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This nirvana was what he’d dreamed about for years. While his logic still needed answers, his soul surged with the wild joy of finally lying by her side.

Where he’d always belonged.

6

A Passion for Silver Angels

RIV - THEN

The terrors never left him. The ghouls walked by him day and night through the darkened corridors of the underground tunnels.

They transformed from ghosts to shadowy creatures with thin profiles, creeping along the rocky walls.

They told him tales in voices that wailed, moaned, and screamed, thumping their chests in feverish song. But he sometimes thought it was simply the wind, his only companion in the otherwise deserted underworld shafts of Eden II.

Lost deep in the underground crevices, he hunched himself against the lunar winds powerful enough to shear skin off, seeking solace and loneliness all at the same time.

He’d escaped the others and their platitudes, appeals, and offers to help because he was beyond help.

His agony was so absolute, so deep that to escape it, he longed to walk to the edge of the sands and throw himself off the moon.

Instead, he’d become hopelessly lost, tangled up in the labyrinth of tiny winding arterials, tight as a duck’s kiss in others, littered with crumbling rocks, koko paraphernalia, rubbish, and hopelessness.

He fell beside a mound of abandoned furniture, boxes, and silver rocks, where he burrowed himself into the silver regolith, shaking with fever.

His shaky fingers tried to close the oversized jacket around his almost naked body, but it did little to keep the howling, shearing, cold wind that whipped up around him.

He thought he was about to die and sensed his soul’s desire to creep out of his body towards the outer embrace of space.

There was still a sliver of his existence that wanted to survive, and it shouted, screamed, and railed at the poison inside him that was turning his locks as silver as the regolith he lay on.

So the fight for his sentience continued, vicious and unrelenting.

Until she arrived.

His silver-haired angel.

She leaned over his broken and battered body and touched him with hands that warmed his frozen skin.

She spoke, her voice soft and earnest, urging him to drink the water she pressed against his cracked, broken lips.

She wrapped her small, skinny body around him and shared what little heat she had.

Feeding him tidbits of meat and bread from the folds of her robes, most of which he spat out and rejected.

She sang to him, sweet and husky, in an unfamiliar song with haunting words he didn’t comprehend, yet was drawn to as they began to heal his soul.

Lured by her siren-like potency, he turned his spirit towards the light, away from the darkness that had consumed it.

When he managed to stand on his ravaged legs, she encouraged him with smiles and tender words to rise from where he’d fallen.

She guided him through darkened tunnels and into a vast underground marketplace packed with sweet-and-sour chili noodle bowl stalls, underground speakeasies, sunken casinos, and tunnel rat bars.

Twas where red-eyed, empty soul figures sat listlessly chugging down synth-hol by the bucket load.

Her hand clutching tight, she led him away from temptation and into a rabbit warren of shacks before stopping at one of the Pika settlements on the edge of Pika City.

She welcomed him into her tiny hovel, where he fell to the ground exhausted. The humble dwelling was barely a hovel, with one sleeping pad and electromagnetic battery heaters to boil water.