Autumn challenge: What are you afraid of?
I am kneeling in prayer, singing quietly to myself in an empty room when they come in. I am thinking about what I have been told -- that I may die. I have come close before, of course -- in the monastery's labyrinth, for instance, or any of a number of other times. Somehow this time it feels more authentic. Perhaps it is the validity granted to it by the word of Archbishop Tiberius.
When the danger actually strikes, I am too preoccupied to be frightened. I have the words of my prayer to remember, the exact structure of the incantation. I barely even notice the creeping shadow, the deadly arms, the obscene howls of triumph. Only in the last instant am I frightened. In the tenth part of a second I make a plan; as it kills me I will send my spirit out and try to find you, to express something more than the few inadequate words I have scrawled to you.
But when it is over -- no danger after all, at least not for me -- and I see you, I cannot put these thoughts into my mouth. When I thought we were facing down an ancient spirit I at least had something to guide me. But with you I am adrift. And amidst the threads and patterns of probability, as always, I see a white void around you, the webwork of the plan no more than spatters.
And this, most of all, frightens me.