Alara Unbroken - Doug Beyer [29]
He arranged Jazal’s limbs tidily. “There you go, Jazal,” he said. The blood was sticky on Ajani’s hands and chest.
Suddenly Ajani convinced himself that the two of them were alone in the world. He didn’t need to go out and tell the others, because there were no others to tell. Of course not. It was just the two of them, and Jazal was simply reclining, like when they were children and Ajani had watched his older brother sleeping. Ajani smiled at him.
“I’ll take care of all of this, Jazal,” Ajani said. “I’ll tidy up your room and let you sleep. Then tomorrow we can go on a walkabout, see the jungle, maybe chase some elves around the woods. I’ll miss you tonight but … But I’ll see you in the morning. I’ll just let you sleep now. You sleep. I’ll take care of the room.”
The dark wave welled up in him. He cursed again, trying to feel anger to make it go away. But it was no use. The feeling surged up his chest and into his mind. He couldn’t breathe. He felt intolerably hot. He felt the blood suddenly, felt his feet awash in the puddle of it, felt its stickiness on his face and mane and hands. He smelled it and tasted it, the liquid that was supposed to be inside Jazal. He had never seen so much blood before. It was all over him. He was drenched in red.
“Ajani—” said Jazal’s voice.
“Shut up,” Ajani said to himself.
He tried to roar, but the sound crumbled and choked in his throat.
The world spiraled in on him, forcing him down inside himself. The weight of it crushed his mind. Everything went dark and warm, and he felt as though his consciousness had ruptured, his mind being exiled to some realm of insanity. Shapes swam in the darkness—the blood-hallucinations he always saw under his eyelids.
But then Ajani realized his eyes weren’t closed.
THE BLIND ETERNITIES
Ajani felt a void around him like suction. It dragged at his fur and skin, and sucked at his eyeballs. He blinked repeatedly and moved his head from side to side, but his vision was reduced to watery impressions. He saw a dark green shape, its hills and valleys roiling uncomfortably, and momentary inklings of creatures moving across the world at speeds too fast to be natural. He could sense that place in a way he didn’t understand, a feeling like the memory of a taste, an imprint once removed from reality. It was Naya; somehow he was certain of it. That green, undulating shape was my home world, he thought.
He saw—or felt—other shapes in the void too. He turned his attention to them, which brought a blast of chaos rushing past his mind, like turning to face into a hard wind. He perceived four other realms in the void, dynamic and textured like Naya was, but they each felt very different. They were alien and off-putting, but he strained his perception toward them as much as he could. His eyes couldn’t take the grasping winds of the void, so he closed his eyes. His mind hurt when he tried to concentrate on the scene before him, so he let his consciousness float freely, as blank as the void. After a moment, the worlds appeared to him, as if he could feel their contours with some sense beyond sight or touch. Other worlds, other lives, other bizarre forms of being—he felt a rush of living textures that bewildered him.
And he felt motion. The worlds moved relative to one another, he perceived. In fact, they were nearing one another, so close that they were beginning to overlap. Streaks of existence reached out from each world like blobs of colored light, blending with each other at the edges, forming an irregular ring with an eye of void at the center.
It was too much to take in. He couldn’t hold what he was seeing in his mind. He let his consciousness slide toward one of the worlds, a swirl of hot reds and smoke. Before he could turn away again, he felt it rushing up to meet him. There was a violent jolt, and the sudden sensation of weight—and falling.
He had a body again, a real, physical body. And it was hurtling through fiery air toward