Realm Wraith

by T. R. Briar

  “What was that?” Rayne felt tears streaming down his cheeks, physical proof of the immense grief burning in his chest, though he could not understand why.

  That was me. Now wasn’t that fun?

  “No! I thought I was going to die!”

  You don’t need to think anything. Your soul has already spoken to me.

  He did not care to ponder her words, or why she had let him witness such things, with his head still reeling from the experience. Just when he had gotten over the previous day’s headache, here he was exposing his poor brain to new pain. He sat there for a while, trying to put his thoughts in order. He tried to block his mind, to keep her out, but no matter what he did, her presence remained, haunting him. Instead, he tried to focus himself someplace else, where her thoughts couldn’t reach him.

  You want to leave this place so soon? Her voice dripped with a mockery. The roots around him loosened their grip, and he slumped to the ground with nothing to support him, having long since stopped resisting or struggling to escape. He reached up and yanked the strange branch out of his skull, removing the uncomfortable sensation of its presence, and reveled in his newfound freedom.

  You have a unique way of doing it, seeking out individuals, using them to pull yourself to where they are. Effective, but flawed, because it still limits where you can go.

  Surprised, Rayne jerked his head to the left and to the right.

  Did you think pulling the branch out of your head would free you from our connection? Our minds connected the moment you reached out to me, and now that you’re more accepting, the roots are not needed.

  Rayne stood up and looked around at the trees, the dirt, the waving roots close to him. He glared, making a single thought very clear.

  Teach you? Well, aren’t you demanding. I cannot teach you that, but I can help you remember.

  A quizzical look crossed Rayne’s face.

  You remember the feeling when you travel, but you don’t understand how you do it. You pull yourself towards others. But you can only seek out presences you know, presences you can sense, and they may not be where you want to go.

  Kaledris continued to speak inside him, responding to Rayne’s mind before he could even formulate his thoughts consciously.

  The Abyss is everywhere and nowhere. It exists in all places at once. This universe cannot be mapped; there is no order here. You cannot rationalize one realm as being ‘next to’ another. Each place runs infinitely in all directions; they intermingle and overlap. There are pathways that integrate between them all, but distance does not exist here. Did it never occur to you that while you stand here, as a single individual, you are standing everywhere? That your feet rest upon another demon’s realm even as your thoughts collect here?

  “I don’t understand—you mean my mind is here? But the rest of me is somewhere else?”

  Just as your body is in another world while your spirit is here. It is a matter of gathering your ‘self,’ so to speak, and becoming aware of being in those other places. You are not the one that moves; it is existence that shifts around you. Rather than pull yourself towards other beings, you are changing your awareness.

  “How—?”

  Do you doubt me? It is this awareness that allows you to move. Awareness is the only weapon Realm Wraiths have in this world. The damned have no thoughts, and they cannot understand such concepts. Instead they take root, stuck forever where they land. They cannot move; they cannot find the mental strength to understand what ‘moving’ is.

  Rayne still did not completely understand, but he could almost grasp the basic point. If he imagined he was everywhere, that he was already where he wanted to go, he would find himself there. It seemed simple enough.

  The question is, where do you wish to go? The other Abyss Lords will tear you to ribbons. Perhaps you should just stay here, with me.

  He stared over at the nearest root, the only physical symbol of the goddess’s existence he could actually see. He sneered as frustration burned inside.

  I see. I know where it is you wish to go, but you already know why you can’t.

  His head bobbed up and down.

  I also know that one of your companions is considering making an alliance with one of us, in order to ensure his safety.

  Another nod.

  But you do not believe that’s the real reason. And neither do I. I know of his kind; he seeks power. I shall tell you, Rayne, I do not object to you being here, but I do not welcome the others. If they come here, I shall devour their minds.

  Rayne already knew that; it was strange to feel this awareness of her intentions even when she did not speak them.

  You wonder why I do not eat you. I have my reasons. I enjoy finding new minds to tear apart. Yours is quite entertaining. If the others knew I was speaking to you— She trailed off.

  Her tone made Rayne wonder just what the other gods would do to him.

  I do not know. I am distant from the rest of my kin. In becoming individuals, we lost our camaraderie, and became enemies. It is our nature as chaotic beings. And yet, we are all still parts of the same whole. To turn on one another is to suddenly decide you don’t want your arm anymore, or your leg, and to cut it off and discard it. It is foolish, but then, this universe is full of fools. So I am alone. I have no desire to dominate. I stay in my forest, and my roots travel deep, but I am alienated.

  Rayne frowned.

  Do not feel obligated to pity me. As chaotic beings, we do not ever stay the same. What is loneliness one day will change another. Tomorrow’s enemy was yesterday’s friend. Things that are lost have a way of becoming found, as is the reverse.

  “Finding something that is lost,” Rayne murmured, echoing her words.

  Do not worry so much about your lost memories. They will return to you, when you are ready to face them. And do not concern yourself so much with him.

  “Him?”

  Kaledris laughed inside his head. The one you couldn’t defeat.

  * * *

  The goddess within Rayne’s mind no longer spoke to him after that, as if she’d grown bored of toying with his mind, and he woke up soon afterwards. She was not quite what he expected from a god. Powerful, he didn’t doubt, and not someone whose bad side he’d want to find himself on. She could have destroyed him with a single thought, and yet, she spared him. Doubt crept in. Whatever her reasons, they couldn’t be anything noble. Though grateful for her help, he resolved not to go back there. She might not be so welcoming a second time.

  The day was a strange thing to him now. He spent his time sullen and quiet, not speaking to anybody, and could not help feeling faint anticipation at the prospect of sleeping again, returning to that place. In fact, when David had come to help put him to bed after the day was ended, Rayne was all too eager, to his friend’s great surprise.

  Upon arriving in the Abyss again, he found himself once more up in the skies, falling through the clouds, metal contraptions all around him. Though caught in a freefall, his mind remained clear, and he remembered what Kaledris had told him the night before. He imagined himself in another part of the Abyss, yet not in any specific location. He focused on himself, in another place, and before he knew it, there was the sensation of numbness, of shifting, and the skies of Tyris’s domain were replaced by strange floating columns of carved archaic stone under a purple sky wrought with lightning, hovering over a landscape of charred rock, where more bolts of electricity wormed across the ground, illuminating it in dazzling patterns.

  “How odd,” he mused, staring down from his incredibly high perch. “This doesn’t look like neutral land, but it doesn’t fit any of the places Darrigan described.”

  He began to imagine that maybe there were still more places within the Abyss. Or perhaps the lands of each god had more variation to them than Darrigan spoke of. If they truly were infinite, then within a single domain could exist endless inner realms.

  There was nothing to indicate which god ruled over the land where he now stood, but that d
id not concern him in the slightest. He laughed, listening to his voice echo across the thundering sky, a feeling of exhilaration spreading through his soul. Even if the creatures lurking here found him, it didn’t matter anymore. He could just go someplace else. He liked this feeling; understanding that this world no longer left him powerless. He felt a sense of daring inside him, a faint voice urging him to push himself further, to enjoy himself. Backing up, he broke into a run, jumping over the edge of the column with his arms outstretched, falling once more. As the ground spiraled toward him, he focused again, envisioning himself elsewhere, drawing his soul towards another realm within this dimension.

  This time he appeared in a desert field under an orange sky. Here he watched an eternal war between many armies, unaware of their death as they continued to fight, striking each other down over and over again, getting back up to repeat the process forever. He stood among them, watching their meaningless battle. If this was the same battle Gabriel had described, he did not know. These skirmishes seemed prevalent all over the Abyss. The spectral warriors did not acknowledge his presence, too focused on their war. Rayne did not exist to them.

  Watching felt nostalgic, somehow. He wasn’t sure why. Perhaps something from a film, or a book he’d read once. He found his eye drawn to one warrior that brandished a great spear, using it to strike at his enemies. When the incoming sword of another soldier struck him down, the weapon dropped abandoned into the sand. Without stopping to think, Rayne reached down and hefted the spear up. It was large and heavy, formed of rusted iron, and covered in dried blood. He didn’t know why he was interested in a weapon like this, and he continued to stare at it, trying to remember.

  His surroundings erupted in blood and agony. A horrific sensation of pain followed the spear as it thrust through him, impaling his skull with brutal precision, and he dropped to his knees with a scream, clutching at his head. A moment passed, and the pain ebbed. Shaking, Rayne looked at his hands. He saw no blood, no sign of a wound. He felt his head, yet his skull had no hole, no injury. When the last traces of pain subsided, he looked down at the spear on the ground. No blood stained its blade, and nothing indicated it had claimed him as its victim. He sat there, trying to breathe, even though he knew he didn’t really have lungs. But the familiar, human sensation of doing so comforted him; it kept him grounded. The helpless feeling that haunted him in this strange world he had finally started to conquer returned, a sharp reminder that no matter where he ran, he would always be a slave to unholy whims.

  “I’ve got to get out of here,” he gasped. Reaching out to another world, the battlefield faded from his sight, and he floated alone in a black, star-filled void. Around him, strange celestial clouds of prismatic variations broke up the emptiness, dotted with tiny points of light and larger luminescent spheres. Planets? he wondered. A fair distance from him floated one such orb with numerous rings, and a charred, crater-filled surface, while behind it loomed a far larger shape, its surface a marbled red color. They seemed simply enormous, yet they appeared so far from him. He was an insignificant speck in a vast universe. Rising before him he saw a dark, lifeless sphere, lit by two dim red stars drifting behind it. Black, ominous clouds marred its entire surface, leaving the land beneath visible only to the imagination, yet even floating near it, Rayne could feel an overwhelming chill radiating from its surface. He tried to approach the strange world, but found moving difficult. Waving his arms and legs had no effect; there was no air to propel himself through. He simply floated in a void.

  With nothing to be done, he sharpened his focus and left this strange space behind. He had no idea where to go or what to really do anymore, and in his mental state of indecision he suddenly found himself spread everywhere at once, gripped by a sensation of being pulled apart. Not wanting to know what would happen if he lost his direction while traveling he tried to clarify his thoughts, but forcing the sensation only made things more difficult. He forced himself to relax, letting his mind go blank, seeking himself out in other realms, looking for somewhere, anywhere that he could take as his destination.

  An unwanted vision entered his mind just then, the sight of that great purple eye, the monster he’d encountered on that first night here. He tried to scatter it from his thoughts, but too late, his motion ceased and fell once again into another world. Terrified, he glanced around, but he saw no other beings. He sighed with relief. Wherever he was, it was dark, and he hovered in the air. Below him swirled a thick fog, as fear gripped him again, and the sudden introduction of emotion inside caused him to lose his position and plummet downwards into the mist. As he fell, he saw white, crystalline shapes with smoky, clouded surfaces pass him by, great pillars larger than any skyscraper.

  Though he fell deeper into the swirling miasma, he could still see a fair distance in front of him, and the ground below rushed towards him. He landed with a soft, crunching sound, and felt an intensely cold surface beneath his hands. Ice, he realized. An entire world of ice surrounded him. The ground, the columns, everything. The watery vapor this world exhumed swirled through the air as tiny shards of frozen crystal.

  He didn’t have to ponder where he was. Rayne knew he stood where Darrigan had forbade him to come: the frozen realm of a maddened hell beast. Worlds within worlds he realized, as this was not the endless ocean from before. An eternal field of ice stretched before him. He wiped away frozen shavings from the ground beneath to view the clear icy shapes below. Plumes of smoke obstructed that clarity, but in its midst he saw people trapped in the ice, their faces haunted, mouths frozen shut, leaving them unable to even scream. Glancing over at the pillars, he saw the same, more souls trapped inside, unmoving, lacking cognitive awareness, but still capable of sensing pain as evidenced by the looks of agony in their eyes.

  Despite his shaking fear, Rayne still wanted to see a little more of this place. He brushed aside Darrigan’s warning, though the promise he’d made continued to echo, and he did not want to go back on his word. He placed a hand against the cold smooth surface of a pillar and smirked.

  “I did promise I would not come here. But I only told him I wouldn’t actively seek it. Besides, if I’m truly everywhere at once, then that promise was broken before it was ever made.”

  He turned and strolled down icy plains. The lack of depth to the mist made it seem less of a danger. Nothing could really hide in it, no snakes threatening to swallow him like before. It was quiet, peaceful. Here there was no screaming like in so many other worlds. Just the cracking of ice, and an atmosphere filled with the pain of the frozen souls around him.

  There was no way to know how long he walked, as time never did make sense out here. The scenery didn’t change much either. He passed many scattered columns, neither evenly spaced nor ordered in rows. But after some length of walking this changed. The mist around him thickened, and he could see thin bead of white land surrounding water off in the distance. He approached it, but he could see it was not the same ocean he’d visited before. He stood by the shore of a much smaller body of water, its surface still, covered in a layer of mist. No storms or howling winds marred its serenity. The clear mirror of the water glowed with a faint turquoise light shining from somewhere beneath. Darker colored, shallower ice surrounded this quiet lake all the way to its shores. It seized the damned as well, but only their lower halves were trapped within the ice, leaving their upper bodies chilled but mobile. Their sluggish forms could not move much in the cold. They clawed at the ice around them, struggling to break free of their prison, and Rayne could see that many of these half submerged forms decorated the shores of the black lake like tormented reeds, their mindless waving reminiscent of cattails and tall grasses.

  One spot caught Rayne’s eye. Another ice column stood close to the edge of the lake, stretching forever upwards. In the side of the column he could see a large gap, just big enough to fit a person. He stared at it, puzzled. Had someone actually escaped? Or was this in preparation, a place for a new soul to be imprisoned upon arriving here? A li
ttle concerned, he backed away from it, not wanting to be the one trapped in there. His eye moved back to the body of water, its turquoise light like a shining beacon.

  His feet moved towards it unbidden, until he stood right at the edge of the shore, the water lapping at the very tips of his toes. He placed a hesitant foot on the surface of the water. His foot did not pass through, rather it rested on top like solid ground. He moved the other foot forward with identical results. His steps continued in this manner, one after the other, strolling over the water’s surface. Not for one instant did he sink. He left the shore far behind him, eyes scanning the entire expanse of the lake around him. He could see icy land to the right and the left of him, and the shore he had departed from behind him. But he could not make out a far shore, for blackness covered the distant horizon.

  He felt the water with his hand. It felt like ordinary water, with no thickness to the surface, and his hand passed through cleanly. It was cold and wet, like any normal fluid. He could see nothing below his feet, only black, and that strange aqua light. But he could see his reflection, and he curiously stared at it. It did not seem that much different from before, only with no twisted hallucinations by masquerading demons to mock him. Rayne saw only himself, his face, his skin, pallid and cold. He reached up with one hand and felt his cheek, watching his reflection do the same. His white hair fluttered every so often, drifting strands waving in the air despite there being no wind, an odd phenomenon to watch.

  His flesh felt just as cold as the ice he had traveled across moments ago. A strange notion occurred to him then, and focusing on that intense feeling of cold, he moved his hand back down, brushing it once more against the water’s surface. Crystalline patterns appeared around it as the cold of his hand spread in a circle, followed by a thick crackling sound as the water chilled and turned solid. Shocked, he yanked his hand back up. A small disk of ice floated there still, continuing to spread until the spot in the center solidified. It rippled outward, slowed, and finally stopped, leaving behind a patch of ice the size of a dinner plate. He pressed his finger against it. There was no doubt, the water had frozen by his own hand. He pushed harder, and the ice cracked beneath his fingertips, shattering as the growing crevices fanned outwards from his touch, leaving broken chunks that slipped beneath the water’s surface, sinking from sight.