Echoes by Syrinx

The man in black stepped from a ledge of arid desert sand onto ice-glazed snow. Snow swirled in torrents out of the clouded sky and into the gleaming white valley; those landing on the border the hot sand were vaporized immediately by the sweltering sun. The man in black descended down a winding pathway into the valley, heavily spurred boots crunching snow and ice underfoot. The sweat froze on his face. He pulled his hat lower over his eyes, shielding them from the icy wind buffeting him from all sides. Skeletal trees that seemed to be made entirely of frost clung to the edge of the cliff beside the path snaking down the side of the valley. They glistened, but there was no sun. The man in black rounded a sharp corner and was faced with a bridge of ice suspended thousands of feet over the valley floor below. It was maybe possible to take two steps across before tumbling into the chasm. Two steps. No more. A gust of wind blew the hat from the man in black’s head, whisking it to an untimely death out over the abyss and revealing the man in black’s pale youthful face and startling dark eyes. The man in black barely stopped to take a breath, and then he was running. Running across the insanely narrow bridge, heavy metal spurs digging into the treacherous glassy surface. The bridge cracked and crumbled behind him, huge chunks of ice growing smaller and smaller as they plunged into the abyss among a sparkling rain of ice shards. The man in black did not look back to see it. He ran on, closing his eyes against the relentless onslaught of freezing snow that speckled his unruly dark hair and froze against his face. The wind changed direction and he cautiously opened his eyes. Before him was an avenue of delicate frost trees, leading to a fountain of streams of water that had frozen in midair pouring from the mouths of four iron foxes rearing up on their hind legs. Behind this strange courtyard loomed the immense twin front doors of a castle of sheer black ice. The man in black strode through the ethereal white trees. His arm brushed a fragile outstretched branch, but the tree didn’t shatter into crystalline fragments, only subtly withdrew its arm. The man in black rounded the fountain and stood before the smooth black doors. Leaden butterflies hovered around an elaborate doorknocker, effortlessly beating their impossible metallic wings. The man in black ignored the doorknocker, kicked open the door, and stepped inside. The doors banged open, hitting the wall on either side, and then banged shut with an echoing clang. Pitch darkness. Then bright flickering lights from an unknown source revealed a tortuous labyrinth. Meandering walls of doors, one after the other, spiraled away as far as the eye could see.
The man in black’s voice was steady, but sounded very small in the stillness.
“I love what you‘ve done with the place, Cyrus.”
A wispy laugh echoed eerily out of the spiraling labyrinth of doors, very loud and very empty.
“You always were predictable, Darius. Nobody calls me by that name anymore.”
“And the only one who ever called me anything is dead.”
The man in black’s voice was flat and emotionless. He strode into the maze.
“Is she? I’m very sorry to hear that, Darius.”
Darius opened a door and looked out into a maniacal night sky. Stars orbited crazily spinning planets in a shimmering blur, and a swirling nimbus of dark azure clouds churned across a frozen sun. Icicles plummeted from it, piercing the star encircled planets as they passed under it in their crazy dance. Darius shut the door with an echoing clang that rang throughout the twisted halls, then tried to open it again. It was locked.
“You’re a magician,” he said to the bodiless voice, panting slightly. Only the faintest traces of amazement crept into his voice, as if any emotion had to creep through the keyhole to reach him, because the door was padlocked shut.
“I’m haven’t become a magician, Darius, only a master of illusion. All of life is an illusion, you see. I’m only…giving it another layer. Icing on the cake. If you dig deep enough, you might get to the cold metal of the serving plate. But then again, you may not. And how would you tell if you had reached it? In any case, there’s plenty of cake to go around. Plenty of lies to keep us from starving.”
Darius turned a corner and kicked open a door to reveal a sun setting behind a city of decrepit towers. The sun sank onto the horizon and blood began to seep slowly from beneath it. The towers stood like dead trees in a swamp of blood, cascading down the buildings in rivulets and crusting hideously at their bases. Darius shut the door calmly.
“You’re twisted,” he spat the words disgustedly, but his expression never changed.
The same ghastly hollow laughter. “Am I? We’re murderers, Darius, and you are the worst of both of us. To you death was just a little poison in a glass or a dagger from behind, one less conceited dignitary, one more day’s wage. You didn’t know the value of what you were taking away. A innocent monstrous child incinerating ants one by one without any knowledge that they feel pain. I know how precious a thing I’m snatching away, and how deeply its loss affects the living. I treasure the lives I’ve taken, line them up like jars on a shelf…like so many caged butterflies with their wings torn off, still remembering how to fly but finding nothing when they try to flutter a wing. I like to collect lives, Darius, because I had one of my own once and I seem to have lost it. That or someone has taken it and carelessly thrown it away without a second glance.”
Darius turned another corner, his youthful face as hard and cold as stone, making it seem so much older. He kicked open a door so forcefully that it swung outward, crashing into the door behind it and cracking it down the middle. The spidery crack sealed itself and faded from view. Within the door Darius could see beneath greenish water, murky and swirling with dust and broken shells. Long spidery roots trailed eerily from above, drifting in the water and swaying gently even though there was no current. Darius looked closer into the doorway and say they weren’t roots, they were naked branches extending from upturned trees, their heads in the water and trunks in the air. From the leafless branches hung softly glowing orbs, balancing in the water. In a slow steady rain, millions of silver coins drifted down, some corroded green around the edges, some tarnished, but most were dazzlingly bright. They swam sway in a flash of silver as they hit the murky bottom, like shoals of tiny fish. It was eerie and foreboding, but somehow beautiful, somehow enticing. Darius stepped toward the doorway, then slammed it shut. His eyes were dark and tortured.
“You are as stupid as ever, Darius. You strut in here, unruffled and hopelessly naïve. Is it confidence? No. You are merely stupid. You think you can find me behind those doors?” Laughter echoed again, but this time it was pure and innocent and childlike, but still hollow, with the same consuming emptiness, and it made it all the more horrible. An angelic little boy stepped out from around a corner. He looked up at Darius with wide, trusting hazel eyes, half covered with unruly golden hair. He smiled, the sweetest smile in the world, showing tiny gleaming needle-sharp fangs.
He spread his hands, small palms lifted upward. “What? Don’t you remember me?”
“You’re mad, Cyrus. Mad and callous and distorted.” His numb, cold exterior slid off him like a mask, revealing a face that was twisted and inhuman with hate. “Why? What did she ever do to you, Cyrus?!”
The little boy twirled a strand of hair absently between his fingers. “Because she made you happy,” he said matter-of-factly, “And you don’t deserve to be happy.”
“And who are you,” said Darius in a trembling voice barely louder than a whisper, “To decide who deserves to be happy and who doesn’t?”
Cyrus looked up at Darius in innocent surprise. “Why, I’m God, of course. Didn’t you know that?”
Darius laughed, and it was an awful, humorless sound like a dying hyena laughing itself to death in the middle of the desert.
“Enough of this, Cyrus. I want to see you as you really are, and then I can finally finish what I came here to do.”
Cyrus smiled, and the wide-eyed little boy was gone, replaced in an instant by a man, not much older than Darius himself. His face was nothing but long, hideous scars carved deep into his skin, red and angry and crawling across his skin like centipedes. His angelic blonde hair was the same, but his trusting hazel eyes were gone, replaced by lucid milky white eyes, both of them blind.
Darius took a step back, his eyes were wide and uncomprehending, “I didn’t do that to you, Cyrus. I can’t have done all of that. You know I didn‘t do all of that, Cyrus!”
Cyrus’s blind eyes regarded him coldly, “Didn’t you?” His mouth twisted into a grotesque parody of a smile, just another twisted scar on his mangled face.
Darius’s face grew hard and old again, and he drew a bright silver pistol from the inside of his short black cloak. And aimed steadily. His eyes were haunted.
That horrible hollow laughter. Darius wanted to scream and scream and never stop. “All right, Darius, let’s end this. Let’s rid the world of one of the many boils on its pitted surface. On three, Shall we?” He laughed, raising an identical silver pistol, his milky blind eyes gleaming. “One…”
Out of the snow-covered valley in the middle of the desert the deafening crack of a pistol shot echoed endlessly. Or it might have been two pistol shots, fired simultaneously.
But that might have been just an illusion.