Silence (25 page)

He slammed into something hard. His
vision faded from a strange white color to black in an
instant.

It looked like things were finally
over.

Chapter 13

The Line between Life and
Death

Consciousness filtered into Sheikoh’s mind. He was lying on
his back, on something soft. He let his eyes flicker open. The
resulting glare had him squinting, half blinded by an
astoundingly-pure, white ceiling overhead, that stretched without
end. It swelled with every shape and color of bubbles. He gasped
when he realized his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him.

The lava-lamp-esque goo hung in clumps
overhead. They floated through each other, drifting around in an
endless, intermingling dance. They seemed to float around in
relation to one another, like cells of some higher entity, part of
some higher pattern. Flickers of designs constantly wrote and then
erased themselves across their marble-white cores, fading before he
could get a closer look. The blobs sort of reminded him of
taffy.

Giant, floating taffy.

Sheikoh watched them float around,
formlessly changing their shapes and colors. He quickly realized
there was no way of figuring out their relative sizes. Some
appeared to be about the size of a water droplet and others were
obviously gigantic, the size of a floating island.

And behind them, the endless expanse
of white was pinpricked dark, purple-blue dots. It was as if he was
staring at a photo negative of the night sky. Sheikoh felt like a
tiny speck of dust trapped within a glaring universe. It was like
he’d been transported to his universe’s twin. Only if this universe
and his were related, than the one he’d been in before was
definitely the evil one.

“
Wow… I
must have gotten hit on the head.
Hard
,” he whispered in disbelief,
slowly turning around to take it all in.

An hourglass-shaped
globule floated by his face. His eyes narrowed and fixed on it. Its
color was part way between green and orange. He reached out his
hand hesitantly, wondering if there was any harm in touching the
stuff. His worry was needless; when he tried it rippled away from
his finger like a frightened Purmynx. Bemused, he stared after it
for a moment.

Then the ground shuddered beneath him.
The earth heaved, knocking Sheikoh stumbling. His arms pin wheeled;
he looked down in alarm. He found his balance and steadied, still
staring downwards. He was standing on a world of the same
color-changing stuff. Its surface was in the process of slowly
changing color from green to yellow-green.

A hill bulged before his wide eyes. As
he watched, the hill’s yellow-green base grew narrower and
narrower, until the ground finally spat out a huge balloon of the
stuff. He stepped back hurriedly. He looked back down again. He was
sure that the blobs were gooey, but the ground beneath his feet was
firm enough.

Until it started rippling, that
is.

   
Being
dead was strange…

Sheikoh shifted his gaze to the
brand-new bubble that’d come out of the ground. His eyes widened as
the rough sphere opened outwards, like a clam opening its shell. A
thin tongue of red material snaked out and tried to poke at his
face curiously.

Startled, Sheikoh slapped the tendril
away with the back of his hand. It froze for a moment. Then it
reared up like a cobra. Sheikoh jumped back to evade a strike that
never came.

The snake of material inflated. It
took the rough shape of a torso with waving, boneless arms. A
neckless head bulged forward. It had no eyes or nose. The only way
Sheikoh came up with head at all was the gaping, toothless mouth in
the center of a rough oval face. The creature stretched its arms
after him, but it wasn’t fast enough.

Sheikoh
never fell back to the ground. For a moment, he thought that
he was flying. But he quickly realized he had absolutely no control
over the retrograde. He was simply in a backwards freefall. The
strange creature dwindled into a speck in the distance, and Sheikoh
still drifted backwards, revolving slightly. Around him, Languid
globs blumbled out of his way.

“
What
the
hell
is going on here,” Sheikoh muttered harshly.

It was more of a statement then a
question, really.

He massaged his temples for a moment
and then pushed his hair back, thinking. As far as he could figure,
this was the afterlife. There wasn’t any other logical alternative.
All of the injuries he’d racked up in Sanatous’s mansion had
disappeared without any trace. He’d been on death’s door and now he
felt great. Well… healthy at least.

Which probably meant he was dead. Two
plus two.

Sheikoh drifted on and on for what
felt like hours. He went through every semblance of dizzy. His
original backwards became his left, and then his downwards, but he
quickly lost track. He floated through white infinity, his thoughts
glancing over his life-line. Maybe all of these globs were other
people. Maybe to each of them, he looked like a glob. Or maybe he
was imprisoned in his own personal hell. Alone forever and ever and
ever.

Directly beneath him, a
hot-pink bubble zoomed alongside him. Sheikoh’s eyes followed it.
After the hours and hours of staring into endless white, he’d do
anything to make his peace with boredom.
If he was dead, then there wasn’t anything to fear from
trying to understand the mysteries of these things.

The bubble floated, backdropped by the
dark, distant “stars” that were massive versions of globs; he had
realized that what felt like centuries ago. His eyes held it with a
new appreciation. Sheikoh watched letters and pictures scrawl
themselves on its formless “core”. They flitted over its marble
sheen like it was trying to give him a message, but whatever it was
trying to say went by too fast for him to follow.

“
This really is a pretty
okay place,” Sheikoh admitted to the sparkling bubble.

Beneath him, it bounced up and down.
Sheikoh reached out to touch the thing and accidentally tipped into
a spin. He laughed, trying to swim back to his earlier position,
but he couldn’t. Sheikoh gave up and stopped waving his arms. The
blob quickly caught up with his face, so Sheikoh focused his eyes
on the little guy. The bubble’s silver sheen had suddenly gone
opaque and mirror-like. He was staring into the reflection of his
own face. He grinned at himself, who grinned back.

“
Well, you’re a handsome
one, mate. Wanna stroll back on to my place?” Sheikoh asked the
bubble, batting his eyelashes at himself.

His hair was silky black, rather
dust-covered and grey the way it had been after Celestial’s roof
had collapsed on him. His face was unblemished by cuts and bruises.
The only mark on him was the old scar, jagging over his right eye.
He looked like he’d just spent a few days in a spa.
Strange.

Someone like him belonged in hell. Not
in a pretty place like this. In all of his life, he had never been
so positive that he was dead than at this moment. His mind
stuttered over a hysterical shock.

He began to giggle. The bubble tinkled
wind chime laughter along with him. Hysteria went all out, and
Sheikoh found himself gasping with laughter until his sides and jaw
ached. Eyes wide, he cackled like a witch. He felt tears on his
lashes. The bubble whirled quick circles around him, like a dog
chasing its tail.

Finally, Sheikoh regained some control
over himself.

“
What’d you do to get sent
to hell with me you cute, little freak?” Sheikoh asked bubble,
flashing an unbalanced smile.

The bubble stopped. It seemed to gaze
back at him with his own reflection. Sheikoh looked into the
distorted reflection of his own eyes, and he half expected an
answer. For a while, they drifted in expectant silence.

Sheikoh cleared his throat.

“
I just got blown way too
many times, Mr. Sheikoh,” he giggled. “On account of me being a
bubble.”

“…
Sheikohhh… ”
the bubble
repeated.  

Sheikoh’s eyes widened.

He stared at the bubble, and the
bubble stared back at him. Its imperfect reflection of his face
possessed a distortion of his own individuality. It flashed with
bright green light and fizzled back into a reflective rainbow. His
mirror image looked pale and uneasy.

“
You can speak? Are you a
spirit or something?” Sheikoh asked the bubble
seriously.

It stared back at him, silent. The
moment stretched.

Apparently it wasn’t in the mood to
talk.

Sheikoh bit his lip and
looked away quickly. His chest sting with fierce longing. He knew
the feeling was irrational, but he’d been certain that Emili had
come to guide him through the afterlife. It made sense. He
was
sure
he’d
heard a whisper of Emili’s voice in his name.

He must have imagined it. It looked
like he was on his own, as always.

Sheikoh shook the thought
from his head, as he slowly drifted a revolution. He gazed at the
white infinite surrounding him in every direction and smiled
sardonically. Heaven really
was
white. Nonetheless, this was nothing like what
people described the afterlife to be. Nobody ever told him he’d
spend his death surrounded with color-changing goo.

Sheikoh glanced back at the
bubble, drifting along behind him like a loyal, little puppy. He
had to admit, it wasn’t
that
bad. Maybe this wasn’t hell after all. Maybe this
was only a single level of the afterlife, a halfway house between
heaven and hell. And even if the bubble wasn’t Emili, that didn’t
mean she wasn’t here. Empire knows
she
wasn’t perfect.

He glanced down at his little
follower, and his face froze in shock.

The bubble had changed. Its surface
had gone crystalline, shimmering with dancing streams of light. It
glittered like beams moonlight on still water. And it wasn’t a
bubble anymore. It was a head. Hair flowed backwards, locks’ wavy
lengths cut short and elegant. A pair of eyes lay closed in
peaceful serenity, and perfect lips traced both the face’s lines of
laughter and life. Even clear of color, Sheikoh knew the face. He
would’ve known it anywhere.

“
Emili..?” he murmured,
voice ragged with surprise and wonder.

Her eyes snapped open in
response.

A scream interrupted their reunion;
the scream of wind. A swarm of the goo pummeled Emili like
raindrops. They slammed into her head, sticking to her face,
drowning her behind their combined weight.

“
EMILI!!” Sheikoh
screamed.

He thrashed around, trying to focus is
drift towards her, but it was no use. Nothing propelled him
forward. Worse, he ended up in a wild, dizzy spin away from Emili.
Sheikoh stopped thrashing when he realized what was happening. His
eyes widened helplessly. Hundreds of thousands of globs flowed
towards Emili. Faster than thought. Faster than he could scream.
And there was nothing he could do.

An instant later, the stuff choked
over her face, and Sheikoh watched on, numb with horror. Emili’s
face had been hidden behind the stuff, but that didn’t stop it from
coming. The glob grew bigger and bigger. The sight of it blasted
Sheikoh in the chest. His heart was ripped to shreds of despair and
self-loathing.

The scream was wrenched from every
torn fiber of his being.

Sheikoh kicked and pushed at the
nothingness that surrounded him, mindless with fury. He wasn’t
going to lose Emili for the second time. He paddled desperately,
trying to swim towards the enormous clump, but nothing seemed to be
able to move him forward.

He grabbed at pieces of the stuff
drowning Emili, but they passed right through his hands. Like they
weren’t real.

Sheikoh noticed without interest that
the synthskin of his right hand had somehow been repaired. His
struggling had accomplished nothing, other than halting his wild
spin. Sheikoh watched the island-sized glob with despair. He
stretched out a trembling hand, desperately willing himself
forward. And a tendril of the stuff streaked out of the mass. It
wrapped itself firmly around Sheikoh’s waist.

Had it responded to his
thoughts?

His chest surged with hope.

“
Bring me to
Emili!”

At his words, it jerked him forward,
moving blindingly fast. The otherworldly otherworld was blurred
into speed streaks around him. Like he was riding the fastest
Swifthooves in the world, times ten. As the blob grew nearer and
nearer, he closed his eyes, steeling himself for impact.

But there wasn’t an impact. Not even a
watery splash.

After a moment, Sheikoh opened his
eyes. Currents of strange, psychedelic colors swirled around him.
He didn’t feel anything as he slid through the liquid time, besides
the tentacle, around his waist.

As he was pulled forward, the currents
rearranged themselves into a scene. When it became clear, it
elicited a gasp. Sheikoh’s feet found solid ground. He stared
around in numb wonderment, barely noticing as the coil around him
melted down his legs and dissolved into the floor.