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Leadem, Christopher

"The Mantooth"


Time passed.
At length Kalus raised himself, understanding, and better able to handle
the heightened state of his senses, feeling once more like a peaceful
sea from which the gale has passed, softened and grateful.
'Thank you,' he said to her. He took a deep breath.
'Are you all right?'
There was something more than womanly concern in her voice. An intense
curiosity had taken hold of her, as if she too pondered some great
riddle of her past. The questions twirled like serpents about the
object she now surveyed.
'Yes. What are you thinking?'
'I've been looking at the mirror,' she said, gazing at it
still. 'All this time we've taken the altar, and the visions of
that night, for granted, perhaps because the questions were too deep,
and they frightened us..... But what does it all mean, Kalus? What's
BEHIND it?'
Turning toward the singular apparatus, which like her he had left aside
until this night as simply too much to contemplate, he was again drawn
by its silent mystery. But in his more earthy, less ethereal way, he
took the question literally. What lay BEHIND it? And stirred at last to
physical action, he took from his pouch the round hammer-stone and
approached the blue-black mirror, which seemed to waver in strange
patterns before him.


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