Floating Through Darkness
an excerpt

Evening settled upon the dewy grass like a fiery orange blanket as the wind rustled through the leaves of the great old tree, whispering mournful dirges at the onset of dusk, a melancholic choir softly singing the tragic verses passed through the hands of time like the sifting of sand. Nestled comfortably in the great bowel at the foot of the ancient rowan, Callen lifted with shaking hands the leathered tome, browned with age and weathered with time, and perched it unsteadily upon his knees. Sweat beaded on his face like pearls of starry dew as he realized just how severe were the implications of what he had just done; it was all he could do to keep himself from dropping the book and running with all his might back to the village. After all, running away from the village was severe enough; to have an actual book yet worse, but (and worse by far) to be in this place, at the roots of this tree, meant not only certain torture, but certain death.
Thoughts raced through his mind like startled jackrabbits: What if they realize that I’m gone? What if they catch me? I’ve heard all the stories about what they do to traitors...I don’t want to die Is it too late to go back? But that would have been of no use anyway. Either they knew where he was now, or they wouldn’t know at all; it was merely up to Fate to decide his lot. Besides, there was something about the book that surpassed all human reason and understanding, something about it that made time seem to stop and the imagination run, something about it that seemed to call out to him across the spans of time and space like an echo of things that were and are and are to be that made him push away all reasonable arguments, worry, constrictions and just sit there and be. It had been so long since he had held a book in his hands like this, so long since he had actually seen a book. The sensation was quite remarkable; with the feeling that accompanied the oddly familiar deadweight came a rush of sensations that flooded his senses like a luscious banquet to a gourmet: the scent of jasmine laced in hair as inky black as night; the tactile sense of warm arms wrapped around him tightly as his small body writhed in fear of his nightmarish dreams, carrying him away to some far-off dreamland as the night unfolded and the storm wept on; that odd gemutlich feeling, unable to be described in the context of any human sense, that had long since left his heart, had died in the ground with those black ashes, but whose remnants lived on in the recesses of his memory.
And a book like this...never before had he seen a more beautiful, a more foreign, a more strange and ominous book. The very binding bespoke of mystery and powers far beyond the realms of his grasp. From the golden lettering of the serpentine script that glittered in the dull light a brassy orange to the yellowed pages and pockmarked leather jacket, a veteran, it seemed, of many a battle, Callen could sense a deep rushing undertone, like the very voice of the universe, that ran as the blood in his veins, pulsating and quivering in the heart of his being. It was this undertone, he knew, that had led him to this forbidden spot whose presence he had neither bathed in nor cared to bathe in ever before, this undertone that had brought him to the foot of the ancient rowan and sat him down, this undertone that put the book in his lap and his finger curled around the cover, this invisible undertone that had led him to do the inconceivable, take a deep breath and a leap of faith into the great abyss of nothingness.
Closing his eyes, Callen pictured the old woman as she had appeared the last he saw her, the last, he knew, that he would ever see her. She had laid there upon the pallet, in one of the innumerable dank sties that were considered “home” for the good majority of the people of Nehalt whom the Government considered too worthless to care about. Callen knew his way around the area well, for the old woman was someone very close to his heart: she had cared for him and loved him when there was nobody left in the world to care and love him, and he loved her as a child loved his mother, unconditionally and wholeheartedly. Now it was her time of need, and, eager to reciprocate the favor that she had bestowed upon him for as long as he could remember, he frequented her home often, caring for her every need, especially in these last days when death was upon her and the end was near at hand - for she was unutterably lonely, and no one had ever or would ever care for her or would carry on her memory as he did. They were, he knew, the only people who knew and cared that each other existed, the only people who would care when the other died.
And so it was the Callen came upon her home that one fateful and blessed night to perform the duties that he felt were compelled by the power of love for him to do. The moment that he arrived, however, Callen knew that this was to be her final resting place, the pallet her unholy deathbed. Her stark white face was gaunt in the quavering light of the single candle that lit her anorexic frame, which wracked in spastic coughs that left on her sackcloth clothing spatters of blood globules like a panoply of raindrops on a glass window.
He had come through the doorframe and into her home, being cautious to step over the mass of ordure that littered the floor, wrinkling his nose at the stench of rotted food and death that flooded his nose like a tsunami genuflecting at the foot of a beach.
”Natu,” he whispered, as though afraid that his voice would be a deathblow to her if he raised it too loud. “Natu, I’m here. And look,” he added, lifting up the bag he was carrying. “I’ve brought you food ” Creeping forward, Callen laid the sack gently at the edge of the pallet.
The old woman had lifted her head from her bed, her pale, watery grey eyes, sunken in the hollows of her face, straining to focus on his own. It was a few moments before she replied, and when she did, it was in that horribly soft and scratchy voice, like the rattling of the air rushing in her feeble lungs, that Callen so despised, a sound quite new to the once vivacious woman, a sound he could not connect to the person she once was.
“Callen,” she hissed, the semblance of her former lucidity returning to her voice as her eyes lit like dimming stars, “I am glad to see you. I am not long for this world, but I believe that the gods have bestowed upon me life enough to last to see you. Fortune works in mysterious ways.” A clawlike hand scrabbled behind her back for a moment before it resurfaced, bearing the very same tome that Callen now held on his lap. “Here. Take this. It was meant for you.” She stabbed the book through the air like an epee. Tentatively, Callen eyed her, unsure of how to react to this rather unexpected offering. Was this merely one of the old woman’s vivid hallucinations, or did concrete truth hide behind her vague rambling?
As if to answer his thoughts, the old woman stabbed the book towards him once more, a swift and violent motion that belied her current position. “Here ” she screeched, in an inhuman voice not quite unlike that of a macaw. “Take it Or would you rather I lob it at your head?” Eyes widening at the memory of both the truth of her word and the strength in her arms, Callen instantly reached out and pried the book from her unusually strong clasp. For a long moment, he merely stared from the old woman to the book and back again, unsure of how best to confront this relatively new mad temperament. In the end, he decided to humor her.
“What is this about, Natu? What kind of a book is this?” he asked slowly, unsure of what kind of reaction his words would elicit.
“What kind of a book ” the old woman piped, her eyes nearly bulging from her sockets in response. “What kind of a book? Ah, what an age we live in that the greatest tales of our history have evaporated from this earth as though they had never existed My dear, this book is your past, is your present, is your future. This book, Callen, was written for you.”
Callen’s jaw dropped, though in his present state, he was unaware of it. “Natu...Natu, are you sure? This book seems very...old. It had to have been written a long time ago, long before I was even born.” He coughed brusquely, his throat suddenly quite dry.
The old woman’s eyes, now lucid in the breaching dusk, bored into his own in a rather unsettling manner that made him blink and turn his own eyes to the ground.. “It is a very old book, my dear. It’s more, much more, than a book, though - it is a prophecy. And that prophecy pertains to you.”
Time seemed to stop in that instant, as Callen’s eyes widened and fell upon the tome quivering like a leaf in his right hand. A prophecy...about me? Of course it couldn’t be true...she was losing it, what was he so worried about? Did he honestly expect to take her seriously when she was so near her own death, when she was so detached from the linear construct of reality? But still...there was something about it, something about the hardness of her voice and the steely lucidity in her eyes that made him doubt himself for even a nanosecond, something about it that bridged the gap between faith and knowledge and allowed him to, in that one moment in time, believe.
The old woman, noticing the weakness in his facade in that single instant, pounced upon his fallability like a hungry cat on a poor, vulnerable mouse. “Take it, Callen,” she told him, the edges of her voice sharper than a rapier as she stared at him with her off-putting, unblinking eyes. “Take it, and with it, you will know what to do.”
And so he had taken it, whether more out of pity for the old woman whom he had loved or out of honest and unjustified belief in that which was so ludicrous, he could never be quite certain. But no matter how vehement he may have been later in his argument that he believed nothing that the old woman had told him, it could not be denied that something had driven him here to the ancient rowan, something beyond the range of his human capacity that had compelled him to believe even the tiniest fraction somewhere in his doubt-riddled mind. Whether he desired to read it simply out of curiosity or out of the hope, somehow, that all this could possibly be proven true, he did not know, but as he sat there under the ancient rowan, staring up into the boughs at the luminous red berries shimmering like dying stars, he couldn’t help but desire that this all be real, that this be something concrete to hold on to, to keep him tethered in the world he had once so desired to leave.
Well, there’s no point waiting anymore. I’ve already gotten myself in this far. With a deep, shuddering breath, Callen carefully overturned the front cover of the book. He was staring at a creamy yellow page, whose ink was surprising luminous despite the outward appearance of the rest of the book. It was not unlike a fairy tale book, if Callen had ever seen a fairy tale book before, with its carefully scripted golden letters and fantastic depictions of the story all down the margins of the book, covering every available inch of space that wasn’t already taken by letters. The beauty of the book was astonishing; Callen could not help but take one more minute, enraptured by the strangely compelling quality that the page possessed, to stare in exaltation and awe before he blinked away the tears from his eyes, took one more deep breath, and began to read.