Hell of a Ride

Chapter 1

The words of truth

The strange and foreign words echoed through the apartment's small living room as they were said aloud for the first time. The air became heavy, sending chills down Yun's spine. Some eerie energy seemed to have replaced the craziness of the city. Time held its breath for a moment, the busy city noise outside suddenly stopped, and everything became hushed, leaving the room uncomfortably silent, waiting for a revelation to appear at any moment. A revelation that Yun had been desperately waiting on for months now, going over and over this strange piece of paper. As if staring at it would help him.

Seconds after seconds, the world started moving again, but nothing happened. The faint feeling of excitement withered down and died, leaving Yun with an empty disappointment. A sense of nostalgia rushed up out of nowhere, making him smile a little. For some reason, it reminded him of a time when he was younger.

A silly little story about an ice cream that Yun had been dreaming about as seven-year-olds do, focusing on insignificant things and making them the biggest and the most epic adventure that exists. He'd saved up for weeks to have enough to buy it, and after waiting in line at the ice cream shop for what felt like an eternity, he finally had the object of his desire in his hands. Younger Yun felt like he was holding, between his ten little fingers, something as precious as stardust, as secret as the recipe to make rainbows, as beautiful as those flying fish that shine brighter than the moon. He had daydreamed about how the first bite would feel: maybe it would taste like those sunset clouds, pink and orange, or feel like an endless river of chocolate. Anything would make sense in the mind of a seven-year-old.

But that day, he learned a fundamental lesson: reality will always be disappointing, and dreams are only dreams. The sweet nostalgia filled him up. Due to the continuous workload and pressure, he hadn't felt even remotely happy in months. Children's laughter overflowed the space. The air smelled sweeter, and some of the tension that was accumulated in this body seemed to ease a little bit. His shoulders dropped to a normal position and his stiff neck appeared to have eased up.

Images of his family became more defined: his grandpa's grumpy face as he discovered Yun was stuffing his face with one too many chocolates, the laugh of his parents when he dressed up as a princess for Halloween and the warmth of their arms wrapped around him as they said goodbye for the last time. But all that was sadly long gone now. The short seconds of childhood memory evaporated as quickly as they came, and Yun was back in his empty apartment. The laughs that sounded so joyful a moment ago were now out of tune. His grumpy grandpa turned into a mound of ash, and his parents vanished away. The pleasant memories shattered into millions of pieces.

He snapped out of it and sat back uncomfortably at his desk, trying once again to shake out the pins and needles that had been bothering him for the past hour. Yun stared down at the sentence lit by a half-broken desk lamp which he'd promised himself to change several weeks ago but never actually got around to doing it. The thought of giving up had crossed his mind so many times that he began truly wondering why he was still there, trying to make sense of this gibberish. From the moment he'd wake up drenched in a cold sweat, spending all day stuck at his miserable desk, barely eating anything until he would have to crawl out of his chair due to exhaustion that even coffee couldn't keep at bay, he had only this translation in mind.

He's been looking at this page for months now, and no matter how he turned these characters, he couldn't figure out what they meant. He had looked in every book and dictionary he owned, carefully organised in his library, to find similarities between the strange language and existing ones, without success. Desperately trying to find inspiration, ideas, or motivation, he surfed online forum after forum on dead languages only to find aspiring historians or straight-out geeks, hardly fooling people into believing that they had discovered the Hellish language. Half laughing, half intrigued with the possibility that this language was unrelated to existing civilisation. Still, maybe something linked to mythology or religion would help him, Yun had decided to read that specific post on Hellish language. Despite the amount of unrealistic crap that made the article clickbait, he happened to come across one of the resources from this article, it was a study of data analysis about supposed heavenly and demonic languages published by a now-retired historian. Although the subject of the study was more than absurd Yun couldn't help himself but be fascinated. So much so that he even tried to hypothesise on how these languages would look or sound like. To his surprise, some of the findings correlated with his own materials. But was he just being influenced by how desperately he wanted to solve and finish this commission?