Born in Darkness

by Thomas Farmer

What she did not know was how long she slept after killing that monster. She was still alive, and so reasoned that it had not been long. Still, Victoria was aware of a brief period of dream-filled darkness in between the monster's fall and the current moment.

  Slowly, she dragged herself to her feet. Blood-crusted sand fell from her as she moved, and she dusted off as much as she could. At least sand was rough, she reasoned, and did not turn slick and treacherous the way bloody tile did.

  After taking a moment simply to breathe, Victoria stripped off the top half of her black suit and let it fall to the sand. It hung in ragged strips after her fight and did little for her anymore. Her ribs continued to bleed, leaving a bright red streaks in the grime on her skin.

  Victoria eyed the four-armed monster. Its clothes were made out of the same black fabric as the other green-eyes. If she could stop her own bleeding, she could scavenge what she needed for a new suit from it.

  Unfortunately, the effort of stripping it halfway took what little energy she had left, and Victoria collapsed again on the sand. She remained conscious this time which, she admitted, was an improvement.

  She adjusted her position, rolling onto the sand and reveling in the simple action of stretching her muscles for a brief moment. The light no longer hurt her eyes and she stretched out on her back, enjoying the warm lights overhead. It felt good, relaxing, and she remained there until the slowly-spreading pool of wet blood under her back cut through the fog in her brain and reminded her of her wounds.

  Victoria sat up, brushing another layer of sticky, blood-caked sand from her back. The warmth overhead slowly soaked into her body, returning some of the energy that the cold lower levels sapped. She stretched again, this time taking a moment to inspect her injuries. Most were minor, the result of endless fights where her attackers landed insignificant blows here and there. They would heal with time.

  The four-armed monster only truly hit her once, but the gash it left in her side was a worse injury than anything else so far. Its razor-edged sword had done its job almost too well. Had it cut any deeper, warned the voice in her mind, it would have done catastrophic damage to her muscles and organs. The wound itself was straight, with none of the ragged edges the others' dull knives and claws left. It was going to be easy to sew back together, at least.

  Small positives, she reminded herself.

  She looked down at her side again, watching the blood leaking from the cut. She needed most of her remaining water to wash the area before sewing it up; none of her previous wounds had been quite so bad. Something told her that it would scar horrifically.

  As the thought of washing the wound crossed her mind, a vision flashed through her memory. Hands, not her own, gripped her leg. A chunk of flesh was missing there, ripped away by the teeth of the dead creature at her dream's feet, one of the knife-wielders. Blood was everywhere and with no way to stop the bleeding, she was quickly losing feeling in the leg, even though it was not hers. The memory reached down and picked up the dead green eyed monster and tore out the side of its throat. Brilliant, crimson-red blood flooded over her hands, bathing them in heat.

  The memory pressed the side of the pale creature's neck against her thigh, filling the wound-echo with blood. Hands that had once been hers rubbed the red fluid into the wound, ignoring the searing pain that made her flesh ache even in memory.

  Her mind flashed forward days or weeks; she had no way to tell how far. The hands removed a bandage made of black fabric from her leg. The wound underneath was red still, at least where the brown color of scabbed blood had not yet taken over, but showed no trace of infection.

  She snapped back to the present, more disoriented than usual by the vivid flashback. The aching sensation of being alone in her body again was dizzying.

  Victoria looked at the huge beast that lay half naked, then looked again at the bleeding wound in her side. Her memories had never given her wrong information before, and when there was a danger to be avoided, the resulting painful death was usually the end result of the vision. To see something that did not promise death gave her reason to assume it was safe, if unappealing.

  Victoria dusted off her knife and once again crossed the sand. She regarded the dead monster with suspicion, as though it were only sleeping and could get up at any moment and resume its attack. Slitting what remained of its throat would, she thought, have the added benefit of forever preventing that possibility.

  She seized it under the upper shoulders and drew the torso into a partially upright position. With the whole creature half again as tall as she was, even that small adjustment made it seem frighteningly large.

  One of its three eyes remained open, an empty gaze staring at the far side of the room. Something about leaving its eyes open seemed wrong to her, as though even this murderous beast deserved some manner of dignity in its death, and she slid the eyelid slut.

  Victoria drew her knife across its throat, digging the sharp blade deep into its tough muscle. Death had robbed its blood of some of its normal sheen and color, but a bright red curtain still poured from beneath her blade.

  She dropped the knife to the sand and cupped her palms under the stream of blood, collecting a double handful of the inhumanly bright stuff. It smelled strange, with a sharpness unlike her own blood.

  Clenching her teeth against the pain she knew would be coming, she smeared the beast's blood across her side. In an instant, her wound burned with white-hot pain. The shock took her knees out from under her as her side burned. She fell to her hands and knees and the sand swam before her eyes. Every muscle in her body tightened against the pain and she dug into the sand with her fingers.

  It continued to burn, searing every nerve within a hand-span of her wounded side. Victoria imagined she could hear her flesh sizzling like cooking meat and the blazing agony only grew worse as her breathing sped up.

  Then, as the moments passed, the pain ebbed. It shrank back from fire, to a sting, and then finally to an ache that she could ignore. Victoria sank back onto her heels, aware that only a few moments had passed.

  With the pain at a manageable level, trusting that her memories were right and what she did would actually help her, she went to work again. Victoria retrieved the sewing kit with its whittled-bone needles, testing them one by one to find the sharpest among them. Into the eye of the needle, she fed a long string soaked with blood from the four-armed monster's throat.

  Victoria's side, she was pleased to notice, no longer hurt. The burning pain had been replaced by an oddly pleasant tingling sensation that, she hoped, could be blamed on the green eye blood she smeared into the wound.

  The numbness did not extend very far, a fact that immediately became clear when she slid the needle into her flesh. She screamed involuntarily as pain, somehow worse than the original wound, flared from the bone needle.

  With one hand, she held the wound in her side closed. Merely pressing the flesh together produced another spill of dark, dead blood. The other hand slowly pulled the thread through her skin, as the agony flared to new heights. The thread was worse than the needle. Not only was it not smooth, but it tugged at her flesh from the inside in a deeply disturbing way.

  Reaching the knot at the end of the thread, Victoria readied herself for the next puncture. This time, she did not scream. Again and again she looped the thread through her torn side, pulling the wound slowly together. Each prick hurt less than the one before it as the pain multiplied to the point that she no longer consciously registered it at all.

  She made a second pass down the gash, crossing each of the stitches carefully, and tied it off where she began. Satisfied, she returned the sewing kit to her bag with mechanical precision. Every excess movement hurt.

  With the wound itself taken care of, Victoria cut long strips of black fabric from the four armed monster's long sleeves and wrapped one around her ribs. She wrapped another around her breasts, replacing the blood-and-sweat soaked strip of fabric that had been binding them down since the day before.

&n
bsp; It would take time to repair her top, and she had no real desire to struggle back into the tight fabric until the stitches in her side healed more. She had less desire to leave it in the sand-filled arena when she left, however, and so tied the tattered sleeves around her waist.

  With her backpack on her shoulders once more, she went to the pile of swords taken from the massive creature. What had been one-handed swords for the three-meter creature were large two-handed weapons for her. Lying there in the sand, they still looked deadly, especially the one that still bore a smear of dried blood on the edge.

  She picked up the nearest sword. A large dent, one that matched the edge of her baton, marred the edge. She discarded that one. The second one was in decent condition, if dull. She returned it to its scabbard and tied it to her backpack. Carrying it that way was awkward, but it would be serviceable with some sharpening, and she learned early on with her knives that having backups was good. The third sword was similarly damaged, and it, too, was left behind.

  The fourth, the sword that had been stained with her own blood, was much sharper. This one she gathered up with intent to use it. The scabbard had a metal tip and a metal band around the opening. Resting against the sand, the pommel of the weapon reached her eyes. She satisfied herself with using it like a walking stick. In fact, after a moment's thought, having it as a walking stick might just be more useful in the long run than having it as a weapon.

  Victoria knew she could re-open the door she came through and return to the dark and damp, but as long as it was locked she felt a strange sense of safety. Additionally, if she was being honest with herself, she did not want to return to that hell of violence, at least not yet.

  With the monster dead, the room felt empty. An eerie silence fell on everything, broken only by the grinding sounds of sand underfoot, as she approached the door through which the monster came.

  The door remained open, exactly as the monster left it. As Victoria approached, a fetid smell assaulted her nostrils. Death and detritus hung heavy in the air. Stepping through that door sent a shiver down her spine. Automatically, Victoria reached for her baton, but the monster's sword was closer. She removed its scabbard, dropped it.

  She tried to raise the sword in front of her, holding it far out like a knife, but the burning pain in her shoulders prevented that for more than a few moments. Instead, she braced her arms against her torso and held the point outward from there. Its size was a sort of comfort. She could interpose its long, sharp edges between herself and an attacking green-eye easily, but the nuances of actually using the thing were lost on her. She dreamed about knives and clubs, even spears, but never something like this.

  Once again, uniqueness had an appeal all its own.

  The unique nature of the room around her, however, was anything but a comfort. Blood coated the walls, with more appearing with every passing moment as her eyes continued to adjust to the gloom. The room, or what was left of it, looked like the one in which she had first awoken, but smaller. Large tables and bits of broken equipment were scattered around, most in a pile to one side that left two large areas clear.

  One of those areas, the one against the far wall, smelled vastly worse than the other. Victoria knew that smell: organic waste, though the cumulative stench of however long the four-armed green eye had lived here was worse than anything she left behind. The other was clear except for two piles of debris, one of black fabric and the other of knives, clubs, even a few spears.

  Victoria went to that area, feeling drawn to it. She picked up the spear. It was crude, little more than a head-high pole carved from the wooden panels of a table with a broken-glass blade tied to the end. Still, it somehow felt familiar in her hands as memories of using it to kill the green-eyes came to the surface.

  She remembered carrying the spear through the same halls she herself, her real self, had walked only recently. Those halls looked the same, but her body was not. An unfamiliar feeling between her legs was all she needed to confirm that.

  The memory-self stalked through the corridors, moving quietly on bare feet. She remembered hearing scrabbling from around a corner and wheeling around, jabbing the spear out without even looking for the target. One of the smaller green eyed creatures died with the glass blade stuck through its throat.

  That sequence repeated over and over. The memory would hunt, seemingly going out of his way to find and kill them. The little ones fell in droves, and he even managed to kill a few of the giants, though his spear proved to be less effective against their thick skin than her hands and knives had been.

  Each memory came as a flash. A thrust here, a kill there, nothing so vivid as the few moments that gave her the idea to use the creatures' blood to clean her own wounds.

  She put the spear back down on the pile of weapons. Its familiarity was welcome, but something about the weapon made her want to distance herself from it. Its owner had failed, else she would not have his memories now, and the weapon stank of that failure.

  Victoria wondered if the four-armed creature had actually lived here. The weapon stack looked like trophies, and the pile of fabric might have been a bed of sorts. She moved it around with the tip of her new sword, finding nothing.

  She went to the far wall, fighting to keep what little food she had eaten in her stomach as she passed the site of the monster's waste. A door sat in the wall there, but it was covered in dirt and rust. She tried to open it, but the metal would not move.

  Victoria beat on the door with the pommel of her sword. It rang loud and every blow she landed left a small dent in the metal, but it stood steadfast and unmoving. She could deal with it later.

  Her body continued to protest every movement, every action. After several minutes, she found herself eyeing the pile of black fabric where the giant monster appeared to have slept. Curiously, it had no smell. The idea of sleeping there repulsed her, but she had to sleep somewhere, and this room could be barricaded.

  Near its sleeping area, a series of designs on the wall caught her eye. Coming closer, they turned into a series of paintings and engravings. Most were simple pictographs, what appeared to be the four-armed beast fighting and killing person after person. Some of them were the dull rust brown color of dried blood; others had been scratched directly into the tile of the wall.

  Each drawing triggered a memory. Though she only had her own memories of the creature itself, many of the designs triggered flashes of fighting or of insight. Some were as simple as, “do not be hasty,” or, “do not be too reserved.” Others were more visceral, painful even. One memory was only of the realization that she had to defend herself before attacking, and the unbelievable pain in her gut burned so strongly that, for a moment, she forgot the pain was not actually her own.

  A human shape holding a spear ended the block of figures. She touched that drawing. There was no way to tell from its simplicity, but she knew down in her bones that it was the same spear she had been holding moments before. Four successive pictures of the encounter stood in a small square, more detailed than the others. First, the man threatening it with his spear, then the man piercing the one of the monster's arms with his spear. The third picture showed the monster having grabbed him with two arms; the spear lay on the ground. The last image was the monster tearing the man in half, complete with a fountain of blood.

  Victoria's memory reaction to that was immediate and agonizing. She doubled over, clutching her stomach. That might as well have been her in the drawing, torn apart by the massive beast. Memory of pain so unbelievable that the thing's blood burning in her wound became a mere footnote ripped through her nerves, lighting them with fire made all the worse by the knowledge that it was not real and would not end with her death.

  Inside the pain, buried so deep that its message seared itself into the core of her soul, was a message to not be overconfident in her own ability.

  In moments, the pain passed, leaving Victoria soaked with sweat, curled into a tight ball on the floor. She forced herself to her hands and kne
es and violently expelled the last of the cooked rat meat.

  She crawled away, forcing herself to her feet. She had one last task to accomplish before she could rest. Debris filled the room and it took her very little time to barricade the door, even moving sluggishly with the echoes of being ripped apart still haunting her brain.

  In moving the rubble, she uncovered a message etched into the tile wall near the paintings. A large knife, likely small by the scale of the creature that lived there, lay on the floor beneath it. She could read the signs she found scattered around the corridors, but this looked to have been done by hand in a subtly different language. The strokes matched the ones that made the pictographs, however, and Victoria's pulse raced.

  She asked herself if the four-armed beast, the thing that attacked her with violent abandon, could have been capable of thought. The idea that she killed something without first trying to understand it struck her as wrong. It attacked her, as they all had, but the question of why remained unanswered.

  Now that question gnawed at her as she tried to make what sense she could of the engraving.

  “Sealed,” she read, halting as several of the words were unfamiliar, or came with strange spellings. “in I. Cannot... something... door. Wrecked? The other door. Strength most having, something about approaching?” She stared as an entire line of text refused to make sense. She understood the pronouns, and little else. “This pit am trapped, sky desire I? No more sings the singer. Kill... all... I.”

  Victoria stared at the inscription for a long time, but nothing else in the carving made sense. She finally turned away and shed her excess gear. The backpack made a poor pillow, but it was better than nothing. She lay the usable sword next to her, draping an arm across its scabbard, and set everything else to one side.

  Wonder about the nature of the creatures she had been fighting ate at her as she sought sleep. However, with the door safely barred against intrusion, she knew she finally had that time to think. Sleep would come, and when it came, she would finally have true rest.