“
But you are,” says the voice, venom spewing against this last resurgence of strength, this resistance to its will both unforeseen and unwelcome. “You are weak, worthless... your failures have not only defined you, they have set those you love on paths to destruction. Death, torment; these are the gifts you offer. These are the burdens you bear and unload willfully on those who would trust you.”
He knows this to be true. Somehow, deep within himself, he can only cede the point, can only give way to the hissing voice in the darkness. It seems to know so much of what he himself has forgotten.
Its grip tightens on his neck, drawing the warmth from his body as it squeezes slowly. He cries out, knowing no one hears him; no one cares. He deserves this. The slow and cumbersome approach of his death has sought him for what feels like years. Now it is finally upon him. Perhaps he is already dead. It doesn't much matter.
The hand squeezes harder; stiff joints and bones jut into his neck. Lights flash across his vision as he writhes away from it, unable to escape. Her face comes to him in that moment. His eyes shoot back open as a beautiful young woman appears in his mind's eye. She is so clear he thinks perhaps she is actually there with him.
He knows her. Not by name... but he knows her. She looks desperate, concerned for him he realizes. The hand wrenches on his neck again, driving the image of her away briefly before it forces itself into his mind. She is there, urging him on with her eyes, her deep, brown eyes.
Something about her makes him want to live. He doesn't know how she could have such an effect, but the impression comes on him as sudden as it is acute. He puts his arms up, broadening his stance, and throws the unseen hand from his neck. He turns to see his assailant, a wraithlike figure barely visible in the darkness. Wispy and white, translucent and decrepit.
“
Leave me be!”
“
I can't do that, boy. You're lost without me.”
“
I can find my own way,” he says, transparently unsure of the declaration as he makes it.
“
I doubt that,” says the voice. “You don't even know where you are, let alone who you are or how you got here.”
His resolve wavers like a low-burnt candle under the whisper of truth. He doesn't know those things; he is lost.
“
I'm...” He pauses unwillingly, groaning under his breath. He tries to force his name from the tip
of his tongue. It refuses to leap into the air like a fearful child into a pond.
“
Lost,” says the wraith, finishing his sentence for him as it begins to move closer.
He pulls back, his fear returning and winning out over the brief moment of defiance.
“
Let us put an end to that,” the wraith says as it continues towards him. “I will take you exactly where you are to go.”
She returns to him then, as real as if she were standing next to him. She says something urgently, her voice garbled and carried away as if by some treacherous wind. But as she continues to speak, the sound gets stronger until he finally makes out the word.
“
Ardin!”
His eyes widen as his heart leaps in his chest.
“
Alisia,” he says quietly.
She smiles briefly before gesturing back towards the wraith as if to remind him of where he is. But he doesn't need reminding, not any more. He knows who he is, who he was made to be. He was made to be with her.
He turns to the wraith and smiles, stopping it in its tracks.
“
That's right,” Ardin says, doom lacing his tone.
It tries to flee, tries to find its way back into the darkness, but can't. It is trapped by invisible walls of Ardin's making. He raises his hands, twisting them slowly as his palms face the creature that would claim his mind. That seeks to destroy his soul.
The winds rise. Light breaks through the darkness like clouds in piercing shafts that burn the night away. He scorches the wraith, burns it with light and with the knowledge that he is loved. He is forgiven. If not by all he has failed, at least by the only one that matters.
It screeches and sputters as it withers away into nothing. The light grows in intensity, burning away everything in reach. The landscape turns so bright that Ardin is blinded before he is shocked back to reality.
Ardin Vitalis awoke sitting up in bed. He found himself under gray sheets in a small, dank room. The cinder block walls, whitewashed some time before, now betrayed their original color. He looked around, sweating and breathing so heavily his throat threatened to collapse from the strain. And with a sudden rush of memory, he screamed in the confines of his tiny cell. For the woman that he loved was dead.
T
HREE
“
W
HAT DO YOU THINK WE SHOULD DO
?”
“I dunno. We ought'a call in the doctor.”
“Well yeah, but I mean what do we do 'till he gets here.”
“What's there to do? He's just sittin' there cryin'.”
“Yeah, but you remember Phillips, right? Little guy there put him in the infirmary last week in one of those fits.”
“I was there.”
“I know, I'm just sayin'.”
The two orderlies turned to look at the kid through the small window in the door to his cell. He had proven to be among the more strange additions to their ward. Which was saying something considering it specialized in strange.
They were used to old war veterans and industrial workers wandering into their hospital with some variance of a mental illness. Most never left, and few lived long in the run-down facility in the mountains. This was where the mad were offloaded to die in obscurity, far from home and their ability to upset the lives of the sane. There were few whose comfort could be upset here. There was little comfort to be had in any case.
The orderlies were not used to healthy-looking young men being brought in. Especially not so far gone as this one had been.
“You wanna try talking to him?”
“No. I trust him less now that he's stopped staring at the ceiling.”
“He's just a boy.”
“The kind of boy that puts two-hundred-and-fifty pound men on a stretcher.”
“Good point.”
And so they left him and went to find the doctor in whose hands his fate rested.
Ardin, for his part, remained unaware of their presence, overcome with the stark memory of his loss. He had been living for what felt like eons among the ghosts of his past. His failures had woven themselves into his nightmares, creating a tomb from his guilt. Levanton burned down around him in a cyclical fashion, reappearing only to burn every time. The memory had grown worse with every recurrence.
But all of that terror amounted to little when compared with the waking realization of Alisia's passing. She had seemed so close to him in those last moments. They stood out clearly at first, but faded from his mind like dreams so often do. Somehow her presence then had felt more real than anything now did.
He stopped crying and wiped the tears from his cheeks with the dirty gown he was wearing. Where it had come from was a mystery, but not nearly as mysterious as the room in which he found himself. The one good fluorescent bulb in the ceiling flickered and made it hard to focus. His bed was a simple metal frame with a few sheets and a lumpy pillow. Then again, the mattress was even more lumpy, so it seemed unfair to label the pillow so harshly.
He felt weak and hungry. He wondered if he had eaten much, feeling his arms as he hugged himself for warmth against an unwelcome chill. He certainly felt skinnier than he had ever been. He frowned; the prospect was an upsetting one. He grabbed at his hair; it was lank and unkempt, longer than his mother would have ever let him wear it. Almost down to his eyes now. His mother... her face flashed in front of his for a moment, forcing him to choke back another sob.
Ardin slowly swung his legs out over the edge of the bed, tentative, shaky. He was afraid that they wouldn't hold him. They didn't do a great job of it, but he managed to lift himself from the bed. He shuffled over to the door which held the only window in his cell. Curiosity slowly turned to fear as he put his hands next to the small square of glass. He peered out through the thin, crisscrossing wires.
Outside was a long hallway that led off into flickering darkness. He seemed to be at its end, looking down a long row of doors that appeared so similar to his own. The tiles in the floor were accented by dirt that had crammed its way between them; there were as many cracked as there were whole. The entire place seemed stained by age and neglect, and for a moment, even if only a fleeting one, it staunched his hunger to look around.
Out of the darkness at the end of the hall came two lights. They were square, difficult to make out, but then they swung into the hallway to reveal that it continued beyond. Three men walked through the doors. Two of them were big, burly young men. They were carrying thick, black batons and what looked like a series of interlinked leather belts. The third was a tall, older man; slender and withered with age, his stern glare behind dull spectacles made him all the more intimidating.
Ardin backed away from the door, stumbling as he tried to sit on his bed and look unassuming. He couldn't help the fear that gripped his chest. There were clicks and clacks as the locks on the door were released. Soon the two large men filled the tiny cell. They came quickly, grabbing him roughly and strapping his arms to his sides with the belt-looking things before standing him up in front of the old man.
He tried to protest but found his strength sapped entirely.
“Well.” The old man peered over the dull glass circles resting on his nose. “It would appear you've finally woken up. It's time to have what I hope will be our first intelligible conversation. Follow me.”
The old man turned and began to walk down the hall. Ardin tried to plant his feet and resist, but found he was barely capable of holding his own weight. He was half carried along behind the doctor by the two orderlies, who took their eyes off him as often as they did their hands. Which was never. He didn't know why, but there was a strong mixture of fear mixed in with the mistrust that their eyes betrayed.
What could I do to such big men
, he thought,
that would make them fear me? I'm half their size.
Ardin's throat constricted as they moved through the intermittent darkness.
They walked through the exit at the end of his half-lit hallway. The doors opened into a longer passage filled with yet more flat doors. Now he could hear the musings of his neighbors, strange and mournful. Their muted cries filled the air. Ardin realized he had been in an abandoned wing of this place, what seemed to be a sort of hospital.
He had never been in a real hospital; he had only heard of them. He wondered if this was like the ones he had been told about, though he doubted it. Hospitals were supposed to be places of healing, of hope. This place was oppressive in its very architecture.
Ardin had never even been seen by a real doctor until he and Alisia had stumbled into Brenton. He had seen one briefly as a boy in Levanton. The strange practitioner had come to tend to Ardin's father and had only stayed for a few minutes. The children had been ushered outside, so Ardin never got a good look at the man. Later his mother had told him it was Elandir's way of making amends for his father's inability to work. Something he earned through his service in the military. His father had never wanted to talk about it.
The old man stopped as he came to a massive metal door. A loud buzz and click sent it swinging, revealing a small holding chamber beyond. They walked inside as they waited for the door to close behind them. When it did, there was another deep buzzing sound as the second door's lock unlatched and allowed them to pass through. They walked out into a large lobby where a variety of haggard looking men stumbled about, sat on benches, or played what appeared to be games of various shapes and sizes.
A few of them gaped openly at Ardin, terror written across their wretched faces. The majority were never aware of his presence. Ardin wondered how they knew him or if it was some sort of delusion they shared.
The orderlies pulled Ardin along past an open window where a man was handing out pills to a line of the disheveled inmates. They turned him down a hallway where they walked through a series of grimy windowed offices. Finally the orderlies pulled him into one of the offices and sat him down in a chair. It sat directly across a desk from the bespectacled old man. The whole place felt so sterile to Ardin. He hadn't seen a single plant in the whole of the drafty building.
“So...” The man thumbed a pen into action and started scribbling on a piece of paper in front of him.
And that was all he said for some time as he continued to write and fill out form after form. There was nothing in the room that gave Ardin any clue to who the man was. No certificates on the walls. Not even a name tag on the desk. The orderlies stood at attention by the door, wary eyes never leaving the back of Ardin's head.
Ardin, for his part, could barely stand it. The scratching of the pen on the paper was paining his ears. His hunger was driving a headache that threatened to break out of his skull and run loose among the inmates.
“Sir,” he finally said, putting on the most polite tone he could manage. “I'm starving.”
“Yes,” the man continued to scribble. “Well, we haven't been feeding you for the last week. We're trying to figure out what's wrong with you, you see?”
Ardin didn't see; he was hungry. “Well now that I'm better, could I have something to eat?”
The man looked up at him, pushing the spectacles back from where they had slid. His brow furrowed with a contained anger.
“Presumption is a trait I greatly dislike. Remember that. As for your health, I would say we have yet to determine the level of it, now don't we?”