Mark Del Franco - Unfallen Dead

“I failed,” a voice said.

Startled, Murdock and I moved together but saw no one. The air rippled and Vize appeared in a relaxed posture, his sword in his hand but down at his side. The nixie squatted on the ground chuckling, her hand clutching the hem of Vize’s tunic. Chalk up cloaking as another of her abilities.

Murdock called up his shield. My sensing ability detected no metal on him at all. He had lost his gun somewhere.

I pointed my blade at Vize. “Drop the sword.”

“Do I have your word you won’t run me through?” he asked.

“You mean like you did Ceridwen?”

He held both hands up, the sword high in his right. “What needed doing is done. I did what was demanded.”

I gestured. “Drop it.”

He relaxed his knees, keeping his eyes on me as he crouched, lowering the sword parallel to the ground and placing it on the grass.

The nixie grabbed at it, and I focused my blade on her.

“No! No! Keep it, Berg! He has two teeth, and you have none,” she said in an old variant of German.

Vize straightened, stroking the nixie’s matted hair. “Hush, Gretan. We have more to achieve here than our lives,” he replied in the same language. Loathing filled her eyes as she glared at me. She released the sword and clutched Vize’s leg again.

“The Wheel could have dropped me anywhere, Grey. It chose here,” Vize said.

“The fact that you want the spear might have something to do with that,” I said.

He shrugged. “Perhaps. But I didn’t cause this, Grey. You did.”

“I have a different interpretation of who caused this, Vize,” I said.

He gave me his back, watching the column in the sky grow wider. “Yes, well, I’m sure you will take great solace in that as we all die. Can you read the runes on the spear?”

The runes. They were there, faint, almost lost in the white essence in my hand. Way Seeker. Way Maker. Way Keeper. I pressed the spearhead against Vize’s neck. He didn’t flinch. “What do you know about them?”

He tilted his head to see me over his shoulder. “What they say. The holder of the spear seeks the Way of the Wheel, makes it and keeps it. And the spear seeks whoever the Wheel decides will make and keep the Ways. It seeks someone to execute the will of the Wheel, like it did when it came to me in TirNaNog.”

I exchanged glances with Murdock. I didn’t believe Vize. “The Wheel of the World wanted you to try to kill Ceridwen?”

Vize returned his gaze to the column. “I dreamed a figure in red would destroy everything I sought to achieve. I tried to eliminate that threat, and the spear seemed to will it. I tried three times and picked the wrong person each time. I misunderstand the metaphor. You are the red figure, Grey, you with the spear in your hand and a bloodstained face.”

“Then I’ve stopped you. I’ve won.”

He gestured at the sky. “Have you? Congratulations.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t care. The spear left me, and the Wheel turns, Grey. Some say we do things that change Its direction. Some say we can’t. Doing nothing is the same as doing something. We always choose. In the end, the Wheel turns. I can accept the choices I’ve made. Can you?”

A sending fluttered through the air. The nixie grinned up at me, and Vize bowed his head. They vanished.

I swung my sword through empty air. “Dammit.”

“What happened?” asked Murdock.

I shook my head. “I’m stupid, that’s what happened. He told the nixie to cloak them. I assumed he couldn’t do sendings because I couldn’t.” I stared up at the column. “I don’t believe that religious crap.”

Murdock frowned, looking down at his feet. “I do.”

“What?”

The column glowed as Murdock stared up at the sky. “I don’t know what that place was I just pulled you out of, Connor, but it was real. I don’t know what that means, but I do know I have to have more reason to wake up every day than to watch shit happen.”

“What the hell do you expect me to do?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I just don’t think we can do nothing,” he said.

The column was growing. If I didn’t believe anything else Vize said, he was right that whatever had happened in TirNaNog was spreading. “I have to go back up there,” I said.

Murdock nodded grimly. “Don’t fall in. We don’t have another bike.”

I started up the hill.

“Connor,” Murdock called out. I looked back. He nodded once. I saluted him with my sword.

I approached the damaged fairy ring, the spear vibrating in my hand. Scattered about the remains of the hill, gargoyles faced the column. Some slumped in the face of all the essence that had spilled over them. Their unintelligible, dry voices hummed in my head, several at once in tones that could only be described as both hope and sadness. I stepped over crushed mushrooms, their broken flesh pungent in the air. The spear pulsed, the runes visible, a dark burning blue. Essence streamed over me, my hair bristling with static charge. The column stretched above, pulling at me while the dark mass in my head clung with tenacious claws to my body essence. The column was a roiling mass, mostly white, with shades of indigo, amber, and emerald. It reminded me of standing in the veil. Maybe it was the veil, unleashed.

A flash of pink spiraled down, and Joe landed smoothly on my shoulder.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

“Thought I bugged out, didn’t you?”

I jostled him as I shrugged. “Not really. I don’t always get what you’re up to.”

He chortled with an incredibly smug look on his face. “Somebody had to take Murdock the silver branch you threw away.”

“Oh. That explains it.” I hadn’t thought to ask.

“What are you doing?” Joe asked.

“Thinking about the consequences of nothing.”

“Ah, it’s come to that. I was afraid that thing would kill you eventually,” he said.

So Joe. I wasn’t sure we were even having the same conversation. He was fascinated and repelled by the thing in my head, the thing he called the nothing. I shivered.

“That’s the choice,” I whispered.

“What?”

“Nothing. That’s what you called it when I asked you how you found me when you teleported. You said you looked for the spot with the nothing in the middle of it.”

He craned his face around to look at me. “Isn’t that what we’ve been talking about?”

I answered him with a laugh. He really was crazy. Brilliant crazy, but still crazy.

Whether Vize intended it or not, his final words made sense to me. If I did nothing, the column would keep growing. But if I used nothing, it might stop. Or it might turn everything to nothing. Between the known nothing and the unknown nothing, I took the unknown.

When I held out the spear, electrostatic sparks arced between it and the column. Power surged within, and my body shook as the dark mass flared in response. After fighting against it for three years, I embraced the darkness, filled my mind with the desire for it to grow. It responded like the spear, only painfully. Taint seeped down the spear toward my arm, no longer pulling the column wider, but spiraling down into a nexus that was forming between the light and the dark.

My mind screamed as I pushed at the dark mass within. The nothingness of it seared through the mesh on my forearm. A dark streak oozed down my arm, a fierce course of nothing, a complete absence of essence. The light and the dark met where my hand clutched the spear. I pressed harder, the thing in my head crushing against the inside of my skull. The column wavered and paused its motion. I forced myself to continue, willing the essence through the conduit that formed within my arm. After a faint hush, the essence in the column brushed against my face, pulling back to form the veil.