starlit heroics chapter 9 sampler

~*~*~* Chapter Nine: Subdivisions *~*~*~

Silence.

Deathly silence, all except the soft breathing of a sleeping young woman. Her dreams, troubled. Her somnolence, disturbed.

Sunken, violet eyes slowly opened in a way that would necessitate a creaking sound were they not made of flesh. A mass of deep-red hair sat up from a soft-looking twin sized bed and gazed around the room in which she lay.

Half of the dark-painted room was coated in a fine layer of dust. Devices that had long sat unused, and books that had long gone unread, lay strewn about, untouched for long enough for dirt to collect on them visibly. Posters and t-shirts of bands hung up on the walls and in the closets, staring down at the newly-awoken woman, even in the dim light. Caught in the light cast by the window, there hung a candy-red guitar that looked very well-worn and loved.

The woman threw off her plush, dark purple covers, revealing copper skin marked all over with tattoos. She took a moment to stare long into a mirror hanging off of the closet door, eyes meeting sullen eyes, before slowly, finally, staggering out of bed.

She crossed the room to another bed, one covered in the grime of a long time untouched. Resting folded on the pillow was an iris-colored, hand-knit scarf, frayed at the ends from heavy use. She looked down at it for what felt like an hour condensed into a minute, allowing tears to fall from her tired eyes, before finally leaving the room, with no clothes on. Not like anybody would see her anymore, anyway. There was nobody left.

How long had she been in bed? It felt like she hadn’t done her exercise in weeks. She didn’t seem any lighter or weaker than before. She wondered how many times she had died of dehydration in her sleep, and been revived. But… no, that couldn’t be. Not here, not in this place. And even if it was, it pained her to think of his reaction. This isn’t how he would want you to live your life, she urged herself.

No, he wouldn’t want her to live in perpetual mourning. Neither would her sister.

She sat down at a dusty table, pulling a pristine bowl out of a long-untouched cabinet. Milk that would never rot again was poured over cereal that would never go stale. There was no time, not anymore. In ways like this, that was ideal. But then, she seemed to be running out of food. The rest of the fridge was empty now. And this, was her last box of cereal. There hadn’t been much in here to begin with, but now she was reaching the end of her rope.

But even though her supplies dwindled, the girl named Zora Blackwood didn’t know whether or not she could face the world.

How could she face a world that had robbed her of everyone she ever loved? How could she step out onto the very soil where her family lay buried? How she’d love to be lie in that deep, cold earth with them. Their graves would still be freshly turned. No, she couldn’t do it. But even if she couldn’t do it, she supposed, she might still pay a visit to the grave that she kept the closest. It was all there was to do, now, besides sleep, do her exercises, and sit around naked eating the last of the Lucky Charms.

Even now, she got twinges, urges to do things that no longer existed. More crust sat resting on televisions and cable boxes than had even been present in her bedroom, because there were no channels to watch anymore. An old PC that would have once been state of the art sat gathering the ages on a desk in a nearby office room. They had given her that room for streaming, but there was no one to stream to anymore, and there were very few games she could play on it without an internet connection, anyway.

But maybe, just maybe, the reasonable half of her argued, the world outside has all of those things to experience. Maybe out there, you could live your life free and heal, just like he would want you to. Like she would want you to.

“No,” she snapped back at her other half, because there was nobody around to hear her, “That’s stupid. She would want me to find some way of committing necromancy because she wouldn’t want to be dead, is what she would want. But… ugh, she wasn’t wrong, either. I don’t want her to be dead… I… I want her back. I want them all back… maybe… maybe I should leave the house today. Even if just to go outside… he really would want me to not be like this. Baby steps...”

She finished her bowl of cereal and stared down into it for a while, before finally standing up. Another cracking of the joints told her emphatically that it was time to do her stretches and exercises. She took a space on the empty living room floor, and stared down at herself. You useless piece of shit, she thought. You’re out of practice. You’re getting… you’re not getting flabby because you’re running out of food. But you’re getting soft and squishy. You would be a disappointment to everyone you used to know.

Maybe she should start small. Some basic yoga poses to stretch out her tired limbs, and some tai-chi to get her back into the motions. Once she was back in shape, then she could return to the rougher krav maga regiment that had ended up saving her life. But first she had to get there. First, she had to rebuild her foundation, because she had been useless and laid in bed for what might have been weeks. Maybe.

She really didn’t know how long it had been, to tell the truth. But it only barely mattered. Were it not for what she was and what she had come to represent to the fabric of the universe, she too would be as perfectly preserved as that last box of Lucky Charms, or the last quarter of a gallon of milk. But she wished it didn’t. She wished she didn’t have to feel the ravages. As she sat here, bending her body this way and that, she wished she could have just slept forever.

Really, though, she knew that she wouldn’t be allowed to do that. That man would come to visit again. To give her some solitary company and, inevitably, disturb her eternal rest. She wasn’t sure if she minded that so much, though. This was a very lonely life, even if it had only been a few weeks relatively since she had suspended herself in this place. But at least she couldn’t see ahead in here. No, for the first time since she had entered this world, she saw nothing but the present. No timeline to maintain. No crushing despair, knowing that it was only you keeping things from breaking apart.

But, it was funny, in a bitter, cosmic sense. Sight of the future ahead hadn’t shown her what happened in that fight. She couldn’t help but laugh; a dark chuckle steeped in rattlesnake venom and concentrated arsenic. Dominion over time and she still couldn’t call a backstabber for what it was. Yeah, some important player she was.

Another bitter laugh. For all her failures, her know it all of a twin, the oh so mighty seer, didn’t see it coming either. Sometimes she swore up and down she could still hear her, howling in rage over her death somewhere in the hereafter. It wouldn’t surprise her in the slightest if she really did hear her frothing with anger. Her sister had feared death, where Zora herself had embraced it… some concerned parties might say perhaps a little too hard. There was always someone who cared to damn much.

Soon, her exercises were finished, leaving her feeling much less stiff and creaky than she had felt when she awoke. She strode for the door nearby, not even bothering to put clothes on. The only ones that would see her now, were the judging eyes of old family photographs. And frankly, when one of your moms was a porn star once upon a time, nudity was the least of your troubles.

To open the door was to reveal that the house itself was suspended high in the air, on a chunk of grass and dirt floating far above the chaos of this sealed away rift in time and space, far above a cloud cover that looked more like ever-spiraling fractals than a natural phenomenon. A few heavy boulders hovered in the air in a downward spiral, just far enough away from each other to hop between with a relative amount of ease. All of this sat above a spire carved from stone and marble stained azure and cyan, the top of which was where the spiral of stony stairs ended. Zora followed the path as if she had built it herself, and soon stood before a tremendous altar. Upon that altar, lines of power surged scarlet around a wide mirror, cracked ever so slightly with the mark of a fist. Within those cracks, ripples of some unknown power, flickering every color imaginable, leaked out in streaks of light.

She knew what it would have meant to shatter this altar, and she thanked whatever super-deity was out there that she didn’t, in the fit of fury that had left that mark.

The tower itself was an ever-shifting maze filled with rusted clockwork odds and ends that would have, at one point, been the pieces to a vast puzzle of self-exploration and growth. Some parts were fixed, and even in their dilapidated state, ticked and spun and twisted around. But, as opposed to anything else in this prison of her own creation, the majority of the mechanics therein stood still and unmoving, forever stalled and broken.

At points, that maze seemed endless and yawning, just as it had during the game. But finding her way down had always been easier than coming back up. This time, she thought to herself, she had better make sure she found real food. Starvation would be unpleasant to her, maybe even more than others. But there had to be something down there. Something maybe not substantial, but that would keep her going until that man came to visit her again. She had better be sure, and ration it out.

Eventually, she reached the ground floor of the tower. In all four cardinal directions of the massive floor, there stood grandiose archways, leading outside. And in the very center of the marble floor, a vast and grandiose fountain, eternally flowing with liquid. In the game, it had resembled quicksilver, and during the construction of this place where time stood still, it looked like it was made of stars. Zora didn’t understand why it kept shifting colors like this, but now that she looked upon it again, the fluid looked an awful lot like a fountain of fresh blood.

She watched it for a moment or two, contemplating it. The last time he had come here, it had been for this stuff. Maybe she should bring down some buckets for them, just in case they needed whatever it was again. But she wouldn’t be able to haul stuff down all that way if she was starving.

Stepping outside now, she was below the thousand-fold clouds, and could stare at the world below her. The realm was divided fourfold into sectors, with one solitary, vast island hovering not far above the tower’s ground floor.

One quadrant below, a vast mountain range dotted with trees, lakes and rivers, painted every color imaginable, like a surrealist painting. It looked somewhat like at one point, it should have been bursting with volcanic activity, but now, all was quiet and still. Another, an ocean of magma, dotted not by hard stone, but by atolls of ever-cold, eternally frozen ice. These days, it seemed like the ice was slowly shrinking away, threatened by the sheer heat of the magma.

The third, a forest made of crystal, that might have glimmered at one time with light, but now seemed devoid of all of its soul and heart. And the last, a seemingly impenetrable bank of fog that threatened to swallow the lands neighboring it, that seemed to grow thicker and thicker by the day. And, beside the tower, a wide, grassy plain with a few isolated trees, whose bark looked not like tree bark, but parchment. Once upon a time, maybe that parchment was readable, but these days, the ink on the branches and limbs ran thin and dripped into the brilliant grass below, staining the luminescent lawn and forever darkening it.

She stared up to the floating knoll beside her, before sighing heavily. There wouldn’t be food there, would there? She would find her way back up later, and pay a visit. She then looked downward. There was only one real way to get down there, these days. She had made sure of that… or more accurately, that man did. So that no one could intrude so easily.

She stepped up to the edge of the chunk holding the tower aloft, closed her eyes, and let herself fall.

Compared to the still, frozen air, the rush of the fall was refreshing, and during the minute where she plummeted, she pictured the open fields and high mountains of back before the game. How she would have loved to see the beauty of those untouched spaces, and felt that wind on her face just like this. But now she never would. Now, she had only this place, and the unknown wilds outside. She didn’t even know if the world out there was suitable for life in the same way.

The ground came up fast, and the death was painless and, by and large, instant. Her head went first, skull and brain utterly crushed by the force of hitting the ground at hundreds of miles per second. A pink mist erupted from the impact of the heart and lungs, each organ crumpling like tissue paper. Limbs bounced away from the point of the fall, an arm landing a few feet away, a leg landing behind a few bushes. Bone fragments and crushed meat and matted hair were all that remained.

And for one, blessed moment, the pain had finally stopped.

But then, as if by the will of the universe itself, the scattered limbs pulled themselves back to the shattered pile of flesh, and the pile of meat began to pull itself back into the shape of a human. Organs reconstituted. Skin stitched itself back together. A brain reshaped from a pile of gray, fatty liquid, and a skull rebuilt itself around it. A face stretched back over that skull, and a mane of hair reattached itself to  the top of a newly reforged head. Within seconds, she lay there good as new in a spray of her own blood.

It took her a minute or two to rouse again, but when she did, she unleashed a deep, low groan.