~Chapter 8~
We suddenly stepped into this daunting dimension as all of our senses seemed to numb and fade away, like dusk during a crippling winter. Shivers shot up my spine, shaking my body as cold sweats seeped from my pores and raised the melanin mane off my scalp while the marshlands of sweat that were my palms glistened as my lead legs shook and trembled like houses of straw.
I dropped to my knees while my vision blurred. Nauseated and disoriented, I gagged before spreading the breakfast I had eaten earlier all over the checkered tile floor. Having forgotten that she was even there, I soon after heard a clearing of the throat followed by Mirella's mild voice.
"Next time let go of my hand before doing that. Are those my hash browns in there?"
"Yeah, they were very good," I replied.
"Although them being on the floor right now, understandably, may be a confusing critic on your cooking. It seems as though I ate one too many," I continued as I gagged some more.
"You ate twenty." She said.
"You have a hound's hunger and you're mental. It happens all the time, by the way, the first hall hop is always the hardest."
I looked up at her with confusion on my face and saliva strings hanging from my chin.
"Hall hop?" I asked.
"Aye! A hall hop, a hefty hall hop. You know, happily hopping into haunted hallways hunting hateful hags. A hall hop. It hardly leaves your head heavy. After the first time, evidently."
"Of course…Wait what?" I said as I gagged once more before more of the undigested breakfast came pouring out of my mouth and onto the poor checkered black and white floor.
"Aaaand there go the bacon and eggs. Still together as they should be. Excellent!" She said as she covered her mouth while lightly gagging into her palm.
I looked up to Mirella once more and wiped away the hanging saliva from my chin using the inside of my elbow.
"Delicious," I said to her after a brief pause, with a smile hiding embarrassment and disgust of both the vomit and having done it in front of a girl; the whole time wishing that the Dark Bride would take my soul to a fate much less humiliating.
"Don't worry too much about it. That always happens on the first hall hop. Even to Erik, once upon a time." She explained.
I forced life back into my legs and stood back up while trying to fight my grogginess in a losing battle. The black and white checkered floor spun like a spinning top beneath my feet, whilst a loud pitch ringing rustled in my head like audible dog whistles. My bearings seemed nonexistent as my body slowly turned around not knowing which way was up or down, nor left or right.
As I easily fell for the Bride's malicious manipulation within the cursed corridor, Mirella's hand firmly stopped me in my tracks and prevented me from turning around only to face a most miserable fate.
"Whoa, my head's spinning. That would have been helpful to know before-hand." I said ignorantly.
Mirella took my hand once more and looked down the corridor of doors before replying in a calm voice.
"There are no lessons to be found in warnings Beuren. Only the suffering that we must endure can teach us to learn from our mistakes…Now we go forward, our door should be just around the corner." She says in assurance.
"Just around the corner!?"
"This haunting hags' hallway goes on forever in both directions!" I screamed while looking down the corridor.
"Aye, and if we wish to escape this place we need to find our Destiny Doors. We simply have to walk until it shows itself because we cannot just open any door that isn't ours to open. No, we walk until it shows itself no matter how long it takes, the key is to keep moving forward until we find a left or right turn, and then our destinies, whatever they may be, should be right around the corner…But first we must endure whatever the Dark Bride has to throw at us. Endure it and move forward towards our doors, or we will die in here. Do you understand?"
With my heartbeat thumping in my ears I answered in a shaky voice.
"I, I do. Com, completely understand."
Still looking forward she continues.
"You are of House Kolte now. It is in your blood; extraordinary strength, power, and courage. In all of our blood. You need not fear anything within these halls Beuren. You are the master of your destiny. The architect of your tower of immeasurable power. And all who stand between you and that destiny will fall without breaking a single drop of sweat from your brow. That is who you are now, and if you are not, that is who you must become."
"Well, that's brilliant. I'm sorry, you said house what?" I asked like a dunce.
A sharp jolt of electricity shot up my right arm from our clenched hands and made my arm slightly numb.
"Let's learn to pay attention, shall we?" She said authoritatively.
"She'll find a way to separate us, if and when that happens..."
"I know, I know, never look back and keep moving forward," I said, cockishly completing Mirella's sentence.
"No matter what you see, no matter what you hear. Don't believe any of it. There is no telling what she might do, or if Erik will even be able to reverse it, so you must be careful. Please." She warned as her voice shook and her grip got slightly tighter.
"Yeah, of course, you be careful as well."
I smiled and looked back down the cursed corridor, now fearless to the torturing trials that lay ahead, for I was a Kolte now. I did a really good job pretending like I knew what that meant.
The haunting hags' howling hallway had horizons for far further than the eye could see. Not being able to turn back we kept moving forward, only forward, all the while wondering without explanation, what had happened for me to find myself here with this strange, although charming cherry-haired girl. The memories of my past having been sent to oblivion, leaving me wondering why I couldn't help but trust her, with my very life if need be; but above all during our present moment, I wondered where she was leading me and why she grasped my hand with a vice-like grip which radiated heat and tingled my nerves like electrical currents, melding our palms together.
We walked and we walked for hours on checkered floors until I heard a voice call a word in a language, which was unrecognizable and quite peculiar. I turned to Mirella, "Did you say something?"
"What? Just now? No." She replied.
"Must be nothing," I said as I shrugged it off and continued walking hand in hand with Mirella.
Not more than a few moments later I heard the voice whisper the word yet again, only this time it came from just over my left shoulder. I was sure of it. As sure as I was that I had felt the ice-cold breath of who or whatever had uttered it just over the skin on the back of my neck, raising every single hair on my body and unsettling every nerve ending beneath my skin.
"Tell me you heard that. Yo, you heard that right?" I asked Mirella as I turned to her with worry and confusion on my face.
"For the last time, NO! I didn't hear anything because look, there's nothing there. Only doors here, oh and look over there, more doors. Now eyes forward at all times! Lest misery claims you." She said in an annoyed tone.
I remained silent, assuming that my imagination had gone rampant, and chose to ignore the strange voice and the word which, like a name, it kept calling out to. A voice, which wailed while we walked in the infinite narrow corridor as we rubbed our shoulders together; a voice uttering a name only I could hear. Like the growing of an angry mob the voices which wailed without withdrawal the name "Qhawe", grew louder and louder. The soft, sinister spectral screams repeated this weird word whispered wondrously in a tongue from another world, over and over like a crazed crowd growing within my skull, refusing to relent. I had never heard this word before or at least had no memory of it. No clue as of where it originated nor the significance that it entailed if any at all; I could have just as well had gone mad within that corridor, as Mirella had warned that I would. Her words of wisdom unfortunately having landed on deaf ears.
Soon after the ominous voices had begun ringing in my head, the warmth of Mirella's hand which bound her palm to mine swiftly plunged and her touch instantly grew as cold as the freezing marble which we were walking on; a cursed corridor of checkered floors riddled with the misting frozen footprints of lost souls, wandering forevermore.
I slightly turned my head to the right and instead of a know-it-all redhead, I found myself holding hands with a shadowy silhouette of a human figure which had a pulsating dark aura, like a black flame rising from its skin. With my peripheral vision, I found our path backward blocked by a giant wall of pitch black, glistening tar. Protruding from this wall, were human arms covered in tar and most of them donning clothes and jewelry which looked more ancient than time itself; some of them were wearing sleeves belonging to the wardrobes of aristocrats and even had missing fingers, some had rotting flesh falling off the bone as they clawed at me like children fighting over a bowl of sweets. Some of the ghoulish arms belonged to soldiers who by the looks of it had died in battle with broken nails and forever bleeding fingertips, and some having arrow pierced gauntlets. I also saw sword-slashed skin on bare forearms and one arm belonging to what I assumed was once a flayed prisoner of war who was then burned alive on a pyre.
The flesh on all the arms was a light gray as corpses would be, although red streams of blood flowed eternally from wounds and veins within the wall itself. This proverbial wall of petroleum flesh resembled a monochrome portrait with the only visible color being crimson. Endless streams of ancient blood-red remains flowed from the wall and formed pools on the black and white checkered floors. The concoction of blood that was spreading across the floor reached my feet and began surrounding me as if I were the last tree on a sinking island.
I looked down and found myself standing in a pool of red rancid blood, smelling like a thousand battlefields worth of slaughtered soldiers, which left me mortified and rendered my muscles cement.
"Bloody Hell. What is this!?" I said as the hundreds of voices shouting the same name suddenly went quiet. The cursed corridor was once again plunged into silence leaving only a ringing in my ears and once again a cold chill brushed itself against the right side of my face; a long but gentle and cold current of wind like the breath of ice came from the ominous figure as it replied to me. The very same shadowy figure whose hand I was still holding, for some reason.
"Deeeeaaaath!" It shouted out in a daunting voice which resonated and echoed throughout the haunted hallway, with breath that froze the sweat seeping from my pores and dripping from the tip of my nose; the death screaming specter made my heart sink into my gut as a sharp pain from a fully armored spiked gauntlet covered in thick and odorous almost black blood suddenly struck my back. The long-dead soldier's arm was also covered in a viscous tar-like material giving off hot petroleum smelling fumes as if he had been bathed in a pot of boiling oil. The walls of the corridor shook as I roared into the roof above me before dropping to my knees because of the searing pain from the steaming gauntlet having caused three lacerations across my shoulder blades as if a bear had patted my back.
The sizzling sensation and sound of my own flesh brought me down to my hands and knees while the white shirt I wore dissolved around my wounds almost like it was rotting away in acid. I bore witness to the sight of my pain as I knelt in the blood of millions, viewing my reflection in the glistening crimson and carrying the pain of a millennia's worth of war and suffering, literally on my back; an agony so intense my scream rippled the pool of blood beneath me as my fingernails scratched the marble floors from me clenching my blood-soaked hands while the cracking of my teeth filled the air as my jaws ground against each other.
Slipping on the smooth wet marble, I desperately tried to crawl and claw my way away from this Wall-Of-Woe with clothes covered in blood, most of it not being my own; I found it hard to move with each second that passed as the blood covering the floor froze slowly until my clothes merged into the now solid crimson, rendering me unable to lift my elbows or drag my knees, trapped on the cursed corridor's checkered floor like a fly stuck in honey.
"Arrgh, Bloody hell! Bloody fucking hell! Arrrgh!" I wailed while I shivered on the floor with my deep rapid breaths freezing over the crimson ice rink in which I now lied. My eyelids remained shut as my tears froze while they rolled down my cheek, not wanting to be tempted to look back and know the face of my demise. I felt but did not see the Wall-Of-Woe creep closer to me with more arms clawing at my feet and legs making it feel like I was being bathed by a red hot cheese grater. As I was beaten and brutalized by burning bare-knuckled and armored arms alongside creepy creature's claws, a few grabbed onto my ankles and I found myself being helplessly dragged into the ocean of clutches; the frozen blood beneath me now defrosting as fast as it froze, back into a darkened crimson sludge, making me slip faster into the deceased sea of fingered snares.
The Wall-Of-Woe consumed my legs and then my waist before I felt dead fingers digging razor-sharp fingernails and claws into my left arm and shoulder with ice-cold dead flesh gripping my neck and covering my nose, my mouth, leaving my entire face smothered by dead hands, robbing me of air and my sense of sight along with my ability to speak and scream in agony; wringing the air out of me as they pulled me further into the wall of flesh.
Almost my whole body was now drowning in a sea of hands with only my right arm still stretched out and holding on to the shadowy figure which I was looking at through the several spaces between the rotting fingers. As my vision faded, Mirella's voice broke the silence in the hallway, like the several voices before, although hers only said one thing, over and over again.
"Don't let my hand go! Don't let it go! Never let it go!" The voices repeated. Shouting and whispering from all directions yet so clearly, as if she were talking into my ear. I did what the voice demanded and didn't let go, with my head having been taken by the Wall-Of-Woe and all that remained of me was my right arm being dragged slowly on the ground but now holding on to nothing at all. In my hand was nothing, no longer the cold chill of the shadowy figure's touch, but only the fist I was balling as I was consumed by the wall, eaten by a sea of crimson and black.
"What do we say when death smiles at us...Little Beuren…?" Whispered the shadowy figure in a voice that echoed in the abyss that I now floated in as if submerged and suspended in black water which was blistering cold with ice crystals and blocks constantly bouncing off my skin, rendering me trapped in a prison of eternal drowning and hypothermia.
"…What do you have to say to me?..."
The very last words I would hear before slipping away. Before being lost in a world of nothingness and noir.