In Eden's Shadow

by Amanda Churi

  She gasped as she frantically hit the stone with her knees, her body finally releasing its built-up terror as a torrent of pain and sickness uppercut her stomach. The strength of her transparency lessened to keep her from falling through the stone beneath her, but in doing so, she could feel the rock closing in on her, putting a commendable amount of pressure on her shaky bones and strained organs.

  She could hardly breathe, closing her eyes and brushing away her salty hair with her knuckles. Every muscle had practically liquefied, but she could not stop. Don’t… she urged herself, swaying when she stood up. Focus was tested to its limit; she had to concentrate her existence at her feet and almost let herself go at the head, treading upward through the solid stone while relying on her blades to keep her held up.

  It had been a long time since she had gone all out with her powers, but even her most recent display was nowhere close to her limit… Yet she was rusty and simply not on par. Her head was fuzzy, her ears ringing as she neared the surface, all while she felt bursts of ice and wisps of poison crippling her side.

  “Bastard…” she grumbled. “Your powers are still inferior to me, but you’re making up for it in cockiness. To think that you really expect me to fall for such lies… You’re kidding yourself.”

  Her light head merged with the heavy atmosphere of the wretched world. She inhaled a large mass of polluted air, grateful for the oxygen, no matter how tainted. On the grounds of the slums, no one was out; the crumbling houses of Players and Bots alike were patched with clumps of trash, keeping out however much light they could as they succumbed to the house arrest that Pinion’s army had brought upon them.

  She remained a phantom, mindlessly walking through the barricaded door of an unknown home. In the grime that made up their miserable lives, a family huddled—a male and female in their mid-twenties, clutching a bundle of cloth that only exposed the soft tip of a young nose.

  Pinion watched blankly while passing through, eyeing up the newborn as he subconsciously suckled the filthy shawl that protected him from the cold. Pinion’s knees were practically swinging on hinges, taking her up a set of crumbling stairs, but her eyes never lifted from the baby. Dumbasses… Do you know what will come to that child? A naturally born Player? How has he even lived to the age of a week? Volatile… Weak… Stupid…

  “…Humans…” she hatefully finished aloud. The eyes of the parents immediately opened and shot around, frantically trying to find the person who had spoken, but Pinion was already on her way, ascending floor after floor of petrified Players.

  The roof was her destination—a tall stack of semi-collapsed rock that overlooked the scum of Aphrite. Poison masked the air and gave the polluted city a personal, sickly overcast that rested just below the thick barrier of endless charcoal clouds. It was hardly day, night giving its last goodbyes, but Pinion didn’t need to see. She only reached out with her mind, a swarm of thoughts pooling into her brain from good and evil alike. She shuffled through them like cards, trying to distinguish the suppressed from the active war participants, using their internal words as waypoints to guide her.

  Her broken wings expanded in her hands, and acting on a whim, she took a running leap. Feet left the ground, and she ran on air, staring down at the close alleyways separating the slabs of cold rock. Only minutes had passed since her escape, and already, Elites and Haxors were flooding the streets, desperately searching for the mastermind behind the problematic revolution.

  With the buildings her stepping stones and her scarred wings carrying her, Pinion headed toward the thoughts that seemed different, desperately searching for the mind that she could connect with better than the rest.

  She thought of Cecil and the link that he had formed with her as a young girl, able to find her wherever she was. She remembered Kevin telling her in their parting moments that they would always be together, allowing her even now to glance through Time’s chest and see her father in his past life.

  And she pictured the only other person that she had ever formed such a connection with, hoping that their heart still beat and that its echo would be carried to her over the mounds of despair that built the world.

  ***

  “…What is it? What’s slowing you down?”

  Seek hardly even realized that she was holding them up, some piece of her brain struggling to properly function. Her feet were shuffling through the accumulated leaves and twigs, tense and uncertain as she tried to follow the small band of Encryptors before her, but air, magic, something held her back.

  Conflicted, she looked up at her allies who had paused their journey into the deepest recesses of the slumbering forest. Griffin and Virgil looked genuinely concerned, and Vasili was a bit irritated by the holdup, but neither Flye nor Sybil directly faced her. Both hadn’t since Kaitlyn’s disposal not even a day ago.

  Seek did not answer, not sure how to explain such a feeling. “Uh…” She innocently grasped her tiny hands, holding them in the crook of her spine and pressing down forcefully, commanding her anxious souls to stay beneath the skin. “Sorry, it’s nothing. Let’s keep going.”

  “Good,” Vasili huffed. “I don’t trust my clan’s judgment without the presence of a leader. The faster I get you out of my ears, the better.”

  “Hey, that’s no way to be,” Virgil input, waving his flask through the air. “We’ll keep you guys full and happy as long as you help us.”

  “…By what…?” Griffin whispered, the strength of his voice comparable to a cobweb. “Sacrificing more Encryptors…?”

  Virgil smacked his head. “Shut up. You’re just a novice; you don’t understand. See, when I was a youngster…”

  Seek stopped listening, watching the group gradually put down more distance. Instinctively, she found herself glancing back at the path she came from. Her heart was slow and heavy, almost shaking the ground beneath her and rooting her to the soppy battlegrounds. This sensation… This cold, decrepit feeling… She wanted to think something good of it, but that was impossible. Although some serenity and purity were present, that little bit was heavily overridden by something much, much more sinister. Something that disturbed Seek to the bone.

  “Nothing…” she reluctantly told herself, turning away from the source of distress and continuing through the hanging, all-seeing branches of her enemies. “It’s nothing.”

  Eight

  Deviant

  “You know, I should kick His ass an infinite number of times for destroying all of the Earth-bound portals,” I muttered, clawing at the next rock within reach. The sharp nails on both my hands and feet took to each slab as though it was sponge, lodging me comfortably against the wall without fear of slipping. Coruscus was draped around my neck with the current occupancy of my hands, trusting that its current position would keep it safe.

  Korbu grunted as he came crawling up the mountain-face beside me, leveraging himself with his sharp bones and slick katana. “How about infinity plus one?” he suggested with a winded grunt.

  “Yeah… I wonder if we’re the first demons to ever cross worlds like this.”

  “We’re definitely among the few,” Korbu strained, plucking his katana out of the rock and sinking it back in a short distance farther up. “Getting a souvenir mug from Earth is not worth the risk; it’s better to just stay in Hell. Besides, if the Proxez decided to descend while you were on a climb, you would be screwed.”

  “WILL YOU TWO PLEASE SLOW DOWN?!”

  I sighed irritably, looking over my shoulder and down at where we had come from. Blackness was nearly all that any eye could find, no matter how powerful; it was a part of the air itself, overlapping the red force field held up by Satan an unfathomable distance down. A fall from such an elevation would not only be fatal because of the distance… This darkness was potent. Deadly. Entrusting yourself to the abyss would be your end; the forces within were so violent and unpredictable that a body would submit to the title of paper, able to be twisted, turned, wrung, and split—all unmercifully. Such distortio
n was not something our immortality could fend off; it was a span that should not have existed under normal circumstances.

  But Earth and Hell were not supposed to be joined at the hip either. In this area of chaos, such perversion was thick and lengthy, spanning miles upon miles to form the bridge between the now overlapping worlds. Undisclosed, unknown matter floated through the tremoring molecules that created the strange, forced connection. Entities slunk by our faces, having such absurd compositions that even if one knew every word from every language, they would have still struggled to build a definition.

  Put together the unpredictability of approaching objects and sheer fall danger, you would have thought that Korbu would have taken up my idea of tying the three of us together for safety measures.

  …How unfortunate that he could clearly picture the likely scenario of me purposely cutting the rope to dispose of them both. Sigh…

  As I continued reflecting on the bottomless pool, toward the limits of my vision and nearly smothered by the surrealism, I found the panicked face of Maeve.

  A frown crushed mine and Korbu’s face at the same time. “You’re such a drag,” I ridiculed. “Keep up or stay there! Korbu has to be lugging several tons in his gut, and you don’t see him fussing!”

  Korbu peered down at his closed ribcage, poking a single bone. “No, but I do wonder if this is the burden menstruating females carry.”

  “H-hey! That’s not fair!” Maeve piped, struggling to hurl herself higher. “You guys are immortal beasts! I’m still half-a-human, you know! My muscles get tired!”

  I looked back at Korbu. “So, wait, what do I call her? Maeve or Mabel? I’m still unsure.”

  “Don’t know. She said ‘Mabel.’”

  “IT IS MABEL, GODDAMMIT!”

  “…Must be,” I chuckled darkly. “A holy figure would never use God’s name in vain.”

  Korbu’s eyes darkened with annoyance. “Why don’t you just satisfy her a tad and call her what she wants?”

  “Naw. How about Mabeve?”

  Our forced companion glowered as she advanced a foot more. “Are you serious…? Why do you guys have to be so cruel?”

  “I think you forget who you’re traveling with,” Korbu said quietly. Refusing to provide her with a cure for her identity crisis, he sunk his slick weapon into a piece of fresh, virgin rock, continuing his ascent.

  I followed contently, amused when “Mabeve” screamed out of pure frustration. As hilarious as the nickname was, in the end, I knew calling her Maeve would continue to give my twisted sense of humor the best run for its money.

  …But Mabel… A part of me knew it to be true. That wasn’t Maeve; that was her Receiver, just as she said.

  “Pleeeaaassseee, I’m exhausted! Can’t we stop, even if it’s just for a few minutes…?”

  I snorted loudly, whipping my disgusted face back toward her. “What makes you think asking the same thing one minute later would make a difference, you stupid mage?! We have—!”

  And I stopped—involuntarily.

  My rough persona smoothed down—just for a second—but it did, and I just looked at her. Her long brown hair suddenly gave off hues of a bleached blonde, a frame of the Maeve that I had known forever ago taking her place. Her lush, hearty crimson eyes diluted to a bright amber, and my heart palpitated in wild, unpredictable strides as mysterious pieces of matter encircled her waist. Even wearing the suit of mismatched, chained silver plates that I had quickly scrapped together, ones so loose and flat that cardboard would have been more fitting—

  …She looked… Beautiful.

  “Eero?”

  Korbu’s voice yanked me out of the stupid hormone trap I somehow fell into. His purple eyes were flickering with a curious power, trying to read me. “Hello, Hell to Eero. You there?”

  “Shut up,” I snarled, powering onward. I refused to look at either of them, more disgusted with each passing act of internal weakness. I scaled the mountain with such haste that I almost slipped several times, giving my appendages little to no time to anchor me to my lifeline. I was an engine, powered by nothing but self-directed incompetence with infuriated bursts of smoke shooting out of my nostrils.

  The rock turned to putty; that was how easy it was for me to grasp and release my waypoints as I bound up the barrier between Earth and Hell like a cat. My anger, my fury, my rage—every goddamn synonym in the universe that reflected my flustered being ran me farther and farther without a moment’s pause until I left both dead weights in the smog.

  When they were out of earshot, I couldn’t help myself any longer. I released my built-up roar, pushing myself higher in harder, more desperate springs. “STOP SCREWING WITH ME, EERO! You are not my master! Satan is not my master! Those insignificant fledglings are not my masters! You are my servant, so do what you’re supposed to and bow down!”

  My claws snagged the tip of an overhanging ledge. I leaped onto the perch feet-first, spinning around until I was set face-to-face with the distorted horizon.

  My actual past and “Eero’s,” that bastard… They were swirling and wreaking havoc inside of me. I had no clear concept of time or the events that had taken place for what had to have been, easily, a millennium, if not much, much longer. Not only was my core in trouble, surrounded by confusion and thirsty fledglings, but so was my body, my mind… My very afterlife was struggling to continue existing. I was fighting a war against what humans would have called a personality disorder, constantly switching from my confident-self to this weakling of a child.

  Mentally drained, my legs flew out in front of me, and I hit the rock flat on my ass. This was stupid… These feelings were utterly pathetic, but there they were, blockading my path to conquest.

  My fingers fiddled at my neck, tousling the wire-like tail of Coruscus. Oh, how nice it would be if the damn thing just cut through my windpipe. If it yanked me off the ledge and threw me into the abyss—

  “NO, STOP IT! STOP, STOP, STOP! YOU’RE BETTER THAN THAT! YOU’RE NOT A HUMAN! YOU’RE A DEMON!” I purposely tested the limits of my balance, the upper half of my body held up by the ghastly hands of desolate space. “You are Eero! Persecutor of Hell! All-powerful, surviving Essence! The only surviving Essence! The—!”

  My fingers slowly relaxed at my neck, falling away from my limp tail. “…The only one…” I repeated breathlessly, hardly realizing the truth in my words. “The only Essence…”

  Entranced, I leaned back toward safety and raised a single fist before my face, flexing my knuckles and absentmindedly watching the tendons shift. My hand’s hardened surface seemed so familiar yet foreign; the rough texture belonged there, but the more I twisted and turned it, watching the layers crease and pull, the more I imagined bones of a small frame and soft, nurtured palms—ones that had never known hard labor, but love and comfort instead.

  I was proud of who I was… Even as I crumbled among the dust and stone, but I was prouder of who I was before.

  Because in Heaven, I was adored by all my family; I could see the entire world and those worlds before this, smiling from the realms of the unknown. I could open gates and let creatures into eternal salvation; if they were scared, I would cross those majestic bridges hand in hand with them; I would carry forming stars on pedestals and give them to Him, watching Him arrange them in the sky and bless the archangels that were to be born from them.

  I closed my fist, crunching bone. And Satan, He took it all away with His propaganda speeches, His charming manipulation and tempting promises. And what did I get? Rivalry, servitude, enemies, pain… It existed for so long that it became the norm, and those scarce memories that not only I, but all of His idiotic followers, kept tight hold of, He stripped away—

  Beat it out of us. Destroyed sympathizers that we had been created next to. Covered up any and all pleasant memories with filth and grime to assure us that we were missing nothing down in the depths.

  Now, I truly was the only one—the only Essence left that not one thing in the entire universe could s
ympathize with nor understand because they just couldn’t comprehend what I had become. And I was the only one who regained the memories that Satan so violently ripped away.

  My sight wound down as Maeve parted from the gloom of her death climb, Korbu sticking beside her for moral support.

  That was definitely unlike him; I wondered if she was doing something to his nature. Her fighting was commendable, but her tongue was fatal. I was “living” proof.

  I looked back out into the swarm of disarray, watching dusty gray particles push and pull one another. Still, not all demons were as rough and tough as the rest; if softness was shown, the perpetrators were punished—if anything that even slightly hinted at unfaithfulness was exposed, Hell literally came to you.

  But many had it; they just hid it. I had been loyal long ago, but even then, I had my gentle moments… And even being the head of the shi army, Korbu very well could have had a soft spot that he just buried at all costs.

  Because no one is one hundred percent evil, and no one is entirely pure; everyone has their dark, even if it be their light.

  Even made for destruction, born from the most deceitful hearts and heinous intentions, Reeve had flaws. Being of ice, she naturally killed most everything she touched when we crossed the open lands on our expedition to kill Maeve. People avoided her like the plague at first glance, but that obviously did not stop us when it came to attacking and pillaging village after village, demanding clues pertaining to Maeve’s whereabouts. A spear of ice through their beating hearts was beautiful to her; a chilling death released at her blessed fingers was a kind departure in her eyes: “Better than falling prey to a sweltering flame,” she would always say. “The organs don’t suffer; they pause, and that’s it.”