Chapter 15

“Read the…” Jennifer glanced around the open landscape surrounding her, “area…” She shrugged, she didn’t have the strength to be mad right now. The little bird Chirp, still possessed by his mother, hopped around the area a couple of times impatiently.

“The battlefield is literally a thirty-minute fly that way!” She pleaded.

“And how long of a walk do you think it’d be”? Jennifer chided, “Besides, I’m not going, I have to focus on finding James.”

“But you don’t even know where he is! What if he’s at the battlefield”? Squawk enticed, Chirp’s little bird mind focused intently on a blade of grass amidst the snow. Oddly enough Squawk was… half right. In her dream with Death Jennifer had heard music, ominous, beautiful music, the same music currently playing softly in her head. The realization occurred the second she left the hidey hole of Forms, the music played so faintly it was a stretch to even call it audible, but, after walking a little way in one direction the music began to slowly increase in volume. Curious and hoping she hadn’t gone mad, Jennifer began walking in a different direction and quickly realized the music was dying down. She had nothing else to go on, and it was Death that had given her the clue in the first place. She attempted to explain this to Squawk, but she just wrote it off as insanity, claiming it to be a thing humans just have from time to time.

“I don’t really care what you think, it’s the only lead I have and I’m going to follow it.” Jennifer declared, standing to her feet and shutting her eyes, attempting to grab a hold of the music.

“Or we could just go straight to him.” Squawk beeped offhandedly. Jennifer’s whole body tensed, shook and released. Her head rotated slowly accompanied by a series of creaking and popping sounds, a vein bulged from her neck.

“You know where he is”? Jennifer spoke each word slowly, calmly, a sweet smile on her face.

“Well duh,” Squawk chirped, back in her cave rolling her eyes, “I followed him after he left.”

“THEN WHY THE HELL DIDN’T YOU TELL ME THAT EARLIER!??!?” Jennifer screamed.

“Yeesh, quiet down Jennifer, you’ll bring the Deathless back,” Every ounce of will power went into Jennifer not strangling the little bird before her, again, only because the real bird in need of strangling wouldn’t wind up being strangled. The sound of her teeth grinding against each other could be heard from miles away. “I didn’t tell you because I thought you seemed to know where you were going, and I didn’t want to bother you, but then you told me about that ridiculous music thing and I realized you clearly had no clue what you were doing. So, I decided to help you, you’re welcome!” Jennifer had to remind herself to breath, she’d broken arms for less than this. As annoying as it may be though, Jennifer knew that, if Squawk could lead her to James, then she had to put up with the little bird, regardless of how strangelable she became.

“Fine Squawk,” Jennifer’s shoulders slumped, “take me to James.” Chirp’s head nodded up and down, his eyes relating that he was not the one choosing to do this, he then took to the skies and flew east. With a great sigh, Jennifer took off after him.

After a few minutes of walking Solaris finally reappeared, Jennifer would’ve liked to thank him and ask him how he managed to escape the Deathless, but she figured he’d need a mouth and ears to properly complete that particular task, neither of which he had.

As she walked, Jennifer found herself constantly staring up at the stars. Only months ago, she thought stars were nothing more than stories, but out here, walking beneath them, they seemed far more real than anything back home.

To entertain herself she picked out images within the stars, one of them a monster, the other a brave and handsome hero. She told a story to Solaris about them, even though he couldn’t hear any of it, a story about how the brave handsome hero was tasked to slay the monster, but the hero was too afraid to kill anything, much less a monster. The monster, his family in need of meat, tasked him to go to the village and bring a few humans back, but the monster didn’t like to eat humans, human fear made him sad. So, the monster hunted deer, chopped up the meat, and told his family that it was human, while the hero would go out, kill deer, and prop up their antlers on great piles of wood, throwing a cloak over it all and setting it alight in front of the other villagers, claiming it to be a monster he’d just slain. Inevitably the two met in the forest one evening, both believing they’d launched the fatal arrow into a deer. The monster tried to explain that it was in the human’s best interest that he takes the deer, but the human countered that it was in the monster’s best interest if he took the deer. The two argued back and forth and back and forth until they finally grew quite angry with the other. Tensions boiled over and the two exchanged blows, the monster gaining the upper hand until the young handsome hero drew his sword and struck the monster down. Ashamed of what he’d done, but excited that he no longer had to lie to the village, he brought the monster home, stuffed its head and hung it over the fireplace of the local tavern. After the monster didn’t return home, the family of the monster began to worry about their son and brother, so they decided to go out looking for him. Believing his lies about killing in the human village they began their search there. They snuck into the tavern only to find their dear brother and son stuffed and hanging over the fireplace, in anger they tore the village apart, burning every house, shop and tavern to the ground. The villagers took arms against the monsters and soon the two groups managed to wipe each other out, until only the young and handsome hero remained. Standing in the wreckage of his burning village he couldn’t help but wonder if he should have just let that monster have the deer…

Some people will tell you that they’ve felt evil. Some human instinct seems to allow you to enter an area and just know something is wrong, something is off and that you should not be there. What makes human beings even more interesting is, the stronger that feeling gets, the more they’ll want to stay. Jennifer, still following Chirp, climbed up an oddly placed crag and stood facing a dark landscape that, through the small amount of available light, told her this was no ordinary valley. She glanced over at Solaris, his little light shining peacefully beside her, apparently over his disappointment at her presence. She motioned toward the valley and began to speak, but stopped, considered it for a moment, began again, uttered a few syllables, stopped and then crossed her arms tightly and glared at the little ball of light. Finally she decided to just go for it,

“Could you light up that valley for me… Please”? The non-sentient star floated idly, not a single sign it had heard her, she felt really stupid, especially since she knew this would happen. Frustrated, Jennifer stared down the little light before snapping her hand over the light and gripping it lightly in her palm, like a child catching flies. The initial heat brought some deep, pained breaths from Jennifer’s nostrils, but she was surprised at how little heat there was, she’d expected her hand might burn off… Which made her wonder why she would ever do something as moronic as grabbing a star, but something told her it’d be alright. Solaris bobbed up and down within her hand, bouncing against her fingers and palms causing little burns wherever he landed. Tired of being burned in multiple places made the even brighter decision to squeeze down on the star and thus localize the pain to one spot. She froze as the light from within her hand shone outwards the moment she began to squeeze. Exploring the phenomenon a bit, Jennifer loosened and tightened her grip, watching in wonderment at the rising and fading of the light. To complete her experiment, she tightened her hand around Solaris as tight as she could muster, shielding her eyes with her free hand as the light from Solaris exploded. Jennifer’s reflex kicked in and she hurled the little star away from her into the valley. But Solaris never landed. At the peak of his arc, Solaris halted, hovering above the snow and maintaining his new level of brightness, enough brightness to light the whole valley.

Wondering if the lesson she should take away from this is violence solves all problems, Jennifer descended the now illuminated crag into the valley below. Crags, many nearly the size of mountains, punctured Adam’s surface, protruding from the crust like splinters in skin. The crags, contrary to Jennifer’s first impression, didn’t surround the valley, rather the valley contained the crags. The Terrain within the valley looked a lot like Jennifer’s hands after pulling the splintered harpoon from Meerous’ gills, great cuts plagued the ground, going to and from massive dips and rises of Adam, not an inkling of order to be found. The ground, covered in snow, hid any clues as to the odd structure Jennifer looked down into, it looked to her like the adam had thrown a tantrum, but knowing Adam that probably wasn’t the case, he was far too boring for tantrums. No, she thought, this was something else, this felt much too human, much too her…

After reaching the bottom of the crag and having a moment to look around, Jennifer began to notice strange white sticks of an unusual thickness and design poking out of the snow. Upon closer inspection Jennifer realized that these weren’t sticks, they were bones. Chirp landed on her shoulder and Squawks voice bellowed in her ear.

“See, I told you it was close!” She beamed. Jennifer took a moment to process what had happened, and, when it finally clicked, she threw her arm around and gripped Chirp tightly, the unassuming bird struggling desperately in her grip. Squawk’s voice, a calm contradiction to the petrified beak it emerged from, chirped in confusion,

“Jennifer, why are you strangling Chirp? You know he doesn’t appreciate that.” She scolded. Jennifer wrenched the little bird in front of her face and spoke slowly,

“Squawk, you told me we were after James and yet here we are in the very spot I told you I didn’t want to go. You lied to me and wasted my time, valuable time I could have been using to find James.” Squawk didn’t know which was colder, the freezing temperature or Jennifer’s tone…

“Well Jennifer, I didn’t really lie, I do know where James went and I’m going to take you there, but I figured taking a quick detour wouldn’t hurt. Why don’t you calm down and I can tell you all about this place and then we can go find James.” Squawk proposed without an inkling of remorse.

“No.” Squawk began to protest, but Jennifer stopped her, “I said no, and I meant it. Leave, fly away and don’t come back.”

“But I know where James is I ca-” Jennifer reared back her arm and chucked the terrified and confused Chirp back toward the crag and then she turned around and walked into the valley, her eyes closed in search of the music. Chirp managed to catch himself before the inevitable collision, and, fearing the angry human before him, Chirp took off, Squawk let him go.

The valley breathed through crumbling ravines strained and bitter breaths, bones lined the frozen landscape like burnt skin peeling off the flesh. The horrifying scene did not go unnoticed by Jennifer, who strode purposefully through the mass graveyard toward the opening on the other end, she found the image disturbing, but unimportant. She knew she needed to move, to make up for wasted time, to find James, then his brother, and then everything would be right again. Right… She paused at the word, chewing on it like a piece of rubbery chicken, desperate to swallow and be done with it, but it refused to go down.

A figure stood amidst the bones, he hadn’t been there a moment ago, once upon a time that would have rattled Jennifer, now she wondered who dared waste more of her time. The imposing figure of Adam loomed over the body of a particularly well-preserved corpse, its body chilled in ice and propped up, like a trophy on a mantel. Jennifer approached the Form cautiously, his demeanor giving her pause.

“Squawk brought you here”? Adam spoke, his eyes never wavering from the icy cadaver. Jennifer nodded, he wasn’t looking at her, but she knew he saw it. He chuckled, a humorless noise that somehow made the atmosphere more dismal. “She’s always trying to make things right that bird…” Jennifer’s eyebrow spasmed, refusing to raise without the other. Adam’s shoulders slumped as he brought a scarred hand over his face to rub his temples, “I’m guessing your history books don’t have anything on this do they”? He motioned toward the surrounding landscape. Jennifer shook her head, he chuckled again, “I thought as much… Your kind tried to kill me right here.” He paused to let the words sink in, by the look on Jennifer’s face he knew he’d succeeded. “Squawk told you about the offer right”? Another nod from Jennifer, “So you may imagine what they were after.” His voice remained calm, collected, as if he were recounting a story from a novel. Jennifer finally mustered the courage to speak,

“I-I’m sorry, for what they did to you… I know that may not mean much but-” Adam raised a hand to cut her off,

“I don’t blame them, I don’t blame myself either.” He turned toward her, his eyes locked onto hers, “I can tell by your face that you’re skeptical,” She turned away, “Don’t worry, centuries ago I was too. That bastard Time finally snapped me out of it, he said, ‘forgiveness and growth go hand and hand, both take time, both acknowledge some past injustice, some past failure, and both rest solely on you.’”

“What exactly happened…”? Jennifer wasn’t quite sure she wanted to know. Adam placed his hand on the preserved corpse and turned it toward Jennifer, the corpses’ face now eye to eye with her. A suit, dark and formal, adorned the body, a dark blue tie and brown loafers, hair a dark brown, coiffed perfectly over his brow, his eyes a bright green and his lips now a chilly blue. Two things immediately leapt out to Jennifer, the first being the large silver knife protruding from the man’s chest, a knife with a curved handle and a straight single sided blade, symbols of human conflict, diseased creatures, starved livestock and a decaying landscape, etched into the blade, whispered quietly to Jennifer, telling a story quite ancient and quite modern. But, despite the shock of the blade, it was the man’s pin froze Jennifer’s blood, flushed it all from her face, and her knees nearly gave out from under her, she was rendered utterly speechless. The man’s pin was an exact image of the tower back home.

“He’s… He’s from my town…” Jennifer choked out the words, the implications of this discovery burning a hole through her mind, every explanation she considered worse than the last. Adam nodded,

“That he is, and more than that, he was once your leader, president Eugene Watkins. Look at him now, a perfect example of where power grubbing gets you.” Adam seemed slightly less than aware of Jennifer’s existential crisis occurring right next to him, but he wouldn’t really care if he did. “You want to know what happened”? Jennifer barely managed to nod, “good, then get comfortable, this may take a while,”

“It all began with Time hundreds of thousands of years ago. Few know this, but Time actually used to be Death, as in the Death you’ve heard so many wonderful things about. Well… not really Death the person, but Death the job… I’m getting off track, the point is Time used to be responsible for human death as well as cosmic death. His brother Destiny tasked him to end human lives at a certain point and escort them back to the Book they came from. Problem became Time didn’t really like the job seeing as he had developed a certain love for humans so, instead of manning and up and just doing his damn job, he decided to create four children to do the job for him; Famine, Pestilence, Plague and War. Destiny wasn’t exactly thrilled about this decision, telling Time that he’d just sealed his own doom, telling him to undo it immediately, but Time refused. Destiny, knowing Time would suffer for this, left and took the Book with him, nobody’s heard from him since. Time on the other hand, went off into the cosmos after him, hoping to make amends or some nonsense.

“In Time’s absence though, those four Deaths began to grow restless, especially War. With the humans developing quicker and more efficient ways of killing each other by the day, War found himself more powerful than ever, powerful enough to murder his brothers and take on the position of the sole Death we know today. The knife he used to slaughter them became their final resting place, their souls etched into the very metal itself. Following Death’s birth came a thousand years of suffering the likes of which we once thought was impossible. Death rallied the humans to his side, taught them new and unique ways of killing and sent them after us, to roam and conqueror to their heart’s content.

“But Time finally returned after centuries of wasting time searching for his brother and confronted his kid. Time gave him a chance to recant, to fix all he’d broken, but Death refused. Left with no other options, Time did the only thing he could and struck Death down, knowing full well that meant he’d have to return to doing the job himself. After that we all believed the problem had been solved and things could return to normal, but life is never so simple. As Death lay dying, he raised up his weapon and drove it into his own chest, tying his spirit to the weapon forever.

“Unlucky for us, a human discovered the weapon, some seedy outcast who’d been driven from his home for some good reason I’ve forgotten, but trust me, he deserved it… What was I… Oh yeah, the weapon. The outcast found it in the woods and heard Death’s voice call out to him, offering him a chance to exact revenge on those that had hurt him. Death had become far too weak to force a convergence on the man, but, with the man’s willing permission, Death was able to syphon off a part of his own soul and place it into the man, slowly escaping from the weapon. Sadly for Death the man died before the process could even come close to finishing, so Death needed another solution. What he hadn’t counted on is the effect tying his soul to humanity would have and, as the man died, a child was born in a village across the ocean, a child bearing part of Death’s soul. The child grew up and made his way to the weapon, his heart crying out to it, and, once he found it, the process continued.

“Generations upon generations passed, Death reincarnating over and over again, his soul slowly receding from the weapon and making its way back into a human Form. All this time slowly manipulating the empires of man, growing them, merging them, developing them into weapons for his end game. When he believed he’d done enough, and his soul finally merged fully with a human being, he rallied the armies of man and the Forms they’d captured or forced into the offer, he rallied Forms that I’d made enemies of, and he set them against me, promising them that the very ground beneath them would serve them. The humans were unaware that it was Death who lead them, but Time knew, he’d watched all of this from afar, hoping that Death may still repent. Death lied, murdered, and betrayed his way to the top of the current leading empire, the capital of which was your home Jennifer.

“With great airships they rained hell upon me, and, with only a few Forms brave enough to stand with me, I found myself quickly overwhelmed. After watching the fury and ferocity of the assault, we all knew whose work this was. The battle continued for weeks, the humans taking refuge in the floating city, just out of my reach, continually bombarding me with explosives strong enough to level mountains, leaving me no time to rest. Eventually I grew tired, weak, and unable to fight back. Every Form that had stood with me had either died, accepted the offer, or fled into the sanctuary I’d made for them, and I stood to face Death alone. This man you see here stood before me, the weapon you now see protruding from his chest, raised above him, poised to strike me down, when time froze.

“Time had witnessed the carnage and figured his kid was beyond saving, so he finally decided to step in. The battlefield, frozen in time save for me and Time himself was probably the strangest sight I’d ever seen. Time approached the man you see before you and began crying for the kid, wishing things had gone differently.

“But Death had been clever, far more clever than any of us had given him credit for. Time had focused everything on the man he assumed to be Death, the man holding the weapon and leading the army, but this man is not and never was Death. Hiding amongst the common foot soldiers, Death slowly broke free from Time’s control and snuck up behind him and drove the real weapon through his heart. Victorious, Death burst into psychotic laughter and began slaughtering everyone in sight, beginning with the man you see before you. He took the fake weapon, a forgery so perfect that it fooled Time himself, and drove it through the fake death’s chest. Time, barely alive and carried by Life, retreated with the rest of the surviving humans toward the city you call home. With the last of his strength surrounding it in a bubble of Time, slowing everything down to the point where time stops being relevant. I don’t know if he’s even still alive in there, all I know is that he’s no use to anyone now.

“Death, his weapon now possessing the very power of Time itself, declared himself ruler over all the cosmos, enslaved every surviving human unlucky enough not to make it to your city with Time, and turned them into the Deathless. He forced the world into the endless twilight it was, began the blizzard and promised swift Death to anyone who attempted to change any of it.

“I opened up my sanctuary to any Form who needed it, and soon even the cosmic Forms like Helios and my father took refuge. Death had taken to the stars in search of Destiny, clearly not satisfied with there being another being out there that could challenge him.

“I thought that was it… My job had become simply to preserve the last of my kind and I accepted I’d probably die doing it. But James, that guy… He reminded me of what Time’d told me and I…” Tears began to form in the man’s eyes, “I can’t make myself hate you, I was tasked to carry you, but I continue to do it because… because you all are something special. Jennifer, do you know why I’m telling you all this”? Jennifer shook her head slowly. “I want you to know the truth, and I don’t care what you do with it, just do something okay? That’s the thing I love most about you humans, you always manage to turn things around.”

“Th-this isn’t my burden… NONE OF THIS WAS MY FAULT!” Jennifer screamed, a broken wale reverberating across the empty graveyard and heard only by the dead and defeated. Falling to her knees, surrounded by the bones of her ancestors she relinquished every tear within her until she held nothing left. A strong arm wrapped around her shoulder, a voice neither friendly nor accusing spoke plainly in her ear,

“Jennifer, you owe me nothing, you owe them nothing. I don’t blame you, I never did. The question isn’t what MUST you do, but what WILL you do”? The question went unanswered, Jennifer had no answer and Adam didn’t need one, he’d made his peace in his soul, she’d only begun learning the depths of the storm within her’s. Jennifer wrenched the knife from the corpses’ chest and did the only thing she knew how to do, she stumbled back into the storm.