Indigo: Abraham, Emotion Vol. 3: Bridges, Chapter Fifteen: "Inside of the Iron HEaRt"

 

Chapter Fifteen: Inside of the Iron HEaRt

 

            The bridge stretched out behind them, long and black.  They stood before the cathedral at the far end of the bridge, black stones laid around them in rows.  Age showed in the smooth, roundness of the stones.  Grooves were worn in by time.  Gothic railing ran the length of the bridge.  Large arches held the bridge aloft in the eroded canyon.

            Pointed rooftops speared the horizon.  A set of enormous doors frown at them from ahead.  They were noticeably thick and stood slightly ajar.  The sky was dull and grey, and the light filtered through it.  It was Deidra’s shell blocking out the sunlight and draining the color from everything within it.  Things that were black were made deeper black.  Everything else was muted.

            The air was thick and suffocating, possessing a somberness that permeated even the stonework.  Alex felt it acutely, while Ellen had only a tickle of it in her spine.  Beneath it all, Alex could feel something else.  In the dense air, buried beneath the decades of hopeless oppression, she could feel Abraham.  It was a faint spark but specific, and it felt to her like the Emotion itself.  Alex realized then the truth in Deidra and Cornelius’ words.

            Alex took a step forward to prove that she could.  Then she looked back at Ellen.  “I can feel her inside,” she said.  “Come on, let’s go.”

            “She’s in there?”

            Alex nodded.  “She is, I’m sure of it.”  She turned back to the cathedral and smiled.  “And she’s waiting for us.”  Looking back at Ellen, she found her staring.  It was a strange reversal for them, Alex smiling and leading the way while Ellen trailed behind.  “Let’s not keep her waiting.”

            Ellen nodded and followed.  They walked together in silence, the sound of their footsteps their only company.  Alex was distracted, focused on other things, her mind fixed on the empty grey atmosphere.  Deidra was everywhere and overwhelming her senses.  Even when she felt Abraham, she only just barely felt her. Walking there made her feel blind.

            She dug through the cathedral interior with her soul and filtered out other distinctive presences.  There were others there with Abraham, but she couldn’t place them.  They had no faces for her, only intentions.  Abraham she knew, though she felt her only very faintly, and what she felt was bound by some invisible force.  There was also the force that bound her, quiet and gentle, but possessive a power in certainty and conviction.  Stronger than that, and struggling against Deidra’s overriding oppression, was a last presence composed entirely of hunger and hatred and completely empty underneath.  The emptiness is what frightened her most.

            Ellen stopped to look over the edge of the bridge and found canyon floor barren and dusty.  She gripped the railing so as not to fall over, and swallowed, and then she looked ahead.  The cathedral stared back at her, its towering spires looking almost like teeth.  She couldn’t feel what Alex could feel, nor could she understand the circumstances that brought her here.  Alex said that they had started this journey together, and while it had made Ellen feel good for a time, the more she thought on it, the less accurate it felt.

            Alex stopped to look back at her.  They stood together in silence, Ellen staring now at her feet while Alex watched her.  “Hey, Ellen, what’s wrong? We’re almost there.”

            “I,” Ellen shifted her feet as fresh tears rolled down her cheeks.  “I’m sorry that I got you involved in all of this, Alex.  If I weren’t so stupid, I never would have brought Abraham back with me, and then none of this would have happened.  You wouldn’t be here.  Shana wouldn’t be here, and Carolyne…”

            “Ellen? No.  No, what are you talking about? None of this is your fault.”

            “It’s all my fault!  I was acting like a damn child, finding a puppy and dragging it home for someone else to take care of.”

            “Ellen,” Alex sighed.  “Listen, Abraham wouldn’t have been safer anywhere else, and as for Carolyne, well, she made her bed.  I chose to protect Abraham myself, just like I chose to come here.  No one else made those decisions for me, and though it’s been tough—really tough—I think I’m better for it.  I think I’ve grown a bit, and I’ve needed to grow for some time.  We’re almost at the end now, so don’t give up on me just yet.”

            Ellen choked and leaned into the rail for support.  Her sobs were hard enough to leave her shaking.  She kept at it until Alex joined her, and then she tensed.  Standing tall, a few inches above Alex, she fell into the smaller woman’s embrace.  Alex rubbed Ellen’s back and soothed her while she sobbed.  It was the last thing either of them expected to happen, but Ellen was grateful for it all the same.

            They stayed together under that gray sky until Ellen settled.  When they had first met, Ellen didn’t understand why Alex seemed so sad all the time, and she never really believed that they could be real friends.  It was, to her, a struggle to even try, but like Alex, she was better for the struggle.  Alex made her better and now supported her in this dark moment, and for that, she was glad for the struggle.

            Alex patted Ellen on the head and looked her in the eyes.  “You okay now?”

            Ellen, sniffling and rubbing her nose, nodded.  “I think so.  I can go, at least.”

            “Then come on.  We’ve kept her waiting long enough.”

            Another nod, and Ellen said, “Okay,” and she followed Alex forward.

            They stopped, side-by-side, before the double-doors.  From where they stood, the cathedral towered over them, an imposing form of dark stone that shrouded them in shadow.  A large stained-glass window hung over head.  Alex saw in it the image of an avenging angel bound by brambles.  Ellen thought she saw someone through it.

            The doors were parted slightly, and Alex peeked in through the crack.  Pews lined the ground floor with large stone pillars between them.  A winding staircase led up on one side, where a second floor hung over the first.  Red light spilled out from above, obscured by the railing.  Inside, Alex could feel Abraham’s presence more acutely, like it was only just barely contained.

            Ellen, at Alex’s side, said, “She’s in there.”

            Alex nodded, distracted.  She could see something out of the corner of her eye, but whenever she looked toward it, it disappeared.  Something teased her ear, like a whisper only softer.  She thought it might be the wind, but it was persistent.  She stood straight.  “Uh, yeah, she is, I think.”

            Ellen tried to smile, but she didn’t wear it well.  She still felt out of place there.  “Then let’s go!”  She stepped forward, through the door, and felt a tingle in her spine.  Turning, she found Alex backed against the door and staring out, back across the bridge.  Looking past Alex, Ellen saw nothing.

            “Get away.  Go!”  Alex swung at the air.  She had tears in her eyes.

            “Alex? Alex! What’s wrong?”

            “I said go!”  Alex gave a wide swing that only just narrowly missed Ellen, who stumbled away.

            Ellen fell backward and landed inside of the cathedral, dust kicking up around her.  She watched Alex staggering toward her, eyes wide in a frenzy.  Pushing up, Ellen used a pillar for support as she got to her feet and scrambled deeper inside to escape Alex’s sudden pursuit.

            The door groaned and collapsed inward with a sudden flash, and Alex stood then at the threshold.  Her Voice was there, its blade gleaming in the dim light that chased her.  She glared into the cathedral, into the dust that rose around her, and fixed her gaze upon Ellen hiding among the pews.

            “Alex?”  Ellen peeked over the pews.  She had her hands up but knew that they would do nothing to stop her rampaging friend.  “Alex, what’s wrong with you? What is going on with you all of the sudden?”

            Alex growled and swung.  The air roared and, in a flash of light, the pew behind Ellen exploded into pieces.  Ellen ducked down to avoid the splinters and landed face-down on the cold stones of the floor.  Looking under the pews, she found Alex approaching, gasping and crying in her fury.  It reminded Ellen of Carolyne stalking toward her with the power of death held tightly in her hand.

            Alex stared at her opponent, his large body at rest on the ground, soaked in blood.  She had left him with a gash across his broad, hairy chest.  It should have been the end of it, but he sneered as he rose to meet her.

            Behind her was Shana, bloodied and bruised, limping at her.  She held one arm which had nearly been ripped from her body.  Blood dribbled from her fractured nose.  She shuffled swiftly in an attempt to keep pace with Alex.  They were walking together when Goliath had appeared.  Shana made a charge, but he dismissed her with a single blow.

            This time, Alex took the lead.  She charged him and lunged, but Goliath side-stepped the attack.  He taunted her as he moved, goaded her as he danced around her.  She spun around and called on her Voice.  In a blaze of light one of the pillars was sliced in two.

            Goliath fell but stared up at her, confident, as she put her foot to his chest.  She poised her blade for his throat.  He had died once, but it didn’t stick.  Staring into his eyes, she saw the malevolence in them.  This time, he wouldn’t listen.  Despite this, she still hesitated.

 

: Bridges :

 

            Alex stood over Ellen, her blade inches from Ellen’s throat.  They both panted from exertion, Ellen crying, pleading, begging for sanctuary against Alex’s uncompromising, empty stare.  Ellen stared up the gleaming silver length of Alex’s Voice and knew that she could die, that she would die, if Alex wasn’t stop.  Her gaze darted from corner to corner, searching even the shadows for answer, but there was nothing.  The walls watched stoically, and here she would die without meaning and without anyone to remember him.  She fixed her gaze on Alex’s dark, hollow eyes and didn’t see her friend inside.

            They stayed like this for a few long moments, Alex shaking, her blade a hair’s length from Ellen’s flesh.  Then, she winced and grimaced, a curse sounding under her breath.  Lifting her blade, she swiped the air and stormed away screaming.  “Damn it! Why can’t I? Why can’t I do this?”  She sliced a nearby pew in half and let the pieces collapse onto the dusty floor while Ellen shuffled away on her hands and knees.

            Ellen took refuge behind a nearby pillar and watched Alex flail aimlessly at the air.

            “Why wouldn’t you listen?” Alex turned, her eyes fixed once more on Ellen kneeling behind the pillar.  “Why do you have to keep coming at me? Why do you have to keep fighting us? Why?”

            Ellen stood slowly on weak knees.  “Alex, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

            “Just stay way!  Stay away from us! If you insist on fighting, then I won’t hold back anymore.”

            Ellen stumbled away, retreating back into the shadow of the overhang.  There, she turned and ran, tripping on the way before she reached the winding staircase and hitting her knee.  Blood seeped from the fresh wound, and she had to sit back and yell before scrambling back to her feet.

            Looking over her shoulder, she saw Alex standing in the silence and staring at the ground.  Ellen let out a shallow breath and stumbled toward the stairs.  Pain shot up her spine with every step.  Seizing the handrail, she pulled herself up the stairs in a hurry and hoped that Alex couldn’t follow.

 

: Bridges :

 

            Alex stood at the cathedral’s center, fractured pews scattered around her, some still baring fresh, smoldering wounds from her spiritual power expressed.  Her Voice was at her side, gleaming faintly with waning heat.  The brace about her wrist caught the dim light cast by the torches and reflected it back.

            Goliath laid bloodied before her, his body cradled between the broken husk of a pew.  She didn’t remember killing him but saw no one else around who could have.  There was a large gash cut across his body.  Blood pooled around his enormous form, seeping into the stonework and making a long, circuitous pattern around him.  It beaded in the hair of his chest.  His eyes were open, pale and blank, his empty gaze fixed on her.

            She cried but didn’t understand why.  He was the one who had died, not her, nor someone close to her.  She wiped her eyes and released her Voice, allowing it to disappear in a dazzling display of light, and she stared at the body, her shoulders sagging, her hair in her eyes.  Once, he had been alive, but she had changed that, turned him to a pale imitation of life, the warmth faded and the skin grown waxy.

            It was hard to breathe.  She braced against a nearby pillar and vomited.  Her throat burned.  She stayed bent, panting and sobbing, wiping her mouth free of saliva and mucus, and she spit out her remaining bile.  The taste stuck on her tongue.  She looked at Goliath again, shuddered, and then turned away.

            She walked until she tripped, stumbled over another body.  Looking down, she found Carolyne at her feet, or what remained of her.  The body was similar to that of her friend’s, the hair similar in color, but she was ripped down the center, her entrails cold and dark between the two severed halves.  They pumped lethargically, the life ebbing from them.  Alex’s feet felt wet and cold.

            Staggering away, she caught herself against the pillar and held tight to it as her body was wracked with shivers.  She stammered, staring at Carolyne’s sundered corpse, blood splattered like a halo around it.  Using the pillar for support, Alex sunk down to her knees.  She wanted to look away, but she could not.  She whispered to herself, soothing as best she could, as she reached forward with a pale, shaking hand.  Blood ran now from her fingertips, from her knees.  She stopped to regard her hands, bloody and warm.  Alex scrubbed at her palms, rubbed them against the stonework and against her pants, but it just smeared the blood around.  She gave a renewed sob.  “Oh no.  Oh God.  What have I done? No, no, no, no, no.”

            She stood and ran for the door.  The air stunk now of old blood and rotted flesh.  She stopped at the door, now held shut by a more terrifying image still.  Three bodies were suspended along the door by long, thin metal spikes.  To the left was a pale body with slender limbs and long, long tawny hair.  The spikes were run through the throat, shoulders, and guts.  Two more were worked in through the wrists.  The waves of the hair were parted and clumped by dried blood.

            From the right door hung the unmistakable form of Shana.  Wearing the tattered pajamas, stained by blood and violence, that carried her through the Emotion, she was suspended by a large metal rod rammed through the core of her, between her partially exposed breasts and right through the breastbone.  Two more spikes supported her at the shoulders, and two more were worked into her waist, through the hip bone.

            Between them, suspended slightly lower and almost within reach, was a small body still dripping blood.  It had dark hair and pale skin, eyes like enormous marbles, black and empty as they watched Alex without judgment, without life.  There were too many spears worked into this body to count at a glance.  It looked to Alex like a human pin cushion, and she recognized it only on instinct.

            Alex fell to her knees, sobbing and gasping, screaming when she got the air.  Her screams were the wounded wail of a lonely animal, of a lost child, of a survivor resenting their own survival.  When oxygen ran thin, she fell into writhing gasps that forced convulsions on her body before collapsing onto her back and staring at the ceiling, alone.

            The sky opened.  Shadows parted long enough for a flash to fill the room.  Glass shattered, the stained shards landing around her, bouncing and shimmering like chromatic diamonds.  A shadow passed over her and landed hard beside her.  Alex leapt to her feet on instinct and rolled to the side.  She fell hard into a pew but hardly felt it as the body came into view.  It was long-legged and very pretty.  Blood and glass had gathered in its blond hair, and as its head lulled toward her, she could see bruising across the pale, dead face.  Its teeth were knocked in.  Its skull was split open.

            Alex wheezed.  Looking around at her failure, she found all the bodies watching her.  Her voice evaporated inside of her as she sunk down and stared ahead, gaze fixed on the far wall, the rest of her world dissolving into periphery.  She sat there, surrounded by the bodies of friends and enemies whom she had been unable to save.

 

: Bridges :

 

            Ellen wheezed as she stumbled up the stairs.  They seemed to be never ending, and her injuries only made the climb worse.  Adrenaline carried her, though, as did the fear of being caught by Alex in this manic state her friend was in.  From where she was, Ellen could see the cathedral’s second floor and swore it was no closer than when she had started climbing.  She gripped the handrailing and stared up at the ceiling, however, refusing to look back down.

            Alex was on the first floor, screaming and crying in a corner that Ellen couldn’t see.  She sounded awful, so awful that Ellen hesitated.  This hesitation died in the memory of Alex’s uncompromising dark eyes and the violence she was capable of.  She remembered the way Alex’s blade gleamed.

            Ellen sighed.  She was near the top.  A red light spilled out and onto the stairs.  Alex had said that Abraham was there with them, but Ellen had yet to see her.  The first floor was too dangerous for a real search, and while the second floor offered sanctuary, Ellen doubted that Abraham would be waiting up there.  She wondered what state they would find Abraham in, if Abraham could be found at all.

            Her bones ached and her lungs burned, but Ellen ignored the ache and the burn and pulled herself higher, toward light and away from the sad, lonely wails of her friend below.

 

: Bridges :

 

            Alex crawled her way to the door, nose crinkled, the smell of iron and rot thick in her nostrils.  Alicia hung, suspended above her.  Blood caked the jagged steel imbedded in her body and pooled at the tip.  Tiny red pearls had splattered across the floor.  A few hit Alex on the head, cold and slick.

            Next, Alex stood and swallowed a sob.  Another droplet hit her forehead and made a slow crawl down her skin.  At standing, Alex’s head was at level with Alicia’s ruptured chest.  She reached up and grabbed at a spike with both hands.  The sharp form of the steel dug into her palms and left a shallow laceration as she tightened her grip.  Dried blood flaked off underneath her fingers.

            Bracing against the door with one foot and planting the other against the floor, Alex gave a tug.  The steel rod broke smoothly, and she fell to the floor, half a rusted spike clattering across the stonework at her side.  The rest remained firmly imbedded in the door, the very edge of it visible inside of Alicia’s pale, waxy flesh.

            Alicia’s corpse clicked its cold, dry tongue.  Bright, foggy eyes rolled around in gaunt sockets and stared down at Alex through clumped tawny hair.  “Poor, little Alex, just can’t let things lie buried where they belong.  Always pulling open the closets to find the skeletons inside.”

            “Alicia?”

            “Your entire life you sat wallowing in your own pity, keeping to the dark corners of the room, never leaving, never living, and the moment you go out and make the effort, you go and get yourself killed,” Shana’s corpse said crustily from the other door.  “How many people have died for you now?”

            “She didn’t kill me,” Alicia’s corpse said, “But she sure as hell couldn’t save me, either.”

            Alex held back tears.  Her stomach ached she had cried so hard that she was about to wretch again.  It took solid, slow breaths to calm her, and those were hard to come by.  She held her hand to her mouth and swallowed bile.  “I didn’t.”

            Shana’s corpse cackled.  “Oh, poor thing, we’re making her cry.  That’s what you do when you lose someone, isn’t it, Alex?  You curl up and you cry and you worry about how sad you are and how alone you are, and you never give one single thought to the dead.  All of your thoughts belong to you and yourself.”

            “She always was selfish,” Alicia’s corpse said.  It stared emptily at Alex’s quivering body.  “I was sick, Alex, sick, and still you depended on me, used me, hung on me like the parasite you are.  Come to think of it, maybe you did kill me after all.”

            “I didn’t!”

            “You killed me,” called a high, hoarse voice from behind her.  Turning, Alex shuffled away into the solid form of a pew.  Slowly, and with stiffness belonging to the dead, Ellen’s corpse turned its head about and cast its pearly eyes on Alex.  It had a large smile that showed all of its bloody, broken teeth.  “I wouldn’t be here if I had never met you, and I wouldn’t be dead if you had been there to protect me.”

            “If only you had the strength to stop Carolyne in the first place,” said Shana’s corpse from the doorway, “Then none of us would be here.”

            “If only,” Ellen’s corpse added with a rasping laugh.

            Alex pushed up from the pew and ran around Ellen’s body, ducking between pews and coming to a halt as two more corpses turned their dead eyes on her.  “You spent so much time trying to fight me,” Goliath’s corpse called from ahead, its head bouncing as it tried lift-up to look at her.

            “Shut up!”  Alex fell to her knees before Carolyne’s blank, empty eyes.  This corpse didn’t say anything at all, and at the back of her mind, Alex felt deep down that was so much worse.  Curling up, she hugged her knees and continued to cry.

            A cold hand came to rest on Alex’s shoulder.  Slowly, with effort, the fingers curled gently, and Alex turned to look up into Alicia’s corpse’s face.  “It’s okay, though, we never expected you to survive without us, anyway.  You aren’t a survivor, Alex.  You’re a coward, and a weakling, and even among us, you’re the deadest body in the room.”

            Another hand, cold and rigid, alighted on the other shoulder, and something with Shana’s voice whispered into Alex’s ear, “You’re already dead with us, Alex, in spirit, so why not go all the way? Cross that final line and really commit.  You can’t live with one foot in the grave forever, and you said not so long ago that life is all about making decisions and sticking to them, didn’t you?”

            Alex fixed her vision on Carolyne’s corpse.  It didn’t stare back.  It sat limp, motionless, empty eyes without judgment.  A shadow fell over her like an omen and, when she looked up, she saw something wearing Abraham’s tiny frame.  Cheeks sunken, neck twisted at an odd angle, it said, “You promise you would protect me, and you couldn’t.  You’re not strong enough to protect me, Alex, you’re not strong enough to protect anyone.  But it’s okay, because we’re here to protect you, now.  We’re here to help.”

            “No,” Alex whined when she finally found her voice, and she hugged her knees more tightly to her chest.  “No.  No!”  She hid her face between her legs and kept repeating the word as her mantra.  She repeated it until the voices died in the dead air, and she kept repeating it as the hands retreated. 

Once alone, she lifted her head, she found Carolyne’s corpse now eying her.  It sat up and shuffled toward Alex, stopping with their foreheads together, their lips nearly touching.  Alex couldn’t feel its breath, and she thought for a moment how strange that was, but then she remembered that it was dead, and she could smell the death on it and, beneath that, cigarette smoke.  Carolyne’s corpse grabbed Alex by the head and screamed, “You should have died back there, not me!"

 

: Bridges :

 

Ellen ran as much from the screams as from Alex’s vengeful strikes.  She hobbled to the top of the stairs and there came to a stop, breathing hard and hanging from the rail.  The second floor was a long, wide platform with four torches lit to show the surface.  Gargoyle’s watched from the walls, their gemstone eyes catching the light and shining.  A large red stone was set into the center of the platform, its surface producing a light of its own.

There was a short, stocky woman with close-cut hair and a boyish face at rest beside the large, liquid-like gemstone at the platform’s center.  She sat with her legs crossed and her eyes closed.  Ellen though her quite beautiful, in a non-traditional way.  The woman was at ease, her repose in meditation as she whispered to herself in a quiet voice tinged with remorse.

Ellen sat watching her while gathering her breath.  She thought to go back down until she heard Alex’s continued screaming.  Using the railing for support, she pushed herself to standing and limped across the platform, toward the shining gemstone and the woman.  As she approached, she slowed and winced so that her eyes could adjust to the light.

            Suffer.  Guilt.

            She stopped a few feet shy of the woman and strained to hear the woman’s whispers.  Leaning forward, she gazed into the gemstone and found a body inside.  It was a small body, with dark hair fanned out around it in a black halo.  The bright red light bled into the white of its body.  It was difficult to see at first, but Ellen recognized the body to be Abraham at rest, curled up into a fetal position and caught in the gemstone like a bug might be caught in amber.

            Doubt and death.

            That caught Ellen’s attention, and she looked to the woman now while Alex cried below.  Alex’s words, though muffled, were those of someone begging, and it slowly fell into place as Ellen made the connection.  She didn’t understand everything, but she knew enough to realize that this woman was in no way normal, and also this woman was somehow hurting her friend.

            Standing in the red below of the gem’s light, Ellen watched the woman and listened to her whisper, repeating the same words like a mantra.  From what Ellen could tell, the woman didn’t possess the raw, destructive force of someone like Carolyne, but Ellen didn’t know what this woman could be like with her eyes open.

            Gathering herself, Ellen took a deep breath and lifted her chin to look confident.  “I can do this,” she whispered to herself, and then more loudly, and also more confidently—she hoped—she said, “You!  You’re the one hurting Alex, aren’t you?”

            The woman didn’t respond.  She simply continued her chanting.

            Ellen frowned at the woman’s lack of response and reached out timidly to shove her.  “Hey, I’m talking to you.”

            The woman jerked into wakefulness and looked on Ellen in mixed horror and surprise.  Falling backward, she shuffled away from Ellen and toward the platform’s railing.  “You!  How are you here?”

            Ellen’s stomach did a flipflop.  She felt like running but didn’t have the energy to do it, so she stood her ground.  “You’re hurting Alex, aren’t you?  Stop it!”

            “I wasn’t hurting her, but I was…” The woman stood and rounded the gem, putting it between herself and Ellen.  The red-light made a mask of shadows that distorting her boyish features into something demonic.  “I can’t let you take her.”

            Ellen looked down at Abraham’s sleeping form, unmoving in the gemstone.  “Why not? What do you need her for?  Because that Abel guy wants to become a god?”

            “She will save mankind,” said the woman.  “Not directly, but she is vital to our progress.  With her, Abel will ascend, and he will bring the world with him after.  This is just the first step, but it is the most important.  With him as our example, not only will he be a god, but we will all become gods.”

            Ellen put her hands on her hips and stared at the woman overtop the gemstone.  “Gods? You’re doing all of this for that? Doesn’t that seem a bit silly to you?”

            “Silly?  It’s necessary, and it is inevitable.  We will all become gods in our own right, someday, and have been moving toward it since Eve first tasted of the fruit.  We’re just giving humanity the push it needs.”

            “Okay, but why? I mean, what right do we have to become gods? And assuming we even can, how does hurting us, killing us, or kidnapping her help anyone at all? Wouldn’t that just, I don’t know, make us worse?  Wouldn’t that take us in the opposite direction?”  Ellen pointed down at Abraham and shouted, “You tell me how in the hell this is supposed to be helping Abraham!”

            The woman went quiet.  She stared at Ellen for a long moment. “Abraham?”

            “You don’t even know her name?”

            The woman’s gaze followed Ellen’s finger.  “I didn’t even know that she had a name.”

            “Really?”  Ellen frowned. “Well, she does.  She’s just like you.  She’s alive and breathing, and she bleeds, and she feels, and she came to me, lost and scared and alone, and she was running.  From you people!”

            “I thought she was just a catalyst.”  The woman said it without certainty or conviction.

            “Catalyst, gods, and all of this nonsense!  Look at this, look at where you are, and look at what you’re doing, and think, really think about all of this, and tell me it’s right.”

            “I was just trying to…”  The woman looks up into Ellen’s eyes.  Her tears catch the light.  “I was just trying to help us, to fix us.”

            “People aren’t broken.  You can’t just fix us, and you definitely can’t do it like this.  You want to make the world better, the only way to do it is by being better.”

            “You,” the woman’s voice died in her throat.  She leaned back and held her temples, staring into the hazy red light of the gem.  Abraham slept inside soundly, a child tucked into bed, a god at rest.  “You’re right,” she said, “We’ve gone too far.”

            Ellen smiled.  “I am, so come and help me to get her out of there.”

            The woman, surprised by Ellen’s candor, laughed.  “Alright, I guess I can do that much.”

            The shadows on her face spread and merged with the shadows behind her, forming into a solid mass.  Her head jerked back and, from the ground below, the shadows lurched.  They speared her through the chest.  Blood sprayed from her in a fountain from her neck and rained down across the red gemstone, obscuring the light.  It ran down her torso and thighs.  She gurgled, hovering a few inches from the ground, and then fell.

            Crest appeared from the shadows.  They slid off him like oil and formed into a cape.  He examined Carla with his cold, dark eyes and smiled mirthlessly.  “You always had a big heart, Carla, and now it’s all over the floor.”

            Ellen stood, shaking, and stared, while Carla clawed at the stonework and struggled for breath.  She mouthed for Ellen to run but it was pointless.  Her air had run out.  All she could muster was a desperate wheeze before she went still.  Ellen’s legs felt wet and warm as they gave out from under her.

            Crest turned his smile on her. “And there you go, just like a child.”  He laughed.  “But, then, fear is never flattering, is it? Well, no point in wasting an immobile target, is there?”  The shadows curled.  He lifts his hand and they swept forward, mimicking his movement.  From the darkness appeared a slender fin that flowered forward like water, the edge a fine blade.

            Ellen watched the shadows flow toward her, watched their gradual progress as they spread around the gemstone.  Her heartbeat lasted an eternity.  She saw her life stretched out before her, the entirety of it, the good, the bed, and everything else, and one thought preoccupied her mind: “I’m going to die.”  It played on repeat.

            The room grew dark as the torch to her right was snuffed.  Death grew closer, a sweeping form rushing at her.  There was a gleam and flash, and a purple disc landed at her feet.  It cast a solid light that repelled the shadows, which rushed against it like water crashing against the shore.  They met with tidal force, and the shadows fanned harmlessly around her.

            Strong arms encased her and lifted her.  Ellen landed a few feet away, nearer to the stairs, and then was deposited carefully to the floor.  Isaac kneeled beside her and held her by the shoulder.  Their gazes met, and she stared back with the uncertainty of a newborn.  He was breathless.  “Ellen! Are you okay?”

            Legs wet, heart racing, Ellen struggled for breath.  The words were lost in her.  She nodded.

            “Thank God.” He hugged her.  “I didn’t know if I would make it in time.”

            “I think you did.”  Ellen spoke absently as she hugged him back.  Her arms were weak.  She didn’t want to let go. “Isaac, you saved me!”

            “Actually, I think you saved me.”  Isaac stood and conjured his other chakram as he turned toward Crest.  “I’ll explain later.  First, I need to settle this.”

            Crest’s featured changed upon seeing Isaac.  His smile grew earnest and vicious as the shadows around him boiled.  “Van’s child!”

            “Ellen, things are dangerous here, and they are about to get worse.”  He extended his free hand and his first chakram dislodged itself from the ground and returned to him.  He caught it by the grip at its center.  “You go, and you take Abraham with you.  I’ll take care of him.”

            “Right.” Ellen stood and, once she was certain her legs would support her, added, “Thank you, Isaac.”  She walked hesitantly forward, eyes on Crest.  He passed Abraham absently, his gaze fixed wholly on Isaac.

            Ellen stopped beside the gemstone and looked inside.  It was built into the cathedral, or more accurately, the cathedral was built around it.  The surface was smooth and had no discernable openings.  It clearly wasn’t meant to be removed.  She ran her fingers along the surface, seeking a place to grip it that she feared wasn’t there.

Indigo: Abraham, Emotion Vol. 3: Bridges, Chapter Fourteen: "The Other Side"

 

Chapter Fourteen: The Other Side

 

            Isaac had to blink, the brilliant morning light was so hard on his eyes.  When he sat up a tidal wave of pain washed over him, sinking him up to his head.  He swayed as the pain slowly receded, and then he stared in shock at his surroundings.  The cement was hard beneath him.  A car sputtered by.  The Emotion was in constant flux, but this was different.  There was life here, actual, human life.

            He stood and swallowed the image of a city in greys and whites.  Stone house, tall and narrow, stood in close, narrow neighborhoods.  They hugged each other, their edges weathered and smoothed, their forms slender and stalwart.  The water beneath the bridge was blue-green and endlessly flowing.  It looked just deep enough to sink under but still see the surface.  The air was fresh but also domesticated.  It smelled to him like a city might.

            People passed him.  Some stared.  Most ignored him.  They spoke in a language he didn’t understand, and there were dozens of them out this morning.  They were not the people of the Emotion, the tortured souls stuck there and warped by ubiquity.  They were a crowd going about their daily lives, living, and breathing, and working without a care for him or for his battles.

            Isaac leaned against the stone railing of the bridge and stared over the edge, and he wondered where in the world he had landed.

 

: Bridges :

 

            “So, this Isaac guy helped you,” Alex asked as she led the way up the stairs.  She looked back at Ellen over her shoulder.  Her tone was light, and she kept her hair tucked back and out of her eyes.  Ellen felt that Alex’s dark eyes seemed somehow brighter with her hair out of the way.

            Shana followed from the rear and watched them both.  Alex’s quick recovery following Goliath’s death worried her.  Her unwillingness to talk about or even acknowledge Carolyne’s death was even worse.  If anything, Alex seemed happier than Shana had seen her in years, perhaps in even a decade, and where Shana should have felt joy, she instead felt trepidation. She thought that Alex was burying it, as she buried everything else, but she didn’t want to force the issue in the Emotion.  As always, Shana chose to watch and wait, to be there for if—or when—Alex needed her.

            “Yeah,” Ellen said, “He’s kind of like my knight-in-shining armor.  He’s been protecting me this entire time.  I don’t know that I could have made it without him.”  Walking between them, Ellen looked first at Alex and then back as Shana, and she made note of their many bruises and bloodied clothes.  “What about you two?  You look like you’ve had quite the adventure.”

            Alex shrugged.  She kept a steady gait and held the wall as she walked to keep herself steady.  “Can’t be much different than yours.  Right, Shana?”

            Shana nodded silently.

            Alex looked past Ellen, into Shana’s eyes.  “Hey, is something wrong? You’re being really quiet.”

            “No, sorry, I’m fine.  I’m fine.”  She looked to Ellen and said, “It really hasn’t been bad.  I mean, we’ve had hard times, but we’re alive, aren’t we?”

            Ellen smiled one of her big smiles and clasped her hands as she laughed.  “Amen to that, sister!”

 

: Bridges :

 

            Isaac walked the streets aimlessly, stopping a plump man with a thick mustache and a fine coat to ask him questions.  The man, who was walking with the aid of a cane, paused and eyed Isaac with distant interest before saying something Isaac didn’t understand and pushing on.  Isaac watched the man go and stuffed his hands in his pockets.  He walked further into the town, keeping to the pale white sidewalks beside the narrow roads and following street signs that he couldn’t read.

            He walked until his feet hurt.  Movement had been hard to start and grew harder as the day wore on.  Within the Emotion, he felt endless and infinite.  No matter how far he went, no matter for how long, he never hungered or thirsted.  Sleep was more from habit than from need and was imposed on him largely for Ellen’s sake.  His return to the physical world, however, was draining.

            Stopping, he found rest on a nearby stoop.  The building behind him was tall and thin, with an old, dark wooden door bolted to the front on black hinges.  The porch was small and decorative.  The entire town looked to him like something out of a painting.  It seemed less real to him than the Emotion had been, but the people here reinforced one impossible fact—he had somehow made it home.

            Isaac’s father had once told him of how a high amount of spiritual energy could affect the mind.  It made Isaac worry that this all might be an illusion, but he kept that thought at the back of his mind, saved for when he couldn’t find anything more reasonable to believe.  For now, at least, the stone beneath his feet and the movement of the sky was proof enough that this was no simple vision.

            He slumped and drew a deep breath.  The air tasted different here, not unclean but lived in.  Somehow, and at some point, he had left the Emotion and gotten lost in the physical world.  He had appeared seemingly from the ground in a place he didn’t know, surrounded by people who didn’t know him and with little chance of finding his way back.  He didn’t like the thought, but it helped him to put everything else into perspective.

            First, he needed to look for Ellen.  She wasn’t with him when he woke, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t come with him through whatever hole he had fallen through.  If she had, then he would need to find her and situate her here—this place was likely safer than the Emotion.  If she was still in the Emotion, then he needed to find a way back fast to keep her safe.

            Isaac stood and, with his fists firmly in his pockets, walked forward with his head down.  He started back in the direction of the bridge and planned to fan out from there.  He wasn’t sure how long he would look, but he wanted to make a thorough search of the area before giving up on Ellen.  He wanted to make sure he searched everywhere for her and figured he could get his bearings in the process.

            On the way, he was stopped by a small woman.  She had large blue eyes that searched him in a cold but not unfriendly way.  Her hair was dark and short, her skin quite fair.  Her lips were full, pink, and her nose very small and slightly unturned.  She had the build of a ballerina, small and lithe, and when she saw him, she called out to him by his father’s name.  “Van?”

            Isaac stopped and turned to her.  The woman whore high-heels and a long black skirt, and she stood several inches shorter than him.  She watched him closely, inspecting every detail of him, and then her brow knitted.  “No,” she said, “Not Van, but you do feel like him.”

            Isaac’s neck bristled.  She approached him and stopped only inches away.  Despite their difference in height, Isaac felt like a child before her, like he was looking up at her.  She had a bag tucked under her arm and pursed her lips as she examined him further.  This time, she was looking into him.  He waited.

            “Who are you?”  She asked only when her investigation was finished, and the answer was not made obvious to her.  Isaac’s response was guarded.

            “Who are you,” he asked, putting distance between them, but it didn’t seem like enough.  She didn’t move.  “And how do you know that name?”

            She shifted her weight.  Her heels scraped the stone.  Her eyes remained cool and emotionless.  She was a scientist, and he was a bug in amber.  “You tell me first,” she said.  “How do YOU know that name?”

 

: Bridges :

 

            They cover their eyes when they reach the surface.  Having been inside the darkened temple interior so long, the sunlight felt like an assault.  They winced and recoiled, but they moved forward, one foot ahead of the other, and soon a warm, fresh breeze welcomed them. 

            The temple opened out onto a large cliff overlooking a forest.  The dirt was dry and chalky.  Their footfalls stirred the dust as they walked.  The sun was stuck in perpetual afternoon, casting a burning orange across the sky, framed in a golden hue.  The cliff tapered into a narrow land-bridge that was cut short by the imposing form of an immense, steel dome.  The dome stuck out of the landscape like a bulbous, grey tumor.  Alex stopped at the dull gray orb and put her hand to it.  It was smooth to the touch and cool against her palm.

            Shana joined Alex and examined it beside her.  “What do you think it is?”

            Alex shrugged.  “Who knows? In this place, it could be anything.”

            Ellen observed from behind them.  “Looks like steel,” she said.  “Wonder how it got here.  It doesn’t look natural, and it doesn’t seem very old, either.”

            Alex tapped her knuckles and listened to the interior ring—it was hollow.  Then, alongside Shana beside her, the hair on her arms stood on end.  They turned and found the temple gone, replaced by an empty, dusty expanse that stretched into the horizon.  More cliffs rose in the hazy, shifting distance.  Standing between them and the distance were two people, one with dark skin and long, straight hair, her eyes world-weary, her movements poised and precise but also slow, as if it were an effort to move at all.

            A tall man stood beside her, lean but with broad features.  Pink lips, large powerful hands, a broad chest and wide-set shoulders wrapped in an iron carapace and an open helm.  A great sword, nearly as long as he was tall, was strapped to his back and touched the earth as he walked.

            Alex put herself in front of Ellen.  She had her right hand balled into a fist.  “Who are you?”

            They stopped.  The man pointed.  “We know her, don’t we, little girl?”

            Alex looked back at Ellen, who stared back in wide-eyed fright.  She hugged her right arm to her side before looking Alex in the eyes, and she said, “I think we’re in trouble.”

 

: Bridges :

 

            The woman, Nyx, led Isaac back to her apartment within the city.  It was cramped and compartmentalized, the ceilings low, the floors made of bright, polished wood.  Isaac had to stoop whenever he moved between rooms.  Nyx had no such troubles.

            The apartment had a small living room with an adjoining kitchenette.  There was a bedroom behind another door and a bathroom connected to that.  A small balcony looked out over the city, guarded by curving, black steel rails that ended in arrow-headed points at the top.  Inside of the apartment, Nyx retreated to her bedroom to change while Isaac waited in the living room.  She removed her jacket and left it in the bedroom, returning and ushering Isaac into a Victorian lounge chair.

            “Tea,” she asked as she entered the kitchenette.  She put a kettle on and started a gas burner with a match.

            “Ah, sure, thanks.”

            Nyx nodded curtly and peeked out at him over a bar that separated the rooms.  “While we wait for the water, why don’t you go ahead and tell me it is that how you know about Van?”

            Isaac gave her a long stare.  She was a small woman, much shorter than him, but she met his gaze steadily.  Her eyes were large and dark and full of secrets.  She knew things about him that he didn’t know, and she knew his father, too.  Considering his history with his father, that left him more curious than trusting.  Waiting on the lounge, he kept his hands in his pockets more out of a sense of protection than out of anything to do, and he looked away.  “He’s just a guy from my past,” Isaac said, and he hoped he lied well.  “An old acquaintance.  I didn’t know him well, but I was hoping he could help me solve a problem I’m having.  He’s a smart guy.”

            Nyx left the kitchenette and glided across the room.  Her footfalls were silent, even on the old, polished wood of the apartment.  She settled on a plain, bare loveseat across from him and leaned back.  As she settled, she crossed her legs sensually and was keenly aware of him watching her.  “Yes, he is.  What is it that you want to know, exactly?”

            “Just some stuff about his past.”  Isaac tried to meet her gaze but could not.  She searched him whenever they made eye contact, like she was seeing everything he wanted to hide from her.

            Nyx smiled politely.  “Of course, any question you might have for him would obviously be about something he has previously experienced, or about someone close to him that he has experienced.”

            “Sure.”  Isaac met her eyes briefly and felt like an animal being hunted.  She was stalking him from her seat, her every movement graceful, even when at rest.  She was relaxed, but he was sure she could cross the room in an instant and seize him.  He cleared his throat, and she smiled.

            “Anyway, I am looking for Van as well, which is unfortunate for us both, isn’t it?  That said…”  She fixed her gaze on him, made it somehow sharper.   The air around them shifted, and so did reality.  Isaac could barely react before she had him pinned to the couch.  His arms were out, drawn from his pockets, his Voices gripped tightly in his hands, and she held her own Voice to his throat.  One foot had his left arm pinned, while the other was pinned to the floor.  The central shaft of a sai had drawn a small pearl of blood from his neck, and he could feel the cold steel of the second one pinning his other wrist to the cushion behind him.

            Isaac’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed.  He met her gaze and found her eyes darker than before and full of power.  When she spoke, her lips her hypnotic.  “No more lies, boy.  Tell me the truth: how do you know Van?”

 

: Bridges :

 

            They stood in silence examining each other.  Alex kept herself between Shana and Ellen and the other two.  The armored man stood in front of the woman, his hands at his side but his blade gleaming in the burnished sunlight.  They regarded each other calmly, the woman showing only limited interested and seeming almost bored with the world.

            The silence was tense.  Without a word spoken, a thin line was drawn between them.  Alex stayed ready, her fist balled, her Voice at the back of her mind.  She kept an eye on Ellen, waiting for her to take the lead, but it was the lady, Deidra, who broke the silence.  She spoke listlessly, her gaze faraway, as if on a distant horizon.  “Do you still intend on confronting Abel?”

            Alex, realizing the question was meant for her, examined the woman before she answered.  Deidra had fine posture.  She carried herself how a queen might, or so Alex imagined, but she saw something empty inside of the older woman.  Deidra was incomplete, and it reminded Alex of herself.  “I don’t even know who Abel is.”

            “He has the girl,” Deidra said.  “He is the man behind all of this.”

            “The girl? If you mean Abraham, then, yes, we’re going to confront him and take her back.”  Alex sighed and let her hand come to rest on her hips.  The tension was gone.  Deidra clearly had no interest in a fight.  Alex wasn’t sure she had an interest in anything.  “Listen, we just want to grab her and go home.  We’re sick of fighting, and we’re sick of being here.”

            Deidra shrugged, and Cornelius laughed.  “The master needs the girl,” he said.

            “Why?”

            Deidra looked away.  She looked into the sunset with the same disinterest with which she regarded them.  Her dress was bunched in her hands, but the ends of it were still caked in dirt.  She walked to the very edge of the cliff, stopping with the tips of her toes peeking over, and she stared down.  Without looking up, she said, “She is necessary to the completion of his goals, very much in the same way that she is necessary for you to return home.  She is a very special girl, that one.”

            Ellen, from behind Alex, called, “Why does he need her? What is his goal?”

            Deidra looked at them directly now, her eyes empty and dark as beads of glass.  “He requires the girl so that he can become God.”

 

: Bridges :

 

            Nyx held Isaac’s gaze.  He looked away, eying the sai pressed to his throat.   His father had trained him since childhood to use his Voice, to feel others with special abilities, and to fight should he need to. Using his spiritual awareness and the powers buried deep within his soul, Isaac could augment his strength, speed, endurance, and even his perception, and even with all of that training, he couldn’t follow Nyx’s movements.

            His mouth went dry as he considered his options.  The hammering of his heart interrupted his thoughts.  She waited patiently for him to gather himself, his arms pinned in place.  A growing line of blood had trailed down his neck and gathered at his collar bone.  A thousand scenarios played through his head, but none of them were believable.  He decided to tell the truth.

            “I am Van’s son.”  Nyx stayed quiet, and she didn’t move, so Isaac continued, “My name is Isaac Eralder, and I am looking for Van—for my father—after I was somehow dragged to this place called the Emotion.  It’s a sort of meta-physical world, trapped somewhere between life and death, or physical and spiritual, in the same way that your soul links your spiritual being to your physical body.  Time and space there are different, distorted, almost like captured photographs.  You blink, and you’re some where and some time else, and the last time I moved between boundaries, well, I found myself here.”

            Nyx didn’t move and betrayed no thought.  She didn’t even blink.  Her dark eyes remained fixed on him for a long few seconds, and then she sighed and let the great tension in the air at rest.  Isaac thought for a moment that he was free, but her sai remained.  She closed her eyes briefly, but when they open again, they bore into him.  “You say that you are his child?  If you knew him at all, you would know that is impossible.  You have at least seven years on him, if not more.”

            “Seven years?  That can’t be possible.”  Isaac’s brow knitted.  He looked about the room, and about her, and he thought back to the bridge, and to the streets, and to the people moving about him.  “What year is this?”

            “1980.  Why?”

            Isaac remained quiet as he digested the notion.  It seemed impossible to him, but when put against everything that had happened to him recently, it also seemed somehow perfect.  The Emotion itself existed between time and space and could, logically, exist outside of it as well.  His time there was no time at all, and his leaving simply placed him at a random moment in time.

            The kettle interrupted them with a whistle from the stove.  Neither moved.  Nyx eyed him a moment longer and then moved, her Voice dissipating as she stepped away.  She left fearlessly, her back to him, and looked at him over the bar top as she prepared their tea.  “It’s ready.”

            Isaac sighed and sagged into his seat.  He wiped the blood from his neck and then stared at his hand.  From the moment he met Nyx, he could feel her power, but he hadn’t felt the full depth of it.  When training with his father, Isaac always felt like Van was holding back.  Nyx feels the same to him, like there is a deep ocean of strength buried in the depths of her, that he is only splashing in the surf.

            Feeling a person’s soul required training, and it also required intuition.  Those who could not manifest a Voice could sometimes perceive the auras of other people.  Those who could manifest a Voice, however, often got interference from the light that they cast off of themselves.  They can feel things, but they do not understand it.  Like a radio out of tune, all they get it static.  Isaac was taught from a young age to silence the storm inside of himself, to clear his thoughts, and to open himself to the world.

            Nyx returned with a tray that held two cups, two small plates, and the kettle.  She set it on a small table in front of him and then poured him a cup.  The steaming water browned as the tea leaves dispersed.  Isaac watched her movements, and he felt nothing.  She had buried her strength again.  One moment a raging fire, then hardly a hint of a spark, and when she looked at him, he knew that she could see everything he was.

            She poured herself a cup and dropped some sugar into it.  Then, stirring, she sat back on her loveseat and crossed her legs again.  Her pink lips pursed as she blew away the steam.  “To tell the truth, this all sounds suspicious, but I can tell you aren’t lying.”  She sipped her tea and licked her lips after.  “But that doesn’t mean that you’re telling the truth.  So, please, try your best to explain to me what is going on, and spare me no details.”

            Isaac did his best.  He told her in detail about the time which he came from, described Van as his father, distant but firm, and of his missing mother.  He told her about Sadieville and about a childhood spent training under his father’s guidance, about his disobedience and the battle at the college campus, and he told her about his journey to the Emotion and his reunion with his mother.  Ellen was mentioned, softly and briefly, and little detail was given about her, though he still thought of her.  He ended his story on this: “I saw a man there.  He reminded me of someone from my father’s old photographs, a man my father knew.  He was a boy in the pictures, I think, and I think his name was Abel.”

            It was only at Abel’s name that Nyx reacted to.  She lifted a single eyebrow and poured herself more tea.  Again, she added sugar, and she stirred it while watching him.  Isaac stared back feeling naked and childish.  Even to him, the story felt like the ramblings of a madman.  He held his tea with both hands and stared at it.  “Anyway, that got me thinking, if my mother was there, and Abel was there…My dad didn’t talk about it, and mom, well…Anyway, something happened between them.  Something that changed them forever, something that was still changing things now.  I wanted to ask my dad about it, to hear it from him.  So, when the boundaries shifted, I woke up, and well, I was here.”  He turned the teacup around in his hands, desperate for something to do.  The words all felt wrong, but he had no other way of explaining it to her.  The movement sent ripples through his tea.  He watched them meet and part and meet again.  “And that’s it.”

            Nyx sipped at her tea and then set it aside.  Diplomatically, she folded her hands on her lap, and she stared at Isaac until he got the courage to meet her gaze.  She made him feel hot and timid in front of her, like a child with a crush, and she seemed to know it.  She smiled at him.  “The Emotion?  If you’re telling the truth, then I know exactly why you’re here.  You wanted your father to answer your questions about his past, didn’t you?  But, by how you’ve explained him, do you think that he would have ever answered you honestly?  Even if he had, could he have been capable of answering your questions honestly, without bias?”

            Isaac, feeling silly for the notion, shrugged and stared at the floor.  “I don’t know, I didn’t think about it.  I still don’t even know how I got here.”

            “You speak of the Emotion as being outside of time, being both static and changing, physical and meta-physical.  Assume, if you can, that the Emotion somehow felt your need, that it ‘heard’ you.  Assume, also, that your desire was so intense that it found you an exit in an effort to grant you a wish, and it brought you here.”

            “But my wish was for answers.”

            “Answers that your father couldn’t give.”  Nyx looked out the window.  “At least not the man you know as your father.  Maybe your father was right there, on the very street where you appeared, just a boy, and neither of us even noticed.  I didn’t sense him.”  She looked at Isaac. “But maybe it was because you covered him up.”

            “Sorry, I guess.”

            “Don’t be.  I’m not too worried about him.  Honestly, I’m really looking for someone else.”  She looked fragile for a moment, and only for a moment, and then she became herself again—a hauntingly beautiful beast.  “You didn’t meet me in this future of yours?”

            “No.”

            “And you’re sure?  Maybe you did, but you were too small to remember.”  She picked up her tea, smiling as she sipped it.  Isaac stared.

            “Trust me, if I had ever met you, I would have remembered.”

            Nyx laughed.  “And now you loosen up.  Well, if we didn’t meet, then I imagine that something happened which took your father down another path.  I can’t imagine what—it doesn’t have to be bad—but it happened.”  She sighed wistfully.  “Maybe, like you, I was just carried away through time.”

            A cloud drifted in front of the sun and cast the apartment in momentary darkness.  They sat, silent, watching each other in the shade.  Isaac tried, ineffectually, to put his guard up, and it was starting to feel like an exercise in futility.  Nyx sipped her tea, and the sunlight returned.

            “How do I get back?”

            “What?”

            “You seem to understand all of this better than I do.  How do I get back?”

            “Who said you can?”

            “If I can get here, then I should be able to go away.”

            “Maybe that door only opens one way.”

            “Then I need to find another door,” Isaac said.  “I can’t stay.  I left someone there, someone I have to protect.”

            “You’re cute, and you’re assuming that the world cares.  But, if you’re desperate, then just use your head.  If a wish brought you here, then maybe a wish of equal effort could take you back.  The Emotion is supposed to be the world’s soul, so large and so vast that it is a vast sea of emotion, yes?  If that is true, then you should know as well as me that it is always around us, surrounding us, encompassing us, and within us.  Think of something, maybe that something you need to protect, and force your way back to it.”

            Isaac thought for a moment and then nodded his understanding.  He set his tea on the table and leaned forward on his knees.  “Okay.  Before I go, though, I have one more question.”

            “What is it?”

            “I was hoping you could tell me what’s going on, now and then, with my father, and with Abel.  You seem to know what’s going on, or at least more than I do.  Tell me what my father won’t.

            Nyx looked at him warily, her interest waning, and then shrugged.  Her smile was impish and rueful.  “Why not.  I could waste an evening.”

 

: Bridges :

 

            “Do you know what your little friend is,” Cornelius asked from behind Deidra.  He stared past them, at the vast dome behind them.  His gaze was empty but heavy, his face blank now, as devoid of emotion as his charge.  “No? And you’re still insistent on constructing a half-cocked plan to come in and save her, to protect her with no comprehension as to her true nature or value.”  Deidra, still looking over the edge of the cliff, called to him, and he stopped.  Bowing his head, he stepped back.  “I apologize.”

            She turned to the group and stared at and through them.  When she spoke, her voice was as hollow as her gaze. “That girl is important in ways you don’t understand and is vital to the function of the Emotion.  Think on your Voice, material manifestations of your soul, able to express your very spiritual essence as materialized, physical energies.  The Emotion where we stand is the world’s soul, and with a soul so vast, it would follow that the world’s Voice might be vast in turn, wouldn’t it?  And yet, that is the girl, your Abraham, the will of the universe, the Emotion’s Voice.”

            Ellen, who had only the meanest understand of the Voice and the soul, looked about for someone to speak, to ask what she felt the obvious question.  When no one did, she decided to speak for herself.  “And her being the whatever’s Voice helps this Abel guy become a god how?”

            Deidra shook her head and sigh; her dark braids danced.  “Not a god.  God.  Should he reign her in, then he will possess the power of the universe, of nature itself.  The Emotion, and all of the energy therein, will be at his disposal. He would control life, death, time, and everything in between. He could restart reality, all of it, everyone and everything.”

            Shana, from behind Alex and Ellen both, added, “Sound pretty god-like to me, but what I want to know is why are you helping him?”

            Deidra looked at her and shrugged.  “Why not help him?”

            “That’s no reason to help someone,” Alex said, drawing Deidra’s focus.

            “But it is a reason to not interfere.  We all suffer.  That is life, random and constant struggles without purpose and without meaning. None of this matters, our words, our battles, our triumphs or our failures.  Even if I chose not to help him, he would continue down this road.  My involvement changes nothing save for my involvement.  Whatever I do, I do knowing that it is meaningless, without value and thus without purpose.  I help him because the situation is what it is, and I am choosing to walk the path that is clearest for me.”

            Alex now scowled and crossed her arms over her chest.  “That’s a horrible way to look at it.”

            “Horrible or honest?  The truth is this: we are radiant souls shackled by material bodies, our earthly existence beginning soft and weak and ending just the same.  From the moment we first draw breath, we are on our way toward an inevitable and inglorious end, our every decision dictated by DNA and electrical impulse.  We are glorified computers carrying out processes assigned by a cruel and indifferent God. All of our feelings, our emotions, our attachments, and our valuables are lies to keep us blind, and I am merely one burdened with the gift of sight.”

            Alex’s jaw went tight.  She thought of Alicia dying in the hospital bed, her body giving out after fighting for seventeen years.  She thought of Shana staying with her through the long storm of Alex’s depression and mourning.  She thought of tiny Abraham, pale and frightened, begging for help as Ellen bled to death while serving as a human shield.  She found value in all of it, though she couldn’t find the words to express it.

            Shana hugged Alex then, hugged her from behind, and then moved to her side.  Staring Deidra in the eyes, she spoke softly, without judgment but also without reservation, unafraid of what she said or how she felt.  “I don’t believe you.  I don’t believe any of it.  I don’t know what happened in your life to make you feel this way, but I am sorry it did.  However, it doesn’t change this truth: I love Alex.  She has been my best friend from the moment I met her.  That is real.  I know that, and no matter what you say or what you feel, you can’t change that, and you can’t take it away from me.  Every tear we’ve shed together, good and bad, every heartache, and every smile, regardless of why they happened, have happened.  So, maybe what you see is the truth to you, but from where I stand, all I see is nothing but smoke and lies.”

            Deidra went stiff.  A frown formed on her delicate, implacable face.  “Your attachments and sentiments are the lies, illusions created by a lonely soul unable to deal with a harsh and uncaring reality, stifled by an empty dream, unwilling to wake up.”

            “Then I would rather dream than wake up!  Because it hurts sometimes, and it’s hard sometimes, but I won’t trade this for the world.  Maybe this life has no meaning.  Maybe the world doesn’t care, but if that’s the case, then I will care in its place.  I will give my life meaning.”

            Deidra stared at Shana without blinking, her eyes dark and glass-like.  Slowly, the frown on her face turned to a sneer and then wrapped into a small, baleful smile.  “Fine, if you feel that way, then I will allow you to pass.”

            Standing between then, Ellen blinked a few times and said, “Wait, what?”

            Deidra pointed past them, toward the iron husk which blotted the sky.  “That thing is borne from my soul.  It is my gift that I can create shells and shields within the Emotion, just as I have built one around my own heart.  In this case, I have been using one to keep you out and keep the girl in, but I can open it and allow you passage.”

            Alex and Shana shared a smile while Ellen whooped at their side.  “Under one condition,” Deidra said, and she let them grow somber before continuing, “One of you must stay here with me as tariff.”

 

: Bridges :

 

            Nyx led Isaac out the front door and stood with him in the hallway.  He stared quietly at her, still feeling a bit like a boy with a crush, his hands in his pockets while she stood at the doorway, an air of nonchalance about her.  “Not too long ago, for me, Abel and Van were once best friends,” she said.  “Something happened between them, something involving Van’s sister—the aunt you never knew—which tells me that it was something terrible.  Your father, your mother, and Abel, whatever happened between them, it is tied up with what happened to her, to Florian.”

            “I think you’re right.  It doesn’t answer all of my questions, but I think it gives me a direction to go.  How can I repay you?”

            She smiled and leaned against the doorway.  Her blouse rode high, revealing her hips to him.  “Well, maybe you can tell me this—do you know a man named Luc in your future?”

            “Luc?  No.”  Isaac said it with certainty.  His father may not have shared much about his past, but Isaac had a way of getting his own information.  He often snuck into his father’s parlor and read his files when he could, and the name was not at all familiar to him.

            Nyx’s expression softened.  Still facing him, she opened the door behind her.  “Well, thanks anyway, then.  Now, go back to where you belong before you break anything that can’t be fixed.”  She hesitated at the door.  “And for what it’s worth, good luck to you.”

            “Thanks,” Isaac said, and he watched her return to her apartment and stood there in the hallway a moment after.

 

: Bridges :

 

            When he stepped into the sunlight and felt the fresh air on his face, he felt a warmth spread through him.  His return would require a reconnection with nature and with the spirit of it. To return to the Emotion, he would have to find somewhere within the city to do just that.  He would be nervous for failure but found it unlikely.  If he had left the Emotion before, then he reasoned that it would be possible to return.

            He went to the bridge and stood idle there, looking over the water and watching it passage.  It was green in the midday sun and lined by white stone walkways.  The sun was drifting out of the sky, distorting his image across the water.  He appeared as a shadow in its murky surface.  He leaned onto the railing and to stare.

            Nyx had told him to find something important in the Emotion, to focus on the promise he had made.  He thought first of his mother, but it didn’t bring him much.  She left when he was young and with hardly any memories to remember her by.  Thoughts of her brought him only an empty hole in his heart.  His father may have been negligent, but when thinking of his mother, Isaac felt grateful for his father even being there.

            Nothing.  Isaac watched the water pass and had a thought: the Emotion was the world of the spirit and the soul, perhaps a passage in itself.  It was meta-physical, operating at least partially on feelings and thought before anything else.  The world he was in now, the physical world, wasn’t so subjective.  It operated on impartial logic, on kinetics, energy, and chemical.

            His exile from the Emotion had been the product of his emotions.  His return, however, would have to be made through the physical world.  The steady burble of the water set him at ease.  Closing his eyes, he thought of his father, as cold and as impartial as this world around him.  He thought of his mother, nothing more than a distant memory.

            Climbing onto the rail, he steadied himself, and then he jumped.  The air whipped up his jacket as gravity pulled him toward the water below.  The impact knocked the air from his lungs.  The water swallowed him with a mighty roar.  He drove in like a needle, his body pulled under by the water which filled the empty air that followed in his wake.  He went deep, fast, as liquid became solid, and the world shifted around him.

            He hit a wall and felt for the gate.  Then, he turned the lock when he found the key.  All he had to think of was…

 

: Bridges :

 

            Ellen was the first to speak following Deidra’s offer, and she said, “I’ll stay.”  They looked at her as she came forward.  “I don’t have a Voice or anything special like that.  I would just get in the way, but the two of you, you’re different, you’re strong.  If anyone can save Abraham, it’s one of you.  So, go, and bring her back for me.”  She wore a smile as she spoke, but the smile was obviously forced and partially wilted.

            Alex nodded.  She took Ellen by the shoulder and stared her in the eyes.  As it had with everyone, their time in the Emotion had changed Ellen.  From where Alex stood, the other woman seemed more solid, more certain than she ever was before.  Alex said, “Don’t worry, we’ll bring her back.  I promise.”

            Shana watched them part before stepping between them.  “No,” she said, “We won’t do it.  Listen, Alex, this isn’t my journey.  It never was, at least not really.  I never knew Abraham.  This belongs to you, both of you, if it belongs to anyone—the people who found her.  You’re the ones she asked to protect her, so it should be you two who bring her back.  Besides, Ellen, if you really think we’re stronger, then I think it’s probably a better idea that we don’t leave you alone with them.”

            Ellen looked over to Deidra and Cornelius, who watched them from afar.  She considered their awesome power and remembered the danger Carolyne had posed to her.  It stood to reason, she suspected, that they might even be worse.  She pulled Shana into a hug.  “Thank you.  Thank you so, so much.”

            “You three are so sickeningly sweet,” Deidra said.  Her calm had broken, replaced by a slowly evolving venom that lined her every word.  She shuffled past them, leaving her dress to drag in the dirt as she moved.  Cornelius followed.  Deidra stopped at the dome and turned to face them.  “Come forward when you’re ready.”

            Alex hesitated.  She looked at Shana.  “Are you sure that you will be okay here by yourself?”

            Shana laughed.  “Are you being serious right now? I’m not afraid of those two.”  She winked at Alex.  “I’ll be fine.  You two go and get her. And be careful.”

            Alex hesitated and then hugged Shana. Then, she turned to Deidra and to the dome behind her.  She found Deidra staring back with growing disdain.  The way she looked, the way she frowned, twisted Alex up inside.  For Alex, it was like a specter of her past.  “Why are you helping us now?”

            “I am helping no one.  I have no sides in this.  Opening this neither aids you nor hinders him. It simply opens a door.  Whether you take it, or what you do after, is your decision.”

            “Right,” Alex said.  She didn’t believe Deidra, but she didn’t have the energy or time to argue.  She looked at Ellen.  “Are you ready?”

            Ellen nodded and together they stopped at the dome. It was large enough to eclipse the sky and cast a large, dark shadow over them.  The surface was smooth and cold even at a distance.  It appeared hollow at a glance, much like Deidra’s gaze. 

            Deidra touched the dome without turning.  She dragged her finger back and the dome peeled away like putty, layer after layer receding, leaving an opening just large enough for them to pass.  A large stone-built bridge, grey in color and long aged, appeared beyond.

            Alex drew a deep breath and looked to Ellen, who nodded one last time, and together they crossed the threshold.  The air inside was heavy and stagnant.  The world grew cold for them.  Inside, buried beneath the ancient apathy that permeated this dome, Alex felt a faint tickle of Abraham, and she smiled.  “She’s here,” she said.  “I can feel her.”

            Ellen smiled in her growing excitement and took Alex by the hand.  “Then let’s go.”

            “Yeah, she’s waited long enough.”  Alex looked back to find Shana waving, and she waved back as the dome flowed, liquidly, back into place.

            Alex turned again and found the bridge significantly shorter, as if she was carried forward by her own enthusiasm.  The bridge stretched over another great expanse, this one a sandy chasm framed by vast, orange walls dulled by the dome-filtered sunlight.  The sky was dull and grey.  A massive cathedral stood before them now, stain-glass showing a maiden in chains with fire at her feet.  Gargoyles stood guard before her, their stone-faced snarling eternally. They felt like the eye of the world was fixed on them.

            Alex felt Ellen shaking beside her and squeezed her hand.  “Don’t worry,” she said, “We’re almost there.”

            Ellen took a deep breath.  “Right.”  Together, they advanced.

 

: Bridges :

 

            Isaac stood in a dusty canyon, stirring the thin, orange dust that had at some point gathered upon his shoulders.  Vast, smooth canyon walls towered beside him, layered and stratified by age and by time.  At the center of the canyon, standing immediately before him, is a vast, stony island crowned by a black cathedral, with a bridge of wrought stone stretching out from it into oblivion.  The sky was steel grey; the air was without warmth.

            He felt his mother here.  She was everywhere around him, in the sand and in the air. She was the atmosphere itself.  He couldn’t breathe without remembering his scent, couldn’t blink without remembering her face.  She felt uncertain to him, and also more real to him than he could ever remember.

            Alex was there, too.  He could feel her presence above him, in the cathedral, but she had changed.  Like his mother, she was more real to him, more solid and more certain.  She was resolved, the hollowness of her conviction having been replaced by some drive that was previously not there.

            He could feel someone else with her, a figure of deep rage, sorrow, and solitude.  They waited inside of the cathedral, overshadowing anything or anyone else within.  He looked up at the ancient, blackened stones of the building and regarded it with trepidation.  That would be his destination. 

            Without a word, he conjured his Voice and took the scaling the smooth, sandstone walls that surrounded him.