Red fabric tore; it reminded him of blood, of the time he watched the arm of an acquaintance be pulled from the socket, and muscle and bone hung from the ends like broken seams. He watched this once, and could do nothing except lock his eyes to the atrocity. Temptation – the little hum in the back of his mind that sometimes would sing when it was most alive – told him to run, at the time. Thinking about it now, he wished he had. It would have been better than just standing there, eyes meeting those of his acquaintance’s, two different pairs of eyes, blurring emotions of horror and fear and panic.
She tore more frantically at the fabric, and red filled his vision. He thought she was bleeding. This, he thought, was how her mind bled. She no longer tried to pull herself off the ground and threw the lengthy pieces of fabric across the snow. Red and white. Bleeding across white space.
He shifted awkwardly from where he stood, and turned his gaze away towards the only lights twitching in the darkness, a line straight up the mountain. Artificial – a word he was accustomed to. Everything about his life was artificial. His home: a small house on a hill outside of the shabby town on the third island in the archipelago; an experiment gone wrong. Yes! he sarcastically thought, let’s see what happens when we give life to our minds!
They forget. Become simple, and as their lives get written over, they’re left confused about why there’s a tower stretching from ocean floor to heavens. And the adults work and work on it, not remembering, not knowing why.
The mind wants progress. The mind wants to build. So it built.
“Help me!” she shouts.
“I don’t know what you’re even doing,” he tells her blandly. They’ve been traveling for years now. He knew her, once. Knew how she was like, how to read her. Then they encountered the crystalline sands, and she went insane, little by little. He doesn’t understand her now. She goes from calm and collected to always moving, every part of her jittery. She can’t stand still, and sometimes she disappears without him even knowing, and it’s days before he sees her again. He wonders if they should return to Memoria. If that is the better place for her, now.
She’s stopped, hands folded tightly in her lap. Rays of red stretch out all around her; a bleeding sun. He wonders why, if there’s some sort of symbolism that he’s missed. Maybe she’s reached the peak of her insanity now. He doesn’t know if she can pull her up again, this time.
He doesn’t try to reach out a hand, arms loosely at his sides. He thinks she’s defeated him.
“What is it?” he prompts.
“Do you remember?” she asks quietly.
Her voice strikes him, and he remembers Easter colored lights lining highway built upon highway and white shadows chasing after them at night. A desolate city where everyone is full of fake joy. Her voice sounds as though he met her – the real her, not the drugged self – all that time ago.
He has a feeling that isn’t what she means. “What?” he asks again, just as quiet. He watches his breath, frozen puffs amongst a chilled breeze. He wraps his arms around himself.
“That place.”
We’ve been to many places. “You need to be a bit more specific, Angela.” Angela… she had changed so much. Pieces torn from her like the fabric she pulled apart; once a bracelet – Never Stop Dreaming – that she lost amongst those sands. She hates to dream, now. In her dreams the voices were able to invade. Alien thoughts and feelings, overwhelming her mind.
He had been lucky. He was always the lucky one.
“You have a chance” a girl, an entity, once told him.
“The sands,” she whispers. Her eyes shift to the side and stay watching a blank spot. He doesn’t know if she sees anything special there, anything that he can’t. He stays silent, but crouches down in front of her. It’s been half a year since the stretches of sand. “I hear them. Why do I hear them?”
“Who?” He thinks he knows the answer. She hears everyone that lives on this planet. Every city, village, island. She hears everyone under the control of towers. Control over their souls, and the will that they lost gets gathered into the crystalline grains along that beach, above everything, above the sky…
“…The Unending.”
He reels back, falling in the snow, hands stinging by the sudden cold digging into his palms. His eyes are wide, and he wonders if there was a way he heard wrong – her voice was so quiet, he must have misunderstood her, again. He swallows and takes a deep breath of chill and his sinuses clear.
Shakily, he manages, “What?”
Her head lowers, hair falling over the dark scarf loosely strung around her neck.
“Angela,” he insists, “who did you say?” He needs to know. She repeats herself, and he isn’t sure what to say first over the bubbling of questions that try to line up in his mind. “Ho – What are they saying?”
“They’re screaming. Maybe they ate too much.”
Who would have any power over them? The Unending have the most control over the world; immortal beings feeding off the sands, off the emotions that they harvest, and that every single wannabe creates. Memoria, Sulcits… all their towers feed into the same beach… even if they try to become separate, the Unending always come out on top…
She reaches down to one of the strips of red fabric and smoothes her hands across it. The snow soaks through. She traces a single finger from top to bottom, and again he’s left to only watch, confused by her actions, wondering if he’s lost her. Again unable to grab for her, even though his hands are growing numb where they rest. She must be sinking deeper now. Out of reach.
“When the sun comes up,” she tells him, voice taking on a haunting melody. Her gaze briefly rolls towards him, and then looks down to her finger, “it will be bleeding. They’re not immortal anymore, and they’re taking everyone with them.”
“But… there has to be a way to stop it!” his voices hitches, and panic swells in his gut.
“There hasn’t been before, and there won’t be now.” She frowns, scrunching her whole face. She stands out of the snow, pants soaked through, but she doesn’t seem to notice. She smiles wide and reaches out a hand towards him, and for a fearful moment he expects her to ask dance with me. “Let’s make snow angels, Rollin.”
