Her perspective on the hallway had not changed as she stood riveted by the violent scene she had just been forced to watch. Ellen had no idea what was expected of her, as her mind and attention floated in the desolate flickering light of the single remaining torch that listlessly stuttered and sloppily spluttered in the crude iron bracket on the wall behind her.

  Before her the door to the small dark cell stood in abject apathy to the presence of the two bodies that lay just behind it. Ellen didn’t know if she was crying now, she couldn’t feel her body where it sat back in the small reading room of the little jewelry shop that was the center of Elgin Stark’s apparent interconnected web that spanned the world and had possibly done so for centuries.

  But she was here, now, in this odd ancient place. A Classical Greece that looked like very little of anything she had been taught in school. She didn’t recognise this island, nor the names of anyone being portrayed in this long ago memory of a man who supposedly had been there. But, as she thought about it, it did make a kind of sense. If Elgin had shown a memory of having been around England in the late 1800s, would she see figures like Lord Nelson and Minister Gladstone? Or would it have turned out that Mister Stark had spent that century in the town of Slough, possibly farming turnips and fighting the railway expansion.

  She was here. With the light from the torch dying more quickly than she would have credited it, the corridor becoming more dim and the shadows crawling ever closer to the small, heavy door before her.

  As she waited, there was a hint of movement. A flash of shadow moving past Ellen where her perception hovered. The flickering torchlight increased.

  And faded again.

  Then that hint of shadowy movement, too fast for her to see. And the yellow light of the firelight from the wall sconce once again flared into its mediocre attempt at brilliance.

  As she watched, the hall dimmed, a rush of movement followed, and the hall brightened again. The pattern had established itself enough that Ellen knew there was a message in this repetitive tidal flow of torchlight. The pattern repeated several more times, five, she somehow knew. Each series coming faster than the last.

  She was seeing the course of a week's worth of days.

  A sense of stillness settled over the hallway. The flickering of the light slowed, and Ellen knew that time had reasserted its natural rate of flow.

  A very soft moan seeped from the cell before her.

  Rusting noises, and a sharp yell rattled through the hallway.

  No words, just a pained, rusty voice.

  A thick fingered, filthy hand reached up from the encompassing darkness. It grabbed at the bars from within the cell, startling her from her compliant lassitude as it finally latched onto the bottom edge of the opening. Had she her mouth, she may have gasped.

  Maybe, she thought …my body back in the reading room had let out a surprised gasp? I wonder if Mister Stark is seeing my reactions?

  Slowly, a moaning came from the dark hollow of the locked cell, the top of a shaggy haired head hove into view as the hand grasping the bars pulled the moaning, crying body up from the floor where it had lain these last seven days. Now two hands shoved frantic fingers through the bars, and mad, wide dark eyes shone in the little barred window.

  Yriakos let out a maddened howl, and the air in the corridor slashed at the door. His voice bubbled with rage as a quiet hiss escaped him. She could see the heavy bar across the door begin to sag, the thick, reinforced plank of wood suddenly supple and pliant as reeds in a breeze. The heavy bar rippled and slipped from its brackets to fall to the floor with all the rigidity of a salmon filet.

  The door itself now sagged in its frame, suddenly the centimeters thick bronze and iron bound wooden door drooped like a woven grass mat, and fell forward and out from where the gory remains of Yriakos now stood, looking more and more vital as each moment passed. His compact, heavy armed frame took in a deep breath.

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  Bracing her mind, Ellen thought he was about to yell once again.

  She knew she herself wanted to. Seeing the pain and rage on the homely, almost simian features of the petite man, she wanted to cry, and scream, and rage with him in all of his loss, shock, and betrayal.

  But he didn’t yell.

  He didn’t scream.

  Yriakos sighed deeply, his entire body shuddering as the breath left him. Looking down at the floor of the cell just inside the door, the flicker of torchlight cast his face as a filthy, mournful skull.

  He took another breath, this one more slowly than the last. Turning his back to her, he bent down, and dragged the limp, still decaying body of the young man, Di, toward the door and up into his arms. The young man’s once beautiful face now bloodless and bloated beyond recognition.

  With a heave, he had the body up in his arms, tears now streaming freely down his filthy face, salty rivulets cutting trails through a week’s accumulation of dried blood, rotting hay, and who only knew what else. With a step thundered in the confines of the tight corridor, Yriakos moved one foot forward. Then another.

  He tottered, and as he turned, Ellen could see the tattered remains of the chiton he wore showed unbroken skin of the desolate man’s back. Not even a scar was left from any of the stab wounds he had suffered at Kleodos’ hand.

  As the man moved along, each step he took rang through the stones of the little palace like a tolling of a great bell. One that Ellen could even feel the vibration of through her distant body. Where she had been unable to even sense her corporeal form previously, now every step Yriakos took vibrated against her rib cage and fought the beating of her heart.

  On the floor above the cells, there looked to be storage for the palace's needs, and Yriakos moved slowly toward a small archway. He stared into the darkness beyond, no one having come by to light this level recently. Sunlight trickled in from the above floor just enough to tell them both that daylight would be had if they only chose to climb higher.

  Awkwardly, and yet with great care, Yriakos reached into the darkened archway, and brought out a large ceramic jug, its wide mouth sealed, and the two small ceramic loops to either side joined to one another with a coarsely woven strap. There was a dark red stain on the lip of the stoppered container at several points around its rim. There was an ungainly set of movements, and he soon had the jug hung off of his shoulder.

  Yriakos turned away again, back to the stairs, and moved on with his burdens.

  Up the stairs and into the palace above, the pale specter of misery steadily walked, arms of the body on his arms dangling listlessly as the large jug swung back and forth, banging against the corded muscles of Yriakos’ filthy thigh. At the top of the second flight of stairs, on what she judged as the main level of the building, Yriakos stopped, and let out a low moan that he built slowly up into a keening that broke Ellen’s now pounding heart back where it sat safely in a cozy little reading room a world away.

  Looking about himself for direction, the resurrected man moved toward a door, and with a calamitous kick of his unshod foot, the door was flung from its hinges to land in a little courtyard filled with bright sunlight, and grape vines gone bare of leaf from neglect. Looking up to the sky, sunlight, misery, and tears making a mockery of the once kind lines of his face.

  Slowly, with great care and gentleness, he laid out the body of Di in the sunlight. Sitting beside the remains, he began to rock back and forth as he chanted a litany of syllables Ellen could only guess at the meaning behind.

  One combination, “Dzeh-oos, Che’RAH, DEEon-EE-jayoos!” repeated often enough for Ellen to recognise it in the cycle whenever it came back around. The word “Moirai” was chanted harshly at the end of each verse. Yriakos had a beautiful tenor, though Ellen knew if she had her body with her, she would be sobbing uncontrollably at the man’s loss and pain; instead, whatever spell Elgin Stark had cast just allowed her to watch in silence.

  At the height of his chanting, he took up the large container, and ripped the wax sealed lid from it, splashing himself and the body of Di with the deep reddish purple contents as he did. Slowly, continuing to sing out his pain and sorrow, Yriakos moved about the little courtyards, pouring out the wine he had brought up from the cellar, drenching the desiccated grape vines in as much wine as he was spilling upon himself.

  As he finally came to a stop, he poured the last of the wine from the jug onto himself and then, finally, onto Di’s remains. As she watched, the filth, grime, the dried blood, and even the bloating and rot of corrupted flesh washed away, leaving a marble statue of a beautiful, sleeping boy in the now vibrantly growing grass of the courtyard. Vines that had lain dormant and on the edge of death sprang back to life, rustling and whispering in unfelt breezes.

  A red stained man in tattered chiton turned back to the door through which he had come, and walked back into the palace, lightning in the now cloud covered heavens illuminating the twisting masses of grape vines that worked to not only seal off the little enclosure from the remainder of the palace, but to also climb up and out, over the eaves, and up into the ceramic tiles of the roof with merciless disregard for the brittle times as the vines tore at the structure of the building in its efforts to escape.

  Ellen’s perspective slowly shifted to follow Yriakos as he moved now through the building as clouds worked to obscure the sun from all below.