Searchlight

Renard jolts to his feet to the river.

The shade at his back screeches in a multitude of wrathful and aggrieved voices, shattering apart into hundreds of weaker shades that all surge in on the group with clawed hands. But, radiating from the flower that glides serenely on the face of the river, is a crimson halo, like the halo of light from the sun, that is felt by the heart rather than seen with the eyes. The rays of this halo, pulsing in and out like the tides of a heartbeat, and yet only ever spearing out further and further and further, strike against the surging shadows as if they have all crashed into a wall, and then, like the closing of a door, disintegrates every one of them.

The glory extends even further. The roiling storm of shadows in the sky too screams, with rage, fear, castigation — a great portion of the host sloshes out of sight to flee, but just as many snap and beat at the bottom of the sky-dome in a mindless, murderous, and ultimately suicidal rage, as the effusing spears of light from the flower abolish all the ones who stayed, too.

Darkness is cast out by very proximity to this flower. The air itself brightens as the oppressive humidity of the depth eases away into crispness — breath comes easier, and too Renard’s thoughts resolve into vital, and positive clarity, that the moribund trend towards surrender, and dreadful ideas of murdering his fellows, are (horrifically, as he can now see them,) stripped away and rejuvenated into sanity.

Renard chokes on his own spit as he skids to a stop at the riverbank. The heat is overwhelming — to look directly at it might blind him — as these thoughts flit through his mind, he sees the flower has already drifted further down the river, toward where Fidel stands, with his hand dipped ready in the water.

As the flower approaches him, its petals tremble like leaves in a storm. With unreal calm, Fidel withdraws his hand.

“It’s not for us," he says, and the flower continues on its way down the river, uninterrupted.

A vicious smile cracks out of Verdan as he covers his face with his palms, laughing. It is not a cruel laugh, nor one of resignation to failure, though it is manic and grim, and signs a resignation to the harsher fate: continuing.

For, looking up the river, a trail of shimmering red light wafts over the water like a scent, which marks where the flower has been, and more importantly, where it has come from. To yell at Fidel for releasing that chance would be foolish, as though they are not being afforded a wish, a godly finger is still pointing them along on this journey. For the scent-trail of light follows clearly up one of the thousand forking branches of the river.

Without hesitation or thought, Renard flips the grounded boat onto the river to disembark the second his passengers board. Reinvigorated by the flower’s mere presence, both of them do so. With a decisive heave of the paddles, the boat sails steadily on.

Teeth grit, Renard’s gaze fixes over his shoulder hunting the trail of the flower. Even among the convoluted city of rivers, it is not hard to find or follow, for the crimson light does not actually run into the labyrinth at all. It skirts just close enough to its mouth to suggest that it joins like the others to whole, when it does not, and instead forks shortly into a small, straight stream that terminates in blackness.

As many of the streams ‘exuding’ from the central mass do. Renard chuckles in his throat. So even that appearance, of the many shoots effusing from the whole, is a vicious deception from the snake. The shifting nature of the false forks, which conspicuously point outward then rejoin the maze, is entirely, merely to cloak that there is one right way, and to erode a witness’s trust that this right way will remain in its clear and apparent orientation.

Which, it will.

Swallowing the cold lump of doubt in his throat, and the dread of the water aborting into nothing, Renard forces himself to believe in the guidance of the red glow, and paddles up the last stretch, before its mild light can fade.

The dropoff into nothingness stands before them now. Renard hesitates — not for the thought that they would sail off the edge and fall, but for fear of knowing there will be no coming back once he crosses that threshold, with no apprehension of what could lay beyond but something even more dark, deep, strange, or sinister.

“If we drop off the edge, I’ll tell Camille at the pearly gates that he’s one dedicated prankster!" Verdan laughs with jocularity that has been absent for weeks. Fidel looks forward into the black with a sharp air of resolution and purpose, recovered too after weeks of absence.

Perhaps, then, that Renard is so afraid speaks of a return to his true character, too.

His hands quiver on the paddles. His guts are freezing, shivering like a man collapsed in the tundra. But, looking over where they paddled from, these blank distorted planes of colour, affirms like an edict that there is no staying here. With a light breath to steady himself, he clenches his lips, adjusts his grip on the paddles, and rows the final stroke.