Beyond Oblivion

by Daryl Banner

  Everything’s normal. That’s what Tide is determined to believe as he smells the delicious aroma of Dag’s cooking, which will also no doubt be infused with good emotions thanks to Dag’s Legacy.

  But still, Tide keeps sneaking glances at the window, as if Gin will suddenly appear there. Every inch of his skin feels sticky at just the thought, as if the very air he breathes is fusing to his body.

  “A foot rub then until dinner’s ready,” Dag decides, rushing up to the coffee table, kneeling, and getting to work.

  Tide closes his eyes and tries to relax, letting the firm push and twist and kneading of Dag’s skillful thumbs into his sore, aching heels and ridges of his feet soothe him. No matter how much he complains, the touch of Dag’s hardworking fingers pressing lovingly into his feet is better than any emotion the boy can cast into his food. He may never know the secret ingredient of a decent massage that makes it so perfect, but he relishes in it, and for a long while, he even forgets about the ghost of Gin hovering around every window and unlocked door.

  Dag’s hands work up to the ankles, which is new, but Tide is too far away and drifting in a sea of pleasure to care. With a half-gone, drunken smirk on his rocked-back face, he lets it happen.

  He lets Dag’s hands work up to his thick thighs, too.

  Tide sighs with relief, his eyes closed, letting it all happen.

  The boy rubs in rhythmic circles and circles and circles. It’s so hypnotizing, the strength of two loving hands kneading his muscles and working out tensions he didn’t even know were there.

  He feels heat between his legs. The heat moves farther up, and then farther up, and then farther up still. The heat now gathers at his crotch, swelling, hovering, patient.

  Tide’s eyes stay closed.

  It’s just heat. The thought barely even occurs to him. Pleasure is flowing through every part of his body, from his fingertips to his toes and up his thick, strong legs, worked into a state of nirvana by the boy’s expert, trained hands. It’s just heat.

  And then it’s a mouth.

  Tide’s lips part as he breathes out with relief.

  The warm mouth opens, breathing and sucking onto the fabric of the crotch of his pants. His dick swells, flexing against the material and aching as the heat grows like a summer sun.

  It’s just heat.

  Dag’s hands keep rubbing, massaging, and kneading his thighs.

  And a mouth keeps sucking, lapping, and breathing on his fast-swelling crotch.

  Tide doesn’t notice how tightly his fingers are clenched about the edge of the couch. He doesn’t see it either. Everything right now is pure feeling, and it is untainted by the bias of vision.

  His crotch has grown so tight, he feels his dick straining to be released. He does nothing to aid it, overwhelmed as the mouth keeps breathing, sucking, working on him tirelessly. His dick flexes against its fabric prison, straining and straining and straining against the hot mouth—and that fucking heat …

  One hand disappears from his thigh.

  And then he feels a tug at his waist. Another tug. The pop of a button, another pop, and another.

  When his dick is freed, Tide lets out a whisper and a groan.

  And a mouth wraps around him, swallowing the length of his thick meat down in one quick, slick sliding of lips.

  Tide bucks against it, groaning worse, melting.

  It’s just heat …

  He gasps as the mouth picks up pace, picks up strength, sucking and twisting, hungry for him.

  Heat …

  And then, with little notice but a grunt of surprise and a small whimper, Tide’s dick releases all its tension at once, causing him to buckle forward, his hands slapping onto the back of Dag’s head. He lets out a series of noises, all vowels, all nonsense, as his dick shoots and shoots and shoots inside that warm, wet mouth.

  Then there is peace. Silence. Stillness.

  A ruffle of clothes, a subtle movement beneath his hands, and then Tide falls back against the couch again, out of breath.

  More peace. Silence. Stillness.

  Tide listens to the soft sound of a body rising, and then short, soft footsteps, and then the tiny scrape of a spoon against a pot. “It’s ready,” Dag announces quietly.

  Tide opens his eyes.

  0294 Erana

  Erana Sparrow, Queen of Nothing, eats quietly and alone in the courtyards outside of Cloud Tower.

  For some reason, she isn’t fond of the balconies anymore.

  Or the view they provide.

  She is seated on a bench situated on a winding path through the militantly-planted flowers. A small pond is behind her, and a bush of bronze blooms is to her immediate left. She eats a sandwich made of the finest Lifted bread, a cut or two of tomato, a slice or two of meat, and a sprinkle of seasoning. It is a delicious meal, even if it’s a bit under the standard of a Royal Queen of Atlas.

  She can’t enjoy a bite of it, anyway.

  The only bite she wants to take is one out of Axel’s cruel, evil fucking heart.

  Erana takes another bite.

  Aegis stands some distance off, observing the flowers. Kellen, her other Axel-appointed watchdog today, has his arms folded as he stares down pensively at his reflection in the pool, a scowl on his long, gaunt face, his waist-length curtain of white hair flitting in the afternoon breeze.

  Suddenly, Erana glances Kellen’s way. “I revealed a lot of awful secrets about you at the Marshal meeting.”

  Kellen, a bit surprised at his being directly acknowledged, looks her way. “S-So?”

  “I put an unfair spotlight on you. I cast suspicion and doubt on your character. And I did so with the sole intention of winning over the room and staking my claim for the throne.”

  Kellen frowns. Despite the scowl on his face, he looks terrified to speak to her, but does. “A-And what exactly is your point?”

  “My point is that I’m sorry.” Erana shrugs. “And also I’m not.”

  Kellen squints at her, not following.

  Erana lowers her sandwich from her face, swallows her bite, then turns her whole body toward him. “Your past actions don’t only suggest a misloyalty to Impis. They also suggest you harbor doubts for the Icarade sisters. Icarade. Axel and Arcana. They don’t like their last name known, as does anyone in the Posse apparently, but I am a person of infinite mental recording capacity, and as such, I remember the full of each name.”

  “What is this?” spits Kellen, annoyed, yet still fearful, perhaps made more annoyed by said fear. “Are you threatening me?”

  “No. I’m enlisting you, fool.” Erana turns away from the now-bewildered Kellen to face Aegis, who has taken note of this dialogue and has lost all interest in the flowers. “Aegis. You once attended a sentencing of a childhood friend of yours, paying certain witness to his innocence. It was the Icarade sisters who pulled something from your friend’s head that convicted him and sentenced him to the Keep for four years.”

  Aegis looks as if he just had an invisible shoe stuffed in his mouth, his eyes wide and upon Erana with shock.

  Kellen comes around the bench and stands before Erana, his tall shadow eclipsing the sun and all else. “Make your intentions plain, Queen Erana. I’m tired of these mind games.”

  “Exactly.” Erana pops in her last bite of sandwich. Through her mouthful of tomato and bread, she says, “I want both of your help, plus four others among the Posse that I’ve handpicked. Umi. Dregor. Lyth. And Yoli.” She swallows, then lifts her chin toward the great height of Kellen. “The seven of us are going to kill Axel Icarade.”

  0295 Rone

  It wasn’t supposed to happen.

  Eerie would never hurt a human.

  And yet she did.

  She killed him.

  All the talk in the camp that night was of death and resentment and phrases like “I never should have trusted him” and “I knew he was bad news” and “He deserves a permanent exile to the Wilds” and countless other words that Rone totally deserves.
<
br />   I deserve this.

  “Rone …”

  He closes his eyes. Wick has tried to talk to him for the better part of a day. Rone can’t face anyone. Rone can’t look anyone in the eye, least of all Wick, least of all Korah Cagemont, least of all anyone who was a friend of Kraag Tourney’s. Apparently, that’s everyone.

  “Rone, please. Talk to me.”

  He doesn’t say a thing. He doesn’t even move, perfectly content to stay put right here in the back corner of Wick’s cabin, out of sight of everyone and everything.

  “You don’t think this is hard on me, too?” comes Wick’s voice. “Kraag was one of the first people I met here in the Oblivion. Now he is gone. And Dran is gone. Please, Rone, just talk to me.”

  I lost a friend today, too, Rone might say. But he doesn’t suspect anyone would be willing to sympathize much with him, nor care to grasp the depth of the relationship he had with that wild beast.

  Eerie was Rone’s only friend for the better part of six months.

  Eerie was Rone’s companion and family.

  He doesn’t care what the people say about wild cats and wild dogs and all things wild, wild, wild. He had a relationship with her. They understood each other. They hunted on behalf of each other. They braved the elements together. They were alone in this world—alone together. Eerie was Rone’s friend.

  And with one bad judgment, Eerie became the camp’s greatest enemy. It didn’t matter that Eerie just saved them by killing all but one of the wolves. Eerie also took one of their own. She had the Wild in her eyes, Rone could see it. Last night, she was unstoppable.

  Now she’s gone.

  Perhaps it was her time to leave. Perhaps that’s why she had gone away for so long yesterday. Perhaps she was ready to return to the Wilderwoods and leave me.

  Maybe the relationship was an illusion of fantasy in his mind.

  Maybe she never cared for him.

  Maybe she only stuck around because he had a use to her. Ever since he returned to Gaea, maybe his use to her has diminished, and she grew bored.

  Boredom, Rone thinks with sick humor. Boredom … That’s what I’m trying to justify this all with: fucking boredom. She was bored, and so took a human life.

  The tears are starting to come again.

  Rone lifts his hands to his face and sobs silently into them.

  Wick’s shuffled footsteps make his presence known. He doesn’t say anything more. Rone listens as Wick lowers himself next to him and puts an arm around him. Wick brings Rone’s head to his chest, cuddling him close, then rubs his back. “It’s okay … It’s okay …” Wick keeps whispering over and over.

  It’s not okay. It’s not going to be okay until something is done.

  0296 Arrow

  “Are you sure it wasn’t just an error? Like, totally sure?”

  Of course it’d be Pratganth who’d be the most scrutinizing. Of all the people seated here in the Penling’s crowded crafts room with old books and boxes of wood chips and buttons and thread and bits of colored paper and glue that gives off a headache-inducing aroma.

  “I don’t doubt my charms,” Arrow says calmly for the thirtieth time, it seems. “I don’t doubt—”

  “But it still could be an error, yes?”

  “I can’t answer the same fucking question ten different ways.”

  Prat gawks, gives a look toward the other room, then hisses, “Language, Arrow! Rippy’s still asleep, but might hear you!”

  Arrow ignores that entirely and faces the others: Ivy, Auleen, Iranda, Edrick, and Arcana. “The reason I’ve called this meeting right now—and at a time while Athan is occupied—is because I do not want to give him some ridiculous false hope that Wick is still alive. While I don’t believe my charm—”

  “But you just said it isn’t an error,” interrupts Prat.

  Arrow nearly talks over him in his ignoring of the insufferably annoying acne-faced fucker that is Pratganth Upgold. “—is erring in its identification of Wick’s locator chip, I don’t think it’s necessarily indicative of him being alive. It’s very possible that the obliteration of the chip by Metal Hand’s touch somehow warped the chip’s last transmission of coordinates, thusly indicating that …” Arrow sighs before saying his ridiculous conclusion. “… that Wick is somehow a hundred miles outside of the Last City of Atlas. There is simply no other explanation.”

  The Penlings look particularly uneasy from the news. They turn to one another with pained expressions, as if dreaming of the remote possibility that Wick could be alive.

  Arrow knows better. There’s no telling at all what Metal Hand’s touch could do to his chip, which was embedded inside Wick’s flesh. The only thing that he finds ultimately confusing is why the chip wouldn’t just give a reading of ‘null’ for the coordinates, or show the last recorded coordinates being Cloud Tower itself where the deed supposedly happened, according to Athan.

  That part, Arrow cannot make sense of, and won’t divulge in full detail to the others so as not to start a mess of annoying theories and conjectures.

  “He also found your dumb former leaders,” volunteers Edrick before Arrow is ready for it.

  “Leaders?” Prat stares at Arrow, surprised. “You mean—?”

  “Gandra and Yellow, yes. They’ve chips in them, too.”

  “And Rone?” prompts Prat. “What of Rone?”

  To that, Edrick is the one who sighs and says, “Yes, I’ve asked that already on the way back from the Noodle Shop. Something to do with Rone’s Legacy making the chip fall out of his body.” Edrick groans. “I don’t understand why his Legacy wouldn’t just phase away his chip, too, like it’s a part of him. A convenient inconvenience.”

  “I can’t say,” Arrow admits, “as I don’t know the odd intricacies of Rone Tinpassage and his gift.” He furrows his brow. “But as far as Yellow and Gandra are concerned, I think it leaves us an opportunity to … what’s that expression? … take two birds with a thrown stone.”

  “I love poetry,” sighs Edrick.

  Leaning against the back wall by a curtained window, Arcana nods knowingly at Arrow, perhaps surmising the plan from his mind before he’s even uttered it. After all, part of his little plan was her suggestion only a matter of days or weeks ago.

  “So what exactly are these two birds?” asks Prat, impatient.

  “One is the matter just mentioned: Yellow and Gandra. Their location is near the Core, possibly in the first or second. That means they might be hiding in the Slum King’s vicinity.”

  “Cowards,” mutters Prat to Ivy at his side, but Ivy doesn’t seem to pay him any mind, her full focus on Arrow.

  Arrow finds her full focus rather distracting. She seems to look on him in a curiously intense way ever since he returned from the Noodle Shop. It makes him want to return her strange staring just as intensely, especially considering that soft gown she’s wearing that, whether she’s aware of it or not, accentuate her nipples slightly.

  Arrow pulls his eyes away, aware suddenly of a specific type of blood-rushing sensation in his pants. Focus, you fool. “And our other bird is the matter of our diseased Greens. The Slum King is said to have a certain talent with … flora. My plan is—”

  “It’s brilliant,” says Ivy.

  A few heads turn her way, surprised by her outburst.

  She glances left, right, then seems to shrink into herself as she adds, “It’s only that I’ve wondered where those two ran off to. And we are worried about the state of the Greens. So if this Slum King’s Legacy can help, and if Yellow and Gan … Ganna … the lady with the strange name … are anywhere near the Slum King’s home, then—”

  “Two birds with a thrown stone,” finishes Arrow with a nod.

  Edrick steps forward. “I’m going to volunteer to join the party you’re sending out.” He gives a flick at his ear. “I think my gift comes to particularly good use when one has to watch one’s back.” Then a flicker of emotion passes over his face, his eyes downcast a second, and then he seems
to wipe the expression away at once. “Most of the time,” he finishes, then adds, “Plus I’m very bored ever since this Nickel butt boy arrived with his mother. Athan’s preoccupied.”

  Ivy makes a look on her face between trying not to laugh and forcing herself to be greatly offended, her face turning away and a hand going up to cover her mouth.

  Auleen gives Edrick a critical look. “Be happy for Athan. Just because you’re not the center of his world—”

  “To be clear, neither is Nickel,” Edrick interjects.

  “—doesn’t mean you get to go around calling him a ‘butt boy’. What do you call my wife and I behind our backs?” Auleen goes on with a smirk. “Pussy girls?”

  Iranda smacks her wife’s arm. “Auleen,” she scolds.

  Prat lifts his chin and rises from his perch. “Excuse me.” He gets everyone’s attention with a dramatic (and unnecessary) clearing of his throat. “As I was the one to map the most of Atlas, I believe it is only fair that I direct the party to its destination. From my memory and the scraps of map data our teams have gathered from our prior post in the sixth, I’m the only one among us with the most extensive knowledge of the first and second wards, and the Core itself.”

  Arrow wrinkles his face, then says, simply, “No.”

  Prat bristles, flicking his indignant eyes to Arrow. “Excuse me?”

  “No,” Arrow repeats. “The team will be led by Athan himself, and his team will consist of Edrick, and …” He ignores a tiny sting of misgiving. “… and Locke.”

  “Locke??” blurts Prat at once, outraged.

  Arrow, perhaps, has a third bird to knock with his stone, a bird he has had suspicions of for quite some time, a bird whose loyalty will be tested with this mission. “Yes.” He eyes Arcana. “I would send you, too, but I think you will be needed here the most, and I fear that I am not yet confident enough in whether your …” Whether your childhood friendship with this Slum King is to our benefit, or to our disadvantage, as you haven’t spoken to him in a very long time.