As Lin twisted in midair, she found herself impossibly high above the ground, a hundred feet at least. How tall was that chicken house?! The feeling of cool glass in her hand brought Lin’s mind back to the present moment. She looked to see Grizz gesturing desperately to the vial he had shoved between her fingers.
Mere moments before being squished into the ground by the merciless thumb of gravity, Lin did the only thing she could think of and uncorked the vial. What followed was a torrent of water, as if every ounce of water had been drained from the grand ocean and shoved within this tiny vial. She didn’t need Grizz’s frantic downward gestures to know what to do next.
While plummeting, Lin aimed the mouth of the vial downward so that a plume of water rocketed out, the sheer force of the blast slowing her descent to harmless speeds. Alighting in what would swiftly become a lake, Lin leveraged the cork against the side of the vial in what she assumed was an act of futility. Somehow, impossibly and against all laws of physics however, the cork slid over the mouth of the vial, easily stopping the torrent.
Lin fell to the ground, unconcerned with her now soaked jeans, as relief and adrenaline collaborated to turn her knees to jelly. The puddle she now found herself in sat in the middle of a grove of Rowan trees. Lin cocked her head. She’d never seen the trees before, or ever really considered herself a tree person at all. So how did she know what the trees were in the first place?
“Hey kid, can- oh shit, fuck that hurts!” Grizz suddenly shouted, leaping onto Lin’s shoulder. The bottoms of his legs had eroded away, the inky red of his surface having been eroded to the black beneath. “God dammit! I had hoped that not being a true demon anymore would let me handle water better, but I guess my beach days are still limited. Anyway, can you walk?”
Lin found herself uninterested in exploring the limitations of Grizz’s life, she was suffering from too much of her own to burden herself with the troubles of others. That was a new feeling for her.
“Right. Well, there’s no use in standing around, is there?” Lin pushed herself to her feet. The crashing of waves could be heard nearby. “I don’t know why we’re here, but I’m sure it can’t be good.”
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A truth and a falsehood together. How obscene.
Lin’s teeth ground together, forming a river of blood stemming from her cheek and running out the side of her mouth. If she couldn’t force the foreign voice out her mind through strength of will alone, then pain would have to do the trick.
Shakily walking through the rowan grove, Lin felt an uncomfortable sense of familiarity with the area around her, as if in another life she had danced amongst these trunks and boughs. Any memories Lin had built here had fled along with her mother’s memories of her own child, all that was left was wisps of recollection stuck to strips of bark and behind the eyes of young woman who had all but forgotten themselves, let alone all those that had made them in the first place.
The ground gradually but steadily sloped upward, toward the peak of a small hill. With every step, Lin felt more and more ensorcelled by the a strange sensation. It was as if she were walking down the hallway of a prison, at the back of which was the cage of a magnificent monster, great and terrifying to behold. What would she find once the shadows were chased from the bars of the cell? What horrors would her eyes fall upon?
“Kid? Is there anything you want to talk about?” Grizz asked nervously, the anxiety foreign and comical on his demonic countenance.
Lin said nothing, indeed, heard nothing. Her eyes were too full of a rhythmic thrumming. The world had turned hollow, the sounds that reached her mind only empty howls. Howls that she very well might have spawned in the first place. This island was full of color. Green grass, rich brown tree bark, red wildflowers and yellow dandelions. Yet the only color that Lin managed to perceive was the melancholy blue associated with those howls. There was a sorrow imbued within this earth that was inescapable and unforgivable.
She continued trudging up this hollow, blue abyss. Even as the hill rose above the tree line, revealing the crater of what was once Elliott Bay, now known as Michael’s Grave, Lin couldn’t feel a thing. Waves crashed violently upon the island’s black rock cliff face, and in the distance, the curved and geometrically impossible skyscrapers of Seatt-Hell twinkled with burgeoning light. A smoke filtered sunset glittered over this magnificent view. And it is all nothing but dust.