Moss slid over the edge of the cliff and, for a split second, he had a beautiful view of the pristine beach far below. He would have liked to have lived long enough to enjoy it. But gravity had its own ideas on that score. It reached up, grabbed his feet, and time slowed to a crawl. A giant leaning shrub reached out, caught the tips of his boots and cartwheeled him out over the abyss like a discarded rag doll. As the view twirled away, he was certain of two things. The remaining moments of his shortening life would end in a splatter of agony and that he would never see Lilith again.
An ever mixing blur of blue sky and green jungle combined until two colors became one. The hidden jungle not so far below rushed towards him like a speeding windshield, greeting an unsuspecting bug. Splat. Flat. Fade to black.
As he torpedoed into the high canopy, a millennium old limb struck Moss across the side of his face. The steel bullwhip, swung by a gargantuan matador, sent a shock of pain through every nerve in his head. The left side of his face split apart like a busted piñata, and gout of fresh blood, macerated tongue and shattered teeth ejected outward in a pink spray. His vision tunneled, a single eye going black and through the searing pain, his searching fingers plunged into an empty, oozing eye socket. Horror seized his churning guts as Moss' stomach let go. For a split second, he thought of Lockspur and Dahl. And then, a blistering bile smeared the torn pulp of his half face. His shattered jaw opened in a twisted, gargling scream no one heard.
That's when it happened. An unseen force reached out, wrapped around his wrist, and jerked him up and away. The bright, ripping pain of dislocating joints and stretching tendons had two polarizing effects. First, the spinning colors stopped and, second, he no longer felt as if he were falling.
Moss's senses failed him. No sound; motion; pain. Absolute darkness consumed him. Not a single pinpoint of light reached his remaining eye. There was no sense of anything. He peered around, trying to center himself. But he couldn't. Up was down, left was right, and right was wrong. His heart raced as he hung in a void, pondering the thought he was dead. Shit, I hope not; he thought. Because if I have to float here for an eternity, I'll go bat-shit crazy. He wondered how long he had already been hanging there and pondered the idea that he may already be crazy. How would he know? Isn't that what crazy is? He tried to move his legs. Tried to walk away. Tried to run. But there was no sensation of body or movement.
Hey. Silver lining, he told himself. At least the raptors are gone. Because if I can't run away, he thought and shuddered. I'm in trouble. He realized he had felt the shudder and felt a sense of relief. Maybe I'm not dead? Another icy chill ran up his spine. But this time, the chill brought with it the return of feeling. He tried walking again and couldn't. But he could feel his limbs. But not his injuries. Did that mean he was alive or dead? He was between life and death. He didn't know., didn't care. At least he wasn't falling. But how did I get here? He forced himself to touch his face with a trembling hand. His face was there. His eyes were there.
Something tugged at Moss's feet, and he sank into the endless darkness. Whatever was down there let go and he popped up, bobbing like a buoy caught in rough seas. An intense explosion of sparks and light filled Moss's vision and his eyelids slammed closed in response. Tears rolled down his cheeks. He looked around, consumed by the reverse of absolute darkness. He was hanging in absolute white. Someone or something had turned the lights on. A deep, guttural reverberation reached his ears. It sounded like whale-song. He was not alone. And whatever was out there was big. His head twisted right and left, but he saw nothing. The sound came again. Closer this time. He looked down, eyes bulging as an enormous creature swam beneath him. It glided through invisible water, an enormous toothless maw opening and closing. Long snaking tendrils jutted out from its glistening, bony lips. It probed the void.
Moss screamed and tried to run away. But got nowhere. The giant creature's glazed over eyes turned to the movement and so too did the long, flowing body trailing behind them. It dove into the white beneath him, tendrils tasting his kicking feet as it passed by. In a single tremendous movement, it reversed course and a writhing tendril darted out and wrapped around his ankle. It dragged him along, making no effort to pull him in. Moss kicked the slimy appendage with his free foot. It slipped off again and again. He looked like a balloon on a string, trailing behind a running child. His left boot heel caught the tendril. The creature twitched in pain and released its captor. It glided away, making a lazy arc.
Moss realized the wraith wasn't trying to eat him. Whatever this lone leviathan was, it was trying to take him back. Back to a world where he was falling to his death. Back to the place he belonged. To the place where he was supposed to die. Someone or something had yanked him up and out, and this thing was trying to pull him down and back. It was the guardian of the place between life and death. He started kicking again, trying to escape the marionette strings that held him in place. He ended up in a prone position, looking like a comic book superhero flying with their fists stretched forward.
Another spark flared into existence on the tip of his nose. A single lightning bug in an endless white void. The flash surprised him and he blinked, trying to focus on the dot of orange/gold. It fizzled, threw off sputtering sparks and moved away like the fuse burning towards a cannon. It was hypnotic. Moss watched as its tiny spark grew brighter. It pulled him along the same way the creature had. He didn't fight. Two opposing forces were fighting for his soul. Then, without warning, the spark flared up as if it had floated into a cloud of gas. He shielded his face from the raging flames and radiating heat waves baked his skin.
The ethereal monster tugged at his feet again. Only this time, when he looked down, the creature was a black shadow cruising through a white void. The shadow solidified into a massive fiery koi fish. It locked him with one burning red eye and opened its gigantic mouth. This was it; when death took him. He screamed and flailed. His futile efforts did little to dissuade the creature's meandering onslaught. The specter swam straight for him, increasing its speed, graining distance and preparing to swallow its prey. The creature's mouth closed around his legs, swallowing him to the waist. He couldn't breathe. He felt the contents of his stomach explode out of his mouth. The damn thing was intent on swallowing him whole. Moss punched its eye and screamed. His hands impacted nothing. The creature was a colored shadow and nothing more. He spotted a pinpoint of blackness at the center of its blood red eye and drove his fist in and grabbed the dark spot. Lightning coursed up his forearm, exploding out of his shoulder. It spit his convulsing body out. It darted away only to turn and begin swimming around him in an ever shrinking circle.
When Moss came too, he saw a second explosion had knocked both predator and prey in opposite directions. The great void filled with black stars and galaxies. It was beyond his ability to comprehend. The creature, sensing the time to attack was nearing its end, raged forward at a frightening pace.
Moss rocketed backwards, born aloft on a wave of unquantifiable energy as blackness drew him down. When he came to, he marveled at the brilliance of a trillion burgeoning stars. The sense of awe was short-lived. The thing had reached him again. It seized his feet, pulling him away, pulling him back towards death.
He kicked it, but his efforts were in vain. His foot slipped through as if kicking at a cloud. The dark entity seized him from below, dragging him down. It intended to bear him back to his final resting place at the bottom of a mile high cliff. But Moss wasn't having any of that. He threw up his hands, trying to pull himself away, and the other force seized him from above and yanked him up. Only this time, there was no scream of pain. No tearing of flesh and bone. Only building speed and a million stars becoming a laser beam that swept past him. He drew out longer, thinner. An ever-narrowing, ever-lengthening, hair-thin line of atoms stretching across an endless expanse of space and time. Time and space merged into an endless realm of possibilities. A million different lives, lived by a million different Moss's.
The two forces played an interstellar game of tug of war with a human rubber band and Moss could do nothing but wait and see which would win or if he would snap.
As he reached the point of snapping into nothingness, the thing that held his feet lost its grip and his speed redoubled. Like an overstretched rubber band finally releasing its pent up energy, he rocketed forward and a trillion celestial embers coalesced into an eye-searing orb on the other side of space and time. He rocketed straight towards it as great waves of heat baked his face and forced his eyes closed. This was it. He was almost there. And then he struck something with the force of a shooting star.
Moss's eyelids flicked apart. He lay face down, choking on a mouth full of gritty sand. He rolled over, sputtering and cursing, until his airway cleared. The moist ground beneath him soothed his hot skin. The sky overhead was a pale blue. He pulled himself onto his knees, finding himself at the bottom of a ten foot deep crater. White clouds drifted by as he clawed his way up the steep embankment. As he reached the top, the sound of gentle waves caressing a nearby beach wafted to his ears.
His head pounded like he'd just come off a 6 month bender and everything spun around him at a 45° angle. For a moment, he thought he was still falling and his little hallucination was just some cosmic joke. A mouthful of bile exploded out his guts and the geysers of puke flew into the sky, only to rain down all over him. The taste and smell of it brought his focus back.
Moss lay on top of the bank, looking into the hole and imagining what a meteorite might feel like after impact. He remembered his face and froze in a near heart stopping horror. His hand twitched as if not wanting to touch his face. He forced himself to run his tongue around the inside of his mouth and was glad to find he still had a tongue and teeth. And a mouth.
Moss didn't know what had happened to him, where he was or how he had got there. Nothing made sense. For that matter, he wasn't positive if he was still alive. The only thing he was certain of was that no one had ever fallen off a mile high cliff and survived. He touched his face and let out a ragged sigh of relief. Apparently, he had survived the impossible.
Something moved between Moss and the sun overhead and he rolled away from the looming shadow, trying to get to his feet before another monster came for him. A picturesque landscape spun around him and he fell on his knees, holding his pounding head in his hands.
"The dizziness goes away after a while," a familiar woman said, looking down at him.
The sun was at her back, blotting out most of her features. He thought he recognized the voice. Although, this woman's silhouette didn't match the woman he was thinking of. This woman had wild bleach blond hair. White in places and her skin was a bronzed suntanned. Whoever this woman was, she was a polar opposite of the alabaster skinned, black-haired beauty he was thinking of. But the voice, there was no mistaking the voice.
"You look like shit," she said, and then laughed when seeing his donning realization of who she was.
"Lilith," he said, more asking himself than her.
"In the flesh."
Moss rose to his feet, looked around and saw a single star hanging low in a translucent blue sky. Half a dozen moons filled the sky, along with countless twinkling stars. Wherever he was, night and day seemed to happen at the same time. Gentle waves washed up along an endless shoreline, and a cool breeze filled with cinnamon and seaweed wafted across the white beach.
"Where am I? How did I get here? And what was that thing back there? It grabbed me." He gestured over his shoulder at nothing. When she didn't respond, he looked her up and down and asked in a confused voice, "And what happened to you? The last thing I remember is trying to get to you after you were hurt. And now… I find you here, looking like…" he paused, unsure of what to say next. In truth, he liked her new look. He liked it a lot.
"It would appear we have much to discuss," she said, turning and walking away.
"Hey," he cried in a shrill voice. "Where are you going?"
She pointed down the beach at a small hut in the distance and said, "There." Then she gestured towards the surf. "You can come, too. After you clean up." She sniffed the air in an exaggerated gesture and grimaced. "You stink of vomit and ass."
Moss stood there, mind pondering the million different questions running through his mind, but all of them seemed to be lodged somewhere between his brain and vocal cords. All except for the most important one. "Hey," he called out behind her. "Am I dead?"
Lilith Hemmingford turned, shrugged her shoulders and answered with a question of her own, "Do you feel dead?" Then she pulled open the door to the hut and disappeared inside, leaving him to his thoughts and a much-needed bath.
Moss peered down. He found himself covered in puke and feces. "God." he said, looking up. "I don't know if you can hear me. But I need a favor. It's not a big one. And I know I don't have any right to ask. But please, never let Lockspur find out I shit my pants. I'll never hear the end." Then he ran into the surf, tearing off his clothes, jumping waves and whooping like a kid on summer vacation.
Not knowing if he was dead or alive. And not caring. He had found Lilith, and she was here. What more could he ask for?