by K M McGuire
He laid his head down on his quiver, pulling his cloak tightly around him. He flopped to his side, facing the warm flickers of the fire, luminescent ripples passing across the scars on his face. The shadows shuttered along his features like cold spirits gossiping in his ears. Andar stared, as though he were listening to their tales. Within moments, a soft rumble curdled out of Vec’s throat. Voden had not expected someone could manage sleep so quickly.
“You sure we should trust him?” Andar asked, now that Vec slept. His expression was so vacant of emotion, Voden felt almost uncomfortable trying to read it. It was drawn tight, hollow from cheek to cheek. Mindlessly, Andar’s hand rubbed the cool polygons, which writhed like a cat against its loving master.
“I don’t know,” Voden whispered, fixing his eyes on Vec, who haplessly snored on the bed of moss. “I don’t think there’s much of a choice. I mean, we’ve all made mistakes. We all have secrets. What is trust without faith? If you leave no opportunity, how can they prove that they are worth it?”
Andar bit his lip, watching the yellow apparitions sputter from the coals. He said nothing. Eventually, he seemed to finally understand what Voden had said, as he slowly nodded, rummaging through his bag. Voden did the same, finding his rolled sleeping pad and a wool blanket. He lay down, watching the fireflies scattering around the forest. Their oscillating flickers were like celestial stars that drifted down loftily from the heavens to meet the creation below.
“Good night, Voden,” Andar whispered. “Maybe tomorrow we can wake from this nightmare.”
“Yeah,” Voden agreed, rolling to his side, observing the dancing veil of colors shift across the embers. “It would make it easier to cope.”
His eyes twitched shut at the sudden burst of radiance. It felt like the first exposure of light to the eyes, the light a newborn hotly protested with their first breath, afraid of the vicious push from their home. It was so brilliant, it penetrated Voden’s mind, transcending to the only thought he had come to know. But as his comfort settled in, brightness slipped away. It stretched across his peripherals, unending east and west. Vertigo gripped his core, the anchor of gravity now tied firmly around his waist, the fall becoming his rope. The light grew less, closing shape around his eyes, birthing glossy walls that slid around each side of him. The fear was now a ticking wonder of an anticipated end; each second felt closer, but never relenting to finish. How much would the seconds increase the pain when he met the ground?
Voden felt hands under his arms, pulling him to his feet. Feeling foolish, he questioned if he had fallen at all. He wished he had not closed his eyes, for now he could not remember how his feet landed on the ground. He felt his body, heart still throbbing, legs still weak.
He decided to give it no more thought, focusing now on the massive marble walls, extending far above the peak of his vision. The height only magnified the perfection of the shear, smooth surface of the four walls, where no crack or blemish was visible. He realized if he had not fallen, there must be a door that kept him trapped in the strange room. He looked in all directions, his heart beating as though it were knocking along the surfaces of the walls, hoping to crack the cruel joke. There was no door to be found. Immediately, he blamed Vec, and he felt his anger begin to boil. What fool could have given trust to that vagrant?
He whipped around, suspecting he had overlooked something and was utterly astonished to find an unsettling scarecrow posted at the center of the room. The scarecrow hung lazily on its swollen, wooden post jammed into a small blight of mud; its burlap head hung limp like a morose child who lost all of their friends. Strands of hay fanned out from its languid neck. The wool tunic was tucked into the pants, forming a convincingly bloated midsection, pressing firmly on its buttons. The dingy pants, brown from the mud, were tied fast to the post right where the feet…
Voden could not find his breath as he stared at the toe dipped in the thick sludge, following the bone structure up to the heels that looked like cherries. How had he missed that this was a human? He refused to believe it. Despite his mental refusal, the sores on the feet nearly glowed with pain and were swollen like they had travelled for far beyond that threshold. Voden looked around the room again. Still no door or any excuse to explain the sores pulsing at the person’s heels. Voden paced nervously around the scarecrow, contemplating what to do.
His curiosity got the best of him, and no matter how his heart refused, he knew it would not win. He reached out his hands and pulled the shirt. The buttons groaned in revolt to his vigor, and they popped, bouncing with a chatter that seemed much too loud for such a small item, revealing a man’s chest. The dread soaked his heart, and Voden snatched the burlap sack, biting his lip, bracing for what he wished he didn’t need to see. A head of thick, dark hair flopped out of the bag and fell against the man’s chest.
Anxiety blurred Voden’s vision, unable to tell if the man was still alive. The man’s hands were bound tight, his fingers pale like decaying white flowers. He had to release him. Voden fought against the thick twine, grunting at the fruitless struggle, unable to bore his nail into the knots to set the man free.
“You might as well kill him,” hissed a voice. It spoke like a sage born of steam, unable to escape the pipe that captured him. Voden turned. Nothing but blank, white walls. “What would it truly matter? It is only you, after all. Not an eye here to pass judgement. This is a safe place, one where all desires could be explored. If you had any sort of pity for him, you see he will not make it much longer.”
Voden turned towards the voice again as cold compressed his spine, like a frozen worm wrapping its mouth over his vertebrae. There, on his shoulder, rested a tiny golden owl. He felt almost panicked, putting a face to the voice, wondering how he had not felt the creature sitting so astutely on his shoulder. The longer he stared at the owl, the more perplexing the creature became. It had three eyes that marked the points of an equilateral triangle, and Voden stared deeply into the one most unnatural. The eyes that were placed normally were anything but that: glassed over and starry where all the twinkling was lost to a void of deep blindness.
The middle eye, the one Voden could not pull his gaze from, looked like it was plucked from a man’s skull. It stared at Voden’s, becoming a listless reflection, as though it knew and was bored at knowing. What it knew, Voden was unsure, but he could feel a queasy sensation clawing up his throat. The owl cocked its head with odd curiosity, fixing its unblinking gaze firmly on Voden’s face. A calm washed against Voden’s subconscious, pulling the doubts away like foam in the tide.
“Child.” The voice was anodyne, soaking through Voden’s brain, “you are not tethered to this world. There is nothing to hold onto. You are not home.”
Voden felt his thoughts begin to split. As the owl spoke, Voden sensed the words roosting in his mind. He stared at the languid man. He wasn’t sure why, but he felt his death was reasonable. He looked so miserable existing. It did seem more humane. The man twitched ever so slightly, and the owl grew stern as its crested brows tightened over its eyes.
Voden looked at the raptor. “I have nothing to kill him with, even if I wanted to.”
“That is not true. You have just the thing,” it hissed, the susurrate voice percolating through Voden’s body, stretching deep to the corners of his heart. A strong tug rushed along his synapses, and something unwilling began to drain from his heart. Whatever it was, it pulled like the vacuum of emptiness, turbulent like timelessness. Voden felt his hands clench his chest, fighting to keep his knees from slamming against the ground. In his hand, he saw dark, inky tendrils weeping from his pores, collecting into a formless lump in his palm. He quickly dropped his hand and the shape floated in a gelatinous mass inches from his heaving chest.
The tendrils grew thick, and thorns emerged from the vines, seeping from his flesh. Finally, the last bit escaped, snapping out his pores and spiraling in a large cluster that hovered in front of his body. The owl tilted its head, appearing pleased, observing the caliginous for
m, and then, within a moment, it began to vibrate and stretch. Slowly, the mass squelched and flattened until an obsidian dagger drifted, tip pointed towards the earth. The owl cocked its head towards Voden, the knife floating carelessly before him. His fingers trembled, and a strange sensation urged Voden to grab it. It would be easy. But no, his moral compass could not bear it. What reason did he have to kill this man? The urge grew strong; the fight against it weakened. Destiny would rather tear him apart than let him disobey.
A hand slid around his own. It pressed his fingers around the hilt of the blade. Voden turned to face the old woman, the arrow still penetrating her throat. Blood sputtered out as she smiled coyly at him, unaware of her grave wound. Her hand was cold, her eyes blazing with certainty, squeezing his hand tightly around the blade.
“There’s no ‘ope. Not for me and there is to be none for ‘im,” she croaked through dripping scarlet teeth. She turned her pale eyes towards the owl. “Never was but the screams of an abandoned world.”
“Yes,” the owl breathed deeply, sniffing their souls. “The truth is, it will all mean nothing when it ends. When this moment is gone, it will be just that. When it all fades, none of it carries on the dead wings of forgotten echoes. Your actions won’t matter. They reverberate to the void. And it will not respond. Let him live; let him die. Either way, his fate will be just as hollow and no less dark.”
Cold was the knife in Voden’s hand. The pommel began to wrap around his wrist, like a parasite clinging to its host. He traced the edge of the knife to the point lined up to the man.
Is this all we are to be?
He felt his legs move. He had not asked them to. He did not want to move forward; he wanted out. He looked up, but there was nothing. To the height that he could see, the ceiling was no sort of absolution, somehow morphing between existence and nihility but unable to choose either, no matter how close to a conclusion he came. The walls ran forever while fading to the maw of night. His legs still trampled forward. He could not entice them to obey his plea, his muscles threatening to rip if he refused its motion.
Voden’s legs finally stopped before the man. A subtle groan puffed from his dry mouth. His head tilted towards Voden. The man’s eyes were forged by the sun. It hurt to look too long at them, which at first, Voden thought, was because he could hardly bring himself to glance into them, convicting what his hands were about to commit. But a deeper look showed the sparking of thousands of nebulas flaring to life. Unwillingly, his hand lifted the knife.
Beyond, stop this hand from disobeying my will! Voden could not resist.
The owl spoke like a serpent in his head. You must—there is no choice when nothing matters. It all becomes neither as they fade away. It will be like you did nothing at all.
Horror filled his bones, unable to resist the motion his hand made. The knife drove into the man, and his radiant eyes widened as the blade entered his flesh. Tears squeezed through Voden’s clenched eyes, his sorrow wishing to refuse his action. Pain jittered across his nerves, following the sensation of tearing flesh. The blade carved into the man’s chest, skin splitting to reveal stark, white ivory as the tip scraped against the bone. No matter how his hand trembled, the knife pulled through the skin until the final jolt of unwilling membrane gave way. The rosy flesh delayed a moment, and velvety blood streamed in torrential spouts to the mud and marble beneath the man’s mangled chest.
Voden could not refuse his hand as it rose again, and he struck further into the muscles. The owl and old woman watched with lustful eyes, wanting to taste the death that mingled with the dirt. The skin turned to strips as Voden continued to strike, peeling away from the chest, offering up the cavity beneath, the human rind dangling like a tattered flag forfeiting victory. But unlike war, where flags should bleed, these spilled it all.
Voden stopped and the voices were gone. His breath was labored, but the pattering of crimson rung louder than his gasps. He dropped the knife. It hit the stained marble with a strange thud, stealing Voden’s attention, and the blood vanished from the knife. It remained vividly black as if it waited to continue. The owl and woman were gone. The man hung slack and lifeless, and Voden was now fully aware of his current solitude.
“What’s wrong?” a gentle voice whispered in his ear.
Voden turned to see a man dressed in a clean tunic, his hand pressing against Voden’s back with concern. His eyes shone with compassion, his dark hair pulled back like they curtains around his face. His smile was kind, and a large scar ran the length of his cheek.
“Why did I kill him?” Voden asked, tears rushing from his eyes. He reached down for the knife to show the man. “I…I couldn’t refuse myself! It came from me! It was drawn out of me, and I slaughtered him!”
The man grabbed Voden’s hands. He cast comfort with his lips, and his kindness settled Voden’s emotions. “Do you want to leave this place?” he asked as peace bloomed from his voice.
“Of course, but this place feels much closer to my grave.”
“You always have a choice,” the man whispered to Voden. “You will need to find the key. Whatever the key is, it is found in you, just as the blade. You will need to find what will separate you from the knife, and then the search for the key begins. It will open the door that leads to home.”
“But there is no door!” Voden cried in despair.
“Have faith! The door is always there. The door grows smaller the tighter you clench your eyes, but it can be made wide with eyes that are vigilant. The key must be found to make sense of what both the door and the key are.”
∞ ∞ ∞
The campfire was but a smolder when Voden awoke. He yawned heavily, filling his lungs with the cool dewy air of the morning. A cascade of brilliant pinks and reds bled through the canopy, pumping color back into the sleeping forest, waking the beaks of the birds, arousing their excitement for a new day. Dew hung like gems pillowed by the mossy ground, eager to travel to the dark earth and feed the tongues of growths. Voden rubbed his crusted eyes, trying to loosen the weighted drowsiness. He breathed softly, staring up into the dense, green trees, red soaking behind them, as if trying to snatch his dream before it disappeared with the dark blue of the evening sky.
He tried concentrating, but all he could hear now was someone digging through their satchel, and his ears heated as the dream slipped further away. Voden rubbed his temples and ignored the shuffling. He wondered about the key as the voice of the man echoed in his thoughts, and it felt as though it pounded against an unknown door he had closed. He pushed the thoughts aside and decided to get up.
He enjoyed the brisk air of the morning; there was something refreshing about it, something that felt like drinking water from a spring on a long hike. His stomach churned. His hand automatically found his bag and started to rummage about the contents. He pulled out some breakfast crackers and began gnawing on the hard food. There was little taste to it. If he hadn’t been so hungry, he would have thrown it to the ground. He glanced over to Andar, who still slept on a patch of emerald moss.
“The wonderful peace of sleep,” Vec said quietly. He was inches from Voden, surprising him at how he seemed to appear just out of Voden’s line of sight. It didn’t matter. Vec didn’t pay any mind to Voden’s shock, though Voden thought Vec hardly cared to make it known. “A fine place to go! Where all the worries dissolve, the impossible becomes a whim! Sometimes, I wish dreams were reality, so I wouldn’t have to live in this one.”
“I wouldn’t,” muttered Voden. Vec gave him a puzzled look, urging him to continue. “It’s just, I’ve seen calamity and horror stitched into my dreams. What makes it even worse is there is no way to understand them.”
Vec placed his hand on Voden’s shoulder. “When your hands find they cannot wash themselves of stains, the dreams become safer. At least you have freedom. Things can actually change.” Vec glanced into Voden’s eyes. Voden saw in a moment a deep pain, glistening inside his pupil, color pacing around a void before falling in.
; “At least you can wake from dreams.” Voden uttered, pensiveness etching across his brow. “If reality became a dream, and a dream the reality, would we wish the opposite to be true?”
Vec remained quiet. It was now him who was without words to argue. Vec’s face twisted uncomfortably, and he turned his attention to Andar. “Probably should wake him. It would be nice to have a warm bed to sleep in and some tasty mead…a nice looking wench—” he bit his tongue and gave Voden an apprehensive stare. Voden furrowed his brow in confusion, wondering what would finish Vec’s thought. Voden was about to ask what he had meant when a low murmur interrupted his conversation.
“Wait! How do I get to the sky?” Andar gurgled, starting to stir. Voden had just managed to catch the slur of words that Andar had strung together. “You can’t think I would believe that.”
“Andar?” Voden asked, turning to his slumbering friend. He suddenly thought about his own dream and wondered what he had muttered before he woke. At the very least, Andar’s dream seemed fascinating. Vec, too, seemed perplexed by the mumbling Andar, leaning close as though to peer into the dream that had caused Andar’s strange outburst. Voden ignored Vec, which proved rather difficult. He was now straining his neck as far as his vertebrae would allow, looking strangely at Andar. Voden slid next to his sleeping friend and placed his hand on his shoulder.
Andar thrashed his hand wildly, grabbing Voden by the wrist. His eyes sparked open, which met Voden with a fiery glow that lit Andar’s flushed face. It boiled hot, unlike any expression he’d witnessed Andar exhibit, and the fear pierced Voden’s soul. Andar soon realized where he was, and his features returned to their naturally calm state.
He released Voden’s wrist. “Sorry. You scared me.” He exhaled deeply. “I was…I had such an odd dream…” His voice faded from his throat as his hand covered his face. He seemed to have lost himself in the fabric of another dimension and hoped to either retain it or completely be rid of it.