by Amanda Churi
But Reeve, why would she thank me? I had screwed her over in every conceivable way.
“You freed her,” Tah replied with a gentle smile. “Freed us. Revenge… For all we endured, all we lost, it was not worth it. And…” A sob choked her. Her pupils swelled with pity, regret, the dull hues in her eyes shining. “I am sorry, Eero, for following her instead of finding my way back that night. I am so, so sorry for causing this—for killing so many and making you hurt so long… I never meant to.”
A certain, unplaceable satisfaction came from those words, but they meant something to him. Not me. “If you want my forgiveness, then let me into the Spirit World.”
She hesitated. “I-I—”
“We’ll do our best,” Laelia jumped in, “but you sitting around isn’t going to get you closer. Get out there and keep looking.”
Her response jolted me—her dead eyes even more so. “You’re not going to vouch for me… Are you?”
Her eyes shrank so much that the pupils were lost.
I yanked forward, the roots of my legs bulging; the cave of my mind rattled and shuddered with my fight, throwing the balance of everything for that moment. “WHY?! If you don’t want her to die, then do something!”
“You idiot! What do you think we’ve tried to do again and again and again?! It never works, and we need to be here to protect your fat ass from them when they come barging through! Stop wasting time and just—”
“BUT I DON’T KNOW WHERE TO GO!”
It wasn’t me who spoke. Laelia and Tah realized it too, turning to look at the pile of fraying white threads and spiritual matter slumped on the floor, rising.
“Eero!” Tah exclaimed, bolting over to his soul.
He was gagging, trying to break from the floor on arms so thin and patchy that they hardly had a stable pathway to travel. His head lifted to find mine, eyes of blue burning stronger than any around him; even though the skull couldn’t stay steady, his existence still a mere stroke of luck, he kept our gaze locked. “I-I don’t know!” he cried out.
“You do not know…?” Tah tried, kneeling beside him.
“NO, I DON’T KNOW WHERE SHE IS! She will die! I’m not going to make it! I’ve known that, so just leave me, and try to persuade the Eyla! Please! Don’t let her die just because you’re afraid to trust him and leave me alone! Does it look like he wants to eat me?! To do away with me?! He just wants to find her! I just want to find her! She may not need me, but I NEED HER! I do! I do! I can’t fight without her! There’s nothing left to fight for if she’s not there! She’s all I have left! I-I—!”
“Eero.”
A tap to my shoulder slingshot me to Earth. My gums ripped, and my ears shot out as a blinding sun came back into view, haunches readied for a spring, but the pale, angelic face stopped me. “Seek? What are you—?”
“I’m sorry it took so long.” Her petite hands took my face, and she threw herself at me, slamming our lips together. My first instinct was utter confusion—to slap her into the next century—but the sensation of her lips kept me there, processing such an odd human custom. The taste—the flavor of her made me drink, the aroma and strands of sinless souls trickling down my throat and flooding my limbs.
I closed my eyes and sucked harder—almost uncontrollably. The taste… It was the highest quality I could remember. The magic was intoxicating—addicting. The angels did not scream falling into my gut; in fact, I wasn’t sure they made it there. There was no sense of contentment, just power. I wanted more and more—
The suction of our lips slacked, and I opened my eyes to Seek hitting the ground, breathless. I couldn’t touch her—I just stared, never seeing her so human, all but void of her gift of light. Even her hair had changed, as black as the chilled expanse of space; the only proof that she was even alive was her filling lungs and the flitting of her exhausted eyelids, trying to catch sight of me.
New voices were sprouting in my head—new courage and determination that made me rise and turn my head to the hills of mortar. The distant mountains looked like they were evaporating—like Earth itself was turning into a plume of smoke, but I couldn’t feel even the faintest ray of heat on my skin. “What the…?”
“Go,” Seek wheezed, flashing me a crinkled smile. “I’ll be fine. They’ll get you… Where you need to go.”
This way!
She is this way!
Follow!
The mist that I first took as vapors were morphing and scattering, the thousands, perhaps millions of Eyla in view parting as a sea to reveal a narrow footpath that I could only see as a road.
She let me in—they fully let me into the Spirit World, all because they trusted Seek.
“Thank you,” I said quietly. And I took off, bounding across the hills of rock and glass. The Eyla rushed behind me after each step to obscure the path; the blizzard of those before me continued to shove others aside, elongating my only road left.
I moved so fast that I hardly even saw the physical world passing by through their massive, banished numbers—hundreds of years of meandering and moaning, grieving for bodies and worlds lost. The worlds existing together—one that even I was never allowed to see outside of feasting—it was suffocating, ghostly corpses piling over one another like stacks of rotten fish.
My body climbed and fell with the path they laid out, but where I went seemed to be nowhere in particular—nothing I would have found without them. They took my desperate body far beyond the formal reaches of the palace and into the surrounding lands. The backland of the fortress was mostly bare; many disconnected, lesser prioritized buildings constructed from stone littered the bleak arena, but I continued past them and into the sunlight, running toward the mountains growing along the horizon.
My Mark was sweltering, but I kept moving my legs and pushing my aching thighs up the quickly steepening grades. The stone crumbled under my feet with each stride, each stake to sanity. The foreign sun balanced at the rugged mountain’s peak, teetering on its ominous summit. I was blind for nearly the entire ascension, trusting in the souls, holding onto their voices with the hope I didn’t step too far to one side. Heights didn’t scare me, especially after the climb up from Hell, but I was definitely happy the clan of Eyla pretended to be clouds, refusing to let me see how high I had come.
FASTER! a semi-familiar voice cut above the others. There isn’t much time!
I gnashed my fangs irritably, able to imagine my snapping muscle fibers. “You think I don’t know that…?!” I knew it too well, and so, I ignored the thundering of my humanoid heart. It could burst; it could pop straight out of my chest. It just needed to happen after I reached her.
In here!
When there was hardly any earth left to conquer, the ground flattened before a peak spliced in two. I stopped to catch my breath and looked back over the gray slate of the world—one masked by Eyla with only the faintest view of a crippling circle that outlined humanity’s last habitable lands. At this height, a distortion could be seen racing across the sky, slightly morphing the sun’s penetrating rays; it was so stable and distant that one could have easily mistaken its existence for the floaters of one’s eyes, but there was no denying it. The force field… The barriers.
The rushing whispers of clamor brought my eyes to the peak of the mountain. A whirlpool of Eyla gushed around the highest point in the kingdom, knocking at the sky above our heads, but though they tumbled and piled over one another, pounding and slapping at the clouds to reach the world above, they were silent at the mouth of the cave that led into the mountain. In a whitewashed world, they left the entrance a solid backdrop of black.
A single Eyla tainted the purity and shot fearlessly through the abyss. HURRY!
The command struck, and my heels launched, threw me between the slabs and into the sharp descent toward the mountain’s heart. The chiseled steps were so small that I was running on my toes and carving the walls with my talons to keep me from flying down. White shooting stars trapped in translucent tubes outlined the
foot of the runway and the ceiling, throwing me in and out of darkness. Its flux copied the pulse of the mountain, of its life, but it clashed with my pounding chest, throwing my beat further off rhythm. The lines kept flying farther and farther until the warming, humid darkness gorged them whole.
Where was she?! “MABEL!” I yelled, hit in the face by my own empty voice. “MABELLL! WHERE ARE YOU?!”
Farther! the Eyla cried. Go farther! Move faster!
I didn’t know how that was possible! Had it not been for my deathly worry and overdose of adrenaline, I would have been on my face a long time ago. But my body, my soul—our souls—wouldn’t let me stop.
The electrical tracks lining my sprint scattered into darkness. The Eyla halted at once; I mirrored it, digging my heels down and gripping the tunnel to catch myself. My consciousness nearly shot out of me with the whiplash, but the scenery kept it there; it tipped my surprised chin up and made me stare, watching the roads of light branch into a kaleidoscope of paths, outlining a dome carved within the mountain. A crater opened high above to the surface—a moon in a world of night that poured its power down onto a large lake below. The electricity continued pulsing in, humming as it cascaded down the arched walls and to the roots of a hidden forest below that surrounded the twinkling waters as a black mass.
This place is cursed… the Eyla admitted quietly. If I go farther, I’ll be swallowed up.
Great. I didn’t voice my disgust—I just focused on tracing the darkness with my eyes and ears, looking for the flinch of a leaf, feeling for the vibration of a voice. Down there… Somewhere down there in this manmade rainforest… They were there. Mabel was dying.
“Stop!” The shriek was so distant I hardly caught it, but what my ears nearly missed my eyes found, shooting to the shower of light pouring down from the mountain’s open eye. The beams fragmented and danced across the waters at the forest’s origin, and at the centermost point, a platform of rock rested atop the waves.
With Mabel being dragged onto it by her hair, thrashing, twisting in her own blood.
“MABEL!”
My feet yanked me to the left onto a path hardly wider than my foot. I didn’t hold onto the wall. I didn’t take any precautions. I just ran. Bolted. Flew with my armor grinding against the stone and lighting up my sprint with fire.
The ledge traced the circumference of the secret garden as I slowly—far too slowly—closed in on the ground. My feet spun with a mind of their own; my eyes were so compressed to see every frame of her that flames felt like they were about to shoot from my skull.
500 feet… 400 feet… I was still too high. I was still too far to reach her, but her screams continued to strike me like bullets. “STOP! STOP!”
Gannon’s foot slammed down on her sprawled hair, pinning Mabel’s head to the rock. She screamed hysterically, writhing so ferociously that she was about to scalp herself for freedom. Gannon said nothing; he loomed above her, glaring with his palms stretched before him. Daggers of electricity cut free from his plated hands, crackling above his skin.
I saw their ragged, unstable shapes reflect in Mabel’s swollen eyes that were bursting with red tears. Her shrieks cut my lobes likes knives, clashing with the squealing energy.
300 feet.
The empowered plasma coursing through his veins entered the enamel of his crooked smile, a grin floating in the dark. He threw his hands down and released the bolts that stabbed through Mabel’s hands and feet like nails. Her blood flew and caught white in the sunlight; flames spouted from her mouth and sputtered under her stapled hands and feet, trying to shoot her free, but the lively currents kept screwing farther and farther through her skin and into the rock.
“MABEL!” I bellowed. “HOLD ON!”
She kept screaming—a continuous stream of agony with uncontrollable peaking pitches. Gannon’s snicker reverberated through the forest at my plea, but his eyes stayed down, studying Mabel’s broken body. “I made quite the enticing offer… It’s a dire shame that I will have to go through with this. Was it worth it, Eero? Was your pride worth her life?”
Mabel could no longer get a word out—I certainly couldn’t get an answer with my heart tangling itself in my ribs. She was choking on her own pain; fountains of fire of all colors were gushing out of her mouth and igniting the air, incinerating the blood and vomit popping off her tongue. Wait! Just wait a little longer!
Gannon spread his fingers and put a palm over her. A torpedo of a bolt plummeted down and tore apart her gut, making her body fold in with a burst of lightning and a slap of thunder as loud as her ripping voice.
200 feet.
I was tripping, my heart bungeeing in its ensnared veins, mutilating itself more and more the longer I watched. This mixture of bodies was no good! I wasn’t going to make it in time!
SATAN! I begged, immediately feeling the tug of skin over the Mark. PLEASE! NOW! I NEED YOU NOW!
“I’ll ask again!” Gannon stated louder. “Was your pride worth her life?”
Mabel’s horrendous suffering was the only reply I received—nothing from the other side. 175 feet… 150 feet… “NO! IT’S NOT” I screamed. “I’LL DO IT, GANNON! I’LL HELP YOU! JUST LET HER GO!”
“…We both know that’s not true. That’s why I have to do this.” Gannon lifted his heavy boot and grabbed her flailing, flickering hair like a bouquet of flowers, marveling in their whipping strands that tried to slice through him. “If you aren’t an ally at heart, you aren’t an ally at all. Shame you made her go like this.”
100 feet.
The splintering of bone roared through my head. The screams of Eyla and bellows of fledglings collided. “SHE’S NOT GOING AT ALL!”
I hurled my body over the ledge and into the flashing night. The air slashed over and under my skin, an explosion of power and desire ripping open my back. Sickles and crescents of white banished the night as Seek’s angels, old friends, responded to my urgency. The mountain heaved; my skin absorbed the air—pulled it in and shot it out, launching me to the stone plate.
Gannon looked me in the eye. Hissing, unfurling snakes of lightning burst from his bicep and empowered his grip.
Mabel’s scream ripped apart space. Flames spewed from every pore.
MABEL! WAIT! I’M RIGHT—!
A rip. A tear so jagged I could not compare it.
Winter shot through me; gravity and damnation returned. My light-borne wings vanished as quickly as they came, and I fell—belly-flopped into water that held me there, below the surface, unmoving, unbreathing, with my eyes stuck above.
Stuck on Mabel’s head in his hand. Her spine still attached, glowing with the white fractals of her embedded sword.
Gannon smirked with the power of a god. Like a rope that just wouldn’t budge, he yanked harder, ripping her spine from her staked body inch by inch, the nerves and fibers tethering from bone.
The water kept me still—everything was static except for the falling crimson droplets hitting the surface and distorting the view. Mabel’s eyes fluttered irrationally; her unhinged mouth twitched. Bone continued peeling from flesh; the cavity of her body continued to pucker and suck in air, filling her with emptiness until the cork had been completely removed.
The full length of Mabel’s spine was in Gannon’s hand, and he marveled in it, holding it high and checking every piece of glittering ivory as a bulb on a string of lights. He snickered once and knocked her head off with a swift backhand, sending it into my nightmare with a plop.
He looked at me a second longer, watching her head sink while feeling his position rise. He put her spine around his neck and even tossed it to one side, a warming scarf, and turned away, stepping from the rock and vanishing from view.
Her head continued to sink, steeping the water red. A poisonous kettle of tea. It was a joke. It was all a joke, a nightmare. I was going to wake up any second. Yeah, that was right, wake up and find her snoring off in a corner with a beard of crusted drool. Gannon hadn’t happened yet—this was what he would d
o if I weren’t careful enough. This—
Her hair swirled, the skull falling before me so that our traumatized faces mirrored one another.
No… No… No…
“NO!”
The slippery arms of the lake released me as my gassed scream tore them apart, and I threw her head into my chest, kicking up to the surface. My head shattered the red pane; I cradled her in the crook of my arm, shivering, begging for air and crawling onto the slick rock—the stone that left me scrambling and flopping onto my chest repeatedly, splashing around in her draining blood. “No, no, no, no, no!”
My knees were at the base of her neck—of her stapled body. I pulled her face back into my hands and held her in front of me as the contents continued to empty out. I couldn’t breathe—I took in air without ever using it. Her eyes were not crimson but brown, the patterns broken with suffering and fright. The brown locks dripped water and blood over my kneeled body, as did the mouth that was open but oddly silent.
“…No…” My burning vision reached up and out in blurred lines, contorting her frown into a smile, her hurt eyes into ones of laughter. “No… No… You… You can’t…!”
I slammed her head down onto her hollow neck. “YOU CAN’T LEAVE ME! YOU HEAR ME?! YOU CAN’T JUST LEAVE, MABEL! NOT LIKE THAT! NOT WITHOUT A GOODBYE! PLEASE! JUST FOR A MINUTE! COME BACK! SAY SOMETHING! PLEASE, GOD, JUST SAY SOMETHING! ANYTHING! DON’T…!”
I gripped her draining skull harder, staring at the slipping pulp gathering beside her shoulders. A foreign pressure broke through my eyes—something I hadn’t felt in so long I couldn’t even tell what was happening. It didn’t feel real. None of this did.
Gannon was getting farther away. I didn’t even know where he went, but I couldn’t move. I just stayed there, hunched and ruined. Coruscus lie limp, the light failing and going out wholly—a dud.