Illusionistical

It is written that couples are made by the Grandfather’s hands, he who lives on the moon and weaves families with his red strings. It is said that until their fates have been met and destinies completed, their strings will forever knot and twist; bend but never break. It is heard that to be tied is to have your souls connected, to live with each other throughout the ages.

They were a match made in Heaven, or rather, a match made by Heaven. What is made by Heaven can just as easily be destroyed by it. He knew it and so did she, or so he had thought. There were some things that he did not understand and she had promised that she would explain it to him in the next lifetime. How many had it been already? This world he had been reborn in did not seem right, the colors of this century hurt his eyes and the stench burned his nostrils; a land bathed in red and soaked in the gaseous fumes of gunpowder. This was not the peace and unity under one Kingdom that had been promised. When had this war broken out? He was now one of the highest ranking military officers in the Kingdom of Himmel and under his father’s nomination, headed the Personal Guards: the King’s assassination unit.

For how many years he had to have spent as a dung-beetle to have received this honor, he did not know. What did know was that his wife had been pregnant with his second child at the time of his passing. He did know that her stomach was pointy and not rounded, that he was supposed to have a son this time around – or so the midwives kept telling him. What had I been then? A farmer? He could not remember. He did however, remember when the lightening bolt came crashing down and washed his world with white. He would also never forget his twenty-third birthday in this world, when he first laid eyes on his wife again and this time, instead of the lightening bolt that took away his life, resounding through his mind was the explosion of his rifle that gave him back his old one. He had shot at his wife. Orders from the King to kill his own wife – no, orders to kill the one responsible for the King’s now botched assassination.
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The boy raised his hands to clutch at his executioner’s arms, arms that did not know the definition of mercy. Little did he know that the nerves in his body had long been restricted by millions of microscopic needles shot through him seconds before. He heard his own endless scream rise up and out of the room, traveling through the streets of his underworld prison, rising up towards the cloth-like sky that never gave way to darkness.

“Fuck! Did you miss again Kay, because I swear!”, Yan screamed, although failing to look menacing with both hands pressed closely to her ears.

“Hey, it’s perfect,” his executioner argued. “It’s not my fault his eyes are crooked.”

“My eyes are not crooked!” The boy piped in defense from behind the group, not realizing that he was no longer in his still screaming, frozen body tacked to the wall with a now invisible arrow.

The three women fell silent, until Kay abruptly grabbed the back of his shirt and mashed his face against the face of his former, still living body.

“Shut. Up.” she demanded firmly. “If you get us caught…” The boy gulped at what he only assumed was the click of a gun pressing against the back of his head. He wanted to believe that the gun really could do him no harm, but here he was, apparently dead for the first, and not the second, time doubting the accuracy of his intuition in a realm where the laws of the living did not apply. How? The boy’s mind raced as he felt the pressure on the back of his head increase with each new, earsplitting wail coming from a mouth that he no longer had control over.
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They had lived their whole lives for this day; he had waited ten grueling years of his life for this moment to come. He had done everything in his power not to get himself killed and now he stood before his brother in their rundown basement, burnt decades before his birth, with his left arm raised and knife pressed firmly against his wrist. He stared into the icy blue eyes of his brother, desperately wishing that he would give the signal so the heart inside him would stop its erratic beating.

“Stop shaking. Hold it steady,” his brother hoarsely whispered at him, who extended his right arm adjacent to his younger brother’s left. His brother pressed his own knife deeply into his own arm, “like mine.”

The boy never broke eye-contact with his older brother, but he could tell that his brother was scared too. He saw through his brother’s steady, unwavering facade each and every day of his life; he just never had the heart to mention it. We have every right to be scared. They were putting everything that meant anything into this. With their heart, their soul, and their memories on the line, they could not afford to fail and had everything to lose. This was the only way, the scriptures and the books that remained after the burning and shredding wrote of nothing else. This day, this hour, this minute, this second — this one moment could solve everything.
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Hell. He was in Hell.

“H-E-L-L.” the girl spelled out for him, her scratchy voice rising higher in pitch for each letter.

Great, he thought.This is fantastic. He flinched at the girl’s voice, giving an acknowledging grunt as he rose from the ground. He briefly raised his head to look at where the rip in the sky used to be and wondered how his brother had managed this one. As he bent to wipe the dirt off of his pants, he noticed that this high-spirited girl was no younger than he was. But no, she’s dead. So age wouldn’t matter. She’s probably hundreds of years older than me.

“It’s nice to see some new people around here.” she said calmly.

Pfft, sure, he told himself. “Hm..so where do I go from here? This is my first time being dead and all.”
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I have no idea how long this story will last, but it seems to be too long to still qualify as a short story. So I created a table of contents to keep track of all the so-called chapters.

1. Prologue: The Serene Darkness
2. Chapter 1: The Yellow Spring
3. Chapter 2: The Underworld Prison
4. Chapter 3: Chamber of Avici
5. Chapter Four: The Dark Mansion

Crash. Crumble. Thump.

Silence.

Crowds gathered around the strange little boy that had dropped out from the rip in the sky, now crouched at the center of the playground. Worried mothers poked and pried as fathers spread out in search of his parents or guardians. The boy curled himself into a ball and clenched his eyes shut. He could hear nothing but the explosion that reverberated in his small ears. His body shook and twitched with fear, unaware of the commotion he had created nor of the attention he received.

“Leave ‘im alone,” an old woman spat, staring down at the boy with her lazy eye. “He just got here after all.”

“Y’eah, they’re all like that,” her friend added with a cackle. “Y’all were like that s’well.”

“B..but they don’t u…usually come…this…way,” a frail young woman stuttered worriedly, obviously a newcomer as well.

The two old woman snorted and continued on their daily walk through the park as if nothing was wrong. Together, the two women were nearly two centuries old and they had seen enough in this world to sleep through a hurricane.
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