Interspirit

Kyrylo hadn’t been the center of attention before. The intensity of pressure coming from Felix and Silvestia bore down on him as he stood above the bodies of the spirits. He liked to sit in the middle of a classroom, to stay off to the side in a group. Didn’t need the attention, didn’t want it. This is why he just wanted to go back to a very normal life.

“You won’t consume them?” Silvestia asked, as if this was a very normal thing to say to someone.

“What?” Kyrylo snapped out from his own thoughts to glance at her. She pointed at the corpses of the spirits. “No you…that’s a thing? Is that what you do?”

“Probably too late now,” she replied. The robes rippled a bit, like she had shrugged underneath them. She turned towards the door, stepping over the bodies on her way.

Felix suddenly leaped in front of her, sword outstretched. “So what? You just stand there while we fight? What’s your game?”

Silvestia chuckled. “I told you. We’re going to the Rat King.”

“No, we’re not.” Felix held firm and Silvestia didn’t try to move him. “If you’re into the Rat King then you’re with those guys and they tried to kill us. So unless you say otherwise, I think you’re trying to kill us too.”

Silvestia waved a blue hand around as if she could swat away the words before they hit her ears. “I told you they would do that. There was no trick.”

“She’s right,” Kyrylo added, earning a blazing look from Felix. “She did tell us this would happen.” Kyrylo was kicking himself internally for jumping into this as if he was an experienced fighter. Even Felix, who had been with the RIF so much longer, had been in a standoff. If Kyrylo hadn’t intervened, it was possible he would have lost as well. But then where did that power come from?

“You can’t seriously be taking the spirit’s side again?”

Now it was Kyrylo’s turn to shrug. “I did it once before, not going to stop now.” Silvestia nodded under the hood of her clothes and began to step around Felix, ignoring the weapon in her face. “But,” Kyrylo continued, “I do need to stop. To…do some preparations.”

“We will keep going though?” Silvestia had whipped around at the notion of stopping, concern laced through her words.

“Just give me a second.” Kyrylo backed away and ducked around the corner. He made sure to stop, letting the sound of his final footsteps echo through the sewer, so that the others knew he wasn’t just making a break for it. He wanted this to be a more private affair.

He knelt down above the thin stream of water, able to see through its shallow depths to the interlocking bricks below. He was just on the edge of the dim light from the blue flame Silvestia had conjured, and it caught the surface of the water just right in a moment, bringing back his reflection. Well a reflection at least.

“That was you, wasn’t it?” Kyrylo peered down into the white holes of the spirit’s eyes, trying to gleam emotions from them, something. It still unsettled him to not be looking back at himself.

“Yes.” There was no movement in its mouth, if it even had one. Kyrylo couldn’t see anything else on the smoothness of its face other than the twin holes. It felt like the voice went straight into his head. “Or I think it was.”

“What do you mean you think?” Kyrylo hissed through his teeth, trying to keep quiet. It was difficult in an empty sewer and he knew Felix and Silvestia could hear, though they would just listen to him mumbling to himself. That was the best he could hope for.

“This is new to me too.”

Kyrylo pressed his fingers into his eyes, rubbing deep into them, enough he felt a pinprick of pain in his skull. Of course this thing wasn’t omniscient. Nobody knew anything about fusion, why would they? Everyone was just doing their own thing in both these worlds it seemed and just killing each other when they collided and now he was some freak anomaly nobody could explain.

“Shit, I was really hoping you knew what you were doing.” The spirit tilted its head in response, almost quizzical. It made Kyrylo want to laugh, to take in the absurdity of all of this. He was talking to his reflection in a puddle, he was talking to himself really, and unsurprisingly his reflection didn’t know what it was doing either. And it was funny to see it feel that way.

“We need that kind of power though.”

Kyrylo felt his skin prick. “Is there some kind of thing? Does our fusion violate like a spirit law too?” He didn’t really want to be wanted in two realms. This place was starting to feel like the safe escape from the world trying to kill him, like this could be a normal place in comparison. He pushed the thought away, ridiculous when he considered there were two dead lizards behind him that had just tried to murder him on sight, for fun.

The spirit shook its head. “To reach the highest heights and become an Honour!” Kyrylo literally felt the excitement in its voice, picking up and reverberating around his head, buzzing on the word Honour. He hated it.

“Not you too.” Kyrylo brushed his fingers through the water, watching it ripple, the reflection distorted and fading as he stood up and walked away. He had barely been in this world and had already heard enough about Honours and being an Honour and having all the power. This felt like RIF training all over again. He was special and gifted because only some people could see the gaps in realms and something something, he needed to become a protector and that was why he couldn’t just go to school and get a job.

“We keep going?” Silvestia didn’t hesitate as soon as Kyrylo rounded the corner back again.

“Did you two just stand here?” Kyrylo looked from Felix to Silvestia. Neither appeared to have budged an inch from before. Felix’s elbows were locked, arms out, the tip of his sword wobbling slightly from increasing exhaustion. Silvestia appeared to be about to open the door down into the sewer, as if Kyrylo hadn’t left.

“I don’t trust any of this,” Felix said, finally lowering his weapon. The relief on his face revealed this was more about sparing his arms than any larger gesture of peace. “I told you that from the start. This place is fucked up. This is where the spirits come from that haunt people, remember? They literally just tried to kill us.”

“Again, she told us they-”

“I don’t want to hear it, man.” Felix ran his hands through his nonexistent hair again. “But I don’t think we can leave anymore so just don’t remind me of how stupid this is, ok?”

“What do you mean we can’t leave? You say that like you know something.”

Felix sighed and Silvestia snickered again. “You think we can just drop down into the sewers, into a place that has guards, and we’re not in their territory? When you walk in the RIF building, there’s cameras everywhere, like they watched us go up to the library. So…” Felix paused and waved his hand around them. “I’m sure that applies here too.”

Kyrylo looked to Silvestia but she simply opened the door as an answer and stepped through, picking up the pace as she resumed the descent. Felix grabbed Kyrylo’s shoulder as he went to follow. They stared at each other before Kyrylo shrugged it off and strode through the door.

“Fucking ridiculous” Felix muttered behind Kyrylo but he knew that he was following along with him. As Felix had said, it was too late for them now.

The sewer suddenly dropped down through this pathway, turning into a steep ramp and beginning a spiral, coiling around an imposing central pillar of polished marble. It was bold and out of place in the dank depths and Kyrylo was struck by the thought of who was regularly cleaning it to make it look this way. But he had other questions to answer.

“When they mentioned other people,” he said, reaching out to brush his fingers along the smooth stone, “what did they mean.”

“However you come down here,” Silvestia replied, not slowing in the slightest. “Other people do too. They die fast.”

“They don’t have weapons or anything? They’re just people?”

“Yes.”

That was it. Silvestia didn’t elaborate, all her answers blunt. While he knew she wasn’t ever telling him everything she knew, it seemed to be more a function of which questions he asked than it was of a more active manipulation. Or at least that’s what he would tell himself as they continued downwards.

It was entirely possible people fell in here though. He could remember the first time he saw the glimmer and thought he was having an eye problem. He had avoided it and gone to an optometrist and when that went nowhere had started to search the internet for answers. Then the RIF kicked down his door and that was it. But if he hadn’t paused, if he had reached out and passed through he would’ve ended up here…and dead.

“Can spirits go through the other way?” Kyrylo asked, throwing it out to see what would happen more than anything. Silvestia finally paused and he nearly walked into her from behind, mumbling an apology and stepping back.

“I didn’t stop for the question,” she clarified, raising up a hand. “We can only pass to the Third Plane, not the Mortal one. But something doesn’t sound right.”

Kyrylo heard nothing. Without their footsteps it was silent. The longer he sat in it, the more he started to focus. There was a drip somewhere but under a sewer that didn’t mean much. It was all he had.

“I don’t like this,” Felix said.

“You never liked this,” Kyrylo countered. “Also, aren’t you mister cool and unbothered and teaching me a lesson, where’s that guy?”

“He’ll return when we get back to the spirit-busting equivalent of handing out parking tickets. Not when we’re about to get willingly mauled to death.”

Kyrylo rolled his eyes. There was an increasing portion of him that wanted to keep pushing on Felix as a form of revenge for months of snide comments and disinterest but he was also interested in self-preservation. He would keep that to himself though.

“Guards are not in the right places,” Silvestia continued. “Someone is challenging the Rat King.”

“You can just hear this?” Kyrylo balked. There was still nothing in the air and he would have to resign himself to the idea that spirits were animals that could hear things a person couldn’t, until he noticed Silvestia’s hand on the pillar. He reached out and felt the pleasing coolness of the marble on his fingertips, noting the little reverberations that passed through. Nothing he could make out but maybe that was what Silvestia called hearing.

“It will be more distracted but brutal.” Silvestia suddenly started to move again, rushing down the ramp. Kyrylo had to break into a light jog to keep up. “Fights will be fast, unexpected. Maybe they will ignore us, maybe not. When someone is challenging the Rat King it is like a festival. A party.”

They were at the bottom, met with another door of similar construction to the first. There were some noises from behind it, faint and muffled. Kyrylo couldn’t distinguish them, couldn’t turn them into some imaginations but it at least confirmed Silvestia wasn’t just making things up.

He felt his stomach tighten. He clenched his fists and tried to squeeze it out but the gnawing nervousness continued to swirl around, dissatisfied by his efforts to push it away. He glanced down to the side and saw a small puddle, the spirit within him not looking back at him but instead turned towards the door. Its focus seemed more acute than before, some determination behind it.

To reach the highest heights and become an Honour!

Kyrylo took in a deep breath as Silvestia spun the lock on the door and it swung open, a cacophony of noise rushing out. Laughter, clanging, clinking, shattering, chatter, swirling together and around.

“You are ready?” Silvestia asked, turning to face the pair. Kyrylo nodded.