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I was everyone and everything. Then, without warning, I was only one again.
My hands were my own. My body? Why it was the body of Jackson Balor, pure and simple, and not Ferengris or anyone else. When I flexed my muscles, no wind blew and no water surged. When I opened my eyes, I saw the world around me with my own vision.
And what was it I saw? Well, that’s a bit of tricky question, on account of I weren’t too sure of it myself. I was standing in a big underground chamber—a cave with walls covered in moss. My feet were submerged in a pool of blood that flooded the entirety of the cavern floor. From beneath the blood emerged tall stalks with mushrooms on their tops, and blue light emanated from beneath the hood of each one. They cast the whole chamber in an eerie glow, and the light mixed with the crimson pool below me to make it seem a deep purple.
Something brushed against my ankle. I was certain I could see shapes in the blood; the small dark forms of fish, swimming about in that violet. The moss moved, and I realized there was a mass of huge flies clinging to them soft green walls. It looked like a hundred of the things were sharing the chamber with me.
But none of that was the important part. Nah, the important part was what I saw in the center of that cavern. Rising up from the blood and extending to the cave roof was a massive pillar of bones, all stacked up and crammed together tight. Some of the bones looked like they’d been sunbleached to white, while others still looked wet and grisly with bits of rotten flesh. There were rib cages and arms and fingers and femurs. And there were skulls—so many skulls. Human skulls, dog skulls, deer skulls, probably a whole load of other types of skulls I didn’t recognize. The skulls spiraled up the pillar, and each one seemed to be watching me with empty eye sockets, an eternal grin on every ghostly face.
I took it all in, and I hardly had the chance to wonder where I was or how I’d gotten there when the flies covering the walls all started shaking their wings. The wings buzzed, and the buzz grew louder and louder in volume, and somehow all that noise congealed into discernible words.
“It is done.”
With those words came a new understanding. I raised my hands to my face and looked at my palms and my fingers. They was my own, and yet I could distinctly remember when they’d been those of Ferengris, breaking the chains of his brother only a few short moments ago.
“Is he dead?” I asked.
“His body is,” Ferengris replied in that buzzing voice, that voice that was not a voice. “But Cerenis still lives. He will always live. One day he will find a new vessel, and he will walk the world once more. For now, though, he is gone.”
Well I reckoned that was one less problem to worry about, at least. “And where am I?” I asked. “Or, um, where are we?”
“You are within me.”
“Right.” I looked around, trying to see if there was an exit to be found. There didn’t seem to be one, and when I looked back at the bone pillar, I swear the arrangement of skulls had changed, that certain skulls were in different parts of the spiral now. “We’ve fully merged then? This is what it’s like, to be a part of you?”
“It can be,” said Ferengris. “If you desire it.”
“And if I don’t?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On what you desire.”
“Oh, of course.” It was all starting to make a strange sort of sense, or at least I thought it was. “Because we’re all one, ain’t we? We always were, even before this whole merging business. Everything’s just a part of the Wild, a piece of the greater whole.” I walked round the chamber. The shapes in the blood swam out of my path. “What I want and what you want... End of the day, any difference’s just a trick, right? An illusion from only seeing a tiny part of the whole. We all want the same thing.”
“Do we?”
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t act like we don’t, Ferengris. You’re really gonna make me say it? Even though you already damn well know?”
“What do you want?”
“To live, obviously!” I snapped. “It’s what all life wants! It’s what we must want! Life must live, like you’re always saying!”
The cavern went silent. I was certain now that the skulls really were changing positions whenever I looked away from them.
A few flies shifted about too. Then the buzzing resumed:
“Humanity remains on the path of self-destruction. That has not changed. One man’s actions alone cannot alter the course of his entire species.”
“A god’s could,” I pointed out. “If I were you, I could change all of it. I could fix the world, society, civilization. I’d have the power to change it all.”
“You would,” Ferengris agreed. “Is that what you want? To be a god?”
My voice was quiet. “No,” I told him. “Nah, that ain’t what I want at all.”
“What do you want?” he asked again.
“A simple life,” I said. “I want... contentment. My needs met. I don’t wanna be fighting for civilization for the rest of my days. I just want to live, you know? Without worrying about all that. Build a nice and quiet life for myself, and maybe a few others, away from all that. It’s... I think it’s what I’ve always wanted. I just never really thought of it, because I didn’t think it was an option. I didn’t think it was possible.”
“But now?”
“Now... Now I know that the society Cerenis built ain’t the only path. It can’t be. Now I understand how much bigger the world is than I thought. And yeah, humanity might be doomed. Maybe civilization’s gonna lead us all into suicide. But I reckon that if enough people start living differently, then maybe some of us will survive. And we’ll learn to do things better. And maybe others’ll follow our example too, and more will survive.”
“The Cerenites won’t allow it. Nor the nobles, nor the merchants. To live such a life would be to reject their social hierarchy, to reject the power they hold over you.”
“I know,” I said. I was scared. What I wanted was so simple, and yet so enormous at the same time. “I guess I’ll have to fight, then.”
“Did you not just say you didn’t want to fight?”
“Yeah, but sometimes you gotta,” I said. “Sometimes, the bastards’ll make you. I’ll fight, because I have to, because that’s how I’ll survive, and how I’ll live. And while I’m fighting, I’ll build a better life, so that one day the fighting won’t be necessary no more.”
“It’s not a guarantee,” Ferengris pointed out. “Far from it. You know this. When humanity dies, it’ll take much of the world with it.”
“Yeah, I know. But if I don’t got hope, what do I got?”
The skulls grinned at me. “Then this is what you choose? This is what you want? Life as a human? You could be a god. You could be the Wild itself. You know all this, and still you choose mortality?”
“I do.”
Something changed. The shadows grew, and they cast the grins of the skulls even wider.
“Then live, Jackson Balor. Prove to me that you are alive, and live.”