Beyond Oblivion

by Daryl Banner

  “See … who?” finally asks Dregor in his uppity, well-meaning voice that so makes him sound like a Lifted, despite his being not.

  Erana clears her throat. “The Sleeping King.”

  Dregor and Aegis eye one another. “Well, I can’t suppose why not,” quietly murmurs the scale-skin to the blond shield.

  The three of them exit the Crystal Court and walk the short street to the entrance of Cloud Keep, which is being manned by two spear-holding soldiers. Uthrec and Daavy, former Sky Guard who, against all odds, survived the Madness and the siege up here in the Lifted City. Their loyalty rests with us only because Axel made it so. Once beyond the Cloud Keep gate, they cross two courtyards and pass under a great chrome archway before entering the largest courtyard yet, at the center of which stands Cloud Tower, which still has a slight lean to it, despite their efforts to right the tall structure.

  “After you,” politely instructs Dregor, pulling open the doors and stepping aside for Erana to lead. He’s very kind to me.

  After ascending a million or so steps, passing down two halls and through four heavy doors, they at last arrive at the great King’s Chambers, which are sadly not meant for Erana, Queen or not. Upon the bed that once held Greymyn’s dying form for many months, there now rests the skin-and-bones body of Impis Lockfyre. His face, without its white powders or colors, is cheerless. He has a blemish near his slightly parted lips, which slowly drink in one breath of air at a time. His hair is a smooth, brushed mane of brown, swept to the side and splayed across his white silk pillow. His long hands rest over his gently rising and falling chest, fingers interlocked.

  Across the room, seated in a chair, is the plump form of Umi, a woman with grey hair, a warm brown complexion, and two watery eyes that—despite their softness—can turn sharp in an instant. She is the one who watches over Impis’s body and cares for him.

  She’s cared for him all these months. A bedside nurse. A healer.

  Erana stands by the body of Impis Lockfyre for ages before she says anything. “He looks so normal.”

  Dregor, who has come to the foot of the bed, lets out a little chuckle. Aegis does not, standing by her side with his hands folded over his waist. “Indeed,” Dregor agrees. There is nearly a pinch of love in his eyes as he looks down upon Impis’s body.

  Umi only watches them from across the room, silent and still.

  Erana tilts her head. “How long has he—?”

  “One hundred and seventy-three days,” recites Dregor.

  “And … is it true?”

  He lifts his gaze. “Is what true?”

  “Is he trapped in a permanent nightmare? As Rone said? I was told that he—”

  “Don’t you dare say his name,” spits Aegis from her side.

  Erana flinches. “I apologize.”

  “Don’t apologize.” Aegis’s voice shakes with anger. “Just don’t say that fucking boy’s name.”

  “Aegis …” sighs Dregor.

  “He tried to kill me and Kellen. And then he stabbed our King. It’s my fault this happened. We couldn’t stop him. We failed. It’s my fucking fault.”

  “It’s no one’s fault. The rogue could literally walk through walls. Calm, Aegis.” Dregor’s voice is soothing, his words drawn out. “Just be calm on it and let the woman speak freely.”

  “She can speak as she wishes,” Aegis goes on tersely, “but she can well enough leave out any mention of that fucker’s name.”

  Dregor takes a breath, then faces Erana. “Please, go on.”

  Umi still watches them in her chair, listening, silent.

  Erana, stirred by Aegis’s outburst, rethinks whether she wishes to ask her question at all. “I … I was just pointing out that … that the person responsible for … for … responsible for this …” She swallows hard. Stop stuttering. “He had said he injected Impis with a nightmare serum, which would keep his mind trapped in a nightmare for the rest of his days.”

  After a moment of thought, Dregor shakes his head. “No. I think he … I believe he was just trying to scare them. That’s what I believe.”

  “But he was under Axel’s power when he said it,” Erana presses on. “He truly believed it about the serum. Unless he himself was lied to, then it must be the truth.”

  Dregor swallows hard. The love in his eyes dies and is replaced with a spoonful of misgiving and fear. “Perhaps.”

  “So isn’t it the better kindness,” Erana goes on, arriving at her point, “to end Impis Lockfyre’s life and, thusly, end his nightmare?” Her gaze is on Dregor, who is visibly shaken by the mere suggestion of her words. “Isn’t it rather an act of mercy, to not keep him in such a terrible, tormented state? To end the torment?”

  Aegis is next to speak, and his words are cold and deadly. “Are you truly suggesting that we kill Impis Lockfyre?”

  Erana realizes her error too late. “No. I apologize. I was … I was only meaning—”

  “Your meaning is clear,” Dregor cuts in to assure her, despite the indignant look on Aegis’s face.

  Erana peers worriedly at Umi, who stares back, expressionless. Then Erana casts her eyes downward to the bed sheets, ashamed and terrified. What a stupid thing to say, she scolds herself. What a stupid, stupid thing to say.

  Dregor offers her a smile. “You come from a place of kindness. I understand. Of course, none of us would suggest to murder the King. No, not truly. We only … wish what’s best for him, of course.”

  “Of course,” agrees Erana quickly, then adds, “The Kingship is kind, the Kingship is good,” though her words are weak and nearly soundless.

  Aegis remains quiet, glowering to himself in the silence, and not one of them utters a thing more for quite some time. The three only stare down at Impis as he gently breathes, Umi watching on from a distance. Cold wind pulls its way into the chambers from the opened balcony, the silk drapes billowing as the breeze picks up and dances about the room.

  Erana’s heavy eyes are on Impis when she asks the question. “He’s … never waking up, is he?”

  And after a long time, it is Aegis who finally answers: “No.”

  0255 Arrow

  He watches the woman leave with the two Guardian, the rising sun over their backs as they disappear in a sweep of morning fog and slum smoke down the street. He had found himself unsurprised by the way in which Wick’s mother carried herself. She reminded him a lot of Lionis and little of Wick, except perhaps for her passion.

  It makes him think of his own mother and sister, whom he has not bothered to check upon for so long, he worries he’ll suffer quite a similar scene like Wick’s mother just did. I don’t want to find them dead someday, he realizes. I want to find them alive and well, even if with that metalworker in the tenth. I want her to even have found love with him, perhaps, to soothe her after the loss of father.

  That thought straightens his spine at once. If he can live his life being just half the man that his father Eron Fyrefellow was, Arrow will die a happy man.

  With a new determination, he marches to the backyard and puts his hands on the giant charm. He closes his eyes and reaches into it, refusing to come out of its inner workings and cryptic coding until he has himself an answer at long last.

  The sun is beaming over his head, burning the back of his neck before he opens his eyes again. A hundred strange charm-codes and confusing webs of power still lie beneath his fingers, unknown, and unreadable. Beads of sweat drip down his neck and backside like tiny cold fingers, and his jaw is so tense that it’s giving him a headache.

  “Father wouldn’t have given up,” he announces to no one, then slaps a hand back on the charm. He puts both hands on it. He crawls atop the damned thing and spreads his limbs, as if to hug it.

  Clouds cover the sky. A once hot-and-blue day becomes grey at once, and then it is a different sort of cool wetness that trickles over his skin. Rain, he thinks ruefully. Why, but of course I’d be rained on in this moment. Rain, a slave to its own nature, cannot help but prove its dislo
yalty to the sky by falling.

  “Well, I had wanted to read a book out here in the fresh air, but it appears a storm is rolling in,” comes a voice near the back door.

  Arrow lifts his head. It’s the pleasure boy Athan brought home.

  “Sorry,” Edrick says as his eyes drag down Arrow’s body. “Is this how a Charmer does his work? What a curious position that is.”

  “I’m …” Arrow sighs and slides off the thick metal disc. “I’m … It’s someone else’s charm. I have to experiment.”

  “Experiment. Aye, that’s what all my Lifted clients would say. ‘Oh, I’m married,’ they crow. ‘I’ve a wife and two boys at home.’ On and on. ‘I’m not a boy of boys, I just enjoy a set of stronger lips on my cock.’ And then they’re sprawled upon my bed much in the same way you just sprawled atop that thing. What is that thing?” Edrick slinks over to its side, squinting at it. “What does it do?”

  “I would like very much to assume it’s a Lifted charm,” Arrow admits. “Perhaps something that ought to lend me ears into the sky.”

  “Ears? Hmm. I only know a handful of ear Charmers.” Edrick circles the thing, gives it a kick, then shakes his head. “Too big, don’t you think?”

  Arrow’s brows pull together. “Yes, quite big. Clearly.”

  “Clearly.” Edrick puts two fingers to his cheek, drumming them there for a moment. “Most Charmers I know work metal to do them a specific purpose. But you’re the first sound Charmer I’ve met.”

  Arrow blinks. He, admittedly, has met very few—if any—other charmers. He tries to remember a boy back in school, but wonders if he’s got the memory wrong. Maybe he was an Elementalist, instead. Well, working metal is a sort of Elementalism, he reasons.

  “But what do I know? I just have sex for a living.”

  Arrow can’t pull his eyes from the charm. “Sound Charmer …” He glances at Edrick. “You’ve met other Charmers?”

  “Doing what I do, you meet all sorts of people. My, my. The list goes on and on. In fact, one of the assailants Athan and I just handled claimed to be an object Charmer, in fact.” Edrick bristles. “He cursed weapons to turn on their owners. Strange, isn’t it?”

  Arrow swallows tightly. “I’m sorry about your assault. Are you faring well with—?”

  “Oh, no, don’t bother, I’m fine, I’m always fine, I’ve had clients who did me worse than those fools,” Edrick says, playing it off.

  Arrow suspects the assault affected Edrick more than he’s admitting, but won’t press it. “Other Charmers, you were saying …?”

  “Oh, my favorite was a man who could touch one end of a piece of metal, and bright red lights would come out of the other end. He played a few tricks on one of my beds, and the whole while as we fucked—and boy did we fuck for a while, a heavy coin I made on that man—red lights flashed and burst from my bedframe. Really, it was spectacular. Sex and charming visuals. Charming. Get it?” He gives a dry chuckle at his own joke, then shivers and moves back to the sliding door he left open, standing there in the doorway. “Not a fan of rain. My hair turns into a blond bramble.”

  Arrow studies the charm, curious. Have I been aiming down the wrong path this whole time? He considers all the hundreds of various ways a Charmer from the Lifted City might affect a piece of metal. As his imagination runs away from him, he realizes the possibilities are limitless.

  Perhaps he doesn’t know as much about Charmers as he once thought he did.

  Maybe sound is only one piece of my skill. Maybe …

  Arrow places his hands on the metal again, searching within it using his power. He tries to think on it differently as he reaches and searches, plunging as far as he’s daring to go.

  He chases an instinct, climbing atop the charm once again. He grabs hold of it on all sides, reaching, reaching. His heart races. He feels prickles of energy deep in his fingers. Is it an electricity charm? he wonders, his mind exploding with ideas. Maybe I will see an image from the Lifted City. Maybe I will see a memory book of the Charmer’s thoughts. A journal charm. Maybe I will burst into flames and this will be nothing more than a lantern charm, emitting fire. Maybe it will emit feelings, causing me to grow incredibly happy, incredibly giddy, or just plain horny as an animal. Maybe it’s a teleport charm that will—

  And then Arrow screams.

  The world flips over. Something surges deep into him. A power. An electric current he has no right to survive. A furious beam of fire that burns him from one end to the other. Ice cold torrents of water enveloping him on all sides, a wintry cocoon, painful and terrifying.

  And then he falls off of the charm and slams against a cold floor.

  Arrow blinks a hundred times, his whole body shaking. Every nerve hurts. He can’t stop kicking his legs and wriggling his arms. A seizure? Am I having a seizure? His thoughts are perfectly coherent, and yet he can’t control his body, his limbs flinging and panicked and in incomparable agony.

  Then it stops all at once.

  Arrow sucks in his first breath of air, all his limbs flopping to the cold floor. He breathes deeply, staring up at the glassy ceiling, and wondering if he’s still alive.

  Wait. Glassy ceiling?

  Cold floor?

  Arrow dares to sit up, then is surprised to find every trace of pain having fled from his body. He turns his head in wonder, looking all around him. He is in some sort of glassy room, like the ones in the Greens that hold plants and flowers within it, a little greenhouse, windows on all sides … except there are no plants here. It is just Arrow in a big empty room with glass walls.

  He peers to the left. Beyond the glass are some trees on one side, and what appears to be a courtyard of some kind on the other.

  He squints. A door is at the opposite end of the room, straight ahead of him, a door in the middle of all the glass.

  Arrow pushes himself to his feet, his left foot of which kicks against a thing behind him. He turns, startled, to find the same giant metal charm sitting there, cold and silent.

  He leans forward. A wiggly, artful, unfamiliar design is carved all around its perimeter. There’s a couple indents around its side, too. This isn’t the same charm, he realizes with a start. It is similar in size, yes, and has the same general shape, but …

  Arrow hears a sound somewhere beyond the glass. He freezes in place and listens, eyes wide. Through the glass—which is quite a bit cloudy, the glass likely aged, or having moisture built upon it—he sees the general shape of a big house, three stories, if he had to guess. An animal is darting across the grass—grass, it’s all grass outside this glass structure. Is it a cat? A dog? The animal doesn’t seem to notice Arrow as it comes to an abrupt stop somewhere in the yard to inspect something, sniffing. Then the animal squats, relieves itself, sniffs at its little gift, then darts away suddenly, as if spooked by a sound. It’s gone from view.

  Arrow hurries to the door, then lets himself out. A fresh blast of air crashes over him. The air is thick and windy. Too windy. He looks off toward the house. A big house. A nice house. Clean bricks, giant columns that hold up a canopy that stretches out over the big back doors, which look as grand as a—

  Arrow swallows.

  As grand as a Lifted mansion.

  He turns the other way. Before him stands a very tall fence made of polished metal and glass. His whole system surges with excitement and fear at once at the sight of it. Slowly, he moves away from the door and approaches the tall fence. Every one of his steps is wracked in fear. He moves slowly, carefully, as if the ground could give away beneath him with any wrong step.

  Then he’s at the fence. Arrow Fyrefellow looks downward, and he makes an astounding discovery.

  The slums.

  He’s looking down at the slums.

  What the fuck did that charm just do?

  He hears another sound, this one coming from the house. He spins about, startled, and finds a face at one of the windows. Then, the window opens and the face is made more clear—a man with a bright yellow beard. T
he man stares and stares, as if unsure whether he’s truly seeing Arrow, or if it’s a play on his eyes.

  Arrow is rooted to the ground, eyes wide, body paralyzed.

  “Hey!” calls out the man. “Who are you?? Hey!”

  Arrow takes no chances. He rushes back to the glass building and throws himself through the door. In seconds, he’s atop the giant metal charm once again, clinging to it. He reaches deep into it with his power, desperately reaching for whatever it was he found that sent him here.

  It isn’t working.

  “Hey!!” calls the man’s voice from the window. “I’m calling the Sky Guard! I’m calling them now!”

  The more Arrow panics, the harder it is to use his Legacy. His heart is racing so fast, it could explode in his chest. Please, take me back, he begs of the charm, searching, searching, reaching, reaching. Take me back now. Please. Mystery Charmer. Please. Take me—

  The world tears itself into pieces once again.

  Arrow screams, the worst agony he has ever experienced in his whole life.

  And then he screams some more.

  The pain causes him to roll right off the charm before he’s even certain it’s finished its task.

  His whole body convulses, arms and legs thrashing about as if a billion tiny shocks are chasing through his every nerve and limb. He doesn’t know if he’s screaming anymore.

  He can’t even hear anything, the world so far away.

  He turns onto his side and vomits at once. It is violent and it is painful. His body keeps jerking without his permission.

  The convulsions last twice as long as they did the first time. He can’t seem to get them to stop.

  He wants to die. He will do anything to make the pain end.

  Then suddenly, all at once and with no warning, it does. Arrow takes his first breath and lies there on the grass of the Lesser backyard, every bit of the pain gone. He whimpers, an unspoken cry of terror on his lips.

  I never want to feel that again.

  Not ever again.

  Edrick stands over him suddenly. Aghast and jaw-dropped, the pleasure boy exclaims: “What the fuck just happened?!”