Clutching my severed arm and leg, I felt the wetness evaporate from my clothes and rolled my bleeding head around. I was lying on a sandy plateau high, high above a desert. The sun was so huge it filled a great portion of the sky, yet it was sinking below the horizon and its brilliance painted the space behind it with many vibrant colors: pink, orange, yellow, and misty blue. And it was warm. The gentle heat soothed the sting in my wounds and dulled the ache of the hole drilled into my jaw. I drank in the rich colors of the desert many miles below where I lay, then shut my eyes again. Exhaustion had won.
“Child,” came the deep rumble of a man’s voice, gentle and soft. “What has brought you to such a sorry state?”
“My sister,” I whispered, thinking only of my broken heart and not my body. “She’s gone. I tried to make it right, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t strong enough.” I felt a tear slip down my cheek. “I’m tired.”
“Put yourself back together,” the voice ordered.
I wanted to resist it, to lie there in pieces and just bleed into the sand forever, but I could not ignore the command. With titanic effort, I heaved myself up with my one arm and let the two limbs fall from my grasp. I picked up my arm from the ground first and stuck it back where it belonged. The muscle and blood were cold against my wound when I first pressed it to my bleeding stump, but warmth soon flooded into it and it re-attached. A tingling sensation lit up my fingertips, and I wiggled my fingers and smiled numbly at the miracle. Next I put my leg back on, and whole again, I lay back down in the sand. The warmth of that burning sun was miraculous. I actually felt at ease. I took another deep, healing breath, then turned to see who the voice belonged to.
At the edge of the plateau, an old man sat staring at the sun in quiet meditation. His dark hair was braided and his eyes possessed a serene wisdom that I knew I could never fathom for as long as I lived. At his side stood a bull, its head clean of flesh and fur, but its skull painted with the mesmerizing images of the southwestern desert. In the intricate feathers and beads that decorated this creature’s head, I saw the luster of deep magic.
I worked up enough strength to crawl over and sit beside this man. For a long while, we fixed our eyes on the majesty of that sun in complete silence.
“What is this place?” I dared to ask as curiosity overcame me.
“The tallest mountain, the center of the world. It is all places and all things. It is the axis,” the man said, a cryptic mischievousness in his voice. I thought over what he meant and decided it was best to let such words resonate through me, to swallow them up and digest them and hope that the importance of them would become so assimilated that one day it would all make sense. “Tell me, child, what is it that you are thinking?”
I considered my thoughts for a moment, and they came spilling out in a flood of emotion. “I’m remembering a time before this. Before any of this. I remember a time when there was tenderness in my life, when things didn’t seem too harsh and cold and hard. I have a memory of hope, and of excitement, and of promise that my life was just beginning. That it would go to so many wonderful places. Things felt fresh once. Things were simple and smiles came easily—naturally. I remember loving people, coming to know and trust strangers and believing with all my heart that they would never hurt me. Safety was something I took for granted and I thought that she and I would go on forever. I never thought that I would end up like this. I would do anything to have that back.”
“And what took this from you?”
“My sister did. Lea took it when she died, and no matter h-how hard I try to hold on, I—I feel like I’m losing more and more. I’m forgetting her. I’m already forgetting her. The sound of her voice, and the moments we shared. I’m losing a bit more every day. She’s fading from my life, and I can’t do anything to stop it.” Tears came now, and I clutched my chest and hung my head, feeling powerless against the pain that gripped my battered heart. “I thought I could fix it by finding out what happened to her, but I just—I don’t know what I should do anymore.”
“You should let her go.”
“How can you say such a thing?” I bit back, looking at him with rage, but he would not meet my gaze. “I would rather die than forget my sister.”
“I can offer you that, if you’d prefer,” he told me. “Stare into that sun long enough and I will make it burn so brightly that your mind will be lifted from you. It will happen gently, easily, like being lulled into the deepest and most wonderful sleep. Everything that you are will fade, and back on the other side, your friend will take your life from you before you even wake. Your pain will cease for all time, and you will be freed from the burden of life.”
“How did you know about the promise Felix made?” I whispered.
“I see all things, because it is what I desire most. It is what I create in this realm,” he told me calmly, a fatherly smile on his smooth lips. “Now, Sarah, will you let me sing you to sleep? Or will you rise fighting?”
“I—” I was stunned, tempted by the thought of being able to leave this world behind for the sweet, endless sleep where I would be free from pain and turmoil. But I was terrified to disappear—to let go of the soul I had built out of—no, earned from the trials of my life. Thoughts of Felix, who had so bravely fought to save my mind, and perhaps my life, from the ferocity of Poe stopped me. What a shame it would be to see such a good-hearted deed squandered. I thought, too, of Joy. It was on her behalf that I’d returned to this world of exquisite nightmares. This meager attempt, however trying it had been, would not suffice. I had to keep going. But going forward felt impossible at that moment.
“I want to live, but I don’t want to live like this,” I told the man. “It hurts too much.”
“It hurts because you are holding on to your pain. You keep it like an anchor around your shoulders. You won’t let it pass. Nothing new can grow in poisoned soil. You befoul it by your own hand; you plant seeds of dead things, and sate their unquenchable thirst with your tears. Let it go.”
“But I can’t. It won’t go. It stays with me. She was such a part of my life—so much a part of me. Lea and I were born together. She brought meaning to my life, and assurance, and peace that I can’t get from anywhere else. She took my ability to love things and love life when she went. I can’t get that back, so all I can do is remember. Without those memories, I’ll—I’ll be nothing. Nothing at all.” I hadn’t realized it, but I was crying again, except without the shame and anger it often accompanied. I faced the man with tears shining on my cheeks, but he would not turn from the sun.
“You are wrong again,” he told me with grave certainty. “Your sister brought those things out in you, she did not provide them. You celebrated your ability to love on a worthy subject: a soul who helped you recognize all the beauty in the world. It wasn’t something she gave to you, or that you lost when she left. It’s still within you. It is immeasurably difficult to sow a field of your own dreams, by your own hand—but the yields are more precious than anything you will ever come to know.”
“I…I understand, but how can I just accept this? How can I make my heart stop aching? How can I be peaceful in the knowledge that I’ll never see her again? That she’s gone?” I pressed, because I knew he was right.
My mother used to say that the truth really rings when you hear it, but you have to listen for it. She meant that there’s a place inside of you that can almost feel the vibration when someone is speaking the truth, and that it flows through you and washes all the doubt away. She said “You’ll know it when you feel it” and I’d never had any idea what she was talking about until that moment.
“She’s not gone, child. Death is an illusion. She is merely changed. Energy survives. We are, each of us, a raindrop. We fall through the air and are shaken about by winds, but eventually we all come to the ocean. At that point, the droplet is gone, but it has become a part of something bigger and more wonderful—a whole system of energy, changing and living and dying over and over again until time will once again c
ease. She is not lost, she is everywhere,” he said, and at last turned to look at me.
His eyes were startling in that orange light, and the sight of them made my tears come even more violently. I leaned into my hands and sobbed, feeling an ache more powerful than anything I’d known up until then coursing through me. It started at the base of my spine, shot through my neck and out my eyes. The deluge of tears poured, my eyes stinging with the emotions traveling through them. I felt as though little shards of glass were falling from my eyes and pooling in my hands, and the mixture of the pain, fear, and grief just seemed to feed my paroxysm. I cried for what seemed like forever, but the tears stopped when I realized they had frozen together in my hand.
I gazed in shock at a beautiful dagger formed by my tears, radiant as though carved from a single diamond. Its facets reflected the brilliant light of the sunset and when I turned it around to grip it by the hilt, it felt light and natural to my palm.
“What is this?”
“It’s yours. You earned it. Use it to defend yourself. Use it to get to the deep place,” the man told me. “Now you must go, little Raindrop. Your time here is fading, and a spirit waits for you in your garden.”
“Felix!” I gasped. I’d forgotten all about him in my moment of self-pity, but the mention that he’d made it back to the garden brought me to my feet in an instant. I rushed away from the sun, but skidded to a halt just before leaving. I looked back at the man, who’d gone back to his meditation, and opened my mouth to speak.
“Thank you,” I said quietly, knowing he’d hear. I almost asked his name, but after thinking about it for a moment, I chose not to. With the diamond-knife in my hand, I rushed away and leapt through the wall of his garden. By the time I passed through another garden, which was a series of endless plains with little villages nestled in the hillocks, I realized I should’ve taken the airway home.
Thankfully I was approached by the stoic, grizzled man with the Kelpie familiar. We exchanged a hurried greeting and I begged him to send me up to the airway. He complied without another word and I found myself gliding over the City on a gust of wind and down into my garden. As I neared the surface, I felled the walls that I had raised upon my leaving with a wave of my hand. I sped through the greenery that had all but taken over the place, rushing about and calling for Felix.
There was no sign of the familiar or the pillar that encased my sister’s bones. A fogginess started to descend upon me, and I knew there wasn’t much time left in Unreal City. Desperate now, I screamed for Felix. Had the man lied when he said that he was waiting for me? Was Felix still trapped with Poe?
I heard his little mewl from a few feet away. I hurried forward and found him lying curled up in a clump of ferns. He was covered in wounds, and his bones were exposed in several places. He was licking at his wounds. I knelt beside him, scooped him into my arms and willed him to be healed. The patches of blood and torn flesh repaired themselves.
“Thank you for what you did,” I said quietly, the fogginess in my mind becoming oppressive.
“I think I’ve made the mistake of growing fond of you,” he whispered back.
I was tired again, and I lay down in the greenery with Felix in my arms. He rested his head against my shoulder. A light, powdery snow started to fall and soon the whole forest was covered in frost. We were being crystallized, both too weary to mind. Snow kept falling, and as my clarity of mind began to slip, I wished everything would stop. Stop forever, remain frozen here in the snow—though I knew now that this could not be.
In the last moments before the vision of Unreal City faded, I held onto that desire, clinging to the belief that we could just stand still for the rest of eternity, that we could keep what we had, and that it could be perfect.
I AWOKE TO screaming. Someone was shaking me.
My eyes snapped open. “Joy?”
“Sarah!” she spluttered, her eyes welling up as she held me by the shoulders. I felt confused and disoriented. How did she get into my dorm room? Why was she so frantic?
“You—I thought you—”
“What’s going on, Joy? I—”
“I thought you’d killed yourself!” she screamed at me, her hands clenching my shoulders.
The memory of my last text to her rushed back to me. I’d sent it on the chance I never returned from Unreal City, and it certainly had had a feeling of finality to it.
“Your text scared me, and when you didn’t reply I came right over. I knocked on the front until someone let me in, and your door was unlocked, and I shook you but you wouldn’t wake up and—”
I wrapped my arms around her. “No, no, Joy,” I soothed. “That’s not what I was doing, at all. Please, don’t be upset,” I murmured into her ear and to my great surprise, she started crying into my shoulder. I tried to calm her down, my eyes focused on Felix sitting quietly in the corner and watching us with great interest.
“Wh-what happened, then? You were hardly breathing. You wouldn’t wake up!” she cried. I pulled away from her, unsure of how to proceed.
“It’s—I’m just a heavy sleeper,” I tried. Felix laughed from the corner, but Joy looked furious.
“Sarah, I slapped you across the face. I was this close to calling an ambulance. What was going on? Were you on some—some kind of drug?”
No, just poison, I thought as I tried to come up with a satisfactory explanation.
“Tell her, Sarah. Tell her everything,” Felix piped up.
Joy tracked my gaze to what she saw as the empty corner, and her concern clearly heightened.
“Sarah, she could be the one. She likes to help people; she’d be grateful for the chance,” my familiar prodded.
I shook my head, trying to make it imperceptible to Joy, but she was on to me.
“What are you looking at? Sarah, did you take something weird? Did you have too many pills?”
“Sarah, do it. She’ll take the deal. She’ll give her blood to the familiar, just like Poe said. If she gives it, we’ll all be safe,” Felix urged, losing his tone of amusement and looking quite serious.
“No,” I said a little too forcefully, and Joy pulled back, thinking I had answered her question in this way.
“I’ll reveal myself to her. I’ll tell her if you don’t,” Felix threatened, bristling all over. “One of my friends is warped by madness and malice; I can’t let him go on in that way.”
“No, Felix! Don’t you dare!” I shouted, getting up from the bed and balling up my fists. Joy’s hand covered her mouth as she looked from the corner of the room to where I stood. She shrunk back from me, her eyes huge.
“Sarah, who are you talking to?” she whispered. She must’ve believed I was completely insane in that moment, but everything changed within seconds.
Felix turned his lamp-like eyes to face Joy, and for one second everything was quiet. Then Joy’s scream split the room, and she fell back onto the bed, scrambling backward until she hit the wall.
“Damn it, Felix!” I raged. “I thought you weren’t allowed to disobey me!?”
“I’m not your familiar, yet. I still possess my own will until then,” he snapped back, keeping his eyes fixed on Joy. “I am the reason Sarah would not wake.”
“Wh-what is that thing?! Sarah! Is it dangerous?!” I could hear Joy’s teeth chattering from across the room. I rushed to her side, determined to guard her from anything Felix might be planning.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Felix told Joy. “I just need to tell you what is going on. I need your help.”
“Stop right there. Don’t you say a word more,” I demanded.
Felix’s eyes never strayed from his prize. “No, Sarah. If you want to spare her from the truth so badly, then give me your blood and I’ll be yours to command for the rest of your life.” He had me. I gritted my teeth, trying to order my thoughts, but I couldn’t concentrate. Joy’s ragged breathing, Felix’s agitated purring, the mad pumping of my own heart—my thoughts were scrambled.
“You bastard,�
�� was all I could growl out, and Felix proceeded.
“Your friend Sarah was on another plane of reality just now. Her body remained, but her consciousness was in a place she calls Unreal City. It is a world where anything you desire will come to be. I can take her there in return for food,” Felix explained to Joy.
Joy didn’t seem to know what to think, her expression both terrified and curious. “Is this—is he telling the truth? How can this be real?” She turned to me.
I hesitated to answer, not wanting to lie but refusing to lead her further into his trap. “Yes. As hard as it is to believe, it’s all real. But it’s not how he makes it sound. It messes you up, it makes you see and feel terrible things, even if it is wonderful, and there’s this—”
“There is a great danger that has arisen from that world. Another familiar spirit like me has been…compromised. It has been warped by the malicious emotions of its previous master, and it is the one that is killing. It killed that boy from this school, it killed the other from Sarah’s town, and it killed her sister. And it will kill again and again. It needs to be stopped, but in order to do that, it needs blood. It needs a new master,” Felix told Joy, his excitement and passion rising until he seemed almost rabid. Joy was shivering, but her eyes remained glued to the spirit.
“That world of wonder, that world where all your dreams can come true. It’s waiting for you. You can help all those people. You can stop it. You can put Sarah’s poor mind to rest. Just feed it. Feed it blood. Just help it,” Felix coaxed her, and I stood up and placed myself between them.
“Don’t listen to him, Joy. You don’t need to do anything. Please, don’t do this. It’ll ruin your life. Nothing will ever be the same. You’re going to lose part of yourself forever,” I pleaded.
Unreal City Page 14
