Excerpt:

My life begins in total darkness. I feel myself floating, but the blackness is so thick around me that I cannot see where I am. Before I can do more than wonder, though, a faint beam of light far below dissolves the illusion of impenetrable gloom. A second beam joins it, and I see that somehow, I am at the top of a vast vaulted stone chamber with only empty air below me. Hurrying though an arched doorway at the far end of the room, two figures in hooded cloaks argue with each other. At first I cannot hear what they are saying, but then a word drifts up to me.
“...wrong...” One figure points in the other’s face, and they stop. Each of them holds a lantern; one grasps a large leather-bound book against his chest. Somehow these figures look wrong, with arms too long and legs too short—and surely the dark scaly skin on that hand is just a trick of the poor light? But I realize in the next instant I cannot tell myself what they should look like. I don’t even know what I should look like. I have no idea of who I am or how I got here.
As I look around wildly, suddenly panicked, I see that the entire chamber lies thick in dust. Near me, faint shreds of cobweb hang from the crevices between stones, also coated with dust and clearly abandoned long ago by whatever web-weavers once spun them. The atmosphere of dry decay speaks of long years of vacancy; clearly no-one has ventured into this chamber in ages. So the two figures, moving again, their cloaks pulling trails through the thick dust on the floor—what are they doing here?
They stop again near the center of the room, near the edge of a circular pattern in the stone floor, an edge filled with opaque blackness. I strain to see more closely, and I drift lower. As I move closer I can hear the two strangers again. The one holding the book opens it and says, “You’ve made these arguments before and yet you are here with me now. You know it is the only way. He grows weary of solitude, and his moods warp our reality as surely as his art does. We cannot put it right. Do you want to live in this hell of his boredom forever?” He sets his lantern on the floor to begin turning over pages in the book.
“Surely he has to go to his natural rest soon.” The other figure, nevertheless, holds up his lantern to shed light on the book’s pages. As he does, I can suddenly see that the large circle on the floor is not a black disk with a grey stone edge, as I had thought, but is instead a well, full of a viscous darkness that rolls and heaves like waves under some invisible compulsion, because of course no wind blows in this airless chamber. The moving darkness laps at the stone edge and I feel afraid. Nothing good could come from that void, I feel sure.
“How many cycles has he been here already? How many of our kind have gone to their natural rest while he has remained unchanged? He is not of our world. Maybe he never ends.”
The second figure hisses. “Everything ends! He is unnatural, to be sure, but you would make him a devil! And she goes to a natural rest, so why wouldn’t he?”
“She is less powerful, perhaps?” The first figure gestures impatiently. “We must begin. Even in his torpor, he may notice that this book, of all, is gone.” Slowly, reluctantly, the second figure draws forth an instrument I had not noticed: a long golden pole with a large, wide hook on one end. The tip of the hook gleams with a single wicked barb tapering to a near-invisible point. He grasps the end of the pole and dips the hook toward the blackness of the well. As the hook approaches the surface the blackness ripples away from it, as if a stiff breeze has just blown across it.
“Not yet!” The book-holding figure puts out a restraining hand. “I must begin the incantation first.” He begins to mutter in a low voice, withdrawing the hand to run a finger over the words of the page. Unconsciously, I drift lower, practically over their shoulders. How do they not notice my presence? True, I seem to have no substance, no limbs that I can see, but here I am nonetheless. Am I a ghost?
The second figure hesitates, then plunges the hook below the surface of the blackness. The chanting continues as he draws it up again, empty. He seems unsurprised as he dips it down again. The first figure glances up from the thick leather-bound volume he holds, but continues reading aloud. The characters on the page seem mere scribble to me; I can’t read them. My eyes keep returning to them, stubbornly trying to make sense of them. I look up to see the second figure draw up the hook, once again empty.
The pitch of the first figure’s voice changes, higher, and he reads faster. His tracing finger is almost at the bottom of the page. The second looks at him, a worried frown creasing his forehead. They’re both frightened! Of this mysterious “he” for whose benefit they are doing this, clearly without his knowledge or, presumably, permission? Are they afraid of failure? Or success? The second figure thrusts the hook into the now-roiling black well and jerks it up sharply. Instead of breaking up through the surface of the blackness, however, the hook hits something and stops. At the same time, I feel a sharp stab of pain.
“I’ve got her!” He shouts. He heaves upward on the pole, and a few inches of its length emerge from the murk. Shifting his grip, he pulls again. The pain I felt before spreads, a tearing fire through an arm I don’t have. The first figure finishes chanting and stands, slack-jawed, watching his companion wrestle with the pole, now slipping downward in his grip. “Help me!” the second snaps, and the book tumbles to the stone floor as the first rushes to grasp the pole and pull.
“Why is it so hard?” The pull together, but only succeed in raising the pole a foot. The agony in my arm has spread, and each time they pull and explosion of pain rocks through me. I want to scream, but I have no voice. How can a ghost feel pain?
The second figure, face resolute, sets his grip one more time and squatting, gives a mighty heave upward. The barbed hook, gleaming point now smeared with a dark liquid, breaks the surface of the well, along with a thin pale hand. The resistance against the pole suddenly vanishes, and the two figures stumble back from the well, dragging forth a young woman. Through my haze of pain I see that the hook has driven through her left forearm. Blood streams down her arm and the left side of her long gauzy dress. Long blond hair almost obscures her pale face, the lips almost as white as the surrounding skin and pale lashes vanishing again her cheeks.
“What did you do?” The first figure drops the hook and steps back, clearly appalled. The second figure rounds on him.
“I? What have I done? You read the incantation. If it has gone wrong then you share the blame!”
My vision is clouding, growing drim through the pain. I can barely see any of them now, but I notice the woman on the floor stirring, and her eyes flutter open. I feel she must be looking at the nothing where I am. Then suddenly I am elsewhere, lower, looking up that the two bickering figures. I can no long see the woman. The first cloaked figure grabs a fistful of the second’s tunic, preparing to shake him, when he glances down. Instantly I understand.
“What have you done?” I croak. I am the woman. As the figures pause their fighting to look at me in horror, I pass out.