by Laury Falter
Text copyright © 2014 by Laury Falter
All rights reserved. Except as permitted by the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author or the publisher.
First Edition: May 2014
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
eISBN 978-0-9890362-5-2
MESSENGER
by
LAURY FALTER
PROLOGUE: INSTIGATION
IT ALL BEGAN WITH A SCREAM.
Undulating down the stark white, arched hall notched with pockets of scrolls and out across the heavens, it was heard by all present in the afterlife.
So unprecedented was this sound in this place that it caused the entirety of those at hand to sit up, to stop speaking, to angle an ear toward it. Glances were exchanged, questioning what it could mean, without any premonition or understanding as to what the answer might be.
That hollow sound was enough to stir fear in a place that had never known that sensation. But what came after it, what filtered from one to another until everyone had been told was what finally sent the chill through us, because it was the cause behind the scream that was truly frightening.
I am fairly certain that I was the last to know. Even those at the farthest reaches of the heavens learned before I did because even if one is surrounded by loving friends, if that one has a preference for it, they do have the option to live in anonymity.
I wouldn’t say I was isolated so much as reclusive, so when the scream rippled across the waters toward my seaside bungalow and rustled the sand on its way by me, I sat alone, watching it pass in curious awe. A second later I was standing, facing the path where the scream had come and rotating to watch where it went, as it faded into the distance, vibrating the almost undetectable aura that separated my afterlife from another’s.
A gathering took place shortly following in which all those interested could attend and discuss the event. This was an unparalleled response for a one of a kind occurrence. Everyone who hadn’t fallen to earth, or was otherwise preoccupied in that particular realm, was there.
The story behind what had happened was recounted again by those in attendance and I was finally made privy to the details of this epic occurrence.
A messenger, one of a small, legendary group with the ability to exist simultaneously both in the afterlife and in the other realm called earth, had awoken in the Hall of Records, opened her mouth, and released that terrifying sound seconds before her body spilled blood from a wound to her stomach, gradually disappearing until there was nothing left but the stone bench on which her body had been laying. It was noted frequently in the course of the conversations that the scream had an edge to it that anyone with experience on earth could recognize as one that is released at the time of death; a particularly painful, frightening death. Since then, her body had not returned, but – as if it had taken her place – a mysterious, previously unseen notation was now entered on her scroll reading Eternal Death.
No one led the ceremony or managed its discussion. As the crowd hovered in a circle over the gorge to the mouth of our shared city, dialogue flowed uninhibited, our broad wings extended from our backs, fluttering in a nearly endless synchronized wave of white. It was a reflection of how we lived, in peace, open, and virtuous.
I remained silent, listening to the conjecture around me, the attempts to form a concrete understanding out of something without any foundation from which to build on. We left that gathering with little more than we’d come with. The only thing we carried away was the realization that something had changed.
When the second scream rattled through the afterlife and all heads turned once again in the direction of the great Hall of Records, we knew it was not the end of something but the beginning. A tear had been created in the fabric of our existence and it was letting in the cold. When this messenger’s death reflected the same notation on his scroll, we gathered again.
There were fewer of us this time, either out of reluctance or disinterest. After all, the scream posed no further threat than to momentarily disrupt our work or festivities. The missing messengers would reappear soon, wouldn’t they?
But I had a sense, even in the serenity of the afterlife, that something very wrong was happening in the other realm and that it was reaching us the only way it could, through the messengers. So this time, I didn’t hold back.
Floating into the middle of that great circle, I addressed my friends in a manner they had never seen, from anyone, least of all a recluse such as me. Uncertain times called for certain kinds of measures, and so as I hovered before them, I announced what no one else would, what we all knew to be the truth but were too uncomfortable with to acknowledge.
“If they are not reappearing here in the afterlife or on earth, there is only one explanation. They are dying the same type of death that is believed to exist on earth. They are dying a permanent one.”
The crowd grew quiet, to the farthest edges. Only the rumble of the falls below us could be heard as the water rushed over colossal boulders and spilled into the river that flowed to a place I had not been.
“In that other realm, they are facing an everlasting demise, and it is being claimed that they are facing it at the hands of others. And there is only one way to prevent it from happening again.”
“What do you propose?” a man asked from the crowd.
I hesitated, knowing the sentiment I was about to utter was again unheard of here.
“That the messengers learn to fight.”
The crowd broke into hushed, tense, frenzied discussion, like a thousand hummingbirds taking flight.
“That is not their responsibility,” remarked a woman to my right.
I turned to her, undeterred. “It is if they wish to live.”
The crowd that had fallen silent again began their murmurs.
I eyed them, knowing these announcements were better left unsaid for the sake of serenity. But for the sake of the messengers I refused to stay quiet, especially because my final point would need to drive home the significance of the situation the messengers faced.
“They have no other choice.”
“Choice?” someone called out.
“They can fight and live or they can continue to die.” Such disturbing concepts weren’t often brought up in the afterlife and it sparked a maelstrom of discussions.
Having said all I needed, having made my decision and knowing it was now up to them to make theirs, I turned to leave but I didn’t make it far.
A woman approached me with several others close behind.
“You believe that is our only option…,” she called out. “To fight?”
I turned to her.
The woman speaking was petite with chocolate-colored hair and wide eyes, which surprised me because we resembled each other. The only difference between us was that she looked innocent, like those gathering behind her.
“Are you a messenger?” I asked.
“We all are.” She swept her hand to the others who had followed her and back around to me.
It was a conscious gesture – including me in that sweep – but I brushed it aside because she was mistaken. I was not a messenger.
“I suggest you fight,” I said, “or die trying.”
She took her time to evaluate me. They all did. “You’re the one who keeps to herself.”
This stunned me. I didn’t know I was “the one”, or the only one.
“For the
most part,” I replied, trying not to show my discomfort at being singled out.
“And yet you care…for us.”
“Being quiet doesn’t mean being indifferent.”
She paused, firming up her assessment of me before speaking again. “I am Hermina,” she said with a gentle nod.
“Magdalene,” I replied.
She nodded again, more slowly. “How do you expect us to fight, Magdalene? You advise this but have not told us how.”
I considered her point for a moment. “If you are ready to learn, I know of those who are ready to teach.”
The woman drew in a breath and held it, recognizing the implications of what she was about to consent to. “Then have them teach us.”
And that is how our loss of innocence became our strength and how I began down the rocky path that led me to the great love of my existence with the legendary guardian named Eran.
CHAPTER ONE: ERAN
WHEN THE MESSENGERS ARRIVED, IN ONE tight-knit group, there were more of them than I’d anticipated.
The word had spread. In fact, it spread far enough for spectators to also appear at the edge of the small jungle I’d carved out and created for our training purposes. From below the drooping emerald vines five men and two women appeared, settling into their stances on the outskirts of my training grounds, legs astride, arms hanging ready at their sides, watchful eyes following us as we gathered in a circle. From the looks of their chiseled muscles and the weaponry hanging from their waists, they didn’t need defensive skills.
“They aren’t with you, are they?” I asked Hermina.
“No,” she said, appraising them with the same watchfulness she had used on me. “They seem…strong. They aren’t the ones who will be training us?”
I shook my head.
They did have an air of strength and authority, an impression left by their diligent awareness and taut smiles, so they may have been up to the task. But we were strangers and I couldn’t be sure one way or another – even if the fight seemed to emanate from them.
They held their staunch postures even when Hermina remarked about a rustling from the velvety green shadows in the jungle’s thickest clustering of trees.
Squinting at the movement, she mumbled, “What is that?”
“That,” I said smiling, “would be the trainers.”
Daniel and Jacob entered the jungle with enough speed to lift my hair from my shoulders, carving a path through the thickly clustered trees and rousing leaves in their wake into upheaval.
By the time their feet were on the ground, the messengers were ducking.
Hermina glanced questioningly in my direction until she saw their faces and then her expression pinched into frustration.
Unlike me, Daniel and Jacob were known, and for valid reasons.
“No harm in making an entrance…,” Jacob bellowed, thrusting his massive chest outward and retracting his appendages with a violent snap as he waltzed arrogantly by the messengers, flexing every bulging muscle visible to them.
Daniel, the more reasonable of the two, serenely tucked his appendages back and strode carefully across the damp earth to meet me. He was brawnier than Jacob and therefore less prone to displaying his strength.
“He’s a little excited,” Daniel remarked quietly.
“Oh? I couldn’t detect it,” I said, brushing the mildew from my shoulders where their arrival had deposited it.
Daniel chuckled at my understatement and watched his friend return to where we stood.
“Splendid day for a fight,” Jacob announced. “Splendid day!”
“Jacob thinks we should begin with a test of skills,” explained Daniel, although he sounded as unimpressed with the idea as I was.
The messengers, too, continued to stare at their new instructors, a blend of inhibition and annoyance in their expressions.
“Let’s see what you all have in you. One by one. Who’ll be first?” Jacob shouted, clapping his hands together with enthusiasm.
No one volunteered, staring uncertainly back at him.
I initially thought this was because they were daunted until I realized all eyes were finely attuned to someone else, someone approaching us from behind me, above the vine-wrapped trees.
Turning, I found him gliding in evenly, patiently, not as if he had all the time in the world but as if the world would wait for him. His massive appendages carried him steadily to the ground where he settled with precision on the uneven mud before they smoothly rolled back, sank away, and disappeared. As he walked the remaining steps to the five men and two women who had collected earlier, they didn’t address him but were observant of his moves in the way soldiers await commands from a head officer.
Just as I had, he had chosen a young adult’s body. He was tall but leaner than the others. This one’s muscles were lithe, allowing his movements to be nimble, precise, rather than clunky like the others. His dark brown, wavy hair was longer, too, swaying as he moved.
He stood out from the rest, by appearance and by the unreserved display of self-confidence. Unlike the others, he could successfully intimidate with ease. Even if I didn’t feel this way toward him, I saw it on the faces of those around me. In fact, I immediately got the impression that there wasn’t much this man couldn’t control.
When he came to a stop, he settled confidently back on the balls of his feet and folded his muscular arms across his chest before sweeping a firm gaze over the crowd.
This was when the messengers began to whisper to each other.
“Is that…”
“No, it can’t be.”
“But I think it is…”
“Eran?”
“The Eran?”
“Yes…the Eran,” confirmed Hermina, her eyes never straying from the man who had captured everyone’s attention.
When he scanned the group, he did so leisurely, assessing the messengers from afar, and it immediately struck me that he was here not as an observer but with a reason.
And then his eyes reached me and stopped.
When he did this, something exploded inside me. I drew in a quick breath and for the first time in my existence I actually tasted the air I inhaled. It was sweet, seemingly laced with sugar. I smelled the dampness of the jungle surrounding us and noticed the breeze slipping across my skin. And suddenly, I felt whole, as if I’d existed in a void until that moment, surviving but never actually living, seeing but never taking in the details.
His eyebrows pulled together as he stared across the clearing at me, in the way someone does when they believe they’ve recognized another. I wondered what he saw beyond my small, five-foot frame, round eyes, and long chocolate-colored hair. Whatever it was, it caused his eyes to become electrified the longer they stayed in place, heating until they burned with concentration and made me feel like he thought he was observing someone exceptionally peculiar or important. I was neither of those, so his interest was unexplainable to me.
As we watched each other, my muscles flexed, and I realized my body wanted to move closer to him, without reason, without a foreseeable purpose. I didn’t know this man, had never seen him, never spoken to him, and yet that didn’t stop or deter the urge to have him touch me.
Then he released the breath he’d been holding, and I knew he’d felt something too.
His muscles rippled through his thighs, but his position didn’t shift, and I thought he might be fighting the same urge I was to cross the clearing and close the distance between us.
Breaking my concentration, but only minimally, Jacob demanded again, this time more insistently, “Who will be first?”
He was losing his audience to the man now staring at me and was desperate to get it back. Jacob lived for attention.
No one stepped forward, not for a pummeling that Eran, the man whom everyone seemed to know, would watch from a few feet away.
I tried to unlock the hold this man had over me, to accept Jacob’s invitation since no one else would, but I couldn’t. As much as I struggled, I
could not break free. I was mercilessly under this man’s arrest.
Then Eran swallowed, opened his mouth, and spoke. “I will.”
A vibration went through me at the sound of his voice, stifling my breath and erasing the memory of what it felt like to inhale.
He spoke with an English accent and a rugged inflection, which seemed so opposing to me. And as we continued to try to figure each other out from afar, my first notion of him was that he was a contrast in personalities; someone refined and contemplative, but who insisted on portraying himself as a rugged brute.
I was so preoccupied with him, with understanding him, that I didn’t notice Jacob’s reaction. It was hesitant.
Eran did, however, and added, “If you’ll allow me, Jacob.”
Jacob chuckled, although there was more than fabricated enthusiasm in it. There was fear, even if his words denied it. “Always wanted to take on the legendary Eran.”
Eran didn’t rebuke that reputation, or endorse it. He simply unfolded his arms and strode toward us.
As he did, his stare remained steadfast.
“Gravity is different here,” he remarked to himself, and I took this as his personal reminder for when the scrimmage began. “Stronger, somehow…”
“That would be Magdalene’s doing,” Daniel remarked. “To make it more closely resemble the setting where the messengers will fight.”
Only then did Eran break his gaze, and I instantly wanted it back.
His reserved manner didn’t change, but added a hint of curiosity as he repeated my name to Daniel. “Magdalene?”
Daniel motioned in my direction and Eran followed his hand back to me.
Again our eyes met, this time sending a prickle across my skin.
He was still focused on me when Jacob sent a fist into the side of his mouth.
Gasps rose around us, out of surprise at having seen such a motion in this place for the very first time but also over the sheer insult of it. There had been no mutually agreed on starting point and Jacob hadn’t waited for one to be decided on.
My first instinct was to step forward and offer assistance to Eran, but Daniel noticed me flinch and held me back.
