by D M Wozniak
Everything becomes silent.
Absolutely silent.
The reverberations cease, and the only remaining sound is the wind. It comes off the sheer cliffs, peeling through this husk of a room. A few birds flutter in the jagged opening above us, perching on splintered beams. A rustle outside, as more bushes give way, another shaving of bluff meant for the sea.
“It’s time,” Mander says.
Chimeline lets out a short and meager scream.
In the stillness, I hear the bright rattling of nails on the floor, as I catch Mander briefly clutching his stone once again.
Chimeline fully collapses, letting her feet finally stretch out, now that the nails are gone. She then brings them back into her chest in a fetal position, as she whimpers softly.
The melted voidstone sits directly between her and Mander. It’s just as bright, but undulating now, casting white-tinged moving shapes in all directions, as if we’re underwater. It resembles a glowing tide-pool, two feet in diameter.
Mander remains sitting on the floor. He looks exhausted—whether from the moonspit or voidance, I cannot tell.
He glances curiously at Colu and the scaffolding in the distance, and then at me, as if all of these new developments are of no significance at all.
Unaffected by the strong light, he extends both hands toward the glowing pool in front of him, looking upon it in beaming admiration.
“Come close and look, Marine. It is most beautiful now, when the doorway is first opened. While it is stable.”
She doesn’t step forward.
A few steps behind the huddled Chimeline, her expression is not one of admiration. Her face is turned away in revulsion, brow furrowed, neck pulled back.
Mander glances at her, sees her reticence, and then exhales.
“So be it. It is your loss.”
“I am interested,” she answers.
She looks up into the destroyed ceiling, as if searching for the words. “Just not like this.”
Mander’s grunt is the only acknowledgment of her reply. “It will lose stability soon, and eventually collapse back into its natural state. But for now, the doorway is wide open. With this size fragment, we could fit hundreds of souls.” He shakes his head. “It seems that it will only be one today. Such a wasted opportunity.”
“You shouldn’t be doing this to an innocent woman,” Marine says.
“She’s hardly innocent,” he snaps. “She tried to kill me.”
But Marine clenches her jaw. “This is wrong.”
“This is necessary,” he replies harshly. “Where do you think your power comes from? Your place of privilege in this world?” He points up at her from his sitting position. “For you to say that this is wrong, you are like a queen refusing her throne. And what a stunning queen you would be, if you only had the courage to envision it.”
A groan echoes throughout the room.
“Quickly, now,” Mander adds. “Push her in.”
“She’s in pain.”
“Then remove her from it! Pain is only of the body. Pain is only of this world.”
I watch on, as Marine cautiously steps forward. She stands over Chimeline, and then stoops down, grabbing her limp arm with one hand, while almost caressing her black hair in the other.
I almost can’t bear to watch.
Marine bends down and whispers something in Chimeline’s ear.
Meanwhile, the area around the pool seems to be darkening.
At first, I think it’s the undulation of the white light. A trick of the eye. Simply moving shapes, underwater shadows.
But then, I realize that the immediate area surrounding the pool is darker than the rest of the room, even though it should be the opposite. It should be bathed in light, but, ironically, it’s cast in shade.
Directly above the glowing pool, the air is hazy and curved. Translucent tendrils, almost imperceptible, are being pulled inward, in every direction.
The voidstone is swallowing the light.
Another groan fills the room, and this time the ground shakes violently. Even I can feel it on the island.
Marine stands up straight. She’s visibly shaking. “No,” she says, her voice surprisingly level and confident. “I won’t help you in this.”
She wipes her face with the back of a hand. In the shadow light, I see a tear fall down her cheek. It looks like a droplet from her diamond earrings.
Mander lets out a guttural sound. He tries to get up from his cross-legged position, but he can’t seem to stand on his own. So he begins crawling around the pool, across the floor, to Chimeline.
“Dem!”
I turn around.
It’s Colu.
Across the rift from me, he points to the bucket of spilled paint at my feet, tied to the thick rope. It’s caught within the bamboo stalks that cross the rift, all the way to his side, where it’s wound and knotted up.
He’s untying it from his end.
The rope.
I pick up the wooden bucket. It’s still coated with wet, blue paint that covers my hands as I grab it. There are holes set into each side of the thick rim, where the rope is bound.
I pull hard.
The rope snakes around some of the bamboo scaffolding, getting caught, but it comes away once Colu unties the knot on his end. Within no time, I’ve got a coil of rope in my hands—about the time it takes for Mander to reach Chimeline.
He grabs her thick, black hair, pulling her toward the glowing pool.
Chimeline screams hysterically while fighting back, blindly clawing at Mander’s face and body. Her hands find purchase on one of his blue shirtsleeves—it rips clean off at the shoulder and falls off his arm.
It’s sucked sideways, into the pool. As it connects with the liquid, it disappears in an intense flash of light.
Her protests aren’t working. Despite Mander’s fatigue, he is still stronger than her, and is dragging her toward the shimmering white.
It’s only a few feet away.
“Stop it!” Marine yells, hands to her head.
I stand at the edge, ready to throw the bucket, but there’s no way she can grab it. She’s fighting for her life.
Minor flashes of brilliance are happening now, like staccato pinpricks of lightning in a darkened storm cloud. It’s from the smaller bits of glass and mirror that are laying nearby. They’re all being pulled in. The two dark nails that were driven into Chimeline’s feet slide across the floor and disappear in two pulses of white.
Surrounding all of this are countless tendrils of black.
With a pang of exertion, Mander again pulls Chimeline’s hair with both hands. His head is blood red and glistens with sweat and reflected light. Her straight black hair is sucked toward the glowing pool—they look almost like the dim contrails, only more vivid and opaque.
One of Chimeline’s hands is on his face, fingers clawing at his eyes. Her other hand is on the floor.
It touches the pool of light.
She immediately turns white, a flash of lightning. And then she begins to scream.
But this scream is different. I’ve heard it before. It’s muted, higher-pitched, distant. A voice in a cave through the storm.
Good Unnamed. It’s the wind. The sound in the void.
As I drop to my knees, the room snaps in two.
The entire western side of the room—the section where Mander, Marine, and Chimeline stand—drops away from view, sliding down about ten feet, until it suddenly lurches and stops with a painful and drawn out cracking and splintering sound. The ceiling is rent perfectly down the middle, separating the two sides of the Celestium.
I’ve lost sight of the three, so I stand and run forward to the edge.
They have all been knocked to the floor, which is now at an angle. The southern, left side is higher than the right.
Chimeline’s hand no longer touches the pool, nor does she glow white. She lies on her back, mouth open, one hand clutching the other hand over her heart. It looks like she’s s
truggling to breathe.
Next to her, the undulating, white pool of voidance begins to spread, turning from a circular shape into an oval.
It’s following gravity, like any pool would.
Headed away from Mander and directly toward Marine.
The room shudders again.
Now.
“Chimeline!”
Her wide eyes lock onto mine, as I swing the rope.
“Grab it!”
The bucket acts as a perfect weight. As it leaves my hands and I loosen my grip, the rope snakes through.
The bucket crosses the ten-foot rift, and falls at least the same distance, until it hits the parquet floor on the other side, perilously close to the shimmering pool of voidance.
It skitters a bit, just out of Chimeline’s reach, and starts to slide and spin to the right.
Marine lunges for it, dropping to her knees to grab hold of the bucket before it has a chance to fall back into the rift. She then shoves it into Chimeline’s hands, who is still lying prone on the floor, as if in shock.
Mander grabs one of the voidstones around his neck.
“I said no!” Marine shouts. She grabs her own necklace, as she steps in-between them.
But Mander is too fast. His voidance arrives first.
It must be the same technique he had used before. A violent gust of air, forced from above, toward Chimeline.
Only this time, Marine is standing there, instead.
Instantly, she’s pushed to the ground, and forward. Right onto the elliptical puddle.
Her body goes in. Underneath. Knees and feet, to her lower waist. As if she’s washing her hair by the riverside, only screaming while doing so.
For the briefest of moments, time stops.
Like Chimeline’s did, Marine’s body turns a painful white, but it’s more than just a flash. Eventually, I need to look away, and when I do, her black figure haunts me.
The cracking and splintering return.
It’s cleaner. Not drawn out. A ripping note of finality in carried in it. Such silence afterward, as if there is nothing left to fight for.
“Chimeline!” I yell in my blindness. “Grab hold!”
Please.
Before the words leave my mouth, there is a weight in my hands. A weight that makes my soul lift in ecstasy.
But the paint makes my palms slippery, and the rope slides through my burning palms.
I fall to the ground and begin sliding off the edge.
Someone grabs hold of me.
The enervated?
No. Colu.
Blythe.
An arm over my shoulder.
Hands on my feet.
“Pull!”
I am blinking, frantically trying to see, but the only thing in front of me is Marine’s haunted silhouette. A black shape against blue sky.
My hands burn, but I keep pulling. The pain is all I have to give. I keep pulling until the weight is lifted.
A void.
An indivisible in my arms.
Sunlight.
There is nothing but sunlight.
Faith is Wrapped in Silence
I don’t take a breath until we cross Colu’s bridge, which is not a moment too soon.
The center island breaks apart and falls away toward the beach in a similar fashion as the western side. The Xian rug, desk, chandelier, even the remains of the scaffolding—all of it snaps off and disappears from view the instant we climb off the bamboo.
As I listen to the distant, ensuing rumble, I can’t help but think of the timing of it all. The Celestium’s collapse and our return to safety. It seems too close a call to be coincidental.
The others seem to be thinking the same thing. Blythe immediately gets on his knees. Like me, Colu sits on the floor. He adjusts his black eye patch. “If that’s not kismet, I don’t know what is.”
Against the blue sky, Marine’s burned-in silhouette is replaced by the living form of Chimeline, as she collapses in my lap. The smell of her sweat and lingering orange perfume comes over me. Her skin is slippery, making me clutch her even tighter, as if she still dangles perilously over an abyss.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper into her ear. The sheer wind blows her hair around me, so I pull back. “I didn’t know they wouldn’t protect you. When I gave the voidstones away—”
“It’s alright,” she answers, placing a hand on my cheek. “They know now. They know my name.”
Her cryptic answer takes me by surprise. “The enervated?”
In the middle of her nod, her skin begins to glow a pale moonlight.
“Chimeline?”
Her eyes roll into the back of her head and her mouth opens slightly, as if in ecstasy. Her body goes slack in my arms, and I quickly adjust my grip to prevent her from falling backwards.
“Chimeline!”
I grip her shoulders tightly and give her a shake.
Her head bobs forward, black hair glowing white.
“What the...” Colu says, standing up in panic.
My heart tightens. She seems lost to me again. After everything that transpired in this room, I was beginning to hope that she was safe.
My only solace is that she’s not in pain. This is not Mander’s voidspeaking at work. It’s the opposite—she seems incredibly at peace.
I slowly lay her down.
“Blythe,” I call out. He’s lost in prayer, so I nudge him in the side, which gets his attention. “Do you see this?”
He raises his head, eyes fluttering. “Good Unnamed.”
“What’s happening to her?”
He shakes his head. “It looks like soterian light. Only not as strong.”
“She touched the pool,” I add. “Briefly. With her hand.”
“I saw.” Blythe crawls forward, squinting while analyzing her. He runs his fingers down her arm, past her body, toward her bare feet, touching them delicately. “They have healed her,” he whispers.
I look at her bare feet. He’s right. The wounds from the nails have vanished.
“Is that what the glow is from?” I ask. “They’re healing her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hey,” Colu says loudly.
I look up.
He stands at the edge of the cliff, peering west, out to sea.
We both look at him.
“That fucker is getting away.” He spits into the open sky. “Somehow he survived the fall.”
“The empowered?” Blythe asks, his head picking up.
Colu nods and points. “He’s on the beach.”
“Let him go,” I say. I cup Chimeline’s ghostly face with my palm. “He can only run so far.”
Tears are in my eyes. Maybe it’s the brightness.
Blythe is correct—her glow is not as strong as the pool. I can make out details of her body. Her eyebrows. Lips. Her clothes. Fingernails. When Chimeline had momentarily touched the pool, she had turned into a pure silhouette of white. The same thing happened to Marine, except Marine’s body sank in deeply. And then the island broke off.
This is somehow the same, yet different.
I want to slap her across the face, to try to shake her out of this stupor, but I can’t bring myself to do it.
It doesn’t even look like she’s breathing.
I bring my face very close to hers, to check. I can feel her warm exhales on me, and then I part her bangs and give her a soft kiss on the forehead.
She stirs.
Her eyes blink rapidly as her body reawakens. She sits up suddenly, putting her arms around me and clutching my back with her fingernails. They tear at my wound there, but the pain is pure joy to me.
She has returned. The moonlit glow has vanished.
“We must hurry,” she says, pulling away while biting her bottom lip.
Her face is soiled in dust, sweat, and dried blood. But I cannot help but stare into her dark eyes, another abyss, captivated by the fairness of her flaws. It rips my heart open that I let so much damage be done to her, and yet s
he doesn’t blame me. She has never once blamed me for anything.
“Hurry where?” I ask.
She puts her hand back on my cheek. “They say you must jump.”
“Jump?” My eyes dart toward the edge.
We’re on a sheer plateau, facing west. The barren, open sky. White gulls circle above, perhaps as shocked as I am.
Behind and above us is the Celestium—or at least the eastern remains of it. A pinnacle of Winter’s Baiou’s splendor, split straight down the middle. In front of us is Xi Bay.
“You mean off the cliff?”
She nods. “Yes.”
Chimeline rises to her feet and urges me to stand, which I do. Together, the three of us approach Colu by the precipice.
Far down below—at least a few hundred feet—is the beach, littered with ruins. The emerald blue paint of the ceiling speckles the shore like colorful rocks, its gold stars reflecting the midday sun. Splinters of wood have already been dragged out to sea. Dust rises from it all, like smoke from a dying fire.
A gust of wind buffets the shoreline. The cloud is torn apart into miniature cyclones that curl while fading away. This reveals a small, untouched area of beach. It is perfectly clear, devoid of any ruins. Pure white sand.
And a pure white dress.
Marine.
My three friends must see her the same time that I do, as I hear everyone take in sharp breaths.
Chimeline turns into my chest.
I furrow my brow, doubt and hope colliding.
The way the area of beach underneath Marine’s body is unblemished indicates that she was contained in the same membrane of voidance that safely held Mander. Her body touched down upon sand as soft as a feather.
“She might still be alive,” I whisper to no one in particular.
“No,” Chimeline quickly says, muffled into my chest. I feel the meager shaking of her head. “I’m sorry, but the cage has been opened.”
“She was in Mander’s membrane,” I point downward. “There is not a mark on her.”
She keeps shaking her head. “I was going to tell you, but she says that the time for mourning is not now. She wants us to hurry.”
She?
“Did Marine voidspeak with you?”
After a moment of silence, I gently raise Chimeline’s head in my hands and make eye contact with her. “Did Marine speak to you?”