Sarah's Story - Final Segment!!

Dear readers,

I'm sorry it took me so long to post the end of Sarah's Story! It turns out that it's much more difficulty to wrap up an entire story in one day than it is to write a brief segment of that story. But it's done. You voted for a twist ending, so that's what you get: It was all a dream.

Haha! Just kidding. 

Just to let you know, I will be taking a few weeks off to devote time to editing my debut novel, book 1 of the Spyridon Trilogy. But I'll be back at the end of May (or maybe the beginning of June), with an all new interactive story. And this time, you'll have a huge amount of power in the very beginning to dictate how that story goes.

So without further ado, I present the end of Sarah's Story, with a brief lead-in from Segment #8 (or read from the beginning). I hope you like it!

And then he kissed her.

It was more than a meeting of the lips; that was certain. But oh, there was something to be said for the sheer passion of the kiss. The feel of his arms around her, the things he was doing with his mouth that inexplicably made her knees go weak. Shockingly, deliciously, she had to hold onto his neck to stay upright.

And tunneling through and over and around it all was the knowledge – the utter certainty – that he had always been, and always would be, her person.

And then he was ripped away from her.

Sarah had one heartbeat to process the sight of Benny being flown through the air, wrapped in an orb of unbreakable blue. Another heartbeat to recognize Venquist, floating over the river, with a horrible smile that seemed to break the lines of his face. She said No with lungs still light on air from the kiss.

And then Benny vanished.

“NO!” She aimed her foil at Venquist, instinct and training taking over thought, anguish, and fear.

Venquist’s smile widened, and then he vanished, too. In a flash, the stories she’d heard and the things she’d seen over the last few days flashed through her mind. Soldiers being vaporized with a flash of blue light. Possibilities so overwhelming that they could not be contained within this realm.

Venquist’s mad plan to develop a new and wholly different universe.

And she knew where he’d taken Benny. Desperate, unwilling to believe that she might be wrong, Sarah aimed the foil at herself.

And then – with a mix of thought, magic, and faith – she sent herself into the fabled thirteenth realm.

*          *          *

Silent.

Empty.

Weightless.

A sheen of white that seemed to press against the eyes, revealing nothing.

A complete lack of air, accompanied by the oddly insufficient presence of mind to fear suffocation.

A shadow – or a face? Featureless but for solidly brown orbs that seemed like eyes, membranous skin the color of rain, a whispered question that sounded only in her head in a language that was a mere continuum of muffled sound.

A push against her chest: solid, like the heal of a hand with the force of a tank.

A tumble backward that felt impossibly stationary: no physical input that her body moved, no visible proof – but her mind was utterly certain.

Then: pop!

And she was standing on the river bank. Her lungs convulsively sucked in air, and her knees threatened to buckle at the sudden gravity. Venquist floated above the water, unmindful of her, his face lit with chilling glee.

Benny lay on the ground beside her, free from the blue, terrifyingly still.

“Benny!”

She knelt beside him, yelled for Lassett and Henry though she didn’t hear herself make a sound. Even as they clamored through the undergrowth toward her, she was checking Benny’s pulse with shaking fingers.

“He is alive,” Venquist said as the others arrived, his eyes shifting slowly, never settling on one thing before they moved to examine something else. He added absently, “If I had killed him, you would not have done what I wanted you to do.”

His voice drifted toward her, an odd echo that seemed to fragment and hover in the air. She suddenly realized that nothing was as it should be. The light of the moon looked broken, sparkling in miniscule pieces that fluttered away with the push of her breath. A whisper flittered through the air around her: a sort of buzzing with no discernible source. And…

Something was drifting away from her skin.

Thin tendrils of…color. She ran her fingers through it, and her heart was shot through with heat and light, with passion, love, hope, fear, rage. The color was seeping from everything: the grass, the trees, the water. Even Benny seemed to emit a trail of light, every strand of it moving gently upward.

She turned to Venquist in horror. “What have you done?”

And he finally looked at her, the wonder still clear in his eyes. He cocked his head, as if she were the most curious thing he’d ever seen. And he said, “You still do not understand.”

“Understand what?”

“I did not do this.” He smiled, and his eyes rose slowly toward the sky. She followed his gaze, and her breath left her.

The night was torn.

A great, reaching gash seemed to bleed upward into a black so absent of color that it consumed all that drifted toward it. The sky was rent down the middle, the stars simply…gone. And in their place was a vast nothing. The wisps of color seeping away from everything she could see were drifting up toward that orifice, as if the very essence of the world was departing.

“What is that?” she asked on a hitch of breath.

Venquist’s smile faded, as if even he was frightened by the phenomenon before them. “Extraction.”

“Extraction.” Beside her, Lassett’s voice was cold and flat in a way no human could produce. “You could not have done such a thing.”

“What….” Her breath hitched again. The air was growing thin, she realized. Drifting upward toward that vacuum, so that what remained grew less breathable by the second. “What does that mean?”

Lassett asked Venquist in that awful voice, “Have you done it, then? Have you destroyed this realm for the sake of another?”

Henry looked up, Benny’s head on his lap. Sarah stared at Venquist, her hand clutching Benny’s lifeless fingers convulsively. Jack cursed, but it was a pointless, ineffectual sound.

Venquist shook his head, barely aware of them now. He said to Lassett, “I told you, I did not do this.”

And then he aimed his foil at himself and shot up toward the rip in the sky.

“What’s extraction?” When Lassett didn’t answer, Sarah grabbed his arm. That strange feeling that he was not human – that he was other – swept her, but she ignored it. When his shifting eyes turned to her, she asked, “What’s going on?”

“I believe that,” he gestured toward the laceration above, “is a gateway to the thirteenth realm. It is taking what it needs from the realm that birthed it. Eventually, it will turn all of this potential into something utterly different from anything in your experience.”

“Are you saying it’s feeding off of us? You have to stop it!”

His eyes flitted uncontrollably from one color to the next, a visible spectrum of distress. “I am afraid I cannot. Only the foil that created the gateway can close it. Only Venquist can stop this now.”

Panic reared within her, blackening her vision at the edges. The buzz around her was growing louder, and she found herself raising her voice to compete. “There has to be something you can do.”

But he only watched her, the sadness in his eyes intolerable to see.

“Then I’ll get Venquist. I’ll make him stop this.”

“You cannot. Venquist has gone into the thirteenth realm. If you follow him, you will die.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do,” Lassett insisted. “It is a different universe. Most of the Twelve Realms do not support life such as yourself. If you were to try to visit them, you would be decimated upon arrival – with no sign that you had ever attempted entrance. The thirteenth realm might be so alien as to be completely unsupportive of your life form.  The only way to know would be to go there, an endeavor which you would almost certainly not survive.”

“What other option do we have?”

“No,” Henry said before Lassett could respond. “No ‘other.’ You’re talkin’ about this like you’re thinkin’ about tryin’ it, and that ain’t gonna happen, sweetheart. Benny would never forgive me if I let you die on my watch.”

“Henry, if I do nothing, he won’t survive long enough to be mad at you.”

Unwilling to accept an untenable choice, Henry’s gaze turned fierce. “Ain’t happenin’, Sarah.”

Sarah looked at Lassett, but he only shook his head. The noise was decibels louder than it had been only seconds before; the air was less and less accessible. The hole in the sky was growing, the black steadily overcome by the offerings of the twelfth realm until it was shot through with light and pigment. A great, dark mass moved across it, a blue-black ripple that blotted all else beyond it, and an odd, unearthly wail shuddered across their sky. Utterly chilled, Sarah looked at Benny and wondered if she was just supposed to sit here and watch as their world was destroyed.

She touched the foil still on her arm, her gaze turned up toward that steadily increasing chasm. She said, “The hell with this.”

And she stood and pointed her foil toward the gateway.

Her eyes glowed otherworldly green in the oddly fragmented light. Color rose from her skin, shimmered away from her hair, feathered through her breath. Her essence, drifting away to fuel a universe that never should have been.

And her foil began to emit light.

It was strong, true, a brilliant blue that shone straight and didn’t fragment like the rest of the world. It was not affected by the pull of the new universe above them, and so it didn’t falter on its path toward the rip in the sky. It shone there against that gash, the color so bright that it burned.

And the tear in their universe began to close.

It started with the tinier shreds in the fabric of the sky. They sealed themselves together with hot white flashes of light that looked like a lightning storm might if one could watch it from a thousand miles away. It gave them all the impression that that hole was far more immense – and far more distant – than any of them had realized.

Behind her, Lassett whispered something that sounded like, “Impossible,” but Sarah barely noticed. It took every ounce of her concentration, all of her strength, to keep that blue light working. In the back of her mind was the fear that if she were to let up, even for a second, the gateway would realize that she didn’t have the right to affect it. The whole thing would open up again – perhaps even wider than before.

Suddenly, a pulse of blue that was not her own shot through the gap. She had a split second to understand that Venquist was back before he materialized in front of her.

And then he aimed his foil toward the tree beside her, and the massive oak began to topple onto her.

Sarah turned her foil toward the tree and pushed it away, and the thing lifted up into the air and fell on its side with a gigantic crash. The debris puffed into the air like a cloud, and Sarah was reminded of the table which had splintered in the library days before. Only this time, the bits of tree, soil, and leaf began to float, gently separating from gravity in an ever upward drift toward another realm.

Sarah had been right. Without the power of her foil, the gash was indeed starting to widen again. But before she could try to close it, Venquist began to attack her in earnest. Boulders, trees, waves of river water. The moment she deflected one weapon, another rose to take its place. The barrage was incessant, inescapable, and she barely had time to defend herself. As her strength began to wane and her reaction time to slow, she realized he might defeat her simply by wearing her down.

And that was unacceptable.

Though it left her vulnerable, she aimed her foil at Venquist. The shock registered on his face a split second before she fired. A rock the size of a watermelon slammed into her shoulder, battering the bone with tremendous force, just as the light of her foil speared toward him. The deflection prevented her strike from sending him out of the Twelve Realms, but it did propel him through the air. He landed on the opposite river bank hard enough to rip his living shell. Bits of his life dust shimmered in the air around his body as he stood.

Unmindful of his injuries, he aimed his foil at his feet, creating a blue disc that rose up to hover in the air. He rode that disc over the water, until he rested feet above the surging waves. He grinned as if all of this had gone according to plan, but Sarah wasn’t fooled.

The balance of power had shifted.

She stood at the ready, her right arm limp and throbbing at her side. Her foil was pointed at Venquist, and she thought she still had the strength to banish him forever. But there was one question that had occurred to her in the moment her foil had moved him across the river. Something she feared signified a far greater power than she’d previously guessed.

“How did you send other people to the thirteenth realm?” He only continued to smile, but something in his eyes seemed to shift in surprise. “That’s what you’ve been doing, isn’t it? But it you shouldn’t be able to. The foil isn’t supposed to work on anyone with free will. The only reason I can use it against you is because you’ve oppressed me. So how did you use it on all those other people?”

Instead of answering, he asked, “Is it not interesting that Lassett chose you for exactly this potential? He had no way to know, of course. He saw only that you possessed the capacity to create great progress. How could he have guessed that this would be the progress you would create?”

An awful sort of tingle began to work its way down Sarah’s spine, as if every nerve in her body fired in a wave. Something Lassett had said tugged at the back of her subconscious, but she couldn’t quite bring it to the surface. Telling herself not to be drawn in by Venquist’s attempts at distraction, she shook her head.

“I didn’t do this,” she insisted. “You did.”

“No. I could not.” His voice was so eerily calm it sent chills skittering over her skin. “I tried. For a thousand of your years, I tried. I sent livestock, people. Entire villages, and then entire armies. I focused my efforts on love at first, and then rage. Fear, horror, triumph, genius. No matter what the possibilities, nothing I sent from your realm ever generated its own universe. Finally, I realized it was not for me to create. It was not for any paladin to create. Such a task could only be accomplished by an oppressed.”

He smiled at her again, and the look had nausea churning in her stomach. She thought of Benny on the ground beside her, her family hundreds of miles away. Every person who at this moment was comfortably asleep in their bed. On the other side of the world, people were going on about their lives, oblivious to the fact that all was about to be destroyed.

She shook her head. “I didn’t do this,” she repeated. But her voice was weak.

“It seems that I owe you a debt of gratitude. You have done what I could not do.” He lifted his arms up, palms open, toward that steadily growing chasm. “By trying to send yourself to it, you have created the thirteenth realm.”

The words held the horrible ring of truth. Though every ounce of her wanted to deny it, she realized that would be a waste of time.

“If I did this, then I can undo it,” she said, her voice sharpened by false bravado. Without looking at it, she knew that the gateway continued to grow, the air around her rushing toward that entrance with ever increasing speed. The din continued to amplify, and she had to shout to be heard over the noise. “Tell me how you banished all those people.”

But Venquist only said, his words an echo of Lassett’s, “Tread lightly. Progress has its own end. It is not for us to judge the value of it.”

He was too confident. He was too calm, completely certain he could deflect any attack she levied.

And it was starting to piss her off.

She thought of a way to take that smirk off of his face, but the result would be horrific. And then she thought of the thousands he’d killed, and any ounce of sympathy she might have felt for him fled.

Sarah aimed her foil at his left arm, where his own weapon stretched from wrist to elbow. She reminded herself that his body was only a shell, and then she fired.

And his arm ripped from his torso and flew through the air, flinging a spray of white, shimmering dust as it went. The blue disc he’d stood on disappeared, and on a cry of surprise rather than pain, he dropped into the water. Sarah used her foil to lift him from the river, set him on the bank far enough away to keep him from being any sort of threat.

His life dust began to drift away from his open shoulder, up toward the thirteenth realm, so she sealed the wound with her foil. That incomprehensible dust was the true Venquist. If she let it escape, she wouldn’t be able to banish him from the Twelve Realms.

Venquist stared at her, his jaw slack, his coloring shifting rapidly, and she realized that for the first time, he was truly afraid. She pointed her foil at his midsection, and she asked again, “How did you hurt all those people?”

“They allowed me to.”

The answer drove up her ire again, and she shot a stream of blue into the ground at his side. “Don’t bullshit me, Venquist. No one gave you permission to hurt them. How?”

He shook his head, his eyes wide. “Not the humans.”

Behind her, Lassett said softly, “No.”

Sarah frowned, glanced at him, and then back at Venquist. “Then who?”

“The Invigilators.”

“Why?” It was Lassett who asked the question. He rose to stand beside Sarah, and in his sudden fury, his eyes glowed with a horrible light. “Why would they do such a thing?”

“I do not know.”

“Then why did you help them?”

Venquist looked surprised at the question. “To see if I could.”

The clamor became a rumble, the rumble a deafening roar that hinted at a crescendo in each moment, until it immediately became impossibly louder.

And then, as if the pull of this universe was no longer sufficient, Sarah’s feet lifted from the ground. As she began to drift up toward that terrifying maw of possibilities, she wondered if she’d waited too long. And still, she couldn’t stop staring at Venquist.

He looked so pathetic now. Broken and utterly defeated. A part of her whispered that perhaps that was punishment enough.

He nodded at her, as if he knew her thoughts, and he said, “You understand now. It was not my fault. They told me to do it.”

And that, she realized, simply wasn’t reason enough.

“You should have said no,” she told him.

And then she sent him out of the Twelve Realms, permanent banishment of a being who had indulged in unforgivable evil to help satisfy a curiosity.

*          *          *

The gateway between this realm and the next was ever widening, stretching for more, as if it were not merely the unintended product of Sarah’s actions but a being unto itself with a purpose all its own. She aimed her foil toward the gap, but even as she did so her body drifted closer to it. She had no leverage, nothing against which to brace herself, but there was no time to try to find a better position.

Her world was ending.

She sent every ounce of her concentration toward the threat above, and the edges of the gap began to fire once more. She thought the break would close, that the edges would seal themselves together – but they didn’t. The pull of the thirteenth realm was too strong. It sucked the life from this universe with such strength that the sheer flow of potential was a force Sarah could not overcome. Small capillaries burst in her nose, her ears, her eyes, with the force of her effort. She began to cry, a silent, horrible admittance of defeat that the rest of her refused to accept.

And then she heard his voice.

Benny, calling her name from somewhere below her. At first she thought she’d imagined it, but then she heard him again. And she knew in that moment that she would succeed.

She could do anything if it meant keeping Benny alive.

She focused her thoughts on him. Let the image of his face drift through her mind, let the sound of his voice fill her. She felt the knowledge of his love swell within her, strengthening all the pieces of her that had been ripped to shreds by this impossible endeavor.

And the gateway, that seemingly indomitable path to a ravenous realm, began to close.

*          *          *

Silent.

Empty.

Weightless.

A sheen of white that seemed to press against the eyes, revealing nothing.

A crushing mass against the chest, blocking all air.

Sarah moaned, fearing the suffocation, dreading the featureless face that was surely coming to tell her all was lost.

Sarah.

The murmur fluttered through her consciousness, a siren’s call to wake, to open her eyes. She resisted, and the heft hit her chest again.

Sarah!

Something familiar about that voice. Something warm, soothing…. It made her long for the love she’d just found, and tears welled at a loss that was too devastating to consider.

Benny, she tried to murmur, but her voice wouldn’t work in this airless space.

Then suddenly, her lungs convulsed. A painful influx of oxygen, devastatingly cold against the raw tissue of her throat. Her body heaved, fighting its way toward life, and her eyes opened against her will.

Stars. All she saw were stars. And then…Benny.

“Sarah,” he said, and she realized he was crying.

Her lungs convulsed again, and her fingers clawed at the dirt. Her mind understood what she was seeing before her body recognized that it truly was alive, and she whispered, “Benny.”

And then she was in his arms, and everything that had been cold within her warmed.

“You weren’t breathing,” he said against her ear, his face buried in her hair. “I didn’t think you were going to wake up. I thought…” He shuddered and held her tighter, and Sarah shut her eyes and squeezed back with her good arm.

“What happened?” Her voice was weak, the effort to make any sound incredibly painful, but they heard her.

“You closed the gateway.” It was Lassett who spoke. She opened her eyes to see him kneeling beside her, his face a reflection of respect. And his eyes looked unbearably sad.

“Venquist?”

“Gone. You sent him from the Twelve Realms. He will never return to hurt anyone in this universe or any other.”

Benny slowly eased back, though he kept an arm around her, and she saw in Lassett’s face that their victory was not of a war, but of a battle.

“Was he telling the truth? Did the Invigilators do this?”

Lassett looked as if he didn’t want to answer, but he finally said, “I believe he spoke the truth.”

“Do you have any idea why they might have done this?”

He shook his head, his expression growing grim. “I do not know. But…”

“If they did it once,” she finished for him, guessing his train of thought, “they could do it again.”

“Yes.”

She nodded, understanding as she studied him that he couldn’t fulfill a purpose set forth by an entity that he could no longer trust. “What will you do now?”

“I do not know,” he replied. But…there was something in his eyes.

She studied him for a moment longer, and then she removed the foil and handed it to him. “I’m guessing you’re going to need this.”

He stared at it for long enough to make her think he wouldn’t take it. Then he accepted it and held it carefully as he looked at her again.

“The Twelfth Realm owes you its gratitude. You saved every living creature in this universe from assured destruction.”

“Which wouldn’t have been necessary if I hadn’t created the source of that destruction in the first place.”

But he was shaking his head. “You were manipulated into a position that would have defeated most, and you persevered. I must apologize for my part in bringing you into this, and yet, I cannot regret it. If I had chosen anyone else, I fear we would have failed.”

He stood, donned the foil with some reluctance. Pointing it across the river, he used it to retrieve Venquist’s weapon. Sarah saw as it drew closer that it was mercifully free from the arm it had adorned. Lassett caught it, considered it silently, and then fitted it to his other arm. He looked at each of them in turn, and then his eyes returned to Sarah and Benny.

“Your future is still rich with possibilities. I look forward to watching it unfold.”

Then he pointed one of the foils at himself, and he was gone.

They sat in silence for a long moment, staring at the space where Lassett had stood. Then Henry put a hand on Sarah’s shoulder and stood, Jack rising with him.

“You did good, kiddo,” he said to Sarah. “We’ll go get the plane started.”

He winked at Benny and followed Jack up river, and Sarah and Benny were alone.

He still had his arm around her. Comforted, she drew close again and rested her head on his shoulder.

“How do we go back to normal after this?” she asked him. “Now that we know what we know, how in the hell are we going to get back to real life?”

Benny rested his head on hers. “I don’t think we can. Everything is different now, and it always will be.”

Sarah’s eyes grew bright, and she squeezed them shut. “We’ll find a new normal,” she said, assuring herself as much as him. She thought of what Lassett had told them. “And as long as we’re together, it’ll have endless potential. We’ll make sure of it.”

At the sound of the plane’s engine sputtering to life, Benny helped Sarah up. He pressed his lips to hers, a fierce branding of possession that she gave back as good as she got, and then he pulled away. And then, hand in hand, they walked together toward the start of their new normal.