CHAPTER SEVEN
The Forge Inside Me
If there had been a camera pointed at me in the castle on Tombstone Mountain, what it recorded would not have made much sense. If the recording started in the morning, it would show me asleep in bed. By afternoon, I would not have moved at all. My eyes were closed in what appeared to be sleep. When evening came, I would not have had anything to eat or drink, and I would still be under the covers. I wouldn’t have made a single trip to the bathroom. Anyone watching the footage would think I was dead, except for one thing. I opened my eyes once a day to see if Brandon or Pricina had returned. It was a pointless exercise. Pricina was a woman of her word.
I had never had much interest in keeping count of the days I spent on the mountainside and I didn’t bother to keep count once the Other Christian started teaching me.
Every day, I curled up in his lap like a cat and he taught me how to solidify tepid water, mold rock with a thought, reorganize tectonic plates to minimize an earthquake, and more.
I had questions. “Can I reorganize the matter in another human’s body?” I asked him, wondering if I could heal broken bones in someone else’s body.
“Can you?” he asked. “Have you ever done it?”
I shook my head.
“You will, but I can’t teach you that. Haven’t you noticed that everything I’ve taught you is how to deal with inert materials? Things that don’t move by themselves and have no power to move on their own? I imagine one of the other versions of myself can give you that knowledge, but not me. I have no power over living things.”
I smiled as I listened to all this. He sounded exactly like the Christian I had known. He didn’t know a hundred different facts about himself, but he knew how to organize his surroundings to suit his tastes.
Suddenly, he asked me, “Have you ever been to the village of the people who never die—Nhagaspir?”
I shook my head. “Where is it?”
He pointed downward. “Under us. It’s an underground palace that moves from time to time in order to hide lesser gods from the eyes of the world. It’s a place where they can monitor the planet and keep things on track. You will need to go there when the time comes for us to flip the poles. Doing it from there will be the most convenient.”
“Why?”
“Because there are lines of communication laid out throughout the world and being there offers you a method where you can send messages down lines of cooperative particles. It’s a seat of power. However, there’s no food there. It’s about as flourishing as the middle of the desert, so humans can’t live there. Though humans have occasionally visited. They’re in awe of the beauty. It was crafted by immortals with my kind of power, so it’s like the gates of heaven, but it’s not a place for humans.”
The idea that I could thrive in a place that is not meant for humans struck me suddenly. He had meant it when he said I wouldn’t be human anymore. For some reason, I hadn’t completely believed him. “Am I not human anymore?” I mumbled.
The Other Christian was not in the mood to humor any kind of remorse on the subject. “You can go back to being a human any time you like,” he said heartlessly.
“How would I do that?”
“You’d merely have to consciously replace all the cells in your body that belong to me with new cells. A human body replaces cells regularly and flushes useless cells all the time. You’d just need to instruct your body that the cells that make up my heart are bad. You’d eat, drink, sleep, and slowly your body would throw away all the cells in my heart and replace them with new cells of your making. After that, you could become human just by telling your body to die. You’d lose control of the Red Forest and your body would age normally again.”
“Do immortal people make that choice?” I asked.
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“Yes, but what happens more often is that they lose control of the Red Forest without meaning to.”
I suddenly remembered asking Christian about the Red Forest in those precious hours between leaving the compound and my kidnapping. I had asked him about the Red Forest and he had no idea what I was talking about. He had fallen very far, but somehow, he was still giving his body instructions and his cells were still following them. After all, he was living without a working heart, but a new urgency to find him was mounting inside me.
“Teach me more. I need to find you.”
The Other Christian obliged and, over the days and weeks, he taught me everything he knew. The world outside went black and then one unknown hour at the top of the world, a soft glow appeared.
When he told me the last thing, I knew we had reached the end. A heat had been growing in my stomach with every word he said. When he told me the last thing, it completed a pattern that had been building in my head, and the moment he slid the last fact into place, a terrible pain spiked inside me.
I groaned, holding my stomach.
“It’s time,” he said. He scooped me off the floor in his arms and placed me on the altar. “Don’t be afraid. It will hurt but when it’s over, the rewards will be great.”
“Don’t let go,” I gurgled, reaching for him. The pain was burning up my esophagus.
“I have to stand behind you,” he said, changing his position. “Be strong. When it’s over, everything about this situation will be better.” He stood behind me and put his hands on either side of my head. “When it hurts most, put your head back as far as it can go, and don’t mind my fingers in your mouth.”
“I’m going to throw it up?”
“Not exactly. Remember to throw your head back. I’ll help you hold it there if I can, and I’ll guide you with my voice.”
The next moment I was screaming. There was a fire in my belly like someone had ignited a rocket there.
Christian was cradling my head. “You’re beautiful.”
My eyes went wide.
He continued and I caught snatches of his words through my pain. “You’re beautiful. I’m nothing… merely a collection of thoughts, but suddenly… you are so very beautiful.”
I couldn’t reply. I could only scream.
His voice was in my ear. “Think of what you thought the first time you saw me. What did you think?”
I felt like I was spitting fire, but I managed to go back to that often visited memory. “You were too much for me. So handsome, so much more than I expected. You stopped my heart.”
“And what do you feel toward me?”
“Obsession, devotion, love…”
“Excellent,” he soothed, stroking my cheek. “You’re going to live forever. Your scream is beautiful. Go ahead and scream.”
I wasn’t human anymore. My screaming was like singing… like an angel singing.
“Take my hand,” he urged, clasping mine in his. “Hold on as tight as you wish. Soon you’ll start coughing.”
It was hard to say exactly what happened after that. I screamed and all the pleasure I felt eating those stones was repaid with pain. Then the pain deepened and it was as if every moment I had ever felt anything positive with Christian was turned against me. Soon, the pain was so great I was paying for every moment I had ever been happy in my entire life.
The Other Christian put his fingers down my throat until I gagged. He put my head back, so it was hanging over the edge of the altar, and held my forehead down with his other hand. He began pulling something out of my throat. I choked and squirmed, but he kept a firm grip on the sword coming out of my mouth.
“Easy girl,” he said, pushing down on my forehead.
A moment later the worst of the pain was gone. I rolled over to get away from it and fell off the altar.
The Other Christian came around and lifted my head. “You did it.” He showed me a sword. It was black metal with the same amount of sheen as the rocks I’d swallowed.
I wanted to stay with him, in the heart, in the Red Forest. I wanted to hear what he’d say about it and how he planned to use it, but for the first time, I was actively ripped from the Red Forest and awoke in my bed.
It was night and the room was almost pitch black, except for a nightlight in the hall. I felt just as sick in my body as if everything that had happened was real. My throat was beyond parched and my mouth felt burnt. I stumbled to the bathroom and put my face under the facet.
The Other Christian had not warned me it would be that painful. I had blisters on my tongue and down my throat.
I let the water run and run because I could not go to the Red Forest to repair myself. I could feel at once that it was impossible. If I could have repaired this kind of injury, I would have done it while I was there. The damage was too much for me to just wish it away. It was too much for my little immortality… which meant what I had just gone through was worse than a bullet in my brain.
I had learned so much, but at that moment, only one thing was clear to me. I had taken a crucial step away from humanity. I looked at myself in the mirror above the sink.
The Other Christian was right. The pain, the sacrifice, the knowledge that came with it… it had somehow made me more beautiful.