by C. A. Bryers
HOUSE OF FALLING RAIN
An Eyes of Odyssium Novel
C.A. BRYERS
Table of Contents
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10
11
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18
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21
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33
EPILOGUE
THANK YOU
BEHIND THE SCENES OF HOUSE OF FALLING RAIN
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
C.A. BRYERS WOULD LIKE TO THANK
1
There were so many words to describe her at this moment, but none of them seemed adequate. As the sunset splayed out across the distant clouds and turned the seas into a vast, swaying pool of molten gold, she reclined beside him on a long chair with ankles crossed. Her hair, cut short for the trip to the resort village of Kijikalae, made the strong yet soft features of her face more visible, and all the more breathtaking. Those dark eyes noticed him taking notice of her, and despite the reflexive laugh she gave, she nevertheless absently placed a hand over her collarbone. It was the latest in her growing collection of scars—a reminder of their recent sojourn to the primordial jungles of the Kanejungdara.
He leaned in for a kiss and, with a delicate touch, pulled her hand away from the tears in her shoulder and neck, still pink and healing. “Over the past months, I’ve been finding it hard to blame that gnawlashike. Poor thing had to be lonely with all those other ugly beasties, and then you came walking in. Couldn’t help itself, just had to take a nibble.”
“They didn’t have eyes, if you’ll recall. But I’ll give you points for the bold move, reminding me of those slimy things as a way to cozy up.” Natke Orino let him have the kiss regardless, a smile gracing her lips as she pulled away. “Another beautiful day. Not entirely certain I can stand much more of this.” The gentle curves of her Miriotic accent were no longer hidden away, nor had it been since they’d come to this place to vanish from the rest of the world. “Really, Salla, it’s been wonderful.”
Salla Saar leaned back and took a sip from his purovian nectar cocktail. “I know you’re getting restless here. Even paradise gets old, I suppose.”
“Not with you, it doesn’t. But can I be honest?” She opened her mouth to speak, but faltered for a moment. “I’m actually a little surprised to find you’ve still been there in the morning every time I wake up.”
Though he hadn’t expected to be confronted on the matter, Salla knew Natke was no fool. After the events of Tempusalist, even he was certain their time together would be fleeting. The power of the Eyes of the One still resided within him, and that alone meant the Majdi Order would likely never stop pursuing him. The Eyes had been hidden centuries ago by ancestors of the Order, secreted away because the Eyes held the power to find anything one’s heart could desire, and that was a dangerous thing. A man imbued with that power could not simply be permitted to walk free, he knew.
And yet he was still here at Natke’s side. Perhaps the remoteness of this far-off sanctuary had given him a sense of security, a feeling that even the vaunted Majdi Order with their mysterious powers of tephic could not seek him out here. But more likely was the chance that the reason he had not fled to the life of a nomad was due to the woman beside him. To a young man like he was when they had first met almost ten years ago, Natke had been—and still was—a force unlike any he had ever known. She was smart, determined, and captivating, and although she was only a handful of years older than he, Natke already had seemed a veteran of a world he was only just beginning to understand. The infatuation he’d felt was an inevitability. Here and now, with that infatuation fulfilled and growing steadily into something more, letting go of Natke Orino was easier said than done.
He nodded finally. “You’re right. I thought I’d be gone by now too.”
“Where would you go?” Her hand touched his arm, fingers brushing over the many tattoos he’d acquired in his six years aboard the Mayla Rose as a scrapper.
“That’s another reason I suppose I haven’t left. My next move’s sort of gotten shuffled to the back of my mind. Distractions have kept it there.” He let his fingertips scarcely touch the top of her bronzed, gleaming thigh. “But I wouldn’t trade those distractions for anything.”
The long, rustic wooden chair creaked as she shifted to face him. “If you haven’t got your next move sorted out, why not listen to my idea?”
He felt his brows involuntarily rise.
“It doesn’t have to end, Salla. You don’t have to go. Yes, we—I have to leave this place, sure, but what we’ve started here doesn’t have to simply disappear. I don’t know if you’ve forgotten, but I have a bunker designed decades ago to withstand anything the United Odyssan Front threw at it. If there is a better place for someone trying to keep out of sight, I don’t know of it. Next step, you come back as my second.”
“What about Jandel? I imagine your current second would have something to say about that part of the plan.”
Natke’s eyes narrowed playfully, and she whispered as if there was actually someone nearby who might overhear. “Jandel’s been talking about heading off on her own and starting her own team. I don’t think she’d mind.” She pressed her lips to his, a soft and brief touch before settling back into her seat. “Keep in mind that my situation when coming to the islands wasn’t all that different from yours. I had bounties out on my head for years when I built my team and started our expeditions. There are still people out there who want me dead for my immersion work. But you make yourself as safe as you can, and then get out and do what you want to do. Otherwise, what’s the point of living? Hiding is not a way of life.”
She had a point. Salla had hidden from his past by creating a new life for himself as a scrapper, but time and circumstances only brought him right back to where he’d started—working with Natke, if for a different and more dangerous cause. How much more of his life would he waste if he listened to his initial impulse to run again, only this time from the Majdi?
Nervous anticipation bubbled within him, and Salla dared to hope that Natke’s proposal was one that might allow him to live without fear of persecution. “So how would it work?”
“I still have connections who can give you a convincing new identity to use anytime we leave the bunker—for expeditions or whatever. But when we’re back home and inside, you’re you. Integrating you into the team…”
Home, she’d said. It was a word so alien to his life, something he hadn’t experienced since leaving his mother all those years ago, that he couldn’t even imagine what it might feel like to have such a place once more.
Salla brought his attention back to the details of Natke’s proposition, but although he saw her lips moving, a shrill ringing sound was rising up to smother her words. At the same time, a heightening pressure was building with frightening speed inside his head, like a balloon filling with air until it was ready to pop. He held his breath, trapping the pain away so none of it would show on his face. He could feel the corners of his eyes grow wet as tears formed, and his lungs were already screaming for mercy.
How much longer? One deep breath is usually all it takes—
The pain intensified tenfold in a sudden spike, and i
t felt as though his skull was cracking, and those cracks were getting longer and wider with each interminable second that passed. His eyes began to ache, as if fingers were squeezing them slowly, testing to see just how much pressure it would take for them to burst.
When it felt as if he could take no more, it was over. No phantom remnants of the pain lingered; it was as though the episode hadn’t occurred at all. That was the most worrying aspect of whatever this was that was happening to him. The fact there were no resonating aftereffects convinced Salla that these sudden bouts of acute agony were no mere physical affliction. They were something else, and he had suspected for some time what the cause might be.
In the three months since Tempusalist, the power of the Eyes of the One had fallen silent. No visions had appeared in that time that answered the mysteries he’d wished solved. Instead, these terrible attacks of blinding pain had arrived. They began in wide intervals, the first pair separated by almost two weeks’ time. Today’s episode marked the fourteenth occurrence. They were coming faster, and hitting harder.
“Salla, what do you think?” Natke was staring at him; clearly this was not the first time she had asked the question. “What’s wrong?”
He shook his head. “Just a headache, it’s nothing. But your idea, I think it sounds like a good place to start.”
“I’ll comm Jandel and see if we have any prospects waiting for us when we get back. I was thinking we’d head home tomorrow?” Natke was already on her feet, bending low to kiss him one more time. This time Salla made certain their kiss was not soft, nor was it brief. When they parted, her smile was hungry and eager for more. “Oh, have it your way. Day after tomorrow, then.”
He turned to watch Natke go, the lithe, agile body that had served her well in keeping her alive now clad in a small burgundy swimsuit, sensual and enticing. Running his fingers over his head, Salla noted yet again the absence of the ragged knotlocks he had worn in his hair for the past several years. He felt like a different man from those days aboard the Mayla Rose, as though the scrapper he had been was slowly fading from the pages of his own history.
This new change was for the best, he thought. It wasn’t as though he yearned to return to those wilder days not so long ago, but neither did he entirely regret them. After all, amid the adrenaline-fueled scrapping jobs and the unpredictable whirlwind that was his relationship with Kitayne, it all led him right back here, to this moment in paradise with Natke Orino.
He looked back at the open doorway of their cozy beachside bungalow through which Natke had disappeared. For the first time since discovering what it meant to house the powers of the Eyes of the One, Salla allowed himself to become hopeful for the days ahead. But with the future seemingly laid out before him, perhaps it was time to take hold of the present. Draining what remained of the yellow purovian nectar, Salla got to his feet and followed Natke inside.
He’d made it two steps toward his destination before a second blast of pain struck him, a force so powerful this time it seemed intent on grinding his skull into a pulp. His vision went blurry, legs buckling, and Salla felt his knees dig into the sand. Nausea swept through him like fire through a field of deadwood. He gagged against what felt like the urge to expel everything he’d ever eaten, and within seconds, a merciful blackness descended over his consciousness.
***
When he woke, there was an ethereal quality to the world about him. His body and movements felt weightless, and trying to see the bungalow’s interior about him was like looking through a thin, fibrous veil of cotton.
“Natke?” he heard himself ask, but like everything else he sensed, it was as though he was experiencing it all secondhand. “Natke, I think I need to tell you something.”
The quiet and emptiness of the indistinct room about him surrounded Salla like a tomb. The resort village of Kijikalae was a ghost town. Nothing living remained within its borders. Perhaps nothing lived outside Kijikalae either. Somehow, he could sense this eerie void about him where life could not exist, and then a notion occurred to him, one that made all too much sense.
He was dead.
Something—whether it was some undiagnosed illness or something tied to the Eyes of the One—whatever had been at the root of the excruciating assaults against his body and mind had killed him. The pain had been too great, something in his body had given way or his mind had simply imploded, succumbing to the need for it all to end. Salla’s life was over, and he was taking his first steps into the hereafter—the Great Darkness.
He had always imagined a great sense of sorrow upon the realization of his own death, but instead there was a strong undercurrent of acceptance in his state of mind. Had he chosen the easier path and simply walked away after waking on the shores near Costa Ojo after Kitayne and Loc Soto’s mutiny of the Mayla Rose, he might be feeling differently at the moment. But he hadn’t walked away. With Natke’s help, he had sought out the Eyes of the One—mystical, dangerous talismans that told him the precise location of the lost Majdi city of Tempusalist. Once at Tempusalist, he stopped a fallen tyrant from usurping the powers hidden there. His actions had averted the reigniting of a new, dark era of global imperialistic domination. It was the best he could do to set right the wrongs in which he had taken part during his time as a scrapper.
It was enough.
The only negative feeling he could detect swimming about in his consciousness was regret. He’d been standing at the threshold, ready to embark on the rest of his life with a beautiful, incomparable woman who, on the very day he died, had rescued him from the prospect of a future rife with hopelessness. Now, the life they were preparing to begin together was over.
Thinking of her, he started moving toward the bedroom they had shared since coming to Kijikalae. The two of them had become so close, intimate in a way he had never thought possible. Even in death, the thought of being without her conjured up an ache inside of his being, one he wasn’t sure would ever diminish.
Entering the room, Salla blinked. Natke was there, lying on the bed. In the overwhelming sense of hollowness and isolation that seemed to permeate every surface in this strange pallid afterlife, he was not alone after all. He touched her leg in hopes of rousing her from sleep, but something was wrong. He could feel her skin, as tangible as it had been in life, and it was cold. He shook it, panic beginning to infect his every thought.
Wake up, Natke. Wake up.
She did not stir. As he brushed the dark hair back from her face, her expression underneath was serene. A stain began to spread across the linens underneath her, originating at her neck. It looked black in the whitish haze draped over everything in this strange world.
Blood.
The stain continued to creep inexorably outward, and Salla staggered away from her. His disbelieving gaze drifted down her body and fixated upon the leg he had touched to wake her. Another black smear clung to her skin, and he reflexively brought his hands up to his face. It was everywhere, sickly black trickles of Natke’s blood dripping from his open, trembling palms to run down his forearms.
“No. I didn’t do this. I didn’t do this. I didn’t do this…” The words repeated over and over, becoming a chant that was quickly escalating into hysteria. “Why? Why? Why would I…”
***
Salla jerked upright in bed, chest heaving and body shaking. The whitish film that seemed to have clung to his eyes in the nightmare was gone. The room about him was dark, lit only by a broad splash of moonlight cascading through the open windows nearby. Through the windows, a cool, lazy breeze floated inside, raising bumps over every inch of exposed flesh. Natke lay there beside him, and with a shuddering hand, he softly grasped her arm.
It was warm, and he could hear the gentle rising and falling of her breaths.
The rapid, panicked thumps of his heartbeat began to steadily decrease, and the tensed muscles throughout his body started to soften, one after another. Swallowing hard down a throat that felt as dry as a dead fish’s scales, Salla eased back onto the d
amp sheets of the bed.
He closed his eyes, trying to shut away the gruesome image of this beautiful woman lying dead. “What was that?”
Casting his mind back to waking hours before the dream, Salla tried to think of anything that might have triggered visions of Natke’s death by his own hands. He shook his head. There was nothing. Nothing had happened, no dark thoughts accompanying plans for his future that she had taken the liberty to lay out for him. It was quite the contrary—the moment she had brought it up this afternoon, he had felt hopeful again for the first time since they’d departed Tempusalist. Hers was a solution better than any he could have imagined for himself.
After that, well, he need only look at the bundles of their clothes scattered across the floor, and to Natke’s naked body lying next to his. Pinching his eyes shut, he fought to recall something, anything between the attack and his waking. There was nothing. No rending of one another’s clothes, no giving way to primal lusts, no reeling in the delirious afterglow.
Nothing. Nothing existed in that space of time, save for the hazy vision of her murder.
It was just a dream, Saar. He let the notion settle over his troubled mind like a blanket tossed over a fire in order to smother it. Just a dream. Let it go.
Maybe it was true. Maybe it wasn’t. Lying there for the next several minutes, Salla tried to fall back to sleep, reminding himself over and over that Natke was beside him, alive and well. The vision meant nothing.
If he were a normal man, convincing himself of this would have been the simplest of tasks. But normal he was not. The power of the Eyes of the One dwelled inside of him. It was a power he did not entirely understand, and worse, it was a power that seemed to have turned on him since its purpose had been fulfilled at Tempusalist.
The thought gave him pause. Perhaps that was the price of gazing into the Eyes of the One and absorbing their power. Once the objective was sought out and the task complete, the Eyes would begin to destroy its host, little by little. It was his best guess as to why these debilitating episodes were occurring, rending his mind asunder one attack at a time.
