Their path meandered along a thick-thin-thick invisible slithering descent, serpentine and hollow and hidden beneath their viscid step. While Kasse remained on the surface with the man he refused to let suffer, his utility mind crawled on its belly in the serried depths,
searching
searching
searching
until at long last
Kasse
fell
through.
He’d been so consumed by his secondhand vision, his reflected sight in magnetic resonance, that when the ghost lost the depth he’d come to expect, he lost his grasp of the overworld and succumbed to the charnel call of substratum.
Kasse was just gone,
like he’d been an illusion all along.
When Eoran’s eyes circled back around to where his companion should have been, it took a minute for him to notice that he was, in fact, alone.
That subsequent realization hit him
H A R D.
The boy halted, spinning in place, heartbeat increasing, chest heaving, panic rising like red death on the day of his final doom, certain that this time it would finally break him.
“Uh—Kasse?” He hissed into the night, searching the ground for scraps. “Kasse??”
Unsatisfied, Eoran was on his knees in an instant; load dropped, fingers slapping and combing through the granular earth.
A sudden frigid breeze blasted up from two feet in front of Eoran despite the fact that it still appeared to be solid stone. The wet, stone accented zephyr carried Kasse’s cough up to the inadvertently abandoned soldier.
But there was something else—
water running down stone.
“Carrier jump!” Kasse’s voice came in echoes from the illusion of solid ground, faint splashing the accompaniment to his treading water. “Get your flashlight!”
Eoran wheezed, hand slapped over the violent trembling of his heart. Thank you, Arsaiya.
Though his father had tried numerous times to rope the boy into his grim stories of the blood-prophetry involved in maintaining the altar of Varonian, Eoran had never taken to them as veraciously as his older brother. Eoran always took losses hard, but now they felt more real. Tainted by the past couple years which had seen him confronted with death and injury on a consistent basis, the first hand experience of mortal fragility did wonders to help the heathen boy succumb to intermittent spells of transient faith.
The two directives Kasse gave him summed up the situation in a perfectly understandable approach—sixty foot drop into a deep basin. They’d practiced this during training over and over, until it came to be as ordinary as jumping from an airplane. Eoran collected his load and threw himself into the breeze. With any luck, he’d make it without dashing his skull upon some errant rocks.
The splash was louder than it would have been if it were just him, haphazard arrangement of supplies complaining during their freefall into the darkness. When he surfaced it was with his flashlight lit—red, then white, bright and brilliant as it illuminated the depths of the emerald pool made by rivulets from the hidden pathways of mountainous veins.
“FUCK that’s cold,” the engineer exclaimed as he scrambled out of the water, fingers grasping his arms. “Are you hurt?”
Immediately, Eoran had an answer—Kasse was hauling him to standing at the edge of the barathrum, the sharpened heat of his razor mouth finding Eoran in the lambent reflection of the water. He kissed him with the adrenaline of a near death experience, the immediate vision of their survival, the elation of their accidental success rushing his heart through the escalation of his metronome pulse.
18B realized there was nowhere he’d rather be than trapped in the limestone dark knee deep in the mineral scent of water with 18C held tight against him.
“I love you,” Kasse breathed, the shudder of the fall still tingling through his spine. “I fucking love you.”
Eoran smiled despite the pitiable filth of his dishrag visage, settling against the other to take the bodily warmth that came coupled with the fury of his affection.
“I love you, Kasse Sejan,” he replied through adoring lips, “Ceaselessly, and sincerely, and intrepidly, and fuck everyone and everything else about this horrible world, because you’re here, and you’re mine, and I love you.”
He pushed the makeshift hood of the Ossan costume off his head, water beading down the curve of his cheeks from his temples; he pulled the weapons sergeant to him by the hips, gripping at soused fabric that clung to his waistline, tight like a second skin.
“We should—”
Kasse, to his credit, protested in words even as his fingers tangled at Eoran’s nape. He was trapped between the sopping inkstain tendrils of his lover’s deepwater hair and the smokescreen valor of his survival skin.
“—find a way—”
The older boy couldn’t help his concave heart’s desperate hunt for body heat. He crept under the hydrosphere of the younger man’s ice husk, braved the abyssopelagic to pull Eo into the needled maw of his perihelion specter, ravenous in extremis.
“—out.”
“Mmhm.” The acknowledgement was evasive, given only to solidify the fact that Eoran, in theory, did believe that they should not spend the rest of their flashlight’s battery on illuminating the chamber that could very well become their tomb if they wasted much more time there fooling around.
Still, eager hands tugged at the clay-stained gauze that enrobed the other, impetuously frustrated by how much more tenacious a dip into the water had made it. If he was going to get anywhere, Eoran would have to have the full commitment of his fingers, so he dropped the light. Off it bobbed atop the waterline, a spinning nebbish on its new journey.
When Eoran turned his cheek to expose the line of his neck to Kasse’s mouth, it was in perfect time to catch a flash of light bouncing off the composite surface of telltale ivory. His groping immediately paused.
“Are you into voyeurism? Because there are four empty eyesockets over there that either like where this is heading, or are very offended by it.” At the mouth of a dark tunnel that led north, a pair of skeletons lay slumped against the wall. Their bodies were mostly obscured by the antiquated utilitarian clothes they had died in—miners, perhaps, led astray by false canarysong and then forever forgotten—but their skulls were trapped in an expression of post-existential horror or surprise or joy (it was hard to tell, exactly), jaws hanging agape, vacant eyes dilated to the cave’s inner-cosmos.
“If there’s bodies, there’s an exit.” Unphased by their lookie-loos, Kasse consumed the pulse exposed to him. He knew better, even as teeth scraped the other man’s salt skin. The thrill of dying evoked a desperate passion in his ghost, but he knew their survival depended on planning for all contingencies, securing their space, building fire, obtaining food.
The kiss that passed from 18B to 18C was soft, chaste, so fucking in love even as he sighed.
“Let’s go find the entrance.”
“Yeah.” Eoran’s concession was delivered with a declensional tone, but it wasn’t intentionally all doom and gloom. The further they walked back from the ledge of immediate peril meant the closer they were to security. Eo was miserable in those heavy, soaked-through fatigues; he was cold, and hungry, and barely able to choke back a longing that was turning rotten; ravenous in the way his nails unclenched their handgrip of fabric and skin, infuriated by the kiss he always had to let go. He looked forward to rest, even if pout-heavy lips didn’t show it. He looked forward to catching his breath, then losing it again.
Turning to the tunnel, the younger boy picked up the flashlight as it floated to the other side of the basin and illuminated the pair of skeletons in full as he passed them.
“They’re pretty stale. Guess we’ll find out if that’s good or bad.” If they were stuck from a collapse further up the shaft, that could be very bad. On the other hand, if this place was abandoned and it came to be that they were simply never recovered, that could be advantageous to the stowaways whose resonant strides made music in that ancient hall.
Kasse was a revenant, a phantom never truly trapped by the confines of a physical world. The boy was conditioned to escape. The ease he felt in the face of being trapped by a cave-in was unnatural—where most would find their throats addled by uncontrollable fear, Kasse was beleaguered by indifference.
The weapons sergeant’s only desire, at this point, was to give Eoran some calm, some comfort in their struggle to remain alive.
The red beam of Kasse’s flashlight flicked on, dancing across the moss drenched stones of the tunnel. The portal extended into the yawning dark and Kasse, ever intrepid, explored without reservation, tugging Eoran behind him.
The cave in came soon after.
A solid wall of collapsed stone rose ahead of them and Kasse sighed, running his ray of light over the stones in their path. Immediately, the boy was popping his last pieces of candy into his mouth, analyzing exactly how much energy this would take.
“How can I help?” Eoran asked as he patted his pockets. “I still have that sweet and a few more pills.” The remainder of the sugary bun was retrieved, made sticky in its plastic cage by some seepage of water. The tablets remained more difficult to present on the fly, securely tucked away into the hard shell of his military-issued survival kit, but he stood ready, if they would make the situation any better.
“You need them too.” The boy stood static even as his words fell with the sharp echo of waterdrops between them. His magnetic echolocation, his indescribable utility like an MRI pinged off iron oxide, magnetite, any deposit that would give him an indication of the shape and depth of their cave in.
“I could clear it,” he said softly. “But it’s gonna take a lot. Or I can make a path—the blockade will still be there, but we can go through. It’s less work and gives us additional security.” Turning, Kasse’s underlit face tried to study Eoran’s expression in the darkness. “It’s deep though, Eo. It’s not like when I push you through walls, or when I drop you through shit and it’s fast. It’s not like when I touch you and it goes weird. This goes for like ten yards, give or take. It might be too much—I’ve never had to… I guess I’ve never had to help someone be in between for a distance like that before. I don’t know if I’ve had to be in between for that kinda length before.”
The engineering sergeant ran his eyes over the rubble, expression still and full of appraisal. His training had been centered on taking things apart—bridges to cut off insurgent supply routes, whole buildings to eradicate shadow-strewn snipers—but this, as his instructor would say from his mouth full of hokey accent, was a whole ‘nuther animal.
“Well, clearing should be a last resort. There are too many unknowns to risk disturbing the whole pile and letting stress fracture other unforeseen points of weakness.” Eoran looked to Kasse. “If you feel like this is something that you can’t do, then let’s assess our options and work up another plan. It’s your call. Death has us surrounded no matter the angle. Either way, it would make me feel better to see you eat something other than candy.”
He held out the gummy sweet, “Please, Kasse.”
“He had two.” The phantom soldier recapitulated his lie, unwilling to meet Eoran’s eyes—in case his efforts were transparent in the exhaustion of all his reserves.
“Yeah, and you should’ve waited for me to see it.” Eoran grabbed his companion’s hand. “Eat it, Kasse.”
The ghost was caught, his haunting evaporated by his engineer’s incinerator touch. He remained in that second where Eoran’s furnace gaze torched the older boy’s willpower, wrapped his resolve in gauze and began his cremation, his rite of ashes.
Kasse was transfixed by Eoran’s touch, unable to wrench his eyes away from the livewire tangent of their hands. “…fine.”
Kasse Sejan was bullheaded, stubborn, and aggressive. He argued relentlessly, stepped into fights that didn’t involve him, and wrapped himself silent with rage until it burst with such force that his temper was all consuming.
But here,
Eoran Toriet quelled the loathing that dwelt there with his electric caress—rendered 18B a docile satellite in his chaotic orbit.
The older boy, as directed, took the rice roll from his companion’s hand, unwrapped it, and very carefully ate it.
The younger boy was, meanwhile, patient; mutely contented by his fleeting victory, an infinitesimal flash of pride catching the corners of his lips in that cherished moment. He released Kasse with an affectionate squeeze, the gesture woven with a hybridization of gratitude and reverence for letting that spoiled boy have his way.
Eoran’s black eyes returned to malformation of boulders and bits as though an easier answer would come to him from betwixt the cavernous cracks spreading through it, but after a period of silence, he was left as wanting as he’d come.
With the crinkling of wet cellophane Kasse rounded the other boy and kissed him left of center, lingering against his breath like a goodbye.
“I don’t know how this will go.” The older boy pulled the other’s sopping scarf up over his nose and mouth like it would do something if things went awry. “But I love you and I will always pull you through.”
Dread cored the weakened soldier. The function and structure of Kasse’s uncertain field of force left him gutted. The boy dragged into the military by the scruff of his neck was already an executioner—Eoran was waiting for him at the gallows
& Kasse was afraid.
But still the voids between all that striated stone lashed out, snared him in their yawning, asp mawed and ravenous in the hungry dark. The trap was an illusion, the exit a trial,
so 18B held 18C’s hand tight
tourniquet fingers
scalpel skin
after a moment of silence, deepwater lungs upwelling, keeping Eoran’s holy trust closer to his heart than the beat that ran through it, Kasse stepped into the space in between.