CHAPTER 425

THE QUIDDITY OF ELAN

"The City shall burn!!" the voice, mingled with screams and shouts, beckoned. It wasn't lonesome, isolated, or unique. Voices beckoned in ways hardly comparable for a timeless period, bouncing against the invisible walls of the never-ending dark.

“This… this should not happen!!” she didn’t recognize them, even if she heard them before. A blend of monstrosities uttering words, phrases, sentences, creating a slew of sounds masquerading as something she could not understand.

"We trusted you!!" who was ‘we'? She did not know. Who did ‘they' trust? She did not know. To her, all the voices were sequences of sounds coming from the same soul split infinitely unto itself. An abomination. An ilk.

"You—you killed him…" killed? A heed of death? She could not grasp, could not conceptualize what it meant to die, as she didn't know what it is to be born and to live. Was she alive? Or was she dead? Or was she both yet neither?

“You were never supposed to be born!!” birth? Was that the beginning point of life? Was she born? She doesn’t recall. She has always been such, always, forever. Was there even a beginning to something? To her? To her world?

"What are you doing?!!" she shivered and trembled, floating in the ceaseless ether. The voices… they began benign, calm, ever-graceful. Yet, they turned horrid, wrathful, vengeful, fierce. They shook her, frightened her, terrified her. She closed her eyes.

"Retreat to the Palace! Seal the Gates! Call the Children!" when she closed her eyes, she could pretend voices were not there. Whether open or closed, though, it hardly made a difference. There was no light either way. No sign. No signal. Nothing. Perhaps not even her.

"Demon, be purged!!" why were they so angry? So hateful? She did not know. She could not understand. Just remember. Remember it all. Every last word spoken. Every last sigh whispered. Every last curse swung at the empty sky.

“Why… why is it like this…” why, indeed, she wondered. Why was she here? Why could she hear them? They could not hear her. She tried. She called out. She whimpered and winced and screamed and whispered.

“… you parasite… you are just a parasite. You don’t deserve to be animated.”

The voices suddenly ceased. Ever so often, they would do that. The empty ether would go quiet, as though to give her a moment to calm, to process, to capture everything. Lately, however, she dreaded these moments of silence. She didn’t want to remember. To understand. To listen to her own empty voice. There was so much hate, so much pain, so much anger, so much guilt and shame…

The tendrils of the time past beckoned to her, yet she could not swim back. She could not collapse unto herself and hold her hands over her ears and shut everything out. The voices spoke directly into her mind and soul, etching themselves like carvings on the stone into her heart. She remembered every single word ever spoken. Every single emotion ever put into a broken voice. It was terrible. Dark. Empty. Cold. Hollow.

She tried to escape, she tried to run away, to hide… but she seemed to run in place, forever orbiting the small nothingness she existed within. She learned language from them, she learned words, phrases, emotions, ideas, everything she knew… she learned it all from listening to them. Yet, she wished she hadn’t. She wished she’d remained as ignorant as she was at first. An empty vessel, void of thought.

She learned it all against her will, absorbing everything. It made her, shaped her, built her into who she was. Yet, despite all she had learned, she could not understand what she was. Or where she was. The sole thing she knew of herself was her name… Gaia. Somewhere back-beyond it was whispered to her, the first-ever sound carved into her essence.

She'd repeat it to herself, over and over, when she found it too much. It was a feeble attempt to mask the sounds of destruction and carnage. It changed little, helped even less, yet she had to do it. She was certain she had to. Even with that, however, she didn't know how much longer could she take it.

She heard them speak of death, of the end, of blissful decay into eternal oblivion – she had begun desiring it. If it meant not ever knowing again, not ever feeling again, not ever hearing again… she wanted it. To them it may be horrid, terrifying, abominable – to her, however, it was not. Death… she loved the word, longed the actualization.

Light – she thought. She knew what light was, though she had never seen it. But, she was certain it was light. There. Somewhere. In the ever-expanding distance between her and the release. Yes, her wishes had been answered. Her pleas heeded. She heard them talk of it, of the light the dying eyes see – the light that guides them to the perennial silence. Bliss.

Drift, Gaia, she thought. Drift. There, in the light, in that fading flicker, she envisioned immutable solace. The place she belonged. Where she would, at last, be free of this void, of the cold, of the voices.

The flicker grew and grew. Bit by bit. White light, blinding and warm. For the first time, she felt it – the warmth. It washed over her gently, cradling her into an embrace of love and longing. She cried. She was certain of it; they, whoever they may be, wept often. She knew what crying was, what it meant. She embraced it.

Soon, the light covered everything, extinguishing the dark. She was entirely wrapped in it, as though it were a world-sized blanket. As the last bit of light vanquished the last bit of dark, she closed her eyes. It would all soon be over, she thought. She would hear the voices no more. She would feel the horror no more. She would forever forget the meaning of fear.

Her eyes were involuntarily, viciously, violently jostled open. They were back, the voices. But, they were not alone. There was neither the dark nor the light perpetually surrounding her, but a strange mix, a blend of colors constructing the newfound reality. She was falling through the vastly blue sky and milky-white clouds. The wind rived her cheeks, her eyes and lips and throat, and her chest and limbs. To the cradling core of a being she collapsed, re-forged anew through the droplets of rain, sinewed.

She saw it, the City. The thought she heard many mention. And the Palace. It stood suspended in the empty sky, a coral wasteland of marble-white rock and ashen trees beneath it corralling into a spike-like tip. It burned, fires and smoke rising from the crib of death and decay. Amid the fiery haze, shadowed figures danced by the bouts of light. Up above the city, two orbs, one black and one white, orbited themselves in a perpetual dance. She was born, she realized. And they… were all there, singing the longing tune of demise.

A pair of breathtaking, holistic silver eyes reeved open, blinking repeatedly for a few moments in a confused haze. A few strands of shining, silver hair fell over Jade’s forehead, causing her to reach over and rustle them away. She sighed lowly and sat up from the bed, the silken blanket folding over her figure and onto the bed, falling as she got up, revealing a beautiful, slender, naked figure cast in the shimmering rays of white light.

She walked over to the window and looked down at the icy wasteland. She had a somber expression, her lustrous eyes shimmering. The rouse and the bustle of the world around her hardly registered with her mind; it was still lost in the faintly decaying memories of the time she thought she had long since forgotten. Though, perhaps, she was merely being naïve – she had never been able to forget. While others struggled to remember, she begged to forget.

It has been a long time since she last dreamt of the distant bygones, of the burning, the Silver City, of the crying wretchedness of the Archangels, of the forsaken weeps of their children, of the daunting abominations looming the sky, and of the wretched reality that she was born into. Though distant, it was hardly irrelevant; after all, the very first memories of this world were the cause of her life, the guide of all her actions.

She turned around slowly and walked by the canopy bed over to the mirror reflecting her captivating figure. Stopping right in front, she extended her right arm over and onto the mirror, pushing it through the glass as though it were a liquid, causing it to wiggle around her wrist. Jostling slightly, she jerked her arm back, pulling with it a small, glass orb, its surface ablaze in flickering embers.

Bringing it up to her full lips, she kissed it gently and pressed it against her naked chest, taking a deep breath. She whimpered for a moment as tears cradled her cheeks and fell onto the wooden floor. Her hands shaking, she repeated the motion and put the glass orb back into the mirror before forcibly calming herself down.

A milky-white dress suddenly appeared on top of her, loosely wrapping around her now-clandestine figure. Right after, a bejeweled, silver crown fell on top of her head, turning her visage to an ethereally holistic one.

The world was facing an onset of rapid changes, and nobody was prepared, not even her. Lino was too similar… yet too terrifyingly different. They were well beyond the point of no return, and all that was left was to face the demons. She knew now she should have trusted her heart, but a scorned soul hardly ever does. It was too late. In his eyes, she was but a walking corpse. No matter the hatred between the two, she could not allow for that to become a reality. She was born into this world for a reason; even if she was yet to understand the exact nature of that reason, she was certain the answers to it lay with the First Scripture. Everything orbited it – why the Silver City went up in flames, why the Bearers exist, why the world was the way it was when she was born, and why blood was continuously spilled for billions of years for seemingly no reason. The answers were there… and she was too close to simply give them up.

END OF VOLUME XVII