Chapter 16

Before I continue, notice our poor Sofi’s condition has slightly worsened. I fear she may yet lose all patience, ask for her check, and leave. I suppose I’m trusting her resilience. I’m fairly certain that she has undergone traumatic situations worse than this. For instance, she had suffered much by the time Warren found her in that sagging, dying apartment building. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Just please keep an eye on Sofi; I would hate for her to leave early and miss her surprise.
Back to the tale. Shortly after Warren felt the bone-chilling shriek resonating through him, a blur of motion and feathers shot up from beyond the edge, folded its wings around itself and landed with a shock on the floor. Warren’s heartbeat began to rise as he studied the now motionless figure. Then movement caught his eye. The wings began to drop away slowly. Warren squinted, watching the form intensely, and inched away with his left arm.
The dropping wings revealed a human form, head bowed, chest covered with feathers, and eagles feet perched on the floor. The wings continued to spread and the figure kept its head bowed. When it had stretched to its full wingspan, it promptly glanced up at Warren, whose mouth dropped open. For the creature before him had Sofi’s face.
Warren tried to speak, but the harpy folded her wings in a bit and smiled grimly at him. She waltzed over to him, hopped around him, fluttering her wings for balance now and again. Warren shuddered, with ice filling his veins.
“Hello Warren, my love,” she rasped in a hushed whisper. She stroked the side of Warren’s face with a claw on her wing. “I was beginning to think you wouldn’t come.”
Warren somehow found the courage to speak, “I’ve been here for hours…”
“Yes, yes, physically. But what does that matter if you aren’t here,” she tapped on his head. “What is the body without the mind? It is a flimsy thing, fit only for a meal.” The creature with Sofi’s face licked her lips and clicked her tongue. “But you, Warren,” she continued, hopping around him and giggling, “you took awhile to arrive, today. Ahh but here you are, and what a delightful little surprise you have become. I think that the rest of this morning will be extraordinarily…” the harpy paused, as if searching for the right modifier. “Pleasing,” she said at last, with a wry smile. She folded a wing around him. “Come, Warren. We have much to discuss. But not here, in this disaster. So come along.” She halfway lifted him to his feet with her powerful wing and pushed him towards the edge. Warren found his balance, but didn’t walk with her.
In a moment, the pressure from the wing was gone and a burst of air sent the dust in front of him swirling. He glanced backwards in time to see the harpy burst towards him with incredible speed. She hit him in the ribs and sent him over the edge and into a freefall. Warren found himself facing away, and in the few moments he had, he noticed that the buildings outside of the crater didn’t adjust in their perspective as quickly as he thought they should in such a long fall. Then another shriek echoed through the ruins and he felt a terrible grasp around his shoulders again, and then the painful grip as her wings opened to direct their fall. They shot through what he thought was a stairwell breezeway and out over the backside of the apartment, where a true crater, nearly the size of a football field, dominated the ground. He was flown right into the center of the place and down into the darkness.
For nearly a minute, the only reason he knew he was moving was the gusts of air on his face and the sound of pumping wings above him. Warren tried to keep his feet tucked in, he certainly didn’t want to smack his shin on any debris likely littering the tunnel. So he hugged his knees with his arms, closed his eyes, and waited for disaster. The forces of turns and drops and rises all played on his stomach, until he was certain they had navigated to the center of the earth. After a while (be it seconds or minutes, he wasn’t sure) he opened his eyes and actually noticed some difference. Faint orange lines swayed across the darkness, stretching, glowing, then disappearing. It was a mesmerizing dance, one that grew in brilliancy as they moved onward.
Then he found that those orange lines had preceded the bright hue emanating from a large, vacuous cavern. The light shimmered off the rock formations, and as he quickly approached the light source, the talons gripping his shoulder released him. Warren’s heart jumped into his throat and flailed a bit for balance and fell towards the stone. But as he neared the floor, it dropped away, so that he felt himself flying over the rock surface, falling into a bath of light. Whatever it was directly beneath him glowed intensely—he nearly squinted as he fell down the hole. Then the side-walls ended and he found himself dropping into an even more monstrous and more brightly lit cavern. The light below him still seemed a ways off—but off course, still rapidly approaching.
Then he felt the talons again, but not as brutally this time. They wrapped around his arms, tightened their grip, and he felt himself slowing as he was edged into another spiral. Warren tried to take in his surroundings as they descended. One side was definitely brighter than the other; he thought he could pick out structures of some sort on the brighter side. But as he approached the ground, he was dropped again. It was a short fall, however, and he splashed into an underground reservoir, which acted like a mirror for the lights above him. He sputtered and kicked himself towards the brighter side of the shore.
When he pulled himself from the water, which had been surprisingly warm, his shoulders felt like hamburger. So he crawled forward on his knees, set his head on the rock and let his shoulders sag. When a shadow enveloped him yet again, he let himself fall sideways and rolled onto his back. There was Sofi’s sly face staring down at him. She perched herself on his chest and gazed thoughtfully at him. “You are something else dear Warren. All this…sensation! And still you manage to think.” She tapped his sternum with a talon twice. Warren decided against questioning her and making a fool of himself.
“Warren, let me tell you something,” she continued and leaned forward until her face was but inches from his. “You are a special person. You realize this don’t you?” She seemed to focus on his mouth and brought her wing over him, again stroking his cheek. “I think you do. Why else would you be here? Oh Warren!” she cried and buried her face in his neck. Then she whispered in his ear, “it has been so long since anyone in our path has thought as you do! They feel and they burn and they hate and they kill. Such an eternity has passed since anyone here thought. Even them!” she swept her wing back and Warren found hundred of hovering harpies watching him. “Their passions have undone them, Warren. I say again, rationality has fled this path; I trod alone in darkness.” She pressed her nose against his
“Can’t you see what difficulty it is to keep one’s sanity in the midst of such animalism? Can’t you understand how many ages have passed since I have sensed thoughts like your own? In the glow of your intellect, it’s impossible to know how I endured those years of darkness!” she exclaimed and brought both wings to Warren’s face, enveloping him in a warmth of feathers. She slid herself down his body and pressed her head against his chest. “Oh do say something!” she said, quivering in anticipation. “Tell me why you have come! What drives you, dear Warren?” she asked, suddenly raising her head from his chest and peering into his eyes, running her wing claws through his hair. “Is it virtue that you seek? Are you planning for the greater good? Or are you just along for the ride, soaking up information like a sponge, ready to use knowledge for your own benefit?” Warren let her talk, eyebrows narrowing and dropping as she went on. “I see you judge me now. Must you focus on outward appearances so much? Listen to me, Warren. Converse with me and discover my mind.” She seemed to study him and decide on a course of action.
“As you have probably guessed, I am not Sofi. My name is Sylvara. I had hoped you wouldn’t be so shallow as to require a similar form for conversation. But I trust this shall aid you, my dear.” Upon those words she stretched out her wings and with a swift motion downwards, shook the feathers from her arms. Warren stared, dumbfounded. The bird was gone—just Sofi’s human form, clad in rags, straddled him. She brushed her hair back and caressed Warren’s hair with soft fingers. “Now speak with me,” she said softly. “I have much desired conversation with you; do not hold out on me.”
Warren’s heart threatened to explode within him; he told himself again and again that the woman on top of him was not Sofi, but some foul creature of an underworld he knew nothing about. She was after something, he knew, and her deceptions likely wouldn’t end here. But then she bent over him and kissed him on the lips—and ignited a war between his senses and his mind. When she pulled back, Warren fidgeted under her pouting mouth, her begging eyes. “I know it’s in there; why won’t you let it out? Can’t you see, Warren? All I want is to talk with you.” Then her expression changed slightly, darkening a bit. “Unlike them,” she said, gesturing to the sky, “they just want to feast.” Warren shivered and she lowered her face again to his and kissed him lightly. “Talk with me?”
Warren couldn’t quite figure why this creature wanted to converse with him so badly—he knew that he knew very little about what was going on. But neither could he discern any reason not to talk; so he managed to swallow once, take a breath, and speak. “Um. What do you want to talk about?” he asked.
“What did you think, when you read that note?” she asked, intrigued beyond measure.
“I was concerned for my friends’ safety,” he answered.
“Yes perhaps you were; but something else, too. What was it?”
“I’m not sure what you mean. I have nothing left in the world but my friends, without them I’m alone and meaningless.”
“Ah! But was this a fear for them, or a fear for you?” she probed.
“I suppose both.”
“And yet…yet there is more here, more to your reaction. Why did you run?”
“I didn’t want to be too late.”
“To arrive before they died?”
“Yes.”
“Did you think you could do anything about it? You knew nothing but my name and a location not too far from you. Did this mystery enable or disable your actions? Would have done more, had I told you the reasons for your friends’ capture, their precise holding location, or the fact that I had to kill two of the more rambunctious ones?”
Warren’s smile faded. “You…you what?”
She sat back on his hips. “Do not burden yourself with the lost. They weren’t your friends, don’t worry. No, the ones you care for are still alive. For now. But what about the mystery, Warren? What did you think of the unknown?”
Warren sighed. “I’m not sure; I decided to try to help them, whatever that meant.”
“Despite the unknown, right?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Oh Warren. Be assertive! You did what few in the whole history of my path have dared to do. Tell me what you did. You risked all for the thought of love, didn’t you?”
Warren nodded. “Yes, I did.”
“And now I have you here, with a legion ready to tear you limb from limb, and you don’t seem to sense the danger to your life. Why? Is it only because I talk to you in the form of someone you love? Have you pity or understanding for a lie?”
“Why shouldn’t I give you a chance to talk? I have nothing to do with your deceptions—why should you have to appear as Sofi? What difference does that make?”
The creature in Sofi’s skin reveled. “Oh Warren! You are something else entirely,” she giggled. “If you saw me in my true form, you wouldn’t dare speak with me. I know you wouldn’t. But that does not matter, for we are speaking. And if I speak from a lie, it should not follow that I speak lies, am I right.”
“You are. But if you spoke truth from truth, I might be more apt to believe it as such, you know,” Warren pointed out. Sofi’s lips smiled and she tossed her hair around.
“So you have yet to ask me anything to resolve the mystery. Don’t you want to know where your friends are? How they are doing? How you can rescue them?”
“Would it really make that much difference if I knew?”
“Warren, Warren!” she laughed, “your questions are an ecstasy! It has been so frightfully long since anything of the sort has been put forth to me. But believe me when I say that yes, it would make a difference. Knowledge is power, Warren. And you, whether you choose to believe it or not, are a very powerful individual. I wonder what you will choose to do with that power? For instance, let us look at Sofi, whose image I have. She will not say it (for she does not know it, as I think you do) but she loves you desperately. She feels, but she will not acknowledge it. And with the power of the mind behind her passions, she will drift away into meaninglessness. But you Warren, ah! you will love her, and you will focus your mind behind it. This will rescue her, more than you could ever hope to do by breaking chains with your hands.”
Warren kept silent for a moment, considering her words. When he began, it was a slow and deliberate chain of words that he spoke. “Are you saying that if I can rescue Sofi’s mind, no earthly bonds will hold her?”
Sofi’s eyes flickered with excitement. “Yes, Warren. Rescue her mind with your knowledge. I long to see it—the love of two in mind and spirit. But beware! Should you fail, you will lose her forever.”
“You mean, this is a test,” Warren clarified. A sly grin crossed Sofi’s lips.
“You are precisely right. It is easy enough to think for yourself…but to bring true thought to another being—even I have seen the sheer impossibility of that. Look around me, Warren. You see years of my miserable failure to lead these wretches from the bonds of their passions. And from this I have learned this: if you fail, you will drive them even further into their ignorance. Just look at them, the mindless souls watching our every move, waiting to devour. Your precious Sofi will become just like them, unless you can light the beacon of reason in her mind."
Warren bit his lip and stared at the creature sitting on top of him. After a moment’s pause, he asked the question she had been waiting for: “Where is she?”