She walked out onto hard flat stone under a night sky. The cold tickled Airya’s arms making her little hairs stand straight as bumps the color of her skin worked their way up to her shoulders. She shivered.
Disappointment had her wanting to cry further. The lake and the beautiful world she had been to before weren’t here, instead, she was on a square of solid flat rock with edged walls.
Hethei flew above. Then he fluttered to the edge of the rock and dove off the edge of this world.
Airya swallowed hard and ran after him, but stopped herself when she got to the wall that was as high as her shoulders. Below were little balls of brightness. Creatures making blaring noises on paths that were carved around more giant stones that reached up to the sky and sparkled with yellow lights. There were other people walking below her on the paths around each giant rectangular rock.
“Who are you?”
She flinched and spun around. There was a boy there, if it was a boy. He had the shape and body of a boy, but his face. Scars. Deep molested warped scars were on the right side of his head where he was also missing an ear. Instead of an ear, there was just a hole. He was wearing some kind of material that covered his whole torso and his legs. She saw that the same scars that ran down his face also covered his right hand.
His green eyes glowed in the dark a lot like the Yellow Eyes, although it may have been because they were watery as if he had been crying. They widened when he looked into hers. “Frek. Why do you have yellow eyes?” he breathed. “And what are you wearing?”
She wanted to hide. Maybe even run back into a portal to someplace else. But she couldn’t leave Hethei. She tried to look over her shoulder, over the cliff, to where he might be.
“Who are you?” the boy asked again. He was taller than she was. He was not muscular like the Solocs were, he was lanky. He could still hurt her.
She tried to step to the side away from him, but when he seemed to notice he was scaring her, he stepped back with his hands up, “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to scare you.”
She didn’t move.
“I’m not keeping you here. You’re allowed to leave,” he yelled at her.
She looked down for Hethei again, worried that the creatures that kept moving and blaring noises from their bodies had eaten him. She was shaking. She felt ill.
She couldn’t leave without Hethei. Hethei wouldn’t leave without her.
“Are you ok?” the boy asked.
She looked to him again, a sadness in him reflecting hers, and shook her head.
“What are you looking for?” he asked.
She looked down again, “My friend.”
All of a sudden, the boy sprang to the edge of the stone and looked over it. The cold wind brushed back his short black hair. “Did your friend fall?” He sounded panicked. “Frek! I’ve been up here. I should have seen. I’m so sorry. I have a phone. We can call,” he started fumbling in the material he was wearing.
“He didn’t fall,” Airya said making the boy stop what he was doing. He stared at her again. “He flew over.”
“Flew?”
“He’s an owl.”
“An owl? Here in the city!? How do you have an owl!?” He looked her up and down again. He pointed to her attire. To the feathers that she wore, “Is this a joke?” he asked. “Are you wearing yellow contacts?”
Phone. Contacts. She had no idea what any of those things meant.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she realized that she didn’t know anything about this place at all, but he did. “What are those?” She pointed over the edge of the rock.
He looked down, “Cars. How do you not know that?”
“Cars?” she tested the word. “Could they eat my friend?”
He burst out laughing, which startled her, “No. Maybe run your friend over, but they can’t eat anything but oil and gas.”
She was confused again.
“Are you an actress?” he asked.
She had no idea what that was either.
He sighed, studying her, “Did you hit your head?”
She brought her hand up into her hair to touch her scalp, “A while ago when I fell from a tree on a mountain after saving my friend.”
He smiled. It was a warm and comforting smile that reminded her a little of her dad. “I am so confused.”
“Me too,” she looked over the edge again when a puff of feathers landed near her neck and cuddle against her cheek.
“A real owl! You weren’t joking!”
Relief flooded her. Her hand brushed against Hethei pulling him closer to her face. Her weak knees had her descending to the stone in a puddle to sit. She needed a moment to collect herself. Everything around her was too much.
The boy looked down at her puzzled. He looked to her, to the owl, and then back to her again. Then he sat next to her. She wanted to move away from him at first when she felt his shoulder touch hers, but instead, he moved away from her instead, resting the back of his head against the wall of stone behind him that formed the ledge. He had sat with his scarred side toward her. She could see all the grooves of pain and torment that had imprinted themselves into his skin and the small hole that made up where his ear should have been.
“What happened?” she asked.
He swallowed, furrowing his brows briefly, and then looked at her, “Did you say something?”
She nodded.
He smiled, moving his hand to the hole in his head, and shifting himself so that he could face the ledge and his other ear faced her instead, “I’m sorry. It’s a little harder to hear out of that ear. Especially with all the cars honking below and stuff.”
It was a lot louder here than it was back at home.
“What happened?” she repeated.
“To my face or do you mean why am I’m up here by myself?”
She touched her own face to show him what she meant.
He nodded, his mouth forming a thin line, “When I was six, these people broke into our apartment and tried to tear me away from my parents. One man ripped off my ear when I tried to stay close to my mom. When they set her on fire, I got free for a moment and tried to go to her again,” he shrugged. She could tell he was choking on the memory.
“Are they ok? Your… parents. Do they have scars too?”
She heard him grind his teeth for a moment, “They died.” When he looked at her, anger flashed in his green eyes. “Of course, they died. My mom was burned to death. My dad was shot before my guardian heard something from his apartment below and ran up and shot the men, leaving me. That’s why I’m up here now. My Guardian, the man who had saved me back then and took me in just died of a stroke. A stupid stroke. And I’m only seventeen!” he yelled up to the sky before his face fell into his hands and he sobbed.
They all died? His mom, his dad, and the men. They all died? Just like that, gone? Like her parents had explained before happened in their world where they were from.
She couldn’t imagine. She couldn’t imagine losing the ones she loved like that. She couldn’t imagine losing her mom or dad forever, even with how angry she was at them sometimes.
“I’m sorry,” was all she could think to say.
“He was a great man,” he said exhaling what looked like smoke from his mouth into the cold air as he tried to breathe, “I have just a year until I graduate. Now I have to stay in this apartment by myself. My friend’s mom lied and said she will take me in so that I wouldn’t get sent somewhere else since I have no one. My parents and I came over alone from another country. She will check up on me though and I have the money he left me to get me by until college.” He swallowed hard. She could see the lump trying to travel down his throat. “I’ll be fine. I’ll be fine.”
Then she saw his face fall into a fake smile trying to drive all the pain away, but it wasn’t working, he still looked like he was going to fall and split apart at any moment.
She scooted closer to him and laid her hand on the scared right side of his face. She had no words to say, but she did have touch to comfort him and to help him remember that he was alive now and a part of this world. That he would be ok.
He sighed deeply. “Thank you.”
She smiled, nodded, and pulled her hand away taking in the appreciative look that she was given. It warmed her that it seemed like he had come to accept her in this small moment, even though she was from a whole other world. She wanted to keep that feeling and bottle it up inside. It was nice to know she could be accepted for just being her, even through someone’s pain.
Hethei hooted softly, which gave her an idea. She could also do something else for him. Something that may help her feel accepted and appreciated even more.
“I can take you away from here. Even if just for a little bit,” she offered.
“What do you mean?” he asked wiping the snot from his nose on his sleeve.
She stood up, ready and wanting to challenge herself. To find another place, another world. She wanted to find someplace vast and limitless. Someplace they could both get lost in and forget all their sadness and pain. The need surged through her.
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And then a portal opened a few feet from them both.
She heard him gasp.
“That is where you came from?” he exclaimed.
She smiled at him, enjoying his amazement, then held out her hand to him so she could take him with her.
He gulped and grabbed her hand making his way to standing as she stepped inside.
And came out right back into Ausrine.
Panic swarmed through her. This was not where she wanted to be or where she had wanted to go. Her mom was here. The Solocs were here. She didn’t want them right now. She wanted to feel whole for the moment. Free like she had with him only a moment before. Not this dread that filled her.
She forced another portal open and tugged him with her inside it, away from her home.
One minute they were standing and then they were falling before the warm water grabbed at her from all sides and pulled her under. She let go of the boy’s hand. The boy who she didn’t even know his name.
She tried to take in a breath but regretted it instantly as water filled her nose. It entered her mouth and her lungs making her choke. She flailed trying to find the surface, trying to swim up.
Too many moments went black. Agonizing moments. Feet kicking, arms arching, trying to pull and push up her body weight with her heart pounding in her burning head. Black dots invaded her eyes until she felt the break of the surface and she breathed deeply again trying to push her face directly up to the sky.
She quickly looked around. Water. Only water.
And feathers flapping, slapping the water, trying to stay afloat.
Hethei was screeching and screaming by the time she reached him. He peeked into her hand making it bleed from his panic. He didn’t look sorry as he tried to scramble as far away from the water as he could go. She set him on her head and felt his claws digging in.
Where was the boy?
She wanted to dive back into the water and try to open her eyes, but she couldn’t with Hethei on her still screeching his terrified cries into the dim grey sky.
Only water. Water that looked like it would never end.
Something grabbed her leg and pulled her under briefly, but she kicked it away. The water only went over her eyes as she struggled to stay up for her friend.
But whatever it was that grabbed her broke the surface. Airya wanted to scream, but the scream died in her throat when she saw it was the boy.
Terror was sketched on his face when his eyes cleared and he could look at her fully, “Are you trying to kill me?”
Kill him?
“Get us out of here!” he yelled at her. A yell full of the same kind of hatred that only made her want to hate herself.
She had ruined it. By trying to do something nice, something good, she had ruined it again and caused someone who could have been a friend to despise her.
She wanted to go home.
A blue and black hole alive and beckoning for them to come, opened above her, enough for her to reach in and for it to pull her out of this world. Which it did, dragging with her the wetness that weighed her down.
She landed in a heap with the boy on solid ground back at home. But she needed to get him back where he had come from. Back to the loud cars, the giant pieces of stone, the cold dreaded night.
She realized that she had opened another portal and knew somehow that it was right. That it would take her to the place she needed the boy to be.
Reluctantly, he looked at it and looked at her. Before saying anything, she got up, grabbed his hand, walked inside, and then instantly let go. They were back where they had been before.
He looked at her, looked around them both, and then ran as fast as he could holding his hand to the hole that was his ear as if he were in pain. There was what looked like a little home, with a wall that he opened and then ran inside of it before shutting it behind him. She was left alone in the cold night, still wet and more chilled to the bone than she had been before.
“You’re very interesting,” a voice slithered with amusement.
Airya whipped around to see another man standing there. This one older, taller, with no flaws on any part of his skin or his smooth face. He had both ears that his short black hair did not touch. He was muscular and bled confidence by the way he moved as he glided around her. His strides did not miss a momentary beat as he walked around her and studied her.
She felt the urge to call up a portal and run away. To run back home.
A hole opened a few feet away from her, welcoming her inside, she took a step toward it trying to ignore the man that had stopped to lift his nose up to the air.
“I smell pixy magick. Tell me. Did a pixy make your world?”
The portal closed. Did he know more about her world, her new powers, than she did?
Hethei hooted at her, begging her to leave.
“Pixy magick?” she whispered.
He brushed her question away with the wave of his hand, “What’s more interesting than that is how your world escapes death in its natural form.”
“Who are you?”
“Oh, me?” He smiled crudely with perfect white teeth, “I’m Obsviden. I know all there is to know about death.”
She couldn’t help that her curiosity was bubbling inside her.
With a flick of his hand, a paper appeared with a glowing red stamp. The lines warping into and over each other forming what looked like countless x’s trying to make a stiff design trapped in a glowing circle of the same red. “I should correct myself.” He said holding the paper out to her. The stamp called for her to touch it, to feel its warmth under her fingertips. Maybe it would help fight against the burning cold surrounding her wet body. “I’m Obsviden. I collect all knowledge there is when leading to death while leaving that knowledge for others to find. Following those people always makes for the most interesting stories.”
If she touched it, would she gain that knowledge too? Would she understand the thing that seemed to haunt the older people in her world that the younger ones could not understand? Death was something she only touched on in a couple books in the temple room, but could not wrap her head around. It was like trying to explain swimming to someone who had never seen a body of water. She wanted to know.
“Are you a god of death?” Airya found herself asking. Her hand was reaching for the paper, for the stamp. She remembered reading about gods and how they sometimes came in different forms. There were the Strigiformes and maybe also this man.
“Ha. No. Just a curious bystander. Just a smart demon of sorts.”
A demon?
Her fingers brushed across the stamp. What felt like unseen sparks crackled into her fingers that trailed up her arm. She was left standing staring at the stamp and then at him. He smiled before she bent over holding her stomach in pain, although a more jarring suffocating pain was in her chest. An aching, emptiness tore through her.
When she tried to look back up to the paper, she saw that it was already gone and that he was next to her.
“There is no natural death in Ausrine,” he stated.
How did he know?
“But you should know, that at some point, death comes for all unless there are tricks and mechanics to prolong it. But even those never work to their fullest.”
Was her world a trick?
Then he was gone. She had felt him there one moment and then he wasn’t there the next as if he hadn’t existed at all.
When she returned home and snuck back into her room, she realized that she could only leave from Ausrine to other worlds. She could not hop from one world to the next without returning home.
She was back on her bed, face covered and pressed into the dark solidness of it, crying her eyes out again. Hethei tried to rub his beak against her, but she kept shooing him away. She had never seen her mom and dad fight. She had almost killed someone. She had met something called a demon that scared her and burnt a hole in her heart. What had she done?
She heard a gentle sigh from the doorway. She looked up through her blurry vision and saw her dad standing tall leaning against the opening. He came and sat next to her on the bed. She lifted herself up and laid her head on his leg digging into it a little. Her tears and snot rubbed into his long tunic and onto his scratchy bark rope that hung down. The rope scratched against her cheek and a few feathers itched her ear.
"I'm sorry, Airya," her dad whispered to her through her whimpers, "Your mom is just scared."
She could tell he was waiting until her breathing became steadier to continue.
"Your mom was a teacher once. Did you know that? She taught little children and education was the most important thing to her until you came along." He ran his fingers through her hair, "But then something terrible happened and now your mom has this big fear that troubles her. I think it’s amazing that you have this gift and I want you to get to use it and see other places and become courageous and adventurous and grow. But your mom, she wants you safe and she doesn't trust other worlds."
Airya sat up and wiped the tears from her face with the back of her hand. She could understand that. She had just seen how truly scary other worlds were, "Where are you guys from?"
Her dad sighed, pain filling his eyes, "The Place of the Yellow Dust."
Airya looked at him curiously. They had briefly talked about it before, but never in depth. They had never given it a name.
"It was this amazing place that had such vast technological advances and machinery. We didn't have a name for it because it was just our home, but after coming here, everyone refers to back home as The Place of the Yellow Dust because the whole atmosphere was fogged in a yellow haze-like dust. I don't know if it was from all the machinery or if it was always like that. Our people there never really looked to or at our past and just wanted to keep moving forward."
"Why did you guys leave?"
"It wasn't really by choice. It just happened."
"Do you want to go back there?"
"Sometimes," he looked down at his lap, "I miss my family, but I know it wouldn't be safe. Also, I’m sure by now they’re gone. It’s been a very very long time. We lost track after about 300 years passed. We decided that there was no point really to see how long we have been here."
"What happened?" Airya asked with a small desperation to know what pained her dad so much.
A tear fell down his cheek and landed on his hand, "I don't know if you would want to hear that my little one."
Hethei slowly hopped to her side and she petted his head, "I do."
Clasping his hands together, her dad looked away from his lap to the doorway, "Ok. Maybe so you can better understand your mom." He took in a long deep breath before continuing, "In The Place of Yellow Dust there were two types of people. There were us, the Yellow Eyes, and there were the Green Eyes. The Yellow Eyes and the Green Eyes got along just fine their whole lives until one day a few Yellow Eyes formed a group and attacked and killed a large green-eyed family. From that day forward a fear began to spread. You see, the Yellow Eyes were really hard to see in the dust. Sometimes it got so dusty that all you could see were people's neon eyes. That act at the festival is what started the Yellow Repression."
Airya gulped.
"Yellow Eyes began to get fired from their jobs as I had. I worked for a company that made and built amazing things and machines, but they were worried that the yellow eyes would start to band together and make weapons to attack the Green Eyes. Your mom had to deal with little children of the Green Eyes bringing weapons to school and attacking the Yellow Eyes. They then opened up these camps they called the Eysology Camps where they attempted to change the Yellow Eyes into Green to calm the chaos. My brother was one of the first ones to be put in and he came out completely blind.”
Her dad was shaking. She scooted closer to him.
“They began holding the Yellow Eyes in camps and even took the young Yellow Eyes from the schools to await their eye-shiftment. After your mother watched most of the children be dragged away, and for me it was my brother that gave me that push, we joined a group called the Veyance who worked to protect the Yellow Eyes. One day we led a group into one of the Eysology Camps and while succeeding in releasing many of the prisoners, something went wrong. There was a big explosion that opened up a big hole in our world. It was our only escape, so we had everyone run into it not knowing where it was going to take us. Your mom and I were the last to go through it and we ended up here." Her dad put his hand on her leg right where her cuts began, "Your mom and I have seen some pretty horrific things. I know that this place is like a paradise and you can't even imagine what is out there. Your mom just wants you safe and protected."
Airya looked down at her dad's hand, tears were forming in her eyes once more, "I understand."
Her dad squeezed her leg tight for a second with his hand and she looked up into his eyes which held tears just like hers, "Now that doesn't mean that I agree with your mother. Ultimately, I think that you should make whatever decisions you feel you need to. I don't want to hold you back from being yourself. If you are a brave adventurer that wants to know the depth of the universe then be that girl. If you want to excel at life here and focus on learning to lead your people then that’s OK too." He leaned in and formed a small whisper, "I'll tell you a little secret though. I don't think that you can learn to really lead if you only know the good of the world. You need to be able to see both sides." He coughed to clear his throat, "But anyway, either way, I support you. Your mom doesn't agree with me, but I told her you need to be your own person. I know if I had what you had and if I was brave enough that I would leave."
"Where would you go?" Airya asked quietly.
"I really don't know. Honestly, I would probably go back to The Place of the Yellow Dust and see how things turned out. If things are still as bad as when we left it then I would have all the Yellow Eyes come here."
"Do you miss your family, dad?"
He looked away so she wouldn't see his face fall, "More than you know my little one. I wish that I hadn't left them in that horrible place."
"If you could have stayed there, would you have?"
"Yes. If things had worked out differently, I would have helped stop the Repression and would have saved many others instead of only the few that we had."
Her eyes dropped to his bare feet.
Her dad clapped his hands together once, which shocked her out of her daze, "So anyway, enough of that! Have you decided what type of girl you are going to be?"