BEYOND THE BEYOND
Brett P. S.
Copyright © 2014 Brett P. S.
All rights reserved.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I: LONESOME TRAVELER
II: ABSOLVING FEAR
III: EMPTY HORIZON
IV: GREAT ANCESTORS
V: IT ONLY GOES
I: Lonesome Traveler
Solar winds howled across the desert sands and they carried with them small bursts of force that rocked Howitz's body as he paced onward with tattered garments. Kilometers away from the boon, he stopped for a moment to turn around to see what remained of a forest on the horizon. It was cold. He could feel his pulse waning. The sages in the village warned him of the beyond, but it was a necessary thing. Yes, it certainly was.
Howitz took one more step, and then another, until his body could resist the pressure from the solar winds. The beyond was unfathomably vast and massively empty, but his own eyes were able to spot a small discrepancy in the distance. It was small ... too insignificant to know for sure. A pillar of some sort? Howitz believed it had grown since the last time he examined it ... and he’d little else to go on.
“Show me the way, Grandfather,” he muttered to himself. “Do not let this be in vain.”
Howitz braved the winds for more footsteps than he could count. His legs ached with a burning fire that almost made him wince in pain with each swing. His body flopped back and forth, and his neck felt the waves and ripples until it was ready to burst.
He stopped for a moment and checked his pulse. Strange, it was just a bit weaker than the last time. The pattern began to show itself. For whatever reason, the longer he spent in the beyond, away from the boon ... he was going to ...
“I must not think of it,” he told himself. “This is for ...”
His sentence began well enough with vigor, but the words struggled to pass his lips near the end. It was all he could do to stand ... but soon, even that was too much. His legs were too heavy. His insides were too weak. Howitz dropped to the ground. His face smacked into the sand and rocks, and his eyes looked onward to the horizon. There it was. Just a little farther. Just a little ... just a ...
His thoughts paused, interrupted by a swelling blackness that took him over. His eyes slowly sealed shut, and the sounds that entered through his ears became muffled by some mechanism he didn’t quite fully understand, but he did know what was happening. It happened to those in ages past who lost the light of the boon. It was happening to his own people now ... back in their beds, suffering slow deaths of illness and madness. Each was different, but fatality was the ultimate end. This couldn’t be it. No, it couldn’t end like this!
“Gra ... Grandfather ... please ...”
An awful silence permeated his perception until he could hardly even hear the solar winds ... but then ... footsteps? He heard footsteps! But whose? Howitz listened to the muffled tracks stop nearby. He forced his eyes open to see robes and a pair of sandals just a few meters away. Impossible. Nobody could live out here. No, it was the madness overtaking him.
II: Absolving Fear
Howitz’s body lay still across the desert sand. His heartbeat slowed with each passing second as he contemplated his failure. The obelisk seemed so far away. How had grandfather done so? How wide was the gulf between their wills?
“Foolish child,” Howitz heard a familiar voice say to him.
His senses perked up to listen. It was his grandfather, the man in robes and sandals. At least, he assumed it was the case. His head could barely tilt, so he couldn’t see a face, not that his poor vision could make one out.
“I ... I’m weak, Grandfather,” he said. “Please ... help me.”
His words preceded a deafening silence as the figure stood by and said nothing. Time was irrelevant, but he felt several gusts of wind before the man spoke.
“Their lights will go out soon,” his grandfather said. “Your light will as well.”
His body stopped aching. A warm rush of vibration circled through his limbs and eventually to his chest. It was a pleasant feeling, but it came with the unpleasant realization of what was actually happening. He couldn’t feel his arms ... or his legs any more. He couldn’t move them at all, no matter how much he forced the notion.
“I’m going to tell you a secret, child,” the figure said. “The journey to the obelisk only goes in one direction. You were a fool to think otherwise.”
One direction? He should have known what he meant. He could feel it on the tip of his tongue, nearly ready to settle in his own mind, but his faculties were failing him. Howitz thought for a long while, long after his eyes shut tight and he could hear absolutely nothing except grandfather’s voice ringing through the darkest corners of his mind. One direction. One direction. Only goes in one direction.
“I KNOW!” he screamed. “Grandfather!”
He glanced around, but all he had to comfort him was desert. Nothing. No man. Just sand. Howitz checked his pulse. It was back to normal ... for the moment. Hastily, he picked up his staff and dusted himself off. The winds were howling with a fervor he definitely hadn’t noticed before. Something = changed in the climate, and it wasn’t boding well.
The obelisk ... there was no returning from it.
III: Empty Horizon
What were once gentle solar winds had become a storm of echoing blasts that carried sand in heaps. Piles and waves pelted Howitz’s robes and face. He tried to cover it up, but his efforts were in futility. Pellets got soaked into his eyes, mouth and every other nook his hood couldn’t completely shield. It was annoying at first, but irritation quickly turned into madness.
There was considerably less sand where he stood now, however. It was something he noticed while glancing down, which he’d been doing for some time. Small patches = eroded to reveal a porous rock of a dark gray. It was definitely unlike the sands of the beyond or the soils that covered the grounds of his village. If the sands of the beyond marked a barren wasteland, then this was something more.
A shaking of chills ran up Howitz’s neck as the thought perked up in his mind. What if there was something past the beyond? What if this was something his grandfather had seen? It must have been, if the old man did reach the obelisk.
The storm was starting to die down. He wiped his eyes over with a tattered and sand-caked sleeve, which didn’t do much good. It took a while, but after his eyes were free of fragments, he shot a stare straight ahead to make sure he was moving in the right direction. The obelisk was much larger now than before. He could make out the shape but not the color. It appeared still small, but he was making progress. That was good, at least.
Howitz checked his pulse. Still very good, considering he couldn’t see the forest any more. Somewhere back there, there was a tiny village settled nicely in the middle of a small woodland. It was the world to him, and a part of his own heart ached because of what he knew.
“I’m never coming back,” he said to himself.
It was an affirmation because until he saw nothing but empty sands behind him, it was never fully clear. Nothing existed for him now. No past. No future. All Howitz had left was to reach the obelisk and fulfill the duty destined for his lineage. Light the Obelisk, return the boon’s light and cast off the curtain of shadow.
“Yes, not much longer now.”
IV: Great Ancestors
Howitz walked parallel to a heavy shelf that housed a good number of scrolls dating back nearly one hundred thousand suns. His eyes noticed the markings of letters and numbers that denoted both the date and the alphabetical order of the pieces of information. It wasn’t here; not the one he wanted anyway. Maybe the next shelf?
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“Can I help you with something, Howitz?” a familiar voice said to him.
An older man walked toward him from around one of the shelves. He didn’t notice before, but it made sense that the librarian would be around. His name was Yekel, a historian of sorts, and the man kept a decent watch of goings about.
“Sorry, Yekel,” Howitz explained. “I was looking for a piece on the benefactors.”
“Oh, you’re pretty close then,” he replied. “Try the next shelf over. Third from the bottom.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Just one shelf? Even a dozen scrolls would hardly suffice as ample material. Howitz bit his lip in frustration as he shuffled over to see what was waiting for him.
“Mind if I ask what you’re looking for?” Yekel said.
“Oh, just curious about a few things.”
“Like what?”
The old man definitely seemed interested ... a bit too much.
“I remembered that I never read up on them. I want to know what life was like before the boon.”
“Ah, then you won’t find much, lad.”
“Really now?”
“Afraid so,” Yekel told him, carrying a grimace. “Still, you’re welcome to the scrolls.”
Howitz saw that there were exactly three scrolls covering the old era, so he snatched them up and offered up the tags attached to their backs. One good look and Yekel seemed to have gotten them memorized. The historian started heading off, but