CHAPTER 1 SHE SAW A SAGA IN HIM

Teara awoke and Heavens was there. It felt so long since she’d seen him. Her deep sleep nearly convinced her. She sprung off her seat, tears sticking pages to her cheek, stumbling over the piles of work she had drowned herself in. How deeply she’d dared to dream. What success she had achieved. In her moments of greatest need before she’d had it all when he was there for her most. And here he was still, sweeping, organizing, and brewing coffee in the corner of the study as if it were just another moonrise. She watched him in stunned amazement until she tapped her cheek and realized it was running black.

“You’re here.”

Heavens opened the window, ushering in moonlit winds to sweep their apartment and papers. “You’re awake.”

The boy’s features were angelic. Pointed ears. Umber hair. Sleepy cinnamon eyes. The moment their gazes linked the girl saw a saga, her reflection in his own. A pearly face with a ruby stare and unyielding umbral brows. Behind her trailed a river of midnight hair.

“I dreamt, perhaps I still dream.” Teara held her breath, thinking. “Were you watching me? Or was I watching you? Sometimes I wonder, which one of us, the dreamer is.”

“Neither. I try to keep my eyes on you when no one else does. Wouldn’t want another train crash.”

A time only Heavens remembered. They were souls. No different from the rest of the bodiless natives of The Fleeting City of Dreams. They’d been involved in a train accident of some kind. No scars or wounds to keep the memory and reason. Only forgetfulness. They had no way of even knowing how old they were now. The advantages of a body and a brain were many. That’s why Teara was building their own with Jyll’s help. A revolutionary invention inspired by her dreams of Heavens.

Though only Heavens remembered the trauma, Teara carried the aftermath. That it was possible if she was injured, she’d cease being who she was. That was a small fear by comparison to the one that always crossed her mind.

What if Heavens forgot her?

What if Teara forgot him?

They’d be lost souls. Teara couldn’t let that happen. That’s why she wrote instead. She wrote for the next Teara. The one that might remember this one. She held out her hand.

Heavens drew out of himself Emotion crystallized into a stained-glass quill. Crimson and gold. Such was the texture of what Heavens felt. What that was only the depths of her diary knew. He placed the quill in her hand. Teara dipped it into her inkwell and began writing her quickly fading dream.

Heavens sat next to her, blank-faced at the city. “Nightmares are nicer than dreams. They’re easier to wake up from. They don’t leave you wanting to go back. Only relief remains.”

Teara spoke some of what she wrote. “Both are inspiration for your Heavenly Body. That world where souls don’t exist. That world humans call Earth. Where Emotions don’t react with reality. Where feelings are no more than a chemical byproduct of what people label as evolution and circumstance.” She looked to the sarcophagus in the corner of her workshop.

Inside would be a masterpiece. Her greatest art. They needed this. It was their cure.

The quill in Teara’s hand dissipated into Fade. “Sorry, I did not mean to sadden you.”

“Souls cannot not exist. That’s what I think.”

Teara pawed the Fade into a soft warm swirl. “The scientists. The saints. All Emotions Fade, but who is to say what happens to them when they disappear? Emotion? Thought? Consciousness? Nobody knows what souls even are and yet everybody agrees! Etrum close her eyes! If that’s not ignorance I don’t know what is!” She fell onto the bed where Etrum’s rays burned brightest, the window frame’s shadow a cross on her chest. “What use is a soul when you can’t remember those closest to you? I know I’m more than everything I am in this.” She wriggled her diary in the midnight wind, then tossed it to the side.

Heavens caught it protectively in a stained-glass shell of Emotion, willing it towards him tiredly. “We got lucky last time. I don’t want to think about what would happen if my ability to remember was as damaged as yours was.”

That question stirred Teara’s stomach. She clenched her teeth, throbbing waves of anger smashing into her head. If she had a body, she would have killed it trying to build him his. The toll it took on her. Sometimes it seemed he didn’t even want one.

Teara pinched the emptiness by the moon where the sun was supposed to be. “With this artificial Untouched body, we’ll be as eternal as they are. Free of ever forgetting each other. Free of Endlessness.”

One day she thought.

Heavens sat on the bed, head lowering silent submission. “Someone’s here.”

The doorbell dinged. Teara leapt up. She rushed down the stairs to greet Jyll.

Instead, was a brutal reminder of the worst things that could happen to them. Souls dressed in ragged hoods even though luxuries in the city were free. It wasn’t a rare sight. They played with thirteen-sided dice, loitering along the light-paraded relief of the apartment. The largest of them gave a roll. They all let loose a cry, followed by groans and sad laughter.

“Man! I’ll get cancer at birth! That’s some bullocks!”

“Let me try let me try!” Another said, rerolling. “Bah! Well, I’ll take it. Minimum wage for my whole life.”

The third turned to the fourth. “And this one actually managed to get not one but two good parents.” She mumbled. “How do you get so lucky?”

“You bet on what you want, not what you don’t.”

Another cried. “Noooo! My mom will kick me out! Rather would have been aborted, to be honest.”

Their game made no sense. They continued rolling. In their gamble, five of the seven continued in a downward spiral of worsening fates. It was too easy for souls like these to forget, disassociate, or vanish. Souls that retained the history eons before the Assemblage colonized the planet were in the realm of myth. Souls that were born spontaneously disappeared just as fast. Some souls even claimed that they once had bodies. Teara hated seeing this. She wished she could help them but had no attention to spare for their suffering. Her mind was filled with making Heavens a body first. If it worked, she’d change the worlds.

Figures watched the souls closely. One standing by the doorbell drew close. Their armor, outfits, or robes seemed to shift like the shadows in the back of one’s eyes. Their armor, changing and shifting. One never matching the next, as if they were the unstable patchwork of a reality set in skyscraper and steel. Only their equipment was clear. Batons, rifles, and identification. One turned to the open door and revealed an unsettling faceshield with gaping voids for eyes.

Teara jumped, startled. It asked her a question, but she was struggling to process what she saw.

It was a theatrical mask. Mouth rounded with awe. Painted eyebrows raised. It was horrifying and ugly. Then, prettier. With eyes crinkled with a welcomingly humane smile. The others had their faces covered too. By veils, knight helms, or even full-face respirators. The first that had turned now wore an ornate soldier’s helmet, armored beautifully with flowery designs and etchings. It flickered, briefly revealing the shadow of a face. They were all wearing ceremonial masks now. Of wood and stone.

“Little one?” The figure asked.

“Y- Yes?”

The figure flicked their baton at the direction of the souls. “You’re their Collector?”

“Collector?”

A question was sometimes a good answer. This seemed to be one of those cases. The figures were already twisting around, their faces covered by ornate helmets once more as they marched towards the lost souls violently.

One figure boomed. “Sadness is banned! Get out!”

The souls froze like statues as if they weren’t sure they were the ones being spoken to. The rest of the figures assured them of the fury, blazing flashlights and swinging batons.

Teara shouted. “They’re not bothering anyone!”

“You’ll feel differently about the Anxiety Elementals that come of them.” A figure replied, raising their identification to Teara’s face.

That’s when it became clear. These were Assemblage Angels. The local police department more specifically. Teara had never seen this phenomenon with what they wore before. She watched the Assemblage Angels clear the area, not fully understanding why. They returned to the door. Weapons drawn.

“There was powerful Sorrow in this building. We’re going to need to do a checkup.”

“No Sorrow here.” Teara replied.

“We’ll decide that.”

Quickly heels clacked like lightning. Jyll approached. A magnificent wing-cuffed cloak trailed behind her. She was voluptuous with a wild yet rational ponytail, raveled beautifully like the feathers of an evening phoenix. Caramel-skinned, nails colored wild berry, and eyes like blooming roses.

“I’m here!” Jyll cried ecstatically, embracing Teara tightly.

“Mam, you’re their Collector?” The Angel pressed, waiting for them to finish.

Jyll spun around. “I am a delegate of Arbanet. She is their Collector.”

“The Thaumaturge? We’re going to need to see documentation. Strong Emotions are banned near the Soulwood entrances.”

“Proof?”

“Proof?” The Angel asked.

Jyll blinked twice and hard. “Since when did Assemblage Angels dictate how people felt without evidence? Get me footage first.”

The Angels seemed to mumble amongst themselves before deciding it was not worth the effort. One turned around before leaving. For an instance, Teara saw their face. A clear emotion in their eyes that seemingly had no reason to exist.

Fear.

Teara spent her march up the stairs trying to figure out a reason for that. Untouched Angels with bodies were immortal, immune to entropy, and could only die when exposed to serious exterior harm. There was little they should fear.

“You could have gotten arrested.” Teara said.

“Good.” Jyll opened the door and sniffed. “The cleaning fairy was here I see.”

Heavens was gone. The window to the night sky open. Teara had gotten tired of hoping she’d get to introduce him to anyone she knew besides the Thaumaturge. Jyll was her constant compatriot. Her one friend among the brilliant-minded many. The rest chastised her for dreaming as a soul, much less making a body.

“I’ve seen men with child support vanish slower.” Jyll remarked.

“What’s child support?”

“Not something you need to worry your precious little head about. More importantly…” Jyll accelerated for her corner of the study and dramatically twisted around with a fan of envelopes. “We’re approved.”

“Already?”

“Already!” Jyll took Teara’s hands in her own, perfectly uncalloused with a lavender lotion. “It’s always those on the precipice of logic that stretch our boundaries of what is real and what is not.” Emotion leaked out of the skin, air, and floor around her as long and elegant feathers of all kinds.

They coiled to the sarcophagus and threw it open wildly. In it was The Heavenly Body Teara had been making. It startled her. It was supposed to be in Jyll’s labs.

“What?” Jyll asked.

“I’ve had a dead body in our apartment this whole time?”

“What was never alive cannot be dead.”

Bit creepy but ok. Teara grunted, then drew close. She barely recognized it, only preparing one part at a time, never with the full picture in mind. Yet, somehow it looked, familiar.

Strange.

“This is my first time seeing it, right?” Teara asked.

“You tell me. This is your project.”

Jyll was sometimes too kind. Teara didn’t like it when she took all the credit.

“Our project.” Teara closed her eyes, breathing in deeply, remembering that faraway star from which the other Heavens sprung into her mind.

That’s right. That Heavens in her dreams. He’d helped her with this as much as Jyll had. Even if he wasn’t real. It was that inspiration that kept her going. His ideals surrounding beauty and masculinity all captured by this body. It was him who envisioned it and through her that his body had been crafted. Teara touched its chest. She didn’t like it because it wasn’t him. But if it’s what Heavens wanted, she’d get used to him looking like this.

Jyll crossed her arms in satisfaction. “Now I just need to bring the body back with me.”

“What?”

Jyll turned, stunned for a moment, mouth agape. “What?”

Teara didn’t understand the surprise. The body was created by her! Of course she would want to deliver it! Jyll had never looked shocked. Ever.

“It’s my body. My gift to Heavens. He needs to get in it before the tests.”

“And how are you going to put him in?”

“Uh.”

“You don’t ride a ship before checking it has holes.”

“Give me an hour.”

Something deep inside her lurched saying that. Telling her this was a mistake. That this was simultaneously her moment of regret and purpose. Her destiny.

Jyll eyed Teara in a way she never had before but left hesitantly.

Odd.

Teara sat in front of the sarcophagus and stared. “Somethings off with you… From the moment I touched you… Are you really what Heavens wants?” She sighed, thinking perhaps, she was a bit crazy for talking to an unborn corpse. “You’re the cure to a soul. You have to be.”

Cure? Souls are not inherently sick. It was their environmental change that made them that way. Inherently, souls were perfect. It was action that flawed them. Why had she made this body?

“You’re what I want.” Teara blurted to herself. “A Heavens that will never hate me.”

If there was one thing pervasive throughout her diary, it was her fear Heavens would leave her in one form or another. If he got injured. If his patience for safekeeping her memories finally tired out. She thought she was giving him a gift, but really, she was trying to prove herself that she was worth looking after.

“I’m real.” Teara gasped, choking, crumpling into a pool of her own saliva.

Heavens believed in her. This was her mistake. This body wasn’t proof of anything but her failure to have faith in herself and Heavens. She cried for a while, not fully processing why. If Heavens saw her, he’d think she was ugly. At that thought sucked it up and became hard-faced once more. Lips kept pursed. The Heavenly Body almost felt alive. As if all this time its fuchsia eyes had watched her as she worked on it.

Had those been open moments ago?

Teara went to close them.

“You made this body because you’re afraid we’ll get hurt and forget each other?”

Teara turned, Heavens was climbing back in.

His fists welled. “Never. Even if the worst tragedies and tortures unimaginable came down upon me. Even if you asked me to. I can’t. I won’t.” He crawled underneath her bed and found a key, then underneath his own, a chest. “Even if you hate me, I will always answer to you.”

Inside were diaries like Teara’s. She opened one. Her heart froze over with horror.

She recognized her handwriting but could not remember the hand that wrote it.

And the next, and the next. How far did these go back? A year? Three? Teara never successfully made a body. They’d all failed. All this time she’d assumed the body was of her own inspiration, but what if the dream had been planted by another? Why is it then that Heavens acted if this idea was all shiny and new to her two months ago? Why did the Thaumaturge? Why did Jyll? It was almost as if they were all in on a sick joke meant to pain her. Now, that she looked closer at her previous diaries, her memory always “reset” around this time.

The time right before she gave the body to Jyll, and then returned as a failure.

Teara had no idea who she was.

Or who Heavens was.

Teara grabbed the boy’s shoulders. “Heavens, how long have I been building this body?”

She always forgot she failed. Her forgetfulness caused her to forget even forgetting. Then horror struck her, what if Heavens also had his memory damaged, and did not realize it? No. This was the incorrect way to think. Even if Heavens was against her willingly or not, Teara would stay with him. Even if he stabbed her in the back. That was for him to do. She would welcome the blade.

Teara shook him. “Heavens! How many times have I forgotten?!”

Heavens struggled to reply.

The body dove between them, leaping straight out the window.

Teara and Heavens leapt back aghast, then instinctively chased. Both jumped into a several-story plummet into the street. The speed of the surrounding city raced against her. The thundering of nearby amusement park rides. The highways like dragons’ backs, glistening with the scales of fuchsia and gold headlights. In the outlets, in the malls, every passing person among the rivers of crowds had someone and a smile. Spotless. Radiant. Filled with song. Her and Heavens could have done so much. Instead, she’d toiled to fix problems they might not have had. Still, deep inside, there were many reasons she wanted bodies for them. It all began with the one sprinting out in front of her. As the wind and honking of their pursuit pierced Teara’s ears, she began to understand. Someone hijacked that body.

Then, Teara’s steps were elongating. Form changing. Heart knotting. She couldn’t speak. Her midnight hair soaked her face with sweat. She swallowed. Her heart sped up. The world was melting around her. Her legs were too long. The world too fast. She tripped, terrified of whatever was happening to her. Heavens gripped her shoulders tight. She didn’t catch what he said. Everything was spinning. She gripped onto the concrete as she fell back again.

Everything grew bright. Reactively, Teara threw her fist straight for one of the headlights swerving into them. The vehicle went whirling through the air and into another car. Fire erupted. Alarms went off. People ran screaming. The white noise of traffic and conversation exploded into pandemonium. So fast. What happened? Teara wiped her face, blood Fading off. Her hand suddenly shining in the beating flames.

Heavens helped her up. “I’m so sorry. I only wanted your happiness.”

The crashed car’s bottom door opened. A woman limped out. Assemblage Angels came sprinting to her aid. One turned to Teara and shouted something. Heavens urged her after the body. The knights chased.

They slipped through an alley as The Heavenly Body tired. An organized formation of Assemblage Angels appeared out of thin air, cutting them off from it. Their helmets twisting into a new item between each demand. The knights that pursued blocked off their escape.

Teara cried at the body. “Who are you?”

The being side-eyed her silently.

Teara ran through the first group of Angels as the second rushed her down. She began flailing. When she opened her eyes, two Angels had been knocked onto their backs, and another had somehow wound up on the third floor of a terrace above. All out cold. The rifles they held were either crushed out of shape or torn to mechanical bits. The man revealed a small round shield strapped to the forearms of one of the soldiers. There was a fist imprint in the steel. It matched Teara’s perfectly. She raised it with horror, realizing half the Angels were gone.

She’d smashed them out of existence. No proof left to living. She didn’t mean to kill them. They were armored. They had weapons. Trained Angels. How could they have been so weak? She didn’t know souls worked for the Assemblage, much less ones so delicate. It couldn’t have been. These hands had built that body. Delicate and precise. They were shimmering. As if there were brief periods of being there and not there. Expanding and shrinking. Slowing and quickening. Every molecule of herself completely out of control. Heavens was laying on the ground, flung far from her swings.

A girl appeared in front of her. From nowhere. Like a ghost with a stardust Fade. A lilac-eyed miracle with no evidence it was not a hallucination.

The girl touched Teaara’s shoulder tenderly. “You’re shaking because you’re scared, you should be shaking because you’re angry.”

Teara tried to stand steady again, but her arms kept changing length, mustering all the willpower to keep herself sane as her voice went through several changes. “What’s happening to me?”

“Remembrance.”

The Heavenly Body was thrown to the floor. Dead. Yet, Fade flowed from its body into Teara’s ragged gasps for air. It tasted warm and humid. Hints of cinnamon and coffee in wind before the rain. This was impossible. Fade was the final display of physically unbound existence before dissipating into nothing. A dying mist. The blood of consciousness. Form for the vanishing formless. Teara could not make sense of why she’d absorb the corpse’s.

Jyll loomed over, inspecting the anomaly. “I have retrieved The Heavenly Body.”

“You killed it!”

“You cannot kill what was never alive.”

Teara shivered. Goosebumps washed her as she felt the lifeless stare of what Heavens would have lived in.

“You asked who the body was. You saw the Fade. It entered you. It is you.”

As more Fade entered Teara, more facts did. Things that she simply accepted without experience. She was a master in gymnastics, calisthenics, and martial arts. She combined them into a single perfect art form. What had she called that? She couldn’t remember any movements.

A stampede of armored boots drew close. Jyll sputtered a bored sigh. Her chest deflating as she rubbed her temple in circles, eyes closed. The earth fevered. A plume sprouted around them. A fiery evening anemone of towering feathers, licking at the sky. Angels could be heard trying to break in. Gunfire, explosions, and Emotions quaked, but failed. More plumes bound Heavens to the earth.

Jyll was pacing around him, calm. “Aren’t you tired of all this? This endless repetition of events. Events orchestrated by you.” She glared at Teara.

Something deep inside Teara resonated with Jyll’s words. Heavens’ eyes shut in admittance.

The woman smiled. “You’re feeling confused, frustrated, terrified. The ever-shifting garments of those Assemblage soldiers. Why souls are so unstable. Why there is no sun. Laws of reality that should have been reliable to you never made sense, and how could you hope to make any sense of them when you cannot even make sense of yourself?”

“I-”

“Do you really want to go back to being the greatest source of pain in Heavens’ life?”

“Heavens cares about me.”

“Precisely. No matter how strong you are, you’re a weakness. Look at him. You can see it. The pain in his eyes when his face meets yours. Something’s wrong, and you can tell, but you can’t say. Because you don’t know, but you can feel. This project to make the body was a mistake. A waste of time. A waste of me. I think we need move on towards more fruitful excursions.”

Jyll knelt to Teara. Her wine-lick lips parted as she breathed in deeply. Slowly, Teara felt skin tug from bone. Tension in every fiber of being released. Blood warmed. Darkness fell. Breath sucked away. Visions came. Of flower-draped hills and scarlet stars divided by a rose horizon. Of whispering shadow-swathed figures with suns for eyes. Of sable bedrock islands cradled by a poisoned-orchid sea. Thunder stoked Teara’s head and chest. Memory felt more tangible than reality, and her consciousness returned to see Jyll gripping her head in shock. The woman looked like she was still in trance. Even her feathery Emotions were stunned. Heavens tugged Teara back where they came, slashing at through feathers with stained-glass blades.

Several lashers surged at Teara. She cartwheeled nimbly through them. She was in shock from the stunt, not knowing she even knew how to cartwheel. They snatched Heavens instead. Teara grabbed him and was smashed in the face by a wing. She went sliding across the ground, blinded by the crushing pain coming down on the bridge of her nose.

“If you won’t surrender, he will take your place.” Jyll bit into the boy’s neck, then inhaled deeply.

The boy stabbed her with his Emotion, but it dissipated into Fade. He struggled with limbs swirling into stained-glass vapor. Teara grappled for Heavens’ twisting soul, but he slipped through her fingers like sand in the sea. The feathers began tugging her back. What was left of Heavens was slurped into the woman like fiery mist in the crackling wind. What was left of Teara was the memory.