Requiem for an Aberrant Chapter 23: Chapter 23- One Last Time

Read chapter 23 of Requiem for an Aberrant by TheJestersGambit on NovelPedia.

There was no sound when Cole walked. The silver sea beneath him, though it shifted in slow and endless ripples, refused to offer him the mercy of noise. For a while, he did nothing but move. Still, he was unaware as to where he was going. The tower in the distance barely seemed any closer now than it had been when he first opened his eyes to this place. And the depthless expanse of black water above him trembled every so often with currents too vast to comprehend, holding those figures suspended in its depths. Beneath that false sky, reflections drifted through the sea around him. Cole stopped. A body floated past his feet, his own face staring up at him from the silver beneath the surface. There was a spear through its throat. And another with both legs missing. And another with its chest opened. And another murdered by hands that had not belonged to any living thing. He looked away from one and found three more. A hundred different deaths. Perhaps more. Every one of them his. His hand tightened around his scythe, trying to grip onto his current reality. He had the vague, nauseating sensation of standing inside a thought he had spent his entire life refusing to finish. The reflections kept moving, a few looking at him as they passed with the familiarity of something that recognised its original shape. “What is this…” he muttered, the words absorbed before they could truly exist. Suddenly, the sea ahead of him rose. It simply lifted, silver slipping upward in droplets until it formed the silhouette of a creature. The liquid clung, coating its body before sliding off in streams. The figure that stepped out made no sound. He staggered back and brought the scythe up in both hands, the blade angled toward the thing before him. It stood tall, though not quite as tall as it had seemed in the garden above. Green tendrils veiled parts of the cadaver beneath, faces stirring beneath the tangle. There were many mouths that frowned, and many eyes that nearly opened facing Cole. The halo above its head illuminated only faintly compared to when Cole had perceived the creature, as if whatever divinity had once crowned it was nearing exhaustion. “We meet again, Cole.” The voice sounded as though it had not been used in forever. Cole stared. “Exrase.” Or what remained of him. He had expected rage when they met again. Instead, what stood in front of him looked at him with the unbearable patience of somebody that had already suffered every outcome and had come here only for the final one. “What are you?” Cole asked. “No. Forget that. What happened to you?” Exrase’s smile deepened by the smallest amount, causing his feet to instinctively edge away. “What happened to me?” he repeated softly. “ What happened to me? ” The silver sea around Exrase rippled outwards slowly. “You died,” Exrase said. “Again. And again. And again. Do you remember any of it, or did you bury every last one of them beneath the version of yourself that kept walking?” Cole’s mouth parted, but no answer came. Exrase took a step forward. Each movement was graceful, and all the faces hidden beneath his frame moved with him. “I remained,” he said. “Every time you reached your end, I remained. I was what the loop refused to carry back. What your death left behind when you were granted another beginning. A scream that never reached its end. A wound that had forgotten the body it once belonged to.” Cole’s throat threatened to close up as his eyes flicked back to the drifting corpses in the water. “No,” Cole said, though the denial lacked any belief. “That doesn’t… that doesn’t make sense.” “Doesn’t it?” Exrase’s tone was not mocking. “You returned. Reset. Began again from the place chosen for you.” His eyes, if they could be called his own, stared at Cole’s face without blinking. “And I was left here. Or there. Or nowhere.” Cole pressed the heel of his palm against his forehead and took a step back, hoping distance might rearrange the truth into something survivable. “How many times?