Hangman Chapter 10

Chapter 10-

“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 for meals and bathing. 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…”

Once more, the darkness peeled back to reveal a paved street; high above them the moon shone down on a young Gallow, walking down the street side, a bag of groceries in his hand. His head was down and his pace was brisk, obviously nervous about being out so late at night, though he was evidently in a residential area.

The ethereal observers watched the reenactment of the memory play, the street moved beneath their feet to follow the pitter-patter of Gallow’s steps.

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

At once, his steps ground to a halt. He looked up, his survival instincts taking hold of his actions before he could even process that something was happening. A flapping sound, recognizable as the flutter of clothes in the wind, wooshed above him. A dreadful panic filled his heart, the pang of unbraced fear. His eyes snapped to the direction of the sound, above a gas street lamp which lay a few feet in front of him. Atop the caged flame sat Warren Roseraid, dressed in a flowing gray coat stitched with patterns of golden roses and thorns. The way he sat was unnatural, seemingly without need to balance himself despite being several feet off the ground on a small, uneven perch; as if he was being supported by some other force in the air. He did not face Gallow directly, rather he was turned to his profile, and looking at him side-on, one hand covering his right eye.

“W-Warren!” Gallow yelped, overjoyed to see his best friend once again, momentarily forgetting the circumstances of their meeting.

“What are you doing here- what is this?”

Warren’s eyes cast on him a renewed emotion, foreign and not readily understandable.

“I can remember how his face- how his eyes- looked at me; I took note of them because at first they seemed completely different. It was only after I studied him for a second that I realized that wasn’t the case, it was just that his whole form- his whole energy- had finally caught up to what was in his eyes.

“Warren always spoke with a certain confidence, but right here and now, 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.”

“W-what do you mean? What’s going on?” Gallow begged for answers.

“It’s become clear to me that that Sister and her home for rejections is only here to hold me back from my goal.”

His voice rang through like satin in the night air.

“I have never been more imprisoned than I am now. It may only seem like a few weeks to you, but you’re afforded the blessing of this fresh air.” He cast out his other arm to motion to the expansive city.

“So how did you get out?” Gallow questioned.

Warren paused before continuing.

“Do you recall the passage in the Holy texts, the one where three of the Saviour’s seven Princes were imprisoned for preaching his word?”

“I- I think…?” Gallow was lost in his reference.

“It was written that in their imprisonment, 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.

“Where are you going with this?” Gallow asked. “Please, just explain what’s happening to me, you’re my friend!” Desperation gripped his words.

“When I was alone, deep in the darkness of my prison,” Warren started, his excitement subsiding into calmness yet again. “I was visited by God, just like the three Princes.”

Gallow gaped at him, confused. Time seemed to stop around them as the blond boy looked up at the stars.

“I was gifted with a miraculous new strength, one which will take me to Hell and back.” He stopped and looked back directly at Gallow.

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

“What?” Gallow asked cautiously, his voice betrayed the inner anxiety roused by Warren’s statement.

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

He stopped for a moment before continuing.

“I’ll burn down the orphanage.”

“No!” Gallow howled.

“Something needs to be cleansed from this world before I can begin my journey, this is the clearest way forward.”

Knotted fear and anguish filled Gallow’s stomach. This was impossible, how could this happen to his friend? What had Warren seen all alone?

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

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

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

“…”

“What does that mean?”

“It means,” Warren began. “That you will have a chance at saving the world with me; all of these backwards old ways of thinking, we’ll prove them wrong, we’ll go down the path of no return. Can’t you see it??” His voice once more grew in intensity and fervor, his heart shone through his words; this was his vision.

“I won’t burn you to the ground, but I will rebirth you as I am, you’ll see the same things I can! Please, my closest friend, Ajax, come with me!”

“Are you going to do bad things?”

Warren’s zeal stopped short.

“What?” For the first time in perhaps their whole relationship, he was lost in the wake of Gallow’s reason.

“You heard me, like when you tried to buy drugs. I mean, that’s how we got into this mess in the first place! My mom won’t give me my allowance for a whole six months, there’s no way I’ll help you do something like that again! Were you gonna do worse? The world isn’t gonna tolerate that!” An anger grew in Gallow’s tone.

“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 was flabbergasted at his best friend speaking to him like this. His face slowly turned from one of bewilderment to a scowl.

“Foolish, the World will leave you behind, and I will leave the past behind me. I’ll burn it to the ground, it’ll all go into the Earth, like the Saviour, we’ll all be saved by the flames.”

His monologue was reminiscent of his earlier words, but now they were marked by a notable 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. I see the last words he spoke to me.”

Warren’s left fist clenched; somewhere deep inside of this new mind, or perhaps his realized mind, was an intoxicating sadness. Gallow, unknowingly, clenched his own fist.

“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 will become like 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 as if 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. Gallow caught one in his hand and looked down at it, studying it intently. With pain, sorrow, and dread in his heart, he looked up from the petal to watch clouds roll over the moon.

---

Gallow turned to the Spirit as the sky was devoured by darkness. The moon was no longer a hanging stone in the sky, it seemed to fold into the background until it looked like a bright yellow hole punched into the air. Blackness dripped down from the hole, at first like small shadowy tears, then in long streaks and much faster. The darkness consumed the landscape, obscuring everything, covering the memory in a thick, heavy despair like tar.

Gallow could not even look at the Spirit.

“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 just 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, devoid of feeling. 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 just as when he’d felt the torrent of primal fear.

“My statement was given to the police and I was tried for second degree murder of everyone in the building. I didn’t even try to fight it. My mom did…” He laughed a bit at the last part.

“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, some cultural thing about ‘knowing better’ or something like that. They wanted to hang me as some final punishment, a recompense for the innocent lives I took. 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 sentences of second degree or lower crimes.

“How pitiful, she fought so hard to save my life, she spent weeks pouring through every law pertaining to the justice system. 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. Water did not fill his lungs to drown him, 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 had no thirst or hunger to go by.

Sitting on the ground, knees drawn halfway up, he held his face in his hands. Slowly, he lowered his hands and steadily raised his head to look upwards. Any tears had dried, his hair was messy and fell over his eyes.

“Spirit.”

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 just wanted to destroy everything in my path. 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 with no strength. 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 slaughtered him. Now, I can’t help but wonder if I wasn’t just like Warren. Maybe we’re on different sides of the line, but the anger behind us was the same.”

In reply, the Spirit said nothing but returned her warm, motherly expression. She knew that he was arriving to a conclusion.

“But it brought me here, didn’t it?” He held up his sigil. “This guided me here, was it you that pulled me to the Garden?”

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

“I don’t think just dredging up the past will help anyone, but I also think that, somehow, this made me feel a little better.”

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-”

“Damn right.”

She stopped for a moment, a little surprised by his gusto after the experience, but ultimately recognized that there was a slight difference in his eyes.

“The rest of your journey in here,” she continued, “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. It calls its user to fulfill a role in the form of an incredible ability.”

Gallow looked down at his Sigil, ‘or,’ he thought, ‘my Vocation.’

“The man you fought before had a kind of twisted Vocation not derived naturally. Despite its power, it could have never been able to grow with his heart. Yours is not the same. 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 turned his attention from the Vocation on his hand to the Spirit.

“Do you mean that… this power was chosen by fate?”

The Spirit pondered for a moment to form 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.”

Gallow laughed and retorted, “For someone with all the answers, you sure don’t know a lot, huh?”

She smiled in reply, his snarky attitude was charming, once she knew him a little closer.

“Well, it’s time for me to get back up there,” he said. “I think there’s some visitors in the waiting 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 the name of his calling?

---

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, fearfully.

“I mean-” Gideon replied, similarly.

Suddenly, Gallow’s body burst up from the Spring, his clothes soaked, violently grabbing at solid ground, forcing himself up and onto dry land in under ten seconds.

“Who is this guy?” the guide asked, hoping to get some information out of Gideon’s prior relationship with him.

While the question was intended for the Captain, Gallow took the charge of answering it.

“The [NAVIGATOR]!!”