Parallel Worlds- the Heroes Within

by L. J. Hachmeister

  This will be the last time I look at my ceiling…

  Fear crept over him with cold, prickling feet, but the warmth of the rightness radiated out from his heart, spreading into his head and belly, his arms and legs. It pushed the fear away, and he sat up.

  Once more, Stavark crawled out his window, but this time he waited at the base of the tree, watching. Moments later, Mother left with the family sword in hand, a curved blade of silver and steel. He followed her silently, and this time he did not use the silverland.

  Mother met four tree guards at the east entrance to the Life Tree, and they had Orem. His legs were bound at the ankles. His wrists had been tied behind his back. No other syvihrk were present, of course. A murder in Sylikkayrn would have to be committed in secret. The elders would say the human had died of his wounds. Deception… It was a lie from syvihrk to syvihrk, and it hurt Stavark like someone was squeezing his chest. The world was upside down when syvihrk lied and humans spoke truth.

  Mother led the way, and the guards carried Orem to the place where they had found him. There, they pushed him to his knees. When Orem saw the sword in Mother’s hands, he began to struggle, but the four guards held him fast.

  Doubt flapped about Stavark’s head like raven wings. Fear prickled his scalp. But he would not flee the horrible sight. His body felt like wood, hard and ready, his heart warm with rightness.

  Mother had turned from her heart’s wisdom. That was her mistake, not healing the human. She had been swayed by fears and doubts and had fallen into turmoil. Now she was about to commit an atrocity.

  I will save you from yourself, Mother, from those who mistake fear for wisdom. And if the human’s words are true, perhaps I can save the lands as well.

  Mother raised the sword.

  Stavark stepped into the silverland.

  The grim tableau froze. He strode to the still silver figures and took the sword from Mother, gently peeling her fingers away from the hilt one at a time. He went to the guards and tapped the sword’s pommel against the back of each of their heads. Then he cut Orem’s bonds.

  Breathing hard, he stepped out of the silverland. The four guards fell like sticks. Orem jerked as his arms and legs sprung free. Mother gasped, staggering, her hands suddenly empty.

  “Go,” Stavark whispered in Orem’s ear. “Run east. Do not stop.”

  Orem staggered to his feet, still unsteady from his injuries. Stavark waited while the human shuffled east in a limping jog.

  Even over his own labored breathing, Stavark could hear his mother’s heavy breaths as she realized what was happening, but he kept his gaze on Orem until the human vanished into the trees.

  “Stavark…” Mother said, but his name stuck in her throat. In all his life, he’d never seen her at a loss for words. Finally, she recovered herself. “Go,” she breathed. “Catch him. Bring him back. We will… We will fix this.”

  But he was her syvihrk-lan no longer. A syvihrk-lan only wondered if he had crossed his threshold. A syvihrk knew.

  Stavark had made his choice—an adult’s choice—and he would live with the consequences forever. There was no wondering. He was a syvihrk now. He’d crossed his threshold.

  There were words he could say to explain to her, to tell her why he’d made his decision, to tell her why he could not heed her demand, but she had been his teacher. It was not his place to give a lesson to her. It would be an offense to try, so he didn’t. They were both syvihrk now. What he could say to her, he already had said to her.

  But it was Mother, after all, so he repeated it. He owed her that much.

  “I love you,” he said softly. “No matter what you decide. No matter what burdens I choose to bear. Know that I love you, and I always will.”

  Then he ran after the human, ran to join his quest to save the lands.

  “Stavark,” Mother called after him. “Stavark, come back!”

  Blinking through silver tears, Stavark kept running, and he left his mother behind.

  BIO

  TODD FAHNESTOCK is a writer of fantasy. His epic fantasy works include the Threadweavers series (Wildmane, The GodSpill, Threads of Amarion and God of Dragons), The Heartstone Trilogy and The Whisper Prince Trilogy.

  He is also the author of the bestselling The Wishing World series for middle grade readers, which began as bedtime stories for his children. Stories are his passion, but his greatest accomplishment is his quirky, fun-loving family. When he’s not writing, he goes on morning runs with his daughter, bounces on the trampoline with his son, and instructs Tae Kwon Do at Family Tae Kwon Do of Littleton. With the rest of his free time, he drives the love of his life crazy with the emotional rollercoaster that is being a full time author.

  LINKS

  Website: http://www.toddfahnestock.com

  Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Todd-Fahnestock/e/B004N1MILG/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1

  Twitter: https://twitter.com/Todd_Fahnestock

  The Last Death of Oscar Hernandez

  Russell Nohelty

  The last time I died wasn’t much different than the first time, or the twelfth time, or the thousandth time, or…

  …well, you get the picture. I’ve died quite a few times before, and every single one of them sucked equally.

  There was immense, searing pain, followed by a loud snap as my soul disconnected from my body. After that, I floated in the cold, dark, nothingness of space until my soul was yanked into another body. Sometimes, it was a baby. Sometimes, it was a dying adult. Sometimes I was on another planet, acting like I understood R’lyehian or why aliens had three heads.

  Those times were few and far between. Most of the time, it snapped into a middle-aged man, on Earth, who lost their will to live, and I took over after their soul faded from their body.

  I was an anomaly when it came to death, but not in a good way.

  For most people, their past lives were wiped from their minds at the moment of death, before they dealt with the void or the agony of rebirth, but lucky me, I got to experience it all, every single time, as if it were my own personal Hell.

  I suppose it’s possible that this was my Hell, and I was condemned to cycle through it until I learned some sort of cosmic lesson.

  But the joke’s on whoever created this screwed up universe, because I’m a horrible student. I haven’t done one worthwhile thing in 3251ish chances at life—I may have missed a couple here or there and I’m horrible at math.

  3251 chances at life, and I’m pretty sure I’m not going to get many more chances. Or at least that’s what I’ve been told.

  Or, more accurately that’s what I learned through my travels. In my many lifetimes I’ve traveled to the tops of the Himalayas and explored the bottom of the Marianas Trench trying to find answers trying to unlock the secrets to my plight, and why every time I come back I feel less tethered to my body.

  All I’ve been able to figure out is that the human soul has a shelf life, like cheese. The longer it sits out, gathering mold, the more it rots.

  Rot.

  I’ve thought a lot about rot the past ten thousand years, or so. The rot, was more apparent with each generation of humanity.

  Sometimes, I would reincarnate on another planet, and would hope humanity would figure it out by the time I got back, but they never did.

  Sure, sometimes they made a breakthrough. Sometimes they banded together to save the planet, but more often than not, humanity rotted with each subsequent generation.

  I saw it when we couldn’t come together to fight global warming and the planet destroyed itself. I saw it when a third and fourth World War decimated what little remained of our species. I saw it when we promised to be better, over and over, but then couldn’t even keep that promise for even a decade.

  I was no better. I felt like I was supposed to become something better than what I was, but every time I came back I drifted further and further from that person, until I was nothing but a shell of my former self, unable to remember what it even meant to
be good.

  I felt my soul rotting with the rest of humanity, but I didn’t want that to happen. I didn’t want my soul to rot away.

  Not until I could become a hero, whatever that meant. When I was a child, I thought that being a hero meant spandex and capes. After I died a few times, I thought it meant living as long as possible in this horrible world. A few times I thought it meant accruing enough power and money that you could pass it on to the next generation.

  Now, I’ve forgotten what any of that meant. Was it doing the most good, or the least bad? What about doing bad for the sake of good? Does that count? All the moral philosophers I’ve read in my many lives and I’m still not sure.

  I don’t have any time left, either. It felt as though my soul lost elasticity to this body, like chewing gum that has lost its flavor. It was harder to stick with every reincarnation, and this body was the hardest yet.

  Oscar Hernandez. That was my name once, when I was born the first time, or at least the first time that I remembered. I stopped paying attention to each individual reincarnation and now just focused on my original body. What did I want? What was I here for?

  I’ve still not figured it out, and if I don’t do it right this time, there might not be another go around to figure it out.

  “Hey, mister?” I heard from across the park from where I sat on a metal park bench. There was not much grass in Los Angeles any more, not that there was much to start with, even during my first life. This grass was plastic of course, as were the trees, but the humans playing in the park were real. At least, they seemed real.

  I looked up to see a little girl in pig tails waving at me. She wore a polka dot dress with grass stains on it that scraped all the way down to her knobby knees. She looked happy, which was something that wasn’t normal in this day and age.

  We had long since killed the sky and were forced to live inside bubbles of our own design, which filtered the smog outside and made it breathable. Of course, that little girl didn’t know any different. She just knew what she knew, which was that this was the way of the world.

  “Yes?” I shouted back to her.

  “Can you help me?” she replied. “I lost my kite up in this tree and if I don’t get it back my mom’s going to kill me. She traded a week’s rations for it.”

  I sighed. I wanted to say no and brood more, but that’s not what a hero would do. At least, that’s not what I thought a hero would do.

  “Sure,” I said, pushing myself up from my seat.

  My weary bones weren’t what they used to be. I came into this body as a young man, full of vim and vigor, but over the decades my body deteriorated until it was almost unusable.

  Yet, even though I felt like an old man, I was only thirty-five. Not uncommon for the times we lived in these days. The pills they gave us for calcium and vitamin C weren’t the same as the real thing, as much as they said they were. I remember lifetimes in my distant memory where I lived until a hundred and fifty years old, and now, here I was, in the distant future, barely able to live to be what they would have called an adult a few thousand years ago.

  “It’s up in that tree,” the little girl said, as she pointed up to a pink kite stuck in a fake plastic oak the city council planted in the middle of the park. It would have cost too much, and been too expensive, to plant a real tree, even if it did give off real oxygen instead of the fake stuff I breathed all day.

  I stared down at the little girl for a moment as she radiated joy back at me. I didn’t spend much time with children anymore. It was too sad to think about their shortened life. The shortened life their ancestors, me included, doomed them to, when we forced them to live in a hermetically sealed bubble and eating rationed powders for food. I wished, just once, they could have the joy of a freshly cooked steak. Maybe I should have thought of that before the last war, when we had a chance to save ourselves.

  “What do you want me to do about that?” I asked, scratching my head as I looked up kite in the highest branch of the tree.

  “Well, I can’t climb it. The limbs are too tall for me to grab. Can you climb it and get it down for me, please?”

  The truth was I didn’t know if I had the energy to do anything more than exist, but if I wanted to be a hero, it meant occasionally acting as if I wanted to help people. Heroes helped people, if I remembered correctly.

  “Sure, little girl.”

  “Becca,” the girl said. “My name is Becca.”

  Becca was the type of name you heard a thousand years ago, but now names were more likely to be B’c’c’ than anything normal that I remembered. I hadn’t heard a name I would consider normal for hundreds of years.

  “That’s a pretty name,” I said, walking toward the tall oak tree.

  “I hate it,” she replied. “Everybody makes fun of me for it.”

  I smiled at her. “Well, I like it.”

  She turned away from me. Adults weren’t known to smile much, and that was inclusive of me. I hardly ever smiled or emoted in any way. Still, I couldn’t help but seeing something of my past in her eyes, and it almost brought me to tears. It didn’t, but it almost did, and that was more emotion than I had felt in quite a while.

  “I’ll get your kite down for you,” I replied, latching onto the rubbery tree. “Don’t you worry about it.”

  “Thank you, mister,” she replied.

  Helping people wasn’t normal. Not anymore. There was a time when people liked being helpful, and polite, but those days were long gone. Now, people understood their part in the machine and worked to keep it going one moment more. There wasn’t joy in a job well done. There was only the satisfaction of having lived another day, whatever satisfaction could be drawn from that, of course.

  I pulled my aching body up to the next tree limb. My bones creaked inside me, and they popped as I struggled to climb higher into the sky. There were peacekeepers whose duty it was to help little girls with their problems, and make sure the city was running smoothly, but it was best not to engage them unless necessary. If you engaged them, you were seen as causing a problem for the city, and even a minor problem was met with a demerit. Enough demerits and you were labeled a threat to civilization and banished into the wastelands.

  This isn’t some great science fiction novel, where the wastelands were truly livable area, and the city had been lying to its denizen the whole time until a great man stood up and showed them the truth.

  I thought that might be the case, two lifetimes ago, but when I tested the peacekeepers and was sent into the wastelands, I fried in the heat of the outside in less than ten minutes. Perhaps others lived. That was possible. I don’t know. However, I knew that I didn’t. I knew that the threat of banishment was real. All too real.

  “How goes it up there, mister?” Becca yelled up to me from the ground.

  “I’ll be honest,” I said, catching my breath as I rose another limb into the tree. “It could be going better.”

  I was already winded halfway up the tree, but I kept climbing. It reminded me of my younger days, and my earlier lives, when the trees crackled in your hands and sent splintered deep into your palms. They weren’t nearly as spongy back then as they were now, when they were manufactured instead of grown. Finally, with a great heave of my body, I reached the highest branch where Becca’s pink kite rested.

  “Now,” I said, huffing and puffing. “I’ll ask you not to fly your kite anymore, please, when I get this down. It could get you in a lot of trouble if it got lost again.”

  “But what’s the fun in that?” Becca said, looking up at me as I peered down at her.

  “The fun is in living,” I replied.

  “Oh,” Becca said, confused. “But what is the fun in living if you can’t do anything fun?”

  I shook the branch until the kite floated free, down to the ground, and into Becca’s loving arms. “The fun is in not dying.”

  “That doesn’t sound like much fun.”

  I couldn’t argue with her, at least not about that. There was
no fun in dying, but there was even less fun in living, especially if it meant living in a world with so little joy. However, that was my job, as an adult, to toe society’s line, and make sure she grew up to be an adult, like me, even if all we gave back was our lives.

  I placed my hand on the hollow rubber tree and made my way back down to the ground. When I finally had two feet on solid ground, I turned to Becca.

  “Now, you be a good girl, okay?” I said to her.

  “What does that even mean?” she asked, clutching her kite tightly in her hands.

  “Honestly,” I said, with not a hint of irony on my breath. “I don’t know. It’s just something we say to kids.”

  “Oh,” Becca replied. “I guess I understand that.”

  I shook my head. “No, you don’t, and honestly. I don’t either.”

  A strong gust of wind blew through my hair. I looked up to see a Peacekeeper looking down at me from his shiny hover bike. As it drew closer to the ground, the wind kicked up faster and harder, until I fell over onto Becca, and we both crashed to the ground on top of each other.

  A Peacekeeper, dressed all in black, covered in a helmet that hid any semblance of his humanity, swung his leg off the bike and unsaddled himself. In his hand he gripped a long, electric baton, the preferred weapon of their class. However, his other hand gripped tightly around a laser pistol which could evaporate a person in a matter of seconds, and they weren’t above using it with extreme prejudice.

  “Citizen!” The peacekeeper shouted. “You have been found in violation of code 124.329. Halt!”

  I shuffled to my feet. “And what is code 124.329?”

  “Flying a kite without a license and getting it stuck in a tree,” the Peacekeeper said, stomping forward. “Please move aside, so we may process this dissident.”

  “Mister!” Becca yelled. “Help me. I’ve already got three demerits this year.”