by Daryl Banner
It was their moment at the riverbank all over again—the only damned moment from his childhood he seemed to remember anymore. It was the moment when he sealed the fate of Atlas forever. Take my hand.
Despite his body still shivering with anguish, he found that he was slowly beginning to feel nothing at all inside. Once again, he’d gone numb, as numb as an immortal who has seen everything.
Live every day like you have already lived forever …
“Take my hand,” she repeated.
His blurry vision moved to Charma. He saw the woman he could have had a human life with, the woman he could have had a beautiful baby boy or girl with, the woman who could have given him normalcy and love.
And the blood, still warm, that ran down her body from the fatal wound.
“Take my hand.”
He was no match for a Goddess. This, he knew. When he put his hand in Evanesce’s, it was not for love of her; it was a surrender to the chaos that had ruled his life since the day he was born. Innocent … He wondered if he would ever have control of what happened to him, of what joy or pain or peace he would ever be allowed.
Evanesce pulled him against her glowing, white-hot body. His skin remembered hers at once, and he bitterly resented feeling that only in the Goddess’s embrace was he truly at home. Safe. Safe in the arms of a jealous Goddess. Safe in the arms of a being who gave him everything only to take it all away.
Safe as a possession.
“Close your eyes.”
Aardgar opened them instead. “Please, Evanesce. I beg you. Let me die. Let me die a human’s death. Let me be with my grief, alone … and let me die.”
“No,” Evanesce answered simply. “Not until you have served your ultimate purpose.”
“I have no purpose.”
“The fate of Atlas rests in your hands.”
“Evanesce. Please, no more. Mercy.”
She gave him none. In her embrace, he was pulled to the floor—and then through it.
Down into the earth they went somehow, through dirt and stone. Down and down they went until the only light in Aardgar’s world came from Evanesce’s dark yellow eyes.
When they at last came to a stop, they were in a small circular cavern. The light radiating from her eyes gave the room its only shape. He felt like he was at the center of the planet where all his worst demons lived.
“I will come back for you,” she promised.
She had promised him that before. It took her decades to return the first time. The words scared him worse than the small cave she had put him in. “P-Please. Evanesce …”
“You’re safe here, safe from all your humanness.”
She pressed a palm to his chest. He felt one small pinch of discomfort before her hand at once passed through his flesh as if it was water. Aardgar screamed at the luminescent eyes of Evanesce as she pulled from his chest a keepsake.
His beating heart.
“Now you will truly never die,” she promised him, then pressed her lips against his, pushing him to the wall of the tiny cave in which she’d placed him, miles beneath the city, miles and miles and years and years from anything he knew and loved. “My human. My only Aardgar. My true King.”
Aardgar was still screaming.
Then the Goddess vanished in a swirl of golden smoke, taking with her every trace of light. Aardgar reached out feebly and fell to the floor, darkness engulfing him.
The Immortal
The pain was an illusion, he came to realize.
Aardgar felt nothing at all. It was just a hole in his chest where a heart used to beat and nothing more. Evanesce held his heart. And as long as she did, he would never die.
Immortal.
The cave that became his new home was small, his hands told him in the darkness, as he put his palms to the walls, to the ground, to the ceiling. No way in. No way out.
No way out, except in time.
Time was an illusion as well. He would never know when a day passed, or a week, or a month, or a year. Evanesce seemed to not have regarded his human needs; he was forced to be the immortal she wanted him to be whether he desired it or not. His human life, which he had fully accepted would soon end, had now been taken from him yet again.
Eternity. Darkness. Nothing. Is this what it is like to die?
Aardgar never dreamed before, not truly, but in the darkness of this cave, he learned how to. He found himself on the smooth, uneven ground, and his palms pressed to the stone. He reached for histories through the dirt, but there were few stories to be told down here. All of the stories had to come from his mind.
The life he lived was his first inspiration. He could see his father’s face—or at least what he pretended to be his father’s face, distorted in memory as it might be. He saw his mother. He imagined a life where power-hunting Goddess zealots did not storm his house. He imagined a life where he did not have a Legacy … a sorcery.
A life where he was not an Outlier.
He imagined meeting Charma in a different setting. Boy and girl on a riverbank, not boy and cruel, jealous Goddess. And the two of them grew up together, loved together, hurt together, and made mistakes together. And they made a small, kind family. Made a humble little house by the river. Grew children to adulthood and saw their children make children of their own. And then they died together.
Died.
Death. Of all the things to dream longingly of. It was a merciful, beautiful delight that Aardgar might never know. The mercy of dying a human’s death. The sweet luxury of it. Perhaps, even as violent as it was, the better fate was for Charma and his child to never know the burden of life.
He dreamed of yet more lives, more possibilities. Maybe he could have been a different Outlier who was not sought by Evanesce. Just a normal Outlier who lived and died, who never saw the birth of Atlas, who never knew the fate of the world beyond the sixty or seventy or eighty or ninety years he might have expected to live.
What sort of King was Aardgar? Was he a good King to his people? Did they love him?
It doesn’t matter now.
And what sort of King or Queen followed him? Did his council pick a name on the list? Or did the jealous Goddess, in her red anger, obliterate everything outside of this cave?
What if he’s the only human left on the planet now?
Without food, Aardgar was left to rot in the small cave beneath the world. His body would gradually wither away. There would be nothing left … unless the Goddess’s touch really did keep him hanging onto the brink of life. He would never know. No light could give him evidence for or against the horrifying image of what he was becoming.
Millions of lives raced past his sightless eyes. Millions of dreams. Millions more.
He wondered if he would forget who he even was. Time became something more of a memory, a thought or a funny joke to which he’d forgotten the line at the end—the part that made him laugh.
He thought he’d never laugh again.
Millions of dreams. Millions more.
Charma. Was that her name? He barely remembered.
Millions and millions.
Evanesce? A Goddess, or the name of his mother? Was it a sister? Maybe it was just another name he made up in his eternal boredom, trapped with his imagination, darkness, and literally nothing else.
Millions and millions of dreams, of lives, of things Aardgar believed and refused to believe.
Which was the lie? Which was the truth?
Aardgar’s mind had let go of the anger. His soul had let go of all pain. Even the emptiness in his chest was no longer a concern of his.
In one dream, he was a humble miner who only knew the black of coal under his fingernails and coating his face. In another dream, he had two brothers he actually knew—not ones who might as well have been lies created in his mind by a Goddess—and they were both married with four sweet children each. The thought made him giggle—having eight nieces and nephews. In yet another dream, he lived as a teacher of histories to a large arena of eagerly li
stening pupils of all ages, and found himself boasting of how the world once lived, then how the world fell, and then how Atlas rose from the ashes of a selfish, cruel planet.
Millions and millions of lives he lived in those dreams of his. Millions and millions of empty dreams …
What was his name again? He dreamed he had a million different names. Did he even have a name of his own?
A life of his own?
He felt free. Death would not come to him, but he could still know peace beyond the brim of his wild, flowing, otherworldly imagination—and the millions and millions of dreams.
In truth, he had seen more than any human in history had or ever will again. He knew that for a fact.
He was eternal.
He was a God.
Millions and millions …
Still, when the darkness became nothing to him and the memories left him alone and even the tingle of hurt faded that he still had for that woman whose name he can’t recall—and his child that grew in her belly—all that was left in its wake was a ringing, empty silence.
Hundreds of days had passed. Or a hundred weeks. Or a hundred months. Did it matter?
Millions …
And in that silence, he knew not even anger.
What he felt instead, to his surprise, was desire.
Yes, desire.
The only thing that remained when every other feeling, memory, and dream burned away was the desire he once felt when he would hold Evanesce in his arms.
Yes, even in some of his dreams, he was with her once again on that riverbank, and also in that quaint, lovely house they once shared, as well as at the very top of a tower that overlooked Sanctum. He could smell her sweet hair. He felt his fingers running down her long, slender arms.
Then he felt all her golden fury burn him white-hot all over again.
He felt his fury boil over.
Evanesce’s golden, beautiful, otherworldly eyes gazed at him with curiosity.
Screaming, he swung a great blade into Evanesce’s face.
Then it was all gone at once, and his world was nothing but the darkness again. Just a dream. No matter what he did to her, even in his dreams, the golden creature endured, unscathed, and looked down on him with a smirk.
And then all that was left was desire, even still.
Yes, even in his numb hatred, he still felt the tingling, eternal heat of love for her. How pathetic is that?
A million pathetic dreams …
In the very end, it seemed, he was content just being a toy to the Goddess. But not for long.
The Risen
The earth shook, groaned, then opened up around him.
Was this yet another dream? That was very possible.
Aardgar saw nothing, but he felt light upon his face. It must have been so miniscule, like the last lingering ember of a dying campfire, yet it felt like fire upon his skin.
Aardgar held up a hand to shield his aching eyes, even though he saw nothing. He croaked out a noise.
Nothing answered. Nothing stirred.
He rose from the ground for the first time in weeks. Or had it been months already? A year? He gave it no mind as he moved to the warmth of the invisible light that guided him. He knew every inch of this cave. He reached out and pressed a palm to the stone.
It had changed. A change …
Beneath his palm was a large fracture in the wall. It was large enough to fit his body. I know what is a dream and what is real, and this carries not the numbness of a million dreams. He knew it.
He pushed himself into the fracture of the wall. Beyond the initial opening, more caverns led the way up. He saw them with his palms since he could not with his eyes.
And with the touch of new stone that his hands and Legacy had not before felt, he absorbed new stories that the rocks dared to tell. Through the touch, he pieced together a city far above him. A sewer as large as a city. Buildings towering over him like stone giants at war with each other. Despite some of the images disturbing him, his Legacy was long starved, and he couldn’t stop them from assaulting his mind as he crept through passages in the unfamiliar stone. He crawled down some and climbed up others as he slowly envisioned smoke, nameless faces, and dirty streets above. So many little histories that made no sense to him. Far too many little pictures without the big one.
Then came a soft voice: “Aardgar?”
He didn’t recognize it. He grew still, listening in the dark as quietly as an insect in a mud hole.
It came again, but closer: “A-Aardgar?”
A young man’s voice. Or middle-aged, perhaps. Slightly rough, yet innocent as a boy’s. Who was he? Had he been sent by the Goddess to torment him?
Aardgar was too curious to care whether it was torment or salvation. He hadn’t heard a voice in ages.
“Uh … Aardgar? … Is … Is that how you pronounce it?”
The voice came from a passage above him, but his hands told him that there were three to choose from. From which of the three came the man’s voice?
Aardgar decided to respond. He parted his lips to speak—then realized he couldn’t. All that came out was a croak and a wheeze.
His voice had gone away with his sight.
“Is that you?” The voice grew more urgent. “Is that really you? Aardgar? K-King Aardgar?”
King? I’m still King? He tried to speak again.
“I … I am here to free you,” the voice promised, coming from one passage, or another, or yet another. “I … I … I thought you didn’t exist. I thought you were just—”
Aardgar tried calling out again toward one passage, then turned his blind eyes to another, and then the other. His hands gave him all the information his eyes could not. He hissed and wheezed through a broken throat.
His hisses must have carried, as the man responded to them urgently. “This way!” But his voice came from every way. “Atlas needs you! Now, more than ever. Oh, Three Sister has answered our prayers. Three Sister, thank you!”
Three Sister … Three Sister put me here, he would have said bitterly, were he able to speak.
“Follow my voice!”
Aardgar chose a passage at random and pulled his weakened, skeletal body through it. Crawling toward the voice of his mysterious aide, he moved and climbed and wriggled through tunnels that led up and up and up. He was amazed at how far away the voice must have traveled, bouncing through these endless holes and burrows. The farther he climbed, the more the warmth touched his face.
Was it his imagination that the darkness seemed to be filling with light?
Or is that fire?
And then his head emerged out of the ground, his ears filling with immense noise. He had broken free, though he still could see nothing. Blurs of colorless light flashed and moved past his blinded eyes, and his ears filled with the noise of running water. Was he by a river? But why was the floor made of stone?
Manmade stone. Brick. His hands told him he was touching brick … damp brick. And from his Legacy, he saw the sewer and the men and women who labored for decades building it. He saw clean water rushing to buildings, to pumps, to machines he could not identify. He saw the tunnels and pipes and smaller machines that drew the water to the tall and taller buildings up above. Had Atlas become an enormous machine powered by water?
“Are you really the King?” came the voice at his back.
Aardgar turned toward the words. He tried to speak again, but his voice still failed him. He parted his lips and let out a rough, wimpy croak.
“Goodness. You … You are not well.”
Aardgar pulled himself the rest of the way out of whatever hole he was in, then spilled upon the brick floor. The noise of water rushed around him. He feared if he moved too much, he would fall in—wherever the water was.
“I … I am … afraid to touch you, King,” the man admitted, sounding younger the more he spoke. “I’m afraid you might … break apart.”
Aardgar didn’t like the sound of that. He gave up on speaking and rose to his f
eet, but carefully and ever so slowly. When he was upright, his knees wobbled.
“You look like a skeleton. You look like …” The man’s voice shook. “Like death incarnate, my King. What they say is true. It must be true.”
The words frustrated Aardgar more than anything. He couldn’t see what his own body looked like—or anything at all. He reached out blindly, and his palm pressed against more smooth, slippery brick, a wall at his side. It was cold to the touch, but damp as well. The brick told him the story of a frightened young man who snuck down here for refuge and then was murdered by an even younger man for a bag of gold he carried that wasn’t his own. Savages and thieves, Aardgar thought to himself. Atlas is full of savages and thieves all over again. It is as it was before the Sisters ever showed up—murder and death at every turn.
“Oh. Oh, you are blind. I didn’t … I didn’t realize that you’d require such assistance. Please accept my apologies. I will guide you.”
Aardgar would rather the man not touch him, but he he had no choice; he needed the guidance. The man’s hands were reluctant when they came around Aardgar’s back, but carefully he guided Aardgar along the path, caring to walk slowly so that they did not trip. Aardgar’s bony feet shuffled annoyingly, the only sound that seemed to cut through the constant rush of water that filled his ears.
Steps caught his feet by surprise. His guide helped him along one at a time. Then all he seemed to know were steps. Upwards, curving, to the side, and then along a path where the noise of rushing water finally seemed to fade. Aardgar worried that their heads would collide with the stars, should they ascend any more damned stairs.
When they broke the surface, the stench of smoke and grease invaded Aardgar’s nostrils and filled him with disgust. The smoke seemed to hang in the air all around him. It clung to his tattered body like a set of greasy fingers as he moved with his guide, padding along the grimy, cracked-pavement steps with his bare feet. He kept looking upward, confused by the dark swirl of shapeless color before him. There are no stars, he realized at once, though he knew not where the information came from. A story that was being fed to him from whatever his hands or feet touched? Stories of a skyless sky above them? Was there even a sky anymore, or had the wrath of the Goddesses taken it down? There are no stars and there should be.