Yet again, I open my eyes to an unfamiliar location, bleary eyed and unfocused. I lay there for a while waiting for the clarity to come to me, but it never does. It wasn’t quite like a void, but nothing felt definite either. It was, like, if your entire world was composed of the objects you see in your peripheral vision. There are ghosts of shrubs, memories of fountains, but also nothing at all around me at once. 

Well, this sucks.

Did that entire episode at Basilisk’s place even happen? Did I just hallucinate the whole thing, and now here I actually am dead? I hope not, this would be a pretty crap heaven.

I pat myself down, but I don’t feel anything sticking out of me, or any wound. That’s less reassuring than you’d imagine, though. I couldn’t really register my own touch either, focus on myself at all. The only thing I can feel is the ankle high water I’m wading in. I feel exactly as ephemeral as the rest of this place. 

“Hello?” I call out to anyone, anything that could be there. “Am I actually dead this time?” 

No real response; as if I expected one. I huff and push myself up from the ground, getting up on wobbly feet, leaning against one of the maybe-fountains. This entire area seems to be some kind of grecro-roman waterway, all stone pillars and sparkling water tiles and dripping ivy. It’s all very Glover. If there’s anything beyond the pillars, I can’t tell. The distance fades into a bright white nothingness. 

Before I could call out again, something catches my ear. A woman’s voice, almost a faint whisper lilting out from the far end of the fountain area. “Plea… se…” 

I bolt upward, moving my way over. “Hello? Is someone there? Did you say something?” I feel slow, cumbersome on my way over. Everything is only lightly flooded an inch or two, and yet it feels like I can never move my legs fully out of the water. It’s like moving through sludge. The sound of rushing water grows louder as I make my way over to the end of the path. It’s only a few minutes before I reach it. 

Glass stairs leading up to a slightly elevated, round platform, reflective like a mirror sheen. Water falls down from the heavens at the back side, seemingly infinite in origin, pooling on the platform and filling into the waterway below. And, standing just before the waterfall, reaching up to the heavens, is a voidlike cutout of a woman, featureless and undefined. Save for Shiftra’s sword, decayed and eaten away, stabbed straight though her heart.

I walk up to the void to inspect it. It’s unmoving, entirely stationary. Matte black, simply a cutout in the universe where a woman should be. This close, even over the rush of the waterfall, I can hear a hissing coming from the sword; steam rises off it as it very slowly eats away into nothingness. 

“Hello?” I feel silly asking it, but it’s the only thing I can reason that’s here to have called out to me. “Did you call me? Am… am I dead?”

It takes barely a moment for it to respond to me, not time even to chastise myself for speaking to it. “No… But I… am…” It’s in a strained whisper, barely audible even though it feels like it’s coming from the bones in my ears and not the void itself. It’s clearly struggling to speak. With each word that it manages to get out, the sword boils and dissipates faster, like a cigarette being dragged on. 

My heart drops to my stomach. “Please, miss. Where am I? What’s going on? How can I help you? How do I get back?” 

“I don’t… No time…” 

I reach out to grab it, but think better, pulling my hand back at the last second, just hovering above the void. “Just show me what to do. Please.” 

“I can give you… But after… On your own…” Give me what? The sword had sizzled away to almost nothing now, just a few jagged spikes and a mass of steam, swirling around the figure, making the air heavy and warped in appearance. 

I can tell that this is it. If I say the wrong thing, wait too long, time will be up and then... And then what? Would I be stuck in this celestial bathhouse forever? No, there’s really nothing to do here but the obvious. 

“Whatever it is, I’ll take it. I accept. Just, like, I need to get back, please.”

Nothing happens after I say that, though. I look down; the sword had completely dissolved. All that’s left is a trail of smoke leading up from its chest, pooling thick around it, around me. God damn, what am I going to do now? 

I take a step forward to inspect it further when I hear a sickening crack. The previously immobile void’s arm had twitched, broken backwards. Soon its limbs are cracking all over, bending and contorting in ways that seem like its bones, if it has them, are breaking and forming over and over again as it moves, as if it was never meant to do so.

I instinctually step backwards, slowly moving away from the void-thing. The smoke is swirling around us now. I start coughing and gagging on it. It’s sickly sweet, like peaches and honey. I lean over to hack up a lung, and when I stand back up to look, the void-thing lunges at me, tackling me, and pulling me down into the water below. 

To my shock we sink down, past the platform, past the floor. It’s a vast ocean, me staring up at the light filtering through the canopy, past the void, holding my head tight, holding its hand on my mouth, preventing me from screaming my last precious breath into the cool water. “Promise me… You’ll save her… From herself…” I don’t know what or who it’s trying to talk about. With each word now it’s entire being is starting to become less defined, less rigid. Almost like it’s starting to dissipate itself. “Trust yourself… Your body will… know how…”

And with that, I’m alone, limbs frozen, hands over my mouth to prevent my air from leaving my chest. The water grew colder, icey even, and dark. My lungs burn for air, begging for me to refresh myself. I can’t seem to move back up to the surface, the water was just pulling me back down. I scan around for anything at all that could help me, when I see a light patch, at the very bottom of the sea, like another breach. 

Impulsive decision, but if it doesn’t help it’s not like I won’t drown here too. I kick my legs, move my arms, attempt to swim down to the shimmering spot underneath me. I can feel the acid burn in my muscles, my lungs screaming at me to just inhale once, my head throbbing. I inch closer and closer to it, light filtering through just as it did on top. One final push, and I’m through!

I breach and take a greedy gulp of fresh air, then another, and another. It was like I haven’t had a breath for years, not minutes. I sit up, patting myself down; that’s weird, I’m bone dry. Actually, hold on! The dingy air, all the random half-built crap laying all over. Am I in Basilisk’s la–

A hand slaps me hard across the face, hard, forcing me to twist over. “From now on, when I give you a goddamned order, you listen to it!” There’s Basilisk himself, standing above me, hand raised high. “You touch one thing wrong and you have no idea what kind of shit you’re going to be in!”

I press my hand against my cheek, rubbing slightly. Dude slaps like he means it. “I’m sorry, sir, I was, just... You’re really scary, you know? I didn’t know what to do, an– Ow!” Sonofabitch, that stung! Something bit me right on my sore cheek. I reach across with my other hand to feel if it drew blood, when I notice my thumb sticking up in my peripherals. Soon that’s my entire hand, and then both hands, as I hold them up in front of my face. The palms are normal, but each digit transitions at different intervals into a clear glass. And out of the end of each of them was jagged, sharp… Nails? Knives? They remind me of miniature, curved versions of Shiftra’s sword…

Oh god, that’s right, the sword! I pat my chest down, but I can’t find it sticking up. I can’t even find the wound. Instead, there’s a baseball sized crack of that same glass running up over my heart, smooth and taut with my chest. It doesn’t feel like a foreign object embedded in me, though; it’s as if my chest has always been like this, with only its transparent nature as any tell that things had changed.

I look back up at Basilisk. He’s backing up to the far end of the room, lifting his scalpel, pointed out at me like a weapon. What? “Sir, what are you doing? Why are you holding that up at me?” I raise my hands around my head in surrender.

“Just a precaution, kid. I don’t know what’s happening, and you don’t either. You could be very dangerous right now.” Me? Dangerous? 

“No, sir, I promise!” I wave my hands around animatedly in front of me. “I’m no kind of danger, I wouldn’t even want to–” 

“You promised me only five minutes ago that you wouldn’t do anything stupid, and then immediately afterwards tried to rip shrapnel out of your own heart. You’ll forgive me if I’m not interested in another one from you.”

I sigh, trying to get up, gripping the table leg to stabilize myself. When I do, Basilisk jabs the knife my way as a show of warning. I take the hint and I sit back down. “Sir, I promise… Er, I have no reason to hurt you. You just saved my life. Kind of. I owe you, if anything!” As I try to stand again, my nails cut into the side of the table leg, and everything goes to hell.

I feel like time has slowed to a crawl again. Thick, slow, almost painful pulses come down from my left arm into the hand holding the table, though the fingers piercing the leg. Suddenly the thing whines, kicks the medical supplies off it, scattering them everywhere, a bottle of sterilizing fluid slapping me in the face. The table crumples in on itself before boils and blocks greeble out of every corner of it. Spikes jut out from seemingly random angles, poking into the floor and anything else around it. 

For a moment, the both of us are quiet, staring at the mess that the table had become. Paradoxically, Basilisk drops his knife to his side. I lift my hands up to my face again, staring down at them, fluid drip-dripping off my forehead between them.

He’s the first to break the spell. “Kid, you know what this means, right?” 

What do I say? That this stuff that’s in me down can do that? That everything is about to blow up around me? That I actually am dangerous? Incredibly so? I split the difference, and just say “That… That I’m a cape?”

“No, kid. That you’re going into quarantine. Now.”

CassieSandwich

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