“You have been named after a dragoness. I have been named after something I am unable to understand, sister.”
—Shadiran to Mardhaka
Consciousness returned with bludgeoning fury, the deformed reflection of her spots on the spindle-shaped crystal outcrops scattered around the throne room greeting her, accompanying the pervading weakness and fatigue reality imposed upon her. Like every time, , her return to the world of the aware came with a whisper, a plea that escaped her voicebox: “Dirofil.”
Queasy and finding it a challenge to keep her spine straight, Shadiran considered the throbbing watercolor landscape around her as her thoughts ran like cool honey. Taciturn and soothing, her palace was ever unchanging. It spoke in a singsong, and it rarely talked with another soul. Rarely were its wails and mops directed at anyone. Her palace, like her, loathed the mere act of being.
A searing pain caressed her mind, and looking inwards she noticed her core sported a scarred fissure, a river of recrystallized mind-matter over the smooth sphere. Right, she had failed. The bradykinesia would soon clear, reality and solitude would soon swing their sledgehammers on her heart. She had failed. All the pain, the fleeting goodbyes and the wasted energy. And her core persisted. The nexus of her existence refused to collapse despite her best attempt at starving it.
Her arm twitched, spilled onto the armrest of her lush throne, most of the slime melted to the sides, a few eyespots barely clinging to the skeleton. Weakness had taken hold of her, her soul exhausted by the daunting task of healing from the self-destructive attack.
“Dirofil,” she repeated, longingly. “Another tide greets me. Another tide fails to bring you to my arms. I am tired, love.”
She tried to unglue herself from her seat of power, but it was in vain. Her core lacked the potency to move anything not classified as an eyespot, a toe or a finger. She barely heard, and her speech came out garbled too.
Architect of her own misery, she let out a small chuckle. This was the price of a failed suicide. Through a window, broken not unlike her, a draft intruded her ancient home. Through another, still terribly whole, beamed at her the flaming core that with unmatched grace balanced over the Zenith of Concepts. But the light wasn’t here to offer her solace, and the gentle breeze had arisen out of the temperature differential between her palace and the outside world, as the palace had never been warmer than after Shadiran’s failed explosion. Everything that touched her did so without a care. Despite the heated atmosphere, the whole world felt as cold and as hard as a glacier, and with the brutality and power of such phenomenon it advanced upon her, grinding the last remnants of her will to a chaotic till.
And this suffering couldn’t be exteriorized: it had no features to crease, no smiles to frown, no bags to burden with the weight of weariness. Only in her haggardness and weakness one could see there wasn’t much of Shadiran left.
She gathered her remaining force and tried by all means to move her legs, to stir her feet and toes back to life. It wasn’t enough: she was stuck to her throne. But there was one solution still.
With the little will to live she had left Shadiran began turning off eyespots, redirecting the energy to the mucilage of her lower body, so it would pull on her old bones, action the levers that pushed her form forwards. To stand presented a titanic challenge, but she managed, and then stumbled forward, parts of her psychosarc still sticking to the back and seat of the throne, like chewing gum clinging to hot concrete. Left behind her, a newborn trail of slime lead from the throne to the nearest window, through whose broken colored glass the draft invaded Shadiran’s home and scratched her battered form.
The head was gone, the shoulders lay partially denuded of flesh, the arms dangled lifelessly to the sides of her torso, and all but one of the eyespots remained dormant, if not smeared upon the polished tiles of her palace. Through a diminished vision Shadiran took in the landscape outside her window. The golden sea below, the purple-clouded sky above, all taken with an overworked photosensitive area, all mixing together in a heterogeneous, but shapeless, image.
The world was beautiful, and she could not look at it and stand at the same time. She was already next to the fenestra that spanned from the floor to the ceiling. There existed no need for further walking. To let go was an option.
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And one she took without doubting it for more than a pair of seconds. One by one other spots turned on, climbed upon barely-coated bones, sliding inside a mere film of slime, to join its equals in the window-gazing. And as they did, the legs trembled more and more, quaking uncontrollably until, at a given moment, the knees gave up, and Shadiran slumped onto the floor of her palace. But her blotches carried on gathering in a mound of psychosarc that dared rise above the lump of slime and bones, just to peek out the window. A small appendage thin enough to take as little energy as possible to manage, but wide enough to contain the photosensitive patches.
This fragment of Shadiran basked in the light and took in an increasing amount of details of the world with each additional eyespot. More colors, more definition, more little pieces of the overwhelming beauty outside.
The world, both the sea of dogs and the sky of airs, was wondrous, so why couldn’t she appreciate it? Reality seemed dimmed, tuned out for her. No more wonder could penetrate into the once-besotted. Without Dirofil, the world had lost its glimmer.
And there she lay, observing, feeling stuck in a titanic strife just to remain cohesive. Her tired core wanted to embrace unconsciousness yet again, and soon enough she would become unable to deny such request. The first awakening after a detonation attempt, something she had wished to never happen to her, had a way to fill a Thinker with resolve. In the case of the fortunate ones, to keep on living, to do their best to embrace this second chance and show fate that they hadn’t been spared in vain. In the case of Shadiran, to gather her remaining force, to heal just to try again. To do so with less care, with absolute disregard for the instant of excruciating pain, for failure was this perfect torture, this state of abject weakness where her thoughts were slow and her body refused to obey her. There would be no second attempt: there would be a success next time.
“Shadiran! Shadiran, are you fine?” Erupted from the stairwell the voice of one of her sisters, but Shadiran couldn’t hear it. She couldn’t hear anything but her thoughts in this sorry state of hers.
Mardhaka rushed from the squared spiral stairs and across the room, her headdress of metallic feathers slanted to the side, evidence of her bumping onto something on her way up to the throne room. Her mask betrayed no emotion, but every feather that bedecked her remained ruffled, raised from either the outer layer of her flesh or the metallic stems that connected them to other feathers.
Vines of silvery leaves fell at the sides of her mask as she leaned over, extending a trembling hand towards her sister’s core. Shadiran didn’t listen. Shadiran didn’t psycholocate. “Shadiran? Are you there?”
Alerted by the energy waves her sister’s heart emitted, Shadiran’s eyespots turned 180 degrees, taking the mask and the elaborate headdress in. Extending a tendril of slime to fetch her voicebox and a single ear, Shadiran deigned an answer. “Why are you here, Mardhaka?”
“A better question is why are you spread all over the room. Or why’s your core fissured and scarring. Or why did you try to detonate your soul, you moronic brat!” Carefully Mardhaka took the core in her hands, the associate mess of bones dangling like slobbery wind chimes from the crystal. “I see you have come from your throne all the way to the window,” She lightly gestured at the trail of body parts with a twitch of the head. “Regret your action?”
“I regret the mishap, sister. Would you be so kind to shatter me?”
Mardhaka groaned and dropped Shadiran’s thoughtcrystal as if it were scorching her hands. “I am not Dirofil, fool! I owe you none of this baleful, corrupted kindness.”
“I know you are not Dirofil! I would never ask that of him.”
A ray of light reflected off one of the drifting, spindle-shaped crystals as it followed its orbit about the room. It landed on one of Mardhaka’s eyes, and she lowered a feather from the headdress to reject the nuisance. “Of all the things I could save you from, Shadiran, you go and pick the one problem I cannot ever solve as your tormentor. The creators gave us words so the world would be poetry. They gave you a limber form so you would adapt and mesh with Dirofil. And yet, in a world so carefully archived as ours, I find no words to describe the level of impotence I feel at seeing you like this. I cannot go into the sea to fetch your beloved: it would harm the others. I cannot stash you in a golden cage and prevent you from detonating. But against all odds I must try.”
“Save me from a life without him, then. Destroy my core, Mardhaka,” she pleaded with a low, weak voice.
Angels wouldn’t descend in their aid and settle the dispute. No magic beam would fall upon her sister and change her mind. The promise she had just struck was a fool’s errand. The core of the cobalt-colored automaton began to feel bluer than ever that tide. “Have we lost you already, Shadiran? Should we grieve from now on? If only for the love you foster for your siblings, relent this death-seeking of yours.”
Consider me a shadow, sister. Shadiran told her through a mind link, and then traded the outer world from the inner one.
“Shadiran! It isn’t time to meditate, Shadiran. Shadiran. Shadiran!” She called, poking the mess of her sister with her feathered tail, each barb a minuscule mirror that reflected the worried and depressed palace. And her voice boomed down the stairwell, caring not that it often were stairwells, turns and corners the ones that led to uncounted hells, that divided the world into the familiar and the tragic.