He didn’t expect an answer and didn’t get one. He looked down at his opponent’s skull. Flies were already flying in and out of the crack in the head like escaping dreams.
He turned to the high, black slit in the mountain, through which they had come. Warren, where are you? he wondered. A warm breath of wind answered him. He lowered his eyes on the majestic mole of Hanoi. Yes, he thought. He’s moving.
He shook his head and picked up one of the petrified forearms of the Disciple. “Well,” he said. “I hope your appetite hasn’t changed in the meanwhile.” He sat before the crab. Mumakil watched his vast face, his clenched jaws. Dagger, come out my friend. We all need you.
* * * * *
2. On the Shoulders of the Giant
“Don’t count on anyone in this world, Dag. For even your shadow leaves you when you’re in the dark.”
“I’m not alone in the dark, I’ve never been. My friends. They—”
“They went away. The all went away. Now there’s only me and you.” The voice was moving away. “Let it flow. You are here forever, just like us. You must just tear down the wall. You must just remember.”
“Is that you, Araya?” Dagger opened his eyes. The crystal statue of his most fragile memory emerged out of nowhere—a woman fleeing with a child in her arms, forever immortalized in her last step.
“Is that you, its true form?”
“It’s me. It’s always been me,” the sympathetic voice answered. “There’s a hole in my soul. It’s been killing me forever.”
The sun dawned at the end of the tunnel. Its light crossed the transparent body, radiating along the scars on her womb, her thighs and face. Dagger stretched out a hand, fearing to see her disappear as soon as he touched her. The surface was wet and cold. The woman was made of ice and was melting, taking away with her what was left of innocence after the useless struggle against the world.
“They’re my memories. Please, leave them to me…”
“What if they are the ones that prevent the full realization of yourself? Your real memories are completely different, but your eyes are too open to see. Now it’s just you and me in this dream of mirrors. Lost in a paradox, you’re not here.”
The statue became water, which infiltrated the sand under his feet making it darker. A sprout raised its green head, obstinate in the imminent darkness. Dagger knelt to caress it, the deepest mystery of Creation.
The unbreakable shadows around him came undone. The black tunnel collapsed. Ocher ruins appeared everywhere in the world dying around him.
A warm wind brought a voice, “Mortals forget. Only matter remembers, but this is what we all are—matter. We’re the paradox in the breast of Creation. We are not here.”
He realized there were other statues, hooded and solitary silhouettes with the sole company of the swords at their sides. Behind them stood basalt giants, their faces hidden by an inclement light. The dark and candid figures marched together toward the last boundary.
Dagger picked up a stone from the ground. It was shaped like a childish face, and a wrinkle furrowed his right cheek like a tear.
“Is that you or just a shadow that is dancing on the wall?” the voice asked again.
“Who are you?” Dagger walked among his memories with his petrified face in his hand. Even the new ice statues were melting everywhere around him, before he could put a name to them. Driven by hate and fear he wanted to see them all disappear, but soon he understood that the statues of his most beautiful memories were the only ones he could hurt, the only ones who wouldn’t oppose his need for self-destruction.
The voice fell from above once again, “Let your memories go one by one. Nothing remains of all the time spent together. You are a god. A god is alone.”
“I don’t remember.”
“You can’t remember.”
Ktisis wiped his eyes with a hand. He saw it dirty with blood. “Wash it away. Whoever you are, wash away the blood on my right hand.”
The voice merely answered, “Let them fall one by one, Konkra. You’re home, now, in the comforting darkness that has never judged you.”
Dag raised his eyes. “Who are you?” he asked again.
The wind brought him a crystalline scream, “Don’t look at me like that, Dag. Please don’t turn away from me.”
Dagger felt the stone pulsing in his hand, the heart of matter. “No!”
“You must not allow it,” the voice said. “You must not let your memories take control. Every being has one destiny and one alone, and that was never yours. They made a mistake when they created you, but now…now it’s time to come home.”
“I must get out of here. I must save Erin…and Kugar. Yes, Kugar, too. She didn’t know. She couldn’t know.”
“You don’t remember. You can’t remember. By dividing your soul into three they divided even your infinite memory.”
“Who are you?” Dagger snarled one last time.
“I am the one to show you the way. Salvation is in the fields. Everything has been already put into motion by someone who really cared for you.”
“Angra…”
Darkness cleared at that name and Dagger could watch the desert from above. The crab was waiting, embedded in the rocks—yellow arid mountains all around, and yellow gravelly plains up to their slopes.
A stunned man in shackles was marching across the desert. Two boys were holding the ends of his chains dragging him through the ruins toward Asa bay.
Those recollections were shaken by a powerful beat, the heart of memory. Now there were two frightened children bound hand and foot on the altar in front of the crab. They watched their father in tears as he approached with a knife in his hands.
The memory’s beat brought back the darkness, one black tongue spat out from the lips of the All and lying under his feet. He was walking on it since always. He sensed the true aspect of life at the end of the road.
“I’m not sorry about what I’ve done to you,” a voice in the wind said. “I’m not sorry, I never felt this good. All I wanted was to get to you and hurt you for a while.”
“Kug, is that you? Was it me on the altar, was it us?”
A voice laughed of him. “Kug?” It laughed louder. “Seeth. Erin. Mommy! Waa-waa!”
Dagger turned around. “They are my memories, leave them alone!” He closed his eyes and blindly threw the stone. Everything shattered in his scream—the high crystalline sculptures, the ruins and the tentacles snaking beneath his perception. The sky and the ground tore under his feet and he fell once again into the infinity.
In that vertical nothingness he was running breathlessly. He looked up. The shadows were chasing him. They had no face. They looked down in that sea of darkness, ran and wanted him, only him. He felt their famished, angry breathing on his neck. He drew his sword, but when he turned the shadows were gone.
He heard the cry of a newborn baby. Then another. The barking of a beast silenced them all.
“Can you hear it?”
A white wolf in the ruins was howling his name.
The light rose behind him this time, illuminating the distant silhouettes of two children with red eyes and…
“What is that?”
“THE COSMIC FUNERAL!”
“The true face of horror,” the voice calmly answered after having followed him there to his rescue. “You just don’t know. He doesn’t know that, too. RUN!”
Dagger turned around, but he was forced to shield his eyes. He took a step and stumbled.
“Run!” the voice said again. “Run and never stop anymore!”
Dagger sprang into the endless tunnel, and his shoulder touched one of the blades that darkness pointed against him. He used the bottom of his strength and ran as he had done since the day he was born, but soon he felt it was behind him.
He turned around. The Beast had Dagger’s own face and gave out a multicolored light. It was horrible.
Dagger looked straight forward. The tunnel had led to a rough land of black stone, divided
into dunes, waves and ruins as high as he had never seen.
Closely watched by the titan hiding in his own obscurity, Dagger slipped and fell, rolled and injured himself, but soon got up and ran toward the light. It came from a narrow slit at the end of a steep ascent, opened in the side of a ship stranded in the cosmic nothing.
The shadows were laughing at him, as they watched him scramble up. A stone struck his forehead, another hit his head, but he ran, ran. Ran.
The Beast had disappeared. Dagger could still hear his distant barking, yet the Beast had not followed him there.
“Where am I?”
“Pay attention now,” the voice said. “Slow it down. You’re chasing the true beast, straight into the mystery.”
Dagger followed the light inside the ship’s side.
In its hostile womb everything was black. He groped along the wooden guts, alone. To the touch of his hands emerged sharp-cornered, monstrous faces covered with notches like the roots of old oaks. They shouted their silent pain, fused with the wall of his deepest memory, from which it seemed they wanted to emerge.
“The horror. The horror,” he thought. “Are these my memories, or those of someone else?”
He walked on to find out.
“Dag!” called a voice from the darkness. “Bring your ass here if you’re back!”
“Not those!” the voice warned him. “Not those, Dag!”
Under his hands a deformed face moved his woody lips, “Do you remember it? Do you remember the darkness at the beginning at the world?”
“Yes,” the voice said. “This memory. Don’t let it get away. Grab it!”
Dag put his other hand too on the face. Its two halves were not symmetric, the lips moving in uncoordinated movements.
He heard two overlapping voices. One said, “Why did you leave?” The other, “I’m in hell. Save me.”
The being appeared and disappeared under his hands, a monstrous and multicolored face lit by a flash in the night. Dagger stepped back, but the floor was uneven. It went up and down, and soon he was wandering in the sepulcher of his childhood.
It was raining in the belly of the ship. Minute silhouettes appeared and disappeared in the storm, at the light of lightning lost under the surface of the waves.
“You think you’ve become someone just because you ran away from here?” a voice was obsessively repeating. “No one ever runs away from here,” another answered. “Come and dance with us in the deafening silence. We’re just the shadows in his memory. Don’t be afraid. Nothing is real.”
A roll of thunder. She stood white and candid on the edge of the cosmic nothingness.
“You couldn’t save her. You wouldn’t save her.”
Those were his memories, but they didn’t belong to him. They had a deeper and more elusive nature, but as soon as he tried to remove the debris that covered them, his human memories overlapped—except for when he saw the multicolored darkness.
Dagger stopped. “I’m tired of being crucified here!”
The voices were silent. In a flash, the polychromatic face of the beast appeared again. It was grinning, its infinite eyes fixed on him.
Dagger locked his hands into fists, and breathed. “Don’t lose your head. Don’t lose your head.” He avoided his remorse and guilt. He avoided every nostalgic or sick memory and walked on, for no one was ever allowed to do anything else.
He got to the wall at the end of the nightmare. At the touch of his hands he read something crudely carved in the wood, ‘The fall from grace. The story that had to be forgotten.’
Dagger pushed the wall, which came down as if made of sawdust. A darkened room opened beyond, with a table in the center and two kids sitting at opposite ends, playing cards. Their faces were illuminated by the warm reflection of a last candle.
Approaching, Dag saw it was Ash and Ianka.
“Why did you throw the prince of hearts away?” Ian protested. “It was the only card in the deck you had left to play.” He turned to Dagger. “Oh, all your love is gone, so sing a lonely song.”
Step by step, Dagger stretched out a hand toward his friend. He was sure Ianka would disappear as soon as he touched him, but when he actually touched him, Schizo let out a mighty fart.
“Ian!” Ash held his nose and waved his hand.
“Well, what did you expect?” Schizo said. “Death stinks in every possible way. Didn’t they already warn you?”
Dagger sat with them. “He’s coming,” he felt the need to tell them. “Boys, run! He’s coming.”
His two friends looked at him, then at each other.
“Do you want to tell him?”
“No, you tell him,” Ash answered.
Ianka looked at Dagger. “Well, red eyes. We’re dead, you know.”
“Yeah,” Ash confirmed, grabbing his hair and pulling up to detach his head from his neck. “It’s something that sooner or later happens to everyone in life. Or maybe after life. Well, you understand.”
“Come on, why must you scare him?” Ianka said.
“Am I scaring him?”
“Yes! You are scaring him!”
The white blood put his head back in place. He adjusted it on the irregularities of his neck and smiled. “Come on, Dag. Have a drink with your old friends.” He poured a glass of draug. “It must be a long time since you last drank with your friends, poor creature. Pardon me if I don’t join you. Have you ever seen a waterfall gushing from someone’s throat? It doesn’t turn into an underground river, it just looks like you pissed on your chest. I’ve never seen a wound get infected that way.”
Dagger saw a Spider crucified to the wall, his cut-off genitals driven in his mouth.
He closed his eyes and opened them again, trying to regain control over his vision, that path opened with difficulty toward his deepest memory. It was as fragile as a dream, and he must not let it disappear. “Where am I?”
“In the damn crab, and you’re having the hell of a journey,” Schizo said. “So far you have never been before. We’re only projections, the face I decided to wear to make you listen. You were not listening. You’re not listening even now, damn you!”
Dag stopped looking around and turned to Ianka. But Ianka was no more. He turned to Ash, but found Olem’s sarcastic grin in his stead.
Dagger jumped up and dropped the chair to the basalt floor.
“I could take this aspect,” the Sword Dracon said. “But you would whine like a child and wouldn’t listen.”
“That’s not true!” Dag clenched his fists.
“Nobody should play with your feelings,” Ash continued. Dag hadn’t seen his face changing. “And you shouldn’t allow it.”
“I’ve already heard these words.”
“Of course you have. You’re inside me, and I’m infiltrating your memory as I did with… well, with half the world. Ktisis, my boy. You’ve seen a lot of interesting things and sometimes you didn’t even realize that.”
“Oh. Seriously?” Dag turned around and took a few steps. “If you don’t tell me something new, I may as well go.”
“But you don’t know where.”
“Don’t bother me with details!”
“So what about if you tell me something that I don’t know. What is it like to die? How does it feel?”
Dagger stopped and looked at the black floor. Only now did he notice the thin, white veins that composed grotesque faces of men and Tankars. “It’s like coming into the world. Just the other way around,” he said. “Dying sucks, that’s what they all would tell you, if they could. Yet I have a vague impression that nobody remembers the day he was born, and no one will remember the one he will die.” When he turned again, Araya was watching him. “Cool. Now I’m really about to cry.”
“Suffering creates monsters, my boy. I believe this is the way things turned out, in the end. And no. I’m not talking about the life of your finite memories.”
“Everything creates monsters in this world.”
“Of course it does. Monstr
osity is a peculiar aspect of humanity which faces death every day and—”
“And blah blah and blah again!”
“You humans are an error in the matter. Accept it. Matter shouldn’t think stuff,” the voice continued, indifferent. “You are the futile attempt of the universe to understand itself, but the universe is everything but harmonious. Good feelings can’t stop an exploding star, let alone the superior forces.”
“Yeah, I saw it out there.”
“That was the greatest thing you could experiment with and not go mad. Some have seen worse, in here. Some have experienced the Cosmic Funeral, but you’re a god, and you can’t.”
Dagger watched Araya’s face in silence. “Who are you really? Where are you from?”
“Behind these two useless questions, there’s a bigger one. One you didn’t dare to ask, hounded by your fears even inside here. Ask it.”
Dagger dug in his memory. Then he understood. “Why are you here?”
Araya nodded, pleased. “I’m looking for someone, of course.”
“Who?”
The messhuggah grinned, and that was his answer.
Dagger smiled bitterly. “Now you really look like the lizard. By the way, do you know what happened to him? His silence is becoming frightening.”
“This is something you don’t want to know. Don’t rush upstream. Enjoy the peace, because it won’t last forever.”
‘Windbag,’ Dag thought. “You should take the form of Warren.”
“Neither words, nor actions…memories reveal the true nature of someone, the reason for his every action.”
“What are you trying to tell me?” Dagger asked.
“You’ll find out when you’ll decide to follow the beast inside you straight to the mystery. This brief respite won’t last long. We’re in the midst of the calm chaos, and I saw it on the riverbanks. The father of the Dawn is on the way.”
“And those figures that—”
“All those who have been inside me over the years have left a piece of themselves. The one I took. This is a dream of mirrors where everything is reflected in everything. Memories, fears, shadows. They carry something of me inside them, too, and some don’t even know.” He stood up. His body was completely skinned, from the white rim of his neck to his ankles.
Dagger 4 - The Tankar Dawn: A Dark Fantasy Adventure Page 8