Chapter 54 - Knowledge Is Pain
I came back a week or so later. My time was spent writing other things, from Voltra to Anton and Moira. They were stories for a younger generation, each weaving problems of future strife they had to overcome without notice.
I stepped into the library in physical form. It was nice to be here where heat was not. My reality was experiencing those last few days of summer heat before the burst into the fall season. Sleep in 100% humidity at 80 degrees Fahrenheit was a struggle, but it was all at an end. Before long, rains would proliferate the sky day and night.
The library was empty, as it often was. The space was big, and the people who sometimes occupied it were few. When Rebecca divided herself into ten separate versions of herself, it felt lively in the library. Not to mention that the library was actually a flying vessel back then. I could still put the building into that mode, but I feared creating another world populated with the things I gathered from the ivy.
That thinking almost made me forget where I left this place. Kara and Lila found out about Akier being Tarne, or rather Tarne being Akier’s reincarnation. There was no longer a way for her to remember who he used to be. The amalgams were gone, and Garr was removed from the garden to keep her a child. I scanned the library over a few times before noticing something off about it. The stairs were going up higher past the second floor. Granted, they stopped at the second floor, but another flight continued after a bit of flat space.
I walked up the stairs, feeling much lighter than in my reality. When I got to the second floor, I looked up the second staircase to find a door there. It was just like the doors on the second floor, but higher. When I got to the door, I dreaded what might be behind it. The worst version was that Kara and Lila decided to put Tarne in a separate room that they locked so that they did not need to interact with her. I hoped this was not the case, but when I tried the handle, I found the door locked.
I grimaced at the realization, still hoping to be wrong, then floated right through the door to a bright and colorful room. The windows were stained glass in random patterns to a wallpaper mingling in pastel colors. The bed was large and in a particular shape. I immediately knew what the room was, and the reason it was locked. I opened a drawer to confirm my suspicion, and smiled. It held various sex toys and massage oils. This was a room Lila made specifically for sexual use. It was a relief, but when I heard the door unlock I immediately disappeared from there.
I would have to stop by another time, maybe after work as more and more places allowed sitting inside without a mask nowadays.
break
I did not come back after work, nor any time during the weekend. I was at the device again in the morning of a late start. It was coffee again, at an uncomfortable seat for populace control. Part of the discomfort originated with me, but that was the flaw of my reality. When I entered the library, I felt at ease from the burdens of reality, and it was exactly that which had me coming back. The ability to do anything you could possibly dream enticed beyond measure.
When I did go inside, I found Kara by herself, looking up toward the ceiling. I did not speak, just floated over silently to surprise her.
“Hey, Jack,” she said, before I got close enough to give her a fright.
“Hey,” I replied, landing on the wooden floor. She looked over from her searching. “What are you doing?”
“Looking for clues,” she said, then cast her gaze up again.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to fly up and look?”
“I can’t fly, genius,” she said. “I’m the only one who can’t use creationism here. It’s starting to get annoying to ask for stuff. Most houses come equipped with tools, but what's the point of tools when you can just use magic?” The last bit she said dripped with sarcasm.
“Clues to what?” I asked, instead of asking if she wanted help.
“As to where Tarne went,” she said. I thought I misheard her.
“Tarne’s not here?”
“Not that we can find. Lila’s worried. Last place we saw her was flying around in the library, so I’m looking for any indication to where she went off.” I tried to make a connection to what I was once, but there was nothing to reach. Did the Rahin take her without approaching the matter rationally?
“You don’t think it was…?”
“The Rahin? No,” Kara said, very sure of herself. “I asked them already. I talked to Fyntn, too. He offered no help, but looked worried. Rather than assist, he made a portal and vanished.” No doubt to look in the untethered space for more amalgams in case he missed some. Just one of those could bring us back to a bad spot.
“I have to go,” I said. “Sorry.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “I just want to find my baby girl.”
“I’d help, but I need to go.”
“You always have to go.”
I looked for a reasonable reply, but had nothing. It was on me, my fault. I never had the time for them unless it was convenient for me. The Monday started off pretty bad already. This was just a continuation of a bad vibe. I wanted to say I was sorry, but you could only say sorry a number of times until it stopped having meaning. I turned into smoke and dissipated out of there.
break
I came back in two days. Kara sure ruined my Monday. I always had to go. There was no time for this in my life, or I failed to make time. Either way, it was becoming harder to be there for every aspect of the story. I missed just as much, if not more, than I did with Rebecca. At least with her, I learned the story afterwards, not even entirely depicted in the story itself. I wanted to keep some of the story she wrote for me secret from all of you.
I stood in the empty library for a few minutes, then looked up to imagine Tarne flying through the air above. She weaved between the columns and arches like a pro, and landed upside down on the golden designs leaving a dirty footprint that still remained. I floated up to take a closer look. The soil was the one in the garden, but it gave no additional clues. She wore shoes, which felt rare.
“Where did you run off to, Tee?” I asked, gazing over the giant space that it felt like now. Akin to the ARC paintings which held a different world in a physical object, the books on these shelves were the Schrödinger’s cat of storytelling.
If there was a place to check, it would be the garden. The lush forest provided a lot of hiding places, and plenty of the plants had properties I did not know about following Lila’s child-proofing. Interestingly enough, the revamp caused Tarne to grow up within Garroton Bloom. Reaper having feathers instead of sickles was a funny change. Brancher now understood commands and served with the branches rather than act impishly full of itself.
I passed through the wall into the garden to find the canopies too thick to see through. I put makeshift finger goggles on and tweaked my vision to allow seeing through plant matter. This revealed the garden to me without green interference. Besides me, I found a few objects deep in the distance. The result of the goggles was a sort of smoky vision of light green. It reminded me of verete dust or the portals that the Keir opened between worlds. I wondered if those two were somehow related.
I flew over to the objects which were respectively, a piano from a show I watched, a cocoon of something I did not even understand, and a hovering little flying object that felt alive. I tapped the surface of the object, but it did not respond. The fact that the three objects were clustered so close together was strange, but I shrugged them off for a bit and scanned the rest of the garden. In the very distant corner, on the very top off the glass and behind a thick layer of green smoke, I saw a small bundle. That had to be it.
I flew over, realizing that the last few feet was just a pure layer of leaves and greenery. I tore at the vines and leaves until all the smoke was gone. With a touch to my temples, my vision returned to normal to find Tarne, curdled up with knees to her chest. Her eyes were closed.
“Tarne?” I asked, extending a hand toward her. The closer I got to her, the weirder it felt, until it reached a layer when my hand started to vanish into atomized ash. I paused after my whole hand was gone, then motioned my other hand to grow it back in an instant. “Are you ok, Tee?”
“Go away,” she murmured.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said, checking my time like an asshole that I was. I still had half an hour before work. “I just want to know that you’re ok.”
“I’m not,” she said. “My moms hate me. I can see their eyes when I’m around, and they avoid me other times. It hurts SO MUCH! It hurt so much, I couldn’t bear it anymore!” I felt a deep throb of pain at the feeling. Even imagining that someone that close to you would hate you felt like a stab through the heart. I was the cause of this. If I never told them about Akier, they would still be acting normally.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s my fault. I told them that the person inside you is an old enemy.”
“Take it out of me then!”
“It’s not that simple,” I said. “Even if you don’t realize it, you are him. He went through the whole process of chaos dissolving to arrive brand new. Then he ended up in untethered space to latch onto anything he found, and that happened to be me. Back when I was Lila’s child, he latched onto the empty shell that was you when I was away. You don’t remember any of this, because you aren’t him anymore, but they don’t understand that.”
“I don’t want to be this person!” Tarne exclaimed, opening her eyes to a well of tears. They did not drip, but burst out in a torrent of water into the garden. I watched the tears in silence, and was glad that the atomizing layer worked in both directions as the water vanished past a certain point. “Can you fix me?” I met her eyes, and felt regret. I wanted to shake my head, be honest, but I nodded stupidly.
She uncoiled slowly, and reached out her hand, removing the atomizing layer. The torrent of water slowed and eventually stopped to normal tears. I held her small hand, hoping she did not try to read my mind on the lie I told her. How did one go about fixing something beyond understanding? I had to do my best for her.
“I’ll be back,” I said. “We’ll tackle this together, Tee. Ok?” She smiled lightly, tears welling in her eyes. I put a second hand on hers and nodded to vanish into multicolored sparkles.
Comments
Post a Comment