Beyond Oblivion
Page 23
If they run, they might happen into any of the other wolves that escaped.
If they try and make their way across the river, they’ll certainly drown in its hungry current.
If they stay, the Wildercat might—
She looks up from the wolf at once, her eyes on Dran and Wick, as if she can read their very thoughts.
Her fur is a deep, purple color, and her tail sweeps about behind her like a bothered, hairy snake. Almost resentfully, the Wildercat’s great, golden eyes narrow into slits as she glares at the two of them, her sharp fangs bared with the blood of the wolf upon them. She is long and lean and muscular, and she’s missing a right ear. Whiskers explode from above her parted mouth, so long that they touch the ground, glassy and oddly luminescent.
Through the trees calmly comes another figure: a young man with deep bronze skin and a handsome face. In just a tattered pair of jeans, he comes to stand by the Wildercat, unafraid. He has dark medium-length messy hair glued to his head by the rain. A modest, patchy beard dusts his cheeks and chin. Perhaps the same age as Wick, the young man puts a hand boldly on the Wildercat’s head, stroking it. “That’s my sweet, sweet girl,” he sings.
That voice …
Then the young man lifts his eyes to Wick’s. The handsome smile on his face fades when recognition dawns on him. His lips part. His hand freezes in place atop the Wildercat’s head.
Wick stares back in disbelief at the boy’s eyes …
His bright, sapphire eyes.
ACT 2
Rone’s Odyssey
Six months ago, a young man named Rone Tinpassage with two bright sapphire eyes fell from the sky after stabbing Mad King Impis with a syringe full of serum in the neck and a dagger at the belly, plunged through floor and roof and earth like a stone through mist, and then pierced into an endless darkness where he finally landed with a great and painful crash.
When he opens his eyes, there is nothing before him but black.
Endless, shapeless, crushing black.
“H-Hello …?” Rone croaks, his one tiny word bouncing off walls that are both close and far, far away from his broken body.
He can’t move.
Not a finger. Not a foot.
Nothing.
His legs throb so awfully, he feels like his mind is blocking out the pain or denying its existence entirely. He can’t feel his arms.
I could be dead, Rone realizes. Or dying.
But dying isn’t a notion Rone wishes to grasp. If he is dying, it means he’s still alive somehow, and that notion is terrifying.
That’s impossible. I’m broken. Every single bone in my body must be broken. Every single bone.
No human being can possibly survive a fall as far as he did and survive. He fell through the length of the Lifted City to the slums—and then miles farther still. He fell the equivalent of a hundred Cloud Towers, he is certain.
“Help …” he moans, throwing another word into the dark abyss he lies in. The dark abyss swallows it up and spits it back at him in a hundred aimless echoes.
No help comes.
Rone closes his eyes, though it’s really just the same as keeping them open. I have reached the center of the planet. Rone’s thoughts he had as he fell circle his mind, taunting him. I am King of the Planet! Rone, the Planet King!
He had felt something touch his hand.
He had felt his body slow.
“Maybe I … I-I’m nowhere,” he groans into the nothing.
With all the pain he feels, it’s like he’s floating in a great abyss of nothingness. He might believe it.
If it weren’t for how his words echo.
“Walls,” he murmurs into the darkness. “I hear them. I hear my echoes. There are walls. I’m … I’m …”
I must be in a cave. A deep, deep cave, deep within the earth, deep and deeper still.
The ground at his back is uneven. Bumpy. It is jagged rock, like the floor of a cave, its deep and many throats eroded into existence by streams of underground water. He knows his sciences. Professor Frey taught him well.
“Gandra,” he hears himself murmur. “Frey. Gandra …” Whatever your name is.
And then he slips away.
He opens his eyes an unknowable amount of time later and still nothing meets them. In and out of consciousness, Rone drifts like a piece of trash in the wind of some narrow street in the ninth, bouncing against the walls of buildings, slapping the pavement, then pitched back into the air, floating and drifting and bouncing.
An image of his sister Cintha touches his mind, his frozen sister.
And the beautiful, invisible woman who gave him the syringe, who told him his sister’s last wish, who followed him to the slums.
Both are ghosts. “I want to die,” he whispers to them.
Neither respond. Then they disappear.
A tear falls from his eye and races down the side of his face.
The tear traces his ear, then falls to the stone on which he rests.
He hears the tiny splat of liquid on the rock. That is how quiet it is down here. No light touches this place, and no sound.
I can hear my own heartbeat. It’s slow.
I am King of the Planet … Rone, the …
“R-Rone,” he pushes out. The more he speaks, the less terrified he is of the imminent end. Maybe speaking to himself is proof that he is not yet dead. “R-Rone … the … the Planet K-King.”
Anwick appears before him, though he’s blurry and strange and too young to be really him. That’s what you looked like when I first saw you at school, Rone realizes. “I’m sorry for what I said,” he tells the darkness, reaching out to touch the younger Anwick in his memory, the hallucination in front of him. “I wish I could’ve had the chance to say I’m sorry to you before Metal Hand—”
Anwick vanishes.
Rone drops his hand.
Then he realizes he wasn’t even using his hand. He imagined it all. He can’t move. I can’t fucking move.
If he can’t move his legs and he can’t move his arms, there is only one way in which he can move. He has, perhaps, known it all along, but was too terrified to entertain the notion.
“I can phase … e-even farther down,” he confesses to the vast, unknowing darkness, his voice echoing around him.
What has he to lose? He’s only barely alive, anyway.
Rone closes his eyes.
Then phases.
His body slips through the planet, plummeting down, down, down, down, down.
And even farther down.
When he hears rushing water, the sudden introduction of sound to his hungry ears startles him so much that he turns solid.
Cold water envelopes him. “FUCK!” Rone screams.
But then his mouth fills with water, drowning his one word.
The powerful, rushing river in which he falls in pulls his body under, taking hold of all his limbs as it carries him deeper into the abyss. Rone is submerged, his whole world converted into the noise of sloshing, splashing, and crashing in his ears. He can’t break free.
Suddenly the world gives away beneath him, but not because of his phasing. Rone’s limbs fly outward as he breaks from the surface of the water into a free-fall, soaring downward through the cool air.
An underground waterfall … His last fleeting thought.
He sucks in one deep breath of air.
Then he crashes into another body of water, but this one is so shallow that he feels his body slam against the stony riverbed before being pulled back up to the surface. The push from the base of the waterfall which he cannot see sends him careening along the stream, his limbs afloat, facing upward, his mouth agape and gasping for air.
Moments later, he continues to float on down the stream, but he notices the movement less and less.
He’s away from the waterfall now.
It’s more peaceful suddenly. A lot more peaceful …
The water carries him away, his lips open and slowly drinking the cool cave air.
He misses Anwick, his best buddy, so fucking much. He wishes he can have at least one loved one at his side in this final moment of his life. He hurts for his sister Cintha, who froze in the strange place that sat in a secret underway beneath the Lifted City. At least she was not alone, he reasons, thinking of the beautiful, invisible woman who led him there to her. She was not alone when she died, remember …
And then Erana, the one he promised he would return for, who was stolen by the Mad Regime, her mind robbed from her. Erana …
And Ruena, the one he lost, the one who was supposed to save all of Atlas by becoming its next Queen. It’s all for nothing, now.
Then a faint bluish-white wash of light begins to fill his eyes.
This is it, he knows. This is Death come to fetch me away.
He’s ready.
The light grows stronger. It might only be the tiniest, faintest bit of light, but it sears his retinas like the sun itself turned blue-white and chose to descend on this cavern, filling it with its blinding glory.
Rone flinches.
He flinches? Did I just move …?
Rone’s head bumps against something firm, and he stops. There is an obstacle of some sort that’s blocked his way down the stream, but he cannot see it. A boulder, perhaps. The blue-white glow about him is so bright, Rone has to lift a hand to shield his eyes.
He blinks. I’m lifting my hand …?
Rone flinches again, and his left foot touches the rocky riverbed. He gives it one gentle, experimental push, and his body bends.
I can move. I can fucking move.
He turns his head and finds he’s pressed against the riverbank, if the dimly-lit bluish spread of stone can be dignified with that word. Slapping a hand to it and achieving grip, he slowly pulls himself out of the water. It is not an easy effort. Upon getting his body on the damp rocky surface, he discovers that there is something very wrong with his right leg.
That’s when he sees the dagger imbedded into it.
His own dagger.
“Fuuuck,” he hisses.
With a tiny squeeze of effort, he lets his right leg phase, and the dagger drops to the stone with a clang, passing through his leg like a mist. To his surprise, his leg doesn’t bleed.
Blood or not, it doesn’t save Rone from the pain. “Fuuuck!”
His expletives echo about him and live long lives as they race down every unseen crevice, passage, and tunnel. He grabs hold of his leg, then attempts to rise. He makes the mistake of putting just a pinch of weight on his right leg at first, then cries out in pain as he shifts all his weight to his left, bracing himself against a nearby wall.
Walking is going to take a little getting used to.
He must have stabbed himself on accident, or else imbedded the dagger in his leg during his long descent into the earth by phasing it in there. Perhaps he turned solid with the dagger near his leg.
Nothing explains why he isn’t bleeding.
He shivers, the air of the cavern tickling his sensitive, wet skin and clothes. With a glance down at his feet, he finds one of his shoes is missing, the right one.
He was only moments ago prepared to die. Now he’s on his feet.
Minus a shoe.
I might still be dead, he reasons, and this could be the world of the dead down here. Tread carefully, Rone. You might find your family.
Then he lifts his eyes to the source of blue light. His lips part. He stares, unblinking, at the strange structure before him.
“What … the … fuck …?” he hisses.
Before him rests an enormous white-blue … thing. It appears to be a building of some sort, though why it’s all the way down here underneath the ground baffles him. The structure appears metallic, its surface giving off a faint bluish glow that shimmers calmly, long ropes and coils of reflected light bouncing off its surface from the stream that runs under and around its great shape.
That is the thing Rone bumped his head into, stopping him.
But what is it?
After bending down to retrieve his dagger, Rone carefully and slowly limps toward it. He walks around the structure in a slow semicircle, stopping at the other side where the stream of water continues to gently flow off into the darkness. On its other side, he notes a deliberate fissure outlining what appears to be a door of some sort—a door that’s smooth and runs flush with the surface of the entire structure. It reminds him of a Lifted Caravan, the chrome vehicles that some of the wealthiest in the sky used to travel, except this “vehicle” is nearly ten times the size and glows.
He presses a hand to the door, if that’s what it is. It doesn’t react in any sort of way. Bracing himself against it, he gives a little shove, but it still doesn’t budge.
“H-Hello …?” he calls out to it.
No response.
Of course he didn’t expect one.
He hops a few steps away, balancing on his left leg, then stares at it quizzically, confounded. He searches his tireless imagination, wondering if this is some strange Lifted scientist’s experiment that had gone wrong, tunneling its way deep, deep, deep into the ground, forever forgotten. It almost looks like Lifted technology in its form, reminding Rone of the smooth, chrome surfaces and clean, glassy structures of the Lifted City. If only I could see what’s inside …
Then Rone Tinpassage conveniently recalls his own Legacy.
After a moment to steel himself, he approaches the structure again, then sets his face against the outside of the door. He takes a short breath, counts to ten, then phases his face through the door to get a look inside.
When he opens his eyes, he is blinded at once by how bright the interior is. He makes to shield his eyes, but his solid hand (and dagger) bang against the outside of the structure first before he remembers to phase them, too. Inside is a circular chamber, perhaps two or three ninth ward houses wide in its diameter. The whole inside of the structure is shaped like a flattened sphere, its inside pulsing as a living heart does, far more white in its interior than blue. The floor is smooth as glass, but atop its surface crawls a web of grey and silvery cords and cables that all lead to the center of the room, which dips down into a triangular pit with its points rounded. Rone can’t quite see what is in that pit from this far away.
Seeing the floor, he phases his bad leg in first, then quickly pushes the rest of himself into the room, wincing as his bad leg takes his weight for a split second. Inside the odd, bright chamber, he takes care to watch his footing. As he limps around the room, his feet keep catching on the cords, but he doesn’t let them trip him; he just takes more care. After his reckless journey and careless choices that led him to this mysterious place, he can afford to be cautious now.
He slowly brings himself to the center of the room. Down in the triangular pit, there is a pool of water, though Rone cannot tell how deeply it runs. It is the only place in the room not engulfed in near-blinding light. The water is murky as well, keeping whatever rests in it a secret from Rone’s curious eyes.
And he is certain something rests in it. “H-Hello?” he croaks.
Everything in the room seems to point toward its center, to this very pool. His eyes search it for a sign of anything. Fish. Glimmering lights. Strange creatures. A spread of bizarre plants. He is prepared to find just about anything in its mysterious, colorless depths.
Then he spots a woman’s face in the water.
Rone staggers back and trips, falling on his ass.
A new pain from his lower back makes itself known as well as a bruised area on his right arm to go with his right leg. But all of his aches are secondary to where he believes he is. This is a burial vessel. A Lord with more gold than he can ever dream to spend bought a great mechanical vessel to bury his Lady in,
then sent her deep into the earth. That’s the only explanation. That’s what this is.
He is in a Lifted tomb.
That woman in the water is a deceased Lifted Lady.
But is he sure that’s what he saw? Is he sure that’s what this place even is? After a brief moment spent regathering his courage, he manages to climb back to his feet, then slowly inches up to the brim and peers down into the pool once more.
The woman’s face comes into view again. Her eyes are closed, if his own eyes aren’t deceiving him.
Then he sees it.
Two faces, he realizes. There are two faces in the water.
Who are these women? Why the dark water? Is it some sort of preservative chemical, like the unnatural poison the Ancients used to pump their corpses with when the rich didn’t choose to burn their deceased? Maybe some of this liquid is leaking into the stream under the structure. Maybe that’s what healed Rone back to consciousness.
Or not.
They might be past Queens of Atlas, he wonders, as he trades his fear for sheer curiosity. If Erana was here, she might know who they are, since she remembers all she learns. The memory of Erana stabs Rone in the chest. It was different when his friends visited him as he floated in the nothingness; now that he is conscious, the pain is so much worse. Those women could almost be asleep, submerged as they are, their eyes closed. The thought then makes him think of Anwick.
Who is dead now. His best friend in the world. Dead.
He winces at a sudden pain in his leg, then staggers to maintain his balance. But I am not dead, he reminds himself, gritting his teeth. A surge of hope runs through him, cutting through the grief. It didn’t seem like very long ago that he was saying goodbye to everyone and everything he knows. I can see them again if I find my way out of here. Erana … and Ruena … Victra … Prat, Arrow, Juston, the others …
I cannot die down here.
He gives one last look at the pool. He notes the two women’s heads touch near the center, implying their bodies stretch to two of the rounded corners of the pool, unseen in the dark water. With the way they’re oriented and the space left unoccupied in the triangular pool, it seems as if there ought to be a third Lady, but there isn’t one.