The Circle of Kirke (ebook)

A nebulous path of flowing smoke and grasping shadows spread out before Pandora, funnelling her toward a cliff. Though she could see the lights of distant torches, their glows seemed muted, unreachable. The sea smashed over the cliff, again and again, as if intent to shatter stone with its relentless anger. Behind her, the smoke formed up into a barrier, one ever encroaching upon her, forcing her toward the precipice. There was naught for it save to stride toward her ending. She knew, if the smoke engulfed her, it would devour her, body and soul. If she fell from the cliff, she would break upon the rocks or drown in the churning deeps.
And still, onward she pressed, bound for her doom. Always, always toward her doom.
The walls of smoke flickered on one side, and from it strode an inchoate image of a man, his form hazy but crackling with energies.
“Morpheus …” Pandora rasped, her words choked out as smoke strove to find a way into her lungs. He had found her, but in the turbulent hold of dreams, her mind could not parse the circumstances of the how.
“I warned you to desist in your pointless defiance of Fate.” Slivers of stone rose like earthen worms and coiled about her legs and abdomen, holding her in place.
Still, despite her powerlessness here in the dream, Pandora found the strength to laugh at him. “Were it so futile as you claim, it would not so vex you or force you to strive so hard against me. Your very efforts only reinforce my convictions. You and the Anunnaki, the Unseen Order, Mithra, the Moirai. All of you are so desperate to stop me from interfering. And yet you would have me believe I have no chance of success?”
“You fall prey to the Gnostic sin, it seems.”
Oh, Pandora had little love for the Gnostics who had so long held her imprisoned. Still, had they come to her under other circumstances, had they striven to become her allies rather than her captors, she might have found common cause with them. She might, if Ananke had proved kinder than it ever seemed to, have even liked Kronos and his ilk. “Get your tortures over with, oneiromancer. I cannot imagine they will prove as tedious as another debate with one so doggedly entrenched in his ideas.”
Morpheus strode closer, his form turning solid, taking on his usual aspect. “Are you any less devoted to your own ideals? Do you not worship upon the fool’s idol of free will, as if such an ephemeral illusion might have aught to offer you save perpetual disappointments? Surrender to Fate, Pandora, and embrace the freedom of the soul that comes with acknowledging your will is not, has never been, your own. You cannot even control your own thoughts, born as they are from causes beyond yourself.”
She wheezed out a weary sigh. Despite her taunts, she dreaded whatever agonies he would visit upon her. Even experienced but a single time, his tortures had left her ravaged and haunted for months afterward. Now, two years since, still sometimes she awoke in a fright and in dread of him. Perhaps, even, her fears had been what alerted him to her presence now, centuries after he had last found her.
“I’ve no wish to visit harm upon you,” Morpheus said. “You have but to submit to the will of the Moirai, and all is forgiven.”
“No.” He called it defiance, and she supposed it was. She had tried appeals of logic, of hope, and of humanity, but none had reached this man. In the end, it came down to choice. Perhaps his words held truth, and even that choice of hers was spawned in the events that had shaped her. But that, to Pandora’s mind, did not mean she was, in fact, any less her.
“Oh, sweet girl.” Morpheus ran fingers along her cheek in an almost affectionate gesture. She might have expected such a tactic to be laced with some predatory lasciviousness, for men so oft turned to such threats against women they could not otherwise cow. But the way he touched her didn’t feel sexual so much as conciliatory. “I tried to spare you, Pandora. But you have their attention now, and they will not be so gentle as I have been.”
She groaned. “One more attempt to get me to fear you and yours.” Though he seemed in earnest.
He shook his head. “If you chance to dream again, perhaps we might try this conversation once more. Mayhap I can still spare you.”
Abruptly, the binding earth fell away from her, and Pandora was tumbling, the whole cliff giving way. For an agonising instant, she was free-falling, plummeting toward the sea.