Black And Deep Desires, chapter 5

Chapter five of Black and Deep Desires has been uploaded to my website.

One day, the day before his sixth birthday, he realised that he knew the way out of the maze.  But he stayed where he was, blindly sitting on the cold stone bench at its heart, his feet some inches from the ground.  The maze was fear.  The fear was within him.  The maze was a dark, tangled place deep down inside his mind.  His thoughts followed the paths as they twisted and turned, doubled back on themselves, led nowhere, led everywhere.  At first the fear had been in the thought of never getting out.  Now, the fear was central to his existence; so close that it seemed more familiar to him than any other place in his mind.  Sometimes he could play with the fear, turn his back on it, push it away, let it approach, stare into it, feel stronger than it, and always be squeezed breathless within the blackness of it, be swallowed whole by it.  And being the only one who knew the dark place, the place where fear lived, silent and lightless, even as he trembled, even though he knew the maze would be his death-place, he knew himself to be king.