Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 3

At the End of the Hall

Where he expected to feel the light suction or expelling of air, he felt nothing.

No wind moved in or out of the Drev's body.

He held a hand up to her partially open mouth, and observed the same phenomenon.

How had no one noticed this!

What did it even mean?

How was she still alive?

He turned towards the call button ready to summon Dr. Katie before he continued on with his observations. He was going to need her help with this. If anyone was going to have any idea what this was about, than it was going to be her, she worked with humans after all, so she should have seen plenty of things more crazy than this.

Like how a Drev could breathe without actually breathing.

Something metal clattered to the floor behind him. Krill turned sharply, eyes scanning over the room in a sharp sweep. His body had gone taught like a wire ready to snap. His antennae were stuck straight up and vibrating slowly with the power of his agitation.

He saw nothing out of the ordinary.

Nothing aside from the bedpan lying on the floor between him and the Drev's bed.

It was rocking gently from one side to the other, its rocking growing slower and shallower as the moments went on until it finally stopped and went still. Ambient blue light glittered from the side of the metal pan. Krill lifted his eyes to the bed, afraid of what he might see when he looked up.

But when he did.

There was nothing there.

Nothing out of the ordinary anyway.

The Drev was still lying there as she had been lying before, not a finger shifted out of place.

Perhaps the Bed pan had simply fallen. Things like that happened all the time.

He continued to turn, his insides twisting and churning with a sudden irrational fear. He didn't often experience this kind of fear, and certainly not in his own infirmary. There were plenty of rational explanations for this, so why did his mind insist on jumping to the worst possible conclusion to begin with.

He turned his head back to the Drev, approaching slowly.

Nothing was off, yet.

Something was.....

And then he saw it.

The rise and fall of her chest had, stopped.

All of a sudden the silence in the room seemed very very loud as he stared at the still body lying on the bed before him, in that same state of prone heaviness from before, though, now, when he looked it seemed to him that the sallow glow of her skin only grew more sallow. The tightness of her skin began to sag. The gleam of her carapace dimmed and festered right before his eyes, as if he was watching her decay in time elapse, until he had a corpse resting on the bed before him

Not a fresh corpse, not one just second sold.

But based on what he could see.

Three days old.

Dr. Krill turned towards the call button arms flailing.

And screamed.

He never made it to the call button.

***

Admiral Vir lay on his back in the half dark, one hand laid across hic chest, the stump of his missing leg propped up on some pillows, while his other leg was cocked at a sort of half angle wrapped partially in the sheets.