Shadowrun - Earthdawn - Poisoned Memories

by kubasik

  "I can see why you smile when you write your story," I said.

  "It's utterly ridiculous," he agreed with a foolish grin.

  The miserable dwarf snorted in agreement.

  "And enjoyable for that," I said. "But now I must try to get back to the realm of the living."

  "Disappointed with your tale?"

  I'm sure I rolled my eyes as I thought of that matter. "Oh, yes. But there's also a little boy who's been cut up into little pieces—"

  "Dead?"

  "No. Living. The last time I saw him."

  "Incredible."

  "We all have elements of the absurd in our lives."

  "We just have to make sure we don't notice only the tragic."

  I thought about that. "Yes. And a woman who I hurt—" My voice trailed off.

  "Your wife."

  "Her, too, actually. But a woman, recently. I—attacked her—"

  He winced at this, and even the miserable dwarf looked up from his miserable story and stared at me. "Raped?" asked the happy dwarf, now not so happy.

  I could look at neither of them. "Yes. I stopped myself, but the intent ..."

  The happy dwarf, now not so happy, asked, "Are you certain you want to go back? It seems as if things didn't work out for you in the realm of the living."

  With my eyes now fixed on him as if I needed his permission to go on, I said, "All I have carried with me from my life is regret. I need more than that if I'm going to be trapped writing my tale over and over."

  "You'll never get out of here," said the miserable dwarf.

  "He might," said the happy dwarf, his spirits rising again.

  "I must."

  "All you can do is try, you know. Success is never guaranteed. But at this point...” He Shrugged his shoulders.

  A tablet rushed toward me as my hand finished writing THE END. I reached out and grabbed it with both hands.

  "Good luck," the happy dwarf shouted after me as the tablet dragged me along through the infinite mass of bodies. Another tablet appeared in my arm—a tablet for me to write my story on j and I placed it on top of the tablet I clung to. My hand with the stylus began to write my short, desperate narrative again and again.

  I swooshed through the throng, knocking people out of the way. Alone, the tablet would have passed easily between people. But dragging me along made getting between the dead difficult. Several times my grip became tenuous as my arm slammed into people.

  But I held on—hoping the tablet would lead me back to my life.

  3

  As I rushed on I read the story the tablet contained. I read it in small chunks, for I could only see it in the glimpses afforded me in the times between my finished tablet flying off and my new one arriving. The story read: MY STORY

  I SAW LIFE AS A SERIES OF DOORS. WHEN I WAS YOUNG THEY STOOD

  BEFORE ME: OPPORTUNITIES. WHEN I BECAME OLDER, THEY CLOSED

  BEHIND ME, ONE AFTER ANOTHER. LOST OPPORTUNITIES. MY LIFE GOT

  SMALLER AND SMALLER. I SPENT ALL MY TIME LOOKING BACK AT ALL

  THE CLOSED DOORS. THE FINAL DOOR CLOSED. I DIED. THE END.

  When I finished the story I took grim comfort in the notion that this narrative's author seemed in some respects to have been more miserable than me.

  My journey seemed interminable. I tried to think of how long I had been traveling. Or even how much time had passed since my death. But I could not think in terms of time. I could remember specific incidents since my arrival, but I could not comprehend the space between them.

  So I traveled on, passing hundreds of thousands of people, all busily writing away. The possibility that the tablets in fact led nowhere came to me. Maybe they circled this strange place or eventually ended up in the hands of another writer, the words mysteriously vanishing.

  This idea had only just occurred to me when suddenly I spotted my mother.

  I saw only a bit of her face—the right eye and forehead buried in a tangle of troll limbs and t'skrang tails. The bit of her looked as if she was in her mid-thirties, the same as she had looked on the day my people had stoned her to death in the kaer. In shock I let go of the tablet and came to an abrupt stop.

  At once I began making my way toward her, grabbing at arms and legs, pulling myself along through the mass of people. A few people glared at me, but most ignored me, simply grunting a bit as I climbed over or under them. An eternity of interminably performing the same task would breed a certain lack of interest in anything, I suppose.

  When I reached her, she was busily writing away, her forehead furrowed in deep concentration. Her skin did not show the cuts and livid bruises from the stoning. But in a way she looked older than I'd remembered. She did not look up as I grabbed her arm.

  "Mother?" I said.

  She looked up then, eyed me with suspicion. Cold eyes. "What do you want?"

  The two of us were both writing our life stories, inches apart from each other, packed up tightly against all the dead of the Universe. For the first time since my arrival I felt a strange panic at all the bodies around me, trapped in too small a place with too many people.

  "I'm J'role. Your son, J'role."

  She examined me. "My son is a little boy." She turned back to her work.

  I looked down at my hands. They were wrinkled and worn. I was older than her.

  “I was a little boy when you died. I lived for fifty years more. I am J'role."

  She looked up at me again. In her throat, the slightest twitch as she swallowed. I thought she might reveal something. Finally. Some sort of truth. Or something. An exchange. But she said, "And what do you want from me?"

  "I ... I don't want anything from you. I want ..." What did I want from her? There was something, but I couldn't put it into words. "I wanted to see you. To talk to you."

  She looked back down at her writing. "Talk then."

  "Don't you ... ? Aren't you the least bit ... ? I don't know ... Curious, at least. What happened to me? Something?"

  Her chin began to tremble. "I really don't want you here. Near me."

  “I'm sorry."

  "'I'm sorry,'" she mimicked. "'I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.' You and your father. You couldn't stop apologizing. You were so much like him."

  Now, as when she had said the same thing to me years earlier, a pain stung through me. "I liked being like father."

  "I'm not surprised."

  "What was wrong with him?"

  "If you couldn't see it then, you'll never know now."

  "Why couldn't you love us?" The words surprised me.

  She looked up, sharp-eyed, ready for a fight. She said, "I did love you."

  I believed her. I said, "Why didn't you show it?"

  Her mouth opened, then closed, like a beached fish desperate for water. "I did."

  Again, without thinking, I spoke. "No. No you didn't."

  "I don't know."

  "You put that creature in my head." My voice took a rising tone, a wind picking up speed through the leaves of trees just before the crash of a thunderstorm. "I was eight years old and you were my mother and you put that thing in my head."

  "I thought you would be all right?"

  "All right! All right?"

  "I had to protect your father and me. It said it would kill me. And you were so young. No one would suspect ... It said it wouldn't hurt you ..."

  "I couldn't speak! Why didn't you tell anyone? Why didn't you get help?"

  "It would have been bad for us." She paused, then her voice rose to match mine. "You were just a boy. What did you understand about life in the kaer? We were all trapped.

  Frightened. Frightened of the Horrors. Frightened of each other. Any weakness, any sign of corruption could get you killed."

  "You died anyway," I snapped, strangely satisfied, childish.

  “I died when you were born.” I could say nothing. A long pause settled between us. She said, "I did love you."

  "You just wanted me dead."

  "I wanted you different."

/>   "Different?"

  "You talked too much. Like your father. The two of you, with that laugh. So—busy! You couldn't stop moving. Run here! Run there! You wouldn't stop. I just wanted you to sit still once in a while. Just to stop. Why couldn't you have been who I wanted you to be once in a while?"

  Her words confused me. My memories of my childhood were filled with images of being still. I thought I had only learned my love of motion after my mother's death. After everything had gone wrong. As an escape from the misery of my life.

  "Do you want to know what happened to me, mother?"

  She remained silent, simply writing. Then nodded.

  "Things didn't go very well."

  "Things don't."

  "For some people they do. Not for me. Not for you. You have grandchildren."

  She looked up.

  "Two boys. Samael and Torran. I haven't seen them for a long time, but one is a swordmaster adept, the other a troubadour adept."

  "A troubadour," she repeated with regret.

  "He likes what he does. I hear he's very good at it."

  "What kind of life is that? Making up stories for people? Great artists can do that. Who does he think he is?"

  "He enjoys it."

  "Your father got nothing from it."

  "Father liked it. It made him happy."

  With teeth clenched, her tone imploring me to finally explain a deep mystery, she asked,

  "Why?"

  "I don't know why. He just did."

  She looked away, completely dissatisfied with my answer. More silence between us.

  Then she asked, "Do you want anything else?"

  "I've always wanted your love."

  "I gave you that. You had that."

  "I wanted to be loved for being me."

  "That I couldn't do. There was so much wrong with you. If you'd ever listened to me ...

  With time ..."

  " 'There was so much' ... !You put a monster in my head! And now you judge me for it?"

  "The monster came for you. How do you know you didn't deserve a monster in your head?"

  The scratchiness of bile began to rise in my throat.

  "You don't know, do you?" she said accusingly. "I think you deserved that monster. It came for you, and I gave you exactly what you deserved."

  "I was a little boy."

  "Other boys knew how to behave."

  "You called it misbehaving because you were my mother. Other mothers could accept how their boys behaved. I was only being a little boy."

  "I don't think so. When I spoke with other mothers I was so ashamed to have to say my son spent all his time daydreaming."

  "If it caused you so much shame, why did you talk to them about me?"

  This gave her pause, and then she said, "I wanted people to know what I went through with you. How hard it was to raise you. To raise you with that daydreaming father of yours. You don't know, do you? You don't know what I went through raising you."

  Her cold words sent my thoughts reeling. Dead or not, I wanted nothing to do with her anymore. A terrible anger rose up in my thoughts. "What is your story?" I shrieked. I wanted it to be something truly terrible. She pulled away, hiding it from me. "Goodbye, Mother. I won't trouble you anymore."

  She finished her story and it slipped out of her hand. I reached out and grabbed it and was on my way again.

  My mother had written: MY STORY

  MY PARENTS TAUGHT ME THAT FAILURE OF ANY KIND MEANT FAILURE

  AS A PERSON. THOUGH I COULD NEVER ATTAIN PERFECTION, I SPENT MY

  LIFE TRYING TO MAKE SURE THE PEOPLE I LOVED WOULD NEVER FAIL AS

  I ALWAYS DID. EVEN IN THIS I FAILED. AT THE TIME OF THEIR GREATEST

  NEED, I FAILED THEM. I FAILED TO MAKE THEM STRONG AND PERFECT, AND SO THEY COULD NOT HELP ME. I DIED. THE END.

  The thought of my mother writing her self-centered tale over and over again filled me with a strange mix of morbid glee and true sadness. Things about her I had always suspected, but never knew for sure, made my hatred of her come full-blown from deep in my heart. I was glad she was trapped here, everyone else safe from her. Yet a part of me mourned the loss of a mother. Not the woman who wrote the story, but the mother I wished I'd been born to. Someone who ... I could not find the words. I did not know what I would want from a mother. But I knew that I would have wanted someone else. How my life would have been different with another woman!

  The tablet dragged me on and on, and I began to fear that truly I would continue my useless motion forever. Then, after a passage of time I could not quantify, I saw a silver light ahead. It came only in bits and pieces, for the bodies crammed together blocked the view of what was ahead. But as I drew closer, the silver light grew brighter and brighter.

  Wider and wider. Within seconds, or so it seemed to me, a wall of brilliant silver light loomed before me, stretching out in all directions as far as I could see. It was to this point that all the tablets traveled.

  The throngs of people did not press against this wall, but floated several yards away from it. With only seconds to go before I reached it, I realized that the massive wall curved slightly, so that it most likely formed a giant sphere. All the bodies of the dead floated around this sphere, piled up against each other for all eternity.

  Several people looked at me as I rushed by. A few called out, warning me to stop. The tablets, so many I could not count, rushed toward the silver sphere and disappeared inside, dissolving into the sphere's walls. I did not know if they were destroyed upon impact or had somehow passed through the sphere's walls, perhaps entering a land contained within the sphere. I had no idea of what I should do—whether to let go of my mother's tablet or whether to let it drag me forward. But then I remembered my fate if I did not challenge myself to move on: I would spend the rest of time writing out my pathetic tale. That I could not bear. I tightened my grip on the tablet and rushed into the silver wall.

  4

  The tablet vanished from my hands. With more momentum than I would have liked, I bumped along a long stretch of dead, dry grass, coming to a stop only when I'd become completely dizzy and disoriented. The stylus had left my hand, and no new tablet appeared for me to write my story again. If anything, I had freed myself of my terrible, endless fate.

  Sensation and pain had abruptly returned, and I moved slowly, my old body tired and weary. The light from the sky caught my attention first. Above churned molten rock—

  swirls of black and red moving in great circles. The land I rested on was on a small island, maybe three or four miles across. The lava sky came down to the edges of the island, cutting off all escape. The legend of Death's imprisonment came to me immediately, and I knew Death was nearby.

  The landscape was enough to confirm this notion. The ground was hilly and covered with short, dead grass. Trees, all gathered in scraggly copses, stood with bare, withered branches. Not a bird sang or a monkey moved about. The red lava sky, swirling improbably above, cast a terrible, stark light upon the land. Everything seemed made of shadow.

  I waited, expecting some sort of attack. A monster of some kind. Agents of Death.

  Nothing.

  Waiting a while longer, I wallowed in the space of the island. Though small and surrounded on all sides by lava, it was far less cramped than the realm of the dead I'd visited earlier. The desire to never return to that place—at least not until I had made a story I wanted to write again and again moved my legs forward. Without a specific plan, I started walking.

  The dead grass crunched underfoot. The uncomfortable noise echoed dully in sharp contrast to the silence of the tiny land. With each step a solid thrum of anxiety traveled up my spine. Even Kyrethe's tears would be comfortable company in such a lonely place.

  Knowing that the weight of Death's Sea not only pressed down toward me, but cut me off from the rest of the world—the rest of all living things—added to a growing apprehension.

  The hill I climbed was taller than those in the immediate area. From its top I saw t
hat the rest of the land was no different from what I had already seen. Except for one feature.

  Toward the center of the dead islands on top of a massive, flat hill, stood a lovely building. White stones made up its base. From the base rose thick pillars, which formed the building's four walls. On top of the pillars rested an angled roof, which sloped down along the length of the building's longer sides.

  The roof cast a deep shadow across the interior of the building, so that between the pillars I could see nothing. Though the structure was beautiful, it filled me with dread. The red glare of the lava above reflected off the smooth, white stones. Like the firelight of Mordom's henchmen back in my kaer, and the Death Sea's reflection on Kyrethe's white sheets, the sight brought to mind blood. This train of thought led me to think of the Elf Queen's thorns, my father's death, my mother's death, the mutilation of…