Fainaru Circus -- Chapter Six

My eyes flutter open, my vision greeting the overwhelming darkness that weighs heavily on the air surrounding me. A single light begins to bloom in the form of that dreaded rose that only just now dares to unfurl its petals, exposing its very heart to the world. I watch as the reborn flower seems to quiver in the chill that has settled over this place. With every tucked-away petal that softly unfolds to support the next, another beam of fading light seems to project into the black, expressionless sky.

I know by now that she is coming. I can almost feel her footsteps across the damp ash, the dewdrops clinging to her bare skin as she dances a hidden waltz that I feel I should know. The thrumming red flashes dully in the background, becoming brighter and brighter with each step, with each bloom. Soon I feel only one thing; my heart, as it beats in tune with the blooming of the rose and the soft tapping of her footsteps. The headache that tightens my mind is nothing to me, the sensation still present but the pain numbed and nonexistent.

My vision shatters, and I am caught between the image of the rose, her feet across the ash, a burning city, and her eyes. That horrid, deep, pulsing red that beckons me with sadness. Her arms open wide to greet me in an embrace; the temptation pulls me, but I no longer have the ability to move. Have I ever?

“Define.”

She speaks, and it scares me. I feel the fear as it wells up, gurgling like the crystalline springs of fresh water in the mountains. She has never spoken before, has she? My memory goes blank; not only can I not recall, I find that I cannot care.

This voice, like the purring of a cat—yet tainted with an unholy melancholy that tugs at the corners of her lips, though I cannot see her mouth—seems to rip open my chest to expose my barely-beating heart to the raw emotion that floats around me. The syllables are drizzled with honey, each sentence sounded by an unheard bell that seems angelic and deadly at the same time.

“Define the law that binds.”

I am caught in the web that she weaves as the rose quivers, its growth halted for a split second before the petals begin a frenzy of unraveling. Too fast, it grows too fast.

“Define the love that binds.”

I scream, but the sounds only heard by the world. Am I ever to feel the vibrations of sound as anything more than the breeze that kisses the lush petals of this impossible flower.

“Define the fate that shall bind you.”

I reach up—I feel my hand, but why can I not see it?!—and claw at something I am not familiar with. As if gasping for air beneath the gloominess of water, I am bound. I am bound by law. I am bound by love. I am bound by fate. I am—

I shriek. The sound gallops through the caravan as I fall from my hammock for the seventh time in two days. My breaths come out in choked, begging gasps, my lungs pleading for fresh air. Dragging myself from the tangle of blankets, knocked-over crates, and my own limbs, I manage to grip the handles of the back of the wagon and tug. One door cracks open, and I see the darkness of the night sky, billions of stars scattered into the black abyss, similar to a spoiled child’s playroom. The moon is a thin sliver in the sky, a crooked smile that grins at me eerily.

Taking deep breaths, I manage to calm down, and—unsurprisingly—find I can’t remember what I was dreaming about. I can’t even bring myself to recall the red that I am sure was present; that cursed color has been haunting me for a while now.

Running a hand through my ragged hair, I sigh, looking around the bumping wagon as it’s dragged across the mountain paths. The ridge of the mountains cascade up and down it rugged slopes in the distance, a haze of blue blanketing them as if they were snuggling together for a long rest through winter.

Winter.

Heavens, it came fast. Seems like just last week it was so hot I thought my brain would boil if I so much as lifted a finger, let alone set up tents. Now the chill of the air nips at my toes and fingers, leaving frost on my quilts and pillow and a crisp thickness to the air that nearly kills me every time I breathe it.

The one thing I find myself liking about the mountains is the pines. Towering beasts with trunks as big as a small wagon, bark-covered arms and fingers reaching up to the sky, covered in a coat of lush, sharp-smelling needles. When the snow dusts over them, it looks… magical. Sort of mysterious in a way, I suppose. Lucky hates it, that much I’m sure of. He hates the cold, he hates the mountains, and he hates the trees. How do I know? He won’t shut up about it.

I think Joker likes it just as much as I do, though. I mean, sure the cold wants to shred some skin off in a horrible case of frostbite, but at least it’s beautiful. We were sitting together last night on the top of a moving wagon, he and I. We watched the falling snow mix with the stars and clouds as it fell toward us. Of course, shortly after him commenting—quite poetically, I think—on how gorgeous mother nature can be, I slipped off the top of the wagon and fell into the snow. Then there was a pack of wolves howling their scrawny selves silly, and I just about wet my pants trying to catch up to the wagon and climb back to the top before it left me behind. That pretty much ended the night for me, as one might imagine.

“Charm, are you still among the living?” I hear Joker call from a few wagons ahead of this one, and a snort. Took him long enough to ask.

“Pretty sure!” I holler back, sitting up as I begin to fold up my blankets and put them with my pillow on the hammock. After I manage to find my heavy coat and put the frozen thing on, and slip out of the open door, closing and latching it behind me. Standing on a thin platform just outside of the entrance to the inside of the wagon, I step carefully over to the left side, reach for a ladder run nail roughly to the side of the wagon, and heft myself around to it.

I remember something Lucky told me the day before last, and it irritates me. He called me ‘manly strong’. I don’t really mind getting mistaken for a boy, but ‘manly’…? That’s insulting on too many levels to count. I’m still huffing as my ice-cold fingers somehow grip and release each fabric-wrapped ladder rung until I reach the top. Rolling onto my back, I catch my breath again—working in the cold is harder than it should be, I’m thinking—before getting back onto my feet. Walking with wobbly steps to the front of the wagon, I sit, swing my feet over the edge, and drop next to Vical.

She jumps, a tiny squeaking sound getting caught in her throat as a look of fear and shock covers her face. Then she turns to glare at me. “Charm, what the Hell.”

I smile. “Yes?”

“You scared the tar out of me.” She hisses, and I chuckle to myself.

“That’s believable,” I nudge her with my elbow, waiting for her to get the joke. She gets it alright, and two seconds later I’m silent, frowning, and feel a knot growing on the top of my head. I didn’t know Ms. ‘Lady’ Vical found it proper to hit a poor, innocent child. Well, partially innocent… and sort of a child… and maybe not ‘poor’ so much as—

There’s a loud crashing sound; a wretched symphony of wood and metal grinding against each other. Horses shriek and protest, their hooves pounding against the dirt as the rear up. Something spooked them? I’m just leaning out to the right to try and see around the wagon in front of us as a horse with a broken hitch hanging off of its back. It’s eyes are wild and terrified as it bolts. I open my mouth to call for it, and the wagon in front of us slams into something. Vical curses, yanking back on the reins to no avail. Our wagon crushes the one in front of us, the horses ducking and jerking on the weak leads until they break free, bolting into the pine forests.

I stand up, and so does Vical. While she hops off of the wagon and runs for the front of the caravan, I jump back onto the top of the wagon to warn whoever is behind us. Arms waving wildly as I stand from my knees to my feet, I feel a pit in my stomach form. Even before I stand up to my full height, I can see the wagon behind ours rushing forward at alarming speeds. In fact, all seven wagons I see that gather up the back of the caravan are moving too fast. The drivers have wide, frightened eyes as they struggle to control spooked horses. What scared the animals like this? Was it the horses that had broken free and run back this way? Did horses even have a herd-mentality like that?

I try and lunge to grab for something, but I’m too late. The feeling in my gut gets all the more sickening when one horse from the wagon snaps the lead and bolts in a frenzied panic. My mind starts putting puzzle pieces together with horrifying efficiency. Our wagon is at the peak of a downhill slope, and the wagons in front of us are already screeching and cracking as they are slowly pulled by gravity. The wagon barreling toward ours is going far too fast for me to find something to latch on to. The path is surrounded by sharp, mossy rocks that jut out at the sides, and on the left, a steep incline dips down a few feet from the road.

My breath catches when the wagon collides with ours. My fingers brush a handle on the top of the wagon used to open a trapdoor, but I can’t grab it in time. The crash knocks me sideways at an awkward angle, and out of the corner of my eye, I see the hard ground a good five and a half feet below me. I also see the steep slope, and scream a curse as I go down.

The last thing I see is Joker jumping over the tops of the wagons in front of ours, his eyes wide as he reaches out a completely useless hand in desperation as he watches me go down. He calls my name, but I cannot answer.

There is a split second as I’m falling that I realize I’m doing down head-first. Recalling the rock-hard frozen ground, I feel sick. Gods, am I going to die?!

My eyes squeeze shut as the slow-motion state I had entered fades away like a curtain just before a play. I wait for the impact, but all I feel is dizziness. Cracking an eye open, I get the odd sensation of being held by someone. I catch a glimpse of Joker’s shocked, still form as he halts mid-leap, tripping over his own feet as he gapes at me. Or more, whatever is behind me.

The feeling of being held disappears, and my butt hits the ground. “Joker, what—“ I start, but don’t make it any farther.

I ripping stream of pain slams into my brain wave after agonizing wave, making my eyes roll back and my hands shake as I fall backwards to lay on my side. I curl up in a tiny ball of pained screams as that cursed red flashes behind my eyelids, its presence flowing with the pain in unison, leaving me to believe that either the pain is causing the red, or the red is causing the pain.

Joker jumps from the top of a wagon with a crunch, sprinting to me. I feel him scoop me up and heft my dead weight over his shoulder. He runs for the back of the caravan, screaming for everyone else to do the same as the next inevitable crash sends the splinter-covered caterpillar that was our caravan lurches forward. The mess folds over itself again and again as rubble meets gravity and what remains of five wagons mixes into a nasty, unusable cake that settles at the bottom of the slope some seventy yards away.

As I lose consciousness from the sheer agony that ripples down my spine, I hear a high-pitched howl of someone in even worse pain coming from the rubble of the fallen wagons. The female scream is tortured, and sends chills through everyone. Even I shudder through the pain, because I know that voice.

That woman screaming… is Vical.

***

I thrust my hand into the vertical pool before she can find an excuse to not answer. I would kill her myself, if not for the many laws that keep me from doing so. That, and I’m rather fond of the current Death.

I feel her reluctance as she answers, no doubt touching her own hand to her own pool as she contemplates our oncoming conversation. “Death,” I project my voice, and feel her flinch away. As Fate, I can feel the Paths that intertwine with each other; one life to another, and another to a life. All paths are bound, so when one is disrupted… it is similar to a single drop of water falling into a lake. A ripple forms, and a ripple spreads. I feel this ripple now, and I do not like where it comes from in the web of Paths.

“Fate,” she rasps; in my mind, as I focus on her emotion and energy, and can see her face blanch. The apprehension twists her gut horribly, and it pains me. She has done something after all.

“What have you done?” I scream. I don’t mean to raise my voice so loudly that I can feel the echoes as they bounce across the vastness of my palace. I don’t mean for the anger and worry to braid the sheer volume of my words until it is a howling shriek of displeasure. But it happens anyways.

I can feel her—visualize her—as her left eye twitches and she averts her eyes from her vertical pool, though she knows I can barely see her at all, even with my mind. It’s the guilt that makes it so clear to me… that heavy, thick, oozing guilt that seems so foreign when accompanied with Lady Death. “I… don’t know… what you’re—“

I cut her off. “You went into a human realm. No, not just a human realm. That one! Why did it have to be that one?!” A slam my free fist against the golden railing, barely feeling the sting of pain. That sensation of pain is nothing compared to what I will feel if I am forced to delete her from the cycle. “I know Time knows about it, but he hasn’t said anything yet. I’m thankful for that, because now I can honestly feign ignorance. But you repeatedly interfere with souls that don’t need your help. You insist on breaking laws that cannot be broken. You constantly eat at me like a parasite with your actions!”

I feel the tears that well up behind her eyes, but I can’t stop. What is this… emotion? It rages inside of me, but it isn’t all worry, and it isn’t all anger. It’s tainted with something else, and I’m not sure I like it. “Fate—“

“If this continues, how can I pretend not to notice any longer? That girl. She should have died today. She should have fallen, hit her head, and fell to her death over the slope. Do you know where that would have led? It was supposed to bring the end to several souls. Unfortunately…” I sigh, running my stinging hand through my hair. Rubbing my closed eyes, I try not to cry myself. “One of the people who would have passed on as a result incriminates you.”

I feel her eyes widen. The sinking feeling that settles into her gut tells me she was hoping I wouldn’t notice. Is she really that blond? How could I not?

“That man. He would have died of thirst. He would have refused to eat or drink after her death, and he would have died. He isn’t the only one, but I get the feeling he was the only one to you.” I say it too harshly, and I realize what emotion I’m feeling. I’ve felt it once… a faint memory, from before I became Fate. There was someone I cared for… you did something incredibly stupid…

It’s a lover’s worry.

The realization hits me like a strike across the face. No, I can’t feel this. It is against the laws. “What will you do about it?” She asks, forlorn. The sadness that wells up inside of her hurts me more than she knows. Does she trust me so little to think I could do this to her?

“I…” but that’s just it. She should trust me so little as that. I should be punishing her. I need to remove her from the cycle. She’s committed a crime; interfering with a soul’s path is an offense because she is not Fate, and she has no right to. But… it’s a minor offense. And I technically don’t know about her extended stay on the human realm those many years ago, so… “I will do nothing. This time. But next time…” I choke on the words that I know must be said. It nearly breaks me, because this isn’t how our conversations are supposed to go. She’s supposed to joke and quote and create poetry. We’re supposed to counter each other to pass the time. We’re supposed to—no. We aren’t. Conversing with each other for non-business purposes is forbidden as well. If we were caught…

“Next time…” she whispers sadly.

“Next time I must take action. Do not break the laws again.”

“Why do we have these laws? Why torture those who govern the cycles of life and death, fate and time?”

I sigh again. “Because some responsibilities come with too much power to allow for any room to fail.”

I know this is true, and I feel she does as well. As her hand parts from her pool, I am left alone. The sensation of solitude is an awful one, especially after a distasteful round of socialization.

Falling to the floor, I tuck my knees against my chest and wrap my arms around my legs, burying my face into the fabric of my silken robe. I cry, because there is no room for error. There is no room to fail. And yet… I’ve already failed my duty. I’ve already failed the system.

I’ve already failed Lady Death.