Tyler strolled down the main thoroughfare, a bag of grocery shopping in her hand. She was going to surprise her mom with breakfast in bed tomorrow morning. She imagined how surprised her mom would be, to wake up to pancakes and coffee, and smiled a happy smile.
It was an absolutely lovely evening. The moon rested in the sky as if on some unseen perch, closer than possible, as a gentle breeze picked up the sweet scent of the late Autumn air. Tyler knew it was cold, but the cold couldn’t reach her. Leaves rustled as they tumbled in across the street and danced in the streetlights. Despite the evening being perfectly calm, not a single soul or car to be seen or heard, though she wasn’t afraid. Tyler did a small twirl and the moonlight caught her eye as her reflection lit up in a shop window. The storefront was dark, and she had trouble making out the words scrawled onto the pane of glass. Behind the letters her reflection danced and wiggled in a way all together impossible to describe.
Am I… Dreaming?
That was weird. She didn’t normally realize she was in a dream. And she didn’t normally dream about coming home from grocery shopping, either. She checked her hand, the bag having disappeared a while ago.
Definitely a dream then.
She had heard about lucid dreaming before, and wondered what she could do with it. Looking around for ideas, she stared up at the moon. It was gorgeous and the longer she stared, the bigger and rounder it became, almost like she could reach out and touch it. She shook her head and looked around, a little closer to the ground this time. The streetlights became lanterns, lit by some magical glow that shifted between pastel colors, and a song grew out of some unseeable quartet. A beautiful melody that was familiar and completely unknown to her, with a tune to match.
raising of the counterpart
melody
straight, in proper condition
third
reed-pipe
fourth
The music felt haunted, sung from some time now hidden from human eyes. The stanzas themselves felt strange to here as two choruses of unseen people sung alternating lines.
casting down of the middle
the lot
bridge of the middle
closing
bridge of the išartum
opening
Tears filled Tyler’s eyes and spread down her cheeks, then fell to the pavement. She kept trying to look around for the source of the sound, but it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. She glanced back up as the light of the evening shifted and became brighter. A shock of fear ran down her spine as she realized the sound was coming from the moon, and that moon was a lot closer than she remembered. The sound of a small child crying followed in the moon's wake, as if someone else felt the sting of the song. That sound was easier to place. It came from straight ahead, and in that place a small girl wearing a white dress and rubbed at her eyes. She had long flowing locks of golden hair and alabaster skin.
“Hey, are you okay?” Tyler asked, realizing she had knelt down next to the crying girl without having walked over to her. It’s weird to be aware of a dream for once.
“I can’t find Nanai.” the girl spoke, between sobs.
Nanai? Where did Tyler hear that name before? “I’m sorry, you must be scared. I’ll help you find her. Is she your sister?”
The girl nodded and took Tyler’s outstretched hand.
“There, there. It’ll be okay. Big sis is here to help! Do you remember the last place you saw here?” She said, reassuringly. Even if this is a dream, there’s no way I can leave this poor girl alone.
The small girl gave a cute sniffle, “Babylon. She and I got into a fight there, and I miss her! Please help me find her.”
Like a blanket falling off a clothesline, Tyler suddenly remembered everything, the veil of dream logic falling away from her eyes. “You wouldn’t happen to be Eris, would you?”
“Big sis knows my name?”
“Y-yeah! Big sis knows you well. In fact, she loves you a lot and misses you greatly.”
The little Eris gave her a big hug, and Tyler couldn’t hold back anymore and hugged the little girl back, fresh tears running down her face. Her tears pooled on the asphalt ground as she hugged Eris tighter and tighter. She didn’t realize how scared she was until now. All the bravado, the courage Eris had gifted her soul when they combined, it all fell away, and she cried openly now. The tears ran ever faster and pooled in bigger and bigger drops.
“Tyler?” Came a voice from behind.
Tyler opened her eyes. It was suddenly daytime, and her tears had filled the entire earth. She was sitting in a warm pool of water under a bright pink sky. The little girl was now gone, and Tyler hugged herself, trying to hold on to the feeling of the hug. Turning around, she saw Eris as she remembered her, sitting up and caked in mud. She looked like she had just woken up, but Tyler didn’t care, didn’t care if this was a dream.
Tyler just ran to Eris and hugged her tightly. “Eris!” She cried. “Where are you? I’m so scared.”
“Tyler? How can you be here? Are you okay? Did you die?” She sounded frantic.
“Die? No, this is just a dream.” She pulled back from the hug and looked at Eris in the face. She seemed real. And scared. Real and scared. “Eris, are you okay? Where are you? I’m trapped in a cell somewhere, can you come get me out?”
Eris shook her head. “No, I’ve been here. I don’t even know where here is. I can’t even feel home anymore.”
Tyler was about to ask what she meant when the sky turned off, and she sat up quickly, which was a weird sensation since she was pretty sure she was already kneeling. She looked around, trying to find where Eris had gone to, until she recognized the pale concrete walls of her cell. She wasn’t sure how long she had been down here, but it was definitely more than a day, based on how many times she got hungry.
Tyler brought her knees up to her chest and hugged them, trying to find some warmth Eris had given her in the dream. She hopped that it was real, that somehow the connection the two shared let her talk to her across whatever divided them.
Then Tyler remembered what Eris had said to her one night, among her many questions. She had asked Eris if she couldn't just free herself from her original prison, and she explained what it was like in there. If she couldn’t feel home, then she was unable to do magic. If that dream was real, then Eris had no way of getting to her. For the first time, she began to wonder if she would ever get out of here. What was once a foregone conclusion, now seemed slippery, unstable.
She began to cry.
The lock on the door clanked, and the door opened.
◊◊◊
The coterie of allies sat in restrained silence. “Sat” might be a wrong word. Physically, everyone in the car was sitting, but they might as well be rock climbing for all the stress that everyone felt. Every turn, every time the two cars got close enough to make out the interior in the nighttime atmosphere, every time the slightest movement, real or not, was spotted in the car ahead, the tension mounted. Urgency compounding hand over fist, casting a spell of silence none dared to break, adding to the anxieties.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
Matthew could feel his knuckles whitening, though he didn’t dare look at them as they were fastened onto the steering wheel. He tried some breathing exercises he learned in physiotherapy more than a decade ago when he had hurt his knee in a hiking accident. The injury was minor, needing only a week to fully heal, but the pain was incredible. For a while, he just focused on his breathing, willing his heart to still and his jaw to unclench. Neither relented, and the old injury flared again. Matthew carefully massaged his lower thigh, trying to smooth out the inflammation.
The silver sedan in front suddenly came to a stop and turned off the road. Matthew kept driving and waited until he was sure that Abigail wouldn’t notice their stopping. Keeping the car at speed and the headlights at their dimmest, he drove for a dozen seconds and then turned off the long stretch of country road onto the shoulder and looked back. From this angle, he could now make out a dirt path heading through the trees, having been hidden on the initial pass behind a rather large barberry shrub. The road led through some rocky terrain and into a valley he was certain used to be farmland.
“Why did we stop?” Christine asked from his side. He could hear the strain on her vocal cords. Her voice came through as a strained whisper, as if she was afraid that she could be heard by their tail.
“I couldn’t risk being seen.”
“But we’re going to lose her!” she was panicking.
“No. We won’t. That road is a dead end.”
“How do you know that?” One of the voices from the back seat asked, sounding hushed against the backdrop of the night.
“See how the road is unpaved? Out here, there are only two reasons for that. Either it’s a nature trail heading into the mountains or a forest preserve, or it’s the driveway for private property. Since there aren’t any signs telling you it’s a trail or a preserve and there aren't any good mountain paths around here, it’s most likely the latter. See how the field around has uniformly sized, overgrown grass? It’s likely this is an abandoned farmland.”
“So what do we do now?”
“We wait here for ten minutes, then we’ll follow. That will give Abigail time to get to wherever she needs to go, and we can drive up without worry that we’ll be spotted. Unless she’s just here to drop off the groceries and leave, if that was what all those groceries were for.”
“It really is her, isn’t it?” Christine said, hurt clear on her voice. She must feel completely betrayed, and it was hard not to feel the same. Until today, he had considered her a respectable teacher, a colleague, and a possible friend. He clenched the steering wheel a little tighter and tried to breathe his worries away.
“It really does look that way, doesn’t it?” Durian said.
Silence befell the car again, and after the fiftieth time of checking the dashboard, ten minutes had passed. Matthew turned the vehicle around and headed on to the small dirt path. He gave a silent prayer to whatever gods there may be that Tyler was safe. He almost chuckled at the silent prayer he sometimes repeated out of reflex, a reflection of his childhood Sunday sermons. If everything was true, he had actually talked to one, and he wondered if there were more like Eris if they’d even bother to help, if they heard him at all.
◊◊◊
“I’m telling you, I don’t like this.”
“And you think I do? What do you take me for, a monster?”
“Then why are we here? We should be helping her, not hurting her! Just look at her!” He pointed to the security camera in the corner and moved to click a button on the keyboard. The sounds from the cell echoed in the security room, the soft crying of a scared teenage girl. “We’re supposed to be the good guys! What’s so good about this?”
“Damascus, 2011.”
“What about Damascus?”
“I was sent there to retrieve a particularly valuable red apatite. The details don’t matter so much, just that we didn’t know what it did, but that tragedy always followed whoever held the gemstone. It was the easiest and hardest job I ever did before this one. By the time I arrived at it’s last known location, it was already too late. Everyone guarding it had either completely succumbed to the sickness, or was about to. Their skin fell from their bodies like it was ash. It was horrible.” She wrapped her arms around her stomach, trying to forget the smells.
“What does that have to do with this?”
“Everything! The artifacts we pick up are dangerous, Andrew! They twist and bend the world into misshapen horrors and leave nothing but tragedy in their wake, and right now, that young girl—” She paused to turn off the sound to the cell. “That young girl is an artifact.”
“There’s never been a human artifact.”
“Well then this is the first. Whatever happened to the real artifact, the fact remains that it’s now sitting in that cell right now. Who knows what could happen if we just let her walk out of here.”
Andrew took a deep sigh and put his head in his hands. “Fine. But after this job, I’m not doing any more field work. I don’t think I can live with myself if anything happened to that sweet young girl, and I wasn’t here to help.”
“You’re too kind for your own good, Andrew.”
“And you’re too shrewd.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
Marisa left the room, feeling much worse for wear. Despite everything she said in there, she couldn’t face that girl. Tyler didn’t deserve any of this, and the girl’s life as she knew it was over. Marisa clenched her fingers tightly into her fists and kept walking for the exit. She needed some fresh air.
She walked through the halls of the old, abandoned mental hospital. Back in the sixties, these buildings cropped up all over the place, the land for this one being bought by the state from a local farmer. The phrasing of the time made it seem like it’d be a place of healing for those suffering from mental illness. The truth was that it was little more than a prison to jail undesirables indefinitely until it was eventually shut down sometime in recent memory. Fitting. Tyler didn’t belong here either.
The door to the roof was broken slightly, a tribute to the decades of weather and rain that had slowly eroded the locks and hinges. She shoved her shoulder into the door as she turned the handle and the weighted metal door creaked loudly open, and she made her way to the twelve-foot high fencing that surrounded the rooftop. She imagined the prisoners were allowed to walk around up here as a small gift to cow them into subservience. They would be able to enjoy the sunshine for a brief moment before they were eventually led back down to their glorified cells. Marisa imagined one such soul throwing themselves from the rooftop to end the nightmare, and the resulting bureaucratic decisions that led to these very fences she now clenched.
Marisa breathed in the frigid night air. What am I doing?
Her mind and heart were at war. She knew the poor child downstairs was a danger to everyone. She knew that. So, why did this hurt so much?
She knew why, of course. All she had to do was imagine herself down there, laying on the cot, afraid and scared, wondering if she’d ever get to see anyone she loved ever again. Each passing hour bringing the certainty that she never will. As if time itself doled out that knowledge in small doses; like an IV drip of poison.
Once again, she tried to find another way out of this. There were only a few kinds of artifacts the organization gathered that they bothered to classify. The dangerous ones, whose only purpose was to maim, disfigure, or disease those around them. The benign ones, sometimes able to protect against simple wounds or weak poisons, sometimes as a utility such as giving off a small light. And then the weird ones. Those created ghosts, phenomenon that couldn’t be explained. As far as she understood it, the organization she belonged to, was the only one who actually took every online mention of supernatural sightings seriously enough to investigate each one. More often than not it was a lie, but often enough it was a true artifact that they found it worth their time to check them all.
There were certain similarities between each category. The peculiar ones were all strange themselves. A star garnet that could hold an illusion of yourself in place for a time that seemed to emit a faint glow along its rocky lines. A thin bracelet of gold that never broke, bent or dulled, that could completely cancel all other artifacts when worn or held.
The benign ones were all some kind of coin or amulet; most of the ones they found were purely defensive.
Then there were the dangerous ones. All of them were something rare or pretty. A red apatite that caused anyone to drink from whatever water source was nearby to shed their skin until they passed. A hunk of meteorite, ashen black, and capable of causing earthquakes. A teardrop painite, probably the largest on earth but still smaller than the end of her pinky, which when drenched in blood would rain fire and turn everyone who saw it to salt. Those were the worst to obtain, almost always in some ultra-wealthy individual’s collection or belonging to an organization who managed to outlive the term “cult”. Occasionally, they would have to retrieve them after a disaster like in Damascus, but the ease of obtaining those was always offset by the horrible scenes they had to walk through.
One other thing all the dangerous artifacts had in common was they all reacted violently to all the reagents they had available to them, as if they had hooked up a terawatt power source to a sixty-watt lightbulb. The trophy was one such artifact, and the initial recon team practically fled the whole state after they finished confirming its existence, fearing that the mere knowledge of it could bring about a biblical plague. With how strange artifacts were, she didn’t blame them one bit.
Why couldn’t the artifact stay an artifact? Why had it taken hold of a person? Was this artifact one that would infect people and spread its influence? She shuddered at the idea of a magical pandemic, immune to all the might science could bring against it.
Then there was her boss. He had treated this like every other mission, until the very moment she gave the report that the artifact lost its power and the strange happenings around Tyler. He seemed almost eager to get to her.
She rested her head against the chain link fence, her neck no longer having the strength to support it. It was as if her worries and anxieties held their own weight. Could she live with what she was about to do? With what she did? She considered, for the thousandth time, just letting Tyler go and throwing herself at the whims of her boss. At least if she survived that encounter she’d be able to sleep again, even if she did end up in a federal prison somewhere, never to see the light of day again. But she knew that would only delay things. One way or another, her organization would capture Tyler, especially since they now knew she was the artifact. She’d just pass that guilt onto someone else.
Her thoughts went back to those prisoners, up on this very roof. Able to stretch their legs and talk to each other for once. She thought again about that one poor soul, who probably threw themselves to their doom to escape their fate. She envied the fictional person; might have even followed in their footsteps, literally, if not for this fence.
Marisa glanced down at the field in front of her. What she wouldn’t give to be a stone, a tree, even the dirt. Anything that couldn’t feel or move anymore. She glanced at her car. She could get into it, drive away from here and live on an island somewhere in the Pacific, always looking over her shoulder. Andrew’s rental was sitting idly off in the field, parked until he could probably make time to go return it.
Marisa sighed, released her grip on the chains, massaging the lines that they imprinted. She needed to see Tyler. If her fate was going to be sealed by her hand, she owed the girl an explanation.