Ravens of Eternity

58 The Seven, Pt After they turned in the thugs for their bounties, the Seven took the very next shuttle to Venus.

They were determined to do right by Amal. When she admitted that she and Jionna hadn’t returned, they realized that they needed to go back. Eva reasoned that they needed to collect evidence of Nightmare’s wrongdoing.

Throughout this whole process, Eva and Miko had their EyeCasts following and recording them. It unnerved the others, but they insisted that it was necessary for their line of work. That they were necessary for their evidence. It was certainly true, but not the whole truth.

More importantly however, they needed to come to the farm to help patch things up – mostly Amal’s wounded heart.

Plus Eva had a hunch.

After they landed, they rented a trio of simple antigrav hovervans, loaded up all their equipment and made their way to the farmstead.

Amal was nervous the entire trip.

She didn’t really want to go back. On top of Nightmare’s threat for them to never return, she didn’t want to face the aftermath of the assault. She definitely didn’t want to see the corpses of the people she loved.

She didn’t want to see his corpse.

.....

All this time she had put up a brave front. But the truth was she was like splintered glass on the inside. Ready to shatter at a moment’s notice, with the smallest provocation.

“Why’re we going to the farm?” she asked.

Her voice was low and sullen, and it was clear that she was still in the midst of processing her trauma.

Even if she tried to say otherwise.

“Well, mostly because if no-one has been back, then it means your dead need to be sent on their final rest,” said Eva.

“What if I’m not keen on sending them?”

“What you want has got nothing to do with it,” Eva replied. “You just gotta. For you. For the Laertidus family. For Dareon.”

Amal shook her head and tried to understand. Her mind was engulfed with the memory of those she had lost, and it kept interrupting her thoughts, her rationality.

But she slowly made sense of it.

None of them deserve to be abandoned like that, she eventually concluded. Hell, they didn’t deserve to get shot down like dogs in the first place. Least we can do is let them rest properly.

She sat in quiet contemplation as she watched the Venusian landscape whizz by.

~

A blazing orange light cut through the hazy blue sky as three antigrav hovervans pulled into the farmstead. They circled around until they reached the center square and parked.

The Seven then hopped out of the vans and walked around. Save for Amal, they all had their weapons drawn.

Just because it looked empty didn’t mean it was empty.

Of course, in the absence of people, the farm had become somewhat overgrown. Some of the surrounding vegetation had encroached a little onto the pathways, fences, and buildings.

The crops were certainly still going strong. Of course, with no-one to harvest them, they were likely just going to go to waste eventually.

As the Seven cleared the grounds, they noted the signs of battle everywhere.

Blast marks and bullet holes were found everywhere, and a few dozen bloodied corpses dotted the farm.

Though most of them were concentrated around the textile mill.

Their bodies had basically begun to rot away, and many were bloated from putrefaction. The gases they emitted was gut-wrenching to say the least.

Some were in the beginning stages of decomposition, and had been partially eaten away by wildlife, maggots, and bacteria.

T-Rex had vomited a few times during their walk. It got to a point where he had become weak from all his retching.

The others were also quite disturbed by what they saw and smelled, and occasionally one would throw up their lunch as well.

Locke was rather respectful towards the dead, but otherwise seemed unperturbed by the corpses.

Truth was, he had seen far worse in the past, and had already done his share of inner upheaval. By this point, it all seemed par for the course to him.

Amal found her way to the main house and stood just outside of it. Next to her was a group of corpses slumped down next to each other. As though they were lined up and shot.

They were mostly indistinguishable at this point, but she could still recognize Dareon.

He too was in the putrefaction stage, and had bloated greatly. His bruise-ridden face had puffed up even more, and accentuated the wounds he had suffered.

There was a bullet wound right in the middle of his chest. The whole area around the bullet’s entrypoint was caved in and matted down with dried blood.

It was difficult for Amal to see, so she turned away. But the image was burned into her mind nonetheless. Every corpse she had ever seen was etched in her memory.

There were too many.

She shivered as a wave of cold pulsed out from within her core.

After some time, the Seven put on specialized gear and filtered masks, then got to work. After all those people’s bodies had been out there long enough.

Some of the team put together funerary pyres in the open square in the yard behind the main house. They used the wood that was already available and stuffed them with kindling made from the various crops around the farm.

Amal made each of the dead a simple, but beautiful flower and herb bouquet. She placed them at the head of each pyre, like some kind of funeral rite.

She wasn’t sure what their funeral rites actually were, and she hoped what she was doing was at least a positive thing.

It was the least she could do to honor them.

Those who could handle the corpses went about cleaning and wrapping them up. It wasn’t an easy task, as they had already begun to decay. Moving them around had become rather difficult as their bodies were already falling apart on their own.

But they had treated the dead carefully, prepared them properly, and moved them to the pyres dutifully.

By the time they were done, the sun was already setting and the light had grown dim.

The seven had made crude wooden torches and lit them together in a circle. They then walked towards the different pyres and lit them.

None of them said a word, and instead infused their thoughts and actions with reverence towards the dead that laid before them.

One by one, the pyres lit up and offered the dead to the sky above.

Amal stood at Dareon’s pyre, the last one that needed to be lit.

She wondered what life would have been like if Nightmare had never attacked, if Dareon was never shot... If that cycle had ended with a kiss and a promise instead of blood and death.

She wondered if they would have actually stayed on the farm, or took some time off to see the stars.

She wondered if they would have married and had lots of children.

She wondered what kind of people they would have grown up to become.

She wondered how many sunsets they would have watched together in an old-beat up tractor.

But she supposed none of that mattered any longer. That life had slipped through her fingers. Or rather, it was violently taken from her.

Wondering about what could have been only made things worse. And she realized that she had to let things go.

So, she allowed all those possibilities to get swept away like ash in the wind.

She tossed her torch right on the pyre itself, which quickly caught alight. It wasn’t long until the fire spread across it, and consumed the entire thing.

Its heat warmed her cold bones.

Although Amal had come from a highly religious part of the world, she found it all to be complete horseshit. People lived and died and killed over some superstitious hokey, and actually believed in fairy tales.

Fairy tales such as heaven and hell. Of rebirth and reincarnation.

But now that she had been reborn herself, things had changed a little. Now, she held hope that Dareon ultimately found his way to another universe, and was reborn there to start anew.

~

By the time daylight came, the pyres had been reduced to little more than piles of ash, glowing embers, and scraps of burnt wood. The air remained warm from the residual heat of the now-dead flames.

They had broken camp at a nearby field as it didn’t sit right with any of them to take lodging in any of the homes.

Xylo, Fluke, and Locke snored soundly in their sleeping capsules off to the side. Meanwhile, Eva, Miko, and T-Rex bantered quietly around a campfire nearby.

“Where is Amal?” asked Miko. “Is she seeking something?”

“Maybe,” replied T-Rex, “she said she was gonna look for her tractor, or something like that.”

“Should we accompany her?”

“She’ll be fine,” said Eva. “She’s just doing something that’s... a bit overdue. Don’t worry.”

“What we should be doing is getting off Venus,” said T-Rex. “I mean, we’ve done all we can here, right? We oughta respect the dead and leave their land and whatnot.”

“Scared of ghosts, T-Rex?” Eva teased.

T-Rex immediately darkened.

“Don’t joke about that,” he replied.

“Never took you for a superstitious person.”

“I’m not – but we were reborn in this new universe, right? If rebirth happens, then how do you know ghosts aren’t a thing here either?”

.....

Eva realized he had a point. Ghosts might not have been a real thing in their old lives, but it didn’t mean that still held true in their new ones.

“Well, regardless of the existence of ghosts, we can’t leave things like this – it’s a mess. Least we could do for Amal’s family is to tidy it up before they came back.”

“I don’t think miss Jionna’s gonna come back here,” said Amal.

She walked over to them and sat in one of the empty chairs. She then slung off Dareon’s rifle and leaned it up against a log.

“Why would she not?” asked Miko.

The question coursed through Amal. It shook her deep.

Her throat dried up slowly as she spoke.

“There’s been too much death here. She lost everything – her husband, her son. Half her family. How could she come here and not feel that loss every cycle? Could you imagine her heartbreak?”

Miko creased her eyebrows at Amal.

“Miss Jionna has experienced death every moment of her life,” she replied. “Not just the deaths of her family and friends, but of everything. Livestock, crops, et cetera. A farm itself goes through many cycles of death and rebirth. After we remove Nightmare, she will no doubt rebuild. She lives for that land.”

~

Somewhere out in space, a group of fighters led by a frigate was harassing a cargo convoy. They fired on the cruiser’s defensive turrets, and blasted them to pieces.

Wreckages of their fighter escorts floated all around, a testament to their failure.

Nightmare sat in the captain’s chair on the frigate’s bridge. Three of his officers sat in stations underneath him and worked their controls as he spoke.

“Isn’t this just the life?” asked Nightmare. “We’re able to do all of the things we love to do. And even get paid to do it! You’re getting paid, we’re getting paid...”

The haggard captain on his comms display didn’t seem to be happy about his predicament, much less about getting paid.

“Why’re you attacking us?” he asked. “We haven’t done nothin’ wrong!”

Nightmare was taken aback.

“Didn’t you hear what I just said? We. Got. Paid. You really oughta spend more time listening, and less time whining.”

“Just... just take our goods and leave us be! Please!”

Nightmare tilted his head in thought, then shook his head.

“Nah,” he replied. “We don’t really need your crap.”

The captain blanched as most of the fighters in Nightmare’s squadron peppered the center of the ship with constant ballistic fire. They quickly perforated its armor and structure, and tore the ship in two.

The comms display went black, and it read Disconnected in the haggard captain’s place.

It was quickly replaced by one of his thugs.

“Nightmare,” he said. “Sorry to bug ya. Got word from the big boss.”

“Yeah?”

“Remember that family on Venus that we had to, er, relocate a few weeks ago?

Nightmare nodded.

“Most fun train I rode in a long time,” he replied.

“Well, boss’ eyes and ears found out some went back and started burning their dead and shit. Prolly been there a couple cycles now. Says we left some trash behind and needs us to go clean up after ourselves.”

Nightmare rolled his eyes in frustration. He wondered why people just couldn’t do as they were told.

“Ugh,” he muttered. “Can’t anyone fucking listen nowadays? Is the new universe filled with these halfwit humans? We’re gonna end up ruling over the lot of ’em!”

His whole crew laughed at his crude and simple joke.

“Guess they didn’t get enough of a hint,” said the thug.

Nightmare immediately turned dark, and an evil grin spread across his face.

“Send a signal out,” he said. “Get everyone together, even the boys on shore leave. Looks like we’re gonna have to teach another group lesson.”