Tiargeth has instructed me to meditate when I feel anxious, or in pain. To distance myself from the torrent of emotions that Mavern’s death—and my part in it—have brought up. To help deal with the trauma from my capture, the questions that still linger in the weeks following, to help rediscover myself.
It’s had the additional effect of strengthening my bond with my own empathy. I can reach it so much more easily, I can feel it growing and becoming a part of me properly. Last night while I meditated, the haze cleared a little. A narrow wooden walkway, surrounded by emptiness. I, a gust of wind, moved along the length of it—curious to see what could be seen from the very edge, but the walkway continued to grow as I explored. Creating itself out of thin air. The walkway was patchy, holes broken into the boards, wood rotten and crumbling. I followed it still.
This was my innermost self. I wanted to see more.
How long I followed the breaking bridge, I don’t know. It gave way eventually to a sandstone wall, running from one end of the nothing to the other—as far as I could see. It went up too high to see the top, but the walkway ran to an arch—an opening in the wall, the only one I could see. So small compared to the rest of the wall. I slowed my approach as I went inside. Behind the wall, a chamber with a floor of smooth stone, vast in size. A roof capped it, but so high up it couldn’t be seen.
Beds filled almost every available space, placed in aisles, each one occupied. Moans, groans, and the odd scream bounced echoes about the room, a hospital of the dying. The smell of blood, sap, and desperation was thick in the air, each patient consumed with their own pain, hundreds upon thousands of them waiting to die. I wove between them, more beds with more patients appearing at the edges, and all of the faces unique but familiar.
They screamed for help. But what could a gust of wind do to help the dying? I faltered over Red, taking in again the sight of his broken body, wondering what—if anything—I could have done for him.
A flicker of darkness passed by, and he looked toward it. It was naught but shadows, a shifting spectre, passing between the beds. Wafting by the patients with the lightest touch, and gone before their last breath eased from their lips. Taking away the pain as it took life, leaving still and peaceful bodies in the sheets.
Figures in white stepped forward in the spectre’s wake, and I moved to follow. They lifted the corpses by head and foot, their pristine uniforms gleaming as they cut through the darkness to a door that hadn’t been there before, opening it, and entering. The empty beds soon filled with more distressed patients, and I followed the attendants through the door and down to another vast chamber. The smell of rot rose from the depths of the pit inside, attendants hoisting the body over the edge and into it.
Bodies. Stacked high inside the pit, from the edge where I hovered, to some unknown eternity still stretched out in the darkness. And the echo of the screams changed, the voices of people I once knew, all the faces I remembered, chorused together.
This is what you’ve done.
