by Tyler Vance
Sheikoh noticed droplets of sweat running down the lines of the black tattoos on her neck. He tried to retreated, but his cyborg limbs were next to useless. He fell against the wall, bracing himself with his natural left hand. The Celestial charged towards him, swinging the dagger. Her eyes glowed red as the devil. There was nothing Sheikoh could do. Desperate, he flung his shivering, metal arm at her as hard as he could.
The vibrating, blacksteel crowbar of an arm pistol-whipped her right in the face. There was shattering snap. The Celestial’s neck twisted all the way back backwards, and she was flung through the air. Her glowing red eyes met Sheikoh’s, as they flickered out. About eight feet away the Celestial women bounced against the floor and then collapsed into a limp heap like a lifeless manikin. A line of blood trickled from her lips.
Sheikoh stared at her for a moment. Then his overworked limbs gave out beneath him. His metal legs dropped onto his knees, painfully jolting his hip. He tried to move his right arm. The fingers didn’t even twitch, but there wasn’t much surprise in that; he’d overdriven his parts harder than he ever had. He had no idea how long he was going to have to wait for the motors to recharge and the adjustments to finish.
Of course, if any of wires had degraded or broken than he would be immobile until whatever got some repair work. He told himself that there was no way that happened, that that didn’t make any sense. The worse overdrive lash back he had ever had was two of useless fingers and a burnt-out knee, and fingers, knees, and elbows all burnt out without any overdrive. The only real thing that he had to worry about was someone discovering him in his vulnerable state.
Still, even though he logically knew all of that, he couldn’t help worrying that he’d never move again.
The haze of adrenaline gave way before a million aches and bruises. He felt like a giant mess of broken weakness. Eyes slightly crossed, Sheikoh nodded back and forth, in and out of consciousness. Every time he tried to surrender himself to black oblivion however, a throb of aching pain would force him back to reality.
He suddenly felt like he was laying on Alimiat’s operating table, so long ago. He could almost see the man’s yellow-scarred eyes, Emili’s crystal-blue irises. Cold steel burned the skin of his back.
He lay there, watching paralyzed as the two silhouettes cut him up and attach bits and pieces of metal to the terrifying skeleton that they’d already built into him. He tried to move his hands, tell them that he was conscious, that he could feel the pain of that saw that was cutting through his bones but he was frozen. He wanted to scream, but he couldn’t.
He suddenly realized that their skin had gone soft and scaly, like they were two human-lizards. He wanted to cry, to rage against the bonds holding him there. He needed help. They needed to understand that he was feeling all of this. Help. Dorothi… Where was Dorothi when he needed her?
“Hey Emili, we’ll cut him at the waist and fry the legs for dinner. Not like the kid can use them for anything, am I right?” Alimiat laughed evilly.
Emili began laughing as well. Their laugh became the double-cackle of a Celestial. Sheikoh suddenly felt like he was looking at them from one end of an ever widening tunnel and he still couldn’t move. They grew bigger and bigger, more and more monstrous until they towered over Sheikoh like scaly, skyscraper-sized dragons.
Where was Dorothi?!
Sheikoh started awake to a hazy world of smoke, dust and tears. In that moment, the word ‘sore’ attained a new meaning for him. The pain across his body roared in his ears, like the complaining of a million angry inhabitants of his body. He was drowning, pummeled under thousands of thousands of bruises.
Sheikoh tried to raise his arms. Then he rubbed the harsh atmosphere of blood and ruined house from his aching eyes. He suddenly registered the cold touch of his right hand. He flexed his leg motors experimentally and looked down at his beaten up, torn up body.
“I’m back baby…” Sheikoh celebrated wearily.
He flicked up to his feet, and his back exploded with intense pain. It was enough to make him gasp out his breath. His autonomic legs had moved way too fast. As bruised pain rippled down his frame, his head swam with white sparkles. The world slowly began to settle into place.
Once everything was back in focus, Sheikoh looked around. The floor to late Sanatous’s room had collapsed under debris. Rubble spilled down onto the floor beneath it. The edge of the room, sagging down, was all that was left of the original floor. Battered pieces of furniture and broken glass lay strewn over burned, dirty-looking carpet. Sheikoh gazed around the destroyed room. He started when something caught his attention.
Beneath a crushed half of Sanatous’s bedside table, next to the splinters of the Celestial’s bedframe, there was a leather book lying on the ground. Sheikoh looked at it. It was an untitled book with an amulet sized indentation in its middle.
‘That must be it! The book that Dream… or… Camillio… Tyche..?’ Sheikoh figured with a jolt through his pain-numbed thoughts. He remembered that his Celestial employer had said something about putting the Transcendent Amulet into the book’s cover…
Sheikoh shook in black hair, and his head rippled with headache. A cloud of dust puffed around his head. He half walked half stumbled over the jagged pieces of remaining floor. His steady, blacksteel legs were at odds with his unfocused eyes. Sheikoh bent down over the book, his back protesting. His eyes watered at the pain. He let his knees fall to the ground. It seemed to be the easier way to go about picking this thing up, but once down, he numbly realized that he wasn’t getting back up.
Probably a bad thing. Honestly though, Sheikoh couldn’t find it in himself to care. At least he’d done everything. He hoped that when he died Camillio Tyche, or Dream, or whoever the dude was, made sure to give his payout to Dorothi. If anyone knew how to treat you when you died for them, it’d be a Celestial… right?
Sheikoh’s vision split into two fuzzy books. He stared at them for a moment, seized by doubt. He needed to be sure that Dorothi was going to be okay if he didn’t make it. He remembered… Dream had said something about putting the amulet into the book’s cover.
Sheikoh pulled the amulet over his head and clumsily pressed about half of it into the indentation of the book’s leather cover. His blurred vision wasn’t helping very much right now. He closed his eyes, fighting against the exhaustion nodding his head, and used felt the leather circle. His fingers guided the medallion into the cover slot with a satisfying click.
Wind shrieking in his ears, Sheikoh’s body was ripped from the ground and hurled into a spin. Around and around and around, he spun within an omnipotent tornado. His body was racing forward fast that he couldn’t see, even when he forced his eyes open. The vortex waved his limbs around like a rag doll’s.
There was a flash and his spinning felt more focused, like he was falling towards the earth. Something had changed. Sheikoh could feel himself going faster and faster and faster. His eyes were slammed with sudden blurred neon hues. He couldn’t wonder what they were or what was happening though, he was going too fast to think at all. He felt his throat burning, and suddenly realized that he was screaming. Next to the wind’s all-encompassing howl, his shout was soundless.
He slammed into something hard. His vision faded from a strange white color to black in an instant.
It looked like things were finally over.
Chapter 13
The Line between Life and Death
Consciousness filtered into Sheikoh’s mind. He was lying on his back, on something soft. He let his eyes flicker open. The resulting glare had him squinting, half blinded by an astoundingly-pure, white ceiling overhead, that stretched without end. It swelled with every shape and color of bubbles. He gasped when he realized his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him.
The lava-lamp-esque goo hung in clumps overhead. They floated through each other, drifting around in an endless, intermingling dance. They seemed to float around in relation to one another, like cells of some higher entity, part of so
me higher pattern. Flickers of designs constantly wrote and then erased themselves across their marble-white cores, fading before he could get a closer look. The blobs sort of reminded him of taffy.
Giant, floating taffy.
Sheikoh watched them float around, formlessly changing their shapes and colors. He quickly realized there was no way of figuring out their relative sizes. Some appeared to be about the size of a water droplet and others were obviously gigantic, the size of a floating island.
And behind them, the endless expanse of white was pinpricked dark, purple-blue dots. It was as if he was staring at a photo negative of the night sky. Sheikoh felt like a tiny speck of dust trapped within a glaring universe. It was like he’d been transported to his universe’s twin. Only if this universe and his were related, than the one he’d been in before was definitely the evil one.
“Wow… I must have gotten hit on the head. Hard,” he whispered in disbelief, slowly turning around to take it all in.
An hourglass-shaped globule floated by his face. His eyes narrowed and fixed on it. Its color was part way between green and orange. He reached out his hand hesitantly, wondering if there was any harm in touching the stuff. His worry was needless; when he tried it rippled away from his finger like a frightened Purmynx. Bemused, he stared after it for a moment.
Then the ground shuddered beneath him. The earth heaved, knocking Sheikoh stumbling. His arms pin wheeled; he looked down in alarm. He found his balance and steadied, still staring downwards. He was standing on a world of the same color-changing stuff. Its surface was in the process of slowly changing color from green to yellow-green.
A hill bulged before his wide eyes. As he watched, the hill’s yellow-green base grew narrower and narrower, until the ground finally spat out a huge balloon of the stuff. He stepped back hurriedly. He looked back down again. He was sure that the blobs were gooey, but the ground beneath his feet was firm enough.
Until it started rippling, that is.
Being dead was strange…
Sheikoh shifted his gaze to the brand-new bubble that’d come out of the ground. His eyes widened as the rough sphere opened outwards, like a clam opening its shell. A thin tongue of red material snaked out and tried to poke at his face curiously.
Startled, Sheikoh slapped the tendril away with the back of his hand. It froze for a moment. Then it reared up like a cobra. Sheikoh jumped back to evade a strike that never came.
The snake of material inflated. It took the rough shape of a torso with waving, boneless arms. A neckless head bulged forward. It had no eyes or nose. The only way Sheikoh came up with head at all was the gaping, toothless mouth in the center of a rough oval face. The creature stretched its arms after him, but it wasn’t fast enough.
Sheikoh never fell back to the ground. For a moment, he thought that he was flying. But he quickly realized he had absolutely no control over the retrograde. He was simply in a backwards freefall. The strange creature dwindled into a speck in the distance, and Sheikoh still drifted backwards, revolving slightly. Around him, Languid globs blumbled out of his way.
“What the hell is going on here,” Sheikoh muttered harshly.
It was more of a statement then a question, really.
He massaged his temples for a moment and then pushed his hair back, thinking. As far as he could figure, this was the afterlife. There wasn’t any other logical alternative. All of the injuries he’d racked up in Sanatous’s mansion had disappeared without any trace. He’d been on death’s door and now he felt great. Well… healthy at least.
Which probably meant he was dead. Two plus two.
Sheikoh drifted on and on for what felt like hours. He went through every semblance of dizzy. His original backwards became his left, and then his downwards, but he quickly lost track. He floated through white infinity, his thoughts glancing over his life-line. Maybe all of these globs were other people. Maybe to each of them, he looked like a glob. Or maybe he was imprisoned in his own personal hell. Alone forever and ever and ever.
Directly beneath him, a hot-pink bubble zoomed alongside him. Sheikoh’s eyes followed it. After the hours and hours of staring into endless white, he’d do anything to make his peace with boredom. If he was dead, then there wasn’t anything to fear from trying to understand the mysteries of these things.
The bubble floated, backdropped by the dark, distant “stars” that were massive versions of globs; he had realized that what felt like centuries ago. His eyes held it with a new appreciation. Sheikoh watched letters and pictures scrawl themselves on its formless “core”. They flitted over its marble sheen like it was trying to give him a message, but whatever it was trying to say went by too fast for him to follow.
“This really is a pretty okay place,” Sheikoh admitted to the sparkling bubble.
Beneath him, it bounced up and down. Sheikoh reached out to touch the thing and accidentally tipped into a spin. He laughed, trying to swim back to his earlier position, but he couldn’t. Sheikoh gave up and stopped waving his arms. The blob quickly caught up with his face, so Sheikoh focused his eyes on the little guy. The bubble’s silver sheen had suddenly gone opaque and mirror-like. He was staring into the reflection of his own face. He grinned at himself, who grinned back.
“Well, you’re a handsome one, mate. Wanna stroll back on to my place?” Sheikoh asked the bubble, batting his eyelashes at himself.
His hair was silky black, rather dust-covered and grey the way it had been after Celestial’s roof had collapsed on him. His face was unblemished by cuts and bruises. The only mark on him was the old scar, jagging over his right eye. He looked like he’d just spent a few days in a spa. Strange.
Someone like him belonged in hell. Not in a pretty place like this. In all of his life, he had never been so positive that he was dead than at this moment. His mind stuttered over a hysterical shock.
He began to giggle. The bubble tinkled wind chime laughter along with him. Hysteria went all out, and Sheikoh found himself gasping with laughter until his sides and jaw ached. Eyes wide, he cackled like a witch. He felt tears on his lashes. The bubble whirled quick circles around him, like a dog chasing its tail.
Finally, Sheikoh regained some control over himself.
“What’d you do to get sent to hell with me you cute, little freak?” Sheikoh asked bubble, flashing an unbalanced smile.
The bubble stopped. It seemed to gaze back at him with his own reflection. Sheikoh looked into the distorted reflection of his own eyes, and he half expected an answer. For a while, they drifted in expectant silence.
Sheikoh cleared his throat.
“I just got blown way too many times, Mr. Sheikoh,” he giggled. “On account of me being a bubble.”
“… Sheikohhh… ” the bubble repeated.
Sheikoh’s eyes widened.
He stared at the bubble, and the bubble stared back at him. Its imperfect reflection of his face possessed a distortion of his own individuality. It flashed with bright green light and fizzled back into a reflective rainbow. His mirror image looked pale and uneasy.
“You can speak? Are you a spirit or something?” Sheikoh asked the bubble seriously.
It stared back at him, silent. The moment stretched.
Apparently it wasn’t in the mood to talk.
Sheikoh bit his lip and looked away quickly. His chest sting with fierce longing. He knew the feeling was irrational, but he’d been certain that Emili had come to guide him through the afterlife. It made sense. He was sure he’d heard a whisper of Emili’s voice in his name.
He must have imagined it. It looked like he was on his own, as always.
Sheikoh shook the thought from his head, as he slowly drifted a revolution. He gazed at the white infinite surrounding him in every direction and smiled sardonically. Heaven really was white. Nonetheless, this was nothing like what people described the afterlife to be. Nobody ever told him he’d spend his death surrounded with color-changing goo.
Sheikoh glanced back at the bubble,
drifting along behind him like a loyal, little puppy. He had to admit, it wasn’t that bad. Maybe this wasn’t hell after all. Maybe this was only a single level of the afterlife, a halfway house between heaven and hell. And even if the bubble wasn’t Emili, that didn’t mean she wasn’t here. Empire knows she wasn’t perfect.
He glanced down at his little follower, and his face froze in shock.
The bubble had changed. Its surface had gone crystalline, shimmering with dancing streams of light. It glittered like beams moonlight on still water. And it wasn’t a bubble anymore. It was a head. Hair flowed backwards, locks’ wavy lengths cut short and elegant. A pair of eyes lay closed in peaceful serenity, and perfect lips traced both the face’s lines of laughter and life. Even clear of color, Sheikoh knew the face. He would’ve known it anywhere.
“Emili..?” he murmured, voice ragged with surprise and wonder.
Her eyes snapped open in response.
A scream interrupted their reunion; the scream of wind. A swarm of the goo pummeled Emili like raindrops. They slammed into her head, sticking to her face, drowning her behind their combined weight.
“EMILI!!” Sheikoh screamed.
He thrashed around, trying to focus is drift towards her, but it was no use. Nothing propelled him forward. Worse, he ended up in a wild, dizzy spin away from Emili. Sheikoh stopped thrashing when he realized what was happening. His eyes widened helplessly. Hundreds of thousands of globs flowed towards Emili. Faster than thought. Faster than he could scream. And there was nothing he could do.
An instant later, the stuff choked over her face, and Sheikoh watched on, numb with horror. Emili’s face had been hidden behind the stuff, but that didn’t stop it from coming. The glob grew bigger and bigger. The sight of it blasted Sheikoh in the chest. His heart was ripped to shreds of despair and self-loathing.
The scream was wrenched from every torn fiber of his being.
Sheikoh kicked and pushed at the nothingness that surrounded him, mindless with fury. He wasn’t going to lose Emili for the second time. He paddled desperately, trying to swim towards the enormous clump, but nothing seemed to be able to move him forward.