Chapter 32-
Gallow followed Warren through the sparsely populated streets downtown. The sky was a warm beige color; sunlight broke through the patchwork clouds.
“Which store are we going to?” he asked his friend. Warren didn’t look back at him, but gave a short reply.
“The one on second.”
“Shouldn’t we be going that way, then?” Gallow asked, pointing to a direction that had not existed before.
Without acknowledging that he was right, Warren abruptly changed course, walking briskly to where Gallow had directed.
It was beneath a tall, overbearing row of buildings that bent and curved in a way he couldn’t understand. The street quickly became narrow, sloping inward at a sharp incline; small trees lined the sidewalk. A large concrete wall blocked the whole street off at a point; many barred windows were built into it, but if Gallow had wanted to look through them he would have seen that there was nothing beyond them but the beige sky.
“We can go around,” Warren explained to him.
Gallow spotted the left end of the wall, which extended further than the rest, like a hallway that gradually shrank in size.
“No!” he protested. “We can go through there!”
“No,” Warren could only say. “We’ll go around.”
“I’m going that way!” Gallow spun around 360 degrees, returning to himself and to the direction of the left end. They split up, and he proceeded down the hallway, tightening his body up as the walls grew closer.
Eventually, he came to a grate, which he removed and peered into. It was a small, dark tunnel with a bright light at the end. That was where he needed to get to.
Gallow got to his knees and pushed himself into the tunnel, plunging himself into a warm, wet black. The tunnel was tight, he had barely enough room to fit through. He kept his arms tucked beneath his chest, he couldn’t even raise his head off the ground. The only way to move forward was by wiggling his body and pushing off with his shoes. The energy required to progress put a great strain on his muscles, and he found himself heaving with exhaustion. Still, he couldn’t stop to catch his breath, if he paused for even a moment, he would lose sight of the end of the tunnel, and claustrophobia would seize him, debilitate him.
Gallow struggled on and on, until finally, the light of his destination grew into the exit. Finally, finally he was almost through this tunnel. The daylight streamed through, breaking the darkness and hurting his eyes, but he inched ever so close to it.
Victoriously, he reached the end, the open hole at the other side.
It was too small.
The tunnel was smaller at the end than it was at the beginning.
His head poked out, but his shoulders couldn’t squeeze through.
Fear gripped him, piercing every inch of his body like an iron maiden. He saw Warren walk past him, down the street and away from him.
“Warren!” he shouted, but it was quiet. Even though every fiber of his being was devoted to yelling out, the noise was muffled, like he was screaming into an insulated box. He knew that if Warren came and just pulled on him, he could get out, but his friend wouldn’t turn around, he wouldn’t show his face.
In just a few moments, Gallow was crushed by the heat of fear.
His eyes slowly opened.
The room in the cabin was dark, but it was a friendlier darkness than the one he was just in. Gallow turned over and laid on his back, his heart was racing and an awful tightness was in his shoulders. He took some deep breaths to calm himself down, and his eyelids drooped a bit in relaxation.
“Just a bad dream…” he mused. “I feel thirty years older…” He smiled at his little joke, in a further effort to relieve his body of stress.
He lay awake in bed for what felt like an hour, mulling over his thoughts, unable to return to sleep.
Why would he be dreaming about Warren now?
“Was that even Warren? Did I ever make out his face?” He tried to rewind his memory through the dream, and realized that he’d just understood it to be him. While he was in the military, Gallow had overheard two friends talking about a dream one of them had the night before. The other friend explained that dreams had some sort of message or hidden meaning in them.
“Are you sure about that?” The first recruit had doubted.
“Well, even if that’s not what it is,” the second reasoned. “It’s at least something noteworthy enough for your brain to want to think about it.”
Did this strange woman have some connection to Warren?
Gallow sat up and observed the room around him, Bleech was fast asleep.
“Alright,” he thought. “Now’s my chance.”
He made his way to the door, turning the handle ever so quietly, and opened it to a dark hallway.
“Hm?” This hadn’t been here before, the door was supposed to open to the living area.
“This place appeared with Melty, as a kind of Garden,” he worked through the possibilities in his mind. “So is this her presence? But…” It just didn’t add up to him, for whatever reason, he felt a strange sensation unlike what he’d felt in the Garden of Armony, or even earlier that day.
Gallow decided to continue forwards, his first few steps down the hallway landed on solid ground, but after a moment, his foot came down on thin air. His heart panicked, a shot of adrenaline ran through his body, there was nothing underneath him.
Then, his foot landed on a step, just a few inches below.
He paused and took a deep breath, kicking himself for being so alarmed at something as silly as missing a step. Gallow descended the staircase, which didn’t seem to end.
“Jeez, how long have I been going at this?” he wondered. “Has this been five minutes? Ten?”
There was no railing for him to cling to as he continued, only the dark walls of the hallway. Gallow peered down into the darkness, trying to make out any kind of end to the stairway, but there was nothing.
He sighed and leaned on the wall to his right. To his surprise, there was nothing to lean on, just open space.
“Wha- again?!”
This time, however, he didn’t hit the ground, or a missed step. He couldn’t tell if he was falling or floating, the staircase had vanished from his side, and he simply waited for something to happen.
…
……
“How long have I been here?”
“I’m getting tired of not knowing the time, I should find a watch or something…”
“I should have learned to swim at some point-”
Abruptly, he recalled his first experience in the waters of the Garden, and the feeling of swimming through nothingness. His sigil glowed with power, and he felt himself being pulled down.
“Is this the same as-”
“Gallow?”
He hit the ground with a heavy thud, as if he’d been hanging above it by a few feet and only just dropped without much speed.
“Agh!”
Once his eyes had adjusted to the light, he could see an upside-down Melty looking down at him with an inviting expression.
“Are you alright? You can get up, you know.”
Gallow sat up and caught his breath before turning around to face her directly. They were in the familiar living area of the house, and she was sitting down in an ornate wooden chair.
“Please take a seat,” she offered,pointing to a similar chair behind him.
“What’s going on here?” he started, making himself comfortable.
“What do you mean by that?” she asked, looking around. The room had no light sources, but was washed in a green glow.
“I mean all the weird stuff going on with the space in here,” he replied. “This place is a Garden, isn’t it?”
She chuckled.
“This isn’t quite a Garden in the usual sense of the word, or the one you mean.”
“How so?” he prodded.
“Well,” she explained. “The only reason we’re in this room is because you associated it with me.”
“I don’t follow,” Gallow confessed.
Melty paused for a second and studied his confused expression.
“Just how much do you know about Vocations?” she questioned.
He racked his brain trying to dig up all the information he knew before telling her.
“Well… They’re these abilities that people can have, that work with the… spirit… body?” Gallow struggled to artfully explain what he could, while at the same time realizing how little he really understood.
The woman sighed and leaned back in her chair.
“In the simplest way,” she began. “The core of a person is their spirit, which finds its origins in the abstract plane. In order to manifest and grow in the physical world, they need a physical body to inhabit.”
“When we’re born- sorry,” he apologized for cutting her off. “But when we’re born, where does that spirit come from?”
“Your parents’ spirits, of course,” she replied matter-of-factly. “Nothing in the physical world has a purpose much deeper than survival and reproduction, but the abstract plane is a realm of thoughts and ideas. There are beings who could exist to find love or hate, or anything in-between really, with no strict need to survive. The spirits that manifest in your physical bodies come with those purposes, and Vocations are the expressions of that purpose.”
“So why doesn’t everyone just have a Vocation?” Gallow leaned forward a hair, fascinated.
“There could be many reasons,” she mused. “Maybe a dispassionate heart, maybe they don’t have any inclination that they have a greater purpose to live.”
“A greater purpose?” he asked.
“Remember, a Vocation is just the expression of your calling,” she wagged her finger. “If you didn’t have any idea what that was, or no reason to even consider it, your spirit would remain dormant.”
“You know Bleech has a Vocation,” Gallow reminded her. “Are you saying that he already knows his purpose in life?”
“It’s not as if everyone who can gain a Vocation will,” Melty reasoned. “It usually becomes awakened when some deep passion or desire is realized. I guess you could say that that boy has a kind of ‘fire’ in his heart.”
He sat back and considered what she’d told him.
“I think I understand,” he confirmed, scratching the side of his jaw as a subconscious tick.
“Those are just the basic concepts,” Melty continued. “Vocations are generally separated into two realms, physical and abstract. The former operate under the physical laws of the world, and affect it likewise. Most people are able to see the limit of their presence, because they rarely extend much of the spirit body. It would be something like starting fires, or moving objects, for example.
The latter are Vocations that extend the spirit body beyond the physical vessel, like your Navigator, and rarely affect physical things. Abstract abilities are much more difficult to detect, unless you have some sense of spirit sight, which is itself an abstract ability. What makes them dangerous is the fact that if they do harm, it will be to someone’s spirit body, which may never recover.”
“Is one stronger than the other?” Gallow wondered aloud.
“Stronger?” she repeated, not expecting the question. “I wouldn’t say so, not in the physical world, but you should know what you’re dealing with, and why I wanted that girl to learn some kind of spirit sight.”
Gallow wanted to learn everything he could while he was in her presence.
“So,” he started, scratching his jaw again. “Where does… Sonsee, for instance, fall in there?”
“Hm,” Melty was amused. “She’s actually a bit of an interesting case.”
“Oh?”
“Her Vocation behaves rarely, you see, because it manipulates both the spirit and the physical body.”
“Both?” Gallow got the sense he could almost grasp what she meant.
“When she uses her Vanishing Point,” Melty explained. “She needs to focus onto a soul for a moment, then locks herself and her target into abstract space for a moment, before moving them along an axis. You of all people should know that pulling someone’s spirit body can affect their physical one as well. In that sense, she’s quite an outlier. Making a pocket in space like that lets her move her target around, and is very uncommon to see.”
Gallow tilted his head for a second, looking at her.
“And how did you know that?”
“Know what?” she replied. “How common it is to see a Vocation that does both?”
“No, how you knew what it was without ever seeing it.” His statement was accompanied by a small smile that said ‘gotcha!’
Melty looked surprised for only a moment before returning to her knowing expression.
“Well, then I guess it’s time to move on to that part of the lesson,” she teased.
“Hm?” Gallow didn’t know what to expect from his question.
The woman crossed her legs and folded her hands before continuing.
“If you remember, a Vocation is a calling to a higher purpose, correct?”
Gallow nodded.
“There are no true abstract beings with Vocations, they’re unique to living, physical creatures like you.”
“But then-” he thought back to earlier, when she’d healed Sonsee. “You need to have a Vocation, right? What did you do back there?”
“Gallow,” she spoke slowly, in an attempt to add weight to her words. “I wasn’t lying then- when I told you that I held a power beyond a Vocation. All abstract being who are strong enough to possess what I do have already reached our purpose, our meaning.
The fulfillment of Vocation- my Dominion.”
---
“Dominion?” Sonsee asked, lost. “What are you talking about?”
Melty, still floating above the ground, raised a hand.
“As an abstract being, I was the aspect of human dreams, the fulfillment of your thoughts and desires.” The glow around her was intense. “That power is innate to me.”
“What is it?” Sonsee wanted answers about this new level of power.
“Siamese Dream allows me to coalesce the dreams of multiple people into a physical space,” she explained. “Here, I can exist at any point in your time or space.”
“Do you mean that I’m dreaming right now?” Sonsee looked around at the room they stood in, looking for any clues that it wasn’t real.
“We’re all dreaming now,” Melty replied calmly. “And you’re here because you wanted to ask something, is that right?”
Sonsee looked back at her and answered.
“I’d like you to teach me spirit sight, like you did Janna!”
Melty raised her eyebrows.
“You want to see spirits?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Sonsee looked down at the ground.
The older woman motioned to a door at the right.
“Why don’t you look through there?”
---
Gallow’s hands and knees hit the ground.
“Why am I here?”
He raised his head to see Warren Roseraid standing before him.
“This is-”
They were in Sigrit, just outside the tree that led to the Garden.
“You’re already getting distracted,” Melty commented from the sidelines. “So what do you think is so important about this moment?”
“This isn’t how it happened,” Gallow answered curtly. “I wasn’t awake yet, I feel like I’m in pain, but…”
He put a hand to his side, where bullet wounds still dripped with blood.
“I don’t really feel it…”
“But why am I here?” he asked himself. “I don’t feel pain, but I’m scared, and I’m… sad?” Indeed, looking at his friend drew out an intense sadness from inside.
Gallow got to his feet and tried to speak.
“Warren-”
Before he knew it, a fist was in his gut, sending him flying backwards and kicking up dust. He’d barely struggle to his feet when a flying kick knocked him down again.
“It doesn’t hurt…” he opened his eyes and gazed up at Warren.
“[NAVIGATOR]!”
Despite his call, nothing appeared, nothing happened.
“What-?”
Warren kicked him hard in the chest, launching his back even further. From here he could see the town, like a model recreation.
He jumped to his feet once more, in time to see Warren charging up a beam of light from his palm. It wasn’t aimed towards him, however, it was to the closest building.
As he realized his intent, Gallow found himself filled with a desire to protect, above even his own safety. The red light focused and shot out from Warren’s hand, only to connect with Gallow’s body as he leapt to intercept it.
The attack blasted a hole cleanly through Gallow’s body, but he was unfazed.
“Why would you do something like that,” Warren finally called out. “For someone you didn’t know?”
Gallow only looked back blankly, unsure himself.
“You wouldn’t have even cared about them otherwise,” Warren continued. “You’re not like that, you’re the type of person who’d try to sell miracle water to make a profit.”
Gallow took a sharp breath inward. He blinked, and in a split-second, Warren was standing above Eli’s lifeless body. Only a few feet away, Janna was frozen in shock.
“She’s having a nightmare,” Melty informed him. “It seems she thinks about this moment a lot.”
Time stood still in his mind, and he gazed at Janna for a long time. The expression on her face, the sheer emotion he could feel radiating from her, it was familiar somehow.
“Familiar…? Where do I know this…?”
His face turned from an expression of deep thought to realization.
“This is how I felt back then, at the orphanage…”
Melty looked on with a knowing expression. She knew what he needed to understand, but wasn’t going to let him off the hook so easily.
“Are you scared of that feeling?” she asked.
“Scared? I mean, of course,” he replied.
“Do you think you should be?”
He stared at her in response, not having an immediate answer.
“Well,” he began. “I think that it’s normal to be scared of being in pain.”
Melty said nothing, but tilted her head slightly. That wasn’t the answer that she was searching for.
“Do you remember how Warren Roseraid lost at the end of your battle?”
“He…” Gallow stopped to really consider his answer. “He saw himself in the water, and decided that he wanted me to kill him.”
“And after that?”
“He fell into the water and disappeared with the Spirit; Demmali, you said? I think that was her name, and they both faded away.”
“What do you think happened to him?”
“He... died…?”
Melty’s eyes closed.
“He didn’t die, Gallow, he left with her into the abstract world.”
“What?” he was bewildered.
“Demmali left the Garden her physical form behind to take him deeper.”
“But that’s what he wanted!” Gallow cried. “He wanted to destroy good and evil!”
“Warren was never strong enough to do something like that,” she explained. “It was precisely because he ran from his own evil that he was at the limit of his power.”
“I don’t understand…”
“Warren Roseraid had an immensely powerful heart, but he was held back by his inability to look outside of his goal. His eye dispelled illusions and saw the truth, but he refused to turn it to himself.”
Gallow looked off at the dream of Warren.
“When he saw himself in the water, then…”
“He confronted those feelings for the first time.”
For a moment, they both stood silently in the dream. There was no sound, not even the ringing of his ears.
“I don’t really like getting other people involved in stuff that’ll get them hurt,” he said finally. “It’s kind of been tearing me up this whole time, if I’m honest.”
“Why don’t you enjoy it?”
“I mean, that’s totally natural, isn’t it?” he didn’t know what she meant.
“You seemed to be pretty affected by Janna’s nightmare…”
Gallow focused intently on his thoughts, spurred by what Melty had just said. Suddenly, all of the threads connected with each other to form the complete tapestry in his mind.
“I think I feel that way,” he began. “Because I let Warren burn that orphanage, because I was selfish…”
“I don’t think you were selfish, Gallow,” Melty assured him. “But those feelings scare you, don’t they?”
He laughed half-heartedly.
“Yeah, they do, but they scared him too.”
Melty turned away from him.
“So, what do you want to do?”
“I think I’ll face that emotion,” he replied.
“That’s pretty difficult.”
“Yeah, it is,” his thoughts drifted towards an old memory. “But I think I can manage it, if I can find the resolve.”
“Do you even know what that word means?” She looked at him from the side.
“No, not really, but I’m excited to find out.”
---
Sonsee threw the door open and stepped through. The black, shadowy landscape transformed into a desert wasteland covered in fire.
“What?” she questioned aloud. “What’s happening?”
The blue sky suddenly took on a sinister air. She looked back to the door, but it was no longer there.
When she turned back, she realized where she was.
“The village?!”
The Atamape homes were burning under the daylight. People she knew ran about, her cousins and siblings.
“W-what-?” Tears welled up in her eyes, she stretched a hand outwards.
If only she could stop this, she would-
“Sonsee?”
Her attention snapped to the voice that came to her side.
“Bleech?”
The boy was standing beside her, scared, as tears appeared in his own eyes. Sonsee looked back to the village, but it was no longer her village. It had morphed into the town of Brake, Bleech’s home.
“What-” she choked out. “What is happening?”