Chapter 1B - A Lesson Learned in Loss
When the wooden door creaked open, I could feel a silent energy exude into the street. A woman stood in the dim yellow light with a grimace, but she waved me inside without a word. If I were anyone else, I would have turned and walked away, certain that this suspicious woman in this discomforting place would somehow pose a threat to my life. Two large men stood in the background, but they paid me no attention. One drew a symbol upon the steel of a blade while the other watched in silence.
The woman looked me over and then said with a sneer, “We have never met, so why are you here?”
“City security caught the love of my life in a lie. If I am without her, I might as well die. They sent her outside the city and into the sand, but I will follow her footsteps until I can’t stand. I need your help to get outside the wall,” I said to the woman and her cabal.
After a moment of thinking, she sighed and she said, “If your words are serious, you’re already dead. I can help you escape, but nothing is free. When you come back, you will work for me. I am Bellaina – the queen of the dark, and from now on you will bear my mark. If you are to survive the monsters in the plains, then you will return to the village remains. It is there that you both will meet my envoy, and spend the rest of your days in my employ.”
I could feel a quiver run deep through my soul. I glanced at the shadowed world into which I had stepped. Though two steps behind me, the doorway was an endless distance away. There was no turning back. The large men glanced up from their blades and symbols to inspect my decision. A low-pitched pounding sounded from a room below us, and the dim lamps trembled with every strike. Bellaina stared at me in silence, awaiting the answer she already knew. My desperation had thrown me into her trap, and though a quiet whisper in my mind admonished me against this, I knew that I had dismissed my survival instinct some time ago. I had nothing left to live for without Alyssa, so I had no reason to preserve my own existence.
I took a deep breath and said with a sigh, “They say we are programmed to just stay alive. But my body means nothing; it is nothing more than the conduit through which Alyssa and I express our love. We are two souls forged by the flames of this fallen world and forced to find eternal love in each other’s arms. This body is worthless without her by my side; it is nothing more than the vehicle through which I will have her back. So if I must brave the monsters and the merciless sands in which they lurk, then that is a risk I must take. If I must work for the queen of the underworld upon my return, then that is a cost I must pay. This is not a matter of want or need. I knew since the moment we met that we were made for each other by the universe itself. It is a violation to the will of the world if we are to let anything between us. The arbiter of destiny conscripted our souls such that we are fated for each other. The stars in the sky are simple steppingstones to the life we’re set to share.”
Bellaina exchanged a quick glance with the large men on the other side of the room. One clenched a pen with a transparent tube, and the ink inside danced in color between the light and shadow. The ink in the light looked green and purple, but the shadowed section of the tube appeared dark gold. With a silent command, Bellaina sent one of the men into an adjacent room. He procured a slender holster with a sword inside. Bellaina then nodded and stepped slowly across the room toward a shadowed hallway. Her sword-wielding henchman followed behind her, so I walked behind them and entered the darkness. As we walked together into the hallway, the shadows encroached upon the light. We stopped when we stepped into a corridor of total darkness, but it was there that Bellaina retrieved a wooden object from the wall. She struck it swiftly on the bricks and forced the torch to ignite with a radiant glow. With only a small flame to light our path through the darkness, she led us down staircases and through a labyrinth of intersecting paths.
After several minutes of walking, Bellaina stopped at the foot of a staircase which led to a pair of cellar doors held shut with chains. The queen of the dark passed me a pen and a small page which prompted me for my name, though I doubted that legal documentation applied at all in her underworld. Nevertheless, I signed my name and then returned her page. She passed her henchman a key, and then he passed her his sword. Without a single word passing between them, her henchman scaled the staircase and fumbled with the chains. Bellaina listened as a small click echoed from the chains to the underground chamber, and then she handed me the holster with the slender sword. She spoke as she glared right in my eyes, “It’s best for us both that you come back alive.”
I stared at the sheath for a moment in silence. I could practically feel a convergence of past lives as I took the weapon in my hand. With a gentle push, I unsheathed it just slightly and saw the reflection of my dark green eyes on its glistening surface. The fiery light of the torch illuminated the darkness around me and sent shimmers upon the sword. I had used this same weapon as a tool countless times for cutting fish at the factory, but this was the first time I wielded this weapon as a means for survival. A genetic impulse commanded me to hold the sword close as it was my only protection from the monsters outside the wall, but survival itself was not my priority. It was only her. It was always only her.
[Author's Note: There is one more part to this chapter.]