by K M McGuire
They cut through the lavender pastel haze of cottony clouds, spattering condensation against his slowly freezing body. He tried to wipe the dew from his face and skin to no avail, giving in to the shivering embrace that came with their ascension. They pierced through the clouds, finally reaching high above it all, where a violet dome, littered with innumerable glitters and streaks of light, hovered above them, as if the dreams of the heavens and the Beyond were sheltered on the other side of the mystical veil of stars.
Voden felt his eyes drift away from the heavens, gazing through the hole they had cut in the clouds, slowly spreading further apart where he could see the world inside the aperture they created. His eyes filled with awe, gazing at the plate of land, scattered with shades of greens and blues and the variations that sat between them, all so small and still large in vision against the bulbs of light dangling above his head. A flare of light stole his attention as a ribbon burned a scar into the cosmos above him. He lifted his hand to his face and felt the dew had turned to ice, now fully aware of how frigid it was at the height of the world.
Do you want to know what lies Beyond the dome?
The owl hissed the curiosity, and over and over the echo grew as it settled further in the caverns of Voden’s mind. Again, the owl shot up, and Voden watched the dark splash of colors approach him, as another strange sensation ripped through his gut, while his lungs drew breath from its shrinking corners. The canvas of black took the edges of his vision, and the stars twinkled, calling his name, offering a gift he was not prepared to receive.
The owl hovered high above the tallest point of the world. Even the clouds were but a distant thing now, far removed, rolling towards the blue hum of light seeping off the horizon far below Voden.
Reach out your hands-s, the owl sputtered, its head jerking erratically. When the strange reaction ended, it continued as though nothing had occurred. The final shudder spasmed, where the owl’s head now faced Voden, and the harrow eyes dug into him. Raise your hand and touch what should not be felt.
His trembling hand feared to break through the thick, yet empty, cold. Yet, his fingers pressed through something he could not explain. It was like snapping out of an ether or passing from one dimension into the next, and his body could not handle the transition. He felt the cold snatching his skin with crooked splinters of frost, biting to burn in him with the deepest blue, stopping its advance at the field that separated him from the ether. He pulled it back the instant he saw the splintering death numbing his fingers, and after a moment of coddling his hand came the pain as the blood returned to his fingers. He could not explain what he’d witnessed, but there, beyond that point, he could not shake the feeling that the sky above was purging him from its presence.
The owl turned and looked at him, nodding its head in affirmation.
That is what lies beyond the dome of the world, an entire realm of death, a plane you cannot pass! We are trapped inside this incubator, only as a sick show to Those That Watch. To Them, this world is a place of contagion; a world They deemed diseased. Out of this sphere, beyond this minor dimension, Those that Lie Beyond have determined we are not worthy to go further than this point. They fear us. They fear we will spread our disease to Them. They see Their lives well above our own while we wallow in our suffering. Watching us writhe must bring Them pleasure! Those Beyond: They made creation its own coffin, waiting to hammer the final nails and close the lid forever. They contain you because They fear what is evil and cannot find a way to destroy it.
The owl noted Voden’s shivering body. He snapped his wings closed, plummeting them down to a more suitable altitude. The owl flew across the sky just above the clouds, heading off somewhere new.
I have gained nearly all there is to know of this world. I am near completion. You and the sentients lie in a dense mystery of motivation that is near impossible to calculate, but it hardly matters. When the time comes, my brethren and I will urge this incubator. We will crumble the dome and plant ourselves in Their dimension, spreading wrath upon Them so that my kin may rule the Beyond! Come.
They traveled a bit in silence, rushing over the expansive earth, where blues flickered to greens and shifted to browns. Thoughts flooded Voden’s mind, racing past him like the dirt and sea, where it lost its property of tangibility, unable to coordinate much more than the start of an idea before it lost itself to the air around him.
“Who are you?” came a voice he thought had breathed from his own lungs but sounded too much like Andar. He thought he felt a hand against his shoulder, turning only to see a spectral form whose features were fractal and hewn of a pitiful reflection, morphing close to reality, only to be swept to smudged shapes of distortion.
I am Kintza, said the owl. Voden only nodded, recognizing the name though he could not draw any thought of where he had heard of it before, when the owl spoke again. Know me, for I am knowledge manifested. I am the epitome of logic. I will be the salvation, the restitution of what fortifications arise from the wise.
The beast’s head turned back. The coruscating purple eye drove through the core of Voden’s mind, as if resetting Voden’s synapses so that everything brought his thoughts back to Kintza.
“Logic only reaches an end. When it is obtained, there is nothing left but its echo of completion,” Voden felt his lips move, but again, he thought it sounded more like Andar than himself. He wondered if the thoughts were his own, and he began to dwell on what he had said.
You are naïve, boy, Kintza responded. I am that end, and the opposition only echoes against my walls. What could oppose what is definite?
“Anything that hopes for more,” Voden blurted out. Kintza jolted to a halt, staring hard at Voden. His brazen brows tightened around his vacant black eyes. The moment pulsed with rays of fear, scanning out from the beam of purple pouring out of the owl’s center eye, considering something.
Kintza’s head staggered and shuddered, and without word, he pulled his wings against himself, sending them down through the clouds. Vertigo dug its claws in Voden’s chest, his innards twisting and jumbling at the back of his chest cavity. The mist of lofty clouds split around them, peeling back in trailing strips of filigree, and Kintza’s beak pointed towards the brown earth, bright from the rising sun. The heat began to sizzle the air, buffeting like a furnace against Voden’s skin, almost certain that the heat could not have been all from the sun. He could tell the hills that cropped up across the landscape were mountains of sand, looking more like a dormant ocean than land. It wasn’t long before his eyes spotted an anomaly trying to lose itself in the landscape, where the ground was charred and cracked, where shards of blackened glass stood on end like sloven teeth. The area was so burnt and chaotic, he had not noticed the snorting slivers of gloomy smoke rising from the marred sand. It must have come from some crag lost to the glassy mound they were approaching, but he wanted to imagine less of it, finding his thoughts only wondering of its depths.
Kintza smashed against the obsidian earth, sending heavy shards against Voden’s arm. The heat was unruly, and the landscape surrounding the burning glass was covered in unending waves of sand whose features were as plain as dough.
We are here! At the threshold of answers. Look in the pit, boy, Kintza exclaimed with a hiss.
He rolled his wings, and his feathers became smooth. Voden slid off his back without warning. He winced at the cracking thud, and the glass crinkled as he stood. He gingerly brushed himself off. He wiggled his toes inside his boots, feeling the leather, unable to breath in the sweltering heat. His brow was soaked with pillars of sweat. Kintza’s image flickered in the heat, occasionally flickering out of place and to the side, his form becoming like the shadow. The amethyst star on his head, however, never stayed out of focus, even amid the waves of smoldering air. His options were left now to the black lustrous cave, rumbling with tormented quivers.
He wheezed from the heat and began to walk, the ground breaking its crust as he stepped. He moved around the scattered pillars of tow
ering onyx, edges still sharp, he found, when his arm brushed up against one, drawing a gash and a surprised inhale. A stalactite inside the cavern cracked and fell, splintering in fractured webs along the ground before the pieces slid down into the smoking fissure. He glanced back at Kintza still watching him through the fettering air, and he gave no more words as Voden navigated the treacherous labyrinth. Voden jumped across a crag of glass, rolling into the hole that curled back into the vertical cavern. The air smelled noxious, burning with ozone and sulfur that he could taste on his tongue, choking out any real thought that could urge him away.
The entrance now hung over his head, like a fat lip to a giant, where the smoke rubbed its fluffy stream along the edge of the orifice. He looked at the smooth surface he stood on now, pressing his hand against the piece that angled down into the breached earth. Determined, he slid down the face, heart pounding with fear, needing to know what slumbered inside. His foot stopped against the next rock jutting up, and he composed himself further to look down in the hole.
Downward pressure hooked his heart, as he set himself up to see below. The walls were cracked all the way down—at least as far as he was able to see—blending into the red glow cast from somewhere beyond his vision. It was not until he looked fully down that the sounds rendered their wretched chorus, screaming in uncontrolled patterns that were not near any known form of sentient life, unsettling Voden’s mind to a madness that could not cleanse his mind of their torment. His soul beat at his subconscious in derangement, as if waking something he feared worse than the fullness of what could lay beneath. Through the jarring howls, he felt his fingers claw at his scalp, trying to dig the sounds out physically, and he found the screams were also his. A voice so violently crushing broke through the sounds, one he did not know, one that reeked of desolation. It began to speak to him above the noise.
I see my roots in you, child. My, do they run deep inside your heart. Can you feel them squirming at my voice? I revel in this brokenness that inhabits you. I savor this anodyne net of apathy you creatures weave, as the pieces of your soul shred from the emptiness of your vanity. Ha, ha! Indeed, my roots grow strong! It is time you accept this. There is no truth beyond this void below you. I will devour your spirit and ravage your mind of its sanity until time has no place but to extinguish even your own conception of self. It is safer to give yourself to me. Perhaps it will hurt less. Look deep, child! This is your void. Know your heart and soul are already here! It is only waiting for your body to join what is already dead!
Convulsions ran through Voden’s bones, asking to be broken where fear and despair gnawed into his veins. Everything he knew siphoned into the void below, drowning in the red, bouncing down the jagged rocks, crumbling in the descent. He felt the sky, though he never turned to look at it, compressing his marrow to pulp. As his eyes glazed and his tears evaporated, he still stared into the depths, unable to move, and the shadows became monsters, spawning from the red maelstrom. Spindly creatures scuttled up the walls, creeping in harrowing movements, shooting dithering leers towards him as they ascended. They screeched in merry cries, echoing with doom that dripped from their mouths, cascading through the void; the darkness settled in.
“Voden!” cried a muffled voice. Voden turned his head, his neck feeling as though it was breaking, and saw the shadow of Andar, shaking his shoulders. For a moment his mouth became clear, but then he slipped back to the blurred realm. “Voden! Come on! Don’t give up on me!”
The monsters howled at the interloper, now digging their claws deeper into the surface of the pit, hungry to capture them both.
“VODEN!”
Voden heard them sniffing the air. They caught his scent, eyes closer now, flaring with their bloodlust.
Give in, Voden. You will be complete in the void!
“VODEN! WAKE UP!”
Voden gasped, his lungs pulling for the sanctity of the air. His eyes flailed open, still flashing with the visions of the raging pit, when he saw the downcast head of Andar, his tears dripping onto Voden’s shirt.
“Kintza! He’s coming!” he shouted, the syllables falling over top of one another, coming out in a stumbling mess of sound. Andar’s hands pressed against his shoulders, shocked by the sudden vitality that erupted from Voden.
“Voden! Thank Beyond!” Andar cried, grabbing Voden in a quick embrace.
“Where’s Kintza?” Voden said, trying to peer around Andar. The air was drafty, almost moist; a breath of cold ran through the stagnant din. “Where are we?”
“Kintza?” Andar shook his head but gave Voden a curious look. “I’m not sure. There was no one with you except me. You saw Kintza?” Andar asked, furrowing his brow. Voden nodded firmly. “No, that idol is a myth, Voden. Even so, if he was real, Eurruk chained him in the Collapsing Plane during the battle of Nul’ Sceza. I don’t know how you haven’t heard that story. I imagine those spores gave you those hallucinations.”
Voden bit his lip. It sounded vaguely familiar, at least the name Eurruk did. One of the great prophets of old who had achieved marvels even the most well studied Syphon users would have feared.
“Well, I didn’t have any visions, just everything was…well extra. I saw you stray away from Yael. She didn’t seem to really understand what was going on, so I followed you up the stairs. You were holding that damnable cube and wouldn’t hear a word I said. You were in…” He paused, sucking in air while he tried to find the words. “You were in some kind of trance. Muttering to yourself. I couldn’t stop you. You found a door.” Andar stopped.
Voden felt a trickling skim along his back, and his eyes adjusted to the somber cradle of the looming trees around him. The trees, though ancient, made no groan, as though they were breathlessly watching the boys, and their silent, decrepit vigil waited to feed on their secrets. Andar looked down to the ground beside Voden. He fumbled with something a moment and lifted the red cube from the dusty earth.
“I thought you got rid of this.” His voice was sharp with accusations.
“I…I…meant to,” Voden mumbled.
“Well, it opened the door to… here,” Andar huffed, lifting himself to his feet, holding the artifact, “but the spark inside is gone. I don’t know how to open it again.”
Voden urged his aching bones to move, examining the door behind them. It was tall, shrouded by the gnarled vegetation that crept in the forest with scaly thorns thicker than his leg, curled in all directions, gesticulating for him to come within their reach. The wall that was under the bramble was made of shale, managing to hold together and giving the appearance—from the small segments that happened to not be covered by woody briars—of pages in a book swollen with moisture. The stone door was pocked with age and bore ancient symbols that seemed to breath curses from the spider-thin cracks withered within. He walked over to the corroded egress, placing his hands against the worn surface. Voden shivered at its touch but ignored it and gave it a hard shove. It refused him, and he braced his shoulder as he pushed again, but still, it made no effort to comply. He continued to push the door until his breath was nearly gone from him, and his vision began popping with the encroaching black. He turned from the door.
“You thought that would work?” Andar scoffed.
Voden shrugged. “Figured it was worth a try. Maybe you had loosened it a bit.” He smiled weakly at Andar.
They let the words evaporate into silence, hoping to find an escape from the dreary territory. The tangle of trees seemed to have stooped in towards them, creaking back into place as Voden shot them suspicious glares. They almost groped to taste Voden’s fear. He tried to give an ounce more of focus to the door, hoping his desire to return to the other side—his desire to hold Yael again—would awaken some sort of magic. But he knew, even more now that the trees felt to be kissing his neck, he was far away from any sort of fairytale that would grant his wish.
He looked at the ancient sentries. They were demons to him, breathing a frothy fog from the roots which covered the loose dirt around t
hem, following those they wished to torment. The branches of the ashen trees had worked for eons to asphyxiate the sky, choking out the hue of deep purple that should have been canvased across it, now only slate, saturating the shades with banality.
“What do we do, then?” Voden finally asked.
“I don’t know, Voden,” Andar sighed. His voice was tired, fed-up, it seemed, with the whole adventure. He kicked the dirt, his eyes cutting around the trees, until he finally pointed through them. “I guess that is as good of a direction as any.” He lifted his bag and threw it on his shoulder, handing Voden his. He also handed Voden the cube. “Take this, too. It’s yours to do what you will, but I wouldn’t keep it. Maybe it lost its usefulness, maybe not.” Voden let Andar drop it in his hand, unable to decide what to do with it before Andar walked off into the haze.
It was a crooked, lanky trail, covered in dead leaves and broken sticks, rolling over the lumps of earth that hardly covered the mangy roots of the equally deranged trees. It fell back through the disheveled hills of broken slate, which appeared only slightly more promising than finding a way to break open the stone door.
“You think this will lead us back around?” Voden asked as they began to walk the path.
Andar remained quiet for a moment, as if dumbfounded by Voden’s question. “I don’t know. It’s hard to really say, considering the door only seems to respond to the arcane, so I rather doubt it. I can’t imagine we are going back. We just need to get out.” Andar sighed, rubbing his face in distress. “I’m sorry, this place…something about it stresses me out. I feel like I’m being soaked in dread.” He stroked the polygons on his arm, as if trying to calm the constricting shapes, urging the dull light to fade.
Voden watched him caress the metallic gauntlet, realizing he was without any sort of protection. “Should have brought a knife,” he muttered, reprimanding himself.
