XXIII.
Vagari’s eyes opened to a world of rust and sodden decay. Somehow, he had fallen inside the ship with the only apparent escape being a jagged hole some twenty feet above him – no doubt his entry point. He staggered to his feet, falling harshly against the wall before righting himself. Once steadied he would make his attempt – a quick vertical flight to freedom, and… pain. The readied intent brought a surge of pain coursing through him. Reaching behind his back, Vagari found his insectile wings had been reduced to charred and bloodied stumps. Further inspection alluded to the rest of his back being in a similar raw condition. He spat a string of curses as his head seemed to churn with the pain.
By some miracle he hadn’t managed to lose the book in the fall, finding it still bundled a few feet away. He had lost BP, however, and he had to find her. Vagari looked around at his options. He was in the ruined halls of the ship’s lower deck. Behind him, the hall led to a set of stairs with the steps leading right into shadowed and turbulent waters. Vagari could feel the heat radiating from there – it was still boiling, or close to it. Boiled alive in the dark wasn’t much of an option, he decided. So, that left forward, into the rotting bowels of the dead thing.
Vagari started inward on shaky legs, though in truth, he couldn’t tell whether it was his legs that shook with every step or the entire ship around him. He staggered and stumbled down the hall, lurching forward in a daze, one hand sliding against the corroded walls while the other clutched the bundled tome tight to his chest. Vagari turned a corner, finding himself in another seemingly endless length of hallway. However, this time he wasn’t alone. At the far end stood a woman dressed in a white sundress covered in poppies. “What the actual fuck…?” Vagari uttered, shocked to crudeness at the sudden sight of her. The woman just laughed, soft and kindly, then walked away. “W-wait, hey! Wait!” Vagari hastily followed, limping desperately after her. He didn’t know if she was a figment of his imagination or maybe a survivor or what, but he knew he had to follow her. “Wait…” He pleaded as he neared the end of the hall, “please wait!”
Vagari took the corner sharply, slamming into the wall opposite as he did. As suddenly as he had, he was no longer in the decaying wreckage, but in a kitchen: white and serene, with carved oak cupboards, and large bay windows wide enough for two to sit comfortably within. The woman stood at the far side, cutting onions at the sink. She hated cutting onions, no matter the trick they always made her cry. “You think one will be enough for the roast, Eddie?” She asked with a sigh, already tired of dabbing her eyes. “Probably… maybe one more?”
“It’s… fine,” Vagari said softly as he entered the room. He looked to her and then behind him, back down the rusted hall that was still there and knitted his brows in shock and confusion. “Is… Is this another dream?”
“Dream?” She echoed with a huff. “I wish! Then I’d just lucid these damn things away – or, better yet, will them to just be cut already.”
“Then,” Vagari asked with a swallow, “where… Where is this, if not a dream?”
The woman turned and propped a fist on her hip. She stood for a long moment inspecting him quietly before saying, “They really work you guys too hard in that lab of yours, Eddie. You feeling alright? If you need, I can call the dinner off. The onions will keep.”
“I… I’m not Eddie. I don’t belong here,” Vagari said, blackened eyes darting to the world he left behind, the world he destroyed. He clutched the book to his chest. “I don’t even know your name… I can’t even see your face. I just… I just remember your favorite dress, the things you love and hate, your favorite room in the house ever since your dad taught you how to cook. I remember that… but I can’t put a face or a name to the love.”
“If you’re not Eddie, then who are you?” she said with a smile upon a face he couldn’t see. “It’s the little things that matter most though, isn’t it? You always told me that you’d still love me when my looks faded. Glad to see that that’s true.”
Vagari fell to his knees and just stared at her, trying to will her face to appear, trying to uncloud her name in his mind. He couldn’t. It was gone, just like the world she represented – a world free of corruption, of fear and pain, a world of sundresses and picnics at the beach. The faceless woman sighed wistfully and then made her way to his side. There she slid her hands across his face and pulled it tight against her shoulder, an embrace that caused tears to stream from his eyes. “There we go… There we go…” the memory cooed comfortingly. “It’s going to be alright, Eddie. It always is when we’re together. Remember, you promised. Do you remember your promise, Eddie?”
“I promised…” Val said, pulling into the embrace, a man once again, with all their faults and weaknesses. “I promised you that I’d love you until the end of the world, and forever after. I promised you that I’d never leave you… But, I broke that promise. You – you were the pillar of my faith in the world, in myself, and I broke that promise – shattered it at the foundations! I broke… you. I left you.”
“Don’t be silly, Eddie,” she said, softly kissing him on the forehead. “You can’t leave behind what’s always inside of you. I’ll never leave you… Seħgaino ħeme, my precious thing…”
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
At those final words, Val pushed himself away in a startled jolt. The world shook with his rejection as he stared back at where the figure had been. Once more he was alone, lying still upon the damp metal floor of the dead hulk, a monster again – an inhuman thing wracked with remorse and regret. He breathed heavily as a certain familiar fear ran its course through him. Had the event truly happened? Or was it all just another fever dream? Was it another vision sent by the Being of Light, or was it something else entirely? It didn’t feel like before, Vagari thought as he tried to gather himself. But that wasn’t true. It felt like the first time, that night in the desert when the dead spoke. It almost felt like another lifetime, a mirror universe even: another girl lost, another duel of giants, another apparition. That ghost spoke similar words to him – words of endearment, words of lives past: Seħgaino – precious thing.
Vagari’s vision blurred and his mind dulled as he tried to push himself to his feet, falling once, twice, a third time before he stood once more. The storm still raged outside. He could feel the raw power of it through all those layers of steel, pulsating up through the soles of his feet into the very core of him. There was no question about the events beyond – the two colossi were still locked in their battle to the death. Either victor didn’t bode well, Vagari knew. Either would see them dead. He had to find BP and escape, somehow. Flight was out of the question a sharp pain reminded him, so that left the boat. Surely the demon couldn’t keep up its pull during the fight, could it?
Vagari pushed further into the ship, nails scratching lines into the walls as he groped them for support as he went. A concussion, that’s all that was, he told himself of the vision, now a tormenting memory. He must have hit his head during the fall – it was just like the fever before. “But that hadn’t been just a fever though, right?” he pondered. “The girl, or rather, the thing masquerading as her is real. The Being of Light is real… What could it mean if it was real? What are you trying to tell me?” he asked himself in thought, before shouting it out loud, “What are you trying to tell me?!”
There came no reply beyond the echo of his own desperation bounding back at him from the near end of the corridor. Once he made it there, ascending stairs greeted him. Not the answers he was looking for, but a welcome change from the labyrinthian twists he had been wandering until then. He climbed, but a few pained steps away from the top, the delirium overtook him again, and he fell. Vagari felt himself slipping away, falling backwards, but didn’t. A hand reached out from the darkness and caught him, pulling him to safety. “Shit, Val… Man, you really need to ease up on the sauce,” Malcom said as he hoisted him to solid ground. “You’ve got a little girl on the way, don’t you? What if you cracked your head open, man?”
Val stared at the man, foggy-eyed in the brick alleyway. “A little girl? BP?” He stammered, looking at the hazy world rocking around him. “Where… where am I? I… I don’t know anymore.”
“Hence the sauce, boss,” Malcom said, easing him to the ground. “There you go. Let’s take a quick break, okay? Carla will kill me if she hears you didn’t get home safe. You know her, our mother hen! Listen, why don’t I call a cab, huh? You can sleep it off at my place, okay? We’ll tell the girls we had our own little baby shower. How about that?”
“No… No, I need to find her,” Val exclaimed as he struggled to stand. “I need to make sure she’s okay!”
“Woah – easy, Val! Easy!” his best friend cautioned. “Shit, man… Looks like you might have already bumped your head. Who is ‘she’?”
“BP,” he explained through pained breaths. “She fell… I have to find her! I can’t… I can’t lose her too. I can’t lose anyone else.”
“Curious,” Malcom noted coolly. “What makes her so special, Val? The road of the future is paved in the bones of our honored dead – isn’t that what you told me before? We were just stepping stones for you – bricks in your road to be placed and trampled upon, to see you where you needed to be.”
“N-no,” Val stammered, staring up with desperate eyes, “That isn’t true! You were my friend, my best friend! I loved you.”
“I believe you, Val,” replied Malcom with a laugh. It was a kind laugh, warm and full of an understanding that hurt far worse than any knife could. “I believe you really did love us, all of us… But love didn’t stop you, did it? It didn’t even give you pause. It never did. So, I’ll ask you again… What makes her so special?” But, before Val could think to answer, the specter of his friend let him go.
Vagari fell, crashing down upon the floor, tossing aside rusted chairs and the ruins of a table in his descent. He groaned and dragged himself to his feet. He was in a mess hall, surrounded by the petrified remains of a last supper. Food sat frozen on cracked plates and rotting steel. Vagari staggered to his feet, cursing the archdemon beyond and every other actor at play, including himself. As if a cruel Fate had heard his complaint, his first step into the center of the room sent a crack worming across the floor, adding to his misery. Vagari hardly got another curse out before the floor caved in, sending him falling back into darkness in a shower of rusted metal. This time the darkness was cold, wet, and tasting of the rust that surrounded him. He sank into that deep void, limp and all but lifeless, but then he felt it – a cold colder than the waters around him, frigid and wholly alien, calling up from the darkness below. “Seħ…gai…no…” something uttered – not a voice, not a psionic projection placing words in his mind, but a feeling, the feeling, that alien dread. “Segh. Ħrey. Segh dhwetħuzi…” – Resist. Rise. Overcome death.
That dread filled him, overwhelmingly and without ease. As suddenly as he had been cast into that place, listless, worn, and defeated, every fiber of his being was awoken by the intense feeling of absolute aversion. Vagari kicked and pulled, pushing away from voidic bottom, upward with all his might. A dot of light shown above him, a distant pinprick that both felt impossible to reach and only a step away; dancing and burning out with his vision and every agonizing pulse of his head. Vagari’s lungs burned and every inch of him, every muscle burned with them. But even that searing heat was dulled against the icy fear that propelled him. In that darkling moment there were only two things left in his mind: that horrible all-encompassing feeling and the escape from it that the light promised.