing. Too many layers of wood and stone and earth separated us.
I didn’t even know how much time I’d spent down here. Maybe it had already set.
What else?
They had taken all my mirrors—not that those could have done much for me in such an absolute dark—as well as the toys by which I might cast my imagination toward escape.
All I had was the tiny spark of hope that this candle-stub kindled in my heart.
Hm. Could that spark of hope in turn kindle the candle itself?
It was a weak metaphor to call on to bear my life’s weight, but I was willing to try anything.
Too weak a metaphor, as it turned out. Though perhaps the weakness was in me.
I bent and twisted and performed my crude little self-inversion, and when I reached inside myself I found too little. The candle remained dead in my hand.
In frustration, I gave in to self-pity. I wept. I was too small, too inexperienced. If it were an older incarnation of myself stuck here, I’m sure she could have managed, but all I could grasp at was a fistful of sunshine and cliché, and I could save myself with neither.
If my older incarnation was to someday arrive where I would eventually go, and this moment was where I began, there must be a path—I reasoned—from here to there, just as there was a path from this candle’s origin to its end here in the dark.
What if it had come here for me?
Its wick once knew a flame. It traced some path here for me to find. By reaching this point, right now, its past was necessarily intertwined with my present and onward. Couldn’t that thread take me home?
My fingertips touched the charred wick. I only had to trace the thread.
On the candle’s behalf, I remembered fire. I un-snuffed its flame. By the bloom of its light, the chamber’s walls painted themselves in a dim orange that might as well have come from the glare of daylight in comparison to the utter black that shrouded me a moment earlier.
On the opposite side from the wall I clung to, there was an opening, and I felt the tug of the candle’s history pulling me toward it. Hand-crafted inevitability guided me through the prison-dump-maze as the candle burned itself upward, lengthening with each step I took.
At last I tasted the sweet breath of the open air. A sunset greeted me from the horizon with the same warm orange as my candle’s flame. With a grateful nod, I lifted the flickering light and returned it to its source before the sun slipped fully out of sight.
The candle—whole and untouched—I placed at the entrance to the ghastly hole I’d just escaped. Some day, some future incarnation of me would lead it through its short, precious life as a gift into the past, but truthfully I hoped it wouldn’t have to be any time soon.
I needed a bath.
I needed time to plot revenge.
If those witches were so afraid of a sorceress in their midst, I vowed to give them new reasons to justify their fears.