Chapter 36 - Breakthrough: Second Layer

The three bloodied, battered and bruised survivors argued on for almost a half hour longer after Skyle’s declaration. Surprisingly, it wasn’t about whether they should enter the Black Zone or not. That seemed to be a given at this point.

For one, Leon had never been one to run from a fight, and he didn’t seem inclined to start such a trend now. As for Leena, she had been confined in this realm far away from her home and her people for years. At this point, she seemed willing to risk anything, even a venture into the terrifying depths of the forbidden Black Zone.

Thus, it would have fallen to Skyle, the cool, more rational and methodical minded in this trio, to put up any objections about walking into a death zone. However, as he was the one who had actually proposed the idea in the first place, there was no longer a question as to whether they would go or not. Instead, the argument had centered around the approach they would take.

Leon wanted to go right away, at first light. He argued that they had created a big distraction on their way out, something to do with a massive army of soldiers and giant cats right in the middle of the Black Zone. Leena had balked at first, but seeing the serious look on Leon’s face, she had set her doubts aside. Instead, she had pushed forth her own opinion even more forcefully.

Leena was of the opinion that they should stop by the Greenwood clan in order to resupply, gather intel and thus better plan and equip themselves for the deadly perils of the Black Zone. She was adamant that she wanted to accompany them, and that she would pull her own weight in the venture, serving as both guide and servant if need be. In her near frantic insistence that she be allowed to join, Skyle could detect the ragged edges of desperation, of having been exiled and struggling for survival in a foreign soil for too long.

Left unspoken was the one point that stuck out like a sore thumb and no one could ignore. Skyle turned his eyes upon Emil, who lay slumped in one corner of the tree, oblivious to the hot debate he’d sparked and snoring through tear-streaked cheeks full of grime.

The small, defenseless boy couldn’t accompany the expedition to the Death Zone, and of course, Leena had been the first to point out this fact. She wanted to drop Emil off with his relatives in the safety of the Greenwood Clan. Leon, in the other hand, had surprisingly argued for taking the boy with them.

Even Skyle had been surprised at this. After all, he suspected Leon was not nearly as callous and uncaring as the young lord strove so hard to pretend to be. Still, taking this small boy would not only hamper their own activities, it would mean putting the child through grave peril for no other reason than whatever perceived advantages their added haste would grant.

Eyeing his friend sideways with a pondering look, Skyle wondered if there was something more to Leon’s stubborn refusal to visit the Greenwood clan.

In the end, no decision could be reached and as the argument slowly scaled up into a shouting match with Skyle as the unwilling, unwitting mediator, the young boy had finally put an end to it by suggesting that they lay this matter to the side so that everyone could rest, freshen their minds and reach a decision come first light.

Leon now stood watch, perched upon a branch at the edge of their improvised camp, such as it was, on top of a majestic tree. Leena lay huddled on one corner with Emil in clingling tightly to her side, though from the vibrancy of her aura Skyle could tell she had not managed to fall asleep yet. Even deep as she lay within the yawning maw of exhaustion, Skyle could see the deep turmoil of the traumatizing ordeals Leena had gone through today in the ugly chaos of her elemental aura.

Skyle shook his head. She was not the only one who wouldn’t get any rest this night, he reflected, glancing down at his own trembling hands. Skyle had used some improvised bandages to wrap the raw flesh exposed under the peeling flaps of skin on his fingers and wrist. Moonshadow was an unforgiving weapon, both for its victims as well as its wielder. This did not come as a surprise to Skyle. Through some art which Skyle could not fully understand, the bow managed to compress a far greater power into each arrow than should be possible, given Skyle’s own limited strength and reach. There was always a price to pay for power, his father had told him numerous times, and Moonshadow seemed to exemplify this. The masterwork bow’s great arms seemed to shimmer under the night sky, and any hints of the blood splattered on it earlier were gone as though they’d never been there in the first place.

That was Skyle’s own blood, of course. Each shot with Moonshadow was a test of not only skill and endurance, but willpower, as Skyle tested the strength and resiliency of his own body, and found them far too wanting in the task of mastering this formidable weapon. Thus, the only remedy was to bridge this gap with his own flesh and blood.

So, that was exactly what he had done.

Each terrifying shot had come with a price, as the taut bowstring continued to chew hungrily into his arm, even protected as it was by a strip of leather Skyle had improvised to wrap around his wrist. For every arrow sent soaring through the sky, an accompanying splash of blood had followed from his own fingertips, where the soft callouses, unused to being strained to such extremes, had already burst and given way to the tender, raw flesh beneath.

Now, with all the hatred and fury long spent, all Skyle was left with was the dull, throbbing pain. The small boy welcomed this pain, focusing on every minute wave of fire it sent through his body. This was not because Skyle enjoyed the pain itself, but he knew the alternative would be infinitely worse.

His hands ached and stung, but that was nothing, less than insignificant. His soul, in the other hand, was alight, burning in a pyre of guilt and horror at the deeds he’d witnessed this day, let alone those he himself had committed. With the swift urgency of survival and the blinding surge of vengeance all spent, Skyle was left alone in his own head with the demons his own tortured conscience conjured up as a vast, unending horde.

Far better to focus all his attention on this lesser pain, that of his raw, bleeding flesh than to turn his consideration to the savaged depths of his own soul.

Unfortunately, the capacity of the human body to withstand and adapt to pain never failed to surprise Skyle. It did not disappoint in this instance either, as the ache in his hands gradually faded into a numb echo of its earlier intensity. The bandages had stopped leaking blood, and he knew this momentary stopgap measure to deal with his tortured conscience was at an end.

So, Skyle did the only responsible thing any twelve year old child would do in such circumstances: he looked for the next door leading the hell out.

It was then when Skyle remembered the deep silence and disembodied serenity he’d been able to achieve in one particular place, even as scared and desperate as he’d been when both boys had just made their escape from the soldiers’ camp.

With barely a flicker of a glance towards Leena, Skyle surreptitiously reached within the folds of his clothes and removed an object carefully wrapped in cloth. Unwrapping it with obvious care, Skyle gazed down at a tattered journal, that of Fierro Latimus’ final legacy.

With an almost casual flicker of will, Skyle was now able to shift his gaze into the True Sight, which instantly made the myriad symbols and patterns etched into the seemingly random and tattered pages of Fierro’s journal spring to life.

As Skyle’s focus narrowed into the scintillating patterns of the arcane script, perhaps it was the small boy’s resolute single-mindedness as he desperately sought any escape from his burning conscience. Or maybe it was the constant use of the Infinite Eye and its first layer, Gazing Far as Though Near. Regardless of the reason, Skyle found it even easier to sink into the meditative trance than the last time he had done so.

Once again, his consciousness sank through layers of darkness, until he was surrounded by a vast void. However, the lights he remembered from last time had now multiplied, from a mere handful to several dozen now. They roamed in a great circle around Skyle’s own ball of awareness, glimmering brightly in a dazzling burst of colors through the dark.

At first, Skyle was lost to this beautiful spectacle, but he quickly brought himself to his senses, remembering that his time in this realm was limited and he should make the best of it while he still had the energy to persist.

Immediately, Skyle turned to one of the biggest clusters of light and activated his Infinite Sight. The first layer had been used extensively by him, so by now it came very naturally to Skyle. To his surprise, he found that his perception was able to follow the azure ball of light he had chosen with much more ease than before. As the light reached a distance that approached the 400 meter limit that Skyle had been able to achieve the last time with great effort, he wondered at the fact that it was still barely a strain to him now.

As he pondered on this fact, the light continued to float away, slowly but steadily, as though guiding him, almost coaxing him to follow it. At the 500 meter mark, Skyle finally realized with a start what the difference had been. Before, he had been trying to follow the light with his sense of sight alone, as though the Infinite Eye were merely a means to enhance his visual percetion. However, within this dark void Skyle didn’t even have any eyes, let alone any means to physically see. These clusters of light then, and the Infinite Eye which allowed him to follow their journey through the dark, must represent something else entirely.

This time, Skyle had inadvertently used the new fusion of his True Sight along with the Infinite Eye which he had been using to aim and fire his arrows. This heightened sense of awareness, Skyle finally began to realize, went far beyond what his physical sense of sight was able to reveal to him. His eyes, after all, couldn’t read the currents of wind, or the elemental flows of energy at such a great distance. Not his physical eyes, that is.

This fusing of awareness to become one with the object of his scrutiny, it went beyond a simple enhancement of his eye’s ability to see. The concept of Gaze Far as Though Near did not mean he could bring objects that were distant closer to himself to better examine them. Instead, he realized with a moment of thunderous inspiration, he was sending out his own awareness to encompass and merge with the object of his will. This was the true essence of the first layer of the Infinite Eye.

As soon this epiphany struck him, the azure ball of light Skyle had been following abruptly stopped moving, and instead began to expand and flash with a blinding light, as though it were secretly celebrating and rejoicing at Skyle’s newfound insight. Then, in an instant too fast to even perceive the shift in perspectives, Skyle was no longer a mere ball of consciousness floating in a vast sea of darkness. Instead, he found himself floating and swirling in the air, deep azure light cascading all around him as he gazed at a small ball of light pulsing with a dim, muted glow in the distance.

“What is this? What just happened? I was gazing at the azure light and suddenly..”

Shock coursed through his mind like a bolt of lightning as Skyle finally realized he had become the azure light, and was now gazing down at the ball of light that Skyle had previously identified himself to be. A torrent of strange images and unidentifiable streaks of information flashed past his mind so quickly that he was simply overwhelmed, unable to cope with even the tiniest drop of that vast flood that had brushed past his mind.

“Se.. second layer? Gaze Near as Though Far?”

In that one moment, just as Skyle struggled to cope with the consequences of this unexpected advance, his world finally exploded into a world of azure light, then he knew nothing but absolute darkness.