Snippet #2717754

Tallyho heard a soft echo in her ear, the voice of the young woman who looked so panicked before. She was grabbing Tallyho’s hand, tugging firmly to lead her away. The blonde offered a low grunt, thick and unladylike, as all the weight in her waif body seemed to sink to her hips, holding her heavy in the grass like a stone at the bottom of a river or like a paper weight.

“I can’t…” she slurred drearily. “I need water.”

Tallyho Abel had a very firm idea of what her threshold was for giving up, and sometimes it wasn’t very high. Finessing herself out of the tree was enough for the day, with this fainting spell coming up it didn’t look like running was in the books for her. Even as the girl tugged at her arm, she half way fought to keep put. If she ran in this condition, she’d only pass out and hold the girl back in a vulnerable space.

She was so out of it that she didn’t even get the satisfaction out of watching someone take her advice. She didn’t hear the curdling hack of the warrior’s sword in the cyclopean’s neck, or the tingle of small onyx shards raining on the width of his blade.

What she did notice was a soft rumble in the ground. She begrudgingly attempted to sit up again, hoping that the quaking she felt was a figment of her own nausea. And yet, there was a shake. She could tell by the way that the trees wavered and the leaves rustled. She let in a sharp breath, throwing one hand over to brush the other girl’s leg—a non-verbal gesture that essentially said, “Not today Satan,” if there were such a figure in Airesian lore.

She turned her eyes to the horizon, everything around them just seemed to keep going. The metal machines that roamed the roads continued to move, undisturbed by the disturbance under the earth. And the people that she could see far beyond the confines of this small corner of greenspace were the same way. But the trees—they were shaking.

And then there was a light, a growing dome that seemed to creep from between the tall buildings in the horizon, and toward the lawn where this slain creature lay scattered. It was slow at first, but as the blinding spectacle came closer it seemed to come faster, and the earthquake more intense. With the light came a fantastic gust of wind that licked back Tallyho’s hair in a sudden woosh.

Tallyho, if she wasn’t already dreaming, was going to die today. The wall of light wasn’t stopping. And as it hurdled toward her and the other girl, the wind felt increasingly suffocating. She always knew that if she was going to die young, it was going to be on her own terms. But now, she supposed, that she was too young to know everything. Blinded, she closed her eyes, held her breath, and let the wall of energy crash into her very being.


What came next was like experiencing death while still being very alive, at least from Tallyho’s perspective. It wasn’t that she was reviewing every memory that encompassed her life, or watching her body from high up, cursing herself to get up. It was a different kind of ethereal removal, a feeling that she was floating in the center of nothing and everything. She was floating in this nothingness for eternity, incubated and healed of all that ailed her only moments before. The dizziness, nausea, and heaviness in her heart was spooned from her body and spilled far away.

Another light flickered in the distance, but it was nothing like the frightening wall of energy that brought her here. It was warmer, sparser, like a single laser pointing to the center of the universe. It grew, but slowly.

Tallyho no longer felt like she was floating. Something cold pressed against her soles, and the pull of gravity felt gradually more apparent. Below her feet, a sprinkling of small white balls of light, almost like stars in a night sky, dotted a path running toward the light.

Beneath the transparent path of stars, a murky body of water was churning as if it wavered in a storm. And then she looked up, catching a glimpse of a flock of twelve large birds. They, glided above her gracefully, a mass exodus of white underbellies toward the warmth of the light. Their bellies were soft and round and their gentle coos rang throughout the space. Before her she saw the path of light. But what was behind her? She turned around to see a wide gaping vortex of blue and black.

And as if on cue, it was like the houselights came on in the theatre. It wasn’t that the darkness was gone, but gradually the blonde was able to make out the forms of the other people around her. There weren’t many, she actually recognized most of them: The girl who tried to help her, the warrior, and other blonde, the man with the loud machine, the fighting trio. And there were even a couple who Tallyho hadn’t really noticed before. She wondered if they saw all that she had seen and felt everything she felt. Could they see her as well as she could see them? The answers to all of these questions were more likely than not going to be yes. She took a step forward. Physically she felt great. It was like she never jumped out of the tree or was on the verge of throwing up. She wondered if those who had been wounded felt similar effects. She wondered if they also felt an inexplicable pressure to make a decision.

“I think,” she began, pausing briefly to behold the way that her voice reverberated throughout the space. “That I’m going to go that way...”

She pointed toward the softer light that was moving ever closer. That’s the direction in which the twelve birds flew and the warped vortex on the other end of the path didn’t seem particularly inviting. In any normal situation Tallyho would have questioned the logistics of such an experience. But something about this made her want to act based on her most primal instincts.