She tasted sweet at first, but it quickly turned sour, and then corrosive. My throat closed shut, and I wheezed, asphyxiated, having no more fight in me. She had been my last chance at survival.
“No,” I whispered coarsely, the single word jolting to a sob.
Her head tilted at my noise. She no longer seemed afraid. The little, black-clad she-creature remained knelt, calmly watching me die. My slow demise appeared to interest her, not dissimilar to the way the facility heads had watched me, strapped to the gurney after doing something particularly painful.
“What are you?” she asked, in perfect Poekkan tongue.
“A wraith,” I said, barely. “Dying.”
“Why?” she asked.
Why was I a wraith, or why was I dying? “I can’t eat you.”
Her eyes drifted over the muddy-orange cloud that covered us both, then toward Nara, who’d done nothing but watch cautiously from a distance since this ordeal had begun. After a calculated moment, one in which I could almost hear the gears turning in her head, she looked down at me, the interest all washed away, now replaced by grim acceptance. “What do you need?”
“You.”
“Why me?”
“Fear,” I gasped, no longer able to breathe. My body was shutting down. I didn’t want to go, yet was going nonetheless.
My deteriorating condition sparked an urgency to her actions. She put a tiny hand against the center of my chest and pressed downward, crinkling the bridge of her nose, twisting her lips in what I could only guess was frustration. If it was frustration, I didn’t know why.
The place where she pressed began to heat, itch. A gnawing feeling, starting at the base of my stomach, moved steadily up my throat. I wanted to know what she was doing, this little creature with the huge, purple eyes, but I couldn’t speak and she offered no explanation. I no longer had the strength to keep my head up and collapsed flat against the cold ground.
The gnawing feeling was gone, as was the lump in my throat. There was pressure now, like my gut was inflating, like I would burst.
My pulse raced; little specks of light flitted around the edges of my vision.
Things began to move around us.
Dark shapes, shadows, embossed by the foggy, chimal backdrop.
The statues.
They were looking at us. All of them.
One of the black statues stirred, releasing wings that arced through the air like dual scythes. Their thunderous clap killed the ambient chimes. Now there was silence, and I heard the she-creature whispering something; a chant.
The statue did nothing more, only crouched on its stand with wings spread wide; a solemn spectator to this all.
I wasn’t starving any more.
I was full, and tired.
Before I could even begin to ponder why, I fell asleep.
*
I awoke with a stiff neck. My head felt heavy. Both sensations worked excruciatingly together as I attempted to sit. I thought I’d been dreaming at first, but then acknowledged that I was nowhere near the wall. I was several hundred yards away, beneath the spread-winged statue, and it was raining.
Nara sauntered around, nibbling at bits of ground around my feet. A little ways from her the she-creature knelt, giant eyes turned upward at the statue sheltering me. She did a weird thing with her chin, lightly hitting it with a finger. Her hair was wet from the impossible rain; clumped together, appearing like black rope. The jacket she wore had a strange symbol presented on the right-side chest and left shoulder areas. It reminded me somewhat of the uniform of a guard, or soldier. But no soldier on this world was ever so small, or ever so thin. Nara paid her no mind. Some pet.
This was all becoming so ridiculous, even for me.
“What did you do?” I demanded. “How am I not dead?”
The only thing that moved on her was her eyes, settling on me during a moment of silent hesitation. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “I just got here. I thought to touch you, and somehow you didn’t die.”
“But I didn’t feed on you.”
“Yes, you did. I felt it, which wasn’t very nice.”
I blinked. “But… you’re still alive.”
“I imagine you’re not used to that,” she said, coolly. “Perhaps all of my fears are too much for even you to stomach.” She smiled.
I stared at her, and she at me. Nara snorted, startling us both.
“That’s an interesting creature,” murmured the other creature, gazing around us again. “This place is not at all what I thought it’d be like.”
I was still confused. “Aren’t you angry at me?”
“No, not really.”
“You’re not the least bit upset that I pulled you through that—whatever that thing is,” I waved my arm toward the flickering wall, “in an effort feed on you? To end your life?”
She gave a brief laugh with a small intake of air. “I haven’t given mortal danger any consideration for a while now. Right before you interrupted us, I was trying to convince my partner that we needed to be here. You finished the job for me.”
I struggled to my feet, towering over her. “Who are you?”
“My name is Leid Koseling, and I’m a part of the Court of Enigmus. We’ve been called to investigate the Poekkan rift that punched through your world two weeks ago.”
“You mean here? This is a rift?”
“So the calculations say,” she said thoughtfully, eyes rising to the statue again. “But it’s not like any reality that I’ve ever been to.”
I had no idea what she was even talking about. It was the kind of banter that the facility heads engaged in, and this made me uncomfortable. I didn’t know what a rift was, or what Leid meant by reality—clearly her idea of reality was different than mine, considering she’d just hinted at having visited more than one. “I sort of thought I was dreaming,” was all I could contribute.
“You’re not from here?” she asked, seemingly disappointed.
“No, I came out of the facility days ago—maybe weeks ago—and everything was like this.”
Leid appeared surprised. “You’re from Poekka?”
“I’m not Poekkan, if that’s what you mean. But I was born at the facility.”
“The facility.”
“Committee of Esotericism,” I said, but the name was all I really knew. Not because I could read—I couldn’t—but because the researchers had said it often enough to sear an imprint on my brain. What the name actually meant was anyone’s guess. I’d lived at the Facility my entire life and knew next to nothing of their function. All I’d known were needles, gurneys, meals, and that dark cell in the sublevels.
“Well,” said Leid, “it really is my day. I need to get there. Will you show me the way?”
“Why would you want to go there?” I asked, but realized the answer mid-question. “You think the facility caused all this?”
“I know they did, though it appears your knowledge is lacking,” she said, tilting her head. “What were you, at the facility?”
“What was I?”
“Scientist, receptionist, grim reaper?”
“Test subject. They called me Nibli.”
Leid rolled her eyes. “Of course. So, will you take me there?”
“Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t know how to get back,” I said, casting an uneasy glance into the fog. “Nothing here stays the same.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean the scenery changes. The last area switched from forest to wasteland in the blink of an eye. It’s like being permanently lost.”
Leid frowned. “I guess this won’t be as easy as I thought. Will you come with me anyway?”
“What for?”
“Protection, obviously,” she said, smiling coyly. “You seem capable of handling yourself. In return for your protection, I’ll feed you whenever you’re hungry. There’s not much to sustain you around here.”
Because the Pillars kept killing everyone off; and that sorceress’s curse. None o
f these points were shared with Leid. “I thought you didn’t give considerations to mortal danger?”
She only continued to smile. “Do we have an agreement?”
I tried to think of why I shouldn’t agree. Without Leid, I would starve again in a matter of days. Unless I went after the Pillars, as Laith had ‘commanded’ of me. But I had no idea where they were, or where to even start looking.
From what I could tell this place was really big, and she was an endless tap. I would be stupid not to agree. “Yes.” And then I could no longer stand it. “Why do you keep looking at that thing?”
Leid didn’t reply at first, her attention once again on the winged statue. “Because that’s my husband.”
“… You entered union with a statue?”
“No, my husband is somewhere else. But it’s a statue of him.”
I, too, looked up at the statue of Leid’s husband. “What do you think it means?”
Leid shook her head. “Someone from my organization has been here before. He says this place can manifest your thoughts. If my husband looked like this anywhere else, it’d mean he was dead.”
Dreams, Laith had said. Or nightmares, in some cases. I circled in place, reevaluating the eerie scenery. “All of this is from you?”
She exhaled, seeming wounded. “They’re familiar, unfortunately.”
I looked down at her in question. “Are these statues of—?”
Leid left the statue of her husband, passed Nara, and began walking into the fog. I watched after her, puzzled, unsure if I should follow. After a moment, she stopped.
“Not all of them,” she said, an answer to the question I hadn’t finished forming. “Are you having second thoughts?” Leid turned and faced me. We locked eyes.
“No,” I said.
She smiled as I approached her, with Nara not too far behind.
PART TWO:
SHADOW WORK
“Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”
--Carl Jung,
The Psychological Foundation for the Belief in Spirits (1920).
CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.595
VII
QAIRA
I’D ONLY BEEN ON POEKKA FOR AN HOUR and was already having serious problems focusing on the task at hand. For one, there was a fucking supermassive blackhole staring me in the face whenever I so much as glanced in the general direction of the sky. That alone was like pornography to someone in my field. For two, Zira and I were standing several feet away from the anomaly perimeter, punching itself into existence with a churning, torrential cloud of UV and dust. Spectrum radiation bent around the base, warping both space-time and my capacity to process all of these amazing things at once.
“Should we put these on now, or when we cross?” asked Zira, looking uneasily at the headset in his hands.
“Now, probably,” I said, taking another look at the blackhole. I shouldn’t have, because I grew mesmerized.
I assumed Zira was glaring at me all the while, and my hunch was confirmed when I heard him impatiently bark, “So, are we doing this, or what?”
“Yeah, sorry,” I muttered, kneeling and fitting the headset on. The visor flickered over my eyes, melding to the bridge of my nose. A warmth spread over the base of my neck, and then, fully calibrated, the headset vanished via stream submergence.
I looked at Zira, who looked back at me, still standing there like an idiot with the headset in his hands.
“Well?” I snapped.
“I was just waiting to make sure your head didn’t explode, or something.” He slipped his on. When it, too, calibrated and vanished, he frowned. “It feels the same as always.”
“It should. We’re outside the field.”
“I was expecting to feel differently,” he elaborated, evidently disappointed. “Stronger, or… smarter.” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“There’s no hope of the latter for you.” I nodded to the wall. “Ladies first.”
“Absolutely not,” said Zira, scowling. “We’re doing this together.”
“We aren’t,” I said. “How are we supposed to test whether the headsets work if we’re both on the same side of the wall?”
“Then you go first. I don’t want you getting distracted by the sky once I’m gone.”
“… You’re being unnecessarily combative.”
His scowl melted away; only a neutral expression remained. Such a typically calm look meant the opposite when it came to Zira. If he wasn’t frowning, then he was an inch from losing his shit.
Before he could, I raised my hands, grinned in spite of him, and stepped into the cosmic hurricane.
I was surprised by what I subsequently felt. Nothing.
Surely there should have been something. Pressure, headache, a change in temperature, even? Yet there’d been none of that; it’d felt like I’d simply passed through an already open doorway. Crossing the threshold, however, was only an introduction. Plenty of other feelings came just moments after my arrival on the other side.
There had been ambient sounds in the boreal fields of Poekka, things you don’t really notice until they’re no longer there—blowing wind, rustling leaves of bordering trees, the distant chirping and chittering of fauna.
Here, it was empty.
Empty, in a way that I’d never considered the word before. It was impossible for me to truly describe the sensation, but the closest I could come was to compare it with being in a sealed glass jar. There was air, but it was…still and not free. The weight of life itself was absent. So absent, I could hear the hollow echo of my breathing.
I was staring at an endless, mist-covered area, peppered in silhouetted statues eerily reminiscent of ones I’d encountered before. The terrain floor was covered in shiny scales—no identifiable vegetation or even viable ground—that crunched beneath the one step I’d taken before succumbing to awe. The sky was the most jarring of this mosaic; a rapidly sweeping cosmos of nebulae and stellar objects that I’d never even seen before.
“Holy fuck,” I breathed. “What in the multiverse—?”
Qaira? Zira’s voice permeated through my spiraling thoughts. Can you hear me?
So, the headsets worked; at least in that regard. Yeah. Come on over. I’m still in one piece. I was able to access attica and sent a notification to Enigmus, including a vis-capture of my observations so far. Unfortunately, Leid was still absent from the attica synchronization. I couldn’t feel her at all, and it worried me.
A crack suddenly echoed from somewhere on my distant right.
Startled, I looked toward the sound, seeing nothing but mist and the unnerving silhouettes of lithic spectators. A memory of Atlas Arcantia, all those years ago, flashed through my mind and I half-expected Caym Stroth to appear from the cloudy recesses with that massive axe, ready to chop me in two.
Then, something moved in the left-hand corner of my vision. I turned to look, but everything was still. There was an area where the mist had cleared, revealing the black statue of Oraniquitis Loren, beckoning me closer.
CRACK.
It came from the right again, forcing my eyes to return to the foggy abyss. And again, there was nothing.
When I looked back at Oran’s statue, it was gone.
I backed up a few feet, now officially creeped the fuck out.
Zira, I called, trying to keep my thoughts steady. What’s the hold up?
I hated to admit it, but I didn’t want to be here alone another second. This all felt too personal; I was being targeted. Zira had warned that this place turned your thoughts against you, but it was already going right for my jugular. I backed up a few more steps, keeping my focus centered ahead, preparing for anything else that might fly at my peripherals.
But I wasn’t ready for an icy grip on my right arm. I started and spun.
> It was a woman.
She had somehow crept only inches from me, clad in a tan, loose dress that looked more like a sack that’d been dragged across dirt. She was taller than most lesser women I’d seen; reaching the height of my nose, so that her head was tilted slightly upward to look me in the face. But our eyes couldn’t meet, as she wore a strange, silver mask, embossed in black, wavy lines that bordered a single painted eye at the center, twisted vertically. The iris hypnotically churned an effervescent red. Her hair, dark and wet, the exact color uncertain, peeked out of the edges of the mask and caressed her jaw.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said, her voice disguised in a coarse, malignant whisper.
Before I could even begin to react, something jolted my brain, sending pins and needles through my extremities. I recoiled at the zap, and then she was gone.
The whole environment was gone.
In her place, stood Zira. He looked at me through a wince, a hand raised to his ear. All the statues were gone. Now we stood at the edge of a babbling brook, and the silence was replaced by the peaceful sounds of chimes. The only feature that remained was the celestial sky and the permanent dusk it cast.
I turned in place, marveling at the sudden transition, trying to wrap my head around what the fuck had just happened.
“What was that?” asked Zira to my back.
I looked at him, saying nothing.
“Did you not hear that?” he went on, his wince falling to a grimace. “It nearly made me deaf.”
“… What?”
“The feedback. You seriously didn’t hear that?”
I hesitated. “How long have you been standing there?”
“I just crossed.” His grimace switched to a confused frown. Then, a knowing frown. “Spooked already?”
“It didn’t look like this when I got here,” was all I said.
Covenants: Anodize (Hymn of the Multiverse Book 9) Page 8