Chapter Thirty-Five: Sleepwalking
A familiar noise made Xaphile twitch wide awake.
He didn't know what it was, but for some reason, it stirred something in his memory.
Still half asleep, he sat up in bed as the noise, a shiver of wood sliding against stone, quietly repeated itself.
Dim candlelight from the one of the oil lamps in the hallway crept under the door, and as his eyes strained to find something in the gloom, he noticed the two shapes marring that single line of illumination.
Feet? he groggily wondered. Who's standing outside the door?
Just as he thought it, the door itself opened.
A spear of light passed over his dazed face, making him raise a clawed hand to shield his night-blind eyes from the attack... then he saw the dark shape peering through the six-inch crack with eyes deeper than any shadow he had ever seen.
They seemed to suck in all the light around and kill it mercilessly, in a way that chilled him to the core and made his skin ripple and jerk.
He opened his mouth, but the figure held a very human finger to its lips and a pair of eyes.... kind eyes of dark brown, eyes that were no longer forged of unforgiving black... smiled at him.
Xaphile closed his mouth, heart quieting, as the hand's fingers curled in the universal gesture of 'come here.'
Then the figure disappeared.
Slowly sliding out of the bed as if in a trance, he stood up with shaking knees, but when he wrenched open the door and stepped into the hallway, the figure was nowhere.
He turned, arms hanging limply, and stared off down the hall just as all of the oil lamps went out at the same time. Dazed, he merely blinked as his pupils expanded, still able to see perfectly.
"S'dark," he groggily whispered. "Wha's... going on?"
Confused, he looked down the stretch of hallway that led to where he and Sinmir had fought.
No one was there.
He turned to look in the other direction, towards inn stairs.
He blinked again, since the mysterious figure was looming near the spiraling staircase.
He opened his mouth to call out to the person, but they raised a hand and motioned for him to follow, which he did. He crept as quietly as he could past countless closed doors until he reached the turn, and with hesitation born of unfamiliarity, he walked down the stairs after the figure.
Shirt off, hands hanging limply, mind glazed over, he walked.
The figure was standing near the entrance to the Inn, and it continued to motion for him... continued to beckon, outside.
Thoughtless, Xaphile followed the figure across the bar room and past the tables, not even feeling the cool night air when he stepped out into the open. Tail dragging limply behind him, he moved after the shadowy person, heading down the stone steps and into the city of bridges.
Everything was blurred over... time had no depth, no sense of meaning... and it wasn't long before the one leading him stopped, turning. He was standing in front of a tower of some sort, at the junction of an open doorway. The moment their gazes locked, the shadowy being turned and walked inside.
"Wait..." Xaphile sleepily croaked, slowly walking after him. "Where are... you going...?"
When he got to the doors and turned to look inside, he once again had the pleasure of seeing his secretive friend walk away from him, only this time, it was up a bizarre set of stairs.
Xaphile tried to keep track of the turns they took as he continued to chase the figure, but he became hopelessly lost.
How... am I going to get back to my room? he wondered, robotically rounding another corner; the confusion intensified and he halted, blinking at the sight in front of him. What's that?
Before him stood an enormous cherry tree resting in the center of an even bigger open-ceiling cavern that had been engraved with carved images.
It was huge, bigger than any plant he had ever seen, standing at roughly five stories high with the girth of a large house.
It pulsed and vibrated with brilliant green light.
Torches sat in sconces to either side of the cavern, providing the incredible scene with flickering illumination that only served to make the picture more eerie, but he didn't look at that for very long.
He was busy staring at the man in front of him.
Or rather... woman.
As the shadowy figure tilted her head back to get a better look at him, Xaphile's tongue went dry and glued itself to the roof of his mouth, preventing him from speaking. Shock slowly began to make his heart pound.
The woman's brown eyes glittered in the light of the torches, her close-cropped brown hair glimmered a bit, and he noticed that it hadn't been trimmed in at least a month. Her cherubic cheeks were puffy, and bags lay heavily beneath her eyes... bags so dark they looked like bruises, or rings of ink.
As she passed a hand over her face the way she always did when she was tired, he noticed that the bones of her knuckles pressed sharply through her skin.
With a rattling intake of breath, Xaphile shuddered, tears abruptly stinging his eyes.
"C... Connie?" he whispered, heart breaking and swelling simultaneously with shock. "Connie... what?!"
She smiled, but didn't come closer.
"Greetings, Xaphile," she murmured, inclining her head. "Are you well?"
Her words threw him off.
Instead of her hip and somewhat modernized manner of speaking, her words sounded like something he'd have thought Ella or Amelia would say, but despite her weird change in language, the voice was undeniably Connie's.
"How... did you... get here?" he dazedly asked, hands hanging limply by his side. "I... don't... understand."
The words took a long time to conjure up.
"I miss you, Xaphile," Connie murmured. "We all miss you."
"I... miss you too..." he croaked, a lump forming in his throat. "I'm sorry, Connie... when I did it... I wasn't... expecting to come here. I'm not even a normal human being anymore... but... but Ella's here! She's here, and she's all right, but she isn't the same girl. She's not the Ella... we used to know."
Her eyes registered no shock or surprise, just an odd sympathy that seemed slightly out of place.
It was only then that he noticed she was wearing a strange combination of a turtleneck and ballgown, and he blinked, staring at the exceedingly odd outfit.
"I'm sorry," Connie murmured, eyes glimmering with sorrow. "I'm sorry you have to face this by yourself. You're still a child. You shouldn't have to bear this burden alone."
"Connie..." he choked, feeling his face twisting up with a serious urge to cry; he fought it back, but a few tears got past his defenses. He held his clawed hands out, reaching for her. "Connie, I've missed you so much, but I—"
"Come home," she said, interrupting him. "You have no idea how worried your father and I are... come home to us soon."
Something about that sentence confused him... but for some bizarre reason, he couldn't really figure out what it was or why.
"Connie," he muttered, swallowing the ever-growing onset of tears. "Connie, I'm not... coming home."
"What?" she asked, a frown etching lines of worry between her eyes. "Of course you're coming home."
"No," he breathed, shaking his head with his fists clenching at his sides. "Connie... I can't come home. You and I both know... that I... I died. I took my own life that day... this is my reality now."
Her smile was a condescending one.
"Death?" she asked. "You think death is a worthy adversary?"
"A... adversary?"
"How did you think I got here?" she asked sadly. "I followed you."
His body went cold, eyes widening, heart freezing.
"No," he whispered, voice coming out as little more than a whine. "You... you didn't... did you?"
"I couldn't bear the thought of losing you," she said, smiling at him with patience. "So... I made a pact. I serve a demon now, and he allowed me to see you. To help you. If you serve him, too, he'll let us all go home. He promised."
The world around them darkened, fading in and out like a dim movie reel.
His ears begin to ring.
"Connie, what the hell did you just say?" he asked. "You... you took... your own life, then... made a deal with a DEMON? Are you NUTS?! I was tortured nearly to death because people thought I was one! Demons are evil!"
The woman laughed, and the darkness pressed in with with a vengeance.
"Demons are powerful, and power is not evil," she said, eyes glittering with derision. "Who taught you that? Power can do anything. It's the only real good thing in both universes!"
He started to reply, to plead with Connie that she was so, so wrong, but something stopped him. He turned, feeling as if someone was behind him, watching him, but no one stood with them in the dim hallway.
In fact, there no longer was a hallway: only him, Connie, and that damnable tree glowing with foul energy.
"Listen to me, Xaphile," Connie instructed, and his vision spun; her voice was hypnotic and full. "The Beasts of the forests are your friends. The people here... they're you're enemies. They'll hurt you, use you, then abandon you... but the Beasts? They can send you home. And they can bring our Ella back."
He suddenly felt sick to his stomach.
"Ella... is dead," he croaked, shoulders shaking as he looked at her. "Connie... have you gone insane or something? You were THERE when she died... you saw it, just like I did. She... and I... we're both..."
He couldn't even finish the sentence.
"We can change things... your own magic can make it possible," Connie coaxed. "Trust me, Xaphile. Listen to me. Listen to your mother."
Her words hit him like a blow.
Lucidity flashed into his head and he immediately realized that something was wrong. Her words curled around his brain like snakes, poisoning his thoughts.
"You've never said that to me before," he said lowly, shaking his head from side to side, trying to clear the odd drowsiness from his mind. "You... you always listened to me and Ella. You... discussed things with us, argued with us when you thought we were wrong, but you never told either one of us to listen to you like blind little children!"
She pulled back.
"Xaphile," she murmured, looking hurt, "what are you—"
That's when it hit him.
Connie had never referred to herself as his mother before now... and she didn't know anything about his father because she'd never met him until that very last day.
Things might have changed after his own funeral, but one thing definitely wouldn't have: his father didn't give a shit, and it was blatantly obvious to everyone.
His body went bone cold and his mind finally sharpened. Muscles turning to jelly, he fell to his knees on the hard stone floor, which was suddenly there again.
"You're not Connie!" he screamed, clutching his head with both hands. "Connie made us a promise!"
He focused on that memory, forced it to come roaring back... made it clear up the odd fog inside his brain.
It had been around the time he'd turned nine... he'd been spending every single day at Ella's house to study, since he was struggling with his work, but back then... Connie hadn't actually approved of him since he'd refused to talk about his mother or father.
She'd tried a great number of times to get into contact with his dad over the years, but with Ella's help, they'd managed to divert and thwart her attempts many times using a great deal of methods, from forged notes written by a sympathetic neighbor to well-timed excuses.
All Connie had known was that he'd lived right down the street in a little yellow house.
She'd paid a few visits in the past, but because his dad had either been working or drinking late into the hours of the night, they'd fortunately never had an opportunity to meet each other.
That day, he'd been sitting at the Richardson's kitchen table.
Ella had been in the living room watching a television show, but he had fallen behind on one of his math papers, so he'd been studying. Halfway through it, Connie had sat down across from him with a crossword and had noticed the frown on his face.
"What are you frowning at, Kiddo?" she'd asked, observing him with curious brown eyes. "My, my, such a scary face..."
He'd instantly blinked and looked up.
"Math," he'd mumbled, letting out a huff of air. "Miss Richardson, am I dumb?"
The woman had looked extremely startled by the question.
"No, sweetheart, of course not," she'd murmured. "Why would you ask that?"
"I can't figure the problems out," he'd explained, holding the paper up with a pout. "I looked at how to do it in the book, but I can't do it like the book. I asked Ella, but the way she taught me doesn't make any sense. I just don't know how to make the numbers work the right way."
Connie leaned forward and looked at the problems, which had been some fairly easy division problems, and had instantly smiled.
"Oh, my," she'd chortled, hooking her hair behind her ear; then she'd held out her hand, giving him a very amused look. "Well, here... hand me your pencil. I'll see if I can help."
"Huh? You would help me with my homework?" he'd asked in surprise. "Really?"
"Sure," she'd laughed, nodding when he'd handed her the pencil. "All right... look here. Division is basically like this: you have one big number, then you split it as many times as you can. An easy idea of this would be... say, four carrots. Take away half, how many do you have?"
"Two," he'd told her, blinking. "Isn't that subtraction, though? That's why I'm so confused..."
Connie, caught off guard by the accuracy of his words, actually blinked.
"Well, not if you look at it like this," she'd sighed, scratching a few circles onto his paper. "Subtraction in math means to take away from a number. Division is splitting a number into as many equal parts or groups as you possibly can. Instead of taking away two carrots, you're splitting the number in half."
His eyes had lit up and he'd beamed at her.
"Oh, I get it!" he'd exclaimed, clapping his hands. "Instead of taking two carrots away and having only two left, you still have four... but they're split into groups!"
"Exactly! Your job is to do find out how many groups there are with each problem: if you divide the top number using the bottom number, whatever you can come up with is the answer."
Beaming, he'd snatched the pencil back and started scribbling away.
"Thanks, Mrs. R!" he'd exclaimed, startling the woman; she watched as he flew through the problems. "Now that I know how, it'll be easy! I didn't know what I was looking for!"
"No problem, kiddo," she'd chuckled, going back to her crossword. "If you need anymore help, let me know."
The two of them had sat in silence for a long moment, but then, Ella came pattering in.
"Mommy, what's for dinner?" she'd asked, walking over to Xaphile and peering at his paper just as he finished up the last problem; she'd blinked when he'd pulled out another. "I'm hungry."
"Spaghetti and cheesy bread," Connie had happily gushed; then she'd glanced at Xaphile, who was frowning at his work sheet again. "Will you be staying for dinner tonight, too?"
"Can I?" he'd asked, not looking at her. "Spaghetti sounds yummy."
"Well, you've stayed for dinner almost every other night," she'd chuckled. "Are you sure your father won't mind?"
His face had twitched involuntarily, but he'd still looked at her with a smile.
"Dad works late," he'd mumbled, setting his paper down and twiddling his thumbs. "He's always too tired to make dinner, so I normally make it myself."
She'd looked surprised by that.
"What'cha doin, Xaphy?" Ella had asked, poking his paper and peering at it through her glasses. "Is that a social studies paper?"
"Yeah, I need to know what a democracy is," he'd muttered, readying the pencil and paper, eyes trained intently on the problem. "That's my homework for today."
"Well," Connie murmured, "a democracy is a system of government in which..."
Her detailed explanation lost both kids after the first few words, and when she'd seen their identical expressions of bewilderment, she'd sighed.
"It's a type of government that decides things with votes. It's fair because everyone has a say in what happens to them."
Ella frowned.
"We don't have one of those here."
"What do you mean?" Connie asked, looking at her in shock. "Of course we do!"
"No, we don't. I don't have a say in when I have to eat my vegetables."
Connie's laugh had all but shook the roof overhead.
"True! I do get to pick that one!" she'd cackled, shaking her head; then her face had grown a bit solemn, and she'd eventually sighed. "Ella, dear... I'm going to make you a promise."
"What kind?" she'd asked, perking up. "A pinky swear?"
"Yes, but it's a very serious pinky swear that I want you to remember, always. Can you do that?"
"Of course!"
"I'm going to promise to always listen to you," Connie had said. "In return I want you to listen to me, too, but know that I will never turn away when you want me to hear you."
The woman had held up her pinky, but Ella had hesitated and glanced at Xaphile, who'd been watching them with sadness in his heart. Seeing the way they interacted had always made him remember his own mom, made him think of how bad his relationship with has father was.
Made him realize that he would never have what they had.
Then, leaning forward, Ella had unexpectedly grabbed his wrist and held up his hand, startling both him and her mother.
"Only if you promise Xaphy, too!" she'd chirped, beaming at Connie. "Okay?!"
The woman had smiled faintly.
"Fine, kiddo," she'd chuckled, holding both pinkies out. "I'll promise the same to him, too."
Warmth had swept through him when the woman's larger finger had enveloped his smaller one.
The memory faded, then, and the thing that was most certainly not Connie was once again standing before him.
"She's never broken that promise to listen!" he yelled at it. "Stop pretending to be Connie!"
He jumped when Connie's face cracked like glass to reveal roiling darkness.
"You try my patience, boy," the beast growled, skin flaking off. "I tire of coddling you."
When it took a step toward him, he found himself caught in its black gaze. His mind start racing when he saw its shoulders widen to a brutish length, and when its arms began to form massive hands glittering with claws of dark cloud, his pulse quickened.
Run! he told himself, but his legs refused to move. Idiot... move!
The thing came even closer.
"You think you can beat me?" it laughed in a voice that was no longer Connie's. "As you are, your magic is nothing compared to mine, even warded and bound as I am!"
This monster's voice was dark, like clouds that brewed tornadoes and hurricanes in their depths, and it washed over Xaphile in a wave that made his hair crackle with static power.
"You have defied me long enough, Faery Scum," it hissed, "now die like the animal you are!"
Then, it lunged.
You know how people say that your life flashes before your eyes when death comes at you from the front? In that moment, those people were right, at least in Xaphile's case. Before, when he'd taken his own life, he'd been blessedly free of these visions... but now things were different.
This wasn't voluntary.
Visions began to pop in and out of his mind, and then faces shimmered in his head.
His father... drunk, uncaring bastard that he'd been... and then a vision of Ella ordering him around, flashes of her bizarrely domineering behavior... telling him with unfathomable eyes that he needed to let her know the next time he went somewhere.
Gus's sympathetic expression as he'd tended to him in the darkness of a metal cage, and his open smile as they'd talked beneath a sky put to shame by the color of his jade green eyes.
Fighting with Sinmir... the man's fierce expression as they'd battled.
Amelia's smile as he'd fumbled with her meditation and magic lessons... magic.
Magic!
Xaphile's eyes opened when the monster was but a heartbeat from his body, trying to reached for his inner power, letting the glow deep within him suffuse his mind.
His spirit exploded out of his body in a wave of cerulean luminescence: it formed a cocoon around him, and he held it in place, hoping it would form a barrier of some sort.
Unfortunately, the monster was too strong, and it paused for only a moment in order to tear a gaping hole in his defense.
Luckily for him, that moment was enough.
A dagger suddenly sailed past his cheek and buried itself in the demonic creature's throat.
"About time, you idiot," a familiar voice snapped. "I've been trying to get through to you this whole time!"
Xaphile slowly turned his head, blinking when Ella stepped past him. He felt relief coat him from the inside out when she halted in front of him and drew her sword.
He'd never been so glad to see her, but for some bizarre reason, her entire body had been suffused in a violet glow. Then again, perhaps it was simply because he'd drawn on his magic... Amelia had been shining similarly the last few times.
"You're... glowing..." he droned, making her look down at herself.
"So?" she grumbled, brushing it off. "Stay put while I take care of whatever this thing is."
Flashing forward, she tackled the struggling monstrosity and ran it through the stomach, letting out a savage scream until the sword buried in the wood of the tree behind it.
The black thing screeched when it was impaled, flailing... but then, with a sound like thunder it collapsed into a heap of flesh-toned muck.
The sludge congealed into a human form after a second, and then it raised its head to reveal familiar features beneath dark brown hair. A hand reached out to him, eyes pleading for mercy.
"Stop using her face!" Xaphile screamed at it; Ella, who had jumped back, turned her head so she could see him from the corner of her eye. "Connie's not your puppet! Let her go, you freak!"
"Ugh, quit crying! Aren't you a man?" Ella said in a low voice; Xaphile blinked when he noticed the tears on his cheeks for the first time. "This thing definitely isn't this Connie of yours and it can't hurt her, either... so stop crying. I'll take care of you."
Ella turned back to the monster wearing his surrogate mother's face. She raised her sword, the tip gleaming violet before bringing it down, and the moment it struck, the creature was reduced to a writhing, screaming mess of bones and torn skin.
Then it vanished into dust, retreating from his sight so completely it was almost as if it had never existed.
Ella turned to him then.
"Wake up, already!" she snapped. "Right now!"
Xaphile blinked and opened his mouth to tell her he was already awake, but then, much to his surprise... the world swirled and he was suddenly falling backwards in a boneless manner.
Everything soon went black.