by R. E. Vance
It charges from the mouth of the cave, a breath of flame climbing ahead as claws strike out. It manages to take out half of my team before it takes to the sky. It’s trying to get away.
Without hesitation I aim my rifle at the scale right over its heart—a dragon’s weak spot—and from this distance I have a one-in-a-thousand chance to hit. Today must be my birthday, because a moment after my rifle thunders, the dragon drops. What’s left of my team rushes at it and I note that the titanium-reinforced bullet has ripped through its hardened scales at exactly the right place. Or wrong place, depending on where you stand.
My bullet broke through its golden scales, but didn’t reach its heart. The hurt dragon is far from dead. Its eyes glow as it attacks with a blazing speed that is amplified by burned time. It swipes down, sending me and two other soldiers flying, as it bites down on a fourth. A thistle bush breaks my fall, my armor saving me from an evening of pulling out needles. As for my two comrades, they aren’t as lucky, both of their bodies splattering against unforgiving rock. The dragon turns to run away.
My team is dead. I am alone on the island with a pissed-off injured dragon. I know I should call for backup. For evac. But it can’t fly, which means that I can track it down. Find it. Kill it. I put down my rifle and leave behind some bulky high-powered equipment, taking only my hunting sword with me. Today will be a good day to die.
I track it to some rocks by the sea where it is cleaning its wound, trying to remove the bullet so that it can burn some time and heal itself. When I walk onto the beach it looks at me, surprised, clearly not expecting me to have pursued it. It eyes me, then scans the empty hillside, glances back at me and my sword, shakes its head and turns back to the sea to continue cleaning its wound.
I charge and it looks at me with more genuine surprise. I slash down on its reinforced scales, but my sword bounces off them without effect. That’s fine. That’s what I want. It turns too late to swipe and I roll, swinging again. The dragon snorts, assuming I cannot hurt it and, no longer on high alert, swipes again, leaving an opening for me to tumble past its front claws and thrust my hunting sword into the hole left by my bullet. I know my blade is long enough to pierce its heart. I push and in the second I have before it turns to crush me, I manage to nick the chamber wall of its heart.
It rears up with a roar, throwing me nearly ten meters away, where this time there are no bushes to break my fall. I must have hit my head because for the first time since she died, I see her.
Bella. Standing there on the beach, hand outstretched.
“Silly Jean,” she says, as if I have simply fallen and scraped my knee, “You should be helping, not hunting.”
Behind her I can see the dragon getting up. Sure, it’s dying, but dying isn’t dead. All it needs to do is stomp on me or bite my head off.
Kill your killer—not a bad end for a warrior.
“Bella,” I say, reaching my hand out to her. “I’ve missed you.”
“Jean, why are you doing this?” she asks.
“Because they hurt you,” I say.
“The dragon did not hurt me,” she scolds.
“No, but other Others—”
“Other Others are not that Other,” she says, pointing at the dragon. “Stop punishing them for something they did not do. And stop punishing yourself.”
The dragon is stumbling over to me, determined to enact its revenge by dining on my guts.
Bella looks over her shoulder.
“Jean, I need something from you.”
“Anything,” I find myself saying. Anything.
“Promise me that if you live, you’ll help them. Promise.”
“But …” I start to say, but Bella holds up a hand.
“Promise me,” she repeats, tears streaming from her eyes.
And I know that, dream or not, real or not, I cannot deny her anything. I nod.
“Say it,” she says.
The dragon is on me, its massive skull eclipsing Bella’s body—this is it.
“Say it!”
“I … I promise,” I say.
What does it matter? I am about to die. Here and now.
A light shines off the dragon’s eyes and it opens its mouth, ready to breathe out its last bit of hate on me, when Bella turns around so suddenly that the dragon takes a step back.
It sees her, I think. How?
I can’t hear what she says; all I know is that they are discussing my fate. Eventually the dragon nods and walks away, making it about fifty meters before it collapses from its wounds.
What happens next is darkness.
↔
It is the dark of night when I regain consciousness. A soft flicker of light catches my eye and in the distance, I see the body of the dragon illuminated by the star-filled night. It is dead.
The dragon never came over, never spoke with Bella. It must have been a dream, I think.
A soft glow of gold sits on the dragon’s neck. Walking over, I see, for the first time, Tinkerbelle, sitting there, crying. When I approach, Tink does not run or hide, she just sits there, hugging the dragon with an abandoned grief.
Seeing Tink there, her grief, the dream of Bella … it all just washes over me. Tink will later tell me that the dragon’s fury and fear was not for itself, but for the little fairy it once protected. But now, all I see is a crying little golden myth. I am stunned and shamed by her misery—it is so pure, so perfect, so complete.
I think back to all my time with Bella, all her hopes and dreams. I have not honored Bella with who I have become, and for the first time since she died, I let myself feel her loss. At first only gentle tears come but soon they give way to pain far more powerful, until my grief pours out of me in such a violent torrent that I actually think it will suffocate me. I don’t just cry. I scream. I bellow. I wrench off my armor.
After what seems to be an eternity, I eventually gain enough composure to stand. The radio clicks. HQ wants to know what’s happening. I throw it to the ground and then stomp on it. Let them think we’re all dead. Everyone else is—what’s one more dead soldier going to change?
That’s when I go AWOL, hiding in my PopPop’s old cabin. It takes a year, but eventually an uneasy peace is brokered between humans and Others.
That’s when I return to Paradise Lot in order to fulfill Bella’s dream.
Chapter 1
Memories
The road to the cabin was winding and to get onto the property you needed to climb a steep hill. The old RoadRunner struggled and I had to push the accelerator all the way down to get her old wheels over the crescent.
This would be the same hill Grinner would have to climb when he came, assuming he didn’t fly. Since I’d never seen his feet leave the ground—at least not by his own will—I guessed flying wasn’t high on his modes of transport. That and because he was the Avatar of Gravity, I figured he was a feet-on-the-ground kind of guy. I supposed he could make his way through the thick tree line or cross the lake, but I doubted that, too. The forest was too dirty for his clean pleated trousers and the lake required hiring a boat or walking on water. Gravity could do a lot, but that trick required a different kind of magic. But the biggest proof I had that he’d use the main path was that he wasn’t afraid of me. This soon-to-be god saw my defiance as an annoyance that had to be dealt with, not a problem with the potential to undo him. Everything I knew about Grinner told me he’d be coming through the front door. As I climbed over the hill’s zenith, I made a mental note to put some sensors in the brush. I’d know when he passed this point, at least.
The cabin was at still there, standing alone on the hill’s plain. It was a lone structure, one story high and completely made of pinewood. There were two bedrooms—one on each side of the cabin—no electricity, a kitchenette with a gas stove and running water that was installed about thirty years ago when PopPop fitted a pump from the lake. As for a bathroom—well, that was what the trees were for.
I parked by the old wood shed and walked up the steps,
opening the unlocked door. What was the point of locking it? Someone could spend all day kicking down the door without a soul to stop them. Inside I noted that, either by luck or because the cabin was so far off the beaten path, no one had found it since I last visited it all those years back. I walked onto its old, uneven floor. A green two-seat sofa sat in front of the fireplace. The floor creaked as I pulled back the sofa and threw aside the tatty orange rug that it rested on. Beneath it was a false floor that I had built. It opened with a pop, dust flying up into the air, and I stuck my arm down the hole, feeling for the old gray-green canvas sack.
It was right where I’d left it. With a strained pull, I lifted out my old military bag from its hiding place. It was heavy, about as long as a ski bag and eight times the width. I pulled back on its heavy-duty zipper, opening its mouth as wide as it would go. And there it all was. All my old military stuff that I had stashed in the cabin when I naïvely believed I would never need it again. Weapons specifically designed to kill Others. They felt familiar in my hands, muscle memory taking over as I held them. Old friends.
Old addictions.
I checked my rifle and went through my bag of tricks. Once more into the fray … into the last good fight I’ll ever know, I thought as I inventoried the content.
The way Grinner burned through time, he believed it was infinite, so the plan was simple: rain holy Hell on him and wear him out. Of course, my plan also required me not getting flattened in the meantime. No plan was perfect and besides, it was a good day to die.
I grabbed my bag and started distributing its contents in the cottage and surrounding lands. When the fight started, the more options I had, the better off I’d be. Then I sheathed my hunting sword and pulled out my trusted rifle, preparing myself for the next part of my plan. I had to get more information and there was only one person I knew who could tell me what I wanted to know.
I needed to take a nap.
Chapter 2
Dream a Little Dream of Me
The darkness came for me the way it always did, its tendrils reaching out like some gruesome, undefined monster. I wanted to run, to run like I had every night for the last six years, but tonight I let the darkness envelop me.
It hit me like a rush of air from a fan suddenly turned on and then I was in it, completely consumed by its nothingness. For a moment I was alone, until she came for me like she did every night—a light in the endless Void, an angel floating down from nowhere, her presence chasing away both darkness and fear.
“Hi Jean-Luc,” she said, her tone soft and careful, “I suspect you have a few questions for me.”
“Yeah,” I said, looking up at her blinding light, “a couple. But I think I’ve figured out a lot of it already.”
“Fine. But first, where would you like to be?”
“Excuse me?”
She rolled her eyes, tempering the gesture with a playful smile. “Oh come, Jean-Luc. We’re about to have a fight.” She stood arms akimbo as she gave me her mocking, It’s-time-to-get-serious look. It was the look she always gave me when trying to lighten the mood before we were about to have a hard conversation. “Jean-Luc, we might as well do it somewhere beautiful. Where would you like to go?”
I looked at her blankly, still not sure what she meant.
She swallowed hard, as if pushing back her frustration, and in a controlled even tone she said, “Do you remember where we met? Just outside that diner you used to work?” In the darkness a glass-and-steel door appeared with a neon yellow sign above it that read: Jack’s Diner.
“Jim’s Diner,” I corrected, “not Jack’s.”
“Ahhh, that’s right, Jim’s Diner.” The sign above the door morphed from Jack to Jim, keeping the same neon-yellow shine. “You were a busboy, weren’t you? My mom took me out to dinner as a treat for getting a perfect report card or winning a spelling bee or whatever it was. Even then, she hated the way you looked at me.” Bella flattened her dress, nervously pressing out wrinkles in the fabric. “We could go there. Or we could go to our first apartment. That hole-in-the-wall just off of—”
“Where I proposed,” I interrupted. “I want to go there.”
“But we went there last night,” she protested, but I held resolute.
“So what?” I said. “You asked me where I wanted to go and I want to go there.”
“OK, fine. You were always such a creature of habit.”
Then from the darkness, mists bloomed from a thousand flower buds that I did not know were there. Maybe the unblossomed pods were hidden in the darkness, or maybe they were never there and Bella somehow, magically, made them appear. Whatever it was, wisps of smoke billowed out as the Void filled around us with a translucent smoke. Then we were standing on a cloud, cool fog shifting in an effervescent dance beneath our feet. The haze had a pleasant smell that I couldn’t quite place. Something safe and pure, like when PopPop used to bake apple pie, or the strong leather smell of his car. Perhaps it was one of those. Perhaps both.
Slowly the smell changed, bringing with it tinges of salt and water and … I smelled the ocean. More than that—I could hear the waves lapping against the shore just in front of me. More out of instinct than anything else, I took a step forward, forgetting that I was suspended in the darkness, floating in nothing. I was surprised when my feet caught onto earth. I shuffled them. It felt like I was standing on sand. I looked down, expecting to see cool white wisps still dancing around my feet, but instead what I saw was hardened vapor that congealed into a white, sandy beach.
A light that was not there before shined above me and I looked up, blinded by the sudden appearance of the Sun. As my eyes adjusted, I looked around and saw that we were on the beach and Bella was no longer haloed by light. She was wearing her white sundress, the one with lilies. There were so many little details that were different from how I remembered them. The boats off the shore. The tree line behind us. A tiny shell that dug into my knee when I bent down to propose to her. And why not? It was fourteen years since we last stood on this beach. In real life, that is. In my dreams, we visited this place often. Still, it had been so long since either of us had been here, our memories of this place were bound to be a bit off. Trouble was, the beach we were standing on wasn’t the recollection of my imperfect memory, it was hers.
All this time when she took me to places to have our nightly chats, I’d believed that they were my memories that took us there. She was my dream, after all, so it made sense that we would go to places I remembered and loved. But we never went anywhere from my memories. We were always going to the places she knew, in the way she remembered them.
As if sensing my realization, she said, “Before I learned how to do that, I thought we had failed. After all, I was meant to be in Heaven, but instead I was lost in a place that transcended emptiness.” She chuckled at the thought.
“But you didn’t fail, did you?”
She shook her head. “I remember what the Ambassador told me. Why did the angels rebel?”
“Pride?”
“Envy. They envied our free will. It was a power that they wished to have for themselves. But what is free will? After all, didn’t the angels rebel? How could they have done that without free will? It got me thinking … and I realized that free will isn’t just the ability to do whatever we want, it is also the ability to shape the world around us. Mold it into what we want it to be. That’s a lot more literal in a place like this.”
She lifted her hand and from it sprung forth the twisty-tie I had used to propose. I felt around my neck—my own twisty-tie was still coiled around the chain. She smiled, tossing it to me. In the palm of my hand, I looked closely at the tiny piece of plastic that my seventeen-year-old self used in lieu of an engagement ring. At the time, I thought it proved me insurmountably romantic to propose with such a thing. Bella came over and showed me her own ring finger. She still wore her twisty-tie. Then she touched the thin band in my hand and it almost felt like her finger pressed on my palm. But like all my dreams, we ne
ver actually touched. I guess that was just another rule of this place. She rolled the twisty-tie on the palm of my hand and turned it into a silver ring, which she put on her own finger alongside her own twisty-tie.
“In this life and the next,” she said, looking at the two rings.
Bella sighed and turned her attention to the sky above. “I think that is why they took all the human souls with them when they left. Because they knew that any human soul in Heaven or Hell would understand that and would bend the Void to their will.”
“I … I don’t understand,” I said, shaking my head, drawing in closer to her.
“When the gods created the world, they gave everyone immortality. Others were granted endless life and humans were imbued with souls. In other words, we were all given essentially the same thing—eternal life. But the two kinds of immortalities drew on different wells of power. When the gods left, they effectively turned off the lights for all the other planes. Others, despite all their abilities, did not possess the right kind of power to turn the lights back on. But a human soul, that is a different thing altogether.”
I nodded, slowly understanding what Bella was saying. “Souls are the on’ switch to this place?”
“Not just the on’ switch. They’re like a million nuclear power stations all running at full capacity. Watch!”
She flicked her hand and in an instant, the beach turned into our apartment where we first lived, then PopPop’s cabin, the airplane on which we rode with the Ambassador, the hard concrete floor where we made love the night before she died. She was cycling through all the places that, once-upon-a-time, meant something to us.
“They are all our memories,” I said.
She nodded. “And not just memories,” she said. “Watch!”
With a wave of her hand, she brought forth a light show that made Fantasia seem like a child playing with flashlights. Meteors shot up as swirls of rainbow-colored imagery shone bright in the sky. The spectacular illuminations danced around us as she transformed the empty Void into her canvas, filled by her imagination. I giggled at the sight.