Chapter Three: A Clash of Starving Souls

The Emblem of the Star-Crossed Lovers (Interitus 1: Book X)

Chapter Three – A Clash of Starving Souls

 

I think I first fell in love with her in a past life, and the love we shared in Bones City was an echo of an eternal bond bound by brevity. It was proven by the fact that we could not live forever in the bodies with which we first found each other. Even now as I set out for a second time across the badlands in the opposite direction, I realized exactly what it meant to exist as twin flames dancing in an endless spiral. We were destined for an eternal cycle of immortal love, but each lifetime was ephemeral at best; we were cursed to find each other for only a fleeting breath in the eyes of eternity, and then the force of our fragile bodies would diverge us again and again. And every time, our memories would burn as the price to echo back into the other’s life.

Even as I crept through the starlit plains, I realized that destiny had likely intertwined us countless times already, but we never realized that it was just another iteration of this convergent series. I was the only incarnation that knew the truth, and therefore it was crucial that I keep these memories. Only then could we claim the eternal love that is rightfully ours. But if we sacrifice our memories to cycle on, then I must live forever if I want to recall the reality instead of rewriting it.

I physically wandered through the badlands, but in my head, I stepped through the way her words had rewritten my reality. I blankly watched meteorites shower through the starry sky, but I focused instead on the way that she and I are bound by each other and destined for another. I concluded that if I could step back from the world, I would see that these reiterated lives are not constrained by space. If I died in the desert by blade or by hunger, I could perhaps reincarnate elsewhere in the sand. But because it was unreasonable to presume that this cycle was constrained by distance, I could perhaps be reborn in Bones City. I could perhaps be born on an island in some unknown corner of this world. Perhaps I could even appear in another world.

But just like the way gravity pulls the fabric of the universe in all directions, anything unbound by space is also unbound by time. If I can reincarnate to any corner of this cold world without a limit by distance, then I could just as easily find my next iteration in a different time. There was no reason to suppose that my previous life had not happened in the future. If I died today, I had no reason to believe I would not return to life in a distant world, thousands of years in the past. I had no reason to suppose there was a finite number of cycles, so it was mathematically possible that two of my lives had overlapped. Perhaps I had met the previous incarnation of myself without ever realizing it; I sacrificed the memories of that life so that I could cycle on and find her again. I even imagined a dark adjudicator standing at the crossroads of a fallen past life, asking a weary wanderer in the hollows of death if he would rather keep his memories in eternal silence, or instead return to a new life but only for a cost. The memories we made are the price we pay for this desperate opportunity, but in the end it’s nothing more than an extra roll of the cosmic dice. I could envision this crossroads gambler in my head, almost as if my subconscious had summoned his silhouette from the stains in my soul.

Every now and then as I wandered the starlit plains, I imagined the silhouette of the city walls in the distance. It was a fantasy unbound by realism, given that I had no reason to believe I had even walked in the right direction. Perhaps it was the way that my monomania merely manifested in my mind, like a myopic daydream of an unreachable reality upheld only by desire. But as soon as I rubbed my eyes, the walls faded from view, proving that it was the tireless reverie of a mind which acknowledged its own hopelessness. It felt like an ember left in the sand after the fire was extinguished, barely clinging to life, smoldering just enough to light the darkness, despite that it knew it would never rekindle in any way that mattered.

But just as that dying ember would cling to life out of pure intransigence, I willfully deluded myself to see the distant walls of the heartless city which banished Alyssa in the first place. I knew that even if I were miraculously walking in the right direction, it would likely take days to reach the city. I had no plan to find it. I had no plan to find her for our next iteration. My destination was locked by space but unbound by time. Even if I were to reach Ember Bay before my body collapsed, how long would it take for her to come? Even if I reached the shore she said, how would I find her? How would we know that the other was the one with which we were meant to spend eternity?

I postponed these concerns when I found the scattered remains of a broken body strewn across the sand. I saw patches of knotted flesh and human bones scraped clean. Torn clothes scattered the bloodstained sand, and shattered ribs suggested that a sword had dealt the killing blow. I was never a great detective, since my tunnel-vision conceals minor details, but even I could see that the murder was recent. The howling wind summoned sandy gusts with every second; it was in this way that the badlands concealed the madness by burying the tragic evidence. However, I saw no sand anywhere on the scraped-clean bones. I only saw faint footprints in the sand leading a short distance away. I saw the footsteps lead to a crouched silhouette which nearly camouflaged with the swirling sand. I noticed them at the same time that they noticed me. The person wiped their bloody face and then pulled themselves upright, lifting a sword from the sand at their feet. Unsure what to expect, I unholstered my own sword and took a backward step.

The swordsman said as his long hair swayed, “I do not have any scraps for trade. It is in your best interest that you move along.”

I asked with an anger which echoed the abyss, “Did you kill a woman and steal her necklace?”

But the cannibal merely laughed as he said, “There are too many killers, and too many dead. More people wander this land than live in the city from which you so clearly came. We are all forced to feast whenever we can. You will never find one specific killer out here. Even if you could, it is more likely that you would merely find the man who killed her killer. It is just as likely that he would then kill you.”

“Is that really the way of the world out here?” I asked with a quiver which betrayed my fear.

He spoke as he glared with the eyes his hunger filled, “It’s the law of this world; it’s kill or be killed. The strong are meant to feed on the weak. Perhaps you come from a city unchained by this truth, but you sacrificed civility when you stepped outside the walls. The fact of the matter is that city life has softened you. You are weak, and everyone out here knows it. You will invariably die before you find the object of your quest, so if you’re damned to die anyway, I might as well be the one to kill you. I’m just so tired of being hungry.”

I knew it was pointless to argue. I could tell by a single glance that his hunger had consumed him. Back before I met Alyssa, I found myself driven only by destructive desire. Like many others in that overcrowded orphanage, I had no purpose. I had no direction until I met her. Many of us found ourselves addicted to vicious chemicals which served as a substitute for the love we were never given. Many of us found our purpose in the way the chemical reprogrammed our brains to only ever seek out more. I had wasted years of my life chasing that insatiable hunger; reality was slipping through my fingers even on the night I first found her. It was only with her help that I managed to overcome that destructive desire in the first place, but it is also only because of the chemicals that I also only understood the cruciality of her arrival. They enshrouded her image with light in my eyes. It was almost as if the chemicals had led me to the only thing that could break their hold.

But it was because I understood his insatiable hunger that I knew I could not possibly argue for my life. I steadied my sword with my shaking hands and threw myself backward, narrowly dodging the lunge of his blade. Without wasting a moment, the cannibal jerked his arm back and navigated his sword through a circular slash as he ran forward. I steeled my nerves and swung my own weapon; our silver swords slammed in the swirling sand and sent a scarlet spark into the air. His strength overpowered mine, and the impact sent me stumbling backward. The barbarian threw himself forward with another forceful slash, but I deflected his blade with a swing of my sword. Our weapons clashed again and shimmered beneath the light of the stars. His bloodshot eyes glared into mine with a ravenous hunger, but I struck him in the stomach with a sudden kick. He stumbled three paces backward on the plain, but he steadied his sword and prepared to strike again.

“You have no reason to fight; the plains will kill you in the end,” said the bloodied cannibal as he then attacked again.

But I yelled as I blocked his sword with a crash, “Life is pain for us all until the day we turn to ash. You can fend for your life with a slash and a crash, or a grunt and a clash, but all you can do is just helplessly thrash. For what reason do you fight your way through each day? No matter how much you kill, you have nothing to gain. Is a life really life if it exists for no purpose but staying alive?”

The swordsman said as he glared with bloodshot eyes, “Nature itself demands I stay alive. I can’t care about the cost, and I can’t care about the consequence. This is the biological imperative. I cannot waste my time worrying about justifying my own existence. I propagate my life for no reason other than that it’s the only thing I have left. I deserve to live because I was born into this world, and there’s nothing more to it than that. I don’t care what the laws of nature demand in exchange for my survival. If I have to kill the innocent, then so be it; that is the price. Nature itself declared that was the cost—not me. If I have to eat the hopeless humans who wander these plains, then so be it; that is the price. If I have to throw away my pride and run from the monsters who scour these sands, then so be it; that is the price. If I have to kill you and eat you, then so be it. That is the price.”

I faced him and said, “This world is unraveled, and you pulled the thread. You live like deep roots that feast on the dead.”

“If that is the case, then that is the price,” he said as if he spoke to the starlight.

I must admit I felt a respect for the swordsman who stood at a short distance. Even though he saw me as nothing more than an easy meal, I could sense that he and I were both bound by the same monomania. Our obsessions led us in different directions, but both demanded of us that we kill the other. So just as before, the barbarian bounded closer and barreled his blade at my throat, but I swung my own sword to deflect his strike. A lifetime of hardship had left his muscles sore, but I had done nothing but walk since the night I left Bones City to scour the sands. I easily deflected his slash and then attacked with my own, forcing him to throw himself backward with a clumsy stumble. The tip of my sword missed his skin by a hair. Years of chopping fish at the factory had left me familiar with a blade.

He asked as our swords again loudly convened, “How much of this world have you actually seen? I always imagined that those in the city never saw anything outside the walls.”

I answered as I moved with a backward motion, “I lived my life between the walls and the ocean.”

“But life as we know it is bound to this world. If your city let fear trap its people in a corner, then the life you’ve lived is not a life worth living. I scoured these plains striving just to survive, and I have seen the world from which you had hidden yourself away. I have seen other cities and other oceans. I have seen towering treetops and a canyon with walls stained by black fire. I have seen the ruins of a long-dead city at the edge of the forest. I said before that I don’t dare to justify my existence because I was born into this world, but it’s also because this world is mine that I can sacrifice any part of it to preserve myself,” said the swordsman in a way I vicariously felt.

Just as he was willing to destroy anything to preserve himself, I also resolved to sacrifice anything to survive this aleatoric encounter. He fought for himself, and I fought to someday see Alyssa again. We were two men driven to fight in the shadows of this world by our own ambitions. We each imagined our ideal future and ran headlong toward it by sacrificing our sweat and soul. I used to see myself as docile and civilized, but I knew in that moment that I would sacrifice my civility for the strength to surpass the swordsman and steal his life. I would burn my morality and set fire to my soul if it meant the chance to see her one more time. We were both two optimists who could only see a single hope, both constrained by the unfortunate truth that we could only access this future by forcing it upon reality with our own fragile hands. But these futures for which we would pay any price could not coexist; our diverging dreams were forced to clash as if in wave function collapse. We could only keep one possible future, and the other would die with its dreamer in the dark desert.

The barbarian threw himself forward in a meteoric motion. I swung my blade to deflect his sword, and in the moment our weapons clashed, he struck me in the stomach with a powerful kick. The impact sent me tumbling to the ground, and I spun with the roll and landed on my knees—just in time to block his next slash. Our two blades crashed together just inches from my hair; the swords sent a scarlet spark sailing into the sandy air. The temporary light illuminated his scarred face, and the spark sailed until it struck my cheek with a sharp warmth. I then thundered through the sand with a clumsy tackle; I had barely stood upright in the moment I slammed against the swordsman. He stumbled backward and slashed his sword a second time, but I threw myself aside so that the blade harmlessly flew past me. I then lowered myself, steadied my sword, and launched myself forward with a slash.

The cannibal swordsman failed to escape my slash in time. He was so preoccupied with striking me that he forgot to protect himself. His sword missed by six centimeters as I darted past him, but it was already too late. The tip of my sword had torn through his left leg, shattering his shin as I shot past him. The swordsman stumbled and nearly collapsed, but he thrust his sword into the sand and used it as a quivering crutch, clinging to it for support. His blood splattered the ground beneath his body, but he winced as he slowly turned his gaze to face me. An ember of emergency ignited in his ambiguous eyes.

“I respect you too much to end this fight in death,” I said to the swordsman with a trembling breath.

But he merely chuckled and said, “It makes no difference; I’m already dead. I appreciate the act of mercy, but I’m too realistic to believe that this ends in any other way. If I cannot run, then I am destined to die. If I cannot fight, then I am destined to die. There is no coming back from an injury like this. Either another cannibal will devour me, or a monster will harvest me for the little life I have left. Without my leg, I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.”

Despite the weird wiring which winds in my mind, I still wanted to protest his judgment. Although the realist inside me catalyzed the cold conclusion that he would die a gruesome death, I desperately wanted to deny the reality and declare that he could hide himself away in the badlands. I wanted so desperately to defend his life despite that he had spent it in trying to kill me. He had a unique simplicity to the way he saw the world, one well worth withstanding this worthless wasteland. But just as this simplicity was the reason I could not accept his end, it was also the reason he acknowledged the finality of his injury without wasting a worried moment.

“If you can make it down this hill, then this will not be your grave. If you can give yourself the will, then you can hide inside a cave. This starlit world is merciless; it is not worth your life,” I said to the swordsman with frantic bloodshot eyes.

With a deep breath, he struggled to say, “We both know that I die today. But even now at the end of my life, I find myself desperate to cling onto this fleeting reality. Perhaps you could call it distrust in either God or the world—whichever it is that damned me to wander this worthless world in agony. If this is my life, then I wouldn’t dare to envision the afterlife that awaits a man like me. That’s why I said what I said; it must be you who kills me.”

“Wouldn’t that still send you to the very same place?” I asked as two tears descended his face.

But the swordsman stared into my eyes and said, “I can sense the darkness dwelling inside your head. I have seen the shambles of slaughtered cities; I’ve seen the remains of fallen civilizations scattered through these plains. It was long ago when a shadow demon descended from the starlight and shattered everything this world once was. It did not waste the lives it ended; it instead assimilated them into itself, and their screaming souls echoed endlessly in a tempest of agony. The victims were bound by the creature which killed them as eternal puppets. I can see in your emerald eyes that this demon dwells in the darkness deep inside your heart. You are from the city, yet you have taken a life. You do not even know the power you possess. But just as the shadow demon makes puppets of its victims, you are also cursed to carry your victims on your shoulders. If you are to kill me, then I am bound to you forever, and then together we will wander this worthless world. It may be an agony, but it beats the ambiguity of an unknown afterlife.”

I nodded slowly, though I doubted his words. I sighed and lightly clashed our two swords. The dying man convinced himself of an illusion, but he already accepted his conclusion. I asked him with a quiver in my eye, “Are you sure that you are ready to die? If I am to kill you, I must know your name, if for nothing more than to bury the blame.”

“I am Aziel, and together we will force upon this world the future we seek,” he answered as the last words he would ever speak.

It was in that moment that I thrust my silver sword into Aziel’s chest. The cannibal swordsman seized as my sword shattered the bond between his body and soul. His brown eyes widened with shock, and a small splash of blood settled in his mouth. His knotted hair danced in the forceful gusts, and his extremities fell limp. As if there were a battle between gravity and the dying strength left in his body, his sword trembled to support his weight until it finally fell. Aziel dropped to the ground in that moment, and his blood drenched the sand beneath him. I stared momentarily at the sword and the swordsman left in the sand. Both the blade and his body were worn with countless years of battle. Broken chips scattered his sword, and several scars stained his skin. My weapon was in better condition than his, so I turned my head and concealed the carnage with my hair as it flowed in the sandy breeze.

But like two roaring flames converging in a fiery spiral, I felt a cataclysmic change. I had left Aziel behind in the badlands, but I carried a part of him with me; I inherited his merciless ambition for myself. I could feel the last lingering shred of my civility surrender itself to the monomania which drove us both. I still saw the same future I envisioned before, the one where Alyssa and I meet again and dance as twin flames in an endless spiral, but a flash of light now illuminated the path in my mind. Instead of seeing a tunnel through the darkness that led to a distant glow, I saw a trail of bodies along the way. When the light faded back to the shadowed tunnel, and the distance became darkness, I clung to the shadows for security. I could feel the change in myself. Aziel had staked his life when he cast the cosmic dice as a celestial gambler, but he fell into my event horizon and traded an instant for eternity. I assimilated Aziel. I inherited Aziel. I was a different man than I was the day before. I cast my sword aside and instead retrieved the chipped blade with which he had fought me.

With the strength of our polymerized souls, I cast aside my inhibitions and recommenced the journey back to Bones City. The arms of an angel awaited me, and I already assured her that we would meet again. Though we were destined to meet one day on the shores of Ember Bay, and though her memories had fallen away and faded to gray, a part of me feared that her immortal soul might not recognize mine. The man she once knew stayed clear of blood and war, but I was no longer the man I was once before. If our incarnations found each other on that shore, a part of me feared she would not want me anymore.

My spiritual fusion did more than simply inherit the merciless barbarism of the swordsman in the plains. More importantly, it proved him right. It proved that a darkness dwelled in the depths of my mind, and this darkness made puppets of the victims who dared to stand in my way. But the way that I assimilated Aziel was a detail of the same shadowed soul with which she had fallen in love in countless past lives; it was not a detail unique to this iteration. She had surely seen the shadows in my soul in the cycles of our lives long lost, and yet we were still bound for each other. Perhaps it was because of my darkness that we were destined for each other in the first place. Perhaps anyone with a weaker will would wilt and wither when the world forced them to fight for their ambition. We loved with a love that was greater than love, which meant that no force in any world could ever keep us apart.