The Dark Between Dreams | ✔️

Chapter 38 🔻 Heartbeat

The scarred creature continued to wheeze and gasp for air it didn't need. So why did it persist in continuing the charade? Why did it so desperately cling to this travesty of an afterlife? Beside myself, I continued to lean against the creature. It quivered at my touch, then relaxed.

"I'm sorry you're hurting, whatever you are," I murmured to it. It reminded me of the pained animals I had cared for during my very brief stint as a veterinary intern. Its wounds continued to bleed, but the monster only seemed concerned about the skeleton it cradled in its enormous paws. I placed my palms on either side of a particularly deep gash and pushed the severed flesh together. Its skin healed itself and the bleeding stopped. I did the same to any other slashes and scrapes while the shadow continued to moan to itself.

Finally, it was as healed as I could get it. I stood to leave—to follow the other shadows that were disappearing beyond the horizon outside. I couldn't waste any more time, not when my friends were in trouble. The shadow with Blackburne's face grabbed me by the arm, not letting me go. It pulled me closer to itself.

"Let go!" I said, wiping away the blood that splattered my face as the creature coughed. "What do you want?"

The shadow struggled to stand and then laid back on its haunches with a groan. Its eviscerated underbelly became fully visible to me. Behind exposed black ribs, I saw nothingness inside the creature. I shivered from the coldness that spilled from its hemorrhaging wounds and the blood that quenched the sand. Yet it continued to pull my hand closer to it—toward its torn-open flesh. I thought it was going to make me heal that, too, but then it pushed my hand inside itself. I tried to pull away and free myself, to no avail. "What are you—?"

A chill ran down my spine, but it wasn't from the freezing temperature of the black void within the creature. Guiding my hand, the shadow led it to some organ within its chest cavity. My hand grasped the creature's still husk of a heart.

But shadows didn't have hearts. I'd gutted enough by now to know that was a fact.

Yet, cold, slimy, and suspended from its ribs with vessels that felt more like spindly, sticky spider webs, the creature's heart beat in my enclosed hand. With each beat, a vision materialized in my brain like ink drops spreading in water. Snippets of thoughts and experiences that weren't my own filled my brain amongst the broken shards of glass littered in there.

"You...You're trying to show me your memories?" I asked the strange shadow.

The shadow nodded down at me. Such a human behavior.

I tried to yank my arm free from its grasp again. No dice. "If I do this, will you let me go?"

Another nod.

After casting one last look toward the mouth of the cave, I sucked in a deep gulp of air to steady myself. I shut my eyes and accepted the monster's memories into my head.

As if playing on a screen in my brain, I saw a battle. Hundreds of knights clashed with each other, kicking up mud that was stained red beneath a great gray sky. Amidst the clattering of metal and rattling death throes, one knight fell to the ground, his halberd still gripped in a fist and a sword buried deep in his chest. His opponent raised his broadsword high, about to sever the fallen knight's head from his body.

The blade cut the air, but before it could end the impaled knight's suffering, a younger man, armor dull with muck, lunged and stabbed a javelin through the gap in the opposing knight's armor between his helmet and chest plate. The younger knight left his enemy to choke on his own blood and cradled the man with a sword in his heart. He removed the injured man's helmet to expose his red hair, drenched with sweat and his black irises brimming with misery. Then he removed his own, revealing matching eyes in a boy's face. "Bleib bei mir, Vater," the young knight begged a dying Blackburne.