[10th] Week 292: Wake the Dead

[Time Lady Katie]

CHAPTER EIGHT
Wake the Dead​

Life is chaotic. People run around, the live dangerously. The burst like fireworks, the whack out on a cocktail of schedule one narcotics, the live, they burn out, they wither, the change and grow and break and die. That, simply, is what life is. It didn’t matter if the ‘life’ in question was on Earth or in Soul Society, living was suffering. And the cycle of souls was a strange eye of order in an otherwise disharmonious maelstrom of unpredictability. Most often the only thing that made a person keep living was the notion that the alternative was somehow less pleasing, somehow more horrible. That ending the constant flow between to equally chaotic existences would be somehow less appealing than chaos.

The truth was more complicated than that for Echo. In the darkness she found order. She found reason. Perhaps even perspective. Augustus and Maria died. Septimus died. Mingzhu’s friends died. The Central Forty-Six were ‘mortal’, as were the criminals brought before them. Death was an equalizing force. Death made children of everyone. It was a cold but welcoming embrace, one that the Lily quickly considered to be ‘home’. Where life was chaos and disharmony, death brought a finality, an order unmatched, as great wave of harmony to the universe. Where existence was a symphony playing trillions of different songs, death was the single final chord the infinite symphony ended upon, and the coda of the balance of souls, the beautiful order that the piece called it’s refrain.

This was a coldness Echo wore like a blanket. She wrapped it around herself. She always expected her death would be unexpected, unknown. That an assassin would end her life in some way that inspired awe and terror because she was a LaSalle. She was destined to this fate. She would, one day, suddenly no longer exist and the timeline of her life felt shorter each day. But that wasn’t what happened. She had died on her own terms. She had been a shinigami when she died and that death, while absolutely in vain, had been something she controlled. She was an active participant in her own demise, not some hapless victim.

That made the order she felt sweeter despite the void, despite the sheer crushing nothingness. This was what order felt like, wasn’t it? Nothingness. Not a blip of chaos or dissent. Everything aquiessed to death as the symphony reached the final chord. No one kept playing. No one defied this simple demand of nature for they dare not. Augustus, Septimus, Maria... how could they not find peace in this? How could there not be serenity in such cold, true love? It was beauty in the absence of all things, infinite stings of souls playing in perfect harmony.

Soon it would end. Soon she would find a new life. Soon the chaos would return.

Just not how she anticipated.

In the absence of all things, there was a glow. She couldn’t see it of course, nonetheless she was aware of it. It wasn’t right to say she felt it; she didn’t exactly feel anything. It was more right to say she was simply cognizant that it existed. If she were capable of dissatisfaction in the moment of pure order, she would have certainly felt it then, because the glow meant change, which meant chaos. She was truly free now, of panic and worry and pressure. She was, in this moment, a wholly free person, able to be just... Echo. Nothing more. Not a shinigami or a LaSalle, just Echo. A fading echo at that. But she knew, in the same fundamental and innate way that she knew the glow existed in the first place, that it was bringing pressure and fear and worry back to her, that soon she would be something more than a peaceful and free creature.

The chaos and the glow grew and fear quickly came. And there was an awareness that sentience was slowly being restored. Like a great system of machinery that had been offline for centuries, overrun by the elements and decay, suddenly the lights were slowly flickering to life. She didn’t know what it meant, but it felt frightening. The glow, the chaos, the storm of consciousness slowly building again from the point to which it had waned. Was this a new brain, firing up for the first time? Was this a new system of organs slowly coming online like so many components of a superstructure. No! No the glow was dragging her back toward chaos, away from the peace that order provided. She, like a child forced to leave her parent’s bedside after a horrible dream, wanted nothing more to stay in the embrace of unconditional eternal tranquility.

Feeling was still more of an abstract term for just remote awareness, but the next thing that came to her was awareness of pain, hyperaccute and beyond horrifying. She reasoned, as much as reasoning meant something at the moment, that this was what nerves must’ve felt like when first ‘turned on’. It was a miserable experience but she supposed she wasn’t going to remember anything from death’s absolute embrace. Thankfully she didn’t really feel pain, she was just certain of its presence. If feeling was something she was able to do, she supposed it might’ve been enough to drive her back to the simple state of perfect harmony provided to her by the human in Canada.

For all she did know, she still was unsure what the glow meant. It seemed to be some spark of life that ignited the functions of the body, the machine the soul was to operate. It felt odd sitting through the process and the dreamlike nature of it all made it seem all the more real, a sort of hyper-realism only able to be known to a dreamer. And the hazy distant awareness of the glow intensified. Chaos had handily won the battle against order already, now all that was left was to incite the change in the organic device that Echo was to be a prisoner of. She was to be held hostage by the hopes and fears of mortal existence again, of the ever-changing and unpredictable world of chaos outside this moment.

She would have to leave her family behind.

Augustus.

Septimus.

Maria.

There was a moment, just a moment, where she held firm to their memories, to the footprints of them on the beach of eternity that was the everlasting love death visited upon those it liberated from chaos.

And then the hyper-realism consumed her, the glow completely enveloped her. The lights were on. The storm of thought and feeling and perception and identity roared to life as if fighting back against order itself. Chaos’ light drove back the night.

Echo gasped, the feeling of oxygen in her lungs something that for once she tracked, knew, quantified and qualified. So much air in so much time, the taste of it. Beeps and sounds filled her ears like the roar of a great hungry mechanical beast, the heat and light around her felt like it made her skin positively radiant. The glow was golden and unforgiving as it repaired the broken container and crammed the soul back inside. Ripped and burnt skin crackled in her ears, pain sang across her body as the dead nerves sprung to life. She still couldn’t see, she assumed her eyes weren’t functional, but if the glow brought her back from the beautiful abyss it could easily repair her vision.

Her finger twitched. It felt like a colossal shift in the tectonics of the Earth.

She gasped for air again.

Chaos had been restored.

She was alive.

1275 Words​