by David Adams
*****
The pounding on the metal grew louder. Tami could hear it from where she was – a solid metal container, nearly four meters cubed, the floor covered in ash.
“Blast it open! Hurry, curse you!” came a voice.
Tami, for a brief moment, thought she recognised it as Antani’s. She smiled and pressed her face against the soot-covered glass, looking at the mix of Toralii faces staring back at her, searching for the Toralii’s grey face.
One of the Neralanese guards raised his voice in reply. “No. That’s Neralanese property... if you damage the furnace it will be out of action for weeks—Warbringer K’sess will have all of our heads.”
“Tami! Tami, open the door this instant!” The original voice again, its owner thumping on the metal with weak, starved paws.
It WAS Antani. She could see the Toralii was trying to pry open the furnace door with his bare paws, his fingers missing their claws, broken and bleeding. “I want you to open this door right now!”
The energy inside the furnace began to build and build, just as Tami knew that it would. The whine of the power buildup was much louder from inside but its pitch remained the same. “It’s okay,” she said, smiling at them all. They looked so very frightened, angry, alarmed, but she felt perfectly at peace with everything. “I’m going to see my mother.”
Antani pressed his face against the glass. “It’s not your time, Tami. You’re just a cub!”
Tami shook her head, giggling at the adult’s foolishness. “No, it’s okay. Mother misses me—I’m going to see her. Don’t worry. It’s like you said, the body is just a container. Up there, there’s food, there’s water...” she looked up at the charred metal roof of the furnace, imagining the bright pinpricks of light beyond. “There’s blankets and warmth and everything I could ever want. And she’s there, she wants me to come...”
The timer she had set ticked down. Already she felt the growing heat beneath her body. She wiggled her partially frostbitten toes. It was the first time they had been really warm in months.
“You’re going to die! Turn off the timer!”
Tami smiled, closing her eyes and leaning back against the metal shell of the furnace. “I won’t die, I’ll go to the Gods. That’s what they told me—that’s what YOU told me—and I believe it.”
A pause, now, as the energy buildup reached a crescendo.
“I have faith.”
*****
She opened her eyes. It was surprisingly cool and white as air rushed past her—rushed through her. She felt herself fly through the atmosphere of Evarel, floating gracefully up into the night sky. She could see a bright pinpoint of light, the ignited furnace, far below her but she paid it no heed. Such mortal trivialities were behind her now.
Tami drifted up through the planet's upper atmosphere and gasped in wonder at all the things around her, things she hadn't seen before, things nobody alive had seen. A pale white trails of souls headed away from the surface, joining and merging with others, forming a great river which flowed towards the welcoming gates of the Sky God's Palace. Dark black streaks of the Harvesters floated around in space like birds over a trout stream, plucking the wicked departing souls—those unworthy of entering the Palace—out of the ghostly stream and tearing them to shreds with their fierce talons.
None came close to her, however.
The faces of the departed watched, smiling, from the field of stars which ever so much resembled the balconies of a house. They called her across the gulf by name, crying happily, beckoning her towards the light.
Then the doors of the Palace opened and Tami saw the outline of her mother, hands outstretched, urging her onward.
“I have faith,” she repeated, throwing herself into her beaming mother's welcoming arms.
The Lacunaverse
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Novels available on Amazon
Lacuna: Demons of the Void
Lacuna: The Sands of Karathi
Lacuna: The Spectre of Oblivion
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Faith (FREE!)
Imperfect
Magnet
Magnet: Special Mission
