One of the groomed versions of Seth waved a nonchalant hand, dismissing his question as he said, "We don't know why we are always late." To his second he added: "Perhaps he should be disjointed."
The strangest thing happened immediately after as the other replica paled visibly. "We do not joke about such things Seth; it is not right."
Seth opened his mouth to speak when the replica replied. "Calm ourselves, Seth. We merely jest."
"An expensive one. An unbecoming one."
"What exactly do you mean by disjointed?" Seth interrupted.
Both replicas turned to him for the briefest moment and shrugged.
"All we need to know," a voice echoed from within the mist, to no one's surprise, "is that it is not a good thing."
"I don't think any of you are old enough to be sounding cryptic," Seth pointed out as another replica joined them.
"Good to have us," the first replica said.
"We're late," the second added.
"And for that we would disjoint me?" the third asked.
The second shrugged. "Like we have already said, it was no more than a joke."
"A dangerous one," the third said.
Seth returned his attention to the path before him, or the lack of one, and continued moving. He needed to find a way out of the mist before these thoughts flayed his mind.
His journey through the mist was a long one. Knowledge did not leave him through it and he navigated with the adeptness of a gardener in his own garden, stepping over obstacles and avoiding trees. Despite the weight of the mist, his breathing did not worsen as he expected it to. In fact, it seemed to get easier as he moved so that it filled his lungs faster and provided him with greater strength than he'd thought possible.
Domitia had always spoken of how breathing was the key to everything but he'd never truly believed the man. He knew it gave direction to rhythm but had never considered how much of a path it played in the generation of strength.
Through it all his companions bickered behind him. They followed noisily, giving opinions to themselves and disagreeing just as easily. His gladness that they were out of his head was short lived. They proved beyond reasonable doubt that they merely needed to exist—in whatever state—to bring him discomfort.
They did not offer directions, as he suspected they did not know which way they were to go. Mercifully, they also did not direct their questions to him, neither did they seek to include him in their conversations.
He heard snatches of them, though. Little pieces of irrelevance that seemed to distract his mind. He ignored it with the same vigor with which he sought an exit.
"Are you sure we know which way we are going?" one of them asked after what seemed like hours of walking.
"We've wanted to ask that for a while now," another added. "Because it looks to us as if we've been doing nothing but wandering about. What are we; the wandering brothers?"
The others chuckled at this, another adding: "Sounds like a path."
Seth had no doubt the path he was referring to was not the path he was currently seeking.
He grumbled as he stumbled over something, the words of the replicas distracting him momentarily from the knowledge of his surroundings. He kept himself on his feet only barely and anger boiled within him, a byproduct of his frustration. Left alone to navigate this maze of mist, he did not doubt he would be successful. But he was not alone. Three companions bickering behind him did not allow his mind focus, so much so that he had tripped over something he had known to be there.
He turned to his companions abruptly and all three froze like flies in a nasty web. They looked at him with eyes wide, yet not so wide to display fear. In them he saw confusion more than surprise, intrigue more than fear. They were curious to what he intended. A part of him did not want to give them the satisfaction. He did not want to bless them with an answer to their curiosity. So his mouth remained shut and all he did was glare.
Then he turned away and continued.
Behind him a replica whispered. "Are we alright?"
"We're not sure," another answered.
The third finalized it with: "I'm not sure this is what the seminary had in mind for a test."
Seth wasn't sure either. The seminary had sent him on a test his notification had categorized as one of fear. Yet here he was with nothing to fear. If he was to face his fear, then what was the point to this. In the beginning he had thought himself his fear, now he wasn't so sure.
Or was his fear yet to come?
..................
It was another few hours before fatigue came to settle in his bones. It was—he knew—a fatigue of the mind. The monotony of a disturbed trek spanning hours on end had bored his mind and weakened its resolve. His legs trembled but he knew it was not from weak muscles. His thighs ached but he knew they could go on for longer. It was his mind that was failing him.
Not to crumble under the weight of his fatigue, he came to a halt a few paces later. He eased himself to the ground, hands patting away before he settled on it.
The mist remained white with a taint of darkness. It made him wonder if a new day had come and gone without his awareness. The thought of it worried him. How long had he been here? Would he even pass the test?
"Three days."
Seth looked up to see his replicas watching him quietly. "We've been here three days," one of them clarified. "You were wondering."
Seth sighed. "Even now you all remain in my head."
"Seth," another turned to the one before him, "Don't rattle us right now. It is not the time."
Seth frowned at this.
"There is no better time," Seth answered, his slick hair slowly annoying Seth for reasons he could not understand.
Seth's frown deepened. He wasn't entirely certain what it was, but something had shifted in this moment.
Something was very wrong.
"If we don't answer these questions," Seth continued, "who will? It's not like he ever has the answers, Seth."
Seth shook his head vehemently, like a drunkard clearing his drunken haze. Something he should fear was happening and he couldn't figure out what it was.
Seth shook his head. "It is not our place to do this when he is down. We are better than that."
"We are really not."
The third replica watched this play out, a quiet Seth in a group of Seths. He watched, and he waited, as if a cloudburst waiting to happen. There was no patience in it, no calm. There was no doubt either. Seth was more a brewing storm than a calming weather. He was waiting for a chance. At what, Seth did not know. All he knew for now was that he waited. After all, he had a quest to complete.
"I need silence," Seth mumbled, needing sleep more than silence.
He needed a quiet world and a quiet mind. A silence that would let him think before he would drift. Their bickering and constant dialogue was unwelcomed. Left to him he would slit their throats and have only one left. Four was three too many. There could be only one. It was what was meant to be.
This fracture of a mind did no good. It did little in the path of unison. That they would disjoint their own was a greater discomfort than it had any right to be. And that they would keep the meaning from Seth was a greater worry.
But his silence was necessary. If he was to win against the others, he needed to be calm, unpredictable. He needed to be very much unlike them. He turned his attention to Seth, seated in the mist, watching and thinking and almost found pity for himself. He had never truly been a confident child. He had been arrogant, stubborn, defiant even. But he had never been confident. Confidence had been left to the purview of Jonathan and Derek. With the headaches and the music, he had never had time for confidence.
He let out a soft breath as he eased himself to sit, bickering amongst himself. He understood the noise now. Why he had always hated it. He had never understood why he had always felt a willingness to trade it back for the headaches, but he was beginning to. With the headaches he had still been able to focus despite the discomfort. But with this?
He turned his attention from himself seated in the dirt in confusion to himself bickering with himself. The cognitive dissonance was repulsive.
How had he tolerated it for over a year?
Perhaps ending it was the right thing. Should they find a silence regardless of their opinion of it, maybe he would find a way out of this mist and into some modicum of freedom.
Freedom was necessary to pass this test.
Freedom was necessary for most things. It was why he'd taken to wandering the night when he should be sleeping, like his mates.
There was something about the silence and the darkness that put him at ease. At first it had been occasional, a reprieve from the nightmares that came once in a while. The death and sadness. The loss of a home he'd thought he'd already put behind him the moment he'd decided to board the ship with Jabari rather than call out for help to the Baron's soldiers.
How wrong he had been to think a simple decision made in a single moment could be lived without regret. The human mind wasn't so rigid in its ways. There were rarely ever important decisions that were never questioned. In the brief time he'd been in the seminary he had learned it quite harshly.
The silence of the night had embraced him, and he'd walked it free of these worries, and plagued only by the minute fear of what Igor would do to him should the priest ever catch him wandering when he should be sleeping. So far no one had noticed. No one had caught him on his nightly escapades.
For that, he had always been glad. For during those moments, he had almost felt truly free.
Slowly, the confusion lifted from his fatigued mind. He watched one Seth watch him. Two more argued about the mundane. There was a fourth. But the fourth was not important. Or perhaps it was better to say the fourth was the most important.
But it didn't matter. What mattered was leaving the mist.
Suddenly there was a shift in the nonexistent strong enough to pull him from his reverie. It was no more than a trembling of instincts, but each of them grew quiet. It was as if they had come to a collective agreement in the silence. There had been no preamble, no realization, merely an understanding of danger should they not leave the mist.
"One of us…" Seth said slowly.
"… has gone astray," Seth finished in sudden realization.
There had been no sign, no symptom. There had been no shifting in the world or induced reactivity. There had been nothing. All of them had simply known. Like the man named Judas in one of Josiah's stories, one of them had made an active decision they should not have.
The problem now, was that none of them knew who it was.
It seemed he was not the only one here with a mission. Another Seth had begun to act.
Seth turned his attention from himself, his bickering long since forgotten. For the sake of all their survival they had to leave this place; they had to pass this test.
"You shouldn't have spoken of disjointing," Seth told him.
Seth ignored himself.
The statement was irrelevant. He had said what he had said. A jest, though it may have been, it had brought consequences along with it. All he could do was move on from it.
"We will not be disjointing anyone," he said. "We are all here, none of us late."
Seth cocked a quizzical brow. "All of us?"
A pregnant silence followed his question. Was one of them missing, he wondered. Had they, in their scrambled fray, forgotten one of their own. Were they so engrossed in their journey to have paid so little attention.
The thought of it annoyed him and he opened his mouth to chastise himself when he spoke.
"Leave him," he said. "We know he's always present. Always watching." He turned his attention to himself and found him confused. He cocked his head to the side, a question on the tip of his tongue.
"Who's missing?"
How a simple question could bear with it so much dread was awe inspiring.
Rather than answer, Seth turned away from himself and started moving. "We should hurry."
"Why?" Seth asked, even as he picked himself up. "We still have time."
At the head of the path, he looked back at the rest of him over his shoulder. "Yes, we do."
"So what's the rush?" he asked, running a tired hand through his groomed hair. He liked his hair neat and packed, tied up in a ponytail. That the others chose the same style did not sit well with him. It took away his individuality, something he didn't like.
Seth watched himself and didn't like what he saw. They had not always been this way. At some point during their brief break one of them had tied his hair up, eased it into a noble, sleek ponytail so that all of them were now identical. One of them had also once been shorter than the rest of them. He panned his vision through them once more and found all of them the same. Someone had changed drastically, but he did not know who.
It was going to make completing his quest a problem.
He returned his attention to the path before him and hurried on as he answered: "The rush is that while we still have time, it's more than enough to lose ourselves."
He understood the test of fear now.
He had never been afraid of his minds. He had been terrified of something else. A strand of hair strayed into his vision and he eased it away with his hand, sliding it back into place. With an unnatural ease, he ran a gentle hand through his packed hair, returning it to its sleek composure.
Perhaps they had already run out of time. Perhaps he had already faced his fear and succumbed to it. Unfortunately, he could not bring himself to care.
So he led them.
He waded through the mist, the others following behind him in silence.
He may not be worried, but it was only a matter of time before one of them would broach the question.
All he needed to do was prepare for the pandemonium that would follow. After all, there could be only one.
So he knew they all wondered as they walked. And in the silence of their minds it echoed quietly: Which of them was truly Seth?