The queen of seremaya, p.1
The Queen of Seremaya, page 1
Chapter 1
She lay there, in the centre of the room, body frozen and limbs rigid by her side. Her body was succumbing to sleep, having fought a battle it was too weak to fight now. She could feel the blood slowing, despite her mind willing it forward. Her heart became slow and rhythmic. It knew of its fate, had seen it coming for some time and decided it was at peace now. No need to pump frantically anymore, rather thought it best to see out its days slowly. Even in her last moments, her body refused to just simply quit, winding itself down to a slow slop.
The woman was dying.
Her mind was awake, and all she could do was scream at her body to continue until it could not scream any more. Her body, limbs, organs had all become oblivious to her mind. There was nothing she could do.
The woman was dying.
She could hear the footsteps pattering around her, some frantic, some leisurely. She willed her eyes open, willed herself to see the world around her once more, but it was no use. She hadn’t seen the world around her for at least a month, although time seemed to lose her here.
Instead, she let the scene before her unfold in her mind. The nurses were running around the room, in desperate need to get to those machines that screamed an eerie warning. Others pottered around, clicking their pens and writing down whatever data the calmer machines told them. Hushed talks were being carried out somewhere in the distance, but the machine closest to her made an irregular beeping. Not quite sure what it meant; she had taken to trusting the sound. Although, more recently, she had come to wonder if it instead was counting down to her death. She felt her muscles begin to cease a number of days ago, and her heart rate slow but her mind had become more active than ever and her memories more vivid.
An illness had taken over her body, attacking her organs and leaving her systems weak. She was quite the enigma, according to the doctor who first had spoken to her mother beside the very bed she now lay in. She had hoped to hear from him again, optimistic that they had found a cure, hoping they had cracked her code and that she would be cleared to return home.
He never returned.
Instead, she heard the nurses every now and then discussing her case, tutting and occasionally muttering something along the lines of “shame”. She thought it the families who were in more need of sympathy. It was them that sounded in so much pain.
It couldn’t have been more than a few days ago when she heard her mother and siblings discussing her over her bedside, their voices wrought and razor-like with grief for a loved one who hadn’t yet passed.
“The fluid has spread to both lungs now,” her mother said, squeezing her hand. She wished more than anything she could have squeezed back. She was almost hoping her thoughts alone could reassure her mother. “They said they’re doing all they can but...” Her mother trailed off.
The woman was dying.
Every day she grew weaker and her body became heavier. She could feel the young life she had lived so far slowly crawl away from her grasp and felt a lead weight increasing on her chest.
A nurse pottered around her, and she heard the familiar scraping of pen on paper and the clank of her medical notes being thrown with a thud on the side. “Sorry about this young lady,” an old and soothing voice told her. “Kel, your family have just stepped outside while I give you a quick check over. Won’t be a moment.”
The nurse’s hand, soft but wrought with the pain of caring for those on the cusp of death, reached beneath her back and lifted her slightly. The nurse tampered with the sheets, and she gently lowered her back to the bed before adjusting one of the tubes protruding from her arm. She felt a numb tingling, although she suspected the movement would have caused her significant pain had her body not shut down already.
She heard her footsteps patter away.
And loneliness enveloped her. Without seeing, she knew she was alone. She could feel the emptiness taking hold of her slow heart and squeeze it. Maybe this was what dying was like, she wondered. A never-ending pit of darkness, and the crushing loneliness that took over. Something contradicted her, some deep part of herself arguing against that it was the end, that this wasn’t the way it was to be.
She had a sister, brothers. A mother. This could not be the way it would stay for eternity.
And yet, as the darkness in her mind seemed to somehow become denser, the demon of loneliness spiralled, circling like a vulture just waiting for the right moment to dive. It spread its poison around her body, smoke invading every part of her body, through her veins, clouding her lungs. Despite the tiniest of whispers of debate, fear took over. If this is what dying was, she didn’t want it.
She jolted. Violently, with such a force she thought she ripped the tubes from her body. The machines beside her began to scream in protest. She battled, and the tube that helped her to breathe was now her enemy and no longer belonged.
A smattering of footsteps thundered towards her, crashing against the machines, muttering panic from their mouths. And still the beeps grew louder as if they themselves were panicking. Her body jolted again, her lungs convulsing as they craved the bleach-laden air, but the tube blocked the path.
Her once slow heart had jumped into action, pumping faster than it ever had done, desperately leading the fight, spurring the rest of her on to continue.
Her sister’s smile came to the forefront of her mind, her brothers’ jokes and teasing, her mother’s hugs.
Again, she flung herself forwards, eyes still glued shut, trying desperately to pull herself back from something she was afraid was too late.
The more she fought, the stronger it got. She could feel something pulling at her very core, tying her to the bed and it was too much to overcome. It had ceased her and refused to let go.
She made one feeble last attempt at air, before she was dragged back to the bed she had lain for days, and her muscles seemed to halt, coming to a rest beside her. Her heart still raced, erratic and with no aim, only knowing how to do what it had always done.
Without warning it stopped all at once. The erratic beeps stopped as her heart slowed to nothing and was replaced with one continuous sound emitting from the machine as though it had faulted. As though her body had faulted.
The footsteps raced away, crashing through a large set of double doors before returning with an army of feet tearing towards her, as the door handles smacked against the walls of the intensive care unit with such a smattering, she thought there might be a hole in the wall.
She had thought she had died, so why then, she wondered, could she hear her mother’s screams drown out the machine. She felt her mother lean over her and hug her limp body, her sobs filled with a pain she had never known could have existed and a grip so tight, she felt like her mother’s hug alone could bring her back.
“No, no, no,” she whispered to her, “no, not yet. Please don’t go.”
Both her brothers sobbed in the background, heard her sister’s gulps for air as she turned her head away and tucked into her brother’s chest.
If she had not just fought a life draining battle for months before, she would have sworn she would have fought her way back, but the strength had been sapped from her in her last effort to stay on earth. Maybe it took a little while after death itself before the brain shut off, but she could feel her brain running out of its power. A tear squeezed its way onto her cheek. She faded.
And then she was gone.
She opened her eyes, the colours of even the dull room dazzled her eyes with a sharp brightness to them. The ceiling was a dull grey, littered with beams zigzagging their way across the surface.
Feeling herself being lifted from the bed that had tied her down for so long now, the top of the room grew closer, and the machines seemed to grow further away. Until she was flung in the air and back onto the solid ground again. She thought someone was treating her soul as a boomerang.
Clambering to her feet, she turned to see her lifeless body in the centre of her grieving family. With every passing second, the blood in her face drained, turning it a dull grey colour, almost blending into the walls around her.
Her mother was bent double, stretching over her body, her arms desperately clinging to someone that had already gone. A strange sensation flooded through her as she stood there, invisible to her family. For the first time in months, she could see her mother’s embrace but could no longer feel it. A pain stabbed her through where her heart should have sat. She reached out.
“Mom,” she murmured, her voice catching on the tears that she now shed herself. “Mom, it’s me. I’m here.”
Her mother was unseeing and oblivious to her sound.
“I’m okay, I promise,” she sobbed. “I’m okay.”
She flung her arms around her mother but she doubted whether she could feel it, and her chest twinged again.
She could see the pain in her family’s eyes, and wanted to take it away from them.
“Please, let me go back,” she begged, not quite knowing who she was addressing it to. “Please, let me go back.”
But before she could splutter any more words, the world before her sped up, like someone had pressed skip whilst she was in the scene of a movie. Her family disappeared and porters threw a sheet over her body and carelessly dumped her body onto a cold metal bed. The nurses were quick to tidy the bed, changing sheets with the ruthless efficiency of a Sargent major, ready for the next poor occupant.
She rushed after her own body, squeezing herself through the swinging doors moments before they locked the intensive care unit away from the outside world. But her body was gone and instead she saw another grieving family, next to a nurse left with the task of breaking the news that someone else in the world had suffered the same fate as herself.
Kel wondered how long she had been here. It could have been days, weeks, even months. She hadn’t even known how long she had been fighting for, let alone how long it had been since she died. Perhaps time moved quicker in the afterlife.
Her feet began to carry her body, or what she assumed was her body. Or was it her soul? She couldn’t be sure, but during her time wandering the haunted walls of the hospital, she had made positively sure that she could not float through walls. Instead, she just met the wall with a thud that threw her back a few centimetres, and yet the visitors around her had not batted a single eyelid and continued about their day as normal.
She also found that she was confined to the hospital boundaries. Shortly after her death, a lightbulb had exploded in her seemingly still perfectly working mind, and she decided she would just go home. If she was not to be with her family in physical presence, she vowed she could at least be there to watch over them. As she reached the main exit, she was pulled back with powerful force, like a bungee cord had been tethered to her soul and dragged her back to the centre of the hospital. She attempted escape numerous times, hoping that the cord had somehow forgotten and that she would be able to see her family again. And every time, she found herself straying around the corridors once again, slumping into a deep sadness as the tortuous realisation dawned upon her that she would never get to see them again.
Tired of walking and seeing the same bleeding limbs, crying families or celebrating parents, she pushed open a door in the furthermost reaches of the building. Kel thought she had visited every room, but this one she must have missed. She slid through as it edged closed and came to what must have been one of the smallest rooms in the hospital.
If she wasn’t already dead, Kel thought she might have passed out with shock there and then. Before her, spread out amongst the small space, was her family. Real and alive, their faces wrought with grief and their eyes strained from sleepless nights.
To the right, her mother exited a door holding a piece of paper, no doubt some sort of identification of Kel’s death. She had been crying again.
“I’m going to see her,” she said, though the words sounded like they had escaped from shards of glass caught in her mother’s throat. She handed the piece of paper to Kel’s brother. “Let me see her first. I’ll call you in.”
She trailed off to a door in the left-hand corner of the room. Kel followed and entered the room behind her mother.
Again, it was small, but this room was light, with clean grey carpet and flowers dotted around against the walls. How ironic, Kel thought, that the nicest room in the hospital housed the bodies that had passed onto the next realm.
She followed her mother around a divider by the door and saw her body in the centre of the room. Her mother moved to her head and she followed. Kel imagined that at least she looked better here than she did when her fight drained her of her life. In fact, she looked like she could be sleeping. Her mother lowered and placed a kiss on her cheek as she let the tears flow freely now, away from the eyes of her other children.
Kel’s body lay beneath a purple silk throw, flowing freely from her body to the floor. It fell like liquid and atop her chest lay a single rose, placed delicately as a sign of condolence by the hospital. Her jet-black hair had been brushed back to give her some sort of dignity as people came to say their last goodbyes.
For a moment, she felt like the body lying there could have been that of a Queen, not ordinary Kel.
“Goodbye Mom, I lov-”
And that is when she felt it. A tug at her core unlike any she had felt previously and she knew that this was it. This was her time to leave.
She fought against it, wanting at least to say goodbye to her mother but it happened so quickly she had no time to utter the words.
Chapter 2
Darkness enveloped her. Her breathing was heavy and she could feel the heat burning her cheeks. A dense shawl was wrapped around her body and she had to fight for several minutes with panic rising from her chest before she managed to wriggle free from the thick material.
She was moving. And moving fast. The cart she was in struggled with the pace and the terrain as the wooden wheels bobbled over the surface. Kel was thrown from side to side, dents in the road pushing her in all directions.
Sweat beads poured from her head. Still all around her was dark, bar a slight opening in the fabric. With a struggle she managed to steady herself, gripping the wooden bars. She was trapped, in what, she did not know, but she had a horrible feeling it was some kind of cage on wheels. Kel peered through the slit in the fabric.
They were speeding away from a thicket of trees, that were now thinning. No leaves sat atop, just dark brown branches of bark sprouting off in all directions.
As they thinned, she could see the sand-coloured ground they were travelling on was hard, with rocks protruding at every opportunity, and holes appearing unexpectedly from where the path had been worn by previous travellers. Particles were thrown up in their wake, dust of the road they left behind.
She could see no life, only a dull wasteland before her, the trees and the ground blending into one colour. And yet, rising even beyond the trees, the horizon emitted a bright orange glow. The fiery sky blazing in the background made up for the lack of life before her.
Except she was speeding away from the life and deeper into the unknown, deeper into the wasteland.
Where was she?
Kel’s heart began to pound, and she scrambled to the opposite end of the tiny cage. Only a tiny splinter of a gap was present in the wooden panel, hardly enough to get a good look through. For as long as she could keep herself steady, she caught a glimpse of the same empty scene she left behind. Kel was in the middle of an abyss, with nothing on all sides. Only the trees that seemed to get smaller and smaller behind her.
“How far?” She heard a hoarse voice growl.
“Unclear.” A second voice replied, just as cold as the first. “The road is less travelled the further out we go. Beyond the border is near unchartered.”
“How long till we get back on track?”
“Again, unclear.”
“Progress would have been good if they hadn’t have followed us.” Silence followed and Kel could feel some kind of tension between the two men.
“I don’t know why we didn’t just rip her throat out there and then,” the first continued and Kel’s stomach knotted. “We’re not couriers.”
“Gold Lunos talks.”
“Surely her head would have sufficed. The contractor would have been happy of her death.”
“Your thirst for blood is why we accepted you, Galter. But we first and foremost accept contracts that are worth our time. If the payment is good, you will ensure your thirst for blood comes second to carrying out what you have been hired to do. Without payment, the League cannot continue.”
“The League is founded upon death and the thirst for loss of life. If all goes wrong, I will take her head to them myself.”
If they were talking about Kel, despite the panic she felt rising inside her, they would have to fight hard to sever her head from her neck, if she had anything to say about it. She scrambled back to the slit in the fence, and tanked hard on the wooden bars. Surely wood could be snapped. But the thick pillars would not budge, not under her arms. She pulled with all her weight and yanked at the bars, but even with all four limbs off the base of the cart, it was no use. There was no way she could break free this way.
She had never quite known where it came from, in fact she had never given it a second thought until now, but a fire had always resided somewhere deep within her core, a spark that threatened to ignite at any given moment. At times, it caused her to lose her temper in situations where it was better left tamed but in others it sparked a desire to fight. Kel often wished herself to be calm, to remain unshaken in certain situations, but now she was grateful. Giving up on the bars, she looked for a different escape route.
She crawled to the driver's compartment. The wood here looked thinner, like a sheet had been haphazardly placed in an effort to get the cart complete and ready for the road.
