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.
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