by Dylan Peters
“Then, in a flash, it was gone… and so were you and the bear. Reego and I were again alone and without a path. We spent the next days doing all we could to get out of the Nullwood, and I barely escaped with my life. It wasn’t until I saw you alive again, outside of the Nullwood, without the bear and without your memory, that I understood what had happened… and it wasn’t until I was brought before Kesia that I realized what had to be done. You see, Arthur, I did not escape Kesia’s tower as I’d said.”
I couldn’t believe what Ah’Rhea was telling me. She had lied. I tried to move my limbs and found I couldn’t.
“I told Kesia I would use you to find the Everflame, and then deliver it to her,” Ah’Rhea said. “That is the only reason I escaped the Starless Tower. I did not tell Kesia you had the flame already, though I knew you did. I wanted to take it from you before she found out.” Ah’Rhea shook her head as if trying to shake an unpleasant thought. “You must see why I have to do this, Arthur. I have to. There was never a choice. You are just a boy. You have no idea how to use the Everflame. You didn’t even realize you had it. I knew that if I pushed you too hard to find it, you would reject my guidance, but if I could convince you that you needed it, and convince you that you were following your own wants and decisions… we would end up in this very place.
“You can’t possibly return this world to what it once was. Didn’t you hear the ancient story? The young man who saved the world was more than a mortal; it will take a powerful person to save the world again. Now I have to take the Everflame from you no matter what the cost. There is no other way. I have used mystical power before. I can be great again… and in turn, I will make this world great again.
“I’m sorry, Arthur. I know you never intended to take possession of the Everflame. Maybe the bear never intended for it to resurrect his fallen friend. The mystical powers of the world have a way of using us for their own machinations, but I have to take the Everflame from you… by whatever means necessary.”
Ah’Rhea raised the dagger over her head, gripping it with both hands. I turned my head to the side, unable to hold it up any longer. I was so warm, and the world was melting, drifting away. I was tired. I wanted to sleep.
“I’m sorry, Arthur,” Ah’Rhea said. “You must understand this. Your sacrifice will save your world.”
Suddenly, there was a fiery blur at the side of the dome. It moved swiftly, and Ah’Rhea gasped. My head lolled back and I thought the blur looked like Reego, wreathed in colored flame. He collided with Ah’Rhea, knocking the dagger from her hands, and darkness washed over me. Warm, soft, comfortable darkness.
When I was a child I had a recurring dream for years. Even today, I can remember it with such vivid clarity that I feel it clotted in my stomach like a rag drenched in old frying oil. I feel it around my neck, squeezing.
The dream was quick. Not one of those all-nighters where you travel from place to place, long into the wee hours of the night. It came like a slap in the face, or like a jump into a cold lake… and yet it seemed so benign.
I dreamed a coil of thread.
It was just a simple spiral of thread, but it filled my entire frame of vision from top to bottom, from left to right, as if I were very very close to it. It was a tattered brown-red coil of frayed fibers, and it was all I could see. At first, it wouldn’t move at all, and I would peer into the center of the coil, the dark abyssal center, my vision panning forward so it seemed to widen and gape.
Then, suddenly, once I couldn’t get any closer, the coil would spin. It spun like madness, so fast I thought if I blinked it might be gone. But the coil never went anywhere, it just spun, the end of its thread being pulled somewhere out of the picture.
Eventually, it would feel as if I were the coil, moving a million miles an hour but going nowhere. Every aspect of my being was rushing, rushing, panicked, rushing. My breaths came quick, rasping, desperate, and I felt like I was falling, falling—falling forever.
It terrified me to be motionless and yet feel like I was racing so fast I would explode in a crescendo. All I could do was fixate on the dark center of the coil as it spun like a vortex, turning faster and faster and faster, while my chest grew tighter and tighter and tighter until I thought I would die or go mad. Then everything would just—
Stop.
And this is when you would say the nightmare was over; when I would wake up. You would think that. A normal person would think it was all just a strange version of the classic falling dream, where the person wakes up just before they smash against the ground. For years, when I remembered the dream, I would tell myself that was where I woke up. I would tell myself that when the coil stopped spinning, the nightmare ended. Yet as I grew older I realized that was just a lie I told myself, because that’s not really what happened when the coil stopped, when the racing panic stopped.
You see, I was still there when the coil stopped, when the thread disappeared, when all that was left was the black vortex in the center. I was still there. Still trapped. Still dreaming. And the worst part of the nightmare, the part I sometimes repressed in later memory, was the feeling that I was dreaming of death.
I dreamed the panic of knowing an end was coming and then continued to dream that end. I experienced the blackness. I felt it. I breathed in the vacuum of nothing. I existed in that non-space where nothing exists, where the simple idea of nothing is too much of anything.
I remember feeling at that moment that my heart was a shadow, and it would never be more than a shadow again. I remember settling in that dark place. I remember existing there. I remember thinking I was dead inside.
Yet… I was so wrong about that dream.
What I never realized until now, until this very moment, was the power in living through the end. To absorb all the darkness and endure is to show strength indomitable. To be surrounded by such emptiness and still be full is power. To be riddled with fear but continue to find courage is might. To take the abuse of the world and still be left standing means I am made of so much more than can ever be taken from me.
In the darkness, I am light kept alive by a heart of flame.
I awoke to find Reego licking my wounds. He was healing me, just as he had done to Kay after the strange cat had attacked her. I was weak but I was alive, and I could hear Ah’Rhea weeping off to the side.
I strained my muscles and sat up. I was so weak I was almost unable to support myself, but I needed to know what was happening. I righted my body and stared at Ah’Rhea.
“Did you lie about my mother?” I asked Ah’Rhea as Reego continued to lick my wounds.
Ah’Rhea sat with her arms around her knees, her head buried, and sobbing. There was blood dripping from wounds on her arms. Her mystical, the animal she had bonded with, had protected me against her. Reego had attacked her and now it seemed as if Ah’Rhea’s mind were being torn apart.
“Did you lie about my mother?” I shouted with a rasp.
“No,” Ah’Rhea blurted through the tears. “She’s still there, in the Starless Tower, or at least she was when I left.”
As I looked upon the woman, I was shocked that I felt pity for her. She had tried to kill me, but to see her in her current state, with her dignity stripped away, I couldn’t help but feel pity.
“You told Reego to stay with the others because you knew he would try to stop you from killing me, didn’t you?” I asked.
“Yes,” she answered. “Arthur, please, I didn’t know what else to do.”
I immediately realized why I pitied Ah’Rhea. She truly believed she had been doing the right thing. She had been taken from a world where she wielded power and was now lost in a world where she wielded none. She was just a scared animal, a panicking child, an aging woman terrified of a coil of thread that would eventually come to an end. Her fear had blinded her and allowed evil to take hold in her heart.
“You knew the Everflame was inside of me,” I said. “Instead of helping me, you decided to kill me and take it from me. Why do you think you
are any different than Kesia?”
“That is a very, very good question, young man,” said a voice that was not Ah’Rhea’s.
Reego growled, and Ah’Rhea gasped. Her eyes were wide and staring at someone behind me. I turned as quickly as I could, but I moved slowly, like I was in a bad dream. Unfortunately, the voice behind me was quite real.
There, standing tall, was the most beautiful and terrible woman I had ever seen. Her gaze was hard, fiery, and green, but her skin was pale, smooth, and supple. Black tendrils of gnarled root laced themselves around her body as if she wore a garment made of the very Nullwood itself. She smiled at me with perfect thin lips and teeth so white they could have been made of stars. She reached down and delicately touched me with long fingernails just under my chin.
“But I’m sure you see the difference now,” Kesia said.
“No!” Ah’Rhea screamed. “Run, Arthur! Run! Take the Everflame away from her. She’ll destroy us all!”
I couldn’t move. Kesia held me motionless with a touch and a whisper.
Then, with a flick of her wrist, Kesia cast a bolt of green light toward Ah’Rhea and the woman burst where she sat, dissipating into the air as if she had never been there at all. Reego howled and rolled on the ground as if he were in the throes of agony. Ah’Rhea was gone.
Kesia looked at me again with a disarming smile. “No time for imposters, my sweet. We must be going.”
“W-w-where?” I asked weakly.
“The Starless Tower, of course,” she said brightly. “Now sleep.”
Kesia blew a green mist from her mouth and just before it hit my face I found the strength to break away from her. I lunged for Reego, who was still on the ground, and covered him with my body.
“Get away from us!” I yelled at Kesia.
She inclined her head curiously. “It seems you’re made of tougher stuff, aren’t you?”
A flock of mynahs landed in the dome behind Kesia, flanking her on either side.
“Well,” she said. “If I can’t get you to sleep, I suppose I’ll just have to do this the hard way.”
She motioned with a finger, and the mynahs were upon us.
III
The Starless Tower
15
As soon as one of the mynahs took me in its clutches I was plunged into its memory, and this one told me all I needed to know about Kesia. She was evil: a fear monger, an abusive slave master who would exhaust any and every resource in her path to achieve her goal, even if those resources were living things. I saw the beatings the mynahs endured. I saw the strange mystical green energy Kesia used to torture them. I saw the mynahs cower before her and bend to her whims. They were not monsters. They were slaves. The mynahs did what Kesia bade them to do out of abject fear and nothing more.
What I saw in those brief flashes was both shocking and revolting. Not just because of the abuse, but also because of the sharp and profound guilt that coursed through my body. I had labelled the mynahs monsters. I, as well as others, had condemned them, passed judgement on them, degraded them. They were living things and I’d never once asked why they attacked; I never once tried to see with their perspective. We had all been lazy, allowing ourselves to believe the mynahs were simply evil, and there was no more depth to the situation than that. The mynahs needed help as much if not more than the rest of us did.
As the visions ended, I found myself in the clutches of a mynah flying high over the expanse of the Nullwood. Just to my right, Reego was carried by another mynah, and the poor dog seemed limp and dead in the mynah’s clutches. I hoped with all of my heart that was not the case, and made myself believe Reego was still alive. After all, if he were dead, he would have probably been left at the dome. Kesia was up ahead of us, her dark silhouette only visible when great bolts of lightning lit the clouds in the distance. There was a storm, but it was still far off given the gentle rumbles of rolling thunder that followed the lightning in the sky.
Another burst of glowing clouds cast light over the Nullwood, and I saw the cliffs we had come down from off toward the right horizon. I quickly realized that meant we were flying north, and then realized something else quite shocking. I waited for another show of lightning to grant me a glimpse of the cliff line, and then I was sure of it. I had seen that snaking line on maps every year I had been in school as long as I could remember. It was the trail of the St. Johns River, the largest river in Florida. I could draw it with my eyes closed. If those cliffs were following its line, and we had come down off of those cliffs, then that meant that the great St. Johns was no more. The Demise had burned it up, or sunk it into the earth, or… who knew.
As the thunder continued to rumble in the distance, I looked down to the millions of black branches below. How far did the Nullwood go, I wondered, and what other great landmarks had it erased with its coming? I tried to look to the south but couldn’t turn my head enough to see that direction. To the east were the cliffs, but I couldn’t see past them far enough to see the eastern border of the woods. To the west, it was Nullwood to the horizon. To the north, the same, with one haunting exception. A dark spike rose high above the trees, a monument I had until now known only in name. The Starless Tower loomed ahead. It couldn’t have been more than two miles off and now it felt like we were flying so fast, too fast, the wind whipping against my face and drying my lips. The fear of my inevitable arrival was unbearable.
I wanted so badly to be strong in this moment. I wanted so badly to stand defiantly against Kesia and the Tower. Yet in truth I wanted to fall asleep and escape from reality much more. I wanted to disappear inside of my mind until the outside world just went away. I looked to Reego and wondered if that was what he was doing, simply allowing his mind to drift away from all the pain and fear. But as I looked at him I could see that his eyes were open now, and he was staring at me. He was almost ten feet away, but I could see the need in his eyes. Reego, who had saved me, time after time, needed me now.
When the Demise came, I slipped into unconsciousness. When the mynahs took Ah’Rhea and were threatening the school, I slipped into unconsciousness. When Ah’Rhea stabbed me, I slipped into unconsciousness. I had always slipped away into the recesses of my mind when things got tough, even back to my days at school. The darkness of my mind… I couldn’t use it to disappear anymore. It was time to make the darkness work for me and for those who needed me. It was time to meditate. I closed my eyes, breathed deeply, and before I knew it, I was awash in a vision once again.
I was back at the beach that had become the dome of colored branches in my previous vision, kneeling in the water that was just a couple inches high. I was at the beginning, the very beginning of an ocean. I somehow knew this because it felt as if the ocean were a part of me. It felt as if I was awash in my own existence.
I looked up, and the dome of colored branches was high overhead. Beyond it waited a universe of stars and bright nebulas. There were so many beautiful vivid colors before me that I wondered how I could ever exist in a world without light. Yet I had found comfort in darkness more times than I cared to admit. It had always been a friend. Darkness had always been my companion.
When I was young, I would hide like most children, but not so that I could be found. I was in love with the idea of never being found again. I hid for the hiding. The idea of being solitary, the idea of being cut off, was alluring. I made fortresses in closets. I found adventure in deep forests. I wandered as if the act of wandering itself was the forbidden fruit. My mind played in the caverns of its own depths. Deep, deep inside of myself was where I found my home.
So when the world around me caused me grief, or pain, or suffering, I retreated inward. Always inward. I retreated and regained strength within the darkness of myself. When someone hurt me, I brought them deep into the darkness, and that was where I destroyed them. That was where my stories came from. And in truth, I would never be willing to admit that my stories were completely wrong. I would never be willing to admit my darkness was completely wrong. A
fter all, it was mine, and it protected me. It grew around me like the gnarled roots of the forest. It was strong and fearsome like…
There was a mist growing around me as I knelt upon the beach. It was a fine green mist the color of Kesia’s eyes. It was cool against my skin, and I could feel it prickle, almost as if it was charged with electricity. Then, the mist whispered to me.
I have darkness too, it said.
I know what strength lies in the deep, it said.
We can share each other’s darkness, it said, if you just let me in.
“No,” I said. “I’ve never shared my darkness.”
Please, the mist insisted. Let me sit in there with you. Let me see who you were, who you are. Let me see who you could become.
“No,” I said. “My darkness is mine. It protects me–”
Like the Nullwood, the mist guessed. Let me in and show me how you use your darkness. Your darkness is strong and fearsome like… like… will you show me?
“You don’t know what my darkness is like do you?” I said in epiphany. “You only know what I tell you or you guess.”
Show me, the mist demanded.
“You can’t see all of my mind.” The revelation amazed me. “And you don’t know how to take the Everflame.”
The mist was agitated. It grew thicker and tried to choke me. But it couldn’t.
“You can’t defeat my darkness,” I said. “It is strong. It is fearsome like—”
Show me the Everflame, the mist commanded.
“No,” I said. “I will show you this instead.”
I reached within myself, and for the first time I brought my darkness forth instead of retreating within it. I brought him forth, and now he stood beside me. Now he breathed deep and readied his immense strength. I got up from my knees and stood at his side. He was my strength and I was his. Together we were destroyers.