Fiction: Lady of Shadows - Part 18
The stone halls of the palace of the Shadow King are never truly silent, filled with the endless susurration of whispered voices even in the dead of night. The carved templars lining its twisting, labyrinthine corridors in high relief seem trapped in an endless dance, stone limbs writhing in tranced ecstasies as the flickering torchlight plays upon them. One is left with the disturbing impression that these stone women are the source of the endlessly echoing murmurs, the true living inhabitants of the palace. When I first came to the Naggaramakam, a confused and wistful child plucked from my dying mother’s mud-brick hovel to become yet another bride of the Shadow King, I wondered for a time whether those stone women waited only for us flesh-and-blood women to leave or to die, so that they might live and serve our Lord and Husband in our place.