The End I Craved in this Life I’ve Chosen

Ol-Lozen awoke to the same agonizing hand that led him to sleep.

The girl had reached safety. The threat to the land had been severed from its head. The survivors, assumedly, loosened raucous, victorious cheers with their weapons to the sky, comrades embraced at the lip, living for the moment and the ones that had not. That stupid boy surely had gotten his fill of war then. Daigay – Quaqua – would remain Daigay, until she threw off her disguise.

Only one thread remained left to pull.

In the back of his mind underneath the sea of pain he’d heard a SHING, not the expected clatter, so the sword landed with enough force for its untipped edge to pierce the surface of wherever he lay. Either it had landed harder than him, or he should have been cursing the ground for its give. One bad, one good; the world in balance, even on a desolate rock as this. He found it a few jarring footsteps away, risen like a blade-handled crozier. He ripped it from the bone growth serving as ground with a scream of effort. It was lighter than he remembered, no longer weighed down with purpose, allure but a memory without an echo. In his grip was a husk of wit-dry, empty, neutered metal.

They’d both crashed into one root-choked spire among the forest of growths reaching for the portal that no longer existed, but Ol-Lozen had risen first. The other, the last body of the Incursion, writhed on the pale shelf. Honey-colored blood dripped from the broken tendrils of its wings; the black scabs on half of its body had been crushed to pieces with the weight of terminal velocity.

“Come on!” He slammed a raging hand into a chest held together by adrenaline. A sharp obstruction made its presence known under his tongue, and he spat out a blooded end of one tusk. “Stand! Fight, demon! Where has your pride gone? Your brutality?”

With a swing of his sword he cleaved one arm from the demon’s torso and one leg, the blade burying itself in the bone they stood upon so he was forced to wrench it free, body screaming in protest.

“Fight!”

Ol-Lozen took the other arm, pseudo-shoulder and all. The first grew back half-way, stunted.

“Fight!”

Standing over the demon, Ol-Lozen swung the sword in a straight line down to sever both legs at once.

“FIGHT!”

He brough the sword down through collar as the second arm grew back, both clapping together to halt the blade. It caught in the demon’s chest. He planted a boot on the demon’s throat, pushing the fungal body down, and tore the blade free before tossing it aside. He crashed down with his full weight, straddling the chest knees in both its arms to pin them.

“I. SAID. FIGHT!”

He began to beat the last Incursion, punctuating his words with blows.

“FIGHT!”

The ground splattered with yellow.

“FIGHT!”

His fists shone brightly with red. Pain wept in his ear but he smothered it with rage.

“FIGHT!”

But the Incursion had no answer to give. With its brain gutted the demon was governed only by instinct to survive. To feel hurt was beyond its capacity. Glory, catharsis, and pride were concepts it had no touchstone for, no point of reference for the point’s point. Ol-Lozen pummeled an organism unworthy of being called a beast, or even a creature. The will that had once taunted him through forest and camp with sadistic glee had been made to burn, as an ill child’s stuffed rabbit. The central mind of an entire species had been eviscerated. His fists beat a tattoo into lobotomized biomass that knew not what it was, nor what it had been or wanted to accomplish.

Ol-Lozen rose when his fists shook too much to land another blow, and recovered his sword, honey-colored blood in his footsteps. The last Incursion had regrown its limbs again by the time he had returned, struggled onto knees and arms, as if prostrated before the gold-spattered altar with executioner’s blade hefted overhead.

With a guillotine crash, Ol-Lozen severed the demon’s head at the neck, bisecting the cardinal organ where it hid in that particular body.

The last of the Incursion, the last true demon, no longer able to retain its form, dissolved into a puddle, and the last of Ol-Lozen’s strength went with it. His blade slipped from bleeding fingers, and he collapsed to the ground in a lifeless heap.

It’s over. His smile spread despite the pain.

The cost was his body, fractured in more places than he had responsive digits. Cold fingers worked their way through his nerves, plucking them like harp strings as he tested the limits of ruined flesh. Every movement drew a pained gasp, but movement was possible even free-falling into solid structure. Orkan biology was a wonderous thing. It had kept him, relatively speaking, in one piece, one green sack of toughed skin; whether that skin was slowly filling from holes punctured by bone shards driven in by force of impact was another matter. He would know soon enough when the flesh distended with fluids, letting him know of imminent demise – not that he was in too grave need of another reminder. Long ago he’d made that choice.

Infection; exsanguination; dehydration; starvation. All the means of death, all the terminations, paraded through his mind like a marching band. A handful of cards to pick from. Which would get him first? He supposed it mattered little. He died in the end no matter the road. That was his future: agony in spades. Although, he had some say the duration of his suffering; he still had the sword. One spade outscored a whole hand where death was concerned.

He let his hand go limp. The sword’s penitent edge, wherever it was, could wait. He felt the warmth of a freshly dried blanket being pulled over. Events of the long day had left him weary. Ol-Lozen was exhausted, tuckered out as his mother would say, taking it easy as his father would. He had been tired for a long time, long enough to conflate it with the passing of years, the weight of age, joking so in the presence of others nearly as old, but never older. Blended in. It was a rest he could say without a hint of guilt had been earned, and the suffocating hand it pressed to his lips would taste sweeter than all before, having been toiled for under life’s oppressive sun. He tried to spit his palette clean of iron tang that would only sully; crimson foam dribbled down his lips and cheek, pooled on the alien ground.

Black strands of hair rustled in a breeze he did not feel the touch of. Sensation was draining away. Sound went after, the world cupping his ears. Soon only thoughts were left, but without sensation and strength he could not hold them long, and they slipped through gaps between his unmoving fingers like grains of sand.

Death took their sweet time. Last was his name on the list of deceased needing escort, but the Orkan body should have lain was unoccupied. A skeletal finger ran over the street name, a twin set of coordinates, time of expiry, denoting the corpse as keeled over on the interstate after having walked out into traffic. The tusked skull scratched at its scalp with a naked distal phalange. How was an Orkan concept to know the soul had been drawn to another world? Perhaps it would heave a dusty sigh, bemoan its limitless time about to be stolen by another summoned, trace a ritual circle in the dirt with the flat end of its scythe, and perform the equivalent of hailing an interdimensional taxi to attend Ol-Lozen’s long-cold body at its corresponding location in the Incursion home world.

He chuckled over the quandary, in the lightless cavern of his mind where neurons still lived to prompt him. Stalactites hung from its ceiling. Tepid drops of water ran down to their points, free-falling onto the shallow lake layered over the cavern’s floor when physics reached their limits. Ol-Lozen sat naked in the wet, waiting. Legs pulled to his chest, his arms around them to keep flesh tight together, conserving heat against the rising water level, now at his midsection, and poised to climb further. Not the shower he’d wanted but a bath was a bath. Some soap, a bit of scrub, a nail file, a few dozen oils – he’d be right as rain.

Then back to sitting in his own soapy filth; an Ol-Lozen soup, best served lukewarm! Bring your own bowl and spoons! Get a taste of the not-man who fled the world he never understood, abandoned the people whose love for him he could never comprehend, all to die alone on an alien star for people who would name him demon for existing!

It was poetic enough to weep.

He did so. Every soup needs an extra pinch of salt.

When he’d finished seasoning his broth, he glanced around through bleary eyes long accustomed to the gloom, taking in the cavern that would be his final sight. Alone at last, in his own private grotto. It wasn’t real, but neither was he; they’d passed from life into the abstract. Adequate room to stand if the need arose, albeit hunched over like his back had gone. Wide enough to toss back his head and spin around as gleefully as he pleased – if his unreal knees were acceptable losses – laughing like a loon in the spring meadow with sunlight streaming through gaps of hair. He’d have to imagine the sun – but not the light. He hadn’t noticed them before, eyes to his lap, but a small handful of luminous blue bubbles revolved around him in the water, illuminating the water and casting a dim glow around the cavern. Revolution stretched and deformed them; they bounced off one another like pearls of mercury.

“Magic,” his gruff sigh echoed. Their sheen was familiar, the last traces of the latent power given him, bled out and hiding in the last recess of his dying mind. Their movement spurred shadows to play on the curved walls, the stone made a stage for flittering actors, projections of dripping stalactites their curtains. In their shapes he saw the towering skyscrapers of home, a tusked figure running that he knew was him, and a circle of unintelligible script, outlined in old, bandaged hands. Dancing his life away, they performed the journey of Ol-Lozen in silhouette. All his triumphs and failures, his choices and misgivings, his sword and purpose, the tusked figure alone at the end, turning to him

“And what will you do now, fool?” he asked.

The shadow swelled in size. Its edges sharped to a fine line, and the silhouette thickened until the cavern wall no longer poked through, taking on dimension and substance of its own. Light held no sway over its presence. It stood real and full as a being with breath and blood.

“Get on with it, then.”

The shadow peeled away from the wall without sound. Quiet footsteps tapped against the stone until it stood at the pool’s edge, and with a splash stepped out onto the water’s surface. Threads of black gauze shed from the shadow’s form as it strode forth to the Orkan, standing above him small and human-shaped, pinkish, and with a nest of unkept hair.

“This is your mind?” she asked.

“I don’t honestly know,” whispered Ol-Lozen. “This might be the Endless Dream I believed myself of deserving.”

“I thought you believed that one of those false promises.”

His silence stretched out, long as winter; it was answer enough. Finally, he replied, “I wanted to see my family one last time. I suppose I wanted to see you, too, safe and unharmed.” The water lapped at his sternum as he looked up at her. “Or are you the reaper in disguise, come at last?”

“I am only a magus,” said Mouse.

“And Daigay is only Daigay.” He exposed a shriveled hand to touch at his throat, feeling the embossed script of runes. “Even in death, I am collared.”

“That is because you haven’t died.” She stated the fact with assurance in her tone. “At least, not yet. But your life ebbs away with the passing moments.” Slick blood coated those palms, he noticed, clogged up in folds underneath her fingernails.

Ol-Lozen sighed. “Exsanguination, then. Not gone, just packing. I’ll take that end over starvation.” He shivered as water splashed higher on his chest. “If I’m not dead, how is it you’ve returned? And here of all places?” He had an inkling of what her answer would be even before she confirmed it.

“Grandmama managed to reopen the door to the Incursion’s world, and is keeping it open long enough for me to find you and come back.” Her words came with an unspoken addition.

“With, or without me,” he said aloud.

Mouse nodded. “My arrival here is through the bond between us. Grandmama’s tome on Orkan contained all the necessary formulae to use it as a key to enter, but your refuge is filling up with me in it. I’ll drown alongside you should I stay too long.” She pointed to the water now at his armpit. “Perhaps, as a decision’s been made, leaving is warranted: the water rises around you, yet you remain seated.” Her voice was that of a statue’s, lacking all emotion.

“Command me to rise if so concerned.”

“I will not.”

“You are a cruel and vicious child. Preserve your sanity, and do not watch me drown in my own blood.”

“I would not ask you to delay your end. You have an orderly mind, one that holds no illusion, so I’ll speak plain: my journey here took a great deal of time, more than you have left. Healing of this magnitude lies beyond every lesson I’ve had. Without an alignment of wills to awaken the latent magic your bones will stay broken and wounds weeping. I would ask that you choose life, or death. One or the other.” Her runed hand twitched with restrained emotion. “Change, or stagnancy.”

“Daigay is up there, you’ve said, and yet I hear her voice in your mouth. Have you forgotten that I am not my own anymore, girl? Here is my chain.” He pointed to his runes, then to hers. “There is my leash.”

“Not choosing is also a choice. In case it’s slipped your mind, that choice is tantamount to death.”

“Do you wish this demon to live, Mouse?”

She pursed her lips tight, binding an answer that pounded at the back of her teeth to the tip of her tongue. Air surged from her nostrils. “The burden of choosing lies with you,” she finally said.

“Now you definitely sound like her.” Suddenly he was slapped with a mask full of water. Mouse’s shoe dripped, and in petulance she kicked another wave at him.

“My grandmama is a font of knowledge with lessons aplenty. Shame me for listening! If she were here, she would not only have named you fool a hundred times but branded the word on your forehead, ensuring you’d never commit the same mistake in the next life.”

“Do her proud, before that chance slips us both by.” He tasted salt. Water dribbled down the curves of his face, seeping in through corners of quivering lips. His hair fanned out in the lake, like tendrils of ink.

Mouse crouched down. With the stalactites creeping closer she’d eventually be forced to, the drops tick-tock-tick-tocking the water level higher. Soon they’d be feeding the water directly. Jaws sunk into raspberry gelatin. “If you’ve elected to die,” she told him, “then look at me as a final courtesy and say so.”

He did not.

“Will you sit with me for a time?”

She nodded. “For what little time is left.”

They sat together in wordless respite listening to the time drip away. Even cross-legged, Mouse still towered over Ol-Lozan, gently undulating with the lake as it rose. His eyes traveled to her, but her gaze was focused on the interplay of light and shadow and cavern wall, as though she had seen the performance and were trying to discern it from layers of discordance.

She turned at air wafting and found his head turned away. Ripples along the water’s surface betrayed his intention. He had gone through the motions of making speech, shaped his lips, along the roof of his mouth shifted the tongue, only to pull back effort at the moment of execution.

“This…” he started, “This is where, in my world, when a job was finished, all the workers would reflect on what went wrong, what went right. ‘Post-mortem’ is what we called it; after death. Taking the corpse apart. Share our feelings. Doesn’t feel right to lay that on a child’s shoulders, so I won’t.” He held himself tighter. “The other side. With the Incursion brain destroyed, how did events play out?”

“Dead, all of them. At once they all, simply, dropped to the ground. I knew we’d won then,” she said. “Not far from the portal there was a mound of demons all clumped together making a hill taller than the houses. I would have died, had we not killed them when we did. What of the one who grabbed you?”

“That one held on longer than the rest. It fought, or at least tried. The brain trying to get its revenge, I figured. What will you do now?”

“Now?”

“With the Incursion defeated. I imagine you had your own plans before all of this.”

She took a moment to think. “More studying.”

“Not even going to take a vacation? Not something you love doing more than being nose deep in books?”

“There’s so much of magic I still don’t understand. I could spend my entire life in books and still not scratch the surface of the arcane.”

“What will you study, then?”

“I’ll keep pursuing the healing arts.” Mouse said this with certainty. “Our journey has been full with people in need of help, and one day I will bring it wherever I go.”

“Larkhen’s Hold. Goldhome-In-The-Dell, too.”

She nodded.

“Couldn’t take your eyes off them, I saw. You were better than me. I turned away from their suffering while you brought bread to the hungry and freed the trapped.” He swallowed. “I was ineffectual.”

“You wanted to help also?”

“The only help I could offer involved bloodying my hands. I know nothing everyone else doesn’t already know about medicine. I can’t solve those hurts.” He looked at his hands. “But I can build things. I know construction, and carpentry, and I follow orders like none before me. But serving Orkans renewed stability doesn’t come with placards for names, so there’s no budget either. Believe me when I say we have more than our fair share. Here, I did just that, and saved a whole lot of people through wearing myself to a nub. And then you showed up here with a second chance.” Breath caught painfully in Ol-Lozen’s throat.

“I had believed you’d be thrilled to see me.”

“I am. Do not misunderstand, Mouse: I am. With this, I can see the sunrise again. Walk the forests. Smell more flowers, trade japes from those with less understanding of why I do so. I can learn your language, join your conversations, become less reliant on you – or the woman who calls herself Daigay. I can help the people who’ve suffered tragedy in the war Daigay made, apply my knowledge towards building them new homes, establishing new settlements. My purpose will return again. Every day I can wake up, inhale clean air, and approach with vigor and fresh resolve my new life. And – if I find myself with enough coin, and wisdom, and good companions of the same mind – a wide, blue world out there is waiting for beholders like me. You’ve brought a new lease on life, and it shines so bright. I’m afraid it will burn me to cinders at the moment I grasp it.” His eyes turned down. “No light comes without shadow; and this comes paired with a dark, unknowable road winding out into the night. Rather I would face the Incursion a thousand times over than take one treacherous step.”

A sheer ribbon of crimson hung in the water above Ol-Lozen’s arm. His green fingers had dug tracks into the muscle. Water slunk up over his collarbone, lapping thirstily at his throat. Gone was the warmth it once held, and the Orkan shivered at the touch of bitter cold.

“But I have found my way once, and I believe I will do so again.”

He turned to the girl, eyes aflame, and nodded once. Mouse smiled, and broke the water’s surface to place her hand on his shoulder, heart racing with the excitement of renewed hope; his with the anxious joy accompanying the start of a new journey. In the cold cavern of the mind, the summoner and summoner hearts beat a staccato as one blasting away the chill of doubt, the grasp of dread. The not-man rose to standing, relishing in sore limbs unfurled. Atop the water, Mouse still outstripped him. Her arm shot high, urging him to rise with all he had, bubbles of magic vibrating with frenetic energy at the words on her mind, then from her lips –

“Ol-Lozen, I command you to return to us. Return, and find new purpose!”

– light enveloped them both, the cavern burning with the smell of petrichor and molten stone.

He awoke on the alien world, alight in sapphire magic so potent it wisped from his body in tendrils of blue-tinged fog. The numerous wounds he had accrued were eased into the far reaches of memory. He picked up the husk of his blade, for it was still a symbol, a memory of the world he’d left behind, and even in its new, diminished capacity, would serve well as it always had.

He knelt down for Mouse to reclaim her spot at his back, arms thrown around his neck. Overhead, the portal home, to their home, was bright as a star and wide as a coin. Reshaping the magic around him into wings, Ol-Lozen took off for that effervescent sight, the portal striking in his vision – a dark, unknowable road, but he swelled with light greater than the sun’s, his hand outstretched towards the coming dawn.

I’m sorry, Mother, Father, for never having given up this uncertain streak of mine. Wait for me, please – I don’t want to sleep just yet.