11. Chace
Fever, relentless and sweltering, devoured every piece of my body and soul. I lost time to the burning, found myself divided into two parts of myself: one young and scared, another ancient and irritated.
No. Irritated didn’t sum up my whirlwind of emotions. Angry. An explosion of fury. Fury so intense it would burn another on contact.
And despair deep enough to suck me under and drown me.
The internal tempest consumed me, and time blinked in and out of existence. On occasion, the freezing dark trapped me. Other moments, hours, or days, the light blazed blindingly bright, cracked fissures through my skull, and set my skin to boil.
Someone slapped my cheek. I cracked my eyes open and peered up at Aoes’s fuzzy image.
“Hey, man. Why did you lock yourself in the drunk cage?”
I hadn’t, wanted to say as much, but I couldn’t make my vocal cords respond. I was losing my body weight in sweat, and my mouth felt drier than the desert wastelands of Helvíti.
I slipped back into the agony of nothingness.
Time was swallowed by fleeting images of Aoes dabbing a wet cloth against my face and neck.
He propped a makeshift pillow beneath my pounding head, making me as comfortable as possible on the cell floor.
And when Aoes last retreated, he promised to come back with help and had left the cell door open.
Had that been the last time I’d seen Aoes? Or had he returned? Brought help?
I couldn’t recall. I hadn’t the slightest handle on how much time I’d lost.
The cell door clanged shut.
I turned my head toward the sound. The Killian stood on the other side of the bars, his pointed glare reminding me of his earlier words: to help ensure your safety while you detox.
Mental darkness and physical convulsing took hold.
I slept and slept and tossed and turned. Found myself heavily bundled in a state of nothingness. Somehow, I ended up on my feet, thrashing inside the cell uncontrollably, slamming my body into the walls, the bars, the floor.
Would my body bruise? My bones crack or break?
Death would have been less cruel. Why had the Killian not claimed me?
At some point, during one of my more placid moments, someone tried to force food down my throat. I held a vague recollection that my flailing arms had knocked both the bowl of porridge and my attempted helper across the room.
I’d waste away, die a hollowed skin if I couldn’t manage to drag myself free of my wretched state. Find peace between the two sides of myself that were at war.
But in my current state of mind, I wasn’t sure if I cared one way or the other—live or die. Both states offered relief and misery in their own ways.
And so, I gave no struggle for either outcome. I would let the god of death decide my fate. Should the god deem my fate one worthy of a decision and not leave me in a limbo state like Earl.
I would not end up zombified like Earl. I had witnessed Aldine’s death, and despite being inside the cursed walls of Veritas, Aldine had indeed died. His essence had somehow moved on. Which meant, as noncitizens…as servants of Thanatos…we might be outside of the curse, able to die a true death.
Will I soon be wishing for my own?
If so, may the powers that be quicken the process.
I choked on a breath.
But death isn’t what awaits me.
The Killian’s words weaved through every aching thought: Reward is on the other side.
What reward, exactly, was I moving toward?
To uncover that answer, I needed to ride the ebbs and waves to what waited on the other end of my soul-shredding agony.
The days… The time of day… All of it was a blur of the same. Unheard prayers for death. For peace.
Someone—a child, I thought—helped me sit upright and expel the contents of my stomach into an awaiting bowl.
Another small person…or maybe it was the same small person…
carried away the bowl while she also wiped the sweat from my brow with a cold compress.
Both activities transpired at the same time…
or maybe my experience of time was overlapping.
A roar built in my head, became all I could hear, and blocked out whatever soft whispers the girl said at my ear.
I fell back against the ground, tiny hands catching my head and easing it to the cell floor.
Closing my eyes, I allowed the vision surrounding me, truth or illusion, to become swallowed by another.
Fever dream, memory, wild hallucination… I didn’t know. Didn’t rightly care.
I lay on the ground of a cage, and I was dying. Or rather, my shell was dying. I could no longer deny the truth that my physical body would soon expire, and my essence would be left adrift, unless…
I was also a young boy standing on the opposite side of the bars, watching the other version of myself suffer. I was both young and old, outside of the bars and inside the cage, all at once. And both versions of me were dying. In different manners, but definitely so. Death beckoned each of us.
One, the young boy, rather permanently. And the other, older me… My death could become forever lasting if I didn’t soon find a new shell to host my consciousness.
At that time and place of the recollection, we were not one yet, but I saw through both sets of eyes as if we were.
“You don’t look good,” young me said, stepping up against the cage and wrapping my small hands around the bars.
Caged me tried to laugh, one filled with bitter sarcasm, but the only sound I emitted was a gurgle of spittle and blood. With a cough, I expelled the phlegm, holding my gut against the ache. Pulling myself to a partial sit, I leaned against the back wall of bars. “Neither do I feel so good.”
Young me blinked. Twice. “Are you dying?”
“Quite possibly.” The older me let my head drop in a weak and unfinished nod.
Sixty-six years, trapped in the citadel, unable to complete my mission, and this…this had to be just punishment for my failure―first husk death.
“Is that why you’re so pasty-looking?”
“No.” Older me glanced at the shaking hand I rested upon my bent knee. “My mother made me this way.”
Silence fell as boy me appeared to consider the answer given. My young lips torqued to the side, and my gaze slipped over the trapped, ailing being―the other part of me.
“I’m dying,” young me added with a shrug.
“That’s why my dad let me go with him to see the infected citadel where he found you.
Because even if my dad doesn’t say the words, I know he doesn’t expect me to reach a proper reaper age where I’ll see such things: the dead, the marked for death, the dead that won’t die. ”
Yes. The state of the citadel citizens was quite curious and had been so for many decades.
Older me dragged my gaze over the child standing on the opposite side of the bars. I was already aware of his (my) condition. Had smelled the coming death when I’d first laid eyes upon the kid a few days prior, back in the citadel.
I surveyed the space that was now my prison. Was I still in the citadel? Or had they moved me? I couldn’t recall.
A scuff of a small boot on the cement floor brought my attention back to my younger version.
“Are you scared of what awaits you on the other side?” older me asked.
“Not really,” young me replied. “It’s natural, right? All part of the cycle of things. So how bad can it really be?”
Caged me nodded. The boy spoke better than many adults. Thanatos would no doubt welcome the child with a gentle embrace.
“My mom is, though. She’s really scared. That’s why my dad brought me with him. I also think that’s why he captured you. And that.” Boy me pointed to another cage in which a flying monster careened uncontrollably against its prison walls.
Young me flinched and shuddered, both at the existence of the beast and its actions.
Young me then pressed my face to the bars and lowered my voice to a whisper. “I’m sorry for how he hurt you.”
Hurt indeed. Caged me had been subjected to countless probing and experimentation.
I considered the boy. The element of the boy’s fatal condition was a rare gene, the result of a compatibility issue farther back in the bloodline. Often carried in a dormant state for generations. The young Chace―boy me―standing before caged me would be the victim finally claimed.
Shame. The kid seemed rather well-spoken for his age.
Older me leaned against the cold cage siding. Let the metal bite into my skin. “Did your father find what he was looking for?”
Young me frowned, shook my head, and dropped my gaze. “I don’t think so. He seemed pretty mad. And my mom…” In a flurry of lashes, my younger me’s attention snapped back to the version of me trapped in a cage. “She cries a lot. Like…a lot, a lot.”
“But you…” I raised my chin, indicating my younger self. “You’re brave.” I narrowed my gaze and studied my younger eyes, saw what I was searching for. “And smart. That’s a fine combination, brave and smart.”
“I’m a Badden,” child me proclaimed with thick pride. “We’re naturally brave and smart. Plus…” I shrugged. “I take a lot of lessons.”
Wounded and trapped, older me shifted against the wall of bars, wincing from the discomfort, and angled my body slightly closer to my younger version.
“I’m impressed. With all your bravery and your intelligence regarding the cycle of things,” I said, “you appear to handle the prospect of change better than I. So young, and yet… You truly have any trepidation in check?”
My boyish mouth pulled straight then pressed downward at the edges. “I guess I am a little bit scared, but not so much.” Child me sighed. “Kind of like I get afraid on super stormy nights, but it always ends up sunny and bright in the end.”
Wise kid indeed.
“But you don’t want to make your mom sad? Or disappoint your dad?”
“No.” Young me pushed my arms through the bars, folding them together on the inside, within caged me’s grasp…should I lurch fast and far enough.
Which, given my current state, I likely couldn’t. Still, the action of my younger version was both brave and reckless.
Boy me sighed. “I don’t know how to fix that.”
“I might be able to help with that.”