Demon's Paradise / 8

8

And then it is over. No more breath. No more life. There is only total silence – a wonderful soothing calm.

Yet somehow, she still is.

A faint thought crosses her awareness, but it slips away just as easily into that obscurity.

Then the sensations return to her, gradually and surely, and she is able to feel the semblance of her two legs first, and then her torso, her upper body – it's cold, it's so numb and cold, and her very flesh feels tender to the touch.

Finally, her neck and head exist, and with that, her sight.

She is inside a beautiful void. The sheer, overwhelming, undulating whiteness all around. She's already standing, and looking down at herself, what she finds horrifies her.

Her naked body is shrivelled; a pruned simulacra of herself as she ought to be. Her arms are terribly rough – the veins visibly protrude out the skin. And her delicate hands with the petite fingers..

They were beautiful once, she imagines. They were the warm hands that have touched and been touched by many things, with different feelings that had gone into the touching; like softness, immediacy, curiosity, hate, and tenderness. Now these hands are old and flaky, with the fingers like little bones extending from her palms. Touching herself just leaves a stale feeling.

Who is she? Who was she? She feels intonations of earlier memories, but as soon as she tries grasping at their threads, they disappear, eluding her reach like mist. Like a dream that had once been, but upon waking up.. it would fade away.

And for some reason, it makes her sad.

Demon's Paradise / 9

9

She finds herself lying prone in a dark, expansive chamber. The first thing that hits her is the smell – the air is rank with such a sourly odour, and it makes her eyes sting, yet no tears come out. When she sits up, she notices how dimly lit the place is, moonlit from a distant hole right above. Velvet curtains drape over a large portion of the wall, and mounds and shapes pop through the folds, their general outline revealed in the folds.

The floor is so dusty and dry. When she moves her legs, the dust billows from her movement, and she coughs a terribly achy cough.

There is distant murmuring from a place she cannot tell where. She glances around, looking for anything interesting. But all there seems to be is the curtains and the stone walls.

Then she notices something on her chest, lit and glowing like embers of a fire. A circular mark over her chest, and she glances at it, touching it and feeling the tickling sensation.

Eventually she gets bored of touching herself there, and the awareness gradually comes to her that she is empty, in a way. There's something missing in the way she is, though she cannot put her finger on what exactly. It is.. What are those things called, memories? People should have them, but when she tries to remember, all she recalls is that white void, and this place.

She hears a rustling. The moonlight is interrupted, and above, something is blocking the hole, and then the light returns, and that something falls down – she reflexively jolts backwards, and the thing lands in an impact of billowing dust.

It's a shrivelled body. She glances back up, seeing the shadow of someone looking down at her, before disappearing into the night. Hm.

The body is clothed in tattered rags, with dark stains over where the cloth has been torn. The notion occurs to her that this could be someone like her, all shrivelled up too, and that this is how she winded up here. Some guy drops her into this room. (For what?)

She has the feeling though that the mark on her chest has something to do with it, and she hurriedly checks the body, peeling away the old rags to see if there's anything like it on the body's chest.

But she doesn't see the embering glow. Though upon a closer look in the moonlight, the body does have the same mark, but it's worn out, hard to distinguish in the wrinkled skin.

What's going on?

The moonlight is interrupted again, and looking up she sees someone lingering over the hole (is it that same somebody?), and then an unnatural light emanates; a heavenly ray shines down over an empty spot, almost touching where the fallen body is.

She gazes, not comprehending what is going on – she only notices how utterly grey the chamber is with the added lighting, and how skeletal bones are spread all over where the darkness used to be.

She waits, tensing up, preparing for something that might happen. Then the lighting begins to shift like a spotlight searching for something, and it catches her in the sights. It's so blinding, her eyes sting and her ears buzz, and then she feels herself growing weightless, and opening her eyes she sees herself floating upward, up to the hole, getting closer and closer to the source of the light-- that mysterious someone.

When she is yanked up over the hole's ledge, the brightness goes away and gravity makes her crumble down to the side – she feels like a delicate ragdoll that has just been gripped.

In the starry night, the damsel and her rescuer in knight armour – with his grated helmet obscuring his face. He's pulled her from this mere hole in the grassy clearing, where nearby, a lake shimmers in the breeze.

"You're no hollow, are you?" he asks her, slowly approaching her sprawled form, with his hand over his sword's hilt. "Can you speak? If you can understand me, give me a sign."

"..oui--!" Her voice is raspy and hoarse, surprising herself, and she almost covers her mouth afterward. "I do understand."

"Oh, thank goodness." The knight relaxes, and sits himself down beside her. "I was honestly afraid I've come here for nothing."

"What do you mean, hollow?" she asks, getting used to the sound of her voice. She brings herself to sit in a more comfy position.

"I know this will be hard to take in.." The knight pauses. "You must be feeling very disoriented right now-- you have died. And now you are an undead."

"..an undead?"

"You have recently died as a human," he goes, "and it is by virtue of that darksign you possess that you are still alive – here, reanimated in that ugly body you have."

She glances out at the night.

"That lostness you are feeling," the knight continues. "You must be trying to remember what it is like before.. you came here."

"Why can't I remember anything?" she asks.

"When you died," he goes, "you left behind all your experiences from your old body, stored in the brain. The body you are in has been created out of the nether. To contain your consciousness before it disappears. This is your spirit body. It is decaying as we speak.

"I don't have much time to explain – I am undead too, like you, and soon I will turn hollow. When an undead turns hollow, they lose their soul – their heart and conscience, and turn into a zombie. What will remain is just an intelligent automaton, living on murderously until death.

"If you may, hear me out. I've regrettably failed in my mission, but perhaps you can help carry on from here, to help extinguish the First Flame and bring an end to this madness."

"What madness?" she asks.

"The realm we are in is changing. But the current masters of this world do not wish for change – they fear it.

"In the beginning, there were dragons roaming in the unformed darkness, amongst grey crags and archtrees. And then came the First Flame which sparked humanity and disparity: heat and cold, life and death, and light and darkness. The duality exists within everyone's heart. There were some people who resented the dragons, and they sought the power of the Lord Souls in that fire. Those few become Angels, and they swiftly took down all the dragons.

"And with the dragons' demise, humanity flourished. To signify their victory, the Angels immortalised the First Flame in a bonfire, and separated reality into two realms. The material and the spiritual. But like all fires, the First Flame was never meant to burn forever. When the fire threatened to fade away, one of the Angels sacrificed himself so to prolong the fire for another era.

"And as if in terrible answer, demons arose from the shadows, tearing at life. Amongst the living, are the undead who are doomed to inhumanity. The world is decaying, and yet the selfish Angels still wish to reign, afraid of the inevitable. If the First Flame is not yet extinguished, the decay will spread to the material world. Look, it has already taken you!"

The knight grabs her by the arm, and his grasp is so painful that she yelps, as he snags her closer to him. "I could only imagine.. what it would be like to have met you before," he says, barely hiding his melancholy. "When I would dream, I caught the briefest glimpses of you on the other side – when you smiled, when you were talking with your friends, when you were alone.. before you were turned into this. You were a maiden. I did not hear your voice, but if I did, I think it would only make me melt."

And she begins to tear up – somehow his words have touched her, and.. she has the feeling that she looked like a real somebody in her past life. What does she look like now? She stands up, walking over the grass to the waters, where her reflection ripples under the moon, but it is as strikingly clear to her as if she was staring at herself in the mirror.

It is an old woman's face, unnaturally worn; the skin is ashen, the eyes sullen and grey, and the hair white and wispy. But still she could almost manage to see the beauty that it had once been.

"Was I always this old..?" she asks.

"You were young," the knight goes. "The spirit body is a poor, hasty recreation of the original – it can copy the semblance, but it cannot recreate the liveliness. At least.. not initially."

He takes off his helmet, and now she can see his face – it's not like hers, it's much more human, recognisably handsome. The stout, green eyes and the golden hair. Still, there is something a little off about it, something sickly, as if a certain malaise is affecting him underneath.

"Are you alright?" she asks him.

"I told you I'm going to go hollow soon," he says, glancing mournfully at the waters. "Normally, I would easily replenish myself at a bonfire, but.." He reveals his neck, where a large bruise bulges on one side. "I've been bitten by a basilisk a few days ago. My doom is certain; I don't know how to get rid of the bite effects with what I have. And so I came here to where the newly unborn are trapped, hoping by luck that I would find someone who can carry on the mission when I'm gone. And I found you."

She doesn't know what to say.

"I don't know what your name is," he says, "or whether you even remember yours, but I hope you manage to remember mine. I'm Oscar, of Astora. Once I had a family, a beautiful wife and a son. Then I served on a quest, alongside others, to invade the fortress of Anor Londo for the location of the First Flame. It was a failure, and as punishment I was condemned to the spiritual realm, never to come back home. May you remember me long after I'm gone.

"Before you go," he says, reaching for his pouch, "take this. Inside is an estus flask – an undead favourite, and some pieces of raw humanity."

Hesitantly, she takes the cloth pouch at hand – it feels almost weightless.

"If you manage to make it to the bonfire, in that direction--" Oscar points the way directly opposite of the lake. "You can manage to restore the liveliness in your body. Hopefully you'll meet others like me, who will offer you further guidance. And also, as a last request.. give me a kiss?"

She wonders if she had been kissed before she lost her memories. If she had ever been kissed once. Her fingers reach at her lips, and she feels how chapped and dry they are. She licks her lips with what little saliva she has on her tongue.

"Okay," she goes, and she leans in, holding Oscar by his face, and gently presses her lips onto his, feeling a little tenderness.

..

It's a little kiss, and yet.. in it, whispers the feelings of a river flowing onward, seeping through every crevice. In it, is the joy of dancing vivaciously to the music with someone, and smelling the crisp scent of blooming roses in the summer evenings. A kind of happiness in knowing you are alive.

It would make her cry inside, and she senses how she must have cried inside a million times over, to herself, no one else understanding the feeling. Her eyes would linger on people, and whenever they catch her gaze, she wishes she could glue them to her, and they would break the gaze and it would always hurt a little, inside.

But always, it's beautiful too.

In the pauses between conversations, in the empty spaces between herself and others, there is the unsung music that only she hears, and would dance to in the sanctity of her imagination. And sometimes she would ask in those longing gazes, would you come and dance with me here? It's wonderful, I know it, we would waltz between the stars and you would feel it.

~

When she opens her eyes, Oscar is gone, and all that remains of him is the way he touched her in the kiss, and his salty taste in her mouth. She gazes at the space where he once was, at the pool of water under the moonlit night.

Her first memory.

She would cherish it as long as she has it.