The other side of water

Panic is a hand at Leven’s throat.

He’s been ignoring the sun ghost for days now, dismissing it as a mere sunspot in the periphery of his vision, a black stain from staring into the sun too long. But the shadow has only grown larger and more defined, slick obsidian flames climbing up its body, giving the impression of a billowing cloak in the stagnant heat of the desert.

Leven swallows, quickens his pace to catch up to his father. “Any sign?”

His father doesn’t turn, merely clicks his compass open, snaps it shut. Click, snap. Click, snap. “It’s here. I know it.”

But his father will not look him in the eye.

Back when they charted their course in the cross breeze of their sea town, their odds of surviving the desert and finding the elusive ruins seemed good. Leven believed his father when he claimed to have glimpsed the infamous city ruins as a child, when his family migrated by way of the vast desert. His father talked of the lost world often, spent his whole life chronicling the stars, pouring over hundreds of maps, records, and old texts. Some thought him foolish, others merely clicked their tongues and shook their heads in pity, believing the old man suffered from an addled mind.

But Leven believed his father, and together they plotted their course, prepared for every setback, save one: that his father was wrong.

Some unwanted memory brushes the edge of Leven’s mind, sets off a tone that reverberates within his skull, like his head has become the clapper of a great bell. He staggers forward, gags.

His father is there, a cold hand on Leven’s back. “Don’t give up, Son. It’s here, I know it. Nearly there, now, I should think.”

Leven shakes his head, dispels the ringing in his ears, wipes the stinging sweat from his eyes with the edge of his shirt. His father has already drifted off, pulling the compass from his pocket again, checking the sky. Click, snap. Click, snap.

Something in Leven snaps shut in time with the compass lid, and he manages to rise on shaky legs, trailing his father deeper into the infinite sand.

Behind him, the sun ghost follows.

While the creatures are dangerous – playing tricks with mirage and slight of hand in the sun-torched sands, in the end, they are merely scavengers. They are patient, stalking their prey for days at a time, waiting until the fight is almost over before sucking their victims dry, leaving behind a soundless heap of ash.

Leven is suddenly aware that he has stopped walking again. His father in his ear, “Son, wake up! Keep moving!”

Instead Leven falls to his knees, hand outstretched toward his father as he bows his forehead to the earth, the weight of reality pinning him to the burning sand – that this is the end.

At least his father is with him.

And that’s when the dark mass brushing the edges of his memory stumbles through the door of his consciousness – that it’s impossible his father is here with him, since his father is dead.

Leven looks up at the shape of his father with sudden horrifying clarity that only the dying are granted at the very end.

The second sun ghost turns, clicks its teeth, snaps them shut.

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Death stands at the Wall, and, curiously, a heartbeat.

Naya knows to keep her distance, but finds herself stepping closer instead.

Most of her kind stay away from the barrier that hides her world from the next. Most of her kind stay away from the ruins, too, because there is poison in the ivy, ghosts in the cracks, monsters at the edge. Most of her kind are content living in the vast valley with a barrier sealed tight overtop, like the dry click of a casket’s lid.

She is not like most of her kind.

Naya climbs the throat of the valley often, skirts the sprawling ruins, which are all broken bones with spires and beams snapped open like waiting teeth, all to run a hand against the Wall. The ruins are the only place in her world where the barrier meets the ground – the place they call the Wall – and she comes in awe to watch the pulsing iridescent waves that seal her world shut, her rippled reflection the answer to a question she doesn’t know.

Today there is something beneath the pale ghost of her face, the shape of shadows, like minnows darting through the light and dark of deep waters, there and then not. It is not uncommon for Outsiders to unknowingly venture close, but today is different, electric, the Wall sparking like a live wire. Naya steps close, and shudders at the dark shape that stands mere inches from her face. It is heavy, like the dark that will never find morning. She takes a step back. But there is something else, too, which holds her to the spot – the thing that drew the dark – only light can do a thing like that.

She steps back toward the wall, crouches down, sees what look like a hand, outstretched.

The question she’s been waiting for.

Naya hesitates, because she knows putting too much of herself through the Wall will be final. None who have left her world have ever returned. To find oneself on the other side is binding, The Great Leaving.

But the hand is there, so close. It doesn’t know she’s there, but she knows it’s asking her a question all the same. She places her hand against the Wall and jolts back from the electric pulse. She thinks she brushed against skin that is sizzling with heat.

She massages her hand, catches her breath.

On the other side, she sees that Death has shifted, suspends over a body like a match ready to drop on the pyre.

And the answer comes, effortless, unbidden.

She reaches for the hand, grabs the pulse of the wrist. Pulls.

One moment it is a hand, and next she has the whole of a man in her arms.

His life is flickering, all heat that feels on the verge of leaving.

But his eyes are awake, wild on her face. They are black. No – not black, she realizes. Almost black, but not quite. They are the deepest part of night, the trench of the ocean, the place that is most certainly black—if it weren’t for the stars, for the anglerfish.

The man sighs, slumps all his weight into her, closes his eyes.

On the other side, death howls.