Chapter Four – Prices and Prospects
I wasted years of my life wide awake but sleeping. She saved me from my sleep and soothed my sordid soul, but she came and left as if I were just dreaming. But this dream of lost love left a hole, so like a nightmare I wake screaming. She poured like water from a broken bowl—a bowl cursed such that it can never be full. But even while sleeping, I heard her voice still singing. Even while dreaming, I could not stop from screaming. I was incomplete without her.
It was three days after I killed Aziel and assimilated his merciless soul that I arrived at the door to the tunnel. It was only with his stolen sense of direction that I managed to find the door in the first place. It was only with my ambition and his will that I withstood the force of my own starvation.
Bellaina had said that she would welcome me back into Bones City in this place so that I could pay my debt with servitude, but I had been gone for weeks. Any ordinary person would have simply assumed that I had died a pointless death in the endless desert. Even as I set my hand upon the door to the tunnel, a part of me believed that I had actually died in the desert; this part believed that I had simply hallucinated this journey as an afterlife to placate me if I died alone without Alyssa. I could practically feel her heavenly hand holding mine, guiding me through the badlands as I stepped upon the edge of death.
When I banged my fist on the locked door, I could feel my own evanescent existence approach its end, but I had come too far to turn back now. I want to say that Aziel had galvanized my spirit, but the truth is that our two souls had converged in that starlit shower of blood. I could not even tell us apart anymore. Just as Aziel cannibalized the bodies of weary wanderers and assimilated their flesh into his, I had cannibalized Aziel’s soul and integrated his valorous heart into mine. I envisioned the future for which I had fought in the desert and sacrificed myself; it catalyzed a surge of strength which shot through my arms and into my sword. I struck the door twenty-eight times until it finally shattered into a shower of woodchips.
Even after the shambles settled on the staircase in a space lit only by starlight, I could hear footsteps storming through the underground tunnel. Desperate to escape the badlands and the monsters which dwelled there, I drove my dying body to descend the staircase. When I heard a steel door unlock and saw the fiery glow of a torch destroy the darkness, I dropped my sword and collapsed against the dusty wall. One of my discoverers rushed up the staircase, but the other hoisted me onto his shoulders. When he helped holster the sword I dropped, I saw a flash of his face in the fiery light. I could see the flame shimmer in his dark green eyes; I could see his short golden hair familiarly flicker from the wind which flowed from the desert into this tunnel. But just as I slowly came to recognize him, he similarly recognized me. Despite that we were almost on the other side of the city, he was the same man who first led me to Bellaina on the night I left Bones City.
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“Asivario! I hope this doesn’t sound crass, but I really didn’t think we’d see you again! What was it like out there?” asked the friendly man with the short gold hair.
I shook my head and said with a wince, “Please forgive my impertinence. Do you have any food? I don’t mean to be rude. I walked for days in the desert and nearly met death. It may be any minute now that I draw my last breath.”
The kind man answered as his green eyes grew wide, “We do have some food, so please come inside.”
I barely remember the moments that followed. Like a runner fueled by euphoria until they cross the finish line, I did not even realize the extent of my exhaustion until I stepped foot inside the city walls. One man locked the door behind me while the other guided me into a dreary chamber lit by a flickering lamp. I may have fallen asleep during the entire experience, and it wasn’t until partway through the meal that I emerged from my fugue state. I can’t help but wonder if my hunger had devoured me because I had assimilated Aziel into myself.
“It must have been hard. Do you think you can speak?” asked the kind man when I finished my feast.
“I felt like a wave cursed to never reach shore. I pushed myself forward like a soldier in war; I lived only because she’s worth fighting for,” I said to the man who let me in through the door.
But he merely chuckled and said with a grin, “There you go speaking in riddles again! Our dark queen doesn’t appreciate your words like I do, but that’s alright! You still have a place in our organization anyway!”
I stifled my chewing as I tried to say, “I owe her a debt I intend to repay. Though I could run, I instead choose to stay. I will find my Alyssa again one day; I will find her again in Ember Bay—the woman for whom my heart was forged in flame. But until we are to meet again someday, I will do as she asks and work the days away.”
The man stood beneath the flickering lights and said, “I don’t know your job since we thought you were dead. Bellaina is the queen of this city’s underworld, but I am her courier. She lives in a home at the edge of the riverbed, so I will bring you there to learn her expectations. It’s likely that I’ll have to show you our rendezvouses around town, so I suppose it’s only fair that we formally meet. I am Donovan, the courier of the dark.”
I nodded slowly and stood up from the table. I saw my own reflection in a pane of stained glass. My skin was stained by desert sand, and my bloodshot eyes revealed my exhaustion. Even after eating an enormity, my sunken face betrayed the truth of my emaciation. My hair was bound together by sweat. Though I had never cared about my appearance in the past, since it had been hidden by the walls of the tunnel which bound my vision, I could clearly see the criticality of my collapse. Even Donovan could see I was in no state to venture across the starlit city, so instead he sent me to the shower. Minutes poured away as my stains from the desert flowed down the drain. When I emerged from the shower, I collapsed onto a dusty cot in a dark room where I dreamt of the day I would see her again. It was a soft silence broken by her voice in the dark, like her immortal soul whispered to me in pieces a promise of our future love.