lost in the deep

— and the air is thick with the smell of earth, water, and age.

when the statue splits open, its stench scatters through the room. it reaches you faster than the streams of the light that flood the room, and even you must draw your head away. further in smells of sharp acid and bitter wine and drips from a darkened source. a ghost finds you; you see its ichor form a hand from the shadows and call out by its familiar scent. all this in seconds and your first instinct is to flee—out of disgust, out of shock, out of worry.

but it still calls for you, bound in a familiar memory. it slips through, pours down, and crawls towards you on salt-chained knees. you swallow down the bile that chokes your voice and step towards a familiar endless to investigate what lies beneath the rot. you reach out to the ichor and the leather of gloves meets the running ghosts. a viscous ichor clings to your hands; the minerals pierce through the gaps and force out a gag. it’s too clear to be mud, like the room down below; it’s salt, the kind from the canals that link to the sea.

your mind doesn’t trace it to catima, at first. instead, you think of the canals carved beneath a golden glow, a sun like a cold spotlight shone overhead with a goddess’s statue at the level of its eyes. the city of catima read through its gilded fairytale before you arrived, but so did you. it’s all the same, down to the reaction the tower draws from you: the rot in the statues reminds you of the dead and long gone.

past the first bridge across the rivers, staring into the seaside town, she had stopped you and told you there she wanted it to end. you said you wouldn’t look back, you said you wouldn’t, you said— it was not just important to your mission, but they were all long dead. it was never a desecration of the deceased in her eyes. when you finally brought yourself to think of it like that, you convinced yourself to draw out the line, aether from one heart to the next. but there, in canal town, overwhelmed by the brine, the false wind, and the revelation your fairytales were awash in a lie, and that you could never hide away in your childhood again—all you could think about was the finality of her death.

the illusion vanishes before your eyes. the water grows thicker and dark pools in your hands, and you trail its transformation back to a rotting corpse. its hands have bloated and deformed from time, but they still evoke the image of prayer. death has molded their remnants into something almost unrecognizable. they are strangers to you, but not to some of the others; and, even then, your memory considers them like family. her unseen corpse aligns with those laid before you, underneath a glowing light; hers, and friends of hers, and friends of theirs, until the entire room is an album of those who could have met a similar fate.

in every step you take, you are haunted by an idea you can’t erase. it is not a memory, but a mockery of one: her dying breath, without you beside her, and only your image from three years ago to deny her final wish. how she remembered someone another world could never steal before she herself became forgettable. you’ll never know what killed her. you’ll never know how she left. in the tower, the fiction warps, and you imagine her in prayer, before a wash of lightning shackles and drowns her away.

your guide—mateo, the archmidwife—recoils, as you did earlier—

recoils, as you did on the summit. was that truly more than a moon ago?

—and you understand, too familiar with the turmoil of discovering those closest to you dead before you could tell them, earnestly, goodbye. even though you have never heard of the everdream that mateo departed, experience rolls its whisper so easily on your tongue. the everdream and the great sleep. everkeep and the cloud. you don’t understand the specifics, but it’s difficult not to assume the equivalence as your only answer in the chaos of a golden grave. but unlike him, you cannot bring yourself to pull away. you have dealt with this once before, though it has grown no easier with time. in your horror and the observations that keep you adrift in madness, you understand precisely what needs to be done.

no one stops you when you draw out the line, aether from one heart to the next. you have seen the symbols before in passing glances. the walls of catima are lined in prayer. so were the unblemished bookshelves you abandoned on the previous floor. the outline of the flesh, a splatter of ink. a flourish of string. the scripture encircling like twine and the spoked wheels that decorate catan stone. you close your eyes and outline the remnants of your memory. her arm traces the image with you: first the outer circle, then, slowly, each spoke through the center. you kill off her prayer and she dissolves in the deep, the paper bandages shriveled and eaten away.

when she finally died, you didn’t have to watch her fade away to know. instead, with your eyes held forward and the line drawn beneath your gaze, you knew when the terminal stone had fully cracked and greyed, and when the ghost garden behind you wilted. when all you could hear in the midst of the city of gold was the echo of the wind, the remnant of your friends’ footsteps, and your breath shallowing to hold back tears, you knew that she was gone.

she told you that she always wanted to be with you. even though she knew—even though she begged—that you be the one to kill her for good. it’s hard to think of her by your side now as you cut open more corpses the same way you did her own.

—someone screams, all poison and bitter churned into her flood. claws draw new blood to drip into muddied water. “what, was killing her once not enough for you?” she cries to someone—the same person who had first torn open a corpse—but you bite down on your tongue, like the blood drawn is your own. or maybe hers. the remnants of flesh burn in the water. you watch them bubble and sink beneath the salt. then, the floor gives way, and their tombs are drowned in bloodied goodbyes.

“just don’t kill me. please.” the same one begs. it doesn’t work. what if this is where you die? perhaps you should have been more careful. perhaps you should have stayed away. damn her final wishes and rot away as the other corpses did. you have never thought ill of your irreverence to combat, but you almost reconsider it here, and then you rescind the notion just as swiftly. even bloodshed could not save you from this. none of wuk lamat’s bravado or her and her siblings’ prowess or the scions’ abilities could save you from the woes of madness itself.

but you still have so much to do. you cannot leave her dream unfulfilled. what would you do if you died, sank into the aetherial sea, and saw her again, with nothing else to show for it? madness has not consumed you yet, as it does to two of your party members in simple sweeping motions of chaos, but it spreads from mind through muscle, takes root in every cell of your body and chokes the aether within. you find yourself afraid of everything, every fear that ever passed through your lifetime: of the great condors, of your mentor leaving you behind, of dying with your dreams unfulfilled, of never getting to see her again. your childhood engulfs you, memories dredged up by madness and the daemons in its domain, and you screw your eyes shut to hide away.

you stopped faulting your mother for leaving you behind for a myriad of reasons.  you would have been a liability, blinded by naivety and the limits of childrens’ energy; she had her own goals and her own aspirations before the last petal of her life wilted; she’s long since gone and you can no longer bring yourself to be mad at her now, even if you wanted to try. but you still remember waiting out those long, quiet days, gazing through the bedroom window towards the village road and hoping today was the day she’d come home. your godmother was always there for you, and you loved her, but you loved your mother most of all. you wanted to be with her as much as you did want to see the world she loved; the two were one and the same. without one, you had neither; you waited out the long days and the ice-cold nights sitting across from iyaate, staring wistfully at every door waiting for her to return.

you were so often alone then. you didn’t think much of it then when it didn’t concern your mother. now, under the effects of the encroaching madness, the thoughts consume you. you cover your ears like you’ve woken up from a nightmare, your breath rapid and shallow, and you shut out the dancing visions of a nightlit room. although there seem to be no woes to torment you, you shrink beneath the covers regardless, too cold and too large and too empty for you on your own.

“silence is escape,” someone read, not yet as paralyzed as you or the others. so you followed the message, listening to the quiet of tesh’pyani, your home, even before the storm surge destroyed it.  you think of the long nights where all you had was the blanket and a book and a dying lantern, the candle running low and the wind lending scarce aid. you want to go home. you want to go home you want to go home you want to understand you want to live you don’t want to die you want to go home. you don’t want to die here, stars away from your mother and the rest of the sea. you want to go home—even if home as you know it, flesh and blood and adobe, is long gone.

but to keep yourself from succumbing, to keep the king of madness away, you run away to the dreams of childhood again. and you run to dreams of yesterday. you think of a world where your mother is at your side, exhilirated and energized and alive. you think of her last adventure through the windspath gardens, where you walked beside her and the warrior of light, studying a scalekin and the surrounding flora from the tip of its tail to the edge of its snout. you think of if she had yet lived, and if she had gone with you. you think of a moment of peace. you think of—

the catima stables, on a quiet sunrise. the mountain summit swells with a frigid wind, but you’re reminded of a cold winter in sharlayan, and you hardly pay it heed. you’ve donned your gleaners’ gloves and a familiar bag and set out again to tend to the white rabbits, who are waking up just as early as you. you need to feed them before they’re borrowed for travel: their incredible mass indicates an incredible appetite, and one all the more necessary to maintain for city and wilds-wide travel both.

as you reach out to feed one with a phantom hand, another hand reaches out, rubbing the rabbit behind its ears. it wiggles, and an old laugh rings out, still as lively as it was the last time you ever heard it. you merely sigh, though you’re tempted to laugh along with her. outside, in the future where this never comes to pass, you remain deathly silent, not even moving an ilm. the shadows swallow you and the rest of your party whole. but here, the sun shines through gates of grey clouds and snow, and the two of you live to see another day, another life, fulfilling the dream she had long yearned would come true.

but the truth is, it’s just you, here, and she’ll never get to see this. she’ll only be able to hear about it in the centuries to come, when the moment has long passed and you have, too. for all intents and purposes, even though there is someone in your lap this very second, even though you are huddled near the rest of your party, desperate to grasp the light beyond the darkest shadows, you are here all alone.

— — — it doesn’t feel like you’re alive until the cold wind rustles past your ears. you’re burning alive under the weight of fresh blood and drowning beneath muddied water, gasping for air in a last-ditch effort to live. your vision had frozen in neon red, your ears pinned back and your breath trapped in your throat. this was it. you’d thought this was it. you were dead, you were drowning, you were going to be killed and left all by your own in a world you hardly knew, with no one you’d loved even knowing you were gone.

but. you’re alive. the bubble bursts and you collapse, swallowing air through heavy breaths, your eyes wide in the aftermath of horror. all the while, any sign that you had ever relived recent memories, helpless and alone, dissipates with the last of Her blood. you watch it all vanish and leave only the gateway behind, and the remnants of scripture with it.

there’s nothing left for you to say. only disbelief echoes through you, and nothing else forms the words. your gloves stretch across the gravetown stone, spilling dried ichor and salt along the cracks, and grey clouds of breath mix with it.

you’re alive. and none of you were left behind, and no one was lost to the everdream, you don’t know what that means for you now, nor through the walk to the clinic, nor the walk out into a starlit, shivering night.

( days later, you linger under the gateway, your tomestone marziphone loose in your hands. you’re staring down at a photo of your her between gloves you worked on endlessly to cleanse the rot and the stains. it smells mostly as it did before: of rabbit feed and bitter tree needles. you blink away the ichor on the seams.

“mother,” you call out, your voice beneath your breath. “it’s me again.” you grip the phone, though you shake out anyway, looking up to the archway scripture. “i’ve gotten myself into a terrible problem,” you say, with a wispy laugh. “something that you would do. i thought of you a few days ago, actually.”

as if you don’t think of her nearly every day. “…but i’ll be okay. so you don’t need to fuss over me.”

i’ll see you in the aetherial sea, mother, just as we planned. …perhaps with a few more stranger stories than you might have expected to hear.

thank you for still being there to save me. )