The Chain

 The chain is part of me.

It has been for an eternity. Through battle after battle, yanking me back by its noose around my neck, dying breaths and bloodstained hands dragged across the mud of time—

I can taste it now—the iron, that familiar metal tang of impending death.

Through rubble and ruin I’ve walked, again and again, these last few years, trying to find some path, some way—

Only to come to this.

It’s been over two hundred years, overall. The exact number doesn’t matter to me, not anymore. No one can record how many times I’ve walked back over the decades in those measly two centuries. None of that matters anymore.

My broken breaths are all I can hear, now.

When I was a boy, the world was endless. I could have gone anywhere, done anything, but I clasped my hands around the sword. I wanted to save that endless world as it shrank between my fingers; save these people.

Now there’s no one left to save. Blood runs over the floor, itching along the side of my hand. The last light. The last time.

The first time was almost exactly the same. I still remember. I barely remember. I mostly remember pain—the side of my face in agony, merely salt in the wounds left by their deaths.

These wounds are nothing compared to the sight of her. Nails like eagle talons dripping blood, hair like shimmering oil reflecting the fires of Death, dark eyes cold as the devil himself—she stands in the ruins she created of her own empire, over the crumpled corpse of a friend, and smiles.

For how long.

For how long?

“Your snarling befits you, Dyste-Eino,” she muses, standing in that pool of blood and scattered feathers. “But a hound who bares his teeth at his master doesn’t make a very loyal guard-dog, does he?”

For all these years.... The cold chain-links coil around my neck as though physical, dragging my head up. If I weren’t choking on blood and magic, I could do more than bare reddened teeth at her approach.

“I could keep you.” The threat of an eternity in agony twines tighter around me. At least her eyes remain blank at my suffering. “I could remake you as a prince once more, instead of a mere shadow. Lonni.”

I would rather die for good.

“...If that’s what you want.”

Ba-dum.

With one flick of her hand, warmth blossoms like cherry petals in the spring and spills down my throat under the fiery breath of summer. True death takes hold with an iron grip, numb, familiar.

And with it her hand reaches out, grasping glimmering chains. Burning chains that tighten like a vice, pulling taut. With one twist, the links crack.

Ba-dum.

Her face is the last thing I see. The last thing I want to see.

If I could go back one last time....

“Sister.”

The last thing she sees of me is my hand attempting to snap around her pale throat, the last thing she’ll hear a gurgling hiss of a promise. Before I lose all feeling, all vision, deafened, and nothingness pulls me under.

Ba-dum.

I should be dead.

I fall through shattered chains. Shards of ice lacerate my skin, a rushing river of faded impressions scattering past me: shade-dappled stones in the heat of summer, worn leather in my hands, a bright red wooden bridge, a sky-blue kite cutting through the sun; wind ruffling glossy brown feathers. My fingers grasp nothing—no rope, no ledge.

If true death is falling forever through this, I’ll start feeling nauseous.

Before I can start fearing for my sanity, searing fire envelopes me, and brings with it the press of a burning hand across the left side of my face.

Ba-dum.

The memory should be dim. I’ve died since then— I’ve been dragged back into my own corpse and forced to make it live again. Yet some part of me still remembers vividly.

If the memory doesn’t scream, I do.

Writhing on the ground like a maggot, I should have died back then. It should have ended there for me.

It didn’t. It doesn’t.

Instead, the eagle’s beak as large as my burning head tears into this multi-limbed monstrosity who plucked away at everything with each one of those disgusting mimicries of a hand. Forelimbs with talons rend at the devil, hind limbs like that of a lion, a scaly tail with a tuft of feathers lashing—a gryphon. A familiar gryphon.

Arvintt, my former companion, a fool who got himself killed in this exact moment.

I watch him die again, half-delirious from pain. I can barely see anything but an all-too-familiar scene stinging afresh through my fingers.

When is this memory meant to end? I can feel freefall slicing through the edges of the vision, threatening to pull me down again. Not sure if I want it to take me. Or see how far this goes.

Ba-dum.

Impressions of deep water and fevered thrashings ebb and grow between the darkness. It’s almost eerily akin to sliding down a steep hill clutching at tufts of grass, only for each one to come loose and douse pebbles all over me. A rocking boat, a face almost familiar, all slipping maddeningly away before any of it can be recognised.

Is this death or is this my mind unravelling? I don’t recognise this bright blue sky, I don’t recognise the disturbingly real feeling of coarse cloth between my fingers. The side of my face still burns and torn chains writhe over the steep tops of mountains I feel I should know.

No one can give an answer. Their language is archaic, like I am.

When does peaceful nothingness come into this nightmare? My mouth tastes sour, the familiar heaviness of another death approaching. Doomed to relive every death again—that sounds appropriately like purgatory.

Ba-dum.

“Lonni—”

Please just let it end.

“—Lonn—”

This process of stripping memories from a spirit is obscenely painful. I don’t care much for it. I’d rather a clean cut and a brutal tossing into the eternal lake. Even if I haven’t earned peace with my self intact, surely I can at least settle for blissful unawareness. I did everything I could.

Apart from one thing.

Her face ripples through memory into the fading shades of reality. If all this has only been some pointless dying vision and I’m still there on that bloodied cavern floor, yanked back—

One thing I didn’t do. I didn’t kill her.

My mistake.

Awareness is fickle, and logic slips to the side in favour of fevered urgency. Someone cries out; tries to snatch at me. That can’t be real.

My hands never even reach her throat.

A glowing scarlet drop arcs through the air, touching my skin, and familiar chains flash, seizing around my arms, legs, neck. Unbroken, new and shining.

Ba-dum.

Unbloodied ground—a polished wood floor—cracks into my knees. This isn’t— Even without the chains, I’d stiffen.

Where am I? What is this? Am I hallucinating into the beginning of my station as a puppet, since she seems to have changed her mind, or is this another memory?

“I was almost too late, it seems.” Her voice is younger, somehow, hair ochre and not shimmering oil. Her dark eyes hold caution, but the keen depths of centuries of experience have vanished. “Are you yourself again, brother?”

Brother, eh? I lift my chin. Her tone is oddly genuine. It’s been at least a hundred years since she thought of me as anything approaching human, let alone anything so sentimental as family. “Quite, sister.”

As much as I ever have been, at least, since these chains bound me.

She frowns—again, far more unguarded than usual, though with a faint glint. I know that expression. It’s the dawning realisation that the man in front of her isn’t the one she was expecting—a different version from a different future.

But I can’t have—

No. This must be some forgotten memory of the first time I came back.

But then... the boat, the pain, and my own reaction here being very much mine, of the present....

“He hasn’t acted like this before,” a rough yet feminine voice says. But she died over a century ago.

“He seemed rather unresponsive, before.”

No, don’t tell me. Don’t tell me her attempt to break the chain failed. She didn’t do it soon enough, did she? She killed me before it could shatter, and so as it was dragging me back—

Somehow, somehow, I’ve found myself spat back into the beginning.

I laugh.

“—sure it’s worked? He—”

It’s absurd. It’s not like her to make that kind of mistake.

Ba-dum.

My heart beats in my chest, fiercely alive despite the weakness of feverish days spent sailing back through the fjords plaguing a body that feels newborn to me.

I’m alive, again.

And as I look up at her, chatter I haven’t heard in lifetimes washing over me, I can see those chains twined obediently around her hand. Again, I’m back here, leashed just as I was before. But this time, I catch a flaw. This time—

I bare my teeth in a smile.

—There’s a chink.