by Gabi Moore
The dagger was brought down at a spot just to the left of his heart, while my other hand wrapped firmly around his neck. I brought my index finger and thumb upward on his jugular vein, and pressed into the space between his jaw and his neck. I watched dispassionately as he struggled to breath, and then stopped. The dagger was pulled out of his chest, and I watched as he collapsed onto the ground.
More blood poured into the portal, and I watched as the body began to disappear.
Thane walked up behind me and dared to put his hand on my shoulder. The interpretation of my actions meant that I had succeeded. There was no reason for anyone to believe that I was under the command of anyone but myself. I pushed his hand off of my shoulder definitively, and turned around to meet him eye to eye.
"Don't you ever push that shit on me again. There is no reason for you or anyone else to tell me what to do. And if you ever draw that sword on me again, you had better be prepared to run me through. I swear by the names of whatever Gods are left after all of this, that I will pull your own hear out, and eat if I have to. Do I make myself clear?"
The silence that surrounded us was deafening.
The storm and the portal had merged into one, and darkness came out from the center of the portal.
I saw the reflection of the portal in Thane's eyes, causing the effect of a strange illusion.
His eyes in demonic form were slit, just like mine. We both had the eyes like a serpent, but with the reflection from the portal, the eyes looked like the eyes of a cat.
He didn't respond to me, except to turn me around and face the portal itself.
The brilliant blue outer ring, and arcing rays of light were still there, though the portal had shrunk in magnitude since its initial expansion. From the inside of the portal a darkness had expanded outward from the center. The effect was similar to staring into the heart of an eclipse.
The image reminded me of the saying "Careful not to stare into the Void too long, lest you find it stares back."
However, the horror did not stop there.
There, in front of me, Erol was levitating in the center of the portal. His body was hung upside down like an occult crucifix. Blood streamed from his side, and his hair was pushed about in either direction. I couldn't tell if he was alive or not, but the pulsating rays from inside of the Void itself caused his body to shift and undulate as though he were still breathing.
The sound of the atmosphere around us grew to a deafening series of percussive blasts. All the while, the edges of the portal became more and more wild in their expression. The boundaries between the void and the outer ring of blue began to dissolve, and the void from inside of the iris began to leak outward onto the ground by our feet. That same inky blackness poured out slow at first, and then stronger so that a deluge had formed.
The desert of the Hell Realms was being flooded.
Transformative action was taking place, and all the while, Erol floated there like a martyr for a lost realm.
The void clung to our legs and climbed upward to encase our bodies. The moment it touched us, it held our bodies fast to the ground. No amount of struggle could undo the connection to it. No matter how hard I tried, I was not able to free myself.
My mind flashed back to the first time I had been here inside of this world, and of the creature that had dragged me through the bottom of the tar, and into the human realm. As Erol had died, I figured that I might as well resign myself to my own fate.
I stopped fighting, and decided to sit down instead. The void flowed over me then, like a river, off the side of my body, and into the landscape behind me. The rain that fell from the sky, mixed with the fluid from the void, and swirled around either side of me. I looked down and saw the liquid was rising and was just below my breasts.
"What are we going to do?"
Thane had lost his sense of composure.
My response was descriptive of my belief about what the right thing to do was, in a situation like that. I responded with nothing. I did nothing. I did my best to embody complete acceptance of my situation.
There was no reason to behave otherwise.
Staring unblinking into the face of Erol, I saw that the void was consuming him. He had been suspended, and the outpour had been flowing out underneath his body. Now, when I saw him, it was clear to me that the substance of the Void was slowly working its way upward around the edges of his body. His complexion was pale, and his body thin. He looked like the Franciscan Friers in the textbooks of Occultism on the Material Plane.
Then, his eyes opened.
A shot of terror ran through me, as I saw that though the outer ring of light had all but faded, the light was now coming out from inside of his body. His eyes were the same brilliant fire as my memories of the sun. He screamed, and instead of a voice, coming out, all that was left was light pouring out from his mouth.
The Void seeped upward toward the edges of his mouth, and through the tear ducts of his eyes.
In my horror, I found that my bottom lip had been touched by the rising level of that thick tar which now covered all things. I closed my mouth in time to prevent it from getting inside of me mouth.
Tears flowed down from my eyes, and joined the deluge. As the fluid rose up over my own face, I remember the last picture in my mind was the fire of being coming out from inside of Erol. Those three points of light had burnt themselves into my retina, as I was overwhelmed by the darkness around me.
Once underneath the substance, there was nowhere for me to go; nothing for me to do but surrender completely.
I opened my mouth, and felt the liquid rush inward and threaten to fill my lungs. My own body was fighting against me, so strong was my will to continue living that I couldn't bring myself to open my lungs and allow the fluid to claim me completely. The deprivation of oxygen pushed my brain into panic. I tried to open my eyes, but they remained clasped shut. The haunting lights still pierced my vision and grew more brilliant still as I faced the swift approach of my own death.
Tremors ran through my body and my chest seized. I opened the back of my throat involuntarily, and gasped for the oxygen that I knew would never be there.
The Void rushed inside of me, and I felt my heart explode with the light that stained my vision. When the light burned out, there was nothing.
Once more, I was lost to time and space.
Chapter 22
The darkness to follow was not absolute. In all reality, I doubt that any darkness ever will be. Though, that doesn't mean that there won't be dark times in the future.
The theory comes from the place that says that things have existed in the past, and they will continue to exist, in the future, though their forms may modify. In addition to that theory, we also have the concept that there is a variety of content in this life.
Some content works for the destruction and degradation of other things, and other content works to rebuild. These sorts of things work cyclically, which means that for any progress to be made, there needs to be a certain level of destruction.
The difficulty comes not in accepting the components of destruction which are necessary to move forward, but in the way that we ourselves participate in destruction. What I mean to say specifically is that some destruction is fetishized, while other destruction is done out of carelessness.
As I lay floating in the void, a soft glow pulsed around me. I felt protection and a certain level of sacrifice given on my behalf. Something was protecting me from whatever elements were out there in the shadows. Large serpentine creatures swam past me, and inspected my body. I could not see them, but I could feel them. I could feel all things pass by me, and I had the freedom to reflect on their nature.
Even the monsters of the deep; creatures fierce and powerful from dimensions far away from the place where I grew up, you couldn't apply the concepts of good or evil to these things. The paradigm needed to accommodate them simply wasn't large enough to be effective.
There is a creature the size of a Leviathan who has jus
t swam past a naked, floating body.
A body now bounces along the wake of the serpent.
There is no pain.
A soft, warm glow radiates from the inside of the vessel.
There is no fear.
Time itself has ceased to hold any meaning.
Attachment to the world of the living is absent.
There is no realm of the dead. The vessel floats in an amniotic stasis in the Bardo between the realms.
That last thought echoed around in my mind for a while, pushing me along toward whatever reflections may be forthcoming. From that point, I moved into nostalgia.
I thought about all of the relationships I had been fortunate enough to have, and all of the pain that was associated with each of those relationships. Every single time I had grown close to somebody, there was this feeling of total and complete betrayal. The sadness was profound, and then I realized that there was no reason for the sadness, or the anger, or even the joy.
Holding onto those concepts was about as realistic as holding onto those friends.
If relationships and emotions are impermanent, and all of my states of mind are impermanent, then what is this thing that is holding onto me?
I looked down at my body.
That same body that I had reviled and despised throughout all of my experiences. That same body that had carried me when I had needed to achieve some pressing and ultimately futile goal. That body was outlined in light, a small, slow light that came out from the inside of my chest, and pushed me forward through the darkness between realms.
Light, of that sort, can only be called hope, because it refuses to part, even when all sensibilities indicate that reality should be otherwise.
Would I retain this light if I had been eaten by the Leviathan?
The thought bounced outward, but no response came back. No verbal response anyways. The light, on the other hand, continued in spite of my question, and I felt both petty and childish at the same time.
At that point, I realized that I was in a place that had been designated for myself, by myself. Or, at least, I realized that this might be a possibility.
I started to unfold myself, pushing my shoulders around a bit, and turning my neck this way and that. I wanted to try and wake myself up. To see if I could push my existence toward something different. I wanted to know if it was possible to move myself through space with the same freedom as was available for my mind to reflect on whichever topic came to mind.
My body unfurled, and I directed myself like an arrow toward somewhere, anywhere that the light would grow, and this awful, terrible, oppressive darkness would be forced to subside. The thought itself modified the world around me, and I saw in the distance a clear reflective shimmer, the faint bit of hope that there was more to be found.
Traveling toward the light was easier than I thought. My body began moving upward of its own accord. There was nothing stopping me any longer. All I needed to do was push forward, and I was propelled by a force from within. The environment itself wanted me to move forward. I was being guided by the hand of fate.
The water around me grew less dense, and then when I reached the surface, I found that beyond the surface, was a brilliantly colored sky, full of pastel pinks and oranges. The light around me faded in the face of the light from without, and the temperature of the water dropped to a point where it was barely comfortable. Something changed around me, and suddenly, I realized that I was no longer floating in-between realms. I had in fact surfaced in one of them.
The air in my lungs came in gasping mouthfuls, and the water on my lips tasted like salt. I looked down at my body and saw that I was no longer a Demon. However, I was neither Fae nor Human at that point.
There were strange anatomical differences that were incongruent. I tried to place myself, and soon became overwhelmed and anxious. I began to panic, and the full awareness that I was a vulnerable creature once more, and too far from the shore for personal comfort. Moving my body now, and finding coordination once more, I began to swim through the water toward the shore.
Initially, I didn't make much progress, but I managed to figure out my coordination, and soon enough was making steady progress toward having land under my feet. The only time I got creeped out was when I remembered the sensation of the serpent that had passed by me when I was floating in the water below. The memory brought more than a bit of anxiety to my mind, though I didn't have the luxury of focusing on those fears at the moment. I had a solid trek to get through, and I was fast running out of stamina. My body felt like I had just woken up out of a dream, but the problem was that I did not feel nearly as refreshed as I would have felt after a solid night's sleep.
Quieting down my mind, I limited my activity to a series of motions. First focusing on pairing up alternating movements of my hands and feet, and then working on allowing my body to move fluidly through the water in its expression. Once I started to utilize more finesse, and let the abrasive anxieties and lack of coordination wear off, I made fairly steady headway toward the shoreline.
By the time I got closer, I was able to catch a few waves in, by surfing along the contour of the waves with my body. Feeling like I was propelled enough along the surface of the water by the currents themselves was a massive relief. The rush of the water in my ears, and the sound of the waves crashing around me was a beautiful sensation. The feelings that ran through me were more of a refreshing, and calm baptism, than the pain of uncertainty.
Each wave that I rode passed through me, until one of them carried me along and deposited me ungracefully on the shore. My body slammed into the sand, and I rolled beneath the final expression of the wave. The sounds around me changed to a soft hiss, accented by the sound of birds overhead. As the water receded back into the ocean, I felt the wet sand lodge itself in my armpits and hair. My body sank into the sand of the beach, and I absorbed the rays of light overhead.
Looking up overhead, I saw that there were not one, but two orbs of light in the sky. The second sun was a brilliant violet color. Colors changed all round it in gradients away from a pure bright center. The contrast between the two suns brought out strange burnt colors in the atmosphere like I had never seen before. Another wave rushed over me, and water poured into my nostrils. The feeling was abrupt, and unpleasant, so I stood up, and got my bearings.
My body retained elements from all of the different forms I had experienced thus far, though the overall combination was not terribly impressive.
My skin was fleshy and pale. There were no protective scales, or luxurious natural tones. A quick look down at my hands and I realized that my claws had diminished from their weaponized, demonic state, but not quite as refined and gracious as they had been when I was a human. I might still be able to do some damage with them, but they were significantly less powerful than I remembered.
I brought my hand to my mouth, and realized that my teeth were disappointingly sharp. I would still be able to eat well, and I could likely use them as a weapon as well, but the implications of tasting more blood in my mouth didn't quite sit with me.
The water wasn't still enough to give me any sort of affirmative about my eyes, but I imagined that if the source of light was different in this world, my eyes wouldn't be the same either.
Possibly the most disappointing aspect of my new form wasn't any of the physical characteristics just listed -- it was my wing.
At least while I had been a demon, I had enjoyed the pleasure of flight once more. When I had been a human, the tattoos had at least been appealing in their own way. Whatever form I was in now, was just as disabled as my Fae body.
I collapsed onto my ass and felt the first waves of loss pass through me. Each wave that followed made its own attempt at cheering me back up, and placing me back in that state of elation and purpose that had been so restorative. I looked around at the new world before my eyes and cried, alone on the shoreline.
What have I done?
Epilogue
“Mom, mom! There’s a
dead man on the sidewalk! Come quick!”
The voices were faint, but they came through all right. The visions of afterlife still burned behind my eyelids. I had seen things that no man should ever be asked to see while continuing to be asked to live his life.
“See! See! He’s not moving, and he’s just laying there!”
“Oh my God. Somebody call an ambulance.”
“No luck ma’am, you think he’s the only one, you’re delusional. Take a look around, this place is in awful shape. He’s probably another one of those freaks. Better to leave the dead where they are.”
Freaks?
I struggled to move, and with some effort, I was able to push myself upward.
“Eeep!”
“This one’s still got a pulse!”
“Quick, roll him over.”
“Oh my God, what happened to him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe some kind of cult.”
“Mom, why does he have markings all over his face?”
“Hush…”
“I don’t like this… I don’t think we should help him.”
“Maeve said that she found a weird one the other day. Wings, and sharp teeth, like a demon. They tied it up and poured gasoline all over it. You know what happened next. They look human enough at first glance, but they’d just as soon eat your children as shake your hand.”
“You don’t know that!”
“Sure I do. Maeve told me herself.”
“What the hell does Maeve know? Besides, do you see wings on this one?”
“You know, I’d do it just to be safe… back off. I’ll bet the wings are hidden underneath those robes of his.”
A boot to the shoulder woke me out of my dream-state. The pain was so sudden and undeserved. A flare of anger grew inside of me. I tried to cut it out, but I couldn’t.
Another sharp kick to the side, and my hand reached out of its own accord and grabbed the man by his leg. I was weak, but all I really needed was a point of contact. I reached into his body, and touched the only part of him that I could see clearly anymore. My fingers grasped something delicate, and separated it from his body.
