12 ~ September night

There was a wind blowing through the night. But then, it wasn’t exactly night but rather the absence of sunlight.

A freezing cold air filled with icy pearls or shards was going against her, slashing her face and her arms, piercing her skin and seemingly heart.

Shaking, clinging with all her will and might, onto the rocks, suffering, crying and screaming.

Her eyes wide open, her breath lost, her mind blank but raging. All against the murderous rain pouring down against her. She was fighting against all odds, climbing the darkest cliffs of the rocky abyss...

She was crying, every inch of her body aching, from the intense effort and physical prodigy she was pulling out in order to climb higher, and climbing... Her fingers clenching against the smallest asperities and trembling, her muscles ripping themselves to give tensile strength she would never have achieved otherwise in her life.

She was suffering body and heart in that darkness, screaming silently against death itself, but now from the other side.

The winds, gulfing through the well and against her, were freezing her cold, going harsher against her at times. It pushed her down, ripping her clothes and skin... She was grinding her teeth, burning her muscles all along her fingers, arms, shoulders and back, to hold on.

She was not letting go. She could not let go...

Because there was a chance.

A small chance, that it was true...

A chance she would take, to go beyond the gates of death, and recover the forbidden hope, of seeing her once more...

Her obnoxious gaze was sharper and angrier than ever, still looking upward through the tears, open to the falling crystals of ice. And instead of flailing and failing her, her weak knees and legs kept pushing.

With more strength toward the blaze, never falling. The rush of ethereal adrenalin overwhelming the pain of each new movement. Her tiny and injured left hand reached for the following grip in the uneven rock, inside a fissure dripping and cold. She stuck her fingers inside to a point it could also hurt, but hold her longer.

She had accepted her death before, so she could lose most living fears... But now a burning drive was settling in her heart, leading her against unlikely chances... Against the raging wind going straight down for a first.

The little thing she was, lost in the heights and darkness but clinging to the wall, she kept climbing like the bug she felt she was, slowly, always fighting, with a humongous and unreasonable might now embraced.

Fighting against life and death themselves...

Because somewhere in her mind, the burning ember of an unreasonable albeit slight hope had changed her.
And gritting her teeth to the point of breaking bits of them, she was fighting with everything against the falling world.

Elise’s hands reached another place to hold, and she pulled herself a little higher, moaning but holding.

Her voice couldn’t be heard anymore by the others below, or by anyone but herself.

The woman who remembered her death, was now fighting with this body of a past girl, against reality with all her might, and so before the doll Esther herself.

With a human uncompromising and unforgiving will, the woman who died was now this child leading the way, toward what no king on Earth ever had the chance to reach...

Going their way for what even few gods had ever claimed their own, the eventuality of seeing the sunlight again...

And so far, none had showed up to stop them...

It didn’t matter what the cost could eventually be, she was grasping her chances and crawling a way out of the grave.

Elise was opening the way with a will neither Scarlett nor Esther could suddenly recognise nor understand...

She had somehow suddenly found faith in Esther’s belief, starting to share her sight and goal, making herself her first zealous follower.

But she had her own reasons to push further without sparing anything.

If there was even the slightest chance that what they thought was true and could come to be, Elise was now fighting for it with all her might.

A chance to see the world again...

Her eyes bleeding from the ice piercing them, her body slowed down by the hail blowing strongly against her, Elise did not let go any grip she had on the frozen rock.

This strangest of caves they were stuck into, she was climbing it without second doubt.

She could hear bits of her dress being ripped away by the impromptu blizzard now blowing against her. She could feel that fake blood boiling inside her head and freezing along her skin. Was it all a kind of phantom pain?

Probably not, since her lungs did not retain the pain of her agony in smokes.

She managed never to falter, and continued to move, heart and will stronger than ever even in her past.

There was something within her mind, hidden and precious, that was fuelling her cold body to go further and defy the odds and all she knew of reality. She was taking that chance Esther had offered them, and never letting go.

And eventually, after an eternity of fight against unexpected elements, her right hand reached the sculpted bricks of the central well.

A large well, far above the sand, where she was maybe now seen as a faint shadowy figure.

Blind, she knew that the glow they had seen before was somewhere above that large well.

It was just up there, she couldn’t let go now.

Not yet, not so close to another milestone, new and promising...

Elise managed to pull herself up and kept clinging, and then climbing, gripping the thin edges between the bricks to hold onto. The circular well was a ladder breaking her remaining nails mercilessly.

The murderous winds faded out eventually, leaving her to rise through the last metres in more calm and quiet weather. It was as if a reservoir of Arctic winds had been ruptured, and poured everything it had held on through history over them. Elise was getting inside that tomb from the bottom end apparently.

She was left to gasp and moan in relative peace for the last metres to climb. She had her frostbites and numerous bleeding injuries.

She didn’t take any rest and kept moving, knowing full well how much she would collapse as soon as she would release some pressure over her fingers.

In the darkness now only filled with the sounds of her own body gauging the way and pulling itself up, she put the last heroic efforts into her limbs, and reached the top of the structure.

She teared up even more, as she was pulling herself up and over the well’s edge, letting herself soon fall on the other side. She now lied on her back on solid ground, gasping for air.

Dust was floating, and the glow was around, in the slightly warmer air. There was new smells floating around, and some light... She could tell.

Behind her cries and agonizing pain, she could now see a little through her fog of blood and mist that there was a kind of flame nearby.

The glow they had noticed from below, was from a small flame here in a lantern of some peculiar kind...

~

Something new and a step forward.

Elise recovered consciousness where she had passed out. In a strange dark place looking like a kind of large basement. She glared into a square room, with four pitch black corridors following each wall in a direction. Against these walls, she noticed four large fog lanterns, hanging there and dimly lit. They were the source of a slight glow to the stone ceiling here, and by reflection down the well, to the cave world below...

This place looked just as eerie in other ways.

Deep below, her sister and Esther, or rather Mary-Esther, were awaiting her help.

She needed a quite long rope or something alike to help them.

Elise stood up, fighting an aching body and trembling limbs.

She unceremoniously grabbed the nearest lamp to her and began looking around. Dust fell out of the lamp as she moved it around, as if it had been forgotten there for too long a time.

The place was clearly unlike the train; but somehow, she found that it resembled it... The two places could be defined as old, with a feeling as if someone was just there before... Or decades ago. Were there other ghosts? Or that place maybe obeyed to the will of another dreaming god? If the rolling train had mostly been Blue’s dream mixed with Esther’s reality, who’s dream could she now have reached?

Unless Esther herself was closer to the truth nonetheless, and it was something else, closer to her history and reality... Would they need to climb from a surreal place to another until they would find a true way to access reality?

Elise reflected that she wasn’t aiming for Paradisio, but simply Earth again...

Pondering for a moment about it, she thought that no matter what the truth would be, it was worth trying.

No matter what...

She hastily ventured off into one of the dark corridors.

~

Leaving behind her the room holding the well in the middle, she went through quite a large and long corridor. It was more like a tunnel actually, with cleanly carved stone walls and ceiling.

The dust was flowing behind each of her steps, where the previous freezing winds hadn’t stuck everything in place.

She was leaving the first trail of footsteps she could notice in this dirty place.

At the end was a turn on the right side, followed by another just after, leading to a slightly less large corridor. Still venturing at a good pace, Elise reached a long stairway and went one floor above, over fifteen metres of large and low steps. This place was looking as if it were built in an antique castle to her, although at the moment she didn’t care about archaeological study.

She reached an impromptu crossroad. In the middle of the wall just facing her was another staircase going up further. On her left, two corridors were running alongside with the stairs. On her right, the same thing, plus a darker area in the middle. Perhaps there was a room or yet another corridor starting there a little further.

Everything around her was with the same neutral colour of rock, lit in ember by her lamp.

Intrigued by the blackness on the right side, she ventured in none of the numerous corridors and went there. The wall was opened to a large place. One more step, the walls on both sides were running smoothly away, describing slight curves, opening a huge room to her.

She made a few steps ahead in complete darkness, on a different pavement and tiling she noticed, though quite hidden below the dust.

She looked upward and felt it. Although it was nothing her eyes could see through the absolute darkness, she felt it.

The thrill ran gradually all along her shoulders and spine.

Far above her, still way beyond reach, but real.

It was there. She could feel it on her skin.

It was the same as every other breathing and movement of air, but also entirely different like night and day.

The gate, or whatever its true form was. The access to reality outside, it was all the way above her!

Elise screamed with all her might into the gigantic void between.

Her voice echoed on the circular wall of this titanic well, at length, gradually dissipating.

Elise was flabbergasted.

She had felt the touch of air coming from outside...

~

Elise overcame her thrilling shock, of being touched by a faint glimpse of reality.

She then began wandering, for rather lengthy hours around this place. She went through the many empty and uninspiring corridors framing that ominous and large circle. It was a real colosseo, with probably the same outer walls as the cave below. It meant that this coliseum plunged in darkness was about sixty metres in diameter, and various corridors were therefore running around that large place.

The colosseo had a pavement hidden below dust or sand, with different kind of stones and coloured mosaics, but Elise left again the archaeological study for later. She also found some kind of empty altars, and some more abandoned lanterns here and there, but nothing useful to help the others below.

She realised she wouldn’t find a rope on this level and returned to one of the staircases leading to the next level. She climbed up there to hopefully have a little more luck.

The corridors up there she found were sometimes closed by a large metallic railing gate for no apparent reason.

She had to search even longer through what appeared to be a labyrinth, exhausting herself through it and two more levels of maze like architecture, before finding a single door.

That first door encountered, a proper normal looking door in this other timely space, it made an impression on her.

Below the colosseo was the well, and then the cave. Above it now was a set of corridors leading to some empty rooms and stairways climbing further up, floor by floor. Elise was making a map in her head, trying to keep everything together.

The small level above had a circular corridor, and the stairs leading one floor above. And on the third floor after the colosseo ground, facing the stairway she just exited, she found that door.

A plain door of rotting wood, where a piece of chalk had written XLVIII. Not thinking immediately about the roman numerals they implied, Elise just didn’t think anything out of the mark and went to open the door.

She found a large closet filled with various decaying tools.

She began searching without a care, trimming with little respect through the items already not sorted, scattering them even more. She was looking for a rope or something alike. She found no such thing, but stumbled upon a chain mail from darker ages. Her surprise over, she used what she had at hand to unknit it, and turn it into a long and uneven metallic cable.

It took her enough work to bleed her fingers and hands, shaking more and more, but she worked without thinking and without any way to define the time spent on this endeavour. Eventually she thought she might have constructed something sufficient to lift someone else. She had worked in a calm frenzy for a long while.

And then as she tried to stand up, she realised she had to find her way back, to spend another hour of lonely walks with her new heavy luggage.

This place was like a gigantic crypt, where nothing but her was making noise, breathing heavily and moaning.

She also tried to lit up the various lamps she could find along her way.

Eventually she made it back to the well. She was exhausted but still driven.

Tying an end of the simplistic but threaded cable to the stone well itself, she attached another lamp to the other end, and began descending it slowly into the cave below.

~

While Elise rested a little, the two others far below began their turn climbing the rather dangerous way up.

They tied what they could over their hands to make gloves to better hold, and took their turn doing the deadly rope climbing.

It took them a lot of time and energy. They cut themselves countless times and even fell out a few times, before they got the best way to make it work. Thankfully the sand cushioned their falls. Almost all their clothing they could spare were turned into crafting the right gloves for this ascension.

It was tedious, but they managed to climb eventually.

The metallic cable was thankfully robust enough to support their individual weight, and also keeping countless little curves and knots that helped their climbing.

They helped each other, and although they struggled and suffered for days on this trial, in the end they managed to make it.

Scarlett reached the edge in poor state of disarray. Mary-Esther eventually followed, not looking much better.

How much time had they spent since they arrived? They couldn’t tell with the absence of sunlight and irregular needs for slumber.

But now the three of them were marching inside the discovered colosseo.

They all were in rags and dishevelled state as they stepped inside this wider space.

But they felt as if they had prevailed against darkness. Each of them was holding a lamp and looking around the new place they discovered, with bewilderment. It didn’t look familiar even to Esther.

The colosseo and the stairways going upward for many levels were investigated.

They could have gone straight up to unexplored floors, but Elise had lead them both first inside the dark and huge colosseo for an obvious reason.

All three of them were then gazing upward at what could have been a night sky. All of them could sense how something was up there, far above, even though they couldn’t see it.

They could just feel some of its influence.

E - You can feel it too, right?

Mary-Esther had her mouth hanging open in shock, unable to reply. She couldn’t say anything, feeling just as well how it was true.

She also had this faint but sharp feeling about something otherworldly hanging at the end above.

That feeling growing into shivers was so intense as it fell onto them, they could have tremors and cry.

Esther lifted her damaged arms in begging up to the unknown sky, to call with all her might her loved one, Blue...

She called her in instinct and mixed emotions from the bottom of this immense well that was the colosseo, in the faint hope of reaching her once again.

She could have cried her dream of seeing her blue bird coming to her once more, once again...

Mary-Esther fell to her knees and began to moan a little. No tear still came out, as if that rule was absolute, but the pain to her eyes and head grew into a headache again.

It was how her body expressed sorrow in this state, and how now she reacted to this abrupt change to her condition, and this exposure to this intense change in the air.

For a moment, she had felt she had a chance to reach her beloved Blue again...

Blue. She called her again, but now her voice strained.

Her hope of seeing her again was in turmoil. Her hope of seeing the couple to whom she had been the blue rose was fuelling her.

She wanted to thank them for keeping her alive, and giving her a chance in a way. She loved them as much as they had loved her in return.

Now under the shock that came with standing below this void, everything was in turmoil inside of her. Mary-Esther barely held herself together, in confusion and emotion.

After she had calmed down a little, she stood up again. As she turned around, she found Elise and Scarlett still there.

All of them were wilful again.

Now it was time to rise from the grave.

If they couldn’t fly straight away up to whatever was on top of this gigantic and deep colosseum, they would make their way through the outer stairs, no matter how long it might take.

Another step toward their goal had been done; and a new call sent through the void.

~

The ascension of the three ghosts in rags began.

Each of them holding a lantern, feeling cold but determined. They took the stairs that Elise had already climbed before. Their ascent began so simply on the way she already knew.

Walking at a calm pace, close to each other, through the endless tunnels and corridors of stone. They were not too scared, but at the same time excited and worried. That silent place was still mostly a mystery for them. For each their different thoughts and concerns to sort out, but they kept walking steadily through the wide and obscure place.

From the floor above the colosseo stairway, they reached a level further above and found the closet where Elise had found the chainmail and other rubbish.

Scarlett and Esther could understand what the chalky inscription on the door was.

As for what it could mean, they thought it might be a floor level, upside down. Making the colosseo stand on level 51 below surface, and making them wonder about what could be on level zero.

Possibly it would be similar to the train they thought. From an end, to the exit at the other end, looping back with each level like a room to cross... Would it be really such a high tower to climb? A ziggurat?

So far, Mary-Esther hadn’t said much. She was still wondering a lot herself.

Now as they reached another stairway to climb one floor above, carved in the rock again, she tried to estimate the overall height of the tower. Looking more closely at the height between two floor levels, she made her calculations.

Whilst she was trying to figure out if her result was sensible, a new deep rumble began to be audible. They stopped walking together, listening to that new noise suddenly there. They looked at each other, exchanging looks as they tried to identify the sound.

E - Is something collapsing?

S - It sounded more like thunder to me...

A plausible hypothesis and an unlikely one. They resumed walking, softly enlighten by their lanterns.

The next level was very much like the previous one. Similarly empty, dark and cold corridors spreading oddly. The same layout as previously, with some closet in the end only this time facing the stairway heading further up.

The differences were as on this level, the air now seemed more humid to their noses, and that sometimes, the distant ruckus hard to identify could be heard again.

Since there was nothing interesting inside that closet, and nothing scribbled around, they continued climbing.

They were growing tired of this climb over long sets of stairs. Now the walls they touched felt a little damp perhaps here and there.

A new sound could now begin to be guessed. Somewhere ahead into the only way forward, a constant soft noise was filling space, replacing the silence.

Step by step, this music became clearer and louder. And every other step, they could feel more humidity in the air.

And when they were becoming pretty sure of what the louder and constant noise was, they reached the sight of the last turn, leading to an important place.

The shriek of thunder and a flash of light behind that last turn stopped them in surprise. It really was lightning. The sound indeed was rain.

Obeying a shiver and an impulse, Esther ran ahead as if her life depended on it.

The women or girls followed her more carefully, somehow not as eager as she was to reach that edge.

The sound of the rain told them how much of a downpour it was, falling right next to them.

Mary-Esther was not thinking clearly any longer. She had never felt the rain. There was an urge, an instinct taking over her mind and body. It was as if she was a mere spectator of her doings and actions once more. As if her mind was pulled a little away and in the background from her body, her puppet which was animated a little on its own.

It was dark around, but it was overwhelming. She was feeling the shivers coursing through her limbs, as she ran through that last corridor to end on an open balcony. The storm and heavy raining were shower over this open space like a curtain to something else behind.

She wasn’t sure whether she was going willingly. She just felt down to the depth of her bones that she had to go.

She had crossed too much and too many empty places and spooky corridors. She had spent too much time in her existence in that train and braving her older fears. She rushed to that pouring curtain.

With rain immediately all over her head and face, she could feel again some breath from reality outside reaching her. She could feel as if she was crying as well, and that could sooth a little of pain in her chest.

As she stood there as if possessed under the rain, she also knew there was something else. It was not just normal water from the sky that came in that odd space. It was not exactly a dream either.

That rain carried the same smell as the caves below. It came from a grotto, not directly a sky.

Also she noticed it was a little warmer than it ought to be, and dirtier, feeling some specks of muds and clay sticking to her.

But still, even if it was still underground, that rain was not coming from any illusionary sky. Some of it came from reality above, reaching them in scattering waterfalls.

The balcony where she stood was inside the colosseo, opened to that wide space. The downpour came from far above and what they felt as being a fissure or a gate above.

To her, it must have had opened itself a little, or the fissure grown bigger. Something more from reality was now sipping into their place.

It was the link between them and above... An invitation to climb, or a chance to take.

Esther was gazing over the edge of the balcony, where the water was flowing down, to pour to the ground far below.

She was waiting or searching for something, eyes wide open.

Her heartbeat was rising.

She could tell it was a fateful time.

A moment when something important was about to happen.

Elise and Scarlett arrived a few steps behind her, as curious and bewildered.

When the lightning fell and stroke the ground again, Scarlett could briefly the pit’s wider architecture around and above them. It was similar looking for at least twenty more levels above them, and some other balconies could be seen here and there on higher levels. Many others...

Elise asked Mary-Esther to step back and come under the shelter of this stone empty corridor, but she wouldn’t move.

She could feel it.

The opening.

She would cry and then scream.

The heavy rain was bludgeoning her but she didn’t care.

The place was changing, if ever so subtly. A shift in the nightmare was slightly opening itself to something different far above her.

Esther dreamed it was reality, and shivered in excitement, unable to gaze anywhere else.

Scarlett behind her was scared it might be something else entirely.

And then, the miracle Esther had longed for during all the time she had spent in the abyss happened.

Her heart stopped, when her sight caught it.

Her perception of time, along with every other senses, paused and vanished, to only focus on it.

An eternity took place when her soft but long hearted dream appeared in the distance above, falling among the drops of water.

Before the girls could have stopped her, she had yelled her name with a fierce and pained voice.

Esther had suddenly leaped over the handrail and jumped over the edge to get closer.

Blue.

She was there. She had come back for her.

Mary-Esther felt as if she had grown wings, and flew at increasing speed toward her, and the ground.

Her heart hadn’t had time to beat once since her eyes caught sight of her falling.

The droplets were turning into ice against her.

And suddenly there was nothing anymore.

~

Blue...

The sound of rain over the water grew softly inside her head and ears, as Esther was gradually regaining consciousness, still thinking of Blue.

She recovered some composure, in an inch deep of water, on the cold ground of the colosseo, now a pool.

She tried to stand but fell, unable to move her legs or hips properly. Her back was broken clean, her legs now not responding fully. She struggled there for a moment, trying not to drown in that little depth of water the rain kept hammering over her.

Esther didn’t care about her back or legs right now.

She crawled toward Blue, whispering her name over and over.

The one she loved, or at least had the most feelings for, if that wasn’t real love...

The one she couldn’t exist without.

Her blue bird, her blue rose, her angel...

Mary-Esther was crawling hopeless toward the lying unconscious human shape a little further. She was lying on her side in a colourful dress, and Esther knew it was her.

Esther could have cried, reaching her again.

Before their meeting had been dark times, but after their separation, Blue’s fateful departure, Esther had suffered more than what her heart and mind could have safely bore...

She touched her, and maybe for the first time of her existence, she felt as if possibly one of the drops of water along her face didn’t come from the cold rain.

Mary-Esther turned Blue’s head so she wouldn’t drown either. Her face was just as she could remember her, only her eyes were now closed.

Blue’s presence in this place was meaning a hundred things.

It would mean a world to Esther once she would manage to properly think about it.

But in that moment there, before everything else, before her only wish to gain life, it was something entirely different. No plans, nor constructed thoughts. Only sincere and spontaneous feelings, without any kind of will behind it.

Esther was solely caring for Blue at that moment, without thinking about anything but her name, her safety, and her affection for her.

Sheltering her face as she could with her own body, Mary-Esther was gently caressing her hair and cheeks to wake her up, softly calling her name as she would have done if Blue had been her precious child.

Some time passed in that cold rain, Blue not moving nor reacting. Esther was growing more concerned slowly. Her fingers touching the cold forehead were trembling, and as damp as she now was fully.

M - Please, Blue... Please wake up Blue...

Her own voice was sounding different, softer and younger... Perhaps another memory speaking through her.

A change of light was felt, and the rain was then calming down a little. It made Esther lose her focus and attention from Blue for a moment. She looked up, as the rain was thinning down and a bright light for the first time was visible through this place.

She now could see and be blinded by the sunlight shining bright, slowly embracing the whole colosseo in a full blown daylight.

The rain last droplets were still falling but more bright, and everything was now shining a little too bright. The sunlight was as bright as it could ever be.

M - The sun... Is shining again?

While Mary-Esther was looking around at the now visible landscape of this huge tower surrounding her under the sun, Blue was waking up below her.

Opening her eyes, she saw the light and the rain, the dancing lights and heard the music of water and rain near to her ears.

She saw in back light the female silhouette apparently holding her carefully, if not lovingly. She saw right next to her face how that left arm held a dark wound, unmistaken. Blue’s eyes were opening wider as she recognised her.

B - Esther?

Because of the strong light above her, Blue couldn’t quite see her face when Esther looked back at her, but she could swear she was smiling and crying in joy...

The sunlight grew even stronger, blinding them both. The lighter rain continued falling, even as the sun suddenly disappeared.

Mary-Esther felt the sudden disappearance of the sunlight above her, and her grasp turned just as suddenly hollow. As her sight returned, she could now see herself alone. She had vanished with the light, but Esther could still feel the touch where Blue had taken her hand between hers.

~