The Hollow World: Awake

    Faller.  That’s what she was called.  It was whispered by some people with

disgust and other’s with pity or admiration.  Wherever she was, everyone could tell,

because of the number forty-three tattooed just below her eye that she was one of

them.  Now on the beach of the Croytisian Outlands, unpigmented hair whipped

across her gaunt cheeks.  A thin, skeletal hand with almost translucent skin (the

blood in her veins could be seen gently pulsing and flowing) came to brush the flag of

her country.  Her homeland.  She tried to recall it… the green meadows, quaint

towns and amazing cities.  Something inside her short-circuited, leaving her brain

feelings numb.  An involuntary twitch caused her back to spasm as she cursed the

Rodias for the nth time.  Such hatred toward their rulers wouldn’t be tolerated

anywhere else in Utoneria.  Croyt was new, tolerant, naïve, for which she was glad. 

The towering woman stood to her full height, six feet and five inches, and listened to

the gentle lapping of the Erelian Sea.
         
    She lifted up the tails of her jacket and sat down on the sand, eyeing the setting

sun.  Slowly, weary lids closed over her eyes.  The bleak, unforgiving horizon that

filled her view a moment before it dissolved, fragments falling away.  Starbursts of

light expanded and she was on another beach.  But this one was different.  It

seemed clean and pure.  A white, glistening feather floated into her hand, and she

turned her head to see a pair of angelic wings.  They were not black, tainted by evil,

but white, as if God himself had blessed them.  Breaking into a run, she began to lift

off the ground in an eagle-like flight.  Coss flew over the water, soaring with white

wings across the endless sea.  There were no obstacles; she could fly freely forever. 

Eyes looked over her skin, which was a normal, healthy pink.  The bright sun of the

Old World shone with a radiance no man could hope to see on this new Earth.  Her

heart was light, the gravity of loneliness and hatred gone.  Flipping and spiraling and

creating small jewels of water with her hand and she smiled.
         
    Suddenly, land came into her view.  It seemed beautiful and serene, but a fog

clouded the rolling hills.  A familiar feeling filled her.  What was this place?  She had

been there before, but… In only an instant, the mass let a shadow cover and

consume it.  Dark winds blew against her and the precious wings began to

deteriorate, just as the land did.  They broke into several pieces as she fell from the

air, like a wounded bird.  Strangely, she didn’t fight the water that pulled her down. 

The kingdom before her crashed into the same sea and drifted away as the shadow

moved to cover the entire ocean.  Chilling waters swallowed her, and her eyes

closed.  How good it is to drown near my home, she thought until there was no more

light to spark her imagination.  Down, down, down, she traveled, into a bottomless

abyss.
         
    Whirling back into the present, Coss’ orbs of pink snapped open.  The sky had

turned to a miserable grey, and she twitched uneasily.  There were eyes behind her. 

Eyes watching and scrutinizing.  Boring into her as a drill does.  A hand came to

heart.  The gravity was back, just as before.  And she had no wings to fly away.  Stiff

knees pushed her up to stand.  She turned around to see a man there, wearing a

vest similar to hers, with a hooded black cloak.  Black wisps of hair licked at his

jawbone; the rest of his visage was concealed within the shadows of the hood.  His

lips parted to speak, his hand outstretched.
         
    “I can give you wings.”
         
    The woman eyed him with cold distrust, though her mind did not portray the

same aloofness.  It swirled in a torrent of doubts and speculations.  Her dry throat

croaked:
         
    “Who are you to give me wings when you have none yourself?”
         
    “My, you are just as cold as they say,” the stranger mused, lips curling into an

amused smile.  He pulled down the hood of the cloak, revealing a grotesquely

scarred face.  Strange incisions at the corner of his lips had left fleshy scars, and

half of his face appeared to hold the scars of bad burns.  His eyes, however,

betrayed the deteriorating face.  Those gems were a violent purple that seemed to

swirl and dance as he cast his glance toward her.  They held a blossoming fire of life

that the Faller had never witnessed.  He seemed undaunted by Coss’ expression of

wariness.
         
    “And who are they?”  She asked, feigning disinterest.
         
    “Them.  Us.  All of us,” he said, the amused smile growing into one of eagerness. 

The scars near his lips drew up almost to the bridge of his nose, leaving his face in a

peculiar and rather disturbing position.
         
    “Us…”  Coss whispered, almost inaudibly.  Her heartbeat took off like an

overeager horse out of the gate.  It all crashed down on her in a welcome blow.  The

scars.  The clothing.  It all became clear.
         
    “You are…” Her voice shook, a trembling finger pointing towards him.
         
    “Yes.”  He nodded, his puzzling grin fading into an almost sincere smile.
         
    She had found one.  One of her own.
         
    After years of fruitless search, she had stumbled upon a fellow Faller when she

had least expected it.  The woman twitched, irises flickering like an old computer

monitor.  Emotions crackled through all of her extensive circuitry, causing various

malfunctions within the system.  She took a few steps closer to her fellow man and

brought a hand slowly to his face.  Her quasi-translucent skin made a stark contrast

to his terrible visage, but they shared the same past.
         
    “What is your name?”  Coss said, uncommon clarity in her speech.  The hand

dropped back to her side, and she stepped back a pace.
         
    The man seemed humbled now, less cryptic and confident as he had seemed a

few moments before.  “I am called Zech,” he said mechanically, and the tone was

familiar to Coss.  So many times they would report to the surgeons new to the

station, introducing themselves like machines.  After all, these bodies were only

shells, things to be tested on and either disposed of or observed.
         
    The man seemed humbled now, less cryptic and confident as he had seemed a

few moments before.  “Zech, I am called Coss,” she stated, unable to break the

forced habit either.  “You cannot imagine of how long I have looking for you.”
         
    “I believe I do,” he said, a touch of gentleness crossing his face.  His expression

darkened, eyeing the light pulsations that reached from the base of her neck to the

small of her back.  In the silence, a faint clicking could be heard as the synthetic

vertebrae moved up and down in a domino-like motion.  A calloused hand, much like

Coss’ own, ran down the implanted spine.  Zech grimaced in disgust, eyes narrowed

in hatred.  He spoke through clenched teeth.  “Is this what they did to you?”
         
    “My nervous system is completely alien.  I am often surprised that my body

accepted it.  The movements keep the brain signals fluid, and allow me to move in a

human fashion,” Coss recounted, taking bits and pieces of information from her

medical file.  The spine was cold, alien, inhuman, and disgusting.  It was no wonder

that the touch sparked the fire of hate for the Rodias.
         
    “Soon… they will all pay for what they did to us,” the other Faller muttered, his

own hand falling to his chest, feeling the distant beating of a synthetic heart. 

Though, even his limbs were not his own.  Each digit and limb was a painstakingly

constructed piece of machinery, supposedly allowing him to move faster, feel less

pain and totally obliterate any type of muscle or bone loss or other such problems. 

Also, complex fibers were woven under his skin, used to heal internal injuries, no

matter the severity.  It also prevented any type of deterioration of his body.  They

said he would never die.  But all things must cease to function someday.  Even

machinery rusts; even artificial intelligence becomes obsolete….
         
    From the various and numerous operations, he was scarred and in his childhood

memories there was nothing but the fear of the tools they would use to cut into him,

and the sweet smell of anesthesia.  Every month, they would develop an upgrade, a

new feature to his body plan.  He would have to go under the knife again.  One time,

before the major surgery where they would amputate all of his appendages, Zech

stole sulfuric acid from the element room (where they kept most harvested elements

from the Old World), and poured it onto his face.  The young child, only about

thirteen at the time, vainly prayed that it would delay the surgery a few more months

or perhaps even cancel it.
         
    As the preadolescent boy huddled in his cell, the skin of his hands and half of his

face eaten away by the acid, he smiled, eyes fused together.  To his terror, his feat

only added more surgeries to build a new eye and salvage what skin was left on his

face.  They were able to reconstruct it without losing many of his features.  When the

Rodias discovered that he himself had caused this extra work for the surgeons, he

was left in solitary with no meals for a week.  After that, he made a promise to

himself:  One day, I and all the others like me are going to get back at them.  They

won’t ever hurt anyone else again.  We’ll find them, and it’ll be our turn…  This vow of

vengeance was the only drive he had to survive the rest of the years within his dank

cell.  Every time the anesthesia wafted into his nostrils, he smiled… knowing soon, it

would be his time.  Their time.