Lux remembered being startled awake by a repetitive tick. . . tick. . . tick. . .. She shot up, skin crawling with what felt like thousands of grains of sand—and found herself extremely dizzy. Around her, an unfamiliar bedroom, furnished in all-white, illuminated by a great, golden star above the skylight. She glanced down at an equally unfamiliar body, finding a patternless white smock, and glimmering hands.
That irritating ‘tick’ had been what dragged her out of bed. She wandered the room in search of it; dipping under the bedside table, pulling open an empty wardrobe. She even examined the mirror that stood in the corner—but became lost in her own reflection. And the fact that something kept telling her that her foreign body must be missing some pieces.
The ticking continued without any sign of stopping, until the still room had begun to feel suffocating. She eyed a strange rectangle built into the wall, a lone rod sticking out of it. She dallied towards it, staring at it uncertainly for a very long time.
At some point, she’d pressed down on the rod, watching it tilt until the strange rectangle cracked open. She peaked beyond the opening, finding an endless hall painted in all-white. She slipped into it, the ticking only growing louder. She had decided to find the noise; force it into silence. . ., somehow.
She hadn’t known it at the time; too fixated on the path forward to wonder what sat behind each ‘strange rectangle’ she passed. Spirits—asleep while their souls were reshaped, their memories extracted, their appearances altered. She hadn’t even made the connection that she, too, was one of these spirits.
She passed by an array of glimmering adults, overlooking the halos atop their heads. Without even a glance back when they began whispering among themselves at the sight of her.
“Wasn’t room 203 scheduled to wake two weeks from now? She should still be recovering from spirit-operatives—,” a dumbfounded voice muttered.
“Memory extraction is much faster in children—are you sure you didn’t miscalculate?” a second, prickly voice accused.
“I absolutely did not, and you know it!” a long sigh sounded “. . ., the ones who die young always seem to come with extra problems. . ..”
A third voice approached to mediate, “It’s too late to make a fuss—she’s as awake as any other—I’ll go update her birthdate.”
She didn’t remember for how long, but despite the tittle-tattle that followed her, her focus had been entirely fixed above. On the silver glint of a large wheel; that seemed almost out of place on the spotless, white wall. There were two thin rods slowly spinning in the center. With each subtle shift—another annoying tick.
The light around Lux seemed to brighten; a lanky woman walking around her, “Good morning, dear—,” the woman bent down, stopping right when their eyes met, “you’re up early!” The woman wore a long, yellow dress with cuffed sleeves; almost entirely hidden under a white pinafore apron. She brushed her hair from her eyes, straitening the gold, stork-shaped barrette pinned to her cap. “You don’t happen to have any. . ., uncomfortable feelings, or odd pains, do you?”
It seemed Lux had already forgotten the way her skin had crawled, the way her balance had waned—convinced the only pain she felt was the tick in her ears. She glanced away from the woman, pointing at the wheel on the wall. “That—,” she insisted, without a clue how vague her answer was.
“Uhm. . ., you feel. . ., the clock?”
Lux nodded, replacing the word ‘wheel’ for ‘clock’ in her subconscious, “—it makes an ugly sound.”
“Okay. . . I’ll turn it off for you, how about that?” The nurse stood up straight, floating up into the air, “my name is Candace,” she rummaged around in the narrow space between the clock and the wall, a small notch clicking into place as the ticking stopped. “Now, I’m what you call a ‘morgue nurse,’ do you know what that means?”
Morgue nurse. . .. The question made Lux ponder, she silently repeated the phrase over and over; but found no answer. Her mind left entirely blank. Finally, she shook her head, “no, I don’t.”
“Well. . .,” Candace smiled, wide and pure-hearted, “as a morgue nurse, my job is to help newborn angels like you adjust to your spirit-body, your new environment—and after that, I’ll prepare you to ascend to the next tier of the Upper-Plane. How’s that sound?” She watched Lux’s empty expression and laughed. “That doesn’t make much sense to you, does it?”
“. . ., No, it doesn’t.”
“That’s alright, you’ll understand eventually,” Candace crouched down again, taking Lux’s hands, “now I have to ask. . ., do you know your name?”
This time, Lux didn’t have to ponder, she answered immediately, “Lux.”
Candace nodded, “good. . ., I have one more question—do you remember ever being called anything else?”
Lux shook her head, “No. . .,” her voice trailed off, “I. . ., don’t think I remember anything at all.”
Candace clapped her hands together, shoulders relaxing, “wonderful,” she said, “welcome to the Upper-Plane, and happy birthday, Lux.”
~
Lux’s days at the morgue stretched longer than most—despite this, her memories were scattered; engulfed in a thick haze. The repetitive décor, tedious silence, and unmoving clock, were all that she knew outside of the clinicians that would drag her off for testing. Each of them murmuring in contemplation; determined to find the reason for her early rise.
And so, Lux watched as angel after angel was discharged; many of them having woken up days after her. It wasn’t until the cheerful morgue nurse, Candace, approached her with a vibrant binder of paitent records, that she realized what boredom felt like. Because she had been offered its opposite.
“What do you think?” Candace sat beside Lux; eagerly awaiting her answer.
At this point, Lux still knew nothing of the world. She examined the binder in her hands; unsure what she was meant to do with it. Until that day, the morgue nurses made it clear that all patient records were off-limit to them; that they contained too much detail on their previous lives. She wondered; were all patient records this colorful? Would she be scolded for holding them?
She flipped the binder over, the image in the back somehow both foreign and familiar. An intricate recreation of what shimmered beyond the morgue’s skylights. Blazing balls of fire; stars. The grey, gloomy moon. But there was no sun; and the sky was dyed in a color she’d never seen before. Only now looking back did she realize it was a deep, dark blue. And that below it was an endless frozen plane.
Candace must’ve saw Lux’s bewildered expression, laughing a bit. “It’s a picture book—see?” she flipped the pages open.
An array of new colors revealed themself to Lux; accompanied by symmetrical lines of peculiar symbols. She wasn’t sure what she should’ve expected, from ‘patient records’ or ‘picture books’, but once her awe at the colors dissipated, she stared blankly; unenthused.
Candace tapped against the page, pointing at the symbols. She lowered her voice, meeting Lux’s eyes where they lingered on the page, “. . ., do you have trouble with reading, dear?”
Finally, Lux looked up at her, tilting her head, “. . ., reading?”
Candace thought for a quiet moment, “how about this—,” she held out her hands, letting Lux pass the book to her, “I might not be able to finish before I get called for my rounds but. . .,” she cleared her throat, placing her finger under the first lines on page, “I’ll read it to you.”
Even through the iatrogenic amnesia that shrouded Lux's memories of the morgue—she still remembered every word of that colorful book; becoming entranced in it as if she were under a spell.
~
The Old World was ripe with rogue spirits. Terrible manifestations of the dead, that returned to place their agony upon the living. Amongst it, the varied mortal-kind, teetered close to extinction, and never once flourished. But soon, a prophecy began spread from the Holy Land.
“Long-life and short-life species, you must all gather and listen! A great revelation has been made!” The theologians stood on tall stones and spoke of an enormous concentration of power, “the magic that fossilizes in the underground, sprouts from the dirt, and soars through the sky has flowed upstream—we must make haste to the north!”
If the theologians were to be believed, a large expanse of ice covered the north-most tip of the world, illuminated by a millennium’s worth of magic. The magic that brought their world up from nothing waiting in stasis beneath the surface.
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The theologians sermons always ended with the same message, “Send your strongest travelers! He who arrives first may acquire the power necessary to rewrite our ill-fated world and become a god!”
However, countless generations passed and it seemed no traveler had survived the journey.
~
Candace’s story had stopped short that day, but when she returned on the next to continue, her arms were wrapped around yet another array of oddities. A stack of spools hung from her fingers, looking akin to cartoonishly oversized rings. A machine with a grey vent on top. And finally, another book, this one much thicker than the last.
“Now this—, the machine thumped against the table, “is what we call a ‘wire recorder’,” she spun the spools around on her finger, “and this?” She slotted one spool into the machine. “well—it’s just wire.”
Lux gave Candace yet another unknowing look, “magic?” she asked. Of course, Lux knew now that the machine was far from magical—but at the time she was convinced every new discovery she made was born of magic.
Candace laughed, “not at all, dear,” she adamantly denied; according to her, even the picture book from the day prior lacked magic. “These clunky things are going to help you. . .,” she trailed off, taking the book from Lux’s hands, “read books like this all on your own.”
“But—that might be a while from now, so. . .,” Candace opened the book, flipping to where they left off last time, “shall I continue?”
~
Little remained of the arctic tribes, who gathered with four elders to deliberate the best path for preservation.
Amongst the lamenting, a slam sounded and the Western Elder clamored, “our young should be most capable of journeying to the tip of the world! Yet their corpses line the trail to godhood! And their spirits trample any new traveler who arrives!”
“Calm yourself, now,” the Eastern Elder urged, “we must—.”
A grieving man suddenly broke into the elder's quarters and begged, “Please—you must send me. I no longer have a thing to live for; I swear to push my body until it falls dead because I do not need it!”
The Eastern Elder took the grieving man by the shoulders and consoled him. “Turn your misery into strength, son.” the Eastern Elder called to end the gathering with an urgent request, “do not give up hope—gather one of each of your young; craft them the best supplies for the journey!”
The Western Elder returned to his aging tribe of only twelve adolescents. He measured them by their worth and pulled a frail woman from her home.
“Please—I cannot go, I do not have the strength, you must understand—,” the frail woman wept and pleaded.
“Do not anguish; your days here may be futile, but you have been given a great new purpose! Reach the tip of the world and you may be able to preserve mortal-kind in its entirety!”
On the Eastern shore, the grieving man was gifted a small ship to cross the drifting ice. He sailed for twenty days beneath a violent storm; eyes set upon the edge of the horizon. But the storm had taken a great toll on his ship, so he capsized just as the ice begun to glisten with magic. His corpse set to become one with it.
On the west side, the frail woman was gifted four sled dogs to ease the toll of her journey. She guided the dogs for some seventeen days. On the eighteenth, she huddled asleep beside the dogs, waking to their bloodstained bodies and a frenzied rogue spirit. She ran without her supplies and continued slowly towards her demise for ten more days. But fatigue and hunger conquered all, and she fell dead just as she stepped onto the glistening plane of ice.
Amongst this generation of travelers, these two were no different. Merely two more failures to pile atop mortal-kind’s defeat. . ., and some five-hundred years passed with no savior. That was until the place where their bodies rested began to crack.
~
Lux had taken her task of decoding the picture book’s strange symbols very seriously. Her first day began with the wire recorder, toying with it as a myriad of phonemes sounded from the machine. They went on to become syllables, then one-by-one, full words.
On the second day, she struggled to connect sound to symbol. Puzzled by the lack of uniformity of the shapes she studied. However, as she was pondering, a morgue nurse passed her by and assured her the inconsistencies were natural. An inevitable result of shaping and reshaping language for millennia.
On the third day, Candace visited Lux, seeing she had exhausted the workbook given to her; she scurried off to find something else. When she returned, she held a thick dictionary in hand. And by the end of the day; Lux had parsed through the entirety of it.
As the fourth day begun, she found herself staring at the last unread book amongst her collection; the picture book. And finally, she was able to make sense of the words on the cover.
Rebirth of the Old World.
She plucked the book from the table and begun to read just as Candace had.
~
A catastrophic quake split the north-most point of the Old World apart. Glaciers rose and fell, expelling tremendous amounts of magic into the air. The ground was rearranged, shifting all that was beneath the surface. It was at this place where two resting souls collided, and were jostled awake.
Two gods were born on the cusp of the new world.
Panicked and fragmented as they were, they looked upon themselves and saw new, unfamiliar existences. Though long dead, they crossed one another’s sights, stood together, and spoke of their love for the living.
“I wish to shield mortal-kind from the suffering inflicted by the dead,” one God said to the other, his spirit doused in light and burning bright as the sun.
“I wish to quell the sorrows of the dead so they may leave the living at peace.” the other God replied, reflecting the blaze outcast by her counterpart.
The sky intertwined them, aligned their ideals so they could begin a conquest to rewrite the law of life and death. On this day, the New World was born alongside them.
~
In the stillness of Lux’s fourth day reading, she studied the meaning of every word contained in that picture book; and the timeless haze shrouding her memories began to clear. Yet, with all the wonder of unfamiliar words gone, she found herself bored once again, wandering around with the book in hand.
The endless hall beyond her room was circular, wrapping around a sterile lounge where morgue nurses dallied between rebirths; while patients lazed between procedures. There were pamphlets scattered around; introductions to the Upper-Plane’s structure; it’s many houses, titles, and magics. Illustrated in sparse, dull color. But Candace had already read these to Lux, so they failed to quench her boredom.
A multi-layered, map detailing the Upper-Plane’s Nine Tiers of Ascension was set into the dome-shaped roof, blanched by white with little variance in shade. She found herself nearly blinded by it whenever she glanced up; unable to make out its toponyms. This too, left her needy mind dissatisfied.
She stopped at the round counter centered in the lounge. She slid the book across it; barely tall enough to peak over the surface.
“Hm?” Candace hummed behind the counter. “Are you asking me to read that for you, dear? I can’t until I’ve finished. . .,” she glanced away from the clipboard in her hands, voice trailing off as she saw Lux shake her head.
“I finished it.”
Candace stepped back, the pitch of her voice jumping, “wha. . ., really—?” her next question came in a baffled jumble of words, “finished it as in. . ., read it all? Like how I read to you? You really understood it?”
Lux nodded, “I understood it.”
~
The astonished breath that escaped Candace that day echoed through the rest of her stay. Not just from Candace; but from the morgue’s entire staff. Wherever Lux went, curious murmurs followed.
“She couldn’t read a thing just days ago! This child may be a prodigy in the making; the great houses will be fighting over her!” One morgue nurse praised after asking Lux to recite a convoluted philosophical text.
“Perhaps a miscalculated memory extraction is good for one’s. . ., IQ?” A clinician wondered aloud as he penned his assessment of her, “or could it be that a miscalculated memory extraction triggers short-term amnesia in unintended areas. . ., has her literacy simply returned?”
“I already told you all, there’s no evidence her memory extraction was miscalculated!” Another morgue nurse protested, filing away her strange case and allowing it to remain unsolved. “Some minds are just blessed—soaking up knowledge so easily. . ., I’m a little jealous.”
“Candace, are you sure you didn’t cast a spell on her?” The rest joked as Candace entered Lux’s room and sat beside her one last time.
“Morning dear,” Candace glanced down down at the clipboard on her lap; the top page marked with Lux’s name, “I spoke with our clinicians about your case. . ., and they’ve authorized your discharge from the morgue,” she leaned in, feigning the cheerful smile that usually came naturally to her, “Congratulations on your ascension! Hopefully this place wasn’t too torturous with that extended stay.”
Candace presented Lux with a pristine garment. An Academy uniform; colored in rich browns and gentle ivory, threaded by gold that spanned into intricate embroidery. The sun sprawled across her back, matching brooches were clipped onto her loafers, a line stars cascaded down each sleeve, only stopping at the cuff folded over her wrist. Then, she was handed a heavy, thickly stitched satchel; told that she would soon meet a new overseer. One titled ‘Headmistress.’
“Take care, okay?” Candace said, pinching the fabric of Lux’s vest and pushing a silver, stork-shaped pin through it, “and don’t forget, if you get lost—show another angel this pin; they’ll know you’re newborn, and show you the way.” She tightened the straps the tied together Lux’s tower of books—which she’d insisted Lux keep; even stacking a few more atop it. She handed it to Lux, stepping back to leave her alone on the ascension platform.
Lux nodded in response, watching Candace lift her glasses to swipe at the tears welling in her eyes. She remembered tilting her head, almost amused as she thought, what a funny face.
Candace sucked in a shaky breath, “we’ll miss you dear, but the world is waiting for you catch up.”
Miss? Lux nodded again, gaze falling the pile of books in her arms. It was her heftiest yet, Candace had called it crucial part of her upcoming curriculum, with domineering typography that read; Law of the Living, Law of the Dead. She should have been captivated by it—would have been if not for the question nestling itself in the back of her mind. What does it feel like to ‘miss’ someone?
Now, looking back, she was sure she’d never missed anyone.
