by Nikki Kelly
Beyond the bird, a pure white Arabian mare came into view. She was rubbing her mane against a tree trunk. As she turned and trotted away, the glow of her horn gleamed, and I realized she wasn’t a horse at all, she was a unicorn.
Entranced by the creatures in the forest, I barely noticed that I was standing still. I’d reached the end of the woodland and was next to a river. Looking left to right, it ran all the way across, and on the other side, the mist returned, only it was now tinged blue. As I’d seen from atop the halo, the white inner circle had come to an end; I was at the junction where it spiraled into the first color.
The sapphire blue mist fogged at the riverbed, and even from here, the streaks of light against the color were obvious. The rifts opened like hairline cracks, and as they did, an almost operatic single note sounded.
Every minute here was far longer on Earth, which only gave Zherneboh more of an opportunity to put his plan B into effect. Quickly, I worked out a way to cross. I bent down, dipped my fingers into the clear water, and closed my eyes, willing my own body temperature to drop. I shuddered at the bitter sting of my blood running cold. I willed the freeze to leave my body, to transfer to the crystal-clear liquid, and the water began to freeze. Bit by bit, steam rose from the top of the river as it turned to dry ice. I whipped out my hands and clutched them together at my chest as I restored my body heat.
I sprang, one foot after the other, across the ice and pushed through the blue cloud. Once again my eyesight took a moment to adjust, and the mist dispersed around me. When it cleared, I found myself face-to-face with an Angel Descendant. Tall, blond, and blue-eyed, he had features similar to Gabriel’s, but he wasn’t nearly as beautiful as my Angel.
He stood on top of what appeared to be broken branches; in fact, the entire landscape appeared to be barren. It wasn’t snowing here. I didn’t understand the shift in weather, in setting, in the feeling this side of the river gave me.
The back of the Angel’s neck was glowing, his crystal reacting to the fissure forming in the air, and as the Angel Descendant extended his hand toward me, his lips shaped a word that never reached me as he was pulled through the rift to Earth.
A hand clamped down on my shoulder, and I knew without looking whom it belonged to. “Orifiel,” I said.
He didn’t reply. As I turned, he stood back, staring at me in what I assumed to be a quiet, murderous contemplation. His expression was blank but his huge feathered wings rose up and out, stretching in a display of reckoning.
He exuded power.
“Come,” he said, gesturing for me to follow him back the way I had traveled.
I willed my darkness, and in a display of my own, black smoke plumed in my palms. Orifiel nodded, acknowledging my authority. I shook the darkness away, and hastening for time, I joined him at a safe distance by his side. He waited until we were back in the thick of the forest before he spoke. “I’ve been expecting you, Lailah,” he said. “Are we what you were expecting?” He brought his hand through the air as though he were presenting me with the beauty of the world and its inhabitants.
“You know why I’m here?” I said, answering his question with a question.
He did the same. “Tell me, what do you see?”
I shook my head, and as I did, a cross between a mink and a rabbit brushed my leg as it went by. Glancing down to my feet, the pathway was glowing blue as I traveled over it. “I don’t understand what you mean.”
“It’s a well-kept secret and it’s one I cannot ordinarily ask, but given your intent, I see no harm asking it of you.” He spoke as though he was bringing me into a circle of trust, and he strode on as though he had no fear of me, of what I was here to do. When I didn’t reply, he tried again. “You arrived through the gateway, you looked down upon my world from the observation deck, you saw the rainbow of color in my clouds?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Then you know that here, at the center of my rainbow, the light is most concentrated. The frequency of the crystal’s light is such that what you see here is simply the manifestations created from your own mind.” He paused. “It’s therefore different for every being. What you are seeing now is being projected from your subconscious. It’s what you expected to see.”
I took a breath, and my lungs filled with a crisp citrus aroma. Still, I didn’t answer his question. Instead, I kept my eye on him, only letting my focus slip ever so slightly as I listened for movement as we neared the clearing.
Another minklike animal scuttled past us, and Orifiel stopped briefly, allowing it to go by. “Every creature, every Angel, each and every one of Styclar-Plena’s inhabitants, however, are very much real.”
“You’re telling me that my subconscious created a snow-filled forest?” I answered him now. Was this the “design” Malachi had told me to see past? “But not the snow leopard, not the unicorn? They are not manifestations?” There was a very large part of me that didn’t want the confirmation—hearing it spoken aloud would only make what I had to do that much harder—but now I questioned what I was seeing.
“Coming from a life spent on Earth, do you really think you could even begin to imagine such wondrous creatures? Lives such as these?” he said, his tone nearing contempt. Then his voice lightened as he said, “A forest of snow, that’s—”
“Ordinary. No, it isn’t.” I cast my mind back to Monts d’Olmes, the mountain in Neylis where the snow had made the nighttime indistinguishable. In that spot it had been neither dark nor light. It was as though my soul had been turned inside out and used to paint the setting. And it had been where I had once again died. I wasn’t surprised that a snow-filled forest had been painted from my subconscious. A combination of the past and the present, both becoming backdrops to my death.
I noticed as we continued on that the frost that had coated the branches of the trees was evaporating. It was as though Orifiel’s telling me this place was not real made it so as it all just melted away.
“You understand, I don’t want to kill this world,” I said. “But your choices have led to my having no choice. Your actions have resulted in the loss of so much life on Earth.…” I paused and then repeated myself. “You know why I am here?” I whispered, stepping out of the forest. This time my question was a rhetorical one.
Ahead, clusters of beautiful creatures sat waiting. There were hundreds of them, beautiful and brilliant, and every one of them had eyes of sapphire blue. I remembered what Gabriel had told me once. That the light souls of mortals when brought here fueled the crystal and the crystal churned out that same light, using it to create the world and the creatures that inhabited it. The souls of these beings had once been human. In the eyes of a snow leopard cub, a young girl stared out. When I blinked, the image was gone, but I knew what I had seen. These beings were human souls reincarnated, brought to a higher dimension. What would become of them when I spread the darkness?
From behind the steels, Angels came forward, standing side by side with the creatures. They were smaller than Orifiel and had no wings. They were Descendants and something about them felt new. Their skin was paler than Gabriel’s or mine; their eyes were wide and startled—it was as though they’d just been born.
I thought then that Orifiel had set this up, trying to appeal to my “light” side. Making me face the lives I was about to bring to an end. I hadn’t realized that despite my thinking that I was standing at a safe distance from him, he had me exactly where he wanted me.
I peered up, and even with the loss of sight in my left eye, I could tell the Arch Angels had taken a seat at their thrones. But the more I focused, the more something didn’t sit right. The galaxies swirling overhead were real. I could feel it as strongly as I could feel my own heartbeat resounding inside my chest. But every so often, it was as though I was missing a little piece of the image.
“You asked me a question before,” Orifiel said easily as I continued to search, seeking the reason for the sensory disturbance.
After scanning the horizon in
every direction, I focused above me once more. This time, the gleam of light reflecting off glass for the smallest second was all I needed to uncover what was disguised.
We were in a dome.
The darkness that had once fallen, a darkness that was identical to the makeup of the third dimension, surrounded the land outside.
My gaze fell, and as it did, the white light bounced. Malachi had said you could conceal just about anything with light, if you knew how. As the setting became static once more, finally the crystal was revealed.
The steels were not just rising and holding up the weight of the halo-shaped observation deck; in between the twisting rods, the crystal sat huge and awesome. Its opulent glow filled me, and right then it was all I knew.
Somehow, it was as though it were speaking to me, but the message warbled and warped. And underneath the preprogrammed story that Gabriel and the rest had once heard, I uncovered the truth.
A series of images flashed through my mind, and I understood everything. How, after the day the darkness fell, this world that was once home to billions had begun to wilt and die. How the light souls Orifiel had brought across the planes had forced the glow to shine again, but it was weak, stretching no more than a hundred miles. That Orifiel had charged Malachi with the construction of the dome around the circumference of the light, trapping inside what remained of this dying world and keeping a line of separation between the light and the dark.
I understood that this was a small island now, and that the inhabitants didn’t realize that beyond the ocean there was nothing more—that this was where their world ended.
A profound question came to me then. How do you see light against light?
And with it the purpose of the rainbow cloud was clear. The rifts needed a backdrop of color on which to be distinguished, and so the layers of the rainbow were ground zero for the Angel Descendants at work.
All of this to keep the ten-mile circumference of the purest white light, a place for rebirth, a place for dreams and imagination to be realized, and for the Arch Angels to continue to be able to sit on their thrones and gaze at the spectacle of the stars.
And maybe, just maybe, despite myself, feeling the sheer wonder of this world, I might have considered the possibility that it was worth it. Maybe.
But then, I heard it.
The cry.
The same cry that had begun to pass from Zherneboh to me but had been cut short.
One single, terrible note, and my eyes filled with tears.
I couldn’t speak.
At the base of the crystal, the Angels and the creatures stared at me, unable to hear what I could. The cry dipped and wobbled, like a radio stuttering between an AM and an FM frequency. The inhabitants of this place were tuned into the lie—into the frequency set by Malachi.
But I knew the truth.
The reason Orifiel had disposed of his brother, sending him to the third.
The reason he had Malachi engineer the sound waves and then sent him to the second.
The reason I was going to end the first.
The crystal was alive.
“Your question,” Orifiel said for a final time.
The cry was still ricocheting around my head. The crystal was dying, but the light energy reaching it forced it to continue to breathe. And every breath was agonizing.
Unbeknownst to me, behind my back, the doorway to the in-between had opened. As Orifiel leaned into my ear, he answered me by returning the message I had once delivered to him. “No mercy.”
TWENTY-FOUR
I ARRIVED IN THE IN-BETWEEN, a place Gabriel had once described as a prison. As I adjusted to yet another strange place, the crystal’s cry reverberated through every inch of my being. I would carry the burden of that sound until I could do what I was now certain I must: kill the crystal and let the darkness spread over what remained of Styclar-Plena.
In my new surroundings, everywhere I looked my image reflected back. I expected to find the door Orifiel had pushed me through, I expected him to be watching from the other side of prison bars, but there was only my face.
A bulb of light flickered in the distance, and that one glimmer gave birth to hundreds and thousands more. Reflecting all around, they twisted ahead as though I were in a kaleidoscope.
With caution, I concentrated on my palm, and laces of light twisted around my fingers. The brightness shone and bounced through the tunnel, creating a nebula of strobes.
This was a prison, but it was one made entirely of mirrors.
Breaking out would be easy enough and then I would be right back beside the crystal. Why would Orifiel think this alone could contain someone like me?
I stomped my foot, and the mirror beneath me cracked. The fissures splintered, growing thinner as they raced forward.
Again and again I beat down my heel until the slits angled vertically and, finally, met with a wall.
I willed myself beside the almighty crack edging up the tall, seamless mirror. Pressing my fingers to my reflection, I pushed down. The first mirror blowing out caused the rest to fall like dominos. The ceiling followed, caving in and raining down shards containing my image, illuminated by the light show.
The last plane of glass crashed against my shoulder.
But there was no Orifiel.
There was no crystal.
I wasn’t where I had been.
Instead, I was surrounded by green pastures that met a cloudless blue sky. For a second, I thought somehow I was back on Earth. But the two glowing orange suns told me different. The mirrored box had flattened and the shards had turned to green blades of grass in what resembled an English countryside. I inhaled clean, fresh air, and concentrating intently, I listened for signs of life. There was nothing.
My mind raced, trying to solve the puzzle as to where I was. No doubt Orifiel would have had Malachi design the in-between. But if this was a prison, where was the cell door? Perhaps Malachi had hidden the building by cloaking it the same way he had the crystal—by manipulating light? Maybe the mirrored box and now these fields were a manifestation created from the depths of my subconscious, the same as the forest had been?
As I struggled to find another explanation, I tried to see through the design. I wondered if the knowledge that this setting wasn’t real would cause it to disintegrate the way the forest had.
Nothing changed.
Eventually it was the sky that convinced me that my theory was wrong. The universe was not on show here; this environment was far closer in its nature to Earth than to Styclar-Plena, which meant I was somewhere else.
But if I wasn’t in the first dimension, then where was I?
An image of the snow leopard cubs flashed through my mind, and my chest tightened. I was planning to commit genocide against an entire world. And just like the day I had killed Jonah’s Pureblood Master, Emery, once again I had appointed myself judge, jury, and executioner. Malachi had told me that the inhabitants of Styclar-Plena were innocent, but it would be their lives that would pay for Orifiel’s decision-making, for what I perceived as being his wrongdoing.
Malachi had said that what became of the Angel Descendants and the creatures was my decision, but it didn’t feel as if I had any choice. There was no way I could end Styclar-Plena but still save its inhabitants. If I led them through the gateway to Earth, Zherneboh and his armies on the other side would slaughter them all.
My heart was heavy.
Ruadhan would have known what to do.
“I wish you were here,” I said aloud, knowing that he was suspended from the game of life, waiting to be stitched back into the universe. I thought of Iona then, how she’d said she sometimes sang to bridge the gap between her and those she had loved most and lost. To connect with me, Ruadhan had often told me stories to help me understand the meaning in his message. But he no longer had a voice to tell me a tale.
My gaze fell back to the ground, and then the heavens opened. Despite the absence of cloud, I was caught in a downpour. As the wet dr
ops soaked my skin, in the distance a double rainbow appeared.
The colors became bold stripes, and I once again recalled the Pairs of Angel Descendants holding hands and the eyes of the creatures I’d just seen in front of the crystal.
The rainbow and the image of Styclar-Plena’s inhabitants sparked another memory. As I tried to place it, in my subconscious, my inner voice was humming.
“The animals went two by two.”
I couldn’t help but smile at the memory of Iris’s little voice squeaking “the Ankeroo.”
The cover of Iris’s favorite picture book, a gift from Ruadhan, flashed into thought, along with the title, Noah’s Ark. And then I remembered the last line of the book: “The rainbow will remind you.”
Ruadhan was still very much with me. The rainbow was his sign, reminding me of the message hidden within the story.
I spun around and spread my gray soul in the form of smoke.
Rushing over the land, through the haze, the white-silver flicker of a gateway appeared. Then came another, opposite it, that dribbled with black ink.
I was reminded of Gabriel’s retelling of the day Orifiel had saved Styclar-Plena, the day the darkness came forward. The gateway to the second had become visible only against the black. And in the third, the dark gateway had been made visible only against the bright autumn arc of the aurora.
But whether a light or dark gateway, my gray gave them both a canvas upon which to be seen.
I recalled Darwin piling his coins on the bar top as he’d demonstrated how he believed the dimensions stacked one on top of the other.
The second dimension had access to both the first and the third dimensions.
And the first and the third dimensions had access to here—a fourth dimension.
The first and third were parallel to one another; the only difference between them was that the first dimension had become home to a crystal, a living being that had fallen out of the sky and created life with its light. Before that, the first had been a void, the same as the third. And the second dimension, Earth, had a sun, water, and breathable air; it was this world’s parallel.