by K.Z. Freeman
The experience had filled me with energy as though I had slept, yet know I didn’t. I spend the night walking around the hilltops, occasionally backtracking to look down if anyone is approaching our campsite.
I think about the experience and the lessons it sought to teach me. I know it is significant, yet how exactly I do not know.
Dawn slowly begins to break and luck decides to grace me along with it. I hear movements below me, behind the threes, and halt mid-stride. I take notice of a huge deer. Its antlers are immense, its bulk that of a horse. My mouth waters. Yet despite my growling hunger, I cannot bring myself to shoot the rifle. The animal stands so incredibly majestic and proud in its stance, the way its head is cocked back by its heavy horns, the rising sun silhouetting its muscular shape, so full of vitality and strength, I cannot fire, even while already aiming down the sight. I notice it’s only surveying, when a whole herd of them shows up behind the bull. There’s at least ten of them, younglings fallowing in their wake.
I need to eat. Fucking hell I need to eat badly. I take a breath, hold my gun steady, and fire. I hit one of the small ones in the head with a precision hit, killing it instantly. The others scatter as I swagger to my prize. I pick it up by its hind legs and haul it over my shoulders.
Not far away, I can see the alpha, watching me, the herd gaining confidence behind the bulk of the beast. I wonder what they feed on in this barren wasteland, what they drink. I realize it may just be humans and our blood, as the bastards charge me. Their feet pound the ground, the alpha ahead of the rest. My legs stiffen. There is something about a beast charging you that feels you with a healthy dose of fear. The kind of fear that either glues you to the ground, or sets your brain on rapid-fire to find ways not to die. I drop the dead dear and heft my rifle. I press the trigger. A fire heats the riffle’s barrel and makes it hiss. My hands shake as the plasma hits the bull’s antlers, but he doesn’t stop. They’re nearly on top of me before I manage even a single burst. Their eyes are cold, heads low, their mutated mouths frothing and snarling, spittle flying as they howl and thrash their heads. Their screams sound like a man vomiting his guts out. I fire at the bull again, hit it in the head and stare in wonder as it bellows, but doesn’t die. I do a wide sweep with full autofire. The plasma spits in hissing ejections all over the herd. They bray and screech, swoosh past me and scatter in between the threes. All save the noise of them and the lingering smell of burned hair quickly disappears.
I pant and shake as I run back to the camp, looking behind me, my ears alert for the sounds of their return.
I throw the carcass at Ty’s feet. He jumps from slumber, his jaw hopelessly stuck in position as his eyes widen. The commotion had woken Calyx as well and she wanders over.
“How did you manage this?” she says with surprise.
“Luck,” I smile.
“Hah! In all my years I haven’t managed to even see one of these, let alone kill it. Luck indeed. Why didn’t you wake me?”
“No need,” I tell her.
We rekindle the fire and skin the thing, then watch it cook and eat it with gusto. Not a single scrap of it remains, although Ty saves most of his portion for later, when he’ll be able to chew properly. The two of us had laughed while Ty pounded the meat with his fist so he could swallow it, his hand throwing curses at us, only making the whole ordeal increasingly humorous.
“We should be able to reach the city today, aye?” I ask her. “I saw it from up there,” I hand her my last bottle. She opens and drinks a bit, then hands it back to me. Ty fetches his own, but has difficulties drinking it until he realizes the best way to do it is to lean his head and pour it down his throat. Snorting a laugh, I wonder if the punch hadn’t somehow made him retarded as well.
“Definitely,” she nods.
“We should head out, stay off the road and go up the hill instead,” I suggest. They agree and we tread up the slope and disappear behind it. We walk down to the city in the distance. The landscape before us is veiled in a morning haze, the radioactive moisture choking the air.
“What do you know about the Templars?” I ask Calyx as she walks next to me and Ty’s feet thumping behind us.
“Not much,” she says. “They’re a secret order of men.”
“Only men?”
“From what I heard, yes. They’re augmented in some way, supposedly both physically and mentally and have technology which they jealously guard. They say they’re preparing for an apocalypse.”
Ty mumbles an incoherent something behind us. He quickly realizes we can’t understand him and he gives up.
“Another one?” I ask.
“Their headquarters are somewhere near here, or at least one of them.”
“What do you think the drilling was for?”
“I haven’t the faintest clue,” she sighs. “They never share their intentions or plans with anyone. You do what they say. It’s said all they need is to speak and you find yourself doing their will. Which begs the question why the one we saw hadn’t simply done this, instead of trying to kill us.”
“Maybe he couldn’t do it? Perhaps he was a low ranking foot solider, there simply to make sure everything goes according to plan.”
“Maybe,” she murmurs.
“It seems to me like the last thing the guy wanted was for your father to get killed or to fall into the wrong hands. He seemed pretty eager to get him out of there.”
She didn’t answer. We walk for a while and eventually reach the end of the hill, or rather, the spot where its slope slowly descends down into the valley. The fog had dissipated somewhat and a golden light embraces us, its yellow sheen endowing the valley with an almost mystic beauty, despite the bareness. I doubt the other two see it in such a way, until Calyx says, “This view almost makes me forget what kind of world we live in.”
“What do you suppose that is?” I ask pointing at a fortress-type structure on top a hill to our right, reveled by the parting mist and overlooking the town below.
“If I had to guess, I’d say that’s the Templar outpost.”
“It’s like some kind of castle,” I nod. “Very ominous.”
“I’m having second thoughts about this,” she admits. “But if anywhere, the town down there is where we’ll find a medic, hopefully some information about my father as well. We need to be careful, don’t ask too many questions.”
“Aye,” I nod.
Ty practically runs past us and we follow his trail.
“You ever wonder how we can have all this technology, yet the world is still like…well, this?” I ask, walking behind Calyx as we descend down the hillside. For the first time, my eyes drift towards her smooth curves and I find myself unable to take my eyes of her as she moves, her hips swaying.
“Sometimes, I do,” she says, “it feels like it’s systematic.”
“Systematic?”
“We have technology we’re allowed to have that’s no threat to the Illuminatus.”
“The Illuminatus?”
“Templars. They destroy things which can potentially aid in repairing the human condition and restore it to a pre-War state. My guess is the centralization of power, they want to control everything.”
“How do they destroy things? How do they even know when to come, where to do it, how to go about it?”
“The details are unknown to me, all I have to go on are stories, really. People who had seen them do it. They come in, take what they need or obliterate it – sometimes eliminate minds that are responsible for creating it – and leave.”
“Why did you call them… what was it?” I ask.
“Illuminatus.”
“Aye.”
“That’s what they call themselves. Supposedly it’s from an ancient language meaning enlightened, or illuminated. It shouldn’t come as a surprise they consider themselves superior. They sure act like it.”
“How’d they get to be known as the Templars?”
“They first appeared in Francia, they wore the same armor as you had
already seen, and since the templar myth is still quite well known, especially in those regions, they came to be known as the Templars. Their donjons have the same writing above their main gate, burned into the rock. Illuminatus Arcis. A warning, I suppose.”
“Or a declaration. A display of power,” I add.
“Very likely, yes,” she nods.
I consider what she told me, the slope leading us to an outcrop. A wide path to our left wounds ahead, towards the run-down city in the distance. Its skeletal apartment blocks look half-demolished, with no tall building to speak of. The smaller houses are missing their roof or have been badly thatched. We halt as we hear a series of milling, gravel-grinding footsteps to our left. We hunker down in the shade of some huge boulders. On the road behind us the footsteps of about half a dozen men slowly approach us.
I tense as their footfall passes and they stop.
“What is it?” I hear one ask.
“We’ve been walking all night, let’s get some rest,” says one.
“These boulders look like a good place to chill for a while,” a gruff voice adds.
I grip the shaft of my gun, my trigger finger twitching nervously, a bead of sweat running down the back of my neck.
I hear a slap and someone tumbling to the ground.
“We stop when I say we stop,” a baritone voice grumbles. “Now get up and keep walking!” No one turns to look behind while we press our backs against the rock. The knuckles of my hands fade to white as I hug the plasma rifle. Fuck, I think. I can see the sentiment well shared in the eyes of Ty as we share a look. Despite the danger, his hanging jaw makes me grin.
“Guys?” Calyx whispers.
“Malkard’s men,” I whisper with a nod.
“We need to take care of this. Now,” she says. “They’ll make our movements within the town a hardship.”
“We can’t just kill a bunch of men on a hunch that they might be after us,” I object.
“A hunch? Seriously?” She arches an eyebrow. “We slaughtered a dozen of them yesterday, they’ll be on the lookout for sure. They’re mercenaries funded by slavers. And they want to kill you. What other reason do you need to shoot them in the back?”
Ty had heard our conversation and sighed. I got a strange sense as though he wishes to somehow ease my conscience. I must have grown on him too, because I watch as he nonchalantly sets his rifle to fully automatic. He gets on one knee and the plasma gun spits fire. In a span of seconds and a series of blood coiling half-screams, flayed flesh-matter and bone bursting from inner heat, the men are transformed into no more than puddles on the dust-covered ground. Ty moves close, keeps firing even as they lie smoldering. I race to him and place my hand on the weapon, the heat of it radiating in a visual haze, distorting the air as excess temperature hisses out the four side-vents on the gun’s barrel. I don’t do it out of some sense of protecting him from himself, but wasting plasma is not how you survive in the wastes. He flashes a solemn look, slings the rifle over his shoulder and walks on towards the city.
“Don’t feel bad about these scum,” Calyx tells me. Truly now they are nothing more than scum splayed over the soil.
“I don’t…I mean, I can’t really say I feel bad. It’s just… these were men.”
“And they died like men. Screaming,” she says and carefully picks up one of the rifles the men had carried – the only one which still looks somewhat intact – slime trails off of it in snot-like cauls. She lets it flop back in the puddle.
“Yuck,” she says, flicks her hand and wipes it on the rocks. “Look at it this way, though. If we kill every one of Malkard’s men, pretty soon there’ll be no one left he can send at us, and he’ll either come after us himself, or give up.”
“I doubt men like him give up,” I sigh. “But I hope you’re right.”
“Let’s go,” she says and we run up to Ty.
He looks indifferent as we catch up to him and begin to ascend the incline surrounding the city. The more I look at his face, the more it seems the slack jaw expression suits his slightly idiotic nature. We soon reach the top and notice three figures standing in the distance. They don’t look dangerous, talking amongst themselves, holding each other over the shoulders and standing over an elongated, metallic object splayed over the ground before them. Another figure stands with his back to us, holding a thin instrument and using it to apply color to a sheet of squared, white wood. The four of them stand below a wide, metal archway. I can see something had been written on it at some point, but had faded away like everything else. The city stands behind the figures, its streets and buildings winding away from a central road of torn asphalt. High Noon had awoken the radiation clouds above and a yellow, almost golden light colors the scene. I find it serene and calming, even more so as I spot people rushing about within the town. A sense of community unlike anything I had seen since shoots through my spine. The sight is like something from a half remembered dream. A dream where childhood memories are given a new, better life.
I look up. “How are so many still alive with so much radiation?” I ask no one in particular, thinking out loud.
“That’s one of the great mysteries of our time, isn’t it?” Calyx smiles. “I’m told people used to ask themselves questions like, ‘where did we come from?’ or ‘what came before?’ now it seems the questions have shifted to a singular one, ‘by what miracle are we still alive?’. It’s a bit funny in its own right.”
We walk down the slope and to the archway, when a familiar outline of a figure begins to greet my eyes. The shape lies below the feet of the three men the individual is trying to portray with his colored stick.
“What’s he doing?” I ask.
“I thought you traveled the northern world? You mean to tell me you’ve never come across a painting?” Calyx asks.
I was too busy surviving, is what I wish to say, but all that comes out is, “No. I tried to avoid places with too many people. Everyone always wanted either my gun, my bullets, or my life. Most of the time it was all three.”
“What do you mean by life? Slavers?”
“Aye. I was nearly caught in a trap by one. My own stupidity lured me into it. I was sixteen when a man told me he could sell bullets if I meet him at his shop. I believed him.”
“Is that for the Mp5 you carry? Where did you get it?” she asks.
“It was my father’s, he used it to hunt game, bought it with his own sweat and the cost of his health by cleaning the streets of the dead.”
She didn’t say anything at first as we approached the painter, then after too long a time asked, “How did you escape the slaver?”
The recollection of it comes in a sudden rush of emotion and images, and I remember the first time I was forced to kill a person.
I catch sight of the man leaning against a building surrounded by enormous trash cans. The night is darker than any I can recall, the fear drawing further darkness even in my mind. The man is hooded and doesn’t look up even as I come right in front of him. My hand rests firmly on the butt of my semi-automatic strapped over my shoulder. The first thing I notice is that this isn’t the man I had arranged to meet.
“Where’s Marcas?” I ask. “He’s not here, where is he?”
The man’s gruff voice and the sheen in his eyes greet me without emotion. “Indeed it would have been odd if he were here. For I stabbed the old bastard in the throat.”
The boldness of his declaration leaves me standing. That moment, however, is all the person behind me needs.
Hands grab hold of my neck and squeeze. Silvers pecks flow and shift in my vision and I see what the stars might look like. But even at my age, I know I am stronger, an ox on two legs, they say. I bury my elbow in the gut of the guy behind me and spin around, backhanding him across the face. He tumbles to the ground, but so do I, dazed as I realize I’ve been struck on the back of my head. I feel a kick in my side, then other, then a third. I grab the Mp5 and fire blindly. The burst is a sweeping, backhanded arc spraying bullets
behind me. The pain stops and I don’t look at what I had done, I just run, the sound of gurgling and the image of a man dying parading before my eyes.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. That night, I became something new. Someone else. I grew out of my skin and shed it behind me in that alley. And even today, when the nights get particularly dark and my dreams grow restless, I can still hear the phantom of that sound. The gurgle of a man struggling to breathe, clinging to the last seconds of his life.
I shiver and she notices, touches my arm. The gesture surprises me, but the warmth of her fingers feels welcoming. “I shot him,” I tell her.
“Good,” she nods, smiling a smile I haven’t seen on her before. “I’ve never liked the bigger cities either.”
Only when the painter speaks as we came close enough, do I manage to divert my gaze from her eyes and feel her hand slip away. I begin to miss her touch instantly.
I wondered how the painter can be so calm towards strangers approaching and carrying guns.
“Dear god, man,” the man exclaims, looking at Ty, aghast, “what happened to your face?”
“He got punched by a–” she stops mid sentence as she notices what lays on the ground in front of the group of three men. The burly looking bunch maintain their ecstatic expressions – as though they had caught some big game – proud of themselves. I figure it’s all for the sake of the paining. One of them holds up a thumb. A ridiculous gesture. At their feet lays the huge body of a Templar, its armor clean and untarnished, its size well beyond the length of the three men. The son of a bitch is even bigger than I remember. His armor looks like a work of art. Patterns of intricate lines and a mosaic of shapes. On his massive breastplate there is a pyramid with an eye floating above and rays shooting out of its triangular outline. His helmet is adorned with a black cross that reaches over the sides of his face and stands out amid the silver of his armor.
“How did this happen?” I ask the painter.
“No idea,” he shrugs. “We found him like this in the morning. Huge fucker, eh?”
“We killed him, of course!” yells one of the grinning men posing for the painting as the other two laugh.
“What is this town? Have we wandered into another dimension?” I ask Calyx. I have never seen such cheerfulness. The painter heard my question and turns to face me.
“You’ve wandered into the City of Time, as we have named it. Protected by the watchful eyes of the Templars themselves. See that fortress up there?” he asks, motioning the blunt end of his brush at the structure to his distant right, atop the highest hill. “That’s the Illuminatus Arx. Our fair town is the only place that I know of that still keeps and knows the exact date in which our planet currently resides.”
“How is it possible that people don’t know this? The date? I’ve actually always wondered,” I ask. Ty keeps patting me on the shoulder, tapping it incisively. “Oh, do you have a medic here?”
“C’mon Eirik, paint, dammit! Before they come,” shouts one of the men.
“Of course we have a medic,” the man nods while resuming his work. “It’s the building with a big red cross over its door, hard to miss. We painted it on it a while ago, the color had waned, it’s still noticeable though. It’s in the main building, can’t miss that either. Lots of cars around it.”
“Tell me, how do you keep time?” I ask, watching Ty wander off.
“We have a clock of sorts,” says Eirik.
“What difference does that make?”
“Either you’ve lived under a rock, or you truly know nothing about the nature of the war that made this planet into what it is now,” he says, sympathetically.
I notice three fiery trails cometing outward from the fortress atop the rise. They speed through the yellow sky with a downward arc while Eirik – with a calmness I found somewhat disconcerting – says, “A story for later,” and picks up his painting. The three men scatter back between the houses. Before I have time to move or hide, three immense figures crunch the soil about ten meters to our right with the sound of deep anvil strikes. Dust and particles of dirt plume about the impact of their landing, settling on their armor and trailing off the contours of it. Their buckled knees straighten as they stand up to their full height. I watch in awe of the sight, the heavy packs on their backs reaching to almost twice the Templar’s already considerable bulk. The four exhausts barf excess heat like furnaces upon their backs. They all wear heavy hoods fashioned out of some metallic material. They trudge wordlessly over the dust and throw a fist sized contraption on their motionless brethren. The thing clanks and sticks. Two of them hold him by one shoulder-pad each, while the third hoists his legs up in between his massive arms. They stand there, motionless. Until the reality of the figures begins to undulate in and out of focus, wavering for a moment, before they disappear entirely.
We stand there, Calyx and I. We share a look, then head after Ty.
On our way we meet up with the painter, Eirik, who carries his work tucked under his arm and greets us with a smile.
“I take it you’ve never seen anything like that before, eh?” he smiles.
“How’d they survive the landing?” I ask.
He takes a right turn between one of the buildings. The town is full of run down vehicles, their insides stripped of seats and anything of note, most are just piles of scrap. They sit piled up on the wide roadway in almost alarming number. A sea of metal parts.
“Careful,” says Eirik.
We climb on the roof of one and continue to walk upon them, sometimes hopping from one to the other. We head towards an official-looking, white building with a tall, pillared entrance in the distance between the blocks. Its construction speaks of age.
“It’s their suits,” he says at length, grunting as he jumps from the roof of one car to the other. I figured as much. “That’s what we presume, at least. Can I ask you two a question?”
“Aye,” I nod.
“What brought you here? To this town?”
“We needed a medic for our friend.”
“I see, nothing else then? Our charming townsfolk, perhaps?” he grins.
“I’m searching for my father, the Templars took him,” says Calyx.
“I see. Yes, I had a sense there was something you needed.”
“A sense?” she asks. “What do you mean? You presumed?”
“More on that later,” he says. “You should come see me at The Fane, once you find your friend, naturally. I think we have much to discuss.”
“The Fane?” I ask.
“It’s a small structure further down the left of the main road. See the white building ahead? You’ll find the medic in there, just search for the door with a red cross on it. Once you’re done, head right down the road and you’ll not miss it. We’ll talk more then.” He turns and waves while we ascend the wide stairs and go beneath the tall archway and into the structure.
Markers on the floor eventually lead us to a room where we find Ty, threatening who I presume to be a doctor at gunpoint.
“You’re seriously going to shoot the only man that can help you within a fifty kilometer radius?” the doctor protests, his hands held up. The man he had a point.
“Ty, what the hell?” I jump in. He mumbles, or rather, tries to murmur something which comes out wholly incoherent.
“I’m not doing any sort of procedure without some credit!” argues the bearded man, his voice rather high, his apron and high-collared coveralls filthy with all manner of nocuous stains.
His shop is a shamble of medical material, most of which I have no doubt was scavenged. There’s a few strange apparatuses placed about, looking like they might see some use in cracking a skull open. Drills are scattered on medical benches and scalpels rest within liquids that smell bitter. I dislike the place like one tends to dislike anything filthy.
“You won’t even do it at gunpoint?” laughs Calyx.
“No,” says the doctor, “because then all of you idiots with a gun will come in here and exto
rt me for services,” says the doctor.
“I can’t say his argument doesn’t hold a strange sort of sense,” she says, shrugging.
“How much you want?” I ask.
“A Visa card for the whole procedure.”
I nod and reach into my chest pocket. His eyes widen with disbelief as I pull out a deck of plastics and search for a Visa.
“Damn,” says Calyx, “where’d you get that many?”
I don’t answer and hand the doc what he wants. “Now do it.”
His demeanor changes in a blink. I notice people do that a lot when you give them credit. He bows curiously and motions for Ty to sit down on the reclining chair in the middle of his shop. The doc adjust it by pressing two grime-covered buttons on a machine to his right. Satisfied with the new position of the chair, he pulls out a pair of latex gloves from a box and puts them on. They look pristine, glossy. Something so clean had to be older than all of us combined.
“Now open wide,” says the doctor. Ty shoots him an ‘are you fucking kidding me?’ look and the doctor laughed his ass off. “A joke, of course,” he snorts, wiping tears from his eyes. He feels around behind Ty’s jaw line with his hands and runs his fingers along its length. A light strapped around his forehead illuminates the cave of Ty’s mouth.
“The good news is; it doesn’t appear to be broken or fractured.”
“How do you know?” I ask.
“For one, I’m a doctor,” he says. “And second, if it were fractured or broken, me touching it would make him whine like a little bitch.”
“There’s also bad news?” Calyx inquires.
“There always is,” he sighs. “The reduction of it will hurt. Like a fucktruck.”
“The hell?” I ask.
“It’s a vehicle that hits you like a ton of bricks.”
“What?”
“It’s like a fat chick tap-dancing on your face.”
“Seriousl–“
“A donkey kicking you in the jaw? Or maybe a–“
Ty grabs the man by his collar and points his rifle at his face. The whole scene would have looked rather serious, if not for Ty’s jaw hanging stupidly and drooling down his chin.
“Fine, geez, no sense of humor at all,” says the doctor, readjusting his collar as Ty lets him go. “How do you people survive without a sense of humor? I don’t even know if…” he went on, but I cut him off.
“Give him something for the pain,” I say to the doctor.
“That’ll cost extra.”
“No, it won’t,” I snarl, his greed made me want to punch him in the mouth.
“What?” he asks.
“You mentioned something like a donkey? Picture that kicking you in the jaw. That’s what my fist feels like,” I say.
“It really does,” Calyx nods, “I saw him knock down a Templar.”
“Are you… Look, the injections are not easy to synthesize, I can’t just–“
I’ve dealt with his kind often enough to know the smell of shit when it comes out of their mouths. They are easy enough to spot, the stench alone is enough. “You’re a scavenger. A thief playing at doctor.”
His face puffs up and he looks like he’s about to say something back, but instead turns around and opens one of the drawers. He takes out a syringe and removes the plastic covering the needle with his teeth. Maintaining eye contact, he stabs it into Ty’s arm and injects its contents. Ty’s head drops before he even has time to object.
He spits out the plastic. “Happy now?” the doc asks me. “Also, do you know of anyone else who can reduce a dislocated jaw?”
“No,” I admit.
“Then I am fucking doctor.”
“Fine,” I say and hand him one of the cards of lesser value. I still had plenty and didn’t much care about them for now. Such worries always come when I start to run low.
“Why thank you, kind sir.” He bows ridiculously and begins his work on Ty’s jaw. He grabs hold of his lower face with both hands and presses the bone down until a crunched click sounds and I assume the jaw had popped back in.
He removes his gloves and throws them into a can beside the examining chair, then plays around with Ty’s jaw.
“That’s it?” Calyx asks.
“Were you expecting a circus act?” the doc smirks. “Perhaps some fireworks? Get him outta here,” he says. “I don’t care if you have to drag him, just get the hell out of my office.”
I throw Ty over my shoulder like a sack as Calyx takes his rifle and backpack and we head out.
“He seems to spend a lot of his time unconscious,” she says.
We descend down the stair leading from the building and I nod. “That or talking.”
“You, on the other hand, don’t seem to say much, do you?” she asks me.
“What’s there to say? I do what needs to be done and say what needs to be said. I wish rather not to expose my ignorance at every turn.”
I head right and realize I had become tired, the added weight of Ty’s body an extra strain upon my feet.
“You haven’t slept a wink, did you?”
“Not really, no,” I answer. “Perhaps we should head over to The Fane, see what it’s all about. Hopefully we can find a place to rest for a bit.”
“I could use a bit of a nap as well, this heat is oppressing on the senses,” she says. “Some food would be nice too.”
“Aye,” I nod and we head out, between the streets and over to a building shaped like an egg, its surface white and gleaming over the distance.
On our way, we run into a girl named Samara, her tiny voice urging us on. “Surely you cannot be so ignorant?” she asks me after I had asked her if she knows the nature of the war that has all but destroyed this world. Asking a small girl seemed somewhat out place. But she had that look on her, like she carries age in her eyes but not in her limbs.
“I have traveled most of my life,” I tell her. “And I have yet to run into anyone who knows what has happened or can tell me with any kind of certainty.”
“You are at crossroads then, friend,” she says. “From here on forward, you will hear all too well what has happened, what is happening and what is yet to happen.”
“Can you be a bit more specific?” Calyx asks her.
The girl, petite and thick haired, sighs as though she had told the story to countless other travelers countless times before.
“The Templars, as the story goes, wished to transform the world, but ended up destroying it. Whether this was by design or because the people wished for the changes not to happen, I do not know. But a weapon was developed and the effects of its detonation had an effect on space-time itself. It tore the very fabric of existence and reality. It made the earth into an ever-rifting zone of time dilation and distortion. I heard stories too, further down south, that there’s nuclear bombs that’ll take centuries to spread.”
“What does that mean, exactly?” Calyx asks.
“It means that you can watch the explosion from a distance and it would seem as though it’s moving in slow motion, or not at all. A perfect sunset, some had called it. I haven’t seen such a thing myself. I haven’t ventured from this town in… hell I don’t even know how long it’s been.”
“You look no more than ten years old,” I say to her.
“This village is a pocket in time. Time here passes slower than in other places.”
The area ahead of us grows thick with makeshift tents and a kind of covering runs along them all, connected by a thick rope that’s pinned to the upper reaches of the egg-shaped building. The building itself has no windows or opening that I can see, but the closer we get to it, the more I feel like I can see its interior through the walls.
“How is that even possible?” I ask the girl. “Time is a constant.”
“There’s much that was thought impossible in this world,” she says while nodding her greetings to the many people that we pass. “The most hidden truth of all is the nature of existence. Why do we exist, what’s our purpose? We
have lived on this planet for longer than anyone can account, yet such basic things still elude our minds.”
“Right,” I nod, knowing all too well the questions that had plagued humanity since its beginnings, for they have vexed my mind also. “You have not answered my question.”
“Time is particles and their movements,” she says. “We could go deeper into sub-atomic levels, as scientists before my time have put it, but if particles do not move, we cannot say that any time has truly passed. The movement of particles has slowed down in some places in this world. How this has happened I cannot tell you, you would need to find a Templar and somehow get him to spill the truth if you want to know that. But that’s something none of us have managed as of yet.”
“How do we not see ourselves move in slow motion, talk in slow motion, if time has indeed slowed down here?” Calyx inquires.
Samara takes the hand of another girl coming from the direction of The Fane and the talk amongst themselves for a little while. Then the new girl smiles and while departing, asks, “Is this the one?” Samara nods and smiles back.
“What was that about?” I ask. The girl had clearly looked at me when asking the question. I feel like the target of some whispered joke.
“Nothing,” says Samara. “We’re here,” she says. “This is where you needed to go, yes?”
We stand in front of what they call The Fane. It’s white and smooth walls reach high, its curvature concealing its top from me as I gaze up at its reflective surface. Above it, the clouds are thinner, the golden rays of the sun cutting through with greater zeal than in any other place I had seen.
“How do we get inside?” I ask.
“Just walk through,” Samara smiles.
“Through where? There’s no opening.”
“No opening is needed,” she says. “Walk.”
“Wait,” says Calyx as the girl turns and start to head back. “Answer my question, please!”
“Consciousness is a weird thing,” says the girl as she walks away. “It deals in relatives. We may just be talking and walking, doing everything in slow motion, but the way we perceive all of this is a whole different matter.”
I find her answer fascinating, but not nearly as fascinating as the prospect of being able to walk through what appears to be a solid wall. Calyx grabs my hand and we walk through with Ty unconscious, draped over my shoulder. I feel nothing but the warmth of her hand as I pass through and find myself within the most beautiful place I have ever seen.
CHAPTER 11
