by Azalea Ellis
“Okay, okay,” I chuckled. “Birch it is. We’ll just say we named you after the mighty tree.”
“I wish China were here to see this,” Sam said suddenly.
We all fell silent, the sadness pushing out the happy atmosphere.
“Me too,” Adam whispered.
Jacky angrily knuckled away tears. “I’m gonna make them pay. I swear it.”
I swallowed the lump in my own throat. I felt like I should say something, but I didn’t know what, so I just said, “Me, too.”
I fed Birch until his stomach was even rounder than my own food-stuffed belly, and then fell asleep with him tucked in the crook of my arm, my organs and bones aching and burning as the Seed I'd taken continued to fight against me.
Chapter 35
I am the creator and the destroyer, I am he that defines all worlds. I bring life to the lifeless, I rain death on all that lives. My judgement is supreme. I encompass all things, I am the progenitor of good and evil. I created sin, I cause its every pain. Hell is one of my works. I am the source of all gods. I create gods on a whim, I destroy gods with a thought. I am man.
— Craig Smith
When I woke up again with a hungry Birch pawing and licking persistently at my face, another whole day had passed. I fed my new little companion and stuffed myself, too, but this time resisted the urge to fall back asleep.
I left the sleeping area and saw the other three on a new stone-floored area of the caldera, fighting against golems. For a second my muscles tensed and I berated myself for trusting Behelaino, but then I realized they were sparring.
When I asked, I found Behelaino had created the golems on Jacky’s request, to help them train, and as a distraction from boredom while I slept. She’d also created stone pathways for us to walk through the water on, so we didn’t have to go hopping around the slippery platforms.
I left them to their sparring, but took Behelaino’s attention for myself, sitting cross-legged at her base. Birch followed me, curling up in my lap to sleep off the huge meal. After only a day he was walking, though it was more like a stumbling wobble than anything.
“Disorder naturally runs free and resists control,” she rumbled at me. “While this is as it should be, if you allow it, you will die. You must learn to enforce order. That is the way of life.”
“Okay, so how do I do that?”
She drew back and tilted her head. “Well, you mold my power. Guide it, rather than allowing it to run freely through you.”
“Okay…but how?”
She frowned, head still tilted. “How?” she repeated. “Can you not feel it?”
“Feel it? I don’t have some instinctual knowledge of how to channel power, if that’s what you mean. Can you explain from a human point of view?”
She huffed, blowing the hair back from my face. “I am not the God of Knowledge, how would I know the training of a mortal to a godling?”
“I thought you’d done this before?”
“Yes, many years ago, but that one was different than you. Definitely smarter. I did not need to teach them what to do with something so natural.”
The heat of anger burned up in me, but Birch woke up and gave a scratchy little growl in Behelaino’s direction. The cute threat startled both her and me, and my anger slipped away. “I’ll try to figure it out. In the meantime, maybe you’d like to continue your sparring with the others,” I said.
Her growing irritation seemed to have dissipated as well, and she smiled, but said, “If I must. I’d be embarrassed if my godling was seen going around with such followers. They must grow stronger before you leave.”
I let the insult slip past with a bit of effort, and took a few deep breaths, forcing my mind into the hyper-aware state. I focused on my own body, ignoring all outside distractions.
I slipped deeper and deeper into my own body, looking closer and closer, till I could see my cells struggling and dying against the onslaught of the Seed. I healed at an accelerated rate, but even the best healing power wouldn’t be enough without being able to stop the constant attack. I tried to focus my will and calm down the erosion, but while I could control a few of the strange Seed organisms, the countless others went on unchecked, and if I took concentration away for a moment, the stilled Seed pieces would be right back to their destructive ways.
I opened my eyes when Birch stirred on my lap and began to pester me for food again.
“You did not succeed,” Behelaino said before I had a chance to say anything. “I could feel it. I cannot teach you how to control it, but once you learn, I will train you to do it better, faster, and in different ways.”
“If I can figure it out,” I mumbled back, feeling defeated and so very, very tired.
I carried Birch back to our little camp spot and fed us both again, giving only lethargic responses to my teammates’ conversation attempts, and went back to sleep.
The cycle of eating ravenously to power my body’s healing, trying futilely to control the Seed, and sleeping as if I was a newborn babe continued for days. I grew increasingly frustrated and irritable at my failure and the constant pain, enough that the others started to avoid talking to me or getting in my way. The only one who didn’t feel the lash of my tongue was Birch, but he was just as snappish as I toward anyone who wasn’t me.
Enough time passed that I felt insidious doubt that I would ever be able to control the Seed, and would die from my reckless consumption of it. I walked along the rim of the caldera’s lip, taking in a view like no other, in glimpses when the stretching clouds below and all around cleared momentarily. The land stretched away beneath me, so far that I could see the curve of the planet.
Birch followed behind me, tentatively letting his wings catch the wind. They were still more fuzzy than feathered, but he’d grown significantly in the time since he’d hatched, and was the size of an adult cat, with all the playfulness and body shape of a kitten.
My claws slipped out involuntarily as I paced back and forth, and I resisted the urge to yank at my own hair in frustrated rage. Tears prickled behind my eyes, and I choked on my own fear. I focused my mind inward, pushing past the emotion with some effort, and begged wordlessly with the Seed to listen to me, to stop attacking me.
It didn’t listen, and so I screamed. I opened my eyes and screamed again, all the rioting emotions within clawing out through my throat. As I did, a strange power burst from me along with a dark-tendriled smoke, and the slippery rock at my feet turned to sand.
I stared down in amazement, unblinking, as the little grains slid off the edge. The wispy black smoke had dissipated almost immediately, and left me feeling empty. Then the rock crumbled and started to fall away beneath my feet, taking me with it.
My stomach lurched at the sudden change in velocity, but already the tumult of conflicting emotion in my mind was back, and stronger than before. My body convulsed with pain, and I blacked out as the wind of my fall brushed against my cheek.
* * *
When I woke, Adam sat beside me, redrawing his tattoo with inkberries, wincing as he embedded the dark liquid into his skin. This design was even more intricate than the last one, twisting up his arm in fractal knots. It reminded me of bindings, holding any broken pieces of Adam secure beneath his skin.
Perhaps I should get some. I was falling apart, too, and could use something to help me hold it together. I giggled at the thought, causing him to break concentration.
He smiled. “You’re awake.” The smile slipped away almost immediately, morphing into a stern look I’d seen before.
“Yes. And let me guess, you’re upset because I was reckless and hurt myself.”
He sighed. “Birch gave this crazy yowl when you fell—he’s awesome—and Jacky caught you. It’s just lucky you fell toward the inside, rather than down the mountainside. Otherwise you’d be dead right now.” He stared at me somberly, his eyes searching my face. “What happened? Sam said you didn’t hit your head, but you passed out, and there’s this crater and cracks i
n the rocks above where you fell.”
I cleared my scratchy throat, and he handed me a flask of water without looking away. I drank, and said, “I got the new power to work for the first time. Or rather, I kind of lost it up there, and suddenly I’d destroyed part of the rock where I was standing. Then it was like all the different emotions went full volume, all together, and I just…passed out. It’s the Seed. It’s…chaos, Adam. Behelaino…she told me she’s formlessness and the void, and I have that inside me. I don’t know how to control it. Even now,” I broke off, swallowing the sudden and furiously strong urge to cry, “I feel like I’m vibrating apart into a million pieces.”
He stared at me for a second. “When I was a kid, I had some trouble…coping.” He looked down to his hands, idly rubbing his fingers together.
I clenched my teeth, holding in an unexpected surge of anger. He was going to tell me he knew how I felt, try to sympathize with me? How dare he? He knew nothing, had never experienced something like this. What advice could he give me?
“My dad drank…drinks,” he corrected. “But back then my mom was still alive. He’d get angry and do these little clever, hurtful things. Sometimes, those can be harder to take than the physical pain.”
My anger slipped away, replaced by a burning shame at its existence only seconds before.
“I’d get angry and sad, and it would all get to be so much I just couldn’t handle it. I’d hole up in my room, screaming into a pillow and punching the headboard of my bed.” He rubbed his scarred knuckles absentmindedly, and was silent for a while.
“Adam,” I whispered, unsure what to say, but he began talking again as if he hadn’t heard me.
“My mom found me one day, like that, just kind of…unreachable. She pulled me onto her lap and rocked me for a long time, until I calmed down. Then she taught me a way to help control all the negative emotions when things got overwhelming. She told me to make a house in my mind, and in that house, to make a room. In that room, to make a box, and in that box, to put the things that were making me crazy. If I felt ashamed, she told me to think of the thing that had made me that way, acknowledge it, and then put it in the box. Then to cover the box and fill the room with things that made me feel confident and proud and safe, so that the shame wouldn’t be as loud. If you put the bad feeling in a room made of bad things, it’ll stay hidden, but it starts to fester and poison you secretly. That’s why you hold it with its opposite.”
He took a deep breath, and met my eyes again. “Maybe you can do that with this new Seed. Take it and lock it up so it can’t keep making you crazy.” He gave me a pointed look, and a small quirk of a smile.
“Maybe,” I said. “At this point, I’m willing to try just about anything.”
With Adam’s serene voice guiding me, I made a house with many rooms waiting to be filled. I chose one of the rooms, and put the sea of chaos within my body and mind into a small wooden box made of silence. I locked it, and put the box in a chest made of stillness. I left them in the middle of my room made of serenity, and closed the door. Then I built a towering wall of protective stone all the way around the house, because it made me feel safe.
I opened my eyes, and then closed them again almost immediately, moving my concentration inward in a different sort of way, checking on the Seed within my body. It was still there, spread throughout, but it no longer pushed so strongly against the natural order of my body, and other than relief, I had no overpowering emotion coursing through me.
I was exhausted by the intense mental effort, and fell asleep again, with a muttered, “Thank you,” to Adam.
The next day, I told Behelaino of my conquest, and she began to instruct me in the use of my newly contained power. She was a hard taskmaster, constantly impatient and fickle, and my body was still weak from its extended battle. Learning even a modicum of control was grueling. According to Behelaino, I was also singularly untalented.
“You must leave soon,” she said to me a few days later.
“Yes. The Trials will be starting soon, and then I will go back to my world. There’s not much time left,” I said, sparring lightly with a man-sized tornado of jagged pebbles and steam she’d made.
“I have not much control left. My strength replenishes by the day, and I struggle to hold it in check so that you and your subjects do not die. I cannot continue to do so for much longer,” she rumbled.
I frowned, and released a short burst of my new power, scattering and disintegrating the twister with a poof of fleeting dark tendrils. I quickly clamped back down on the Chaos, locking it up again before it could attack me in a frenzy of sudden release. The effort exhausted me. It would be a while before I could use the Skill again, though I was getting better compared to fainting the first time. “You’re regaining the strength lost from when you…erupted?” She’d hinted as much a few times before.
“Yes. If you do not take some distance from this place, your lives in mortal form will be gone, your energy mixed with my own. Prepare your subjects to travel. If this Trial does not take you when you have said it will, you will need to run. I have grown…fond of you, and would like you to live on.”
But it did take us, shortly afterward. When the Boneshaker started to play, a cube formed in front of us, and we were given the option to go to the Trial or not. Behelaino could somehow tell. “You do not bear my power in vain, Eve-Redding. May you go free.”
My eyes met the gaze of her face’s swirling orbs of water and held, and then my team and I were snapped away to a Trial. For the first time since my first Trial, I felt no overwhelming fear.
Chapter 36
A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.
— Gillian Flynn
As I’d guessed and hoped, Zed was there, so we could protect him. When he saw me, his face lit up, as happy as I’d ever seen him. But instead of rushing forward to hug me and make sure I was alright, he hesitated, and his eyes searched mine.
I was puzzled for a moment, and then realized what was going on in his mind. I remembered the last time I’d seen him, and the things I’d said. So instead of waiting for him, I stepped forward and wrapped him in a crushing hug. He wheezed from the force my strength could now create, but when I pulled back, he was beaming. “I’m glad you’re okay,” I said. “And…you know, those things I said—”
“You wanted to keep me safe,” he interrupted. “I know. Sometimes we do things we shouldn’t, trying to keep each other safe. Must run in the family,” he said pointedly.
My eyes widened in surprise, and I finally let go of the last bit of anger I’d been holding against him for taking my Seed. “Yeah. I guess we do.”
He nodded, but I knew that even if all was forgiven between us, it would be a while till the wounds healed and things were back to normal. Maybe they would never be back to normal. And that was okay, too.
After the Trial, which seemed designed to test our speed, dexterity, and endurance, the team returned with Zed to the normal world, wrapping our arms around him in a kind of bulky group hug in the hopes that he’d take us with him to the point where Blaine was waiting with an escape route.
It worked, and we all piled into Blaine’s dark-tinted pod, ignoring the queasiness that came with teleportation. He peeled away. We were in some network of mostly empty underground tunnels, which he navigated with ease.
My eyes had adjusted to the dark, so when the pod burst out into the brightness of day and merged with flowing traffic, I flinched and lifted an arm to block my face.
Zed, who was sitting beside me, did the same. When we’d had time to adjust to the brightness, he turned to me. “You seem different.”
Jacky grinned and poked her head forward from the backseat. “Yah. That’s because we’re bad-ass strong now.”
Sam, on my other side, sighed and leaned his head back against the seat. “Training in Hell will do that to you. But I never realized before how bad Earth stinks. I’d gotten used to the freshness.”
“No,” Zed shook his
head, “that’s part of it. But there’s something else, too.”
Adam flicked me a look from the front passenger seat, which I pointedly ignored.
Zed looked from Adam to me. “What is it?”
I shook my head. “We just have a lot more experience with danger than we did before. We’ve become veteran Gamers, kind of in the space of nine days. It’s been a lot longer than that for us. That disconnect is probably what you’re sensing.”
“How long were you over there for?”
“About six weeks.”
He nodded and let the questioning go, but the frown on his face said he wasn’t quite satisfied. He was more sensitive to lies and evasion, after everything that had happened. “Well, you’re crazy, crazy powerful now.”
I couldn’t blame him for being suspicious, but I didn’t know what to say about the Seed I’d taken, or how to explain it, and I didn’t want him to worry. But I felt a small twinge of guilt, and decided to elaborate anyway. “I also have a new…Skill-type-thingy.” I made vague hand motions meant to play down its importance rather than explain.
He perked up with interest again, but I gave vague answers, and kept the true danger and side effects to myself.
The others knew the truth, more or less, but they wouldn’t go against my word.
Blaine took us to a hotel suite, which he’d paid for using a fake ID link. He had some lab equipment set up, though not even close to the realm of the laboratory in his basement.
When I let Birch out of my backpack, where I’d firmly ordered him to stay hidden, still and quiet before the Trial, Blaine went into a state of frenzied, ecstatic curiosity, and lamented that he didn’t have better equipment to examine the animal. Birch even bit him when Blaine tried to touch his wings, but the scientist seemed even more excited by that, asking a series of questions about him and the Trial world that I was too tired to answer properly.
Luckily, Adam was more than happy to rave about my new monster companion. He adored the little tailos, even though Birch seemed to know it, and bullied him mercilessly. Every time Adam got close, Birch swatted or made coughing sounds at him. And when Adam tried to feed him scraps of meat, Birch always deliberately nipped his fingers, too. It was obvious the tailos found it all great fun, and for some reason Adam only liked him even more.