Free The Duke In His Castle by Vera Nazarian Page A

his suppressed life force.
    This doll with a rosebud mouth has attained the knowledge of her full power, while he has not.
    She is potential force, curbed violent energy. She is an abyss of spheres, a universe without end. For, she knows how to pull from it, from the fabric of it all. . . .
And he does not.
. . . Not yet.
And yet—yes. It’s the will and the responsibility, he knows and realizes he’s known always.
    And thus Duke Rossian approaches the corpse and for the last time forces his fear and awe of the death before him to lie in the open, in the forefront of his mind in a thin oil-slick coating of vulnerability. And for the first time, he allows himself to touch that fear—not a deep-set beast within him, but a shimmering illusion, a parasitic flimsy membrane. Fear reveals itself; it is a bubble to be popped. And then there’s nothing on the other side, nothing but his self. He allows the wanting and the urge to take over, and he reaches for the responsibility.
    He feels a rift.
    He is cracked and patched together.
    Responsibility flies to him like a falcon, his falcon, trained to return. Responsibility is merely the undeniability of certain things, the acceptance of reality for itself and not himself.
    And in a pale smoky film, something comes away from his mind. His consciousness is now a sphere of new, strangely sharp clarity , as though a bubble of self has expanded to twice its size. The walls of his castle spin around him, rushing upwards, as he experiences vertigo and a grounding in the present moment—sharp awareness of the night’s cold, the slight movement of air upon the numb skin of his face; gold flickering of two candles; the fuzzy microscopic chamois cloth surface; her body; body lying nude and perfect with the pump of lungs; two moths flying over the flames; overhead, sky, sky, sky. . . .
    In his fixed grandeur of clarity, Rossian suddenly knows the exact meaning and result of any and all of his possible actions for that moment and all others to come—terrible, sharp, clean, perfect. And knowing, he realizes certain absolute inevitabilities and consequences. There are necessities of things arising as a result of other things. It is frightening, the unfurling of a new mindset.
Izelle never sees his eyes in that moment, is never later to be sure what it is that happens, but the candlelight knows.
It touches the gaunt man’s face, caresses it once and flees, as he, inhuman, turns away while appearing to glance into the night.
The Duke stands before the wax-like body. There is absolute determination in his fluid movement, and this time he is sure.
    His hands flare with light and he runs them down the living-dead flesh. Izelle can surely feel it, the fierce light, and her own hair stands on end all over her body, in sympathetic resonance and something else .
    It is like a string being tuned. Power comes to a snap all around and resettles into a new harmonic key. The walls of the castle sing. The meta-sound surrounds Izelle, perfect as the pitch within her own self. And then there is a rush of something.
    The woman lying on the table shudders, full-body, and opens her eyes. In the dim candlelight they are colorless spots of shadow, the irises only slightly paler than the dilated pupils.
    Rossian, the light of his hands extinguished, shudders also, his vigor spent. He lurches forward powerfully against the table, across the body of her who is now truly present among them.
    Everything afterwards is anticlimactic. Izelle gives a small scream, then quickly stifles it. She comes forward to help him, and now it seems she is unable to hold her tongue. The jester is allowed to surface; it is the mad aspect of herself. “Come, my Duke, it cannot be so bad now, that you faint away. You’ve brought her to life, yet you would as soon kill her again by the weight of your body falling on her delicate newborn frame.”
    Yet the nature of her touch to help him up belies the flippant words. Her small thin