by K.Z. Freeman
Like the hollow insides of a vast overturned pyramid, level 23 greets me with dim light refracted of dark-grey walls. A smell of stale air brings forth the images from outside. My mind wanders. I gaze above to see the same sight as below. Levels upon levels. A memory grabs me as though it had been drifting upon the winds trapped within this place. I see a plane of broken kingdoms and lands that had once been great, majestic even. They wait broken now, shattered, the remains of greatness scattered in the minds of men like the books they choose to keep hidden.
I wonder how I was made, when I realize just how vast the structure is, for in those rare moments when the outer world reflects the inner, it brings with it a special kind of clarity. After a rather lengthy walk, I reach the railing ahead of me. Multi-leveled and stretching into the depths, the walls slope into a single point where light spins in a circle. Whips of white twist and jump into machinery lying upon each of the levels, like pods or cocoons. I wait to see the light slowly dying and then stopping its spurring lights altogether.
The doors had closed and now re-opened again behind me. I don’t take notice, drifting into the sight before me, my eyes scanning for Ia. The need to see Calyx again fills me and pulses in my chest.
Three Templars walk out of the open maw behind me. Each holds a thick needle pointing upward, a sword as thick as my neck, reaching high to another half the Templar’s height. The steel is near blinding. Heavy and synchronized footsteps approach me, the ring of them reminding me of the time when a group of men ambushed me in an alley. The sound of it is that of no escape. Eye-slits shine with deep crimson. An inner light cast by their greatswords contrasts the decorations over their chests where they hold the black hilts of their swords. A serpent’s head coils about the blades to half their length.
I’ve learned that no matter where you are or where you go, you will always find people who know something you do not. Our minds are shaped by other minds, by interaction with other minds, and others will always have something they can teach you. The lessons may be bitter, they may even teach you in death, but in the end, you will have learned something. Perhaps an ultimate lesson before the bastard stabs you in the eye. The lesson I have learned, however, is to always run from men bearing swords bigger than your arm.
I ignore that lesson this time. This time, I will not run. This time I shall kill them. I see the same sight. I see the men in that alley; their grins as they thirst for my weapon, my clothes. I remember how I managed to escape and run. I was too afraid to use my gun on people back then, but life teaches bitter lessons. But unlike then, I don’t have a gun this time. I have something better – my mind. The first slash of a sword hisses its way towards me in a balanced downward strike. The other two follow with side-slashes from both directions. I roll on my axis and grab hold of the wrist swung down at me and lurch the Templar forward where I had stood. He is cut down from both sides. A yell escapes his helm and a vomit of blood paints the crimson slits of his helm black.
We are all machines. Easy to break. I wonder what would roll out of me instead of guts and gore should I be cut open.
I don’t feel like finding out just yet, and before the other two have time to dislodge their swords, I cave in the helm of one with my fist. Desperation makes weird things happen in our brains. After seeing me punch his friend’s skull in, the third and last Templar drops the blade and attempts to parry my approaching fist. A most curious choice of repose, since my hand flies forwards as though his parry isn’t even there, punches his skull in with a loud crack, then his whole form goes flying aside as I backhand him with the same fist. The process had felt like fighting a tin can. I hear footsteps behind me and see five more of the bastards had come. I pick up one of swords, holding it two-handed before me as they draw theirs.
Challenge accepted.
This time they don’t rush me, but surround me slowly and carefully, one of them kicking aside the corpse of his friend with a sideswipe of his foot.
“Perhaps you think you can win this,” I recognize the voice of Awir. “Perhaps you even think you can escape. But perhaps and maybes are not what makes this world whole.”
I tend to disagree. My mother had thought me many things. My sweet mother. She thought me quite the opposite of what Awir had just taunted me with. A poor taunt to be begin with, it has to be said. And if I wasn’t so used to the gritty quality of the Templar’s voice serrated by their mouth-grille, it would be his tone that would carry the true weight of his words, not the words themselves. Now I know even the words are not true. “The world and its intrinsic field is nothing but pure possibility,” my mother had told me once. “Your father may tell you something else, but consciousness is nothing else but a field where all of these possibilities are fazing into relative existence for all beings.” She was full of lessons like that, my mother, and while I respected my father more, I loved her on a level I could never have loved my father.
The most important lesson which finds me in the very moment when the first blade slashes my way and I can sense the second and the third a hearbeat behind it, is to always have the mind of a beginner. “Remember,” she said. “The beginner’s mind sees possibilities where others see obstacles.”
I see those very possibilities now; a sword thrust forward and a twist of the wrist, and the first Templar falls with thick steel in his neck, gargling his own blood. If you cut in the right place it’s quite surprising how far the blood will go, so far in fact, that it baffles me how we don’t just explode. I cut a my way to the side, slashing the neck I had just punctured and seeing red spray the silver of the Templar to my left.
All forms are energy. When I clash my own energy propelled through several feet of hard Ancient steel, the Templar bursts apart in a fountain of red life. The upper part of his body slumps back and I can see the one half of his heart still pumping as the bottom half of his body falls to the ground. I duck beneath a swing and parry the next almost simultaneously. The small photoscreen on the right side of my inner display shows me clearly that Awir, who had been standing behind me, had started to run away. That angers me and I feel spittle flying as I cut through one Templar with a roaring madness that goes right through his attempt to parry and shatters both our swords. Bits of metal spatter across our armor and I jam the broken sword in his eye while side-kicking the fourth in the gut. I walk up to him as he tries to get up. One mighty punch and I watch him spill over the floor in a wet spasming heap. I pick up his sword. It’s not as ornate as the one I had before, but it will do. I race after Awir.
I chase him floor by floor in a spiraling run that takes us further below, surrounded by machinery vast in complexity. I know I would require innumerate guidelines to know each of them and their individual function. They smell old. The lighting becomes dimmed while I chase Awir to the very lowest apex of insanity. I hear the clank-clank-clanking of his heavy boots, yet he is no more than a shadow suspended on dust. Sometimes a machine will come to life as he passes it and illuminate him in silver splendor, stomping the dust-covered floor. It is in instances like these that I realize how our little glimpses reflect the fragmental nature of being. Don’t pay attention to it and it is gone in the moment behind you. Templars and their empires, their lies and deceits, lifetimes of the earth and eons of flesh will pass, transient, but me? Will I stay forever? Will I walk over the last heap of corpses rotting in the sun and shout into the wind to take me?
Awir stops before a hunched figure standing behind a console and I catch up to him. There’s only a few more decks below us and I can hear a strong buzzing of what could be an electric coil of some kind.
I notice it is Ia that he pushes aside and begins mashing the console. I ram the sword through his chest.
He says nothing. He utters nothing, he simply falls when I yank the blade out and doesn’t get up.
“Loregar,” says Ia while getting back on his feet, “I am sorry.”
At first I don’t know what he means. I look at him, look at what he is holding then look back at the irreplace
able machine-work Awir had just destroyed, his own sword still impaled deep in the fizzling engine. I hope that what this means is not true, for my knees are already shaking.
CHAPTER 27
I heard a proverb once. When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. I’ve never seen or tasted lemons before, but what if those lemons are rotten? I suppose that would make for a real shitty lemonade.
I hold the blackbox Ia had given me in my hands, weeping. My inner display is blurry and I can’t even make out the details of it, but I know what it means. I don’t understand how it’s possible but I know what it means.
“There has to be a way,” I say looking at Ia.
“The Way,” he whispers. “There’s always a way. Depends on what you’re willing to sacrifice to walk it.” His helm takes on a prophetic meaning in the dark, with only the red of his slits visible and the broken console fizzling behind him, drawing shadows of his shape.
“Everything,” I tell him.
“Good,” he nods. I can almost see the smile behind his helm as he extends his palm to me.
CHAPTER 28
I am racked by a fitful sleep every night since we left the Illuminatus Arx behind. Ia says the box holds the consciousness and will and the whole of who Calyx and Ty were. He tells me there are places like the Arx way down south, where the sands stretch like the ocean and my will shall be tested to its uppermost limits. He says it’s there that we can bring the two back to life. I am ready. I am ready because for the first time I feel as though I am not simply Nomad. I feel for the first time that my life has a clear vector I must follow, a purpose, a meaning. Ia feels it too. He tells me he feels alive when I ask him why he left his brothers behind. Alive for the first time in his three cycles. That’s what the Templars call their lives. Cycles. He tells me he would rather have one brother that he himself had chosen, instead of three hundred he cannot stand. He says he was the youngest of them and I can see he still possesses as certain spirit through which a peculiar wisdom punches through every time he speaks. I suppose we have that in common. We are both old. Old men in young bodies and minds, but with ancient eyes and a heart that has been beating for far too long. But they shall beat for a while still. I know my father will chase me. I know Malakard and his agents will not forget me, but let them come, let the whole world come!
I catch glimpses of the black sphere above the radioactive clouds. It seems the further south we go, the thinner they become and I sight the sphere every now and then. It doesn’t reflect anything, doesn’t give away anything. It is simply there, watching us. I still hear the voice in my head saying, “Come see me when they fall.” I wish to know The Eye’s secrets. But the blackbox is what truly propels me. They will walk again, we will walk again, my friends and I. I will touch Calyx again and I will smile with Ty again. And they will call me what I truly am. They will call me by what I now know I am. I will hear them speak my name. My purpose is clear for the first time since I set foot upon this dread-earth. I am no longer Nomad. I am Loregar, and I am forever!
