37. Julien
thirty-seven
Julien
J ulien glanced down, dazed, to find himself dressed in a loose-fitting white shirt that billowed at the sleeves. He plucked at the material before casting his eyes across his surroundings.
There was no mistaking it: he was in Cinn’s red city, in all its dusky twilight glory.
Here was the cracked asphalt, red hazy mist, the crawling scarlet ivy over every surface. Derelict buildings, some of which were mere piles of concrete. To his left, it appeared like someone had attempted to build a makeshift shelter out of salvaged metal sheets and tattered fabric. The structure seemed precarious, with mismatched pieces held together by improvised ties and ropes. Faded graffiti adorned the makeshift walls, tags left by artists long since gone.
Across the road were the strange, streamlined cars Cinn had described, all curves. They looked fast, he’d give them that. None of them would be a patch on Maz, of course.
Half-ripped billboards filled the sky, advertising products or people Julien couldn’t place.
However, this wasn’t quite Cinn’s red city, was it? Because that had turned out to be London, and this wasn’t London. Julien knew this for sure, because he was in Paris. Far across the horizon, the Eiffel Tower’s steel structure still stood, but twisted, warped, sagging down towards the ground on its right side. An eerie red hue was emanating from the colossal vines of the invasive red ivy that choked almost every beam of it .
This was the City of Lights no more.
After another second spent gazing at the iconic monument that he’d always openly joked about hating, but now felt rather sorry for, his head snapped up to seek another element of Cinn’s red city that had always intrigued him. Sure enough, he found the disturbing fractured moon Cinn had described. For a moment, he stared at it—the artist in him itching to capture the strange, unsettling sight.
Forcing himself to walk on, he understood why the Beksiński paintings in his old bedroom had reminded Cinn so much of here. This place dripped with surrealism. Oozed with it. Julien half expected to melt into the ground as he travelled, or turn the corner to find a giant skull with spider demons crawling out of it.
An almighty crashing sound in the distance had his head snapping up. Colossal plumes of dark smoke billowed across the skyline.
Then, the ground began to shake.
Heart thumping, adrenaline surging, Julien turned in the opposite direction and ran.
Footsteps pounding on the volatile surface, Julien pushed his body to the absolute limit, forcing his muscles to carry him faster and faster, until his thighs ached and begged for mercy. His chest tightened painfully as he struggled to inhale.
He pressed on, regardless. He’d always been the master of his own body—the years of intense physical training during his youth had proved that to him.
Why did it feel like he was running out of time?
One wrong step away from the world crumbling around him?
A hair’s breadth away from death?
Something prickled down his spine. An icy prickle. There was an umbraphage behind him. Close behind him. Julien was certain of it.
Not glancing behind him even for a millisecond, he continued to press his body into the punishing pace. He tuned everything out—the growing hiss of his pursuer, the agony in his legs, and the sound of his blood rushing through his ears—to focus only on his next step.
A tiny blur of dark flitted across his vision, zipping left, then right. A… collection of shadowmotes ? He’d never seen them before. It was bizarre to sight them but not feel them the way he felt all the others. Regardless, he stretched out his arm to them, as if he were a child chasing a butterfly. He followed them down a narrow Parisian street, which opened into the wide thoroughfare of Champs-élysées. A giant double-decker tour bus, red ivy invading every smashed window, brushed up against him as he sprinted towards the Arc de Triomphe, the motes a pace or two ahead of him. The arch’s once majestic facade was now marred by mighty cracks, chunks of stone missing from its structure.
A sudden thought consumed him: the knowledge that he had to reach the arch at any cost.
And so he continued, using his last reserves of energy to catapult himself down the ruined avenue, debris and ivy threatening to trip him at every step. Finally, he was there, in the deep shadow of the monument. Reaching his predetermined destination, he turned to face the umbraphage.
It wasn’t there.
After a moment of blinking through shock and confusion, the ground disappeared from under him. There wasn’t a prelude, neither a tremor nor shake, but the cobblestone beneath him fell away, sending him plummeting into an abyss.
Then he was freefalling downwards, white shirt billowing out around him like a parachute.
He should, of course, be terrified—the scientific part of his brain told him he was about to break every bone in his body. Conversely, he felt little to nothing as he plunged downwards.
A handful of seconds, a minute, longer? Time became irrelevant as cool air whipped his cheeks .
Initially a speck in the distance, the bottom became steadily larger as it filled his vision with dark brown hues. When Julien reached the ground, his chest hit the firm surface with a tremendous thud, but he did not experience the agonisingly rib-shattering, body-destroying impact that he should have.
Dusting himself off, his eyes slowly adjusted to the extremely dim light, his murky brown surroundings eventually somewhat revealing themselves to him.
An expansive cavern of sorts, rocky walls circling him on all sides. His unsteady panting echoed off the walls, his lungs still feeling the effects of being pushed to their limits above.
And there he was.
A mere handful of metres away.
A gasp escaped Julien, loud in the silence of the cave, and his hand flew to his mouth before he urged his body forward to close the distance between himself and Cinn.
Encased horizontally in a rib-like cage made of black. The texture and glossy shine of it reminded him of an umbraphage’s inky tendrils. Indeed, as he stepped closer, the bars of Cinn’s jail writhed with life. Through the gaps, his body was just visible. Naked, laying on his back on a slab of grey stone. Very much as still as the body that Julien currently cradled in his arms, back in the hospital, a place that felt aeons away.
There was something attached to Cinn’s skin, several somethings , all across the side of him. The more he looked, the more he saw—a row of tiny wormlike creatures wiggling fluidly, stretching from his neck to his feet. As if sensing Julien’s presence, one lifted a head, turned to Julien and hissed, revealing rows of miniscule sharp teeth before it burrowed into Cinn’s side again.
Julien stepped even closer towards the cage. What the fuck are they doing to you?
His hand reached out to hover an inch from one black curve .
He wouldn’t be able to touch it. To be able to simply snap it off. Of course he wouldn’t.
But he had to try.
Excruciating pain shot through him, originating with the tips of his fingers where the black material burned him. He blew on fingers that were already blistering, biting the inside of his cheek to distract him from the agony.
From behind the cage, darkness deepened and twisted into a boundless shape, rising up like a black phoenix ascending from hell, wing-like protrusions spreading wide across the expanse of the cavern.
OURS NOW
Julien staggered back before holding his ground. The sudden revelation that these creatures could communicate wasn’t lost on him, despite the limited processing time.
The raspy voice, emanating from the core of the being, thundered again:
POWERFUL
HE BELONGS TO SHADOW
“No! You can’t have him. He belongs to us,” Julien shouted, half of his mind chastising himself for entertaining the idea of reasoning with an umbraphage.
A ripple cascaded through the shape of the creature, then part of it bulged out, lunging towards Cinn’s body as if about to devour its prey.
Julien had no time to think about what .
This was it. The moment his body had been waiting for, and the moment his mind most feared.
Closing his eyes, he gave in, finally relenting after all these years. He reached for the motes that were always within his grasp, no matter where he was. Not lumenmotes: there was far too little light down here for them to be of use. Not windmotes, though there was plenty of air. No, Julien sought out another type of mote. The ones that were always waiting for him. The ones that nobody else could feel. The ones that he’d never allowed himself the opportunity to learn to control after they’d killed his mother.
The nameless motes.
The illicit motes.
The motes that made him feel like a god, with all the power and destruction that brought with it.
They came to him, as quick as light, ready to be commanded, so eager to serve.
A feeling of euphoria submerged Julien, wrapping him in a bubble that numbed his senses to the world around him.
A drink of water after being parched in the desert.
A long-awaited sunrise after an endless night.
That first gasp after being held underwater.
Stepping out of the shadows and into the sunlight.
Power coursing through him, he aimed the motes straight at the umbraphage, which made a harrowing screeching sound, as it flapped its formless shadowy contours this way and that.
Its dark shape threw itself at Julien, but his motes were there in nanoseconds, protecting him without him consciously channelling them to do so, their pure whiteness forming an impenetrable barrier. The umbraphage flew backwards as if electrocuted. Its booming voice seemed to annunciate scraps of syllables that were too garbled to make meaning of.
With each fresh pummel of Julien’s motes, the umbraphage’s skin—if it could be described as that—started to peel off. Inky layer after inky layer floated in the air before breaking apart into black confetti. Smaller and smaller the creature became, until its harrowing scream quietened to a pathetic broken whimper.
Then there was only silence.
Silence, and Julien, and Cinn .
The cage was gone, and so were the worms, although they’d gifted Cinn’s flesh with a line of circular bite marks. Still Cinn slept on, and Julien’s heart lurched—because he was all out of ideas, of energy. His small stockpile of hope dwindled as his throat constricted, and he blinked back hot tears. The plan had been simple—come here, find Cinn. He had no roadmap for how to actually revive him.
Joining Cinn on the rock slab, he perched on the edge of it, looking down at him. “Wake up, Sleeping Beauty,” he whispered into the silence of the cavern, brushing a thumb over Cinn’s forehead before tracing the outline of his face all the way to his lips.
Should he attempt to wake him up with a kiss?
The fairytale would be all well and good, up to the moment Cinn woke up and punched him. He laughed, a tiny hollow sound that echoed through the space, and the shake of his body caused two teardrops to fall on Cinn’s cheek.
Who was he kidding? Cinn wasn’t going to wake up. Julien would either remain trapped here forever, or have to go back and face telling everyone Cinn loved he’d failed and Cinn would die.
“I’m sorry.” Julien ran his fingers through Cinn’s curls. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t save you. I tried. And I’m sorry for Tyler. God, I’m so sorry, Cinn. I’ve never regretted anything more in my life. I know it’s my own stupid fault. I wish I was normal. I wish I could have treated you how you deserved from the beginning.”
Julien pressed a kiss to Cinn’s forehead, before continuing to caress his cheeks.
“Now you’ll never know how special you are. Because you are. So special, to everyone, especially to me. And the more I realised it, the more I acted stupidly. I wish I’d told you. I should have, a thousand times, until you believed it.”
He interlaced their fingers, bringing Cinn’s hand to his lips .
Then the miracle occurred: the slightest flutter of Cinn’s dark eyelashes.
The tiniest stir of his body, shoulders rolling backwards.
The quietest groan from his lips.
When his eyes cracked open, Julien wrapped his arm around his back to pull him upright. “Cinn,” he half choked out, as he pressed his palm to Cinn’s chest, watching every precious dazed blink of Cinn’s eyelids as he took in their surroundings.
“Julien? Why the fuck are you crying?” Cinn’s voice was croaky and hoarse, as if unused for a hundred years. His expression morphed into one of tender concern as he reached up to cup Julien’s face, swiping away a tear. “Why are you here? Why are we here? How are you here?”
“Don’t worry about that now. Are you alright? Are you hurt?” Julien’s hand slid up to grip the back of Cinn’s head, rubbing a thumb in slow circles.
“I…” Cinn’s eyes fell shut for a moment as a shudder racked through his body. He scraped his teeth across his bottom lip. “Are you real? I don’t know if you’re real. I’ve been trapped in this horrible endless cycle of different versions of reality. My memories…”
“I’m real,” Julien said on an unsteady exhale. “I’m real, I promise.”
Cinn’s hand pulled the collar of Julien’s shirt to reveal his bare chest. “Your locket is missing,” he said, with panicked suspicion.
Yeah, and this isn’t even my shirt, and you’re buck naked. The clothing rules in this place seem pretty loose.
“It’s back at the hospital. Where we’re all waiting for you to wake up.”
“This is just another trick,” Cinn said, alarmed panic creeping into his voice, as he clutched at Julien’s shirt, holding it tightly. “You’re about to kill me. You’ve done that twice already. Kill me, or just leave me here alone forever.” His face crumpled in desperate fear, making Julien want to do anything in his power to make Cinn okay, to absorb his terror for himself .
Julien pressed his forehead against Cinn’s. “I’m not going to leave you. Ever. Not even if we have to live in this cave for the remainder of our days.”
A weak chuckle.
“We’ll eat maggots and grow our own weeds.”
Cinn’s mouth twitched upwards; he felt it under his fingertips.
“Darcy will be so impressed when we tell her.”
“Julien,” Cinn whispered, before crushing their lips together in a kiss so fierce, it was a collision of stars, an igniting of a wildfire of passion that bloomed blindingly bright. Julien savoured each press of Cinn’s mouth, each firm glide of his tongue, searing them into his memory, lest this be the last kiss he ever received.
“Cinn,” he protested weakly, pulling back. It seemed highly probable Cinn had some sort of memory loss, forgetting that he currently hated him.
An exhale of breath. “I’m just checking that you’re really real.” Cinn tangled his hand in Julien’s hair and tugged as if to test its legitimacy.
“And how’s that going for you?”
“Pretty well. There’s no way anything could imitate the way you kiss me.”
Julien stilled. “Which is?”
“Like you need me like air. Like you’ll never let me go. Like I’m everything.”
“You are, mon amour , you are.”
Cinn blinked at him, wide-eyed and fawn-like, a tiny smile blossoming on his lips. Julien ran his thumb over it. He swallowed before pressing a kiss to Cinn’s forehead. “Let’s get out of here.” Let’s get out of here so I can make you smile like that every day.
“I can’t just choose to leave. I’ve never been able to.”
“That umbraphage seemed to think you were Mr. Almighty Powerful. ”
At that moment, a tiny humming noise popped into existence. A shadowmote landed on Cinn’s nose.
“It’s you!” Cinn declared, going cross-eyed.
“There’s no way in hell you recognise one specific mote, Cinn.”
Cinn slid off the rock, landing with a soft thud. He held his palm upright, and soon there was a writhing ball of shadowmotes floating above it. With his other hand, he reached out and tugged Julien towards him. A soft blow of air later, Cinn had scattered his shadowmotes, who quickly multiplied and started circling them, enclosing them in the eye of a tornado.
“Are you… channelling them?”
Cinn shrugged. “They kinda do their own thing. I’m cool with it.”
As the shadowmotes picked up their pace, Julien reached for his own motes, if only to feel their power one more time. Instantly at his fingertips ready to be commanded, their bright white light illuminated the cavern.
“Woah!” Cinn almost stumbled back in shock, but Julien steadied him. “That’s new.”
With a flick of his wrist, Julien sent the motes spinning into Cinn’s shadow vortex. Merging together, the dark and light motes danced between each other, humming. Cinn slid his arm around Julien’s waist, and Julien tugged him closer and closer, pressing Cinn’s warm body against his until his head rested on his shoulder. The volume of the noise surged to a near deafening cacophony as the motes formed an increasingly tight whirlwind.
They clutched each other like they never wanted to let go. Like they were holding a piece of themselves. Flickering flames in a hearth, merging as one. Two puzzle pieces, slotting seamlessly together. Two wings of a bird. Two hands, bound in prayer. Two halves of a whole.
One shadow, and one light.