Story:The End of Eternity/E3

 III 

Cold winds blew throughout the air, but Arend did not feel them at all. He stood atop a small hill, overlooking the country before him and taking in every inch of its blackened plains and ruined ground. As was normal for every large city, the surrounding land had been sterilized and destroyed in preparation for further growth, and aside from a few feet outside the city limits, miles and miles of dead land lay around in the horizon. The setting of the sun painted the sky in a brilliant red and orange as night quickly came, and before long, the frontiers of the city were empty deserts of nothingness.

The Collapse had changed everything, and destroyed what wasn’t able to adapt. The land had been one of these things that couldn’t get used to the new rules of existence, and had been wiped out within days. The human race was one of the few living species that had survived, and it was only through the ingenuity of current science and intelligence that they managed to squeeze out what resources they had from the dead world they inhabited.

That was why a huge majority of the world’s population lived in gigantic cities spread throughout the countries of the world. The very fact that countries even continued to exist were proof that humans, as hardy and adaptable as they proved themselves to be, were unable to leave behind everything of the past. America, Russia, Portugal, England… These places still existed, but in name alone. The government was the same everywhere, as was the human condition. Where nations and regions may have had unique landscapes and customs were now living fossils, skeletons of previous prosperity that humanity had taken refuge in. Besides wastelands, desert, and arid beaches, there wasn’t much else to see anymore. The world was uniformly barren.

There was no difference between any of these places.

Arend turned and began to walk back towards the sprawling city. He did not completely remember when or why he had left the metropolis and decided to walk towards the dead plains, but he had not bothered to walk any further into them and simply stood entranced in watching the stagnant landscape for almost an hour, until the sun began to set. The frontier was one large plain of unremarkable, arid land, and traveling into it without any sort of navigation would spell certain and eventual death. He was not yet ready to die.

He did not remember how long ago it was that he went for his first day of school, nor how long he had been in the city, but it wasn’t more than a few weeks. The amount of time it took for the city to become monotonous and generic was abysmally small. Just as before, the landscape soon melted into a drab prison of gray and black, an oppressively modern labyrinth for him to map out and rediscover every day.

School was something he attended on a whim, and his studies were only indulged in when he was pressed, hard. No other students associated with him, and it was rare for the boy to speak in class. The only thing that held his interest in the useless social construct was the view from his first period class.

The atmosphere had darkened before long, and the boy found himself wandering the streets as always. Idly, his hand went to the golden pen he kept in his pocket. He had more than a few pairs of the school’s uniform and he took to wearing it always, but the pen was always in his pocket no matter which outfit he wore. The gift from his classmate was something he found unexpectedly endearing. Something about it and the odd weight it held made him think it was flawed or otherwise extraordinary, but he could never focus on exactly what it was that caused this.

In the midst of his thoughts, Arend idly noticed a figure run in front of him and turn into an alley. Just before he saw this, he had involuntarily let out a yawn and had decided that he would return home and go to sleep. Normally, he would have simply looked after the blur of a person, blink at them, and return to his business. That was usually what he did when encountering people; it would not have been out of character for him.

That was not what he did this night.

Arend was not himself sure why he decided to follow the person who had obviously been running in a rush. There were no nearby police sirens nor people running after the person, so they were not being chased, and it was unlikely that they were chasing someone else, because he would have seen them first. As if justifying his decision to himself, Arend thought these strings of thought to himself as he began to walk at a fast pace with one hand in his pocket and followed the running person.

These justifications, he knew, were simply a farce, and he didn’t even believe the lies he was telling himself. For the first time in his life, Arend felt a force compelling him to act that was different from the destiny and fate he believed in. What was happening to him wasn’t something that simply should or would be, but was rather a situation that he was suddenly being thrust in.

The person he was chasing led him through slums and dark, quiet streets throughout the limits of the city. They climbed up fire escapes, ran through buildings, and even slipped into a few windows. Arend did not recognize a lot of where he ran through but was able to navigate himself sufficiently by simply following the person he was pursuing at a safe distance. They did not notice him following them for a single moment.

Before long, Arend’s prey had finally stopped running and broke into an abandoned lot through a dilapidated fence. Off in the horizon, the constant groanings and goings-on of the cityscape continued as always, but were a far-off afterthought at the moment. Arend slipped through the fence and followed the person into a tall and abandoned-looking building with many smoking chimneys.

Once inside, Arend stood still in the foyer of the building, which descended immediately down a short flight of stairs and emptied into an unremarkable floor that took up the entire surface of the building. Much of the expansive floor was cloaked in complete darkness, but the center of the floor was illuminated by a large circle of candles, which was itself surrounded by a multitude of people identical to the person that Arend had been following.

As this person dashed down the stairs and slowed their pace to enter the circle, Arend realized that they wore the uniform of the school he went to, as did every other person in attendance. As his pursuer entered the circle, every one of the ten people standing together took black ski masks off their faces at the same time, revealing all of them to be fairly young looking boys.

From his position, Arend was not invisible, but one of the boys in the circle would have to crane their neck upward to see him. On the other hand, he could see down to the circle quite clearly, but couldn’t exactly see what they were looking at – for they all turned and looked into the darkness in front of them – because of the slanted ceiling that started a few feet in front of the elevated foyer that he stood at. For the moment, he decided to stay where he was and simply watch the conference that he had stumbled upon.

It soon became obvious that the boys were starting some ritual that befitted the dark environment they were taking residence in. After a few minutes of muttering to themselves in tones that were too quiet for Arend to overhear, one of the boys pulled at a string that hung from the ceiling. The warehouse’s lights shuddered on with an audible click, revealing a gruesomely decorated area around the boys’ circle. The floor was filled with red circles, blood stains, skulls, and ten thrones on each side of the expansive area. As the lights came on, the boys went to their thrones with rehearsed speed, save for the boy who had pulled the light string.

Now the boy in the middle spoke with a loud voice as his companions had moved a considerable distance away from him. Arend could hear him clearly. Even though the lights were brightly lit now, he still stood unnoticed. As cruel and disgusting as the warehouse had revealed itself to be, he still looked upon the scene with a barely perturbed face and blank, empty eyes.

“Friends. Comrades. Fellow Revolutionaries. We’ve found it. We’ve finally found it.” The boy standing still, who spoke with the confidence, volume, and assurance of a leader, was facing forward and staring right into the darkness. Arend began to wonder what he was looking at, but wasn’t going to leave his hiding place just yet. Something urged him against it, but he couldn’t exactly pinpoint the feeling.

“Thanks to Darius, Lentus, and I, our sun shall shine again and the world will be plentiful once more. The dreams we’ve all had – the wonderful illusions of verdant greenery, of plentiful and prosperous people, of a sky that doesn’t blotch grey from smoke – will be illusions no more. It is just as we prophesized, and just as he all hoped. Our Key has fallen right into our hands.” The silence around the room was palpable.

The leader twirled and looked to every throne in turn, staring down the members of his odd club. “The utopia is at hand, friends. But as anxious as I am – as we all are – to unchain that which holds our freedom, it is completely inconceivable that we do so without the proper sacrifices. After all – we are the Cavaliers. What else have we been preparing for all these years together in this level of purgatory?” The question, as ever before, went unanswered. When he finished looking at every member sitting on the throne, the leader looked back into the darkness and raised his arm. “Well then, comrades. The goats, please.”

Everyone who was sitting on their throne immediately stood and, reaching from behind their chair, pulled out a heap of red and white in their arms, and everyone carried them towards the leader. When they had all gathered in a circle, as they were before, they dropped the bundles onto the floor, and they all landed with a deep squelch on the cold metal floor. It was then that Arend realized that they were all holding bodies, human bodies. The white he had seen was from their skin; the red from their blood.

After being so unceremoniously dumped onto the ground, the bodies began to stir, moan, and awaken. Arend moved a step down quietly and squinted; he could clearly see that the “goats” were in fact little, naked girls. Every single one of them had a head wound of some kind, which had bled all over their bodies. In addition, they were tightly bound and gagged. Their muted screams quickly permeated the dark room.

Arend could do nothing but stare at the situation with slightly widened eyes. His hands, still in his pockets, clenched tightly onto a fist and the golden pen. As always, he could only watch, not act. There was nothing he could do to prevent this sin from happening, just as always. He was helpless.

The leader of the group, who had since raised his hands and started to chant in a language Arend could not understand, raised his voice slowly so that he could always be heard over the children’s mummed screams. As some point, he must have said some signal phrase, for every one of the boys standing around him brandished a sharp knife from their pockets and stabbed downwards uniformly, immediately killing every single one of the girls with one precise strike.

This was a practiced, ritual killing.

Every sound stopped as the girl’s screaming all stopped at the same time. The boys who had done the murders stayed where they were, all kneeling over the fresh corpses, as the leader slowly lowered his arms. He was still staring right in the darkness. When he spoke, his previously confident and assured voice was shaking and unstable.

“Finish it, my friends. Finish it, so that we may finish everything.” The boys, spurred on by his command, all lifted their knives from the bodies. Finally breaking their rehearsed uniformity, they began to stab ruthlessly and independently, over and over, until every one of them were filthy with the blood of the girls. Rather, the blood of their sacrifices.

Finally, when the deeds were all done, the boys stood up and dropped their knives, one by one. The leader, whose back was now splashed throughout with red, snapped his fingers, and every boy turned until they were looking at the darkness alongside him.

“Let the blood of the past soak in our bones, brothers. When the end comes, everything will be cleansed, including ourselves. Now, let our savior know who we are – who the harbingers of the future are. Let the world know!” Slowly, every boy began to belt out a name, their own names. They were going in a proud roll call with not an ounce of trepidation over what they had done.

Arend felt a tugging in his body, an assurance that this was a chance he had to take. Whatever it was that they were staring what, whatever it was they sacrificed human lives for, was something he had to see. His fingertips, previously white-hot from his nervous clenching were burning – scratching, yearning for what lay in the unknown beyond. He wondered, for a brief moment, if everything he had ever done was a set-up for this very moment, and a moment after that, he knew that this was the truth.

As the boys spoke their names, he went down the stairs, slowly, carefully, so as to not be detected and killed like the girls he had witnessed. As the leader gave his name and the roll-call ended, Arend had left the stairs and was a mere few steps behind all of the boys, staring and watching with peeled eyes at what they had all be staring at.

There, right in the middle of the floor, sat a girl, one like Arend had never seen before. She was sleeping in her sitting position, and she sat atop a tall throne of unrecognizable material, a type of stone that Arend had never seen before and would never see again. How the boys had managed to drag the throne into the warehouse, and where they had found it, Arend couldn’t imagine. The tall seat’s back rose about 12 feet in the air, and every inch of it was pitch black and covered with red words – no, red symbols. Whatever they were, they weren’t English, and they were completely indecipherable. It was impossible to tell if these words were etched into the throne, or merely written, but they seemed to glow on the black backdrop as if they were pulsating with light. Porcelain white chains wrapped around the entire throne and snaked around almost every inch of the girl except for her face, which looked incredibly peaceful and at ease.

What was more amazing than the throne was the girl sitting in it. She attracted attention from her mere existence, because the more one looked at her, the less they could believe that she was actually real. Although she was sleeping quite heavily to have not woken from the screams earlier, her face was incredibly peaceful and didn’t even seem to be moving, nor did her chest, although it was admittedly obscured by the big chains over her. The girl’s face was extremely pale, so much so that it seemed to reflect light and shine in an opaque way, and the only things marring her otherwise perfect face were the deep black bags – no, perhaps scars were more accurate descriptions – that started below her eyes and trailed down her thin cheeks. Her hair, pulled back from her face with the help of a red hairband made of the same strange material as the throne, was as black as her seat and was extremely long. It trailed down from her head, down to her seat, and even past that to the floor. It was so plentiful that it didn’t even look real. None of it did, not the throne, or the completely white girl, nor the tight white bodysuit she wore that was the same shade as the chains. Everything about her was wrong, but she was just so astoundingly beautiful that Arend couldn’t figure out exactly what was wrong with her.

He had never been the type to find anybody beautiful, not when they as humans committed so much sin that their hearts completely marred any attractiveness they had on the outside. Arend had always been a firm believer that was not only asexual but a very severe form of aromantic, as well. Relationships meant nothing to him; beauty was a concept he did not believe in.

But this girl defied all of that. She was incredible, to say the least.

Just looking at her filled him with a warmth that he had never experienced. It was, he realized with despair, a form of blinding hope, as if he had found the solution to all his problems. All of this from a sleeping girl trapped on a throne of unknown origin.

Both Arend and the leader of the club took a silent step forward. As they did so, the girl’s eyes opened, and they both froze in place. Her eyes were an unnatural golden, bright and burning right into both of their souls. They were barely opened, and looked at them abstractly, but they had a terrifying quality of omniscience. She had the eyes of one who saw everything. Arend had only seen that before in mirrors.

She spoke, and every single one of them wanted to scream.

“What has humanity amounted to?”

The level and completely calm, almost soothing, voice of the girl was laced with a painful despair and a heart-wrenching pain. In that moment that she spoke, her lips barely moving, if at all, everyone in the room felt what seemed like years and years of agony, stabbing through their bodies and sacrificing them in the face of the unknown. Nobody knew how to react, and they all looked at her with terror. Even Arend.

The chains, once so constricting and tight, fell off with a loud clatter and the girl stood with barely any effort at all. “Why have you awoken me?” There was that pain again; the boys were all driven to their knees, all except Arend. They were so caught up in their agony that they didn’t even notice him standing behind then. But she did. She noticed them all, and looked at every single one of them with the most extreme hatred, the most scathing disgust, the most painful disappointment. In her eyes they saw the combined measures of their sin, and they screamed.

She took a step forward, her bare feet barely covered by the tight white bodysuit that she wore. Her limbs were skinny but her body shapely, all curves perfect and almost artificially constructed. She spoke again, and they all felt her words in their brains, in their ears, resonating in every molecule that formed their existence. “Do you find that the stars have aligned for you? Can you bring the future to the present?” Her words, delivered in a confident yet pained tempo that was like nothing any of them had heard before, were innocently inquisitive and damning.

The boys struggled with their bodies, all sensitively aware of gravity pushing on them and her words crushing them. They wanted to answer her, to proclaim that they were indeed, that they wanted to use her and summon the future to the world they were all ashamed to live in, but something was holding them all back. Something about the girl was denying their body’s functions, shaming them into wanting to die and hating everything about their existence. Her eyes were cold, so cold.

Only one of them still stood, body struggling with the weight of her words and her gaze. She looked at him with what could have been curiosity, but was objectively undetectable. Her final phrase, spoken in rivulets that crashed over all of them like a tide, was too much for all of the boys in the club, and after she delivered it, they all turned to one another and choked each other to death.

“Shall we begin the annihilation of the world?”

Arend was instantly filled with a feeling of unprecedented bliss. Hundreds and thousands of colors, most of them unknown and unlabeled in his mind, flashed across his eyes, his being, all of his body’s nerves temporarily overwhelmed by untraceable, interstellar stimuli. Whatever she was saying sounded like an aria from heaven; her meanings elevated him to the status of a star; he could have picked off an atom from himself and looked at it without another thought in that moment. All of humanity was a game, he saw, and the time had come for the game to end. He opened his mouth, which was previously curled into a dumb smile, and his once clenched eyes now opened to show his eyes staring blissfully at nothing.

“Yes.”

Although he couldn’t see, nor could he understand any of what his five senses were telling him, he saw the woman step forward and walk over the corpses of the boys, and knew that she held out her graceful, perfectly slim hand. She stopped in front of him, her hand reaching out, calling for him.

“Then let’s begin.”

The sheer power of the woman in front of him, communicated entirely through signals he was not born to understand, slammed into his every molecule and threatened to erase him from existence. She was so much greater than him in every fashion, he knew without knowing. It felt as if he were an ant looking out at a human reaching for him, to pluck him from the ground, to smash him into dust with just a thought and an effortless movement of the fingers. He was completely entranced, however, and greeted this with a smile and a hand of his own.

He didn’t remember grabbing the pen, nor did he feel its weight in his hands, but he suddenly grew aware of its presence when he held onto the girl’s hand. They both looked at the pen with surprise, but the shock didn’t last long for Arend. As soon as his skin touched hers, his head was thrown back and blood rushed to his twitching, constantly moving eyes. He saw everything and nothing; eternity and the void. The contract he had formed was one that he would never forget, could never let go of, because it rushed into his veins. He was wrought with white-hot burning pain, ripping and tearing and cutting and destroying everything that he was before rebuilding him and doing it again, subjecting him to an eternity of pain in less than an instant, and he could only feel it with an open mouth and widened eyes. Then came the hope, an imperceptible feeling in his heart that the end was near and that he should welcome it, and then it was over.

He let go of the girl’s hand and fell to his knees, struggling to breath, blindsided by the sudden lack of feeling in his body. All of the sensations he had been feeling, all of the crushing fear and existential terror that had been induced by the girl’s mere presence had vanished. He was normal again, and all the pain was gone, and he was still alive. Arend looked at his trembling hands in disbelief before looking up to the girl. She stood where she was, just as before, except she was looking down at him and the pen was in her hands. Her eyes, once morbidly curious and disgusted, seemed to glint for a second with relief.

As soon as their eyes met, she turned and pointed the pen towards where her throne was. As soon as she did so, all of the white words on the throne began to glow with a red light, and in a soundless explosion, the throne and the chains and the words vanished and were reformed.

The black material of the throne peeled from its rightful place and rushed through the air like a fish in the sea, and coated her, covering her body and changing her suit to a sleek black shade. The red words slammed onto her once her suit was a uniform black, forming and hardening on her face, shoulders, hips, wrists, and chest, adorning her with a celestial armor that defied logic. And finally, the white chains that were surrounding her until now, like leaves in a storm, began to twirl around her hair and in a defiance of logic began to merge with it. Before Arend’s very eyes, the girl’s previously black hair instantaneously shifted to a striking silver.

She turned once again, and now he could see that the once golden pen had also undergone a change, and it was an extremely long sword with an elongated handle and an off-grey blade color. As he looked at it in wonder, the thin blade elongated and extended from the back of the golden hilt, as well. At its final state, the sword was taller than him or the girl, but it was as thin as a spear and she seemed to have no trouble wielding it as lightly as one would hold a pencil. He knew, then, why its weight was perfect. Arend reached out to the hilt of the sword and felt its weight as he used it as a handhold to stand. It was no heavier than the pen ever was.

Now that the two were standing together, and her metamorphosis had apparently completed, the girl looked up to Arend and they were both silent. Arend was breathless, not just because of the situation but at the incredible beauty of the girl. As they looked in each other’s eyes, her hard gaze seemed to melt, and what once shone as hatred became a blinding light of hope, love, and relief. A slight smile tugged at the girl’s lips, which were as pale and pink as the rest of her skin.

“I’ve been waiting so long to meet you, Master.”