The Gifts Of Youth
an excerpt

Epilogue

Ending the corridor in a blunt crash, robes billowing out unfittingly behind him, the man skidded on the over-polished panelling on the floor and tripped into the rough stone that covered every inch of the antechamber’s walls. A shout came out from behind him.
“Are you okay?”
“Fine.” He called back, “Just keep coming, I think-“
There was an almighty explosion, sending him back to the floor again from the kneeling position he had managed to recover himself to. As his face met the wood again, a thick slab of mahogany flew over him and bounced off the granite with a sickening thud, careering back down the room towards the sound of footsteps. There was a momentary shriek, but the footsteps soon resumed. They, too, skidded to a halt, arms found their way around his chest, and he was back up again.
“Good god, was that-“
“Come on.”
They ran in the direction the flying door had come from – the last few metres around the corner. Through the blown-out doorway ahead, they could see blackness. They burst in.
“Daniel? Daniel!?” he cried out.
Nothing. His companion’s eyes grew accustomed to the dark quickly, and the full splendour of the room was soon revealed. It was circular, the roof slowly curving up to a delicate peak and a grand bay window at the back that looked out onto the city and beyond. The wall and some of the floor was covered in shelves which at one point seemed to have all contained jars. Most of the jars were now shattered, as were the shelves, and as she looked down and shuffled her feet she noticed that the floor was covered in a fine silt.
A fine silt, and three bodies.
“Oh god, they’re dead.”
“All of them?”
“They’re dead…. They’re dead, does that mean-“
He could see a little clearer now. The bodies were slumped in a perfect distribution around the edges of the room, against the shelves as if tired after too much work. Even through her mask, he could sense that she was crying. She turned to him and repeated the half-question again.
“Does that mean-“
“I don’t know… I think…”
Through the window, a light went out in the far distance. He raised a finger.
“Look.”
Another light, somewhere nearer. Then another. Clusters of them suddenly extinguished. A building exploded. He thought he could hear the faint whisper of screams beginning.
“We failed, I… how did we fail? Is it really over?”
He turned to her, looked deep into the black notch cut into the perfect whiteness of the mask. He asked himself the question he asked every night, before he went to sleep. Every night, for so many years. Tenderly, he grasped each of her shoulders, and slowly applied pressure to that strange part of his mind he had fought so long to control.
“Maybe not. Maybe this can be the beginning.”
“No… no, not again…” she protested, as the light grew around them, “NO!”