Airel: The Awakening (Airel Saga Book One)

Chapter XXII

I OPENED MY EYES to behold a black sky. The sun above was enclosed in a womb of smoke and smog, looking red-orange, like light seen through flesh. The horizon was jagged rock shining oily coal black, its ridges cantilevered out of the ground at discordant, unharmonious angles, on purpose. 

I was inside a cage.

It was like a bird cage, but completely inelegant. It was a utilitarian cube, made from iron bars. The floor was of rough wooden plank. I could see as I looked out that I was high above the ground. My cage was hanging from a single limb in a tall and ancient tree.

I surveyed the expanse of the valley within the bowl of the black rocks below. Row upon row, mountain range stacked against mountain range like teeth, like an upside-down jellyfish, rising and falling. It was impassable even if I could get out of my cage. Nothing grew, nothing lived. This ground was cursed. 

I thought I must have been dreaming, but the bump on my head argued against this conclusion. I did indeed pass out and eat the bleachers. I couldn’t explain it to myself.

I stood.

My cage swayed with the movement, back and forth, bobbing up and down as I shifted my weight to walk around. The limb above was a wisp; a gossamer confection. I hung from this thread.

I wondered: if I were to die here, would I be dead in the real world? Maybe my body was in a hospital right now with a nasty cut on my head and the doctors were trying to revive me as my mind cavorted here in this macabre rink.

I made my way slowly to the center of the cage and it groaned with each step. Long, fat floor boards spanned from one end of the cage to the other, twelve across, each held in place by rusty iron nails. 

I stood and tried to reason, each irrational dream thought coming as a surprise, comic strangers that couldn’t possibly have issued from my own internal process. I let these apparitions of possibility parade absurdly before me until finally I decided there was only one thing to be done—whatever needed to be done. And the only thing I could think of after that was a single, risky, harebrained thought.

Maybe death is the only way out of a bad dream.

I heard pages turning.

The rustle of feathers.

I heard that strange but friendly voice in the recesses of my mind whispering to me. I could pick it out from my other thoughts; I could tell when something wasn’t Airel. I had to listen.

“Be careful, Airel. Things are not what they seem.”

I ran. I ran straight at the iron bars of my cage, slamming my shoulder into them, screaming in rage and frustration as I did. It hurt. I had expected them to do anything other than that. What, I didn’t know.

My little cage rocked, groaning in protest, and I felt my world turning horribly.

I could feel the rhythm of the swinging I had created and I decided to exploit it. I pushed hard, throwing my weight into the wall. The cage leaned crazily on its side, and I caught glimpses straight down to the concentric maw of writhing rocks below.

I felt a shudder. The single limb that held me snapped dead, the sound of a rifle shot ringing out.

I fell.

The cage tumbled, turning over and over, flashes of black shard reached up for me from below; it all happened too fast and I screamed, both hoping and dreading that someone would hear me crying out for help.

But really, I knew the truth. There were none who could help me. I was different: just what I’d always wanted to be. 

The explosion of wood was deafening on impact, and the clang of iron against stone ran right over my ears like a truck on the freeway, drowning out my screams. But the dream would end now. I would awake; I’d be snatched right out of here and thrown back into myself. 

But there was pain. This couldn’t be a dream.

The impact hurt badly, and unsurprisingly, I was injured. But it meant I was alive, if nothing else.

I lifted my head to survey the destruction. The bird cage had left wooden shrapnel in a large radius around me. Some of the bars lay at my feet, twisted and bent. 

I checked myself for damage and discovered that I had a serious problem. My left arm was shattered, hanging and ripped almost completely off near the elbow. Blood squirted out with each heartbeat and I could see the bone sticking out yellow-white, like a tooth. Blood ran down my arm and dripped off my fingers.

I was going to bleed to death.

The panic I thought would come never did, though the pain was so sharp I could feel myself going into shock. In a matter of minutes, I would be dead in this godforsaken place, alone and confused, not knowing how or why I was here, or even where here was. As numbness took over my wounds, ambivalence cast its shadow over my heart and I became carefree.

Then another shadow, emaciated and malign, reached for me. Thick nausea washed through my gut, cresting in my throat, and I gagged. I sat in the pile of debris I had made, keeping my wrecked arm from falling completely off by holding it with my good one, and my back was turned to the shadow as it crept up my body, as it wickedly tasted of me. 

I could smell the stench of rotten flesh and mold. It was so strong I could taste it in my mouth; it was vile. Clicks and gurgles effervesced from this presence, sending shivers through me. I didn’t want to look at it. But I was compelled; I had to know. Something within me demanded I turn to face whatever was there. I turned.  

The thing was cloaked in waxy blackness, its hood pulled low. All that could be seen beneath the hem was a pair of blood-red eyes. Wetness dripped from the lip of the hood, making a puddle on the black ground. I was frozen, unable to look away. 

White and withered hands reached up slowly, pulling the hood back, revealing a dark nothingness; an empty void where a face should have been. It managed a grotesque laugh in spite of this, beholding my arm with pleasure, drooling clotted black slime down the front of its robe, leaving a long, stinking stain. 

I felt something move at my hip and I jumped with fright. I wrenched my gaze away from the figure before me to find my fingers brushing against my leg. My arm was whole again, the blood now dry. I let go of my arm, stretching it out to test it. It was as good as if it had never been broken, never gushed blood or hung by a thread of flesh. I flexed and wiggled my fingers. There was no pain; not so much as a scar was left where the bloody mess had been.

The thing screeched like a dying owl and splattered me with brown snot and slime. I recoiled, crouching down, ready for the attack. It came right at me, and I reached out to resist.

But as soon as I did, a shining white light, pure power, exploded between us, throwing me backward. I landed some distance away from the screeching thing.

I looked up to see it rushing toward me with unreal speed, a big black stone in its hands. It raised the rock overhead, meaning to crush me. I rolled, but not fast enough. The rock caught me on the side of my head, wounding me badly. 

I saw pureness, nothing but clean whiteness, a tabula rasa. And then the strange world vanished painfully.