The turtles bequeathed and safe in the hands of different disciples that ignored the others had been gifted turtles too, Mirn contemplated the vial between his fingers. Come tomorrow morning, when Kilna did the inventory of the laboratory, she would notice it’s absence, and as intelligent as the girl was, she would rush out of the laboratory and find the letter addressed to Gleur over Mirn’s desk, and probably his lifeless body lying somewhere in the room. He admired the transparent liquid inside the glass ampoule, his ticket to solving this crisis, last of his life. They wouldn’t let him euthanize Felsia, and his job was concluded: The Ratchet was nowhere to be found: it was a madman’s pursuit to try to find and extricate it, it was looking for crustaceans inside a cactus. Felsians were affected, damned even, by matters of the divine, there was no changing that nor trying to deny it. When they built the monuments in their plazas, Felsians were damned. When they sang shanties as they fished animals so shimmering under the torturing sun, Felsians were tainted. As they picked fruits and specially as they made sin so lovely, Felsians were contaminated. They had been made apart from every animal and plant and mushroom, conceived in a dark corner of heaven that abhorred the world.And no in image of their gods, but in spite of it. Failed offshoots without a clear purpose.
This was his renunciation, his last wise act as a sage of Felsia. To gift the city a truth so boldly stated, as he could if he injected the venom and immediately went out intot he streets, that idea was precious. But he couldn’t. Death was to be had between those walls so thoroughly impregnated with his life. There was a Mirn of the past reminiscing a future almost like this, fantasizing about its last years in calm , there, next to a desk devoid of turtles. One only died once, so he had to get it right. A Felsian or a beast of rituals, he was. He had to perish in his favorite chair, maybe reading his favorite novel. Or he had to wane admiring the collection of bones showcasing animal osteopathies that he so proudly displayed inside vitrines in his room. Or would he, perhaps, expire looking at his laughing face in the bathroom’s bronze mirror?
So many ways to die, so many chances he would waste. Once, one could only die once. How unfair. As a naturalist, he was privy with death. Grant, not to him, would she a little omission? It felt unfair, even if he knew one could not barter with nature. He stood from his deck and reached for his first aid cabinet, where he hoarded needles and syringes for when he needed to vaccinate his turtles, or test something on rats. They also worked for applying certain drugs to himself, but it would be a lie to say he thought about them like that often.
Back in his chair, he assembled the needled syringe, took the cap of the vial off and filled the instrument of his demise with the foul liquid. He fixed his gaze on the needle tip, crying silently as he turned it to admire the shine of the scant sunlight that percolated through the windows on the surface of the metal.
A happy ending, that’s what he held on his hands. The misshapen had gifted him the means to put out his misery before shedding his mortal vessel, even if that would be the end result. The metal and glass utensil trembled as his hands did, so he inhaled and exhaled deeply to calm himself. An analgesic for a pain of the soul, he had to think of it like that.
The trembling had not subsided, but did it really matter if he botched an injection when trying to suicide? There was enough venom in the syringe to kill several Felsians, and a little bit still remained in the vial. He closed his eyes and smiled softly. The evening slowly adopted the shape of eternity. The last day of one’s life… how long would it last?
He placed the syringe over the desk and reread Gleur’s letter. Taking his wooden quill, he bit the top end of it. What to change for it to be worth postponing the suicide? In the end, he added another “Sorry”, to the last line. He would meet him again someday. Not there, not among mortals, but in Mother’s heavenly abode.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
He sat up from the chair and, placing four delicate fingers on the desk, he began walking around it, caressing all around the edge of the piece of furniture. He did the same with the walls, the doors of the cabinets, the vitrines, and the pieces of misshapen that adorned his walls. He sat in the middle of the rug and looked at the ceiling, at its rafters and at the chandelier that, fed by a vial of his blood, ignited the candles when night fell.
“You are letting me go, extension of my soul. Dead as you are, my home, it causes me great pain to know I will never walk through this room again.” He chuckled and slapped his own face playfully. How silly it was to talk to a house. “Goodbye, Mirn’s house.”
He stood and went back to his chair, where he sat with disheartened determination, and then, with a sour expression and a slowness worthy of a crime one wants to leave uncommitted, he injected himself with the liberating toxin.
For a few seconds, nothing but the pain of the prick was felt. Then he began giggling as the tickling sensation overtook his body. Elation hit his mind in a tsunami, clouding his rational thoughts. He was going to die! How amusing!
The sun shone brighter, the placer smeller way nicer, and the colors he saw were invigorated. He tasted a gentle sweetness, as if his teeth of honey were made.
His guffaw was the last inhabitant of the house, its echoes dying a second after he fell upon his desk, twitching, another Felsian finally free form the Ratchet.
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Mirn was now aware of every angle and direction at the same time. His field of view now spherical, he stood or hovered over a platform of chalk so pale, faced by a cotton-like sun that stood on the center of these same platforms, suspended among the dusk-colored atmosphere. Behind him, if we consider the part of the soul that faced Mother the front, rose columns or bars that lost themselves into the skies, as if the way back were forbidden.
He was devastated by his new reality, but also really happy to meet the mother of every Felsian. This titanic ball of fluff that floated several platform spans away from him, emanating a tranquil aura, and he wondered where were the others.
“Mother, I am back!” The innocent soul claimed, rejoicing in this newfound, ostensible eternity. The ball of fluff trembled and cotton began falling in patches. An eye opened its ugly lids sideways, revealing a flesh colored iris and a pupil that dripped a yellowish substance somewhere from the depths of the eye. Mother beheld her son’s soul and, Mirn recognized that said iris the pupil were no eye features at all, but a monstrous, festering cervix. He wanted to fly away of that gaze, but soon he realized he was shackled in place, his amorphous , bright form unable to leave the platform that now , in his mind, was slowly becoming a cell. The cotton-like substance around the eye peeled off, revealing bifurcating mouths lined with shaper teeth and sprouting many tongues. Mouths like scars of war, around the eyes that revealed themselves, around the pulsing womb that doubled as eyeballs, with wriggling tongues like feasting maggots.
She extended several of her tongues slowly, the eye that was fixed on Mirn drawing closer each second. He wanted to scream, but a soul had no throat to do so. He realized only by her will he had been able to speak before. , and that the tongues, with their bulgy and bumpy suface, were nothing but sheaths full of ovaries strung by their blood vesels and connective tissue.
He pushed against the bars, a feeble attempt to run, but he couldn’t. Not even beign a mass of energy he could escape.
When the first string of ovaries grasped a tendril of his being and began pulling, when he found himself unable to hold onto the platform, the purest terror washed over his spirit as he finally realized why there were no brothers or sisters in this heaven: the afterlife was but an abattoir, and Mother preferred to devour her cattle whole and alive.
A final time he tried to scream in vain, and then, he disappeared between the rows of teeth, the wool growing back over Mother to hide the horror the All-Carver had begotten so long ago.