Shadows of the Fallen

Chapter 1: the death

I didn’t remember dying. With an obscure sense of apprehension, I wondered if the distant angry voice drifting in my head meant I was once again about to experience that transcending ending: death. If I was, there was nothing, at that point, I could do.
While I didn’t remember dying, I dimly recall, at some later point, solemn whispers saying that I had, saying that death had taken me, but that some unrevealing shadows had pressed their mouth over mine and filled my stilled lungs with air, their life, and in doing so I had been rekindled. I had had no idea who it was that spoke of such a task, or who “he” was. But if I didn’t remember the dying, I remembered the pain before passing into that great oblivion as little more than a vague notion. The pain I will never forget. I remember the blood, so much blood. The cobble stone streets soaked in it, running from curb to curb into the street drains. My head bashed against the road as people slowly walked towards me in front of the tall tower, lying there gasping for air. They all shook their heads at me, some weeping for those who hath not known me. The officers marked where my body was laying, searching for evidence of self-conviction.
I knew what I had done. Suicide. It was thy only way out. I was miserable. There was nothing left for me back in that world, the world that tormented me so. Every time I passed down the street I was stared at with some curious look as to why I was pale. Perhaps it was my wicked life. No parents, nor siblings; no one to teach me right from wrong. No girl to show me faith or love. Nothing but hates, evil, trickery, treachery, and demonic sensibility. Even if it was an accident…
Am I not a sinner? Have I not betrayed the commandments? Me, the actual rebel of society found his way out, but it was not out enough to die fully.



My dream…
I lay there on a small cot, wrapped in bandages that soaked up my blood. But, if I had indeed died, why did I still shed as pathetic humans do? I struggled to rouse myself wholly, but my awaking awareness seemed aimless, bobbing in a cosmic, shadowy sea. My abdomen roiled. I suddenly had to pull all my mental strength into throwing up. I knew all too well that in my present condition. My eyelids sagged closed again, and I foundered to a place darker yet.
I caught myself, forced my thoughts to the surface, and willed my eyes open again. I remember: they gave me herbs to dull the pain to help me sleep. The pain, if not as sharp, still found me there.
I could still smell my own blood running from my body. Even that of what actually happened. I fell, that’s all. I just fell. I could keep telling myself that for hours at a time as I lay their lifeless. I was trapped in a deep sleep, yet no one would come and wake me. How long had I been in this trance? I had no body and I knew it all too well.
I tried to let my mind empty, freeing my thoughts to savor change. I felt my mind and body melt and flow. For a moment I was weightless, nothing more that a breath of air, a wisp ready to drift apart on a breeze. My tendons pulled in all directions as I tried to move, forgetting I was gone from body. If so, why do I feel pain? Am I still being judged as to where to go? I knew where I was to go, hell.
My panting twisted the daggers piercing my sides. I had to will myself to slow my breathing in order to get the stabbing under control. As the worst of the torment in my arm and the, what felt like stitches, in my ribs eased, I finally was able to let out a loud moan of agony.
When I was alive I remember how some people wondered in the back alley and would be able to heal the simplest things such as my pain, but now that I was in the middle of no where, as you hear quite often in exaggeration, there was nothing for me to do, but await for my coming. I almost feel sorry I left the pathetic world the rest our left to destroy. I never imagined I would suffer such a great feat for my own depression of withered confusion of weather to jump or not.
Most people either believe in God or Satan. Me, I was neither, nothing more than a wondrous soul searching for somewhere to belong. But, where do I belong?

********************


My redemption began in hell.

It was a day like any other, except there are no days in that singular place. No minutes, no hours, weeks or years. No seconds either. There is no time in hell you see. There just is. That's the hell of it. There I ruminated under the faintest light from above, nameless, Godless, with no sense of humor at all, I existed as a wretched and self-sorry soul, all reflection and no projection, contemplating the base, wasted life I'd once lived. Regrets? Too many to mention, but occasion enough to remember them all. Credits? Not enough to dwell upon. No, the balance was tilted in the worst direction and at the most extreme angle.

In my opinion, London was hell, especially, the day of my accident.

Cold rain drizzled on the dark London streets; at least it looked cold. Harsh light and traffic at both ends of the long, narrow street made the area seem much darker that it actually was. The stoplights down the street were flashing from the horrid storm that took place that night. Lightening had shutdown half the electricity in town as I sat in the abandoned, or what used to be, a guard tower. Trees lined the curb, most of them seemed short, most of them still able to shatter the streetlamps’ glow and drop shifting speckled patterns onto the cobblestone pavement that had more potholes than the local construction site. I remember slightly the glisten of glass in the gutter from a broken light bulb as half the windows remained lit.
The buildings were more brick-face than brownstone, and few still had the weathered grimaces of gargoyles and stone lions above their narrow lintels. A handful of false balconies on the upper stories were hidden by the night sky. No music, no shouting, and the voice of the city so constant, it was silent. All I could hear was the pitter-patter of the rain clanking against the vacant streets of London.
There I sat. Lonesome me. My hair dangled in my face from being drenched and my elongated, black trench coat was billowed around me as I sat deciding over what I was to do. People could never understand what I had been through. My mother died from my birth. I remember, faintly, the crying and screaming as my father was supposedly pushed out of the room. Then at the age of five my father passed away from cancer. No one would take me in; I had no relatives who saw me as theres. I strived from day to day taking on different jobs to keep myself alive. I suppose going into an orphanage would have shown my weakness.
Crouching over the bolted fence I gazed at the people below. How simple their lives must have been. And not noticing me may have made it simpler. The raindrops flowed down my face like tears of repent, but I was not repenting for my decisions.
I wanted to die. Nothing in my mind could change that, but something about doing the actual death scene left and eerie feeling in the pit of my stomach. I had been there for two hours, as I was most every night, watching the occasional pedestrian, sneering at the cars cutting through different avenues. I speculated at the few silhouettes passing by as I hooked my foot up the bar, prepared to dive.
I couldn’t go back to the streets, even if I were mad enough to want to. Then again, even if the people down there, the hypocritical humans, did not care of what was to happen to me, was I really prepared to end my own life?
I pondered my conscience, but the inner chaos didn’t subside. I didn’t matter either way. I either jumped, or resumed my pathetic life on the planet known as earth. It was time for me to comprehend that I didn’t belong, or if someone wanted me to stay. Yet, what did I have to live for?
I took my right foot off the bar and released my hands, my left foot still pressed against the bottom. My father said once that everyone deserved a chance. My thoughts, as well as my emotions, raced. A chance? A chance for what? To leave this place? To attain a new level? A chance to escape the perpetual misery of an existence without hope? What did he, it, mean?
The moon was on the wane. It hung low in the sky with blood-red mist, a silent observer of the answer. I had decided before I came to this dark place to die, prepared and all, but something pulsed in me, something telling me I was frightened. I was not terrified of my end, more prepared for it. I could not back down this time, but it seemed as though that is what I wanted to do as I had been doing for many days upon this one. From the moment of my birth I have been different, pale and red eyed; me just now regaining my true form. But it felt like a demonic form, what with my mind forming guilt and psychotic ingenuities.
With the drying out of mankind, what would it change if my life ended? What do I have to live for? Myself? As much as I wanted to take that final leap to and my pathetic role in life, I still felt unworthy of such an ending.

I turned around, slowly, as to not let people hear me down below. Something inside seemed to have broken the night, some idea of myself, and some trepidation of myself. I could have so easily died, but I backed away once again. Sweat cooled on my flesh, and I shivered. Vaguely, I was aware of the lightness of the skin around my eyes and across my brow. I knew my face was fixed in the skull-like expression of utter terror I had seen so often, though I felt little of the actual fear it must have been displaying.
A day. It had only been a day since I had come up here, plotting what seemed to be eternity. Yesterday afternoon I had stood like this, gawking at the height. I had a shudder at first, easily dismissed as a spasm of weariness in my own flesh, then another, and a third.
I was prepared to try tomorrow. I stepped forward, ever so slightly as to not crack a tile. The floor was worn. A blinding ache spread from my eyes to my head. My leg was unable to budge. I turned around, but in a gesture to slide it free I heard three cracks in my leg. Falling to my knees in pain, I began to wonder if this was chastisement. That was until I felt the flooring beneath me rupture. I could feel the tile snap beneath my hand as I pressed to get up. I tried to scuttle back alongside the wall where the floor was robust, but my foot was still wedged in the bars. It hurt too much to shift, so I tried to quaver the bar free to heave myself athwart.
It crumbled. Everything on the sixth story had been shattering the entire time I was up there. I was too wrapped up in myself to see it. Falling. That’s what I was doing, falling to my finish: death. What I was once to petrified to do was now inevitable. It seemed to be my destiny to expire that night.
My back had smashed against the stone at the bottom, shattering my spine, detaching each ligament. I was now unable to move both legs and my right arm. I had become paralyzed. My head, the sensitive back of the brain had been gummed together. I gasped five or six times before I caught I good breathe of air, but that lasted only for two or three minutes. The blood from my corpse had flooded up the streets where people peered over, trying to see what had happened and telling their own side of something they did not see. Their whispers echoed in my ear. People were telling me I would be fine and that the ambulance was coming, even though I knew I would be dead long before they reached me. Others said how devastating I was and how I deserved what had come.

Not true…

I may have been the black alley cat of society, but I was not a worshiper of evil. It never occurred to me where I wanted to go when I finally did perish, but now that I had lye there and felt the rain drizzle on my body, soaking into me, I realized what I wanted. Hell may have been best for my essence, but I would rather prefer heaven. If the stories in the book, recognized as the bible, were true, than I rather be up there with someone who could aid me than to be with someone who enjoyed my misery. It was only a wish…

Sure it was an accident, but not many saw it as one. No one would deny that I have known hardship in my time; brief though it has been for all that I have done in it. This, I think, I may say without boastfulness. I knew for a fact I could not see how bad my body was damaged then, but there still remained the fact that I knew I was “DEAD.” And as this is so, I continue to feel all the pain I felt lying on that wet street crowded by the humans, mages, and somewhat lost souls like mine in which they hid along the dark alleys.
Now I lied in the back of my mind drifting off in a black whole continuum with no end. I had no shape or form, no voice. I could not see nor hear. Yet, I could feel. I could feel everything. It was the worst part of my grief. Even though I head no voice, nor echo, something still rang clear. There was a different voice than my own, one I never remembered from my still life.
I could never remember a time when I couldn’t hear the Voice in my head. I could talk to it any time I wanted by thinking in a special way, and the Voice would always answer. It didn’t matter when I called, or where I was. I was the only one in the whole world who could hear the Voice, and it had always said I should never tell anyone I could hear it.
For a long time I thought other people had their own Voice, but of course they didn’t. I couldn’t remember just when I had thought that out. I could never ask, of course, but grownups didn’t act like they had Voices. They forgot things. Of course I forgot things too, but the Voice never forgot anything.
I heard it ever since my father died and I was left with no one around. It kept telling me things, strange things that made the world secluded from me every time I tried to reach out to it. Slowly everything would fade and I would be left standing in a black sphere of nothingness.
For a long time I thought my Voice was God, because the Voice always spoke in stern unemotional tones like nuns and priests always said he supposedly did, and they used words I didn’t understand. Besides, the Voice knew almost everything, and sometimes it could do strange things like bringing me to believe one thing and then another.
I slowly grew out of that. Though that was soon after I failed myself and everyone else. I switched to the devil, but soon became bored with the fact he did nothing, but irritate me. So I believe in nothing, which is probably why I ended up here, in nowhere…