Fifth circle of the Empire
Earth
I never wanted to talk about my destiny out loud, as if, if I did, the universe would decide to give up on my requests. But now that I no longer saw that door as my only exit to happiness, I felt brave enough to defy everything and take the pain I'd caused so long on Doxy.
"I was born 7 years before the Empire arrived on Earth... When the worst monsters I knew were humans, the farthest place I could go was at the opposite end of the world's circumference, and the paradise was already there, around me, even though at that time I couldn't see..."
"But..." She looked me up and down, searching for something she never noticed but had always been there. "You should be dead..."
I knew that very well.
"Apparently the universe had other plans for me." I shrugged.
"So... You're 720 years old?" Doxy recoiled, like I wasn't human anymore.
"No. I'm still the same age as before, because I skipped most of those 700 years."
"But..." The confusion on her face was palpable. "How?"
I took a deep breath... And then I revealed her my entire past:
My father died when I was the same age as I am today, but about 700 years ago. The moment I saw the bullet pass through his head, I let out a roar that, through my father's helmet communicator, alerted the Empire and its soldiers that I was there - a witness to their brutality.
And, in the blink of an eye, they were advancing towards the Hasta.
I started the engines and fired into the sky as fast as my ship could, but not enough for the Empire to lose sight of me.
The guards followed me through the emptiness of space - where it was impossible to hide - and I heard gunfire at the metal around me. I needed to find some Itopis' world to land on, but the nearest pore wasn't close enough. I tried to dodge the shots, but those creatures' aim was too good, so one of their bullets made the Hasta roar, begging me to land before it was too late.
I advanced to the first world I saw, not caring what was on its surface, and pierced the atmosphere like a shooting star, the Empire at the back of my neck digging in the knife and twisting. From the window I could see the smoke that escaped the Hasta mingling with the air, painting it black as blood on water, and the next shot turned my descent into a fall.
Everything was failing and the ground approached with violence, while the Hasta sank around me...
But I could still swim.
I ran my hands over the panel in a brief moment, saying goodbye to everything my father had once built, that life that rose around me and was no longer enough to sustain me.
"I'll come back for you..."
For the Hasta. For my family. For my life.
So I pressed a button.
And the Hasta exploded.
The fireball took over that world's skies.
The guards prowled the debris from the explosion for a few minutes, but found nothing alive for them to kill and quikly took off back into space.
That button had also ejected me from the Hasta with a mirrored parachute that camouflaged me in the skies. I slowly descended to the surface of the planet, and when my feet hit the ground once more, I dropped onto the soft sand, my back to the ground, my eyes on the endless sky.
I spent an eternity there, listening to my heartbeat, the crackle of the burning Hasta and the song of the forest beyond my helmet.
As soon as I regained my strength I set out in search of some town where someone could tell me where I was and help me fix the Hasta. But after so many sunsets, I realized that there wasn't a single trace of civilization in that world. All that existed around was sand, trees and wild animals, surrounding me and waiting for me to fall so they could swallow me down.
I was truly and completely alone.
And if I failed to escape, I would be alone for the rest of my life, on a desert island...
"With no one to hear you scream..." Doxy whispered.
And I wanted to be heard again.
I dedicated every moment of my days to rebuilding the Hasta as soon as possible, because I needed to send a message to some friend on Earth who could rescue me, a cry to someone who could hear. I took the energy cartridges I recovered when I ejected myself from the Hasta and used them to power the tools that had survived the fire, lighting the nights with the glow of my work and driving away with the sounds of the saws the creatures that stalked me from the dark... And from my nightmares.
When the panel first turned on and I finally managed to figure out where in the galaxy I was, it was too late.
The star that lit my mornings wasn't actually a star... It was a black hole, slowing and dragging every minute in this world in comparison to the rest of the Empire. It was so that, in each minute I lived, countless noxdiems had passed by outside.
So, when I finally managed to get a message out, the 700 years I didn't live had already passed between my old and new life.
And everyone I knew was dead.
My mother, my brothers, my friends, acquaintances, heroes and villains... All hostages of a time that did not reache me. I left my family to misery, to die without a trace, as if they had never existed. And if it weren't for my memories, I would have believed it.
I could think of one creature capable of surviving a passage of time like that... And so I sent him my coordinates.
When the ships flashed in the sky and approached the beach, I believed in miracles... But maybe I should have believed in revolution.
The vehicles landed, kicking up the sand in a cloud from which the creature emerged, red as liquid death, sharp claws like annihilation, staring at me with that crooked smile and the question in the language I'd taken so long to learn:
"Arkadi Phaga... I thought you and your father were dead..." I almost couldn't believe he still remembered my name. "Where is your father? When I heard his voice in the message I thought it was a joke." He laughed. "I didn't think humans lived that long."
"We don't." I muttered. "The voice was mine."
Korrok assessed me for a brief eternity.
"Apparently Phaga didn't die completely."
And from that moment on, he started calling me Phaga.
"Is that how you joined the revolution?" Doxy asked, pulling me back from the past.
"Yes... At that time the revolution was still focused on the collectors, so I spent time with them rebuilding the Hasta and getting energy to contribute to the rebellion, because there was nothing else in my life to fight for..." I said. "But in one day, I found out about the Fate Store, where, even for an exorbitant price, I could go home... So my life became dedicated to this, gathering every starstone I could and trading with far worse creatures than the ones my father worked with, so that someday I could return there and open that door that would take me back..." I sighed and swallowed hard. "On the way I made a million mistakes, but one of them led me to you... It was the only mistake I've never regretted."
Doxy touched my face, moving closer as I already missed her.
"But how did you know that's what you wanted? How did you know it would work?"
"Because they gave me a free sample..."
And so all my doubts disappeared.
• • • ֍ • • •
One day, without knowing it, I lost everything... But then the Fate Store let me go back.
I woke up with sunlight on my face and the smell of coffee reaching me through the crack in the door. I heard birds singing outside the window and looked at the walls covered with reminders that had once been so important, but that I had forgotten so quickly... I walked barefoot through the morning heat to the bedroom door and, for a moment, my hand hovered over the doorknob, not knowing if my touch would make it all disappear through my fingers once again... But when I opened the door, my house was still there.
I walked slowly down the wooden stairs, just like the ones I still remembered, and stopped when I saw my brothers running and laughing through the hallways, like there was nothing to worry about in the universe.
"Don't run so fast!" I yelled at them, automatically reverting to being the big brother to those pests. "Don't spend your quota so soon..."
They made faces at me and immediately started running again.
One day they would learn that they couldn't run forever.
I followed the coffee smell and, seeing my mother's back, I stopped at the kitchen door. She was whistling, distracted, quiet... And when her eyes fell on me, she opened the welcoming smile of someone who just saw me last night, not 700 years ago. For her, my presence wasn't a big deal, but for me, there hadn't been a day when I didn't ask myself how much she suffered from my absence, not knowing if I was dead.
"I thought you were never going to wake up." She joked. I shrugged and sat at the table like an alien, while she sat across from me and took a distracted sip of her hot drink, a gesture so common, but one that seemed to come from another life. "Working on your projects until late?"
"Yea. This one took me a while to get, but it's still in a... 'Testing' phase."
She nodded and looked up at me for a moment.
"You're so pale... Is everything okay?"
I nodded and filled a mug with trembling hands.
"Just missing my daily dose."
"You drink too much coffee." She laughed; and I wondered what she would say about the hundreds of cans of energy drinks lying around my ship. "And I almost forgot... I need you to take a look at the shower. The water is no longer coming out hot." I lowered my face, smiling. It was so...trivial. "What?"
I finished the coffee and stared at the grounds at the bottom of the mug, where the remains no longer showed me the future - because I wasn't looking for it anymore.
"Nothing much..." I muttered. "Just thinking about how nice it would be to take a hot shower again..."
"Better fix it soon then."
My mom laughed and I tried to do the same, but I felt splinters under my skin, trying to open me up to see the sunlight they couldn't believe in. I had been pulled from the edge of the precipice and refitted into my past, like the shards of a broken vase once again joined; but there were grains between me and my reality, thoughts intruding in the cracks... Because going back didn't make the vase never break, and to the past I brought the remnants of a world at war, where those who had saved me lived... Those I shouldn't leave behind.
"Mom..." I whispered, almost voiceless, and when she saw the seriousness on my face and the tremble on my lips, her smile fell. "If I disappeared, would you... Miss me?"
Her hand reached across the table to mine and I swore she would pass right through me, like I was a haunting her imagination... But her touch hit me and I held on to her as one who holds on to the edge of a cliff.
"A part of me would die."
Mine too.
"Why so melancholy?" The voice erupted in the kitchen and the entire world stopped for an instant. "Did someone die?"
How could that voice be there, after all this time? As familiar as mine and equal to the one that lived in my memories... The voice of something steady as an anchor in a storm and too immortal to ever die.
I turned to him slowly, afraid of what my eyes would find when his figure reached me... Would I stare at his dead body? Or at the void he left in my lofe? Or even at the monster of my guilt materialized in his face? I closed my eyes tightly, but I knew that, someday, I would have to look.
When I opened my eyes, he was there, with that smile he had even when the world was crumbling around and the understanding expression that one day stared at me from the abyss... A vision of the past that was there, in the present, with the heart beating, the mind full of thoughts and the hands pouring coffee into a mug.
"What's wrong with him, Hasta?" My dad asked my mom and she just shrugged. "You don't need to make up an excuse if you don't want to go, Arkadi. Besides, the atmosphere is not for everyone."
And it pained me to see how sincere he was. I didn't have to be brave or follow his footsteps to have his respect and I didn't have to be a hero to be admired by him. I already was, unconditionally, almost as if all my mistakes could be forgiven by him, even if I never could.
"It's not that..." I stammered. "Can I talk to you?"
He exchanged a confused look with my mom and then nodded to the porch.
I followed him into the morning's sunlight, letting myself be embraced by the orange warmth that reached me through the tree's leaves. I waited for the silence to catch up to me, but there, amidst the bird's song, the rustle of the leaves and the distant laughter of children, the silence wasn't real; not so much as in the emptiness of space. Maybe when my father traveled through space he also felt that loneliness that I once knew; but there, on Earth, it didn't exist.
I was really at home.
"I'm sorry..." I muttered. "I shouldn't..."
"What are you sorry for, Arkadi?"
"I had a dream... That felt too real..." I started, almost not daring to continue. "You died in it... And I disappeared from this world forever, as if death were too merciful a punishment for me." I swallowed hard, avoiding his gaze. "My mother and brothers were left alone, with no one to support or defend them... And it was all my fault."
"A nightmare?"
"It started like this... But then it became too hard to wake up." I stared at him. "But I needed to wake up, to apologize for your death..."
"Did you pull the trigger, Arkadi?" I shook my head intensely. "Did you want me to die?"
"Never."
"So it wasn't your fault." He laughed.
"But what if it had been?" I insisted. "What if I had made the mistake of being a coward and it cost you your life?"
He stared into my depths and, for the first time in a long time, I felt like I had some soul inside of me.
"We are only human, Arkadi..." Yes... That seemed to be the problem. "To make mistakes is part of our nature. But dealing with them is a skill that only the strongest of us develop."
"What if I'm never able to?"
"I don't believe in 'never'." He shrugged, leaning on the rail. "Anything is possible, if you fight hard enough." Maybe it was... He was there with me, wasn't he? "I believe you can forgive yourself someday if you look at everything from a new perspective."
But I not only blamed myself for their death... I also blamed myself for being alive, when they were gone.
"Would you forgive me?"
He sent me a look as warm as the sun and as merciful as a god I'd like to believe in.
"We both know this is no longer up to me."
I closed my eyes tightly and hugged him as if I was throwing myself into an abyss that had no ground to receive me... But he was there.
So I was a kid again.
And I knew that everything would be fine forever...
Until they brought me back to this life, because that was just a sample...
And I lost it all over again.
"You had a shower to fix..." Doxy whispered thoughtfully.
"Yes..." I clenched my fists. "And now an Empire."