Face The World
19th and final chapter of Surface after all this time.
The raft on the canal between the rows of cow carcasses led Mano to a white door with a scale carved in, Libra-like. There was no doorknob, but one of the scale's sides was high while the other one was low. Looking closely, she saw that the high one also had the image of a heart carved on top of it. She grabbed the carving of the heart and pulled it down, bringing down the side of the scale on which it was as its other side rose while the door opened for her to enter. She'd solved the puzzle, but it had still been successful in getting its point across to her.
She could only walk in with a heavy heart.
She walked onto a large stone platform which covered most but not all of the room she walked into. She took a few steps forward as soon as she walked in because she could feel that her feet weren't steady, that the platform would've otherwise lowered under her weight until she'd slide right off from it. It was as though it had only been supported by a much smaller fulcrum at its center but, as long as most of the weight on it was distributed near where its center was, it would hold. She could hear bubbling and feel heat rising from down below.
She hoped it was just really hot water.
Getting across the platform was going to be made more difficult by the fact that there was also someone else on it with her, someone who'd been waiting for exactly her to show up. By the protrusion extending from her forehead in front of her face, Mano could tell that she was dealing with an anglerfish. She was completely transparent, the light filtering through her as though she were too ethereal in her majesty to even deign to reflect it. The white toga she wore made her seem as though she'd belonged on a cloud or in ancient Rome, not here today.
She wore a blindfold and held a white polearm with a hammerhead on its end. Silence hung between them as they briefly stood still.
"So, you've come," the would-be personification of Justice finally said, "to finish the job, I'm sure." Mano wondered if she could see out of her anglerfish protrusion, and simply wore the blindfold to trick opponents into believing that she couldn't see at all. "To finish what job, now?" she tilted her head, unsure of what the judge had meant. "The job of destroying everything that meant anything to her, of course," the cultist had accused, "because it's not enough that you killed her, no. You have to come here to kill those who admired her work."
The walls around them shifted as though they'd been screens, displaying multiple intersecting psychedelic patterns of kaleidoscopic light. Every imaginable color of the rainbow was swirling into unrecognizable shapes around them, making her dizzy. It might be vision which would be a disadvantage in this room after all, but the cephalopod hadn't considered that when she'd first walked in.
"I didn't kill my girlfriend," she said simply, steadying her gaze.
The eco-terrorist swung her long hammer at her, Mano blocking it with three of her forearms. "Bullshit," the anglerfish spat at her, "you may as well have." The octopus pushed her back with her three other arms. "Did you ever read any of her poetry?" the judge went on. "What do you think she was writing about?" she objected. "How often did you talk to her?" she snarled. The cephalopod scoffed at her. "You people have some nerve." She descended into a defensive fighting stance, making sure to keep her balance on the platform as she did.
The cultist growled, swinging her long hammer at all of Mano's arms and both of her legs successively in an attempt to disable her limb by limb. But the cephalopod was fast and agile, all her arms and her legs slithering out of the way of each attack in a disorienting, ever-shifting mass of chaotic-seeming yet somehow perfectly coordinated limbs. Frustrated by the octopus' evasion of her long-range weapon, the eco-terrorist pulled her polearm into two pieces, each of them with a hammerhead on its end that time, and begun swinging them at her with each arm.
Scraps of paper with the word 'guilty' on them rained from the ceiling on the ground around them, the sound they made when stepped on another way for the unseeing to easily locate her.
Mano was still somehow able to dodge and parry most of her strikes but it was proving harder than it had when she'd only been holding a single weapon, as long as it had been. The anglerfish's hit rate was still a lot lower than she'd expected that it had been going to be. After having dismissed that approach as unsuccessful as well, she put them back together and extended them sideways into a three-sectional staff that time, also with hammerheads on each end, swinging it everywhere around her in a whirling blur of condemning hammer strikes.
"You never even met her." The judge stepped back, pulling apart all three sections into separate hammers that she hurled at the octopus. "I loved Elizabeth," she continued, batting all three them off the platform with two arms each in turn, "and she loved me." The cultist laughed a cruel laugh at her. "Wouldn't we all like to believe that," she dismissed as another hammerhead polearm mysteriously reappeared in her hands. "We gave each other everything we had," Mano sustained, "can you say the same about anyone you know?"
The anglerfish's girlfriend had been Ammut's second visitor in The Pit. With the judge's blessing, at that. She was a true believer.
Angry that her psychological warfare was proving less overpowering than she'd hoped, the cultist swung her pole hammer at the octopus faster and with more strength than she had at any point until then. It connected with one of the cephalopod's arms, hard, and a dark blue blotch formed on it as blood gathered to her internal injury. Her arm was now simply trailing down her side, wracking her with pain, useless.
"When she died, did you even care?" The eco-terrorist had saved this one for last. Mano didn't know what a hypocrite it made her, but it didn't matter.
Bracing herself for something she knew she could but hoped she'd never have to do, the octopus screamed and ripped off her disabled arm altogether. Gritting her teeth through the effort of going on through the pain, she waved it in front of the anglerfish a few times, just to see if it'd get a reaction from her. Aside from a puzzled expression on her face, nothing. She probably really couldn't see anything after all, the cephalopod realized. Stepping back out of range, she gathered momentum and threw her arm at her opponent. At first, only confusion.
Then, when the still animated arm started wriggling around on her, the loudest scream.
The judge passed right out on the platform from the shock. "I'd give everything for her again," Mano had finished, stepping over her body into the next room. It wasn't true she hadn't cared, Soma could've attested to that. What he'd done in his grove before the three of them had left for Atlan's headquarters had been to restart one of her hearts, which hadn't worked in years.
When Elizabeth had died, one of her hearts had stopped beating.
"Can you hear the whales around us, Mano?" She'd walked into a large cubic glass room, with nothing but the deep ocean everywhere around them as far as the eye could see. "People say whales sing, but they don't know what they're talking about." The octopus remembered whale songs had been one of her favorite things to listen to after Elizabeth had died. "Whales don't sing." They'd provided some measure of comfort to her. "The whales are crying, Mano." She didn't care to have him take that away from her. "Crying over the loss of their loved ones."
A small, arrogant dolphin stood in the middle of the room, staring at her.
Atlan.
Rather than them having been out watching whales, it was the whales around them who were now gathering around to watch them. "You don't know why the whales are singing," she spat at him. "You're not a whale." With this, they leapt at each other screaming, ready to fight to the death over the poet's memory.
'"Do you ever think some of those who were remembered as prophets were just poets who people ended up taking literally?"
Mano sometimes asked Elijah questions in her dreams she wished she'd asked Eliza when she'd been alive. The male turtle-crab finally had all the time in the world with her.
"Beats me," he shrugged. "Be vaguely interesting if they were, though. Do you think she'd have approved of this?" Mano's expression became dubious. "You mean Atlan?" Eli had chuckled. "No, I mean this. You, me, here. You know how she'd have insisted that she was really gone. That you had to face the reality of that." Mano smiled. "I guess that's true. She'd have liked being you, though. You're true to her, the way she wished she could've been born, the first time." Elijah smiled back. "Fish don't need to sleep, you know." Mano sighed. "I know..."
"Well," Eli conceded, "you always did like the part about the dreams."'