Aisling

by Nicole Delacour

  “Set.”

  Jess blanched at Kilpeni’s words and stared unabashedly in awe of the manifestation before her. The calm, empathetic figure before her was who Itzal had once loved. When placed together in her mind, they seemed a poorly matched pair, yet there was an air of nobility to Set that was undeniably alluring.

  “I see.” Set paused before adding, “Did you pick it?”

  “No, it was the Compass.”

  Set frowned. “A great honor to be named thusly. I suppose it is not surprising after they named Itzal.”

  “Aisling are named for purpose – not for love.”

  Set laughed as he pulled the stone from his body. He stared at the stone for a moment as if contemplating its worth before saying. “True, or Itzal would be Eurydice and I – Orpheus. This world is not always a fair one.”

  “Unfortunately, no,” Kilpeni acknowledged.

  Smiling forlornly, Set blinked, and black bled over his eyes. “There are no heroes here, young one. There is nothing worth saving in these side steps to hell. You will never have the accolades that you earn for despite every noble intention – despite your greatest deeds. No matter how deeply you love here in these,” he glowered out into the whole of a dimension without horizons, “godforsaken dimensions that were cleaved from the face of a world that gains ever luxury and buries itself in ruination.”

  Her heart broke at his words, but she could find nothing to say in reply that would contradict his conclusion. The worlds beyond the core were filled with understated cruelties wherein the worlds were either void of life or where life was void of hope. Reality became starker the further out she went. Aislings were slaves who were made to guard a people that would never see them. In the fourth lived creatures enshrouded in pain at the smallest conflict, and the third was as close to hopeful as there had been, yet there was no safety in an open ocean. The eighth dimension was coming. There were creatures who had never felt the warmth of light of even the smallest heat. They had never felt land or drank water. In theory, they had no need of any of that, but there was the desire for more; otherwise, Jess could not fathom a purpose for wanting any stones at all. Blaming them for wanting such basic pleasures felt cruel.

  Her hand fell to the stones. Pulling the pouch away from her neck, Jess opened the bag and pulled a stone from the mix. They were the only bits of warmth that she had as her eyelashes covered in frost, but one remained hotter than the rest. “He’s here. He was in the fifth. He loved you.”

  Set caressed her cheek gently. “You are a sweet girl.”

  “There has to be some way that you can be together. He loved you,” she whispered as Set brushed a lock of hair behind her ear.

  “I never doubted that Eurydice loved me. What we had together was impossible. As all good things here are.” He leaned forward and kissed her forehead.

  The small clink of the stone falling into the pouch from his hand marked his disappearance. In the cold cloud that swirled around her, Jess took a sharp intake of air, letting Itzal’s stone fall alongside Set’s before turning to Kilpeni. Kilpeni’s arms wrapped around her. He held her tight as she sobbed. Her soul ached. The silence was punctuated by her gasps as she tried to suppress her tears.

  “You knew,” Jess accused as the throne melted back into vapors.

  Kilpeni frowned. “Knew what?”

  “Tell me the story of Eurydice and Orpheus,” she prodded.

  He shook his head. “You read it back in elementary.”

  The lines about her mouth deepened, and she leaned away from him. “You know what I meant. Tell me the story of Set and Itzal.”

  Studying her face, Kilpeni wanted to tell her; however, the idea of telling stories was never one that he had possessed. He was not a storyteller. From his birth, he had been a soldier, a guard, and perhaps a scientist. He didn’t have the capacity for such romanticism as would be needed to speak of Itzal and Set in the way that Jess desired him to do. They had been his friends and the only two souls he could trust with what he had done and what needed to be done. Kilpeni had spent long hours explaining the immorality of what they would do for the sake of maintaining the separation between the core and outer dimensions. They had listened. They had understood that at times what the world requested of them was a terribly poor means to an imperative end. Jess could not begin to comprehend with the same sort of nonchalance that Set or Itzal had. Jess was of a world where politics were debated, where inhumane acts were noticed, and where idealists existed. She did not understand his world of service; she would call it slavery. Romanticizing the lost would not bring them back.

  “This is not the time for stories,” Kilpeni retorted. His eyes darkened as he turned away from her. “And that is not a story that has any need to be remembered.”

  “If you knew me at all, which you claim to know me best, then you know that these sort of stories matter to me. Itzal went mad when he found out that Set was dead. Set was just – despondent. Aislings love – that much I can see is true. They loved each other, and you do them a great injustice by pretending that their love never happened. Tell me the story of Eurydice and Orpheus – Aislings,” she spoke calmly, but there was an edge to her voice.

  Closing his eyes, he prayed to a god that he knew could not hear him at such a distance and willed his flesh to split into the words. Up and down his legs, he requested the final door as he repeated, “This is not the time for stories.”

  “We are all stories in the end,” she whispered, watching him tear himself apart. “And if no one tells it, then we become nothing. It might not matter to the world, but it matters to me.” Crystals wove, forming a large circular door. Jess glared fervently at the darkness that stretched beyond. “This is the last one. Then it’s over.”

  “The stones will still need to be managed,” Kilpeni pointed out, propelling them closer to the gloom.

  Jess considered his words as they floated on the threshold then said, “For you – my purpose is collection. This is it for me.”

  “Jess?”

  She shook her head and reached forward into the black. “I can’t keep doing this.”

  And they were swallowed by the endless dark.

  Chapter Fourteen

  There was no light, so Jess could not possibly rationalize the lightning that slammed down onto the emptiness without sound. She could not even reasonably describe what she was, or perhaps was not, seeing as lightning. Whatever it was made the darkness even deeper before crackling away. Mist rolled where she could not see, but the creeping feeling crawled up her spine and moisture clung to her fingers. Stumbling in the absence of light, Jess felt the soft lichen upon which they treaded until Kilpeni hefted her to her feet. There were no colors. No shades were within the absolute black though she felt the brush of crystalline plants and a whisper of wind almost too cold to bear. The softness of the lichen was the old softness in this lightless world.

  “How do we know if they come for us?” Jess whispered. Though she had seen odd worlds, this was the first that stole her courage.

  “We won’t.”

  Beneath their feet, the false ground was just a display of the monsters’ power. They had woven falsehoods in the fabric of their world, but still the land was cold. Still, the sky was dead. Still, the land was shaped around a pull weaker than all before it. The lightning was a desperate attempt to generate electricity and light. A failed working of monstrous minds that ached with a genius the worlds would rue. Fear quieted Jess slithered around his chest ten times and ten times again. He knew the absence that this dimension was meant to be. There were not meant to be storms or softness or crystals shaped like life. The Illuxenolith had tried to reach far beyond what they had been given. They dreamed of a potential that was never theirs.

  In Kilpeni’s mind, the last stone blinked. The stone was a beacon in the distance that promised an end to the quest and freedom from the suffocation of the outer dimensions. He would be home soon. The sentence permeated his being. All he had done would finally be
finished and sealed away for the rest of time. Kilpeni simply had to keep going for a bit longer, and then his mind turned to Jess. She had survived this far, but the trip back held no fewer perils. Even if she made it by some miracle, they could never remain as they were. They would never speak again. More likely than not, the Compass would alter her memories, and Kilpeni would spend the rest of her lifetime watching Jess be happy. He wanted to be content with that thought. Her happiness should have been enough, but the idea of watching her fall in love – of her making love to another – of spending her life with another – sent cracks across his skin that he could never stretch to fill.

  “Will we hear them?” Her words brought him from his mind.

  “We should,” he replied, but there was only thundering in the distance. Kilpeni could not even recall what an Illuxenolith sounded like when they wove through space.

  “Kilpeni?” Jess called when he failed to say anything more. “I think they know we’re here.”

  Small forms slithered this way and that around Jess’s legs. There was no sound loud enough for her to hear above the rumbling, but there was a sight even though she had believed she would be blind in the eighth. A dim glow burned upon the horizon. Kilpeni had seen the light as well and took hold of her hand running as the Illuxenoliths squirmed around them. The leeches were not attempting to connect to her, and in the moment of that realization, Jess looked towards Kilpeni, who stood at the end of her fingers where they were entwined with his. He was in danger here. She rushed to keep to his side blocking as many as she could. Visions of him being overwhelmed and taken as a host burned in her mind.

  The glow grew and spread out across the false earth in veins of dull light. There was no manifestation in the dull light that stung Jess’s eyes. Before her eyes could adjust, a lumbering humanoid form slid into the illuminated area. Her heart thundered in her chest as she recalled where she had seen him before. Two black leeches had been burrowed into his eyes on the bus; however, though his eyes were black, they were not squirming. The corpse of the Aisling slammed its head to the side before wrenching its hand up into claws. There, upon its torso, a dark wormlike form stuck deep into the Aisling’s flesh.

  Kilpeni threw an arm in some forgone attempt to protect Jess, but as the parasite snapped its host’s bones and moved closer, no one was safe. The corpse reached out towards them, and Kilpeni’s heart fell when three more hosts drew forth from the darkness into the small circle of light that the last stone burned forth into the eternal darkness. Each hissed words from mouths that shifted and blurred while randomly some limbs grew while others shrunk. Lichen glowed blue holding tightly to the light. Along its fast network on the false ground, the lichen released a steady glow ignited by the small star-like stone. Crystal trees towered high in multiple hues of purple and green while the mist sparkled almost white and at times periwinkle. An army of dead Aisling stretched into the distance with some stone giants of the fourth standing tall with multiple leeches up their hard skin. A glimmering electric space skimmer fluttered upwards, the lights of her wings blazing as the lichen’s light spread. A leech upon her back squirmed before settling into flight.

  “What have you done?” Kilpeni gasped, but Jess stared in bewildered wonder.

  “Ly-t,” one corpse gurgled then the next until they chanted, “Light, light, light, light…”

  Kilpeni tried to pull a sword from his flesh then a gun then a dagger and a knife, but his body remained unchanging. Panic trickled throughout his body while tears lined Jess’s eyes as the light stretched out to the horizon. Machines and cities were illuminated in the distance. Darkness flashed across the sky grew brighter and brighter until true lightning cracked the sky. The first sight that her eyes saw was the massive army that stood before her. Second, the city that the light revealed. Though their world should have been nearly empty by all accounts, they had created a city that grew illuminated by the spreading light. The brightness caught like a plague and spread across the dimension from that single stone. Jess acted without thinking and snatched the stone from the ground. Dragging him via their joined hands, Jess pulled Kilpeni in the only clear area running and weaving through the growing first dawn in the eighth dimension.

  “We have the freaking stone!” she yelled. The army of corpses marched upon them. “What now, Kilpeni? The Compass isn’t going to help us out of this one. No weapons, outnumbered, and our only hope is some invisible force that likes using people as paper,” she shrieked as fire trailed up her arm leaving burnt letters: Kid Please Stop The Compass Saves Your Butt Again Stop. “Oh, come on!”

  “Be quiet,” Kilpeni commanded. “If the Compass is about to assist, one of us is going to be shifted into a conductor.”

  “One of us? What do you mean one of us? You’re the shifting one. There shouldn’t be …” Her words cut out as her right arm twisted against her will. The skin peeled and back the muscles twined outwards from her elbow like an exploded diagram leaving bloodied bone in its wake. The small bones of her hand and wrist flew up to orbit her radius and ulna. A sphere of blinding white light grew at the center. “If you’re so damn great, why don’t you just strike them down from inside of them?”

  The light shot forward throwing her arm back with the recoil. Jess grabbed hold of her right arm at the elbow with her left hand. Forcing the blast to curve about them, she set the half-dead sleepers on fire. They did not scream when they fell. They hardly made a sound at all over the roaring flames and thudding of disarticulated limbs against the ground. The hoard crawled forwards even as they burned. Their bodies crackled beneath the foreign heat. In the darkness of this furthest dimension, there was no fire or true heat. The bitter coldness seeped into the marrow of one’s soul.

  “Light,” they chanted endless across the hoard. “Light, light, light.”

  With each shot, more fell, yet the army kept marching towards them unhindered. Kilpeni watched in fear as sweat beaded at Jess’s brow. She was not formed to be bent in such a way. He tore into his flesh pleading for a portal to swallow them and throw them somewhere, anywhere but in the midst of the massacre that would occur once they were reached. With each line, he pleaded, but there was no answer. A cold panic set into his flesh until he went pale. The Compass needed the stones destroyed. Grabbing the stones from around her neck, he dumped them into his hand. There, in his hand, was whatever was left of all those he had sacrificed in his attempts to protect a world that would never know they lived. Closing his eyes, he molded his hand to encompass them entirely while he stirred them to awake before taking Jess’s transformed arm and shoving his hand into the blaze. The eighth had once had no light. The eighth once had no heat, but in that instance, the eighth exploded.

  Chapter Fifteen

  They floated through the hole between the worlds, and he held her tightly to him. He had never felt so protective of anyone in his entire life, but he knew anything that happened to Jess was his own fault. She was his. He had seen her at her worst, and he knew that there was something deep inside of her that would yearn to be so much more than the fate that the Compass had proclaimed she would have. She wanted so much. She needed nothing. She needed nothing from anyone, but he knew that he had to protect her this one time even if it killed him. He knew that she needed him now, and he had once promised a small child that he would make sure she never felt that much pain ever again.

  “I love you,” he whispered, and he shoved her towards the center. The move pushed him further towards the outside, but he felt it was always a one-way trip for him. The stones hadn’t been destroyed. Not completely. He felt them. Each small and sleeping scab buried in his own body. He wasn’t an Aisling anymore, and he might never get home; however, the Compass never picked without forethought.

  The words seemed to materialize from the holes in the eighth dimension. They were solid and powerful as they spread in dark vibrations outwards and around him. He thought it was from the Illuxenoliths, but the small parasitic leeches fled further into their marsh-like
universe as the words dragged him forward creating a chain between him and his girl. Her eyes were open and staring right through him as the words moved from her lips to cradle him back towards the center. The dimensions rushed by until he saw the shining light of the second universe – his home. His heart ached as the words ceased. The link between the dimension was closing.

  “Goodbye.”

  Jess smiled as she fell backwards into the core world. The small cubes began to reform as the link between the third and second closed, rising to the surface of his body without falling completely free. Then the tunnel was gone. Standing in his world of reflections and lights and shades, he had never felt so alone.

  Chapter Sixteen

  One Jessica Gould wept. The world around her seemed impossibly fragile. Each crumbling bit of dirt stood as another insult. Sentiment passed. Love waned, didn’t it? Even before she had dared to name the feeling in her head, she knew – they had known it was impossible. It had to end. Though every word he had said was undeniably human, Kilpeni had been so alien to her. All the worlds she could have imagined, but he had been to ones stranger still. Ones she had barely survived in. Her shield – her shadow – her reflection – hers only in ways that cheapened her tears. Nothing truly mattered anyhow. The universe had torn them apart bit by bit. Wanting lingered. The idea of anyone else was unbearable. Like poison, the truth sat on her tongue. She’d always pick them over him. Earth won over him, and he had known that. Even in the scant moments when they might have been together, there wasn’t a soul who might have believed it. Aislings couldn’t love. Didn’t love. Not like he had grown to love her. If she remembered nothing else – believed nothing else of what she’d been through, she believed him.

  She was exhausted and cold, but she sat in the cavern letting the waterfall refract light around her. She did not look at her shadow. She stared into the darkness of her hands and sobbed until her heart ached too much even for tears. With little else to do, Jess slid through the water and walked along the river until she found the way that led up and around and back to a path that trailed up to a place where she hadn’t been in a long time. Her body trembled, but her legs did not let her fall. She did not glance at the ground. She did not look to see what followed.