The Crystal in the Chasm

chapter 38

Flesh. Bone. Blood. A beating heart. Mounds of bodies. A tower of corpses. Cries of lost souls clawing at the last grain of life before it fell through the hourglass and vanished into the abyss of other grains of sand. Flashes. Moments in time. Snippets of a life that may or may not have been mine. Darkness.

In a world of stars, I was nothing. Translucent but sentient, I was floating through galaxies, traveling through space and time. In the distance, a shooting star was glowing with a fiery desire to burn brighter than the rest. It flickered and fought, lightyears away from my reach, my extended hand, my outstretched fingers nearly there. The strain in my muscles, the aching, the breaking. I was desperate to touch it, to keep it burning, to infuse it with my life force. Something about it was familiar. Something about it was not starlike at all, but something more. It was a bud of life, of a soul. An unexplainable feeling that could only be described as the overwhelming sense of being aware of its presence, of recognizing the feeling only one person created when he stepped in the same room as me. Merlin's presence.

It was him out there, soaring through the cosmos. Something about the fire seemed to smile at me, as if to say one last farewell before he took his final breath in this life. In an instant, the ball of flame roared to a breathtaking size, the light shining through all of space to warm the nonexistent flesh I could still somehow feel against my face. The ball exploded into millions of burning pieces, dispersing through the darkness and flickering out of existence as the flecks of what he once was crashed through the universe. His life force blinked out of existence like flipping off a light switch. Merlin was gone. Elsewhere. No longer here with me.

I knew I was dead. This place was safe and familiar and quiet. Endless and beautiful and peaceful. It was home. The only place I was not confined into a body, tied down and bolted in by muscle and bone and taut skin. It was like taking off a heavy coat matted with enough snow to accumulate over a lifetime. It had the warmth and safety of a mother's womb, the caress of a loving touch, an infinite feeling of freedom and power. Out here amongst the stars, I was not powerless. I was not robbed of what made me who I was. Something about being dead reminded me that nothing ever really belonged to me in the first place. Nothing but this feeling. This peace.

A planet was orbiting around me, covered in a familiar landscape that resembled the maps I studied growing up. The world I lived on. Two glowing orbs seemed to hover around the ball of lush greenery and seas of blue, hands materializing from their glow and lingering over the center of the spinning world. Their essence, recognizable instantly by the unmistakable feeling it evoked through the air. Dread. Wicked, conniving, power-hungry gods. Blix and Bellatrix, controlling the shift in the tides of the ocean, the illumination of the moon, the formation of clouds.

I was swimming through the air as if it were water, uncertain of what I might do once I reached them. As if on cue, the orbs of light seemed to notice me. Their glowing faces materialized through the light, their eyes locked on me. The scent of something burning filled the air, flashing me back to what they had done to Merlin. A battle cry seared its way through the never-ending space separating us, seeming to douse their flame of power in a sudden wave of liquid. Their screams of terror sounded as they retreated, as I began to burn within, hurling at them angrily and hungry for their end. Like a meteorite, my speed was too rapid to slow as I broke through the atmosphere of the world and tore into the oxygen like a box of chocolates in the palm of a starving child.

I plummeted through the brewing storm clouds roaring to life around me, clawing through the atmosphere with greedy hands. I crashed down and down and down, falling through the air, the wind whipping through my entire being as the body I once resided in emerged from below. Familiar wine red locks of flowing hair cascaded around my unconscious body, white angel wings with charred feathered edges folded around me like a gate of protection. Onyx held my body in her arms.