Fallen World

by Ben van Eijk

  Eventually Seth found the small silver bead he was looking for; he was lucky it hadn’t been smashed. Now he could just enlarge himself and escape the madness of Estever — but he truly did sympathise with Oxford and the resistance... He decided to search through the building to see if he could help them any further. Whatever the clase was, it needed to be stopped, and the Inquirers were the source of the problem. Seth’s heart jumped as he heard a loud gasping noise from behind him and spun around, ready to defend himself, but he saw it was the bald resistance member on the ground, still alive, and coughing up more blood. Seth rushed to the man’s side and helped him stand up. The resistance member stood slowly but eventually pushed Seth away to indicate he could support himself.

  He spluttered a little more blood.

  “Is this the Reference Centre? What happened?”

  Seth had his arm up, politely trying to prevent being hit in the face by the blood sprayed from the coughing man. He felt a few flecks make contact and replied

  “I think so, yes. The Inquirer said he knocked us out with some kind of sonic blast.”

  “Those spizzing Inquirers! Sonic technology, that’s always been their way. Let’s get out of here!” The resistance member picked up a sleek silver pole from the table and headed towards the room’s only door.

  Seth walked calmly behind the man and watched him try to puzzle the door’s mechanism.

  The resistance member turned around to face him.

  “I’m Rekler, by the way. Where’s Oxford?”

  “I woke up in the same room as you, just a few minutes earlier,” Seth replied as he shrugged his shoulders.

  Rekler stood to the side of the door and pointed at it.

  “Can you knock this down? We need to get out of here and find Oxford`.”

  Seth nodded his head and saw the door had buttons similar to the ones he had been fiddling with on the table cube earlier. He pressed one button after another until the door abruptly slid upwards so fast Seth jumped back in fright, hands ready to cause some damage.

  “I could have knocked it down though,” Seth said as he turned to Rekler with a smug grin on his face. Rekler laughed and they both walked through the doorway cautiously. The door led to a square room two metres deep, the walls of the room of which were a flawless shiny metal. Seth could see himself reflected almost perfectly: he had not managed to dodge much of the gore from the violent scene in the previous room.

  The ceiling in the small room was a dark carpet-like texture, with a square, black metal panel in the centre. When Seth turned around to exit, he noticed next to the door were more small glowing buttons. They were all the same size — small green circles about three centimetres in diameter in two columns of ten. Seth pressed one at the top and the door flew shut with a loud clang.

  Rekler looked at Seth; they were clearly both experiencing the same heavy, nauseous feeling. It quickly subsided and the door opened again. Now they were looking into a completely different room. It had the same motif as the last room, with many straight glowing green lines creeping across the walls, floor and ceiling, but the room was empty. Seth tried pressing another button and the door shut again. This time he felt lighter and not quite as nauseous, until the sensation disappeared entirely. The door opened once again, revealing yet another strange room filled with glowing green lines.

  Rekler and Seth explored the building in this strange contraption, not meeting any other Inquirers as they did so. After ten different rooms, they emerged in a room with one wall coated in illuminated images. They both wanted to explore it a little: the images were all moving, showing real time feeds of different parts of Chos Garren. Rekler seemed to have a vague idea of what he was doing, as he immediately started pressing different buttons next to the small displays. The air filled with the strangest noise. To Seth it sounded like someone had picked up a guitar, detuned it beyond recognition and then began plucking the strings with their teeth; oddly enough, they were doing it in time with some unheard beat, so although it lacked harmony it did have rhythm.

  Rekler turned to Seth with tears in his eyes, Seth was surprised by such a display of emotion from the tough man. Rekler gritted his teeth and smashed his hand down on the keyboard.

  “This is where they control the clase! This is...” Rekler choked on his last words as emotion got the better of him. Rekler pressed the button that had activated the noise and it became silent except for a low humming in the room. Seth was puzzled: that noise was supposed to be the clase, but it just sounded like chaos. Exactly how could such a noise bring people to tears? Or a better question, make them happy? It had brought a tough guy like Rekler to tears so it was clearly pretty powerful stuff, but Seth had not been affected by it.

  “Was that Chos Garren...onian music?” Seth asked Rekler.

  Rekler wiped some tears from his face and responded his breathing now under control

  “What? No, what is that? That was the clase. We have to stop it!”

  “Well, this seems like a good place to do so. Wait, was that “ding” noise I kept hearing clase?” Seth asked Rekler hoping this would finally reveal the source. Rekler shrugged his shoulders in reply.

  “Maybe? They play corrections through the speakers somejits to rebalance the harmony or modify the clase”

  “The harmony? So it is music — but why’s it so terrible?” Seth asked Rekler, no modicum of sarcasm behind his voice. Rekler looked surprised.

  “Because they use this to control what people are feeling, they are no longer able to feel their – “

  “No no, I mean why does it sound so terrible? ‘Harmony’ is probably the last word I would use to describe the sound I just heard.” Seth noticed Rekler appeared to get a little offended as he heard Seth’s description of clase.

  “It is harmonious, Seth. Clase was once used for recreation, but when the Inquirers devised an equation linking clase directly to emotions, they turned it into something else. Look, this really isn’t the time for this. I think I know how to shut this down. One of Katarina’s blueprints taught us about this kind of machine. You go and find Oxford; I’m sure you can hold your own if you encounter any more Inquirers”

  Seth agreed and reentered the strange room that moved him through the building by methods unknown. He faced the small panel of glowing buttons and pressed one that he hadn’t tried yet. He had been going down the buttons one by one starting from the left column and noticed he was now feeling lighter between each room. Three rooms after Seth had left Rekler, he discovered a room containing a sight that would be seared into his memory: Oxford’s lifeless body was lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling, thrown on top of several other corpses. The walls in this room had far fewer glowing lines travailing its surface, so illumination was poor, amplifying the haunting atmosphere of the scene in front of Seth.

  Seth could see about forty corpses scattered through the room. Very few of the resistance members now lying dead had any of the original white of their clothing still showing; their uniforms were now completely bloodied. The troopers had no wounds of any kind on their bodies, but their faces showed they had lost all their blood orally. Dried blood coated their necks and chins, but not the rest of their faces. Many bodies were just silhouettes, interrupting the few illuminating green lines in the walls. Seth had seen enough and pressed another button on the small panel to advance to the next room. Anywhere — he just needed to get away from this one filled with death.

  The door opened up to one of the rooms he had already visited. It had a small table in the centre with a couple of gadgets. The lights travelling through the grooves in the walls and ceiling were coloured white in this chamber. Seth supported himself with both hands on the table and breathed deeply; he felt like throwing up. All of these people he had just met and started to respect — now dead. He had never had to witness so much death so close before. He could still see some faces with their eyes hanging open, staring into nothing. What kind of people were the Inquirers, to dismiss so many lives so ea
sily? Had Seth and Rekler been the last two survivors, intended for the same fate? Everything started to blur. Seth looked around for some place he could get fresh air. He needed to get out of this building. With his retrieved jewellery that would be no problem.

  Several thick shafts of steel shot from Seth’s hands and created a huge dent in the wall opposite him. Seth continued to fire poles of metal, making their ends ever sharper, and suddenly a yellow light shone through a hole he had made in the wall. He fired several more humongous spikes and ran up to the resulting breach, poking his head through to look outside. Seth was inside the other Reference Centre tower; he could see the one he had assaulted alongside the resistance standing alone inside its smooth coating. He looked down, jumped out of the hole and summoned his trusty water propeller to lower himself safely to the ground. When he landed, Seth began to breathe normally again, the fresh air helping him regain his balance.

  Seth had had enough of Chos Garren. He did want to help the resistance, but his goal was to get home. This really was not his fight, and it seemed like a fight he could not win either. Maybe Rekler would be able to shut down the clase, but eventually the other Inquirers would come and strangle him to death, like the rest of the resistance. Even if Seth were to help, the Inquirers would use their sonic blast again (or who knows what other powers they might have that Seth would not be prepared for). He did not feel like waking up to listen to another Inquirer ranting about the universe for an hour — nor did he want to end up a corpse.

  The propeller made its familiar buzzing sound as Seth used it to lift himself into the air. When he was a kilometre above Estever’s surface, he focused on his ring holding the small sample of molten metal inside a glass bead. The landscape beneath Seth got smaller and smaller as he grew bigger and bigger.

  Chapter 9

  The water propeller kept buzzing beneath Seth as he rose further and further above the surface of Estever. The towers he had assaulted with a team of fifty men were now just a small speck. Seth continued to ascend, trying to avoid becoming too huge too quickly in case he killed everyone in Chos Garren under his gargantuan sandal. The rim of Estever became visible and the familiar turquoise of the massive blue orbs was revealed. Seth felt a strange sensation as his head hit the frictionless surface of the atom, and the rest of his body fell on to the blue surface. He stood quickly, remembering there was no air in this part of his universe. He increased his size faster to climb back up to the surface of the atoms he had fallen in between.

  One huge breath was left inside Seth’s lungs, slowly turning to carbon dioxide as he desperately tried to escape his miniscule prison. The elemental that Seth had just been inhabiting continued along it’s circuit of the atom. Soon it became so small Seth couldn’t see it anymore; only the surface of the atom was visible now, and the many more above him. Once Seth was tall enough, he clamped one hand around a blue orb and tried to pull himself up. He couldn’t help noticing he had lost a little muscle mass now that he had been manipulating matter as transport instead of the old-fashioned pedestrian method. Running out of air was now a distinct possibility, so Seth accelerated his growth even further and flew upwards, bumping into atoms on the way — and possibly knocking thousands of civilisations into their own version of The Abyss.

  Suffocating was a terrible feeling. Seth’s lungs felt like they were on fire as he continued on his flight. He wanted to cough so badly but he knew that that would certainly end it all. Suddenly there were far fewer turquoise orbs floating in the air in front of Seth; he could still see a few, but nothing like the mess that had just played pinball with his body. He was almost completely out of breath and in his panic to find some oxygen, he grew a little too quickly. Both of Seth’s feet were now too big to fit on his segment. He waved his hands around as he attempted to balance himself, slowly shrinking until he was the right size — he hoped. He didn’t have any reference point for his original size; he had not planned for the eventuality of his massive size fluctuation.

  The vegetable garden didn’t seem to have suffered terribly in his absence. In actuality, he had only been gone two of his nights, though it felt a lot longer. So much had happened during his short time on Estever — a planet that Seth had probably just kicked into oblivion. He thought back to his journey between the ‘atoms’ that apparently were the particles making up his universe. He had bounced around so much and grown so big he had no idea how much damage he could have caused. He started to think about it: right now, was he crushing trillions of elementals just by standing still? If so, he had already killed an inconceivable amount in his lifetime. He could not make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things… he couldn’t live his life thinking about how he was murdering entire civilisations everywhere he went. Even the air was made of these particles; they were probably smashing into him with the wind.

  Seth had seen enough death, and from extremely close range. He didn’t want to cause any more. He began to think about how he had left Rekler down there, in the grass, on one of its atoms. That scene was not something he would easily forget, no matter how much he wanted to. He thought about how it wasn’t entirely noble of him to leave the way he did.

  But to be fair, I kind of panicked after seeing about fifty dead bodies strangled to death and dumped like ragdolls.

  Even if he wanted to go back to help Rekler shut down the clase, it would be impossible to find the exact atom he was on again, never mind the elemental on that atom. The world was much more complicated than he had realised, and probably more than he could ever realise. Not long ago Seth was living in a world that only contained three thousand people, shrouded in a white mist. He had never even dreamed there was a whole world beneath his, and that this world would be made from other worlds inhabited by beings made of other worlds. Seth’s head spun from the complexity of the puzzle he was trying to assemble in his mind. He might need to draw this one day to try to understand it; for now he would get some food into him.

  Seth sighed in relief when his matter manipulation convinced his passionfruit vine to grow several more burgeoning tendrils. Purple fruits hung from small stems, causing the vine to sag with their weight. Seth plucked three and smiled in relief, enjoying the knowledge that he could once again draw on any kind of matter in his surroundings for his powers. Seth walked inside his small cottage and cut open the purple fruits on a plate so he could feast on the yellow-black seeds inside. As Seth happily crunched his food, sitting back home at last, he began to think about his next plan. Maybe he could try searching for Swevender again —although he had only been gone two days and his skills hadn’t really improved that much. Yes, though necessity had driven him to push the limits of his abilities and he had definitely learned a few things, but he didn’t want to encounter anyone with abilities like the Inquirers again, nor anyone as cold-blooded.

  The best course of action Seth could think of was that he should just keep exploring the landscape around him. He still had some small hope that something had survived the shockwave that had destroyed the world’s surface. While he was journeying above the surface of the planet, he could try to hone his abilities by practising techniques Red had taught him. Soon enough Seth would be able to elevate his small concrete vessel to the same altitude as Swevender and then he could truly begin his search.

  ***

  A week later, Seth finally had a normal night’s sleep. He had managed to keep himself distracted for long enough so that visions of lifeless bodies sprawled across a poorly lit room didn’t haunt him, and he drifted into a deep slumber. That day he also found a strange statue in the middle of the barren landscape beneath his floating concrete ship. He had travelled to the surface to investigate it. Once again it was a statue of two people, a woman and a man. These two, however, did not entirely resemble the statue he had seen in the Restyard, though it seemed to be carved from the same, unusual stone. The woman was much shorter, with hair stopping just above her shoulders. She was also wearing a different kind of cloak with a lot more patter
ns decorating it. Part of the woman’s face had crumbled away, making it impossible to see possible facial similarities. The man had a long, pointed chin and deep sunken eyes, also wearing a long cloak, but his statue seemed completely untouched. It left Seth thinking more about the recurring appearance of two wizards in his travels. Such thoughts were a welcome distraction from his most recent experience in Chos Garren.

  When he woke up, his first thought was that he had finally been able to sleep normally — which reminded him why that was remarkable, which brought up more flashbacks. But he was getting better. He had been able to eat well, since he could manipulate any bit of matter and food would appear, begging him to eat it. He usually thought back to the steak Katja had cooked when he was in Chos Garren; that was the best meal he had had recently. His food manipulation skills were getting better, and the fruit and vegetables were of an even better quality than when Swevender was still agglomerated.

  Today was rather warm, with the sun shining strong. There were very few clouds and just a slight breeze, bringing with it the same dusty smell it always had nowadays. He scanned the landscape beneath his segment: flat, brown and featureless as usual. The wind started to pick up unexpectedly and travelled in a circle beneath Seth’s home. The spinning air darkened and a miniature tornado appeared, smashing the earthen column that had held Seth above the ground while he slept on his concrete ship. The segment shook violently as Seth struggled to control the swirling mass of wind beneath him. He descended quickly, floating for a few seconds as the downward acceleration of his segment exceeded that of gravity. His body thumped down against the grass as his vessel slowed its descent. Eventually everything felt stable again and Seth was once more flying confidently on his little piece of Swevender. It was not long before he finally saw something in the distance: it looked like a small network of villages, but Seth needed to be closer to get a better idea. He manifested his waterscope and peered towards the objects in the distance.