A temple. Walls of white, brown, maybe black brick hewn from limestone or marble or wood. Nothing was exactly clear. Stained glass windows stood high, crafted by the hands of tradesmen and installed with the help of slaves.
No.
No that wasn’t right. No history in the walls, no personality in the glass. It was all some creation, some made-up thing that imitated an Excalan temple of worship. No, looking closely the walls were shifting, pulsating like the inner lining of a stomach. The light through the windows was not directed, it barely even resembled sunlight.
No, Iris stood somewhere else. Enveloped in magic like hiding in a hollowed corpse. Out there was cold, vacuous. Nothing.
Nothing. She could spit the words out, spit them out venomously.
Worship. Wesper seemed like the type of person to worship himself. Lowering to his knees for some higher creation was not his way of life.
“Then you’d be right, Witch,” he said, voice booming, echoing along the cavernous expanse and assaulting her eardrums. Spitting the words right back at her.
There he was, at the end of the aisle, at the lectern at the end of the aisle, the lectern at the end of the aisle at which she stood. A white gown; purity, divinity. A sick mockery of someone’s beliefs. Yet he only presented himself as a preacher. He only saw himself as a messenger whose job it was to spread the good word of god, or else he’d have taken god’s place on the stained glass behind him.
A messenger.
“I am a messenger.”
To enact the will of a non-existent god.
“To enact the will of a returning god.”
Returning?
“A hazy god, a being of divine importance. Neither benevolent nor punishing, loving nor hating, real or fake…No. Not anymore.”
Wesper’s robes morphed and grew awash with the pitches of pitch-black inks. He threw away his divinity, his purity, his allegiance. He had the power to do so, the arrogance, the gall, the—
“Courage. I had the courage to see that the throne of god was empty. Like an ant farm, whatever created this world and divided us between greed and pride, long ago left us to our own devices. No, even gods can’t come back from the dead it seems.”
A change of scenery. A rooftop. A hospital in Excala. Large one; orange brick stretched from the sidewalk to eight storeys high. Busy street below. Cars, people, carriages.
Iris could tell. She was standing on the very edge. One gust of air, or one wrong twitch. It was…exhilarating.
“God’s plan. Punishment. Reward. Tests. Do you think all these things exist? Do you think that it was chance which led sixteen people off that ledge last year, or do you think something divine pushed them? Was that part of some grand ordeal orchestrated by something above, or just the terminus of an animalistic brain?”
Wesper stepped onto the ledge with her, his beige suit beautifully pressed as if he had come dressed for the occasion. The wind rushed through his hair as it did hers. As the grass plains right outside her veranda, it reminded her of home. Her home.
“No," Wesper said. "Whichever one it is, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter which one is true or which one is fair. What matters is, which one is worse to think about?”
“Die at the hands of a higher power or to mere coincidence,” Iris finished. She could feel it inside her, the Spirit stirring in her and coming out to play. Maybe it liked him, this Wesper character. Someone insane enough to play along with.
Scene change. An army base, forward operations. Tents set up in a clearing on the fringes of a distant battlefield. The frontline was miles away, but she could see smoke rising from over the horizon. The putrid smell of burning bodies, scattered gunshots, and explosions. The dust lingering in the air made her eyes water.
They sat opposite each other in a medical tent, perfectly unharmed fortunately enough. Iris turned to her left and came face to face with a young man. Only one arm left; he was unusable, judging by his state.
Unusable. What a word. What a horrid word.
“You see, young Witch. I think whatever made this world…god, let’s say…I don’t think they got it right.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think? It’s not exactly a hard notion, is it? I’m sure it’s been drilled into you thousands of times. Godless we are! Entire schools of thought revolve around the disillusion with god.”
The young man bent over, his dog tag dangling from his neck like a ball and chain. Another one rested in the palm of his hand, rusted and bloodied. He began to cry, the tears doing little to wash away the grime.
“No," Wesper continued, "the disillusion with god is not a cause, it’s just another symptom. Even my assumption that god got it wrong is nothing but a symptom. No, there’s something greater.”
“We hate each other and we have no way of justifying it,” Iris muttered, words not at all of her own making. Words that bubbled up from the pits of her stomach, brewing like foul, ancient alcohol so strong it almost made her gag. “We hate each other for the fact that we are nothing more than creatures and therefore hate ourselves.”
“Human and Spirit, a wonderfully hideous parting gift. The biggest denominator of our world, one that we so easily get fixated on. The 'other'. It’s easy, isn’t it, to point at them and feel some sort of justification.”
“But this is no matter of human and Spirit,” Iris regurgitated against her will.
“Human between human, Spirit between Spirit. Smaller and smaller denominators divide us over and over and over and over and over again. Until what?”
She watched the soldier cry. The incomplete soldier. The divided soldier.
“Until we are not even left with the self.”
Not her words. Not her suffering. The pain of the other inside her. The divided self, the other portion of her was just as much a stranger to her as anyone else on the street.
She observed herself and traced her eyes over the shaking hands which she could not even confirm were her own. Her jacket was numb to her, and so were her clothes. The presence beside her, breaking into tears felt so real. The warmth, the aura, the sadness. It was all there, completely there. The only whole thing about him. His breathing, his beating, his wish to leave the world behind.
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The presence was right beside her. The same presence existed across from her too. The same. Same beating, same breathing, the same revelation that the world was not even smoke and mirrors. The smoke and mirrors were only there because people wanted a justification for their suffering.
There was only one truth in the world, and that was that the world could not do anything for anyone. All the world could ever do was be the eternal battlefield. The setting for the grand act of survival.
“There is nothing to it,” Wesper hissed, the words venomous as they trailed off his tongue. “There is no game, no grand plan, no ingenious evolutionary happenstance.”
He looked at her directly, pinning her eyes to him.
“There is only 'I want something', and 'you want something different'. That’s all there is to it. That’s the fatal flaw.”
He leaned in closer, his words nary a whisper over the faraway reverberations of the battlefield.
“There is no order to it, no sense, no fairness, no game, no reason, no logic!” he snarled. “There is not even a dice roll. You don’t even get what you get, you get nothing. It just happens. Don’t you think that’s wrong?”
“Yes,” Iris’s alien voice said. “It’s wrong.”
“But it can be changed, Iris.”
Could it?
“It can be changed when everyone sees the world for how it is. We can’t be the only people who feel this way! We can’t be the only ones who feel like there’s nothing where there should be something!”
No.
“Change it!”
Why? When there are so many good things already.
“We can make it complete! Perfect!”
Nothing is perfect. The bad makes the good shine twice as bright. That’s what Elvera told her when she had listened to a poorly performed piece of music.
“We don’t have to live in competition! We don’t have to be divided to the point we can’t even trust ourselves!”
Yet doubt had made her stronger, forced her feet to move. She did not want to be divided, to compete with anyone else just to be able to live. But wants gave her purpose, wants gave her things to love, like Evalyn and Elliot. She wanted to protect them, was that so bad?
“It’s all so simple!”
It was all so confusing. She couldn’t decide. She couldn’t figure it out. She couldn’t for the life of her find a way to prove him wrong, to say for sure that the world could be better, that the world could thrive if it were to be completed. After all…
“What if you want a perfect world, but someone else doesn’t? What does that solve?”
Wesper’s face contorted, and his deepest pangs of joy turned into a gruesome snarl. She had defiled him in his sanctum, his Mind Palace. The one place where his notions could run free.
Everything he said was true, and as far as she knew, she was only contributing to someone’s suffering, someone’s pain, someone’s life ending, yet she couldn’t resist. She couldn’t resist the urge to act on her own accord, the urge to move in her own interest and no one else’s.
To be a burden, to be a detriment, to be selfish above all.
“I want to save him, Wesper. That’s all I care about.”
She could feel it, the acidic bile churning deep in her stomach as she stared at the breaking Wesper. The same entity that had borrowed her tongue and manipulated her lips. It was still there, frustrated at her choice. She had angered it, made it feel small.
Yet the reality was that she was in control. Whatever Spirit lay dormant in her, its time had already ended. She was the one alive at that moment, and that was all that mattered.
The fake world contorted around her. It was messy, nothing like the instant scene transitions of before. Faulty, emotional, falling apart. It was breaking, and Wesper was triggered. She could not stay alive for much longer, not as she was now.
She focused on the feeling at the base of her stomach, focused on the poisonous angst and embraced it, all the while picturing the manifestation of her inner workings. Her Mind Palace. She took her ten fingers and pried it open.
She never thought she’d be glad to see it, the musky lighting and dingy walls. Hostile it was, and hostile it forever would be. She’d never quite be welcome, but this time she was standing on her own two feet. Feet that were planted firmly, and legs that refused to buckle or even shake. Two doors remained open behind her, and she eyed a third to her left.
She knew the drill, and although it never felt as simple as it seemed, there was only one discernible, clear way toward reclaiming more of herself.
She took a step forward, testing the waters of the situation, but nothing jumped out to bite her. She took another one, same story. Another, another, and then one more. The third door stood before her, silently judging her, waiting to see what she would do next. She cleared her throat and took a deep breath.
The beast. The serpentine dragon from her last battle. She could sense it behind her, watching her every move. She could feel it, feel its presence and its intentions. It wouldn’t attack her, no, but it would watch her keenly. The cold brass handle stung her skin, giving her a final warning, a final test of courage. A simple glance through a keyhole would not suffice.
The world devoured me and used my life to destroy itself. Even then it wasn’t enough.
Another corpse. Another lifeless Iris, lying in a pool of her own blood. Her own fake blood. Her neck was ripped open, and her body was nothing but cuts of meat. A woman sat there, sat behind her, ripping at her neck with rotted yellow teeth. She was eating her with the insatiable hunger of something that could do nothing but consume.
Strange robes, ancient robes. Ancient robes from a time long past, with unfamiliar patterns and long-lost symbols. Luscious black hair, smooth pale skin. A forgotten Queen.
Then Iris blinked.
A man in armour. Bare forearms and clad in leather and bronze. His short sword skewered her stomach while he, as before, ate into her neck.
Then she blinked.
A knight of old in shining iron, dignity thrown aside as he devoured the corpse with an unstoppable thirst for blood.
She blinked again.
A general.
Again.
A pitchforked peasant.
Again.
A boy with a musket.
Again.
An aristocrat.
Again.
An oligarch.
And again, and again, and again, and again.
Her neck would gush blood, and they would greedily lap it up. Different symbols, different insignias, different causes moral and amoral, different motives and reasons and perspectives. They all dug at her neck like parasites, like maggots crawling in dead skin.
Then she saw Elvera. White sheet stapled to her face, a thin cutout with nothing but a vacuous cavern for her mouth. Geverde’s insignia on her shoulder glistened in the fresh blood.
She saw Elliot. Same dehumanising fabric, spattered in blood from head to toe, sucking at her veins like they were his lifeline.
She saw Evalyn; her orange hair dyed sickly crimson, and nerves and veins stuck in her teeth as she scooped at the opening with her bare hands.
They devoured my power until I was nothing. And still, they wanted more.
The beast sat at its full height, watching the scene alongside her. It was her voice it spoke in, and it seemed to emanate from the corpse itself. The dead, blank eyes still somehow harboured a voice.
Devoured. Eaten. Used and thrown away. Iris’s past life was grim even without the detail. She watched the scene unfold together with the beast, knowing that the other half of her was trying to show her something. A plea wrapped up in a taunt, a way to warn her of danger in a way that did not seem desperate, in a way that still made her feel terrified of herself.
They would eat her too, just like they had eaten her past life.
“I’ve never felt used,” Iris said. “I know I’ve only been around for a few months, but I never thought I was feeling used.”
She thought back on the battles she had partaken in, the choices she had been made to make. They were gruelling, and the outcomes of her choices would haunt her for the rest of her life. But in it, there were things she could be proud of, even if she did not wish to be. Her part in dismantling the FSA was something she would regret, but she had saved people’s lives in the process. Not only the hostages, but the Spirits of Fadaak simply living an honest living.
Helping Alis ended up doing more harm than good, but she had found value in him. Value she still clung onto, that she could still see in him. He wanted to be good but had no one like Evalyn to guide him.
Has the thought ever occurred to you why you think you can be proud of your choices?
She had saved the lives of a few citizens of Geverde, and other citizens of that same country had praised her for it. She would get no such love from the fractured remnants of the FSA. Her choices would never been good outright, someone would always be trampled in the process.
Everything from destroying an organisation to buying the last loaf of bread. Someone would be left without.
“I don’t know,” Iris said. “But there’s something I want to do right now. Someone taught me to be selfish, and to me, there’s a good guy that needs saving and a bad guy that needs defeating.”
She turned to the purple beast as she spoke her final verdict.
“Maybe you're right, and maybe I'm wrong. But it’s my turn to live, so lend me your help.”