Panacea for Souls

"When god finally found us, it asked who we were. That was frightening, of course, like seeing a parent falter in confidence for the first time. We had hoped it would shed some light on the question, itself, but in our lack of existential bravado it grew bored and continued onward, shut us out like we were an infestation best left alone, like billions of stagnant souls adrift in the cosmos was none more interesting than a used napkin.”

Mr. Rogers spat. Despite his haggard form, he’d become youthful once more upon entering the afterlife. He continued.

"Now that wasn't very neighbourly of him, was it?”

The man he addressed, a freshly deceased Kai Kalama, was still somewhat in shock from his abrupt departure from the physical world. There was no preamble.

*

Kai had been standing in the middle of his kitchen absentmindedly, incapable of deciding what dish he would serve himself before nightfall set in. His indecisiveness stirred such a powerful apprehension that he took it upon himself to walk the outskirts of his town in Maui. These Hawaiian vistas, he thought, were exactly what grand fantasies were made of, no more so than during the illustrious golden-hour, when the island becomes obscured in gold ocean mists by a sky that looks like a quiet apocalypse.

It was in the midst of this thought that a wayward coconut decided to park itself atop Kai’s head. One cracked and spilled, while the other continued to roll along the path and into the shrubs.

His life switch was flicked, and the darkness that followed absolute.

Never in any lifetime would he have guessed that, upon waking after death, he’d find himself in chains, carted along by some primordial shadow entity standing some fifty stories tall, crammed into some type of wheeled soul container with around thirty others.

The wails of his fellow spirits were subdued by the intermittent beat of drums that could not be seen, although the transparent walls of the container he was placed in afforded some view of the murky turquoise skies tainted by black.

When the drums grew quiet, Kai could make out a variety of prayers offered to differing gods by his fellow captives; Shiva, Jesus, Eru, to no avail. The last saviour they were expecting was a man from Latrobe, Pennsylvania named Fred Rogers.

He appeared before the lumbering giant, wrists locked to hips in disapproval, his gaze against its featureless face unwavering as it closed in.

The giant’s pace faltered, and finally stopped. Its head craned downward to take note of the rogue spirit obstructing its path.

“That’s right. Down here, friend.” Mr. Rogers said. “Now I know you don’t mean any ill will towards these kind folk holed up in that lovely spirit box you’ve constructed, but their being locked away remains a conflict of personal liberties that I simply cannot abide. It’s because of this that I am compelled to help these good people and relieve you of your duties, enigmatic and uncertain as they may be.”

As Mr. Rogers continued, two separate figures appeared from the crevasses along the gorge in which they sat, one a pale wiry man with thick-rimmed glasses, the other a short woman of African American descent, her high cheekbones accentuating the intimidation of her no-nonsense demeanour.

Those that saw them on approach began to plea for help, an unwanted chorus of attention that was cut off as the would-be saviours brought a finger to their own lips.

The wiry man leapt onto the edge of the cart and gave the captives a crooked smile.

“No need to fret! We’ll have you out in a moment.” He was English.

“Here you go, space man,” the woman said, throwing him a makeshift dagger of purest obsidian.

“Thanks, General.” He took the weapon with a grateful smile, then turned to the captives. “Stand back, please.”

Some did not speak English, and were confused until he bade them back with a simple hand gesture. They did so, just as the Englishman pressed the point of the dagger against the invisible barrier. A faint white luminescent circle appeared against the barrier upon contact.

“Hurry, Stephen.”

“Just trying to find the angle,” and even in that deathly concentration was a humoured curiosity. “Almost.”

The shadow entity had given Mr. Rogers enough of its time and began to reach for him, a slow and terrifying display of motion for something so large, a manifestation of the void.

“It’s reaching.”

“Got it.”

With a small push the barrier faded to nothing, its deactivation spreading from the point of contact.

He ushered everyone along, helping them from their crude prison, as did the one he called General. When it came time for Kai to step down, he could not help look as the hand of the giant shadow closed in on Mr. Rogers, just before he leapt and disappeared within a manmade dugout hidden at his feet. Before he could gawk any further, he was pulled along by Stephen. Their eyes met, and a recognition dawned.

“You’re—” Kai began.

“I am,” he said with a smile. “Later, though. We don’t want to be here when that thing turns around. Off we pop.”

“Stephen!”

“Yes, yes! Follow Harriet,” he said, helping Kai down and turning to the others.

He did so, just as the giant began to turn around. Mr. Rogers appeared only meters away from the crevasse Harriet stood at the face of. Traces of a smile came to him as he approached.

“Is that everyone?”

Harriet simply nodded.

“Thank you,” Kai blurted out. He turned to Harriet. “And thank you.”

“Less thanking, more walking, honey.”

He obeyed.

Their captor took note of its missing collection just as the last were ushered away, spilled souls washing down the drain. A dull, thought-rupturing horn sounded from the creature’s center upon the discovery, what came next was left a mystery as Harriet kicked at two support foundations that caused a collapse of silt along the entrance.

Despite the escape, the power of that sound followed and haunted every step.

“I simply cannot tell if they get angrier each time we do this, or if it’s a reaction no different from throwing a pebble into water,” Kai heard Stephen say.

“Let him stomp,” Mr. Rogers said. “Seems even giant shadow demons need an outlet.”

“There’s that word again!” Stephen mused.

“Don’t goad him,” Harriet said. “It’s a ways back and I don’t need the headache.”

“Can’t get headaches!” Stephen perked.

“I’ll imagine myself having one and that’ll be enough. Now hush, child.”

Some of the escapees thought to question their predicament, which led to others demanding the same in fear.

“I promise you all,” Mr. Rogers began, “that when we see the light at the end of this tunnel I’ll help explain what little I can. Just take comfort in the moment to know you’re safe and among friends.”

Several captives expressed their confusion in Chinese, Italian, and Arabic. Harriet repeated Mr. Rogers’ words to them flawlessly in their own dialect, much to their satisfaction.

They walked for some time, enough for Kai to question his lack of fatigue until realising once more in a minor grip of despair that his physicality was now an obsolete notion. He had almost asked for food reflexively, but caught himself before traveling down that avenue of thought, the no-more’s and inevitably the why. Panic was the dagger in the heart of any struggle, so he kept his sheathed and hoped others would do the same.

They came out upon a dusted clearing of cracked land, another gorge that snaked its way between a series of towering cliffs and paved the way for a wide, slow stream of grey waters. Kai followed its path with his eyes, and was drawn once more to the sky where, between the lips of those magnificent craggy cliffs, hung a black sun. Its crescent border shone a brilliant silver, and called to Kai in a manner he could not contest.

“It’s best not to stare into that abyss,” Harriet said, not unkindly.

“How much longer?” A middle-aged man asked behind a great bushy beard, his large white mane resting on his shoulders.

Everyone turned to regard him, but it was Stephen who answered.

“Relative to time? I don’t think anyone here can answer that, quite honestly. It doesn’t exist in this place. Not much further, though.”

They followed the water, a thinning wind through the runoff of the cliff base, shale fragments breaking under their feet in wet crunches. A wooded hill appeared around the bend as they left the gorge behind, the first of many that sat atop one another, the highest of them hidden beneath a shroud of fog. Traces of a path extended and coiled along the hill’s face, fading into the mouth of a dead forest.

At the centre of this depleted wood lay a concrete heart, the remnant of a fractured structure built by unknown hands for reasons that were lost to the yesterdays that weighed upon it. A rhythmic clash of metal on metal rang as they entered.

The interior was drab and somehow more lifeless than the dead world it shielded them from. Mr. Rogers turned to them as they filled a large entrance hall.

“This is just a checkpoint,” he told them. “Head upstairs to get those nasty chains off your wrists. Cain will see to them. Don’t take offence when you thank him and he doesn’t respond. He’s been here longer than any of us and then some.”

Kai followed the others as they climbed one of two stairs leading to the center of a second-floor balcony, where structural integrity became dependent on the rubble that propped it up.

They entered an armoury, crude wood-handled weapons lining what remained of the room’s walls. In the corner, hunched over a workstation utilised from a fallen support pillar, stood an ancient looking man in white wool garments, loose and singed. He struck blows with a dented block hammer to a metal strap of unknown design. He bade them forward as they shuffled in, his focus and rhythm unwavering from his task.

When he finished he beheld the flat metal strip, reflective and pristine, placed it against the length of his forearm, and with a satisfied grunt threw it into a container with many others.

Again he beckoned.

A young woman approached him first, and without question placed her wrists atop his altar of metal works. Two deft blows from Cain rendered the woman’s shackles useless. He collected them and urged another forward.

Kai presented his wrists. As the hammer fell and the link shattered, Cain hesitated at the sight of Kai’s tattoo. A flicker of consternation upon the ancient armourer’s face as he gripped Kai’s wrist, and whispered something that Kai could not hear.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Anuenue,” he repeated, Hawaiian for rainbow.

Kai’s tattoo was a triangle with interlocking geometric lines and half circles. Within its border lay a full spectrum of colour, a touch more vibrant than he remembered.

“You speak Hawaiian, cuz?”

But Cain ignored the question. “Markings received after birth do not travel with you to this place. They are impurities.”

Suddenly it did strike Kai as odd that his tattoo managed to remain with him, not that he was in any way familiar with the physics of an existence after death.

“Am I gonna get in trouble for this?"
 “You’re a bright-soul.”

“What’s that?”

“Unknowable. I have not seen many, and those that I have did not linger long. It was a name given here by one who has always been. It is a lurcher’s bane, and we have spoken of this enough. Practice caution.”

Cain beckoned to the next chained soul behind Kai, and that was that. He fell back in line with the others and found himself in the entrance hall, once again. When the last had gathered, Mr. Rogers gave his speech about god’s abandonment, followed by the almighty spit. Harriet and Stephen listened with distracted interest, incapable of recounting how many times they’d heard it, previously.

“So what is this place?” someone asked. “This doesn’t look like the heaven I was told about.”

Mr. Rogers and Harriet looked to Stephen, the attention ripping him from the revery he had lost himself to.

“Hm?”

“The gentleman in the back would like to know what this place is, Stephen,” Mr. Rogers said.

“Oh, right. Apologies.” He pushed himself out of his lax position and stood before them all, a lecturer ready to educate. “As far as I and others who are no longer here with us have come to understand, it’s a question not easily answered.”

Harriet began her translations, starting with Chinese.

“Explaining our surroundings might not be possible in a physical sense, although we do perceive and interact with them in a way that appears physical. Is it an afterlife? Most assuredly, but as to the relevance of that title in accordance with our own understanding of the term, it is very much a mystery. We do not age, we do not thirst, hunger, become sick, or experience any intrinsic biological need that had so long burdened us in our prior lives. Yet…we can most certainly dissipate.” This seemed to trouble him.

“We can die again?” a woman asked, standing tall in a lavish business suit. her arms crossed in defiance of the situation.

“Death might very well be a construct of man’s ideals and no more, I’m afraid. We may perish in this place, but our current occupation renders those terms obsolete. We have no way of knowing where we might wind up, next, if anywhere at all.”

“Bible never mentioned none of this,” a burly gentleman commented, his gentle features obscured by a powerful beard that appeared to take up more space than his own head.

“Ah, yes,” Stephen threw up an acknowledging finger as he veered towards the gentleman. “Indeed, the confusion that must be felt for those who used the bible as a lexicon for faith must surely be—”

“Ain’t religious,” the man interrupted, traces of a smile upending his beard. “Just sayin’, was all.”

“I see,” Stephen said, the words riding a chuckle. “Well thank you for bringing it to our attention, regardless, because let’s face it…if we can look back on the bible and omit a great deal that has nothing to offer us in a modern era, the chances of it being dictated by an omniscient being must surely come under some form of scrutiny.”

“Amen to that.”

“What about others?” Kai called out.

“Oh yes, multiple cells of us occupy different parts of the known landscape, but we don’t—”

“No, sorry,” Kai interrupted, “I meant like…are there any other spirits here that aren’t human? You know, like aliens?”

This caused a flurry of sound to distill throughout the group, both of annoyance and humour.

Stephen smiled. “I believe I’ll let Fred answer that one.”

Everyone’s favourite neighbour took the reins of the conversation’s responsibility with a smile of his own as he gauged those before him. He met each of their eyes and beheld them not as an audience, but as individuals with purpose.

“Well first, let me just start off by saying that our current predicament doesn’t shatter my faith. The god we thought we knew might have abandoned us, but that’s not to say it’s the only one. Who created Him? Is He ours? Seems to me He’s held up, somewhere.”

He allowed that to sink in for a moment.

“It took me a while to come around to that sentiment. When my faith wavered, I looked for answers in places that went beyond countless horizons. I walked through that vast endlessness alone, not once seeing another soul. I must have traveled for,” He looked to Harriet, who demonstrated her disdain for the answer without shame, “quite some time. Eventually I stumbled on structures that filled the sky. When I say these things were big, I mean they exceeded anything I’d call possible with human ingenuity. It looked to me like a few cities stacked on top of each other. Their scope gave me some hope that I’d finally come across intelligent life, so I went to them. Now, I don’t know how long I looked or how often I called out for others, but I had somewhat familiarised myself with these structures as a whole, and I didn’t come across a single soul in the time I spent searching.”

Kai deflated at this.

“Whoever left that place behind, I’d be hard pressed to call them human. Their furnishings were too large for an average sized person like myself, and their entryways to different rooms sometimes suspiciously small, with hollowed tubes that forced me to crawl through. But most curious of all were the many idols I came across, often crudely made and large. They depicted a cloaked figure, no visible features, and its body…” Mr. Rogers trailed off, disturbed by the recollection. “Well. I left shortly after. I had wallowed enough in the questionable, too long for those who didn’t have the luxury of doing it, themselves.”

He looked to those before him once more, seeing not those present but the ones he had been absent for.

“We got by,” Harriet said. “Those things might be tough, but they’re hungry and stupid. We don’t have that problem.”

“What do they want with us, exactly?” someone from the back called out.

“To harvest,” Harriet said. “To feed on your soul, purpose, identity, whatever you wish to call it. When they take what’s left of you, you’re nothing more than a husk that wants to feed just like them. We don’t know where they come from or how many there are, but they too can dissipate…with some physical encouragement.”

“So we just died to come here and fight shadow demons?”

“No,” Mr. Rogers said. “It's obvious that these things are invaders. This place had a purpose at one point in time, only now it’s under duress. But there is a place of passage that Cain was kind enough to point us in the direction of. What lies beyond is unknown. But once you step through that gate, you pass on to whatever comes after this.”

“Will you take us there?” Kai asked.

“Son, why do you think we’re still here? Arm yourselves and suit up. We move out in twenty.”

*

Far off, between rolling hills of grey sands and the jagged obsidian obstructions that pierced them, where streams of silver anointed their base and collected in various pools, there tarried silt of no known origin, collected and weaved throughout the expanse as a road for wayfaring souls. It was on this that Kai ran with the others, barely ahead of the pursuing army of shadow demons and their giant centurions.

The pack of abandoned souls ran together at an inhuman pace, their physical limitations unshackled, unburdened of the need for air. Silent was their pace, and loud were the inward roars of the advancing horde.

“I believe they might be fed up, this time!” Stephen called out. “We’ve never had this many in pursuit.”

Kai, at the front of the group towards the side, snuck a glance over his shoulder, and indeed the advancing wall of shadow seemed to him like an accelerated sunset, the darkness overlapping the ground they’d covered without any hindrance.

That glance caused him to trip and fall away from the path. He felt no pain as he hit a minor slope and crashed into both sand and streams of silver. The group continued on without him, and his separation from the pack drove those leading the demonic charge into a frenzy.

A group accelerated beyond the horde, five voracious creatures that appeared smaller than the rest, too fast for Kai to register, properly. Two reached him and leapt for his throat, one subdued by a makeshift dagger to the head, thrown with terrific accuracy.

Kai couldn’t afford to look as Harriet slid down the hill after him. He raised the spear he had been carrying to place the haft within the maws of the other feral thing snapping for him. Harriet retrieved her dagger and put it between the eyes of the one atop Kai. Its form puffed into a wreathe of chalky wisps and became nothing.

“Get up and start running.” Harriet said. turning towards the last three.

Kai obeyed.

She wouldn’t wait for them to leap while she stood still, so she charged. When the leading demon finally did launch itself, Harriet slid beneath and drove her blade along its sternum. The second received her dagger in its malformed face as she pushed herself up, the third succumbing to her free hand as she gripped its throat. She used its momentum to pin it to the ground, where its feral outrage ended in a burst of smoke as Harriet drove her dagger into its side. She was trailing Kai before those final wisps could become nothing.

The front of the horde had spearheaded their way along the path, those running along the dunes and over streams falling behind. Both Harriet and Kai ran alongside them as they tried to catch up to their party. Some from the horde deviated upon seeing two running along the base of the slope, a decision that proved to be their final one as Harriet made quick cuts while running. Even Kai found it easy to simply point his spear at those that leapt down as he ran.

Both Mr. Rogers and Stephen took note of Harriet and Kai’s predicament. Unless the horde along the path was deterred in some way, neither Kai or Harriet would be able to surpass them, and would eventually be overwhelmed and lost.

Their destination came into sight as they surpassed some of the larger dunes, a temple of extraordinary size walled with stone pillars. A steep set of stairs led the way to a ruptured chamber, upon which sat a depiction of a humanoid sitting upright on a throne, its head a vine-studded pyramid.

“What’s the plan?” Stephen asked.

“These people are the priority,” Mr. Rogers said. “You lead them ahead no matter what happens. Understood?”

Stephen couldn’t help showing concern for the implication of the command.

“Stephen.”

“I heard you, Rogers. Just be careful.”

“Everybody listen up!” Rogers called out. “I’m slowing down a bit. Go around me and keep going. I need to hold them off for a bit to give the other two some breathing room. Don’t stop for anything!”

He fell back, eventually falling behind the group, completely. He turned and readied the quarterstaff that had been sheathed on his back, and planted himself as one who would not be deterred, not by the denizens of darkness or any other force of nature.

Surprise took him when several men and women stepped up beside him, others ready to give themselves for the preservation of others. He looked to each of them, their solemn nod the only affirmation of certainty he needed.

“Thank you,” he said, before charging the surging channel of death.

He held his staff wide and barrelled into his pursuers, stunning their flow and forcing a good many off the path. Mr. Rogers heard Harriet call out to him as she passed, but he dared not break his attention from those he held back. He knew she wouldn’t let his decision be for nothing,

Those that circled him were met by the blows of those few men and women and their crude weapons. For the time being, their ground was held.

“We should help!” Kai said, as Harriet finally caught up.

“Don’t be foolish.”

The dunes seemed to level out a great deal upon their approach to the temple, enough for them to veer up and onto the path, just before the entrance to the temple.

Stephen had hung back after directing everyone beyond the temple’s stairs, and waited to help them in their final ascent. After pulling Harriet up, a perplexity dawned on him as Kai extended the arm that held his primordial tattoo.

“That’s interesting,” he said.

Harriet then caught sight of it, too. “What is that?” she asked, but her eyes were on Rogers and the others, still holding their line a great deal further from them. “Never mind,” she said, before Kai could answer. “Get up those stairs with the others. Hurry, now.”

Again, Kai obeyed.

“Let’s go,” Harriet said, making her way towards Rogers and the others.

But Stephen placed a hand on her shoulder. “They’re forcing us to move on, Harriet. This was our last hurrah. He and the others are fighting to give us the chance to move on, too.”

“Not like this.”

“Sometimes we aren’t give a choice. Come on.”

As Kai reached the apex of the temple’s grounds, he turned once more to look at the approaching horde. Mr. Rodgers and three others continued to disrupt the the advance of those on the path, surrounded and forced to fight back to back. Many elected to ignore them and continue their pursuit, and the encroaching army had now surpassed them. Several shadow giants would soon be upon them. It was when Stephen and Harriet began their climb against the temple’s steps that he turned away.

He came to an open courtyard, the stone ground before him carved into a faded relief, its depictions and shapes indiscernible. The closer he came to its center, the more vibrant a physical thrum began to coalesce beneath his feet, and the colours of his tattoo grew warm and iridescent. A pillar of light erupted from the center of the relief, a kaleidoscopic surge of colour that pierced the miasmic skies above and continued on into that starless expanse.

“What did you do!?”

Kai turned to see Harriet coming towards him, Stephen not far behind. He could see, breaking out from different points at great distances, several other pillars of the same light erupting at different points along the horizon. His gaze guided Harriet and Stephen’s.

“Stephen, what is this?” Harriet asked.

“Very hard to say,” he said. “But it might have something to do with the tattoo on this young man’s arm. Show us, Kai.”

He held out his arm, which Harriet took in both hands. “How long have you had this?”

“Since I got here,” he said. “But I didn’t think anything of it, and then when Cain mentioned it I thought it was something I should just keep to myself. He said I was a light-soul. A lurcher’s bane.”

And with that, Stephen’s eyes widened as he turned and ran back towards the steps. Harriet and Kai followed, stopping just as he did at their edge.

The army of shadow had begun to recede, some that fell behind simply falling to the ground to become nothing. The hulking shadow giants had also turned to fall back, all but one that continued its advance on a lone Mr. Rogers.

He stood surrounded, his staff creating an impenetrable circumference that meant an end to any who attempted to pass its threshold. The shadow giant stumbled as it drew closer, determined to snuff this soul that had disrupted the order of their ways with impunity. The light piercing the skies grew too much for the smaller shadow folk, and so they abandoned their prey. Mr. Rodgers’ fortitude appeared to wane as they left, using his staff to hold himself up.

Mr. Rogers remained in place as the giant approached. He brought himself gently to his knees and placed the staff at his side, holding his head high to the colossus before him. If words had been spoken, they could not be heard.

The creature of malice raised its leg, and in a weakened motion drove its foot to the ground, its last act destroying both itself and Mr. Rogers alike. Nothing remained along that road now but rusted weapons and sorrow.

“I’m so sorry,” Kai said.

“Come on,” Harriet said, turning away.

Stephen granted Kai a consolidating hand on the shoulder. It was not his fault. He motioned his head towards Harriet to suggest they follow.

They found the others in the only chamber afforded by the temple’s entrance, a dark space of cold stone and high-pitched winds infiltrating its many cracks. A wooded archway stood at the room’s centre, weaves of branches intertwined from one end to the other.

“What happened out there?” a woman asked as they entered.

“We’re not entirely sure,” Stephen said. “But it’s high time we all moved on.”

“Some of the others already went,” the woman said. “We stayed behind just in case.”

“In case what?” Harriet asked.

“In case you needed us.”

These were good people, and the smile on Harriet’s face said as much.

“We better get on,” she said.

The remaining souls passed beneath the wooded arch and left the broken world behind, all but Kai, Stephen, and Harriet.

“What if we don’t see each other, again?” Harriet asked.

“Anything could happen,” Stephen smiled. “We found each other in all this, didn’t we?”

“That we did, old friend. That we did. But what about those lights, and this young man right here?”

Kai wasn’t sure he wanted to speculate.

“If the effects of those lights on the shadows are anything to go by, I might guess a cleansing of sorts. If not that, then maybe a signal.”

“A signal? To what? And where?” Kai asked.

Stephen merely shrugged. “Hopefully to someone who needs to see it. Now,” he held both arms wide, offering them to both Kai and Harriet. “Together, shall we?”

They locked arms and stood before the archway.

“After all this time…” Harriet said.

“Yes. And finally, an end. Ready, Kai.”

“I suppose I have to be.”

“To boldly go, eh?” he asked with a smile.

And with that they stepped forward, echoes of the void.