As I’m spinning my wheels deciding what to do now that The Audacity Gambit has finished its run, please enjoy a short story from the same world, some years later. This was originally published at Patreon and Comradery on February 26, 2024, as one of the stories for Flash Fiction February.
Have you ever truly been in the dark? You can find something approximate in a darkroom—not the kind they have now with the walls of any colour and lights rated for a more robust film, nor even the old darkrooms with the dim red lights and black walls. If you’ve ever closed the door of a film rolling closet behind you and found the air gone thick in the absence of light, you have tasted some darkness.
Standing beneath old growth trees on a cloudy night also comes close. It’s a different texture, softened by the humus of the earth. When you stand under the cradling arch of branches, your feet sinking into the layers of verdant decay, that’s another flavour of the dark.
Probably the easiest to reach is a cave. Almost any good caving tour has a moment when you’re deep beneath the rock and the guide asks everyone to turn off their lights, to extinguish their lights. And it does feel like that, as though the light has been put out, put away forever. Because at that depth any light is but a momentary visitor. And as you become aware of that, feeling the space of a cavern, the other bodies around you fading as surely as your torch did, you can taste the darkness.
I’d been here before. An absence of light so complete I could feel the pressure of it on my skin. I’d panicked before. I was trying not to panic now. I’d had a sword before and this time I had left it behind, knowing I’d find myself in the dark again.
It had all made a lot of sense at the beginning. The basic thesis of proving something to myself, even though what I was proving was as nebulous as my plan. I walked around some, in the dark, schooling myself to take sure steps, to not flinch at imagined horrors or pitfalls as I made my way through nothingness.
This is, I told myself, just fine actually.
And it was.
As I let myself accept it, the softness of the darkness brushed against me, the nothingness below my feet held me gently. This was just another place; I could make of it what I wanted. For a while I just wanted to revel in it, that I’d come here and found a peace instead of a fight. It was a victory of a kind.
But that tamed nothingness was only a step of the journey and I realized its softness could be a different kind of trap. So, I pressed my hands against the downy coat of the dark and tore into it. The light that spilled between my fingers was as warm as blood.
This post is part of The Audacity Gambit – Serialised. Learn more about when the book was first published here, see the archive and overall content warnings here, and find more of my writing here. I’m over on both Comradery and Patreon, if you feel like supporting my creative endeavours. If you’d like to subscribe to this story, here’s a handy email box for you: