by Rich Hayden
“More riddles. I’m so tired of your explanations,” said Amil.
“Please be patient,” Krykus pleaded. “With the Mortals gone, she was left all alone, hollowed out and emptied by the death of all of her children. But, in her saddened unconsciousness...she dreams of them,” he said, as he raised his ringed eyes to Amil.
Amil froze and he shook. His eyes watered, and what remained of his heart was savaged by the jagged clarity offered from the feeble god.
“To suppress her loneliness, her mind found a way to cope, and so Isadora created the earth and those upon it,” continued Krykus.
“The world is a dream,” whispered Amil as he fell to his knees among Isadora’s flowers. “The world is a dream.”
“It was her invincible will, her absolute love for life that brought your kind into being. To be just a dream of Isadora’s is an honor.”
“None of it was real, was it?” questioned Amil, as he leaned his head back against the mattress behind him.
“Was it real to you?” challenged Krykus.
“What I feel, what I felt, that doesn’t matter, does it? My family, my friends...Ali,” he said, in disbelief. “Did they even exist?”
“No, and neither did you, until the day came when Aphelianna plucked you from the earth. I’m sorry. I cannot even fathom how difficult this must be.”
“But...but I remember them,” said Amil.
“You were all imaginary players that shared the same stage. Memories of things that never happened overlap, and in what you understand as death, you were given life. But in this life, you retained the memories formed while only a figment of Isadora’s unconscious. It is truly a testament to her majesty.”
“So...I never actually met Ali? We never...we never...”
“You never did a thing, Amil,” said Krykus. “Your body is just a shell, a lookalike of someone who lived a life of fiction. Those you knew, those you recognize, they are but shadows. Devices your mind conjured up in order to somehow integrate itself into Isadora’s dreams. Do you see why the pursuit of her key is purposeless? I know it must hurt, but be sure: Ali never existed. She was just a fancy of Isadora’s imagination placed beside you in her dreams. So you see there is no need to try and free her from whatever torture she suffers. The woman you seek to save is an artist’s rendering of a character from make believe.”
“Then what am I now?” demanded Amil.
“When you arrived in the afterlife, you were born. Arriving into the physical world of Isadora gave you life, a real life. Isadora is that powerful, and it is with that power that she keeps us all safe from Aphelianna. In sleep, she has created humans to save the world from her sister’s treachery. You should be proud of your race, however transitory you may be, for you are true saviors. If you value the miracle of life, you will leave Isadora be,” said Krykus.
“Do you consider a Waste a miracle?” asked Amil.
“They are the influence of Aphelianna over her sister’s miracle.”
“I don’t see any miracle in this, and I don’t think I can value this life. I value my old life, even if it was all a lie. I love Ali, the Ali I remember, and I will keep the promise that I know I made to her,” said Amil, as he rose to his feet.
“Think of your actions, think of Ali if you like. What you are about to do will eclipse even the most selfish of acts perpetrated by Aphelianna. Would the woman you desire to save wish for you to do such a thing? Keep your fond memories of Ali. Cherish the fact that all your bad days never occurred, and leave Isadora her key,” Krykus pleaded.
“Krykus, what will happen if I take the key?”
“You have won, Amil. You know the secret of life, you can stay here forever with Isadora, and you will never again have to fear Aphelianna.”
“Answer me! What will happen?”
“Isadora will awaken, and the dream will end,” said Krykus.
“I don’t believe you.”
“It is not for you to believe. It is truth. I grow so weary...”
Before she was subdued, Isadora had thought of everything. She took every measure to preserve the life that she had created, and had set the ultimate trap for the one enlisted by Aphelianna who would eventually gaze upon her key. If the promise of eternity with God wasn’t enough to halt the advances of someone like Amil, then the revelation that all of creation depended on the perpetual slumber of the goddess surely would.
Amil was free to do as he pleased. There were no Wastes to destroy him. Krykus was powerless, and there were no more locked doors that stood in his way, but still, he remained motionless. He could not accept what he had heard. He could also not live with the consequences of waking Isadora, were the tale offered from Krykus proven to be real. But what Amil could no longer bear was the image of Ali as she suffered. He once told Aphelianna that he would do anything to save Ali, and, as everything proved the price of his triumph, Amil knew that he had to make good on his foolish promise.
With a sudden motion, an apocalyptic reflex, he tore the key from Isadora’s neck. He jumped back as a trail of flower petals were tossed asunder in his wake, and heard as a heavy sigh left the lips of Krykus. Isadora remained still for a moment, and Amil prayed for her continued stillness as he looked on from a pose born of tense muscles and rigid bones. But then it came, a sight that his eyes could not ignore or pass off as a trick of the mind. Isadora stirred.
It began as a tremor, a rustling in sleep, a harbinger of the awakening to come. Isadora rolled onto her side, and her face twisted with the telltale signs of the tears which would soon emerge to wet her face. She curled into a ball, as though a deep pain sank pins into her stomach, and a distressed wail cracked its way out of her throat. The roots that cascaded off her head were pulled taut as she squirmed, and, one by one, their fibers began to snap. The thinnest tethers went first, and, as they were severed, they uncoiled themselves over the ground like worms put under the sudden assault of a virulent toxin. Small fissures surfaced over the skin of Isadora, and the more she writhed, the longer each of the splits became.
“What’s happening? What’s happening to her?” shouted Amil, in a panic.
“She is dying, and so am I,” stated Krykus.
“What? Why? How can this be?”
“It is a broken heart that will end her, as you have taken the lives of her dream children,” he whispered.
Isadora shot upright in the bed, and the cracks over her skin widened like sinister eyes. Out from the wounds light did radiate, and, as the tears opened further, beams of white brilliance poured from Isadora. As luminous bands of energy escaped from her, the goddess finally opened her eyes.
The dream was over. All that Isadora had created and nurtured, while asleep, for eons, had been undone with the ascendency of her eyelids. Her magical dreamland world was torn asunder by chaos, shattered into slivers of life unmade. Unspeakable rage and violence smashed the wonders conjured up from her imagination, and ushered the end unto all that she had bore. Interminable seconds of cataclysm erased every trace and reminder of the earth. A sweeping black ate the world away in a rampage of stillness that knew no sound. All was eclipsed, extinct, and final, as all that humanity had ever known was blinked from existence.
Isadora screamed and she shook. Her beautiful ocean blue eyes, rimmed with a green penumbra, were wide with fear. The roots had dropped from her head, and as she continued to convulse and shout, she ran her shaking hands through her hair. The feel of the severed roots called water into her eyes. With clumps of hair knotted around her fingers, Isadora lowered her arms and stared into her hands. They, too, were cut deep, and as she stared into the light that bled from her palms, a terrifying realization was Isadora’s to accept. She was actually going to die. After an eternity of existence, death was coming for her.
The streams of white shot from her like machine gun fire, until the whole of her body was wreathed in the purged magnificence that had been contained within for so long. Isadora was, at last, enfeebled. The highest action left t
o her was merely to sit helpless and stare into her palms as disbelief and tears continued to smear across her face. Once her mouth seemed to have depleted its supply of screams, Isadora steadied her erupting body, and raised her eyes over the horizon of her fingertips. They told of the fear and of the loss that gripped her. They trembled in their sockets, and for a moment, her eyes found Amil’s stare. As he watched her lips quiver, and tried in vain to hide from her accusatory and sorrowful glare, Amil witnessed the death of God.
A blast of energy, more powerful than the collapsing of the Sun, was the death rattle of the ancient divinity. It conquered everything in a searing white blaze, sweeping out over the ground and rising into the vastness of the sky on a tower of flame. The wash of luminescence rolled upon all that it could reach, and took apart the tiniest of atoms as its purifying onslaught inexhaustibly raged. Its terminal glory filled the whole of existence, and then forcefully blew it away, with all the fury of a thousand heavens betrayed.
Far away, down upon the stone bench of her fountain, Aphelianna knew that Amil had done the impossible. Her gaze left the fields beyond and all the dead thereupon. Her vacant eyes passed over the rancid swamp of her spring as it roiled with every description of sickness, and they flew over the rot of Saint Calvino’s grove. Upon the weathered face of the house she once called home was where Aphelianna stared. She looked into it, through it, and her lips quivered with emotion as a menagerie of feelings were reawakened and set loose within her. Like a child who views the return of a pet once lost, she was overcome by forgotten passions. She was shaken by the irrefutable death of her sister, and by the ability to finally return home. But, like the monster that she had become, Aphelianna’s mind was soon overrun by what now stood at her command. She rose, the collective of existence cowered, and Aphelianna walked toward the mansion.
Amil awoke, or, perhaps, he merely remained. He could be sure of nothing, as no sense was to be trusted. The extinction of Isadora, which had seemed to annihilate everything that it had touched, had spared him. His continued presence suggested that the key that lay strangled in his palm had served as a relic of omnipotent protection. But as he looked out upon the ruin that had been left behind, all he could feel was the need to flee the scorched garden.
It haunted him. The fact revealed that he had once viewed the future. This razed land, tinted to a red ambiance and warmed by the furious eradication of the previous minutes, was a place that he had already been. Before he ventured into The End of Time, Amil had set foot upon this ashen wasteland. Among the charred flakes of things once majestic, as they blew through the air, this image of a time prophesied paralyzed his mind. He felt as though he were frozen into the background of this woeful setting. Condemned to forever bear witness to the destruction he had wrought. Soon, however, a more terrifying blend of imaginings came to Amil’s consciousness. He became stricken by chills, sensations that stung so cold, they felt powerful enough to shatter bone. He was made to ponder the realization that perhaps he had witnessed other futures as well. What else had he seen? What else did he fail to see as a promise, a warning, of things to be?
Exhausted from twisting in the net of riddles that was The House of the Divine, Amil pulled himself from the ground, and stood before a door. It was the last barrier, the final gateway to extinction. It was unlocked and plain. It appeared new, and though he had not seen it materialize, nor did he know of what awaited on the other side, Amil knew the passageway had just come into being. It was the next step for him, and for everything else that remained. It was the true unknown, the ultimate conclusion, and into its mercurial embrace Amil did offer himself.
He emerged into a place familiar, The Hall of Worship. Out from one of the doors guarded by the massive statues, Amil walked onto the soft cushion of the scarlet carpet. The crystalline fixture overhead radiated with the glow of moonlight as it reflects off of snow, and among the pale blue aura, Amil wandered. His vision was drawn to the massive dining table. It looked as brilliant as he remembered, with its bejeweled wood and silver accents. The stone slab that topped it held a high polish, and looked to be as deep and mysterious as the ocean in repose. But one feature had changed. A lone guest was seated at the far end of the table, and through the dark, the silhouette of Aphelianna was unmistakable.
“You have something for me,” she said, softly.
“Where is Ali?” he meekly asked.
“Where you left her.”
“But...you promised me,” said Amil, as he could not find the will to challenge Aphelianna.
“I promised to secure her release, and I have honored my promise.”
Aphelianna rose from the table, and from her lap tumbled the deformed and bloodied head of Saint Calvino. Finally free to do as she pleased, Aphelianna had silenced the Spirit Ripper. The monstrous head had been severed in a manner terribly violent, and overly involved, as evidenced by its grotesque condition. As the pasty orb rolled out into the light, Amil saw the abject horror that was burned into Calvino’s lone, bloodshot eye. It forever relayed the agony of his final moments. As his gaze swept over the jagged flesh of the Spirit Ripper’s neck, he saw the ghostly imprints of teeth marks. It was a wretched truth. Aphelianna had chewed off the head of a man she once loved, but it was understandable in its perversity. For her, it had to be personal, the undoing of Saint Calvino. He once had stolen from her, and for his lecherous violations, she had, at last, taken everything from him.
“Give me the key, or I shall take it from you,” Aphelianna said as she stepped away from the table, the blood of Calvino still visible on her lips and where it had sunk between her teeth to rest along her gum line.
Flatfooted, she appeared quite tall, more intimidating and powerful than before. Her dress shifted around the motion of her body, and, as it did, the cloth resembled an entanglement of specters as they squirm in unease. Her white locks swam over her shoulders as she approached, and once she stood before Amil, Aphelianna placed a hand upon his cheek. The arctic kiss of her skin, and the poisoned tips of her nails, sent a terrible sensation through Amil, and forced him onto his knees. Bowed before her like a feckless servant, he felt the failure of the bones and muscles in his legs. His vision began to blur and his hearing dulled. He felt as a hole opened itself up inside his mouth, and he was rendered powerless to resist whatever atrocities the Goddess of Death had in mind.
“Will you give me the key?” she asked as Amil knelt before her with all the physical disabilities of his earthly life returned to him.
“Ye...ye...yes,” he strained out, while offering up Isadora’s treasure.
She took the key tenderly, and Aphelianna kissed Amil’s forehead. Her gesture impressed upon him a heavy measure of pain, as the cracks upon her lips felt like shards of glass sunk into his flesh. But he knew something more than blind virulence was offered through her action. Under the punishment of her kiss, kindness and appreciation was felt.
She walked quietly to the stage that floated at the end of the crimson lagoon, and washed her empty eyes over the throne before her. She hesitated to assume the seat reserved for the god of gods, almost as though she couldn’t believe it was hers to take. Almost as though she feared the conclusion of the fantasy she had long harbored. But like Amil before her, Aphelianna had not come this far to turn away. Everything be the cost, everything be damned, everything be cursed. Aphelianna sat upon the throne.
She had done the forbidden. Every god that had before passed through The Hall of Worship knew never to sit upon the throne. All knew the unraveling that would follow. Even the arrogant Krykus dared not to take that seat for his own. It offered a power too strong for any to control. It stood empty, like a warning of the future to come if any were to seize it for their own. It was a lone seat, one that should have remained vacant for all time as the ultimate testament to symbiosis, and Aphelianna had broken the eternal circle. She had upset the balance of order, and surely even the most benevolent of spirits would eventually lead all into ruin with the feral supremacy un
furled before the wicked Aphelianna.
Amil watched as the Goddess of Death eased herself into the chair. She allowed her slim body to be hugged by the fabric and draped her arms along the rests, leaving her long fingers to dangle over the sides. She learned her head back and closed her eyes, as some perverse relative of serenity snuggled up to her. She seemed to beg for sleep, as a thick collection of hair swept over the side of her face, and, eerie as it felt, all then fell into silence. It was an absence of sound that Amil did not realize as being possible. Everything was not simply muted to his ears, but even the vibrations caused by his heart as it hammered or his lungs as they heaved were sensations that went unfelt. Aphelianna had asked for a moment of total calm, and so all the world did comply, but when her lids ascended to reveal the empty sockets below, a din of evil praise did erupt.
The porcelain statues, those towering parishioners who for all time had stared silently down upon the hall below, awakened. Like milk swirled within a bowl, the white stone of the figures moved with perfect fluidity as the worshipers offered their outstretched arms to the arch of the ceiling above. The stained glass panes affixed to the curve of the ceiling, darkened further by the gloom of the sky as it bled through, were nearly touched by the fingertips of the congregation. Pushed to the limits of their constitution, the glass shapes shook in their frames with the collective boom produced from the voices.
Like a chorus to proclaim the arrival of hell as it returns from the fields of bloody conquest, the voices sang as one. The male members of Aphelianna’s new church fed the massive volume, and were responsible for the vibrations that threatened to drive cracks through the mortar of the foundation. But it was the haunting soprano harmony of the women that articulated the finer points of the menace unleashed. Like velvety poison as it courses through veins which beg for a rapturous death, the higher pitched arrangements of this cursed movement filled the chamber with a siren voice that called forth the nature of all things corrupted.
Aphelianna rose from her seat and slowly walked from the stage. She basked in the spectacular aural adulation that was showered down upon her as she seemed to float over the bloody complexion of the carpet. Her arms remained outstretched as she drifted toward Amil, almost as though she absorbed some unseen sorcery from the song being given to her.
