Verse 9:

Heavenly In Bloom

“When we got out, Warren was almost thrown out of the orphanage. Sister Elaine was furious that he had strayed off the path of God. He was immediately forbidden from leaving his room except to eat and bathe. I can still remember visiting with my mom and being unable to see him, I could only look up at his room from the outside.

His blinds were always closed…”

The darkness was pulled apart like curtains, draping the world. A full moon hung in the sky, shining down on the tar-paved street and a young Ajax, groceries in hand.  He kept his head down, avoiding glances in either direction, and every step followed the last in what was almost a run.

“Not even two weeks later; I can still see it vividly.”

Like a switch, he ground to a halt. At the urge of his survival instincts, he cast his eyes upward. A flapping sound over his head, the flutter of clothes in the wind. Unbraced panic slammed his heart. A bird? A bat? In a second, he’d tracked the sound to the gas street lamp a few feet from him; sitting atop the caged flame was him, Warren Roseraid.

Dressed in a flowing gray coat, stitched with patterns of golden roses and thorns, he was perched like he was weightless, without any effort to balance himself despite being nearly ten feet off the ground on a small, uneven post.

He wouldn’t look at Ajax head-on, rather from a side profile, a hand covering his right eye.

“W-Warren!” Ajax yelped, excitement leaping from his throat.

Warren replied only with a foreign, discomforting look, as if he had noticed a dog at the side of the road.

“I can remember how his face– how his eyes– made me feel. It stood out because they seemed completely different at first. It was only after I studied him for a second that I realized that wasn’t the case; it was just that everything else– his whole energy– had finally caught up to what was in his eyes.

“Warren always had this certain confidence, but then… it was like someone from another world was talking to me…”

Warren parted his lips:

“Ajax, my friend, I’m here tonight because I still believe in you.”

Ajax nearly dropped his bag. “What? What are you talking about? Warren, are you alright?”

With inhuman stillness, Warren proclaimed, “Sister isn’t running a home for people like me. I’m tired of sitting still and waiting for something to happen, that’s all they do there. I’ve thought a lot about it, and it makes me sick.”

His voice was like satin in the night air.

“I’ve only just realized how confined I’ve been,” He continued, casting his other arm outward, motioning to the expansive city.

“How did you get out?” Ajax pressed, taking an incremental step forward.

Warren took a long, slow blink. “You recall the passage in the Holy texts, the one where three of the Saviour’s seven Princes were imprisoned for preaching his word?”

Ajax “I- I think…?”

“When they were imprisoned, the Saviour’s God reached down from Heaven and granted them magnificent powers, which they used to escape their captors and strike down their persecutors. Those three Princes became the fathers of the great nations of the Antiquated Continent.” Warren’s voice gradually rose in excitement as he spoke.

“Wha-?” Ajax was grasping at straws. “Okay?”

“When I was alone, deep in the darkness of my prison,” Warren began, his teeth gritting in anticipation before relaxing. “I was visited by God, just like the three Princes.”

A pregnant pause followed before he elaborated.

“I was gifted with a miraculous new strength, Ajax.” Warren blinked at him with one eye, and Ajax found his breath short, the air now filled with an oppressive pressure. “It will take me to Hell and back.”

Ajax’s gaze darted from building to building; a tight knot formed in his stomach, like something terrible was about to happen. Again, Warren spoke. 

“I’m going to do something you’d think is drastic.”

“…What?” the word crept out of Ajax’s mouth, mostly breath supported by what little force he could muster. “What are you going to do… Warren?”

“Everything will be reborn after the fire; I will start it.”

Warren launched the next words from his lips with a bone-chilling glee, tempered to hide his true excitement.

“I’ll burn down the orphanage.”

Ajax’s heart was on a hairpin trigger. “No!” he cried. He was breathing in shudders, and the thin handles of the grocery bag strained against his palms, constricting and cutting off blood flow until his hands were numb.

“The way to Hell is the Way Forward.” 

The knot in his stomach twisted and contorted. Ajax wanted to vomit; cold sweat trickled down his back and his numb palms. His mind struggled and strained to believe that what was happening was real, and the panic-switch at the back of his brain was close to flipping, to say that none of this was happening, and any moment he would wake up and this would all be some troubling nightmare. He wanted this to be a nightmare, Oh God, please let this be a nightmare.

“There is one other alternative,” Warren continued. “So I need to ask you one more time.”

Ajax knew what the question was before he even said it.

“Will you come with me where I’m going?”

Ajax swallowed, and his saliva rolled down his throat like a rock. “What does that mean?” His voice wasn’t shaky, it was nothing but sincere.

“It means,” Warren began. “That you will have a chance at saving the world with me; we can kill all the rotten things, we’ll make it meaningless, we’ll go down the path of no return.” His voice grew in fervor, he was barely able to stop himself from speeding up to the point of fumbling his words, the excitement of his vision. “Can’t you see it?”

The air trembled, and Ajax said nothing but trembled with it. And Warren began again:

“I won’t burn you to the ground, but I’ll show you how to be born like I was, you’ll see the same things I can! Please…” there was an urgent desire in his voice. “My friend, Ajax… come with me!”

Ajax’s hand clenched tightly around the bag, and he steadied himself. “Are you going to do bad things?”

Warren stopped short.

“What?” For the first time, he couldn’t understand his friend. It was such a silly, childlike question that he dropped his guard.

“You know what I mean,” Ajax hammered. “You know-” his voice cracked and broke, so he swallowed and he forced it back together again into a forceful rasp. “You know that that’s wrong… That’s evil!”

“This was the first I think I’d ever been angry with him. He was always just… right, if you know what I mean. But this… I knew this couldn’t happen. It’s just…”

Warren’s face melted from confusion to scowl.

“Then the World will leave you behind. And I’ll leave you behind; I’ll burn it down, and it’ll go back to the Earth… Just like the Saviour.”

As he spoke, he tipped his chin up to gaze into the night air, as if addressing the sky. The ideas were the same as a moment ago, but now they were stained with an ugliness, an anger that struck a deep chord of dread inside Gallow. 

“My first thought was ‘this is not the Warren I know,’ but I soon realized that this was the Warren Roseraid who had existed all along, he just hadn’t come into full bloom.”

Deep in Warren’s old mind, the unrealized mind, he felt an intoxicating sadness.

“I knew what my decision would mean.”

“Goodbye, Ajax Clarke, I hope we can meet again in Heaven, or something like it. But in the time between now and then… I’m becoming a [SALAMANDER].”

With that, an intense force filled the air, like a bomb had gone off where he was perched, yet no sound resonated off of the metal wires of nearby fences, or hanging chimes on neighbors’ porches.

“Somehow, it felt like the world had changed for a moment, like something powerful had happened. I still don’t know what that was, but when I looked up at where he was on top of the lamp, there was nothing. He had vanished like a phantom. The only thing left in the air were…”

Several crimson rose petals floated down from the sky. Ajax caught one in his hand and studied it. Above him, clouds rolled over the moon.

—

Gallow faced the Spirit. The sky was devoured by darkness, blacking out the stars and closing in on the moon until it was a bright, yellow hole punched into space. Shadows seeped from the hole in long streaks, then in an overflowing torrent. It flooded the Earth and blanketed the landscape until the entire memory was slathered in a thick, heavy tar of despair.

Gallow could not even look at her.

“That night, the orphanage burned down. Thirty people died in the fire, most of their bodies weren’t recovered. I ran there as soon as I was able to move my feet. When I arrived, Warren was gone, the fire was in full rage. A witness saw me at the scene. I fell to the ground and said, ‘This is my fault, this is because of me.’”

Gallow’s voice was hollow. If he did not smother his emotions down, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to breathe, the water would fill his lungs again.

“My statement was given to the police and I was tried for third degree murder of everyone in the building. I didn’t even try to fight it.” With a deadened chuckle, he added, “My mom did…”

“She didn’t have anything to go on for my defense, we weren’t rich enough to afford a lawyer. There was a single gas lamp in the whole orphanage which, ironically, was found intact in the rubble.

“I was convicted for that charge. The laws in Pettma for criminal minors are pretty strict.”

He paused.

“They wanted to hang me. The last defense my mom had was a recent law put out by some progressives. The Redemption Act allowed able-bodied minors to serve in the military as public service for a crime under a certain threshold. I just barely made the cut… 

“It was pitiful… She fought so hard to save my life, she spent weeks pouring through every law book she could find. All that work because she loved me, and I would just as easily have let it happen. I can’t even fight to save my own life.

“Pitiful.”

A long time passed between them. Gallow stewed in his sorrow, but water did not fill his lungs, perhaps living at the bottom of the ocean was punishment enough. To the outside world, it was certain that very little time had passed, but within the abyss of the Spirit World it could feel like days, months, even a lifetime. Gallow couldn’t quantify how long it took him to recover, he felt no mounting thirst or hunger.

At some point, he fell over.

Some time later, he was sitting on the ground, knees drawn halfway up. His face was cupped in his hands. With withered pace, he lowered his hands and raised his head to gaze at her. Any tears had dried, his hair was messy and fell over his eyes.

“Hey.”

She blinked and looked down at him.

“Whenever I felt like this, I got really angry. I think I was frustrated and sorry, so I got this attitude about things. I didn’t know what I’d do if I got someone hurt again, it scared me so much. All I did was run from it, I couldn’t own up to anything; I was just a shell, I couldn’t do anything. When that guy was gonna burn the town down, I saw the orphanage burning down again, and it was because he was looking for me. It was because of me again. I just lost it, I killed him, I was so angry. Now, I’m wondering if I can understand where Warren was coming from. Maybe we’re on different sides of the line, but the anger was the same.”

His skin was pale, and shone so brightly in the void.

“But it brought me here, didn’t it?” He held up his sigil. “This guided me here, you guided me here, didn’t you?”

Nothing in reply. Without even looking at her, he knew the answer.

“I don’t want to be in the past forever.”

He finally turned himself around to look at her, and gave the look of strength that’s only possible after tears are shed.

“I think I’m all out of tears to cry.”

—

When he had gotten to his feet, the Spirit put a hand to his shoulder.

“This isn’t the end of your journey in here-”

“Really?”

She paused, astounded. The way he’d said it, like a child asking their parent when they can leave, was so different from the shambles he’d been in just a second earlier.

“The rest of your journey in here,” she continued, collecting herself. “Will occur out there. In the World of the Living. You’ve awakened a gift here that will aid you amongst the living. The mechanism of this power is not unique amongst the inhabitants of the world, in your language it would be called a Vocation.”

Gallow examined the Sigil blazed into the back of his hand, his eye instinctively drawn to it.

“The man you fought before also possessed such an ability. This is my gift to you: when you use this power, you will be able to control your spirit body independently of your physical one, you can touch the souls of other living beings just as you would their flesh and bone. This is not the most destructive Vocation there is, but it is the one that has been decided for you.”

Gallow cast his gaze up at her. “Decided?”

The Spirit pondered her words. “There are things far greater than I in this place, it’s only a small pocket of the infinite expanse of the ethereal plane. If there is such a thing as Fate, then I couldn’t tell you.”

A big, silly grin spread across Gallow’s face. “For someone with all the answers, you sure don’t know a lot, huh?”

She replied with a gentle smile; his snarky attitude was charming, knowing him better.

Gallow clicked his tongue and raised his head. “Well, I should be going now, there’s some visitors in the guest room.

With that, he pushed off the ground, now light as air. Suddenly, he was propelled upwards by an incredible force. The feeling was exhilarating, the Vocation glowed on his hand, no longer a tingling sensation, it felt like a rush of energy was flowing out from his body. Streams of water jetted past him; he approached the light at the surface of the water.

This feeling…

Closer…

This power…

Closer… 

This Vocation… its name…

His nose was an inch from the surface.

What was its name?

—

At the bank of the water, Gideon and his guide stood pensively. They had waited for three whole minutes and still saw no sign of Gallow’s reappearance.

“Do you think he-?” she asked, her words jittering with anxiety.

“I mean…” Gideon tilted his head, as if it would give him a new perspective.

The guide drew her attention to Gideon. “You know him, don’t you? What’s your problem with him? Who is he?”

For a single, split second, the surface tension of the water strained, and before either of them could even see it coming, Gallow’s body broke through. His clothes were soaked, his hair matted down to his face, he grabbed violently at solid ground at the shore, flailing his limbs through the Spring. In less than ten seconds, he had forced himself onto dry land.

Without prompt, and as if he was answering her question himself, he planted his knee in the mud and shot a wild glance at the two of them, declaring with a prominent, self-assured voice:

“The [NAVIGATOR]!”