Lost in Translation: A Collaborative Story

Part 7: T.L. Bodine

All for nothing.

All for nothing.

All. For. NOTHING.

The words echoed angrily through Sia's brain as she felt her body pulled under the surface, the sentient tides swirling and eddying around her, tugging her down. She could not see through the deluge of black water, but she was aware of her brother's absence. They had been separated. There was no way she could swim back to him now. She couldn't even regain use of her limbs.

She tumbled, water rushing up her nose, rancid where it touched her throat.

It would seep into her lungs soon. If the water itself did not kill her, surely its demonic nature would infect her somehow, the way The Depths had invaded the living organisms of the sea, the way their eldritch influence had turned creatures into abominations.

Better to drown than to succumb to that fate.

Better to die now than to reach the bottom, to open her eyes to the murky waters of Hell and see what it had in store.

And yet. All the same.

That bubbling rage in her heart. That indignance.

How dare it end this way?

When they had come so far. The people they had been in the beginning. The friends and family who had come and gone. Every step of this journey was all rendered meaningless by this senseless, awful churning abyss.

It was all for nothing.

Already she could feel her consciousness slipping. Already her memories were beginning to jumble, her awareness swirling with as much ferocity as the vortex that sucked her down.

Mizim. That idiot. Using water magic against water monsters.

What was it her old instructor once said? When the only tool you have is a hammer...

What had his name been, anyway? She tried to remember. It didn't matter. She wasn't certain of her own. Had she always been here? Or had she been someone else, not so long ago? There had been others here before, hadn't there? Ali, and....and...others.

She was certain there had been others.

Her body crashed into Ali's endless side, and she scrabbled weakly for purchase. Could the serpent drown? Was he dead already? He felt so cold. Her fingertips were so cold. She felt nothing.

It was nice.

It was nice, feeling nothing. Being no one.

She couldn't have said how long she fell that way, swirling in the fathomless depths of the maelstrom that bore them down to hell. Surely it could not have been more than a minute or two. Surely any longer and she would have died.

Unless of course she was already dead. Unless, of course, that was the point.

She seized upon this idea with a sudden and fierce kind of hope. It crowded out that other, despairing refrain in her mind.

In the end, nothing mattered.

But, perhaps, this was not the end.

Something brushed against her, a narrow stick, and it was nonsensical for it to be here. It should have floated away. It should have vanished into the whirlpool. But its presence here seemed to reinforce the growing, hopeful, straining voice that built in her chest, the last rallying cry of survival instinct.

Her numb, icy fingertips curled around Mizim's wand.

She could not speak the words. But she could summon their intent. And, weak, dead or dying in the cold and wet, she directed every ounce of her latent power into a single act.

Reverse.

Her body stopped in its miserable slow-fall. The water around her ceased its churning, falling still, then began to whirl in the opposite direction. Pulling her toward the surface. And with the last of her energy, before she closed her eyes for good and hoped to awaken into a different life, a different world, a different body – one that had yet to go on such a fruitless adventure, one that was still filled with possibilities – she had a single clear and powerful realization. In that single moment, she knew everything. Understood everything.

Hell was merely the primordial soup from which all creation burst forth. Death was merely the blink between lifetimes. She was, and would be forever, as she had always been. Everything. And nothing.

Time ran backwards. Her awareness ceased. Her existence evaporated, and with it, creation.

This was not the end. This had never been the end.

This was the beginning.