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2345

Musing, not publishing.

Project Nemesis:  “Anima”

In the cold, gentle blue light, her dark eyes stare into the absence between life and death. The bodies hover around her, and she senses the stress but can no longer discern the who or why behind them. So much stress. So much cold. So much numbed to slow. Slow to stop.

            She is Malaika. She is six years old. Her skin is dark as charred wood; her eyes are jet stones in a lake of white; her black, nappy hair tied in small braids, coalescing into a ponytail. She is the daughter of an influential politician, and a daughter of Mombasa, though here she is in Nairobi. She doesn’t like this city, mostly because her mother doesn’t like this city. Mother is one of the bodies hovering, like a blob of stress. Father … may be one of the bodies. She can definitely feel his stress; it has a unique misplacement to it.
            The girl’s breaths are shallower. She wants to feel something else. There is a sense like she should be panicking, but she’s too weak to do it. There is something … special happening, for lack of a better word. A one-time unique experience… Shallower.
            Breath to slow…. Slow to stop.
            Her last exhale escapes her chest like feathers into the sky… before she can even be cognizant of what’s happening, and her eyes pause. The gaze is still, and her body freezes as the spark of life leaves her to Forever.
            Life leaves her, and her stopped gaze, Forever…
            …A noise… A whisper. Whispers… She winces.
            Malaika blinked and looked to her right, and suddenly on her shoulder a man’s hand clasped her. Startled, she pushed herself back against the bed, but the man only laughed. “Hello,” he chuckled.
            “Who are you?” Malaika asked. The man began speaking to her, but the words escaped her for a moment. He was speaking in one of the Mijikenda languages- like what her mother would mutter to herself time to time when she was angry. If she put a little effort into it, she probably could’ve still understood it, but she shook her head, too exasperated to handle it. “Please speak Swahili.”
            “You’re an outgoing little girl, aren’t you?” he smiled gently down to her. “I am Tendaji. And we need to go.”
            He held out his hand in offering to Malaika, but she looked at him in disbelief. “I … I don’t think I should go.”
            Tendaji leaned forward and asked her rather pointedly, “Oh, I see you know what's supposed to happen from here then?” and nodded towards the fading room. The blue light was dimming, and the shadows of the people who had been tending her were one with the absorbing darkness. It was over… She was over.
            Malaika felt the rush of fast moving air on her skin- Something just flung itself by her, and she gasped. “What-”
            “No time,” and Tendaji lifted her by the waist with his moon sized hands. He was an enormously tall man, skinny as a strand of light. His ebony skin radiated a subtle purple highlight, and his eyes glowed the same lavender hue. “We must go.” He set her down, and although she knew the linoleum floor was cold, she knew it without feeling it. A strange sensation that was only… sensation. She didn’t feel- it just was.
            Tendaji bolted and the dim blue light followed him, leaving Malaika in the dark. She felt another rush of air, and she shrieked into a dash after him. She ran as fast as she could- surprisingly faster than she thought she could go. She heaved, but the air didn’t actually reach her. She felt nothing in her lungs, but she kept pushing. She didn’t need to breathe, she found.
            The shadows whipped out and grabbed her by the ankle. She crashed to the darkened floor, feeling pain and knowing the impact, but not knowing the pain or feeling the impact. Terror gripped her heart, though it didn’t beat, and physiologically, she felt no difference. She turned to fight it, but Tendaji’s hands gripped her again, yanking her from the shadow's grasp, and holding one of Malaika's hands, he led her in the run. “What is happening?!” she screamed at him.
            “Death!” Tendaji laughed back in Swahili. The empty darkness swirled around them threatening to swallow the dim blue light. Tendaji stopped abruptly, and using Malaika’s momentum, he swung his arm up, holding her hand tightly. “Follow the sun!” he screamed in maniacal laughter, and flung Malaika through the light. The blue expanded as she was hurled higher, forming a vast sky. She flew through a barrier of white tufts before gravity caught up with her, and plopped her back down into an island of white in a sea of black and blue. A golden sun arose and blinded her for a moment. Without blinking, her eyes adjusted, and she saw…
            Hills of alabaster clouds- They were clouds! She was on a cloud! She looked down and lifted the ends of her pink patient gown to see her feet grounded in the insubstantial mass of glistening condensation at the top of a cumulous hillock.
            It was at this moment that self-awareness finally hit her. She was familiar with the surrealty of waking from a dream, and thus far her mind was willing to accept that she was caught in that place between sleep and awake. Only now, she realized that she was not at all in a dream state. She was totally coherent… She blinked trying to resolve that with the reality that she was literally standing on a cloud. The sun was warm- She looked up into it. The warmth she knew, but did not feel. The piercing light did not hurt her, though factually it took a few moments for her eyes to constrict enough to see functionally through it. “Follow the sun?” Malaika asked. She felt Tendaji’s eyes on her- and maybe several, several more…
            Across the great expanse, she saw others… Others of all different colors. They were walking towards the sun. She shrugged it off and started walking down the cloudcrest in the same direction, the cloud lengthening into a path carved over the heavens, and the deep darkness far beneath.
            As she continued, some of the others stopped, while others faded over the horizon. As she got closer to one, she snuck a look at him. He was a brown colored man, eyes deep black, skin tanned by heat, but not sun- a child of an island jungle. He was emaciated, weighed down with worry, staring… And as Malaika watching him, passing him by slowly, she could feel a memory that held him in a trance. A memory of loneliness.
            She passed others as she dutifully crept after the sun. Each was in a place beyond obliviousness. They became virtually inanimate, and in a strange sense of distilment, Malaika found herself constantly examining each. Some of them had smiles on their faces, and she felt a shrill of laughter; some had contentedness, and she felt peace.
            But most had looks of regret, and she found their feelings much more specific, and memories always accompanied them. A man in a busy intersection, embittered not by poverty, but by the selfishness of those who had a right to be selfish. A girl holding an ailing kitten in her palms, discovering helplessness for the first time. A woman watching her parents admonish her adulthood, holding her heart in comfort against the rejection of conditional love. A father bowing his head, broken under the weight of a judge’s gavel.
              The others surrounding her became exclusively negative incarnations, but though she tried to ignore them, their memories became more and more intense, and was unable to ignore them. She burst into a run to avoid them, but they reached out to her, and assaulted her with their pasts.  She was abruptly confronted with a wall of catastrophe, and the horror of the emotion ruptured her soul. There was no escape; a kaleidoscope of Loss enveloped her, the sun darkening and fleeing into dusk.
            A child, held back by steeled hands, wailing as her parents were taken away from her to a doom she couldn’t fathom- her eyes flooded in tears. A boy collapsing to his knees, screaming, finding his friend hanging from a rope he fastened himself. A man in digital uniform howling out in damning rage as the bloodened, fiery dust of an explosion settles where his friend was once racing against carnage. A plump flight attendant freaking at the television, as another man tries in vain to calm him, the second plane full of his friends striking the other tower. A woman falling to the ground, head to the sky in condemnation, a city ruptured by the storm of an insane child-god, shattering around her. A man breaking under the push of police, while the murdered body of his lover is carried away unceremoniously without him. Loss. All of them jagged, falling pieces, toppled and succumbing to the mercilessness of total Loss.
            And Malaika couldn’t run anymore. Her own eyes were dripping in tears, shrouded in the sky’s night. The absurdity of her body’s reactions to emotion and physical stimulation were beyond her, but if there was anything she knew had not changed, it was her empathy, and the perdition of personal calamity when someone is irrevocably taken from you was something she would not run from. She stopped crying, and was determined to turn back.
            Her last tear slipped off her cheek, splashed on her wrist, and shimmered a beam of light. Malaika looked down in shock as the light weighed her arm down, sliding into her palm, clinging to her and tugging her to drop. Instinctively, she gripped it to counterbalance herself- As her hand squeezed ahold of the light, it flashed into a hilt, wreathing into the symbol of a sun; from it, the light lanced out into a broadsword’s blade. She felt the weight in her other hand, squeezed, and a sword with the hilt of an eclipsed moon manifested. Around her chest, back, and abdomen, gilt platemail glittered into being, and slowly her dried tears dressed her in the cataphract of light. She gaped in awe, until she again felt Tendaji’s stare. Slowly, she turned around to peek over her shoulder.
            In the distance, the nebulosity of thunderhead mountains and puffed fog opened under the striking spark of dawn. The sun reappeared, lancing its golden light down the valley of clouds, and everywhere it touched, a wave of persons stood, and wings spread behind them, loosing a tsunami of stray feathers. Captivated, Malaika stared as the fringe plumage rained around her like angelic sakura. Then anxiety began to catch her- There were hundreds… maybe thousands… of people… Winged people. Staring back at her.
            “Hello.” Malaika heard a familiar chuckle, and neglected to spasm as its accompanying hand touched her now metal clad shoulder. She turned and found herself flanked by four adults and their folded wings, each gazing down on her with a strange kind of adoration. “And welcome.”
            “… Hi,” Malaika squeaked. "What are you?”
            Tendaji laughed aloud and motioned to the others over his black tipped, white wings, “We are Angels. We are Seraphim, to be exact. This is Enoch,” he motioned to a young, beige skinned man with dark hair, eyes, and beard. His wings were caramel brown, like an eagle. “This is Itzpapalotl,” he motioned to a light brown, younger woman with brunette hair, wearing a strong smirk, and rainbow wings like a bird of paradise.
            The last of them was a tall woman, with wavy, blonde hair and watery, blue eyes. Her wings were longer than the others, the massive feathers silky and opalline like her skin. “I am Radiance,” she whispered, and the sky shuddered at her voice. She knelt down to Malaika’s level. “Welcome to the Angelic Realm.”
            “… What’s going on?” Malaika asked. “There was… There was … This thing grabbed me, and then… Then he,” she pointed at Tendaji, “he threw me up here. There was these people… They were all- crying- And these- These?” she lifted the swords still held strong in her hands. “I don’t-”
            Radiance reached a hand to Malaika and pinched the little girl’s chin with a thumb and finger, guiding Malaika’s eyes back into Radiance’s. “And you won’t. No one does for the first transcendence. It’s normal,” and Radiance grinned a motherly acknowledgement that made Malaika relax, despite having no idea what the woman meant by that. “The basic things you need to understand are these:
            “You are dead.
            “You, unlike most souls, did not ascend or descend. You transcended.
            “You are now an Angel, like us,” and Radiance motioned to the multitude of the host. “This happens very rarely, and every time an Angel finds her way here, we have a bit of a … ceremony, so to speak. Candice actually just transcended yesterday, so you’re the second after almost a century.
            “Your discomfort during this transition was a test. Due to your reactions, we found it fitting for you to be chosen into our caste. You will be trained as a Seraph in the arts of war to be a Guardian.” And after this, Radiance leaned forward to kiss Malaika’s forehead. “And I’ll explain what that means later.
            “Right now,” Radiance stood back up, “It’s time for you to return.”
            “I… thought I was dead?” Malaika blinked.
            “You are, but death is a little … complicated for us,” Radiance winked, and reached into Malaika’s hands with her own. The swords glowed into vibrant light, and Malaika’s armor shimmered in kind. “Feel that?” Radiance asked.
            Malaika thought to herself. It was that feeling like she had to do something. Had to help someone… Those people triggered it. Those memories. It was intense, and it was real. Perhaps the only thing she truly knew she was feeling, in the same sense of what ‘feeling’ meant when she was alive. And so she nodded.
            “I call that ‘Righteousness,” Radiance whispered. “It is the key to your power.” The sword and armor flashed and vanished to Malaika’s surprise. “… We will summon you here again when you… ‘sleep’,” Radiance shrugged at the term. “But you will always have access to Righteousness. It’s endemic to who you are. And who you will become. Now,” Radiance’s wings spread mighty and wide, shed feathers slinking around her into the clouds at their feet, “you’re reborn.”
            The cloud lost its tangibility and vertigo shot up Malaika’s gut and stomach into her heart and throat and pierced her mind in a scream. She fell into the black, claustrophobia swallowing her whole. She screamed endlessly in the plummet and began thrashing her body wildly. She began hyperventilating, unsure what she was feeling- if she was feeling- and screamed again. It felt like she was in a box- a relatively strong box.
            She heard the crunch and jarring squeal of gears as a shard of light flooded her. A rumble under her carried her into that light, until she was grabbed by the terrified mortician who was as scared to death by her as she was of him. He screamed at her in an unrecognizable Bantu language, then apologized profusely.
            She was taken out of the morgue, then held in a safe room while voices rushed around her. She picked up bits and pieces. The man who found her was initially being blamed for her inappropriate, early box storage. She died from some kind of pronounced Yellow Fever- she had total organ failure after a heart attack- she didn’t remember any of that. Her father was missing. She had been dead for two hours and seventeen minutes- barely missing the world record by four minutes. There was a doctor really upset about that, apparently. Her mother was being fetched right now, with her father in tow maybe?
            But the most important thing she heard was her breath. At will, it numbed to slow. And slowed to stop. And she felt nothing but knew. And did not know other things, yet felt.
            She felt it… A power… Not just a will, but a power to answer that will.
            And if she clutched that power, light-
            Her parents broke into the room and suddenly the girl was surrounded by the loving arms of her mother and father.

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