by Heath Pfaff
One of the things massive black hands fastened around my neck and the other came up to slide its visor back into place. Two large wings tore out of its back, spreading out behind it and blocking out the sky as they ripped into the air and lifted us up into the sky.
I didn’t know what was happening, but I had a sudden crazy suspicion that it was going to take me high into the air and drop me to the ground for seeing into its secret. It was going to punish me for finding out the truth. I could still see the horror that had been inside of it, and being so close to it filled me with revulsion. This was the future that might wait for me. I could become something like this if I failed.
What if that was what was going to happen to me now? I gagged and choked in it’s grip. I couldn’t even claw at its hands. My fingers were raw and still bleeding from the tunnels. I thought I was going to strangle, but then the creature’s other hand grabbed the back of my shirt and before I could contemplate anything else we were diving back at the ground at terrible speed. I was dropped just before we reached the ground, but instead of flying away the golem landed next to me.
I looked around, trying to figure out where we were, but we weren’t in the Rift anymore, at least not any part I’d ever been. There was no fog here at all.
“Where have you taken me??” I asked, though it was hard to get the words out through my raw throat.
“Beyond.” The metallic reply came from the body of the golem.
“It has taken you to answer for your actions.” A voice said from behind me, and I turned to see a man in Warden attire that I’d never seen before, the flaming fist etched in black on his chest. He had a long knife in one hand, and he stepped towards me with a dark grin playing evilly on the edges of his mouth.
Chapter 3
The Woods
3.1
“I haven’t done anything wrong.” I snapped venomously at the man, taking a step back and away from him. I wasn’t sure who he was, but I didn’t trust him. This whole situation was unnerving. Where was everyone else? Where was I?
“Haven’t you, deady?” His voice crackled with amusement. “I’m sure that tattoo on your face is just a strange decorative choice then. Clearly you’re an upstanding member of society.” The amused chuckle that accompanied his words wore heavily on my nerves. It sounded unhinged, and frightening.
“I’m already being punished for what gave me the tattoo. I don’t know what this is about.” I said, gesturing to the golem and the area around me. As I looked at the thing again, the horrible remnants of a man, I shuddered.
“Right now this is about a trigger that you activated. You’re the first of your year to do so. You opened the visor on the golem.” He said, that same grin still on his face. “There is always one who does and it’s always interesting to see who it is that first time. You’re the first deady to do it, so that’s new. I’m guessing someone told you the story? You had to see for yourself??” He sounded excited, eager even. He walked across the space between us a bit, passing by a strange, small pond that looked full of foul black liquid. I found the pool unsettling for some reason.
I frowned at the Warden, not sure I wanted to say anything about Ori that might bring attention to her. I didn’t want her to be in trouble for my actions, though I really owed her very little. “I was just curious.” I said, folding my arms across my chest and standing up straight. It was an attempt to look less afraid, though I certainly didn’t feel that way.
The man laughed. “That’s true in a way, but you’re also lying. Don’t lie to a Warden. It takes Will to lie effectively, and to succeed you must have a stronger Will than the one you’re telling the lie too. You’ll never out-Will a Warden. You just look stupid. Are you stupid, girl?”
I shook my head, anger flaring up inside of me. “No, I’m not. I still don’t understand why you brought me here. Why does it matter that I looked under the golem’s visor?” I shuddered again, hating myself for the sign of weakness.
“You’re trying to avoid my earlier questions. It’s clear you’re protecting someone that you think is a friend, but it doesn’t matter. Telling you about the golems isn’t giving away a secret. I was merely trying to determine if you had some idea of what you were going to see before you did it. You did. You knew, and yet you still lifted it. Did you believe the stories were false?” He pressed, and as he asked the question I felt a terrible weight pushing down on me. It was oppressive, and suffocating. Suddenly I was certain that the only way to get free of the weight crushing me was to speak truth.
“No, I knew they were true! I just had to see.” The words burst out of me. It felt like I couldn’t have held them in if I’d wanted to, and I realized that he was using his Will on me. The pressure was the direct weight of his Will pressing the truth from me, rending it from my mind. I felt distinctly violated. It was upsetting.
“I made them.” The man said. He’d walked across the clearing to a nearby tree which he then leaned into in a casual manner. “The golems are my creation.” He added, and the weight of his Will, that last remnant of it hanging in the air, departed.
“That’s impossible. They’ve been in the school for hundreds of years.” I said, not compelled, but speaking my mind anyway. The relief of having that pressure off of me made me a little brave. Perhaps foolishly brave.
“You are naive if you believe that the Wardens are constrained by human lifespans. I’m not here to dispel your naivete though. I’m here to talk about them.” He nodded towards the golem. “Did you hear it when you opened the visor?” He asked.
I wanted to pretend I didn’t know what he was talking about, that I hadn’t heard the terrible shrieking agony of the once living thing, but I had, and I could tell he knew I had by the smile that spread across his face.
“Why are you doing this? This doesn’t seem like a normal part of the training.” I felt a tinge of fear spreading through me. What if he really was the one who’d made the golems? Had he brought me here to turn me into one? My eyes flicked back to the strange black pool. It was significant, I knew that.
“I’ve seen hundreds of these classes come and go. I tried teaching some for a while, but I don’t have the patience for it all. I have a streak of cruelty in me that runs deep. Still, I’m a Warden and I’m powerful, useful, so they let me do as I will. They need the golems, and it takes a certain type of Will to make them.” He turned and started walking into the woods. “Come with me.”
“No!” I said, certain that if I did as he said I wouldn’t be coming back from this side trip.
I could hear his laughter, and suddenly I was walking after him, body stiff and doll-like. I’d never felt anything quite so revolting before. It felt like he’d grabbed the bones in my body and was moving them as he wished. I let out a scream of protest, and tried to resist, but I was helpless. It was like falling. Once you’d started, there was no stopping it until the fall was over.
“You can’t fight Will. Not yet, maybe not ever.” He said as we walked through the woods. I looked to the sky and saw it was getting later. How much time was left in Rift? Would I be saved if night came before he did whatever he intended to do? We exited into a clearing and I saw a rock pedestal ahead of me. There was a suit of armor, a golem, laying on the slab. That was all I needed to see.
I screamed and fought with everything in me, warring against the movement of my limbs. It was no use. I was a toy to this man, a plaything that he could use as he liked, and what he intended to do was something far beyond any horror I could have imagined before looking under that visor.
“No, please don’t do this!” I yelled, trying again to regain control of my body but failing miserably. I just kept walking forward until I reached the side of the pedestal and then I stopped.
“This one is empty.” He said, looking down at it. “I’ll fill it this year. I fill one every year. It’s impossible for me to do more than that. It requires a monumental act of Will to make them the way I do. It was easier when they didn’t need to be self suffici
ent, or I didn’t need to suppress their misery.”
I was shivering in terror now.
“Do you think it’s cruel?” He asked, looking up at me. He had milky eyes, almost yellow, and now that I was a bit closer to him I could see that there were streaks of black beneath his white sin. His veins were black, even those running through his eyes. “Do you think I’m cruel for making them?”
I nodded. “It’s horrible. What you do to them is horrible. They are living people and you turn them into . . . things, suffering things.” I couldn’t hide the revulsion in my voice, or the fear. I didn’t want to become one of them.
“Yes, I do. They’re alive and awake for the whole process, even as I cut away their bodies to get to the pieces I need. I tried knocking them out at first, but it was impossible to respark their existence later.” He smiled at me and shrugged. “You shouldn’t be so afraid. This isn’t your fate. You’re not good enough for this. I have my eyes on a few.”
A sob escaped me as he said this, tears slipping down my cheeks. The relief was so strong that I felt like I might collapse, but I still didn't have control of my own legs. I was relieved that someone else would meet this fate, but it wouldn’t be me. It was a horrible thing to be relieved by, and yet I couldn’t deny the feeling. “Why did you bring me here?” The question was a whimper.
He shrugged again. “Because you were curious. You wanted to know, and now you do.” He walked forward and began unfastening clasps on the armor which let him open it up. There were thin black cords with hooks on the ends running in elaborate patterns, and strange devices full of miniscule black and silver gears. It was impossibly complex. It looked like the work of a completely insane watch maker. The black cords and hooks reminded me of that pool near where we’d started, the little black pond.
“Every piece is crafted by hand. It’s all I do, make the pieces and assemble them. I build the armor here, the mechanisms, and complete the rest elsewhere. I can finish one every year, and the process of mounting the living component is so complicated. It is art, an art that very few ever see. You get to see. Out of the hundreds I’ve brought to see my art, only four of them have ever made it through the full training process. That means, alive right now, there aren’t even enough people who have seen this art to count on a single hand. Well, there are a few others, a few Wardens, but that is it. Does that make my work any less beautiful?” He asked, looking up at me again.
I wasn’t sure how to answer him. He seemed completely out of his mind. He was as twisted and wrecked inside as the golems were. It made sense that he was the one who had created them.
“Your work is incredible, but it’s also vile and disgusting.” I went the route of honesty. He could tell when I was lying anyway. I could have denied that his work was good in any way, but the technical precision of what he was doing was amazing, and I had to guess it had taken incredible patience and some kind of artistry to attain.
He laughed, and it actually managed to sound quite pleased. “Yes, thank you. Incredible, but vile and disgusting. That is what you were brought here for, an opinion. I could force every student to come and give me their view on what I’ve done, but I prefer just the ones that come to me. I used to believe it might be some kind of drawing of fate, but as my belief in fate dwindled it has become more of a practice in habit than anything else. Habit and . . . well, maybe something else. There is a man with dark eyes in my dreams, and sometimes . . . “ He shook his head and waved his hand in the air, as if dismissing his madness for a moment. “The first to get curious from a new year gets brought to see my work, the others learn about it from afar.”
He nodded to himself, smiling slightly, then his eyes snapped to me and his expression became dark. “What’s your name, girl?”
“I’m Lillin.” I answered, my voice a bit quieter than I meant it to be.
“Lillin.” He repeated that. “I’m Ghoul. Well, that’s not my actual name, but that’s what I’m called. I feed on the living for my work, so Ghoul fit well enough, and I rather like it.” Ghoul turned and leaned over his unfinished golem. He had a cloak on, the ends of it tattered and torn, threadbare in places, but it too had the Warden symbol on it, a fist clenching the Everburn. That symbol seemed unnaturally black and white on that weathered cape.
“Are you afraid to die, Lillin?” He asked, not turning back to face me.
“Yes. I am.” I again was truthful, though this time I wasn’t sure why. He’d know I was lying if I didn’t tell the truth, of course, but it seemed cowardice to admit that I was afraid to die.
His reply was a bit of a surprise. “Everyone is. The Wardens are more afraid than anyone else. It’s alright to be afraid, but you must never give in. Death has a Will of its own, and yours must be stronger than that.” Ghoul said, voice harsh with determination. “We must break the wall of Will, and Death must be defeated.”
“I’m not . . . “ I was about to say that I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I stopped myself. “No Will can be stronger than death.” I said on impulse.
Ghoul turned back to me, a slow smile spreading across his face. “Correct, yes! It’s true, of course. They will try to teach you otherwise, but they are deceiving themselves. Death can be denied, Will can triumph for a time, but she will always come back for you, and you can’t turn her aside forever. Death is the ultimate Will, even stronger than Everburn, and I have seen both. I know.”
He sighed. “I like you, Lillin. You’re clever. It’s a shame your time is short. All of you deadies, so short.” It was hard to tell exactly where he was looking with his milky eyes, but I was fairly certain they’d passed to my torn fingers. “The tunnel is small and cramped, but it’s just a tunnel. You’ve come through it once and it will never get any more difficult. In one side, out the other, some crawling in between. Panic is your enemy there, not the tunnel itself. You are your own enemy. Remember that.” He turned his back and gestured with a hand. Before I could open my mouth again the golem that had been following us grabbed me and hoisted me into the air.
I was too confused to be afraid at that point. Nothing seemed to make sense in that moment. My meeting with Ghoul had been like something out of a nightmare, though the same could be said of most experiences that took place in the Rift, but this one felt poignant and sharp. Ghoul had been an insight into a side of the Wardens that I hadn’t seen before. For all that he was mad and dangerous, he was human, flawed and real. I’d been looking at them like they were something else entirely, but Ghoul had shown me differently. He’d also shown me that the lessons I learned here were not absolute.
I wasn’t sure if I believed he was as old as he said he was, but he had seemed ancient. If he was that old, how old were the rest of the Wardens? Did they never die? It seemed like there would be an awful lot of them if every single one from the beginning of the academy was still around somewhere, and yet we rarely saw them. Even the school seemed to have very few of them. Most of our training was handled by those who’d chosen not to go past the first three years of the Warden academy. Ori was almost as far along in her learning as they were, though they were older and probably had much more experience than she did.
My contemplations ended as I was dropped roughly back at the opening point of Rift, the giant hill-wall rising above me into the mist. I groaned but got to my feet and approached it to begin climbing again. There were others around, some climbing, some loading up stones. No one seemed to have noticed I’d just been dropped in without having run back, and no one called me out on not adding another stone to my pack. I hadn’t actually run the course, and I didn’t think I was ready to add even more weight. I could barely climb as I was.
It wasn’t long before my talk with Ghoul was in the back of my mind, far under the agony I was feeling and the knowledge that I couldn’t stop until it was done for the day. At some point we started to be plucked from wherever we were on the course and brought back to the beginning. Another day of Rift was done. It was time to be healed.
3.2
Time became a blur. There was never a moment to break really. Sleep was our only reprieve. We had meals and our time in bed, and between those moments we stole a few minutes to talk and maybe laugh together. Laughter was rare enough that it became like a drug, intoxicating, something you fought to enjoy in the moments that you could.
In some ways things became a bit easier with time. I learned that though the later year students didn’t necessarily like deadies, they didn’t go out of their way to give us trouble either, and after the first four weeks at the academy, the first year students didn’t really have time to focus any hate on us. They were as pressed as we were to do well.
One first year had developed a strong hate for me, however, and she was prone to going out of her way to make my life miserable. Her name was Kiiava and she was the red haired girl that I’d fallen on while climbing the wall in the Rift the first time. Apparently she held a long grudge. In martial training she had intentionally hit me with the sharp edge of a weapon on multiple occasions, once opening a wound wide enough that I had to be dragged to the healers in the middle of training, costing me several hours of work and putting me behind the others. Of course she’d been sent to the Rift for the rest of the day, which had only served to make her more angry.
After that she kept her tormenting to more subversive methods. One day my clothing delivery came without a breast binding which got me in trouble. Another day my clothes were removed from my locker while I showered and I had to go back to my room naked and without supper since I wasn’t going to go eat with no clothing to wear. She hid my axes once, though I’d been fortunate and that had been the day we’d been assigned to weapons more fitting for us. Very few people kept the weapons they’d chosen.
Trouble had been averted, but I still had to answer for not having weapons to turn in, and I pulled a week of Rift. It was a bad week. I was then even further behind the others when it came to weapons since I had only a single day with my new tools, as opposed to everyone else who’d had that first week of classes to practice.