The Forever Knight

8

Gone.

To a place I couldn’t see or feel or comprehend. Floating in a space that terrified me. Blind, without a body or pain.

Alone.

* * *

I was dead, or very nearly dead, and I knew that my mind had left the rest of me behind. But my soul, if that’s what it was, didn’t drift freely up to heaven. I was trapped, suffocating in a blackness that went on forever. I searched the darkness but saw nothing, horrified that I had no eyes at all now.

But I could remember. I knew who I was and what had happened to me. I wondered where Cricket was, if she was dead like me. Or worse.

“Malator?”

My voice carried through the void. I tried to feel Malator, hoping he was somewhere in the darkness.

“Malator, I need you!”

He was gone. Like me, he didn’t exist any more. If I had eyes, I might have cried.

“Malator. Help me.”

* * *

After a while-after forever, maybe-I realized I wasn’t dead. I couldn’t be dead. The dead were like the Akari. Once the spirit leaves the body it dwells forever in its special place. Like Cassandra in her apple orchard. She wasn’t floating mutely through eternity. She had another life beyond her mortal one. She had a world around her.

I had only darkness, and that’s when I knew I was still alive somewhere. Barely, yes, but alive, although I couldn’t imagine what kept me from death. The wrestler had broken my neck. No one could have survived it. He might as well have decapitated me.

Yet here I was.

“I can’t stay here forever!” I screamed. “I’m alive!”

That’s when I felt him. Just a tremor at first, far away, invisible out there in the blackness.

“Malator!”

I put everything I could into my cry. All of it, all of me. Anything to reach him. Suddenly he was there with me, like a mother over the bed of a sick child. Still invisible, but I could feel him.

“Malator, where am I?” I pleaded. “What happened?”

“Wait. Not now.”

“Where’s Cricket? Is she all right?”

“Lukien, you’re almost dead.”

“My neck. .” I understood. “Can you save me?”

“I will save you, Lukien,” he insisted. “No matter what it takes of me.”

“You can let me die, Malator. It’s all right.”

I heard him laugh, and it cheered me. “Same old Lukien. You have a mission, remember?”

“Now can you tell me what it is?”

“I can’t talk, Lukien. I need my strength. You have to fight, too.”

I imagined reaching out for him, but he was already gone.

* * *

Except for Malator, I thought I was alone in the void. I thought I could just wait-until I realized something was in there with me.

It was the first thing I had seen in however long I was trapped there. A shadow among the shadows, moving across my consciousness. I had no body, no flesh to grow cold, but it chilled me. Suddenly I felt it everywhere, and I couldn’t run from it or fight. So I watched, and for a moment it appeared like a pile of bones, then bloody rags of skin, and then as just a pair of horns. Finally it looked at me through the eyes of a dozen decayed faces.

Human faces.

“Leave me!” I cried.

It fled so quickly it stunned me. But I knew what I had seen.

* * *

Time passed, more and more, until at last Malator returned. This time I could see him. He brought light with him. His weary face nodded at me, and I knew he was too tired to speak. But he had saved me. I would be alive again.

“Malator,” I said. “I saw the monster in the sand.”