There is a dream within a dream, where the entire world is asleep and cannot wake. Here, the light of day must be met with open eyes.
Passage Three, Third Precept of the Combat Codes
Cego opened his eyes.
Something brushed against his skin. Tendrils of darkness slithered across him like eels. He was helpless as the black currents ran the length of his body and found their way in, penetrating his nose and ears, stuffing themselves into his mouth.
He tried to scream, but he was voiceless. He tried to think, to recall who or what he was, but even his thoughts were shrouded by the emptiness that had lodged itself inside him.
Cego hung in weightless suspension, a never-ending black stretched out before him. The wetness against his skin and the pressure of the darkness were heavy and sleepless.
If this was the end, what more could he do? Why fight it?
Maybe this was home.
A voice penetrated the void and a face illuminated the darkness.
“Who were you before you were born?” Farmer asked. The old master’s wrinkled face pulsed with life in front of Cego before dissipating to black again.
Nothingness reigned until another luminescent form took shape, this one even more vivid, pushing the darkness all the way to the edges.
Cego saw himself walking on the beach beside Sam, the piercing azure sky above.
“The best crabs are the ones with the blue shells, don’t you think?” Sam said. “Maybe Silas will bring some back from offshore today.”
The island scene dissipated and was replaced by a round, smiling face. Joba Maglin reached out to Cego with those massive arms of his. And beside Joba stood a little boy, blood trickling from a cut on his face. Weep.
“If anyone was to get out of here, I’m glad it was you,” Weep said from a place where vines crawled up stone walls and reached to street-level window grates.
The black intruded again, swept the vision away like a wave. Cego waited in the darkness until another radiant face came to life.
“You’ve got to darkin’ keep at it, kid,” Murray Pearson said as he stroked his grey beard. “If you let life hold you down, you’ll stay down. So, you need to keep standing back up.”
Cego tried to hold on to Murray, will him to stay for a moment more, but just like the rest of the visions, Murray left him alone in the darkness.
Cego waited an eternity. He had no grasp of time. He may have floated in nothingness for a second or a minute or a year, and none of it mattered, not until another voice dropped from above.
“You told me you would stop visiting me here,” the voice said. “You said it would be the last time.”
This voice had a different tenor from the rest. It came from a different place, one that Cego could reach out to, almost grasp.
“It is okay, Cego; I am here,” the voice said. “Open your eyes.”
Cego obeyed. He opened his eyes.
An overwhelming flood of light and sensation blasted him. It was nearly too much, but soon the light faded and Cego saw a familiar face hovering over his.
Xenalia.
“Are you real?” Cego asked, finding a parched whisper.
“I certainly hope so,” Xenalia replied. “Though reality itself is subjective, given the neuron impulses that fire in your brain are likely different from what any other sentient being is experiencing, so actually, your question is quite—”
“Xenalia.” Cego stopped the cleric. A painful smile slid across his face as he recognized Xenalia was indeed standing over him, not a vision in the void but a friend in the ward.
“I am sorry,” Xenalia said. “I forget that it takes several days to fully reimmerse in this physical world.”
Cego blinked and looked around. The medward was different somehow. Dimmer, quieter than he remembered.
He looked to one of the translucent stasis vats, empty of any occupants now. He could feel the wetness against his skin, his body floating in nothingness.
“I was in stasis?” Cego asked Xenalia. “How long was I gone?”
“You were gone three weeks,” Xenalia said. “You suffered severe damage during your match, internal hemorrhaging, not to mention a variety of fractures and tears; all that needed to be repaired while you were out.”
Cego tried to sit up and get a better look around, but a sharp pain stabbed at his midsection. The little cleric put a cold hand on his bandaged chest to keep him still.
He was glad to see Xenalia’s pale face looking down at him, blue veins streaking her forehead. She looked different, though, changed somehow.
“I… I only remember fighting my brother,” Cego recalled. “We were on the island, in the Cradle. I’d left the arena behind. I thought I would never come back.”
“I was not sure you would come back either.” Xenalia frowned. “In particular because we had to do things… the old-fashioned way.”
Cego shook his head, confused.
“I was there, watching you,” Xenalia said. “The mass of blacklight that hung over the Circle you and Silas stood in, my Observer took readings that were beyond anything I had ever seen before.”
“Silas,” Cego said. “Is he…”
“Gone,” Xenalia finished. “Yes.”
“How?” Cego had to know.
“As you know, I understand nothing of fighting,” Xenalia said. “But even I could see the unnatural speed you two moved with. The blacklight was feeding both of you and could not sustain the output.”
“The island.” Cego saw the black rain, the red veins of lightning, the giant tsunami. “It was falling apart.”
Xenalia nodded. “I believe the Cradle was destroyed. It was already damaged when the Codex infrastructure was dismantled in Kiroth and Ezo, but some part of it remained, an imprint within its initial inhabitants, those born from the blacklight. When you fought Silas, the remaining structure appeared to have self-destructed… as if it were programmed to do so.”
Cego was silent. The Cradle was gone. Silas was gone. He could feel a part of himself missing, as if Xenalia had removed some vital organ from Cego while he was unconscious.
“I saw both you and Silas in the aftermath within the Circle,” Xenalia said. “I was able to get to you quickly enough and apply my remaining shot of catalytic adrenaline to restart your heart. Your brother Silas was dead already. His body was recovered by his lieutenants. They took him and gave him a proper burial.”
“Wait,” Cego said abruptly. He tried to sit up again, but pain racked his body, and Xenalia guided him back to a supine position. “You said you applied your remaining shot of adrenaline. You had applied one before?”
Hope budded within Cego.
“Yes,” Xenalia said. “I told you I was there watching you fight, but primarily, I was caring for Kōri Shimo.”
“Shimo is… alive?” Cego asked.
“Yes,” Xenalia said. “He was right beside you in this ward, recovering for the first two weeks. To be honest, I am still not quite sure how his symbiot reaction was able to fire so quickly after—”
“Thank you.” Tears flooded Cego’s eyes. Kōri Shimo was alive. Sam was alive.
“You are welcome, Cego,” Xenalia said. “Though as you know, it is a part of my cleric’s oath to care for all who come within my reach. If I could have saved your brother, I would have.”
“Xenalia,” Cego said. “You did save my brother.”
“What?”
For once, Cego saw confusion flash across the cleric’s eyes, though it didn’t last for more than a moment.
“Ah, I see.” Xenalia nodded. “Kōri Shimo was also born of the Cradle. His body housed the boy you grew up with, the one called Sam.”
“But… if Kōri Shimo is my brother,” Cego said, “who was the one I thought was Sam? The one you cared for in this ward for the past year?”
Xenalia smiled. “I had a theory and now it is proven true. The boy we housed was a Bit-Minder Hive, brought up from the Deep by your friend Murray Pearson. They were using his body to transmit the blacklight.”
“Like Aon Farstead?”
“Yes,” Xenalia said. “Though both of the Hives were destroyed.”
Cego was weary. His eyes began to flutter shut, and he could feel the inky blackness intruding on the edges of his vision again. He feared he would lose this reality, that the nothingness would return.
“Please don’t leave me,” Cego whispered to Xenalia.
“I will not leave you,” Xenalia replied. She placed her cold hand on his cheek. “Nor will any of your friends. They are as loyal as any I have seen on this planet.”
Cego had not even considered the Whelps, whether they had survived the destruction of Albright Stadium that day. A pang of guilt hit him in the gut.
“Do not worry,” Xenalia said. “Your friends are alive and well. In fact, I have had to prevent them from barging in here on numerous occasions, in fear that they would disturb your recovery. But the one called Solara… she was insistent. She watched over you every night. I told her she was not doing anything to help, but she refused to listen. I could not tell if it was stupidity or… something else that kept her here.”
A smile broke across Cego’s face and he felt his lip split open. Blood started to run down his chin.
Xenalia made a sound of annoyance and reached for the clotting ointment.
Suddenly, Cego realized why Xenalia looked different.
“Xenalia, where’s your Observer?” Cego asked. He couldn’t remember ever seeing the cleric apart from her little red spectral.
Xenalia frowned and shook her head. “It’s gone.”
“Oh, you mean helping elsewhere in the—”
“It’s all gone, Cego.” Xenalia stared down at him, brushing the hair from his forehead. “The energy… When your fight with Silas ended, when the Cradle was destroyed, it emitted a massive pulse of blacklight. It shut everything down: the Enforcers in the arena, the feeds, the factories… the cities. All technology stopped working. And the spectrals, they’ve all vanished.”
All gone.
Cego’s eyes began to close again.
This time, he let the darkness come.