Torn Apart

Everyone Was Working For This Goal

Note: My thanks to Backuppixiedust for a question she asked that made me think about Lewis and what happens with him in a place where there's no death. However, be warned. Any chapter with the Cage has dark and disturbing imagery, and this is no exception.

.....

For once, Lewis was grateful he no longer had lungs. The force of life squeezed around him with such pressure, he would have choked had he needed to draw breath.

Lewis paced a frantic circle around the barren fig tree he'd scorched into submission moments earlier. What had looked like fruit hanging from the tree had proved to be fat-bodied flying spiders that dropped and homed in on Dulcie the second he stepped into its shade. Nothing remained of them but writhing embers and the tree spreading blackened branches accusingly.

The area was a circle with three openings leading in at even intervals with no decent cover, but it was the first near-enclosure he'd found since Dulcie had left the first one. And so he walked the circle, posting a Deadbeat at every opening and sending two out to keep scouting.

Dulcie hadn't seen the spiders and had only curled up tighter when Lewis threw flames. She hadn't opened her eyes since he had covered them the night before.

He'd seen children like this. They gave up and stopped moving, and refused to move no matter what the other children or the Shiker did to them. They weren't taken in for healing. They weren't broken properly, they'd just given up, and the Shiker left them to die.

Heat roiled in his chest cavity. The Shiker would not win. Lewis would not lose Dulcie too. Everything that had been done to him, everything he'd lost, everything he'd become. It was that hellbeast's fault, all of it!

Kay's face flashed in his mind, followed swiftly by Arthur's.

No. That wasn't true. Lewis' head drooped in shame. Not everything.

Lewis' steps slowed as he replayed a moment in his mind. The moment Kay saw him for the first time since he died. That terrible mixture of grief and overwhelming joy as she spread her arms to embrace him. He'd hardly seen her excitement, so fixed was he on Arthur. He only spared a thought to make himself incorporeal; he didn't want to touch her. Traitor, he'd thought.

And Arthur. Lewis was beginning to grasp the size of the debt he owed his friend. That there was anything left to save at all... he tightened his grip on Dulcie, his pace picking up again. And for it, Arthur would have to live bound to the most horrible creature in existence, with every memory of what it had done embedded in his mind. Arthur, who always had his back, even when Lewis didn't have his.

If Arthur thought he could just give up and end himself before Lewis had a chance to fix things, he had another think coming. It was Arthur who had refused to give in up to this point, and Lewis would be damned if he saw his friend give up so soon. Arthur was smart, but he could get stuck sometimes. There had to be another way to deal with the Shiker, Lewis just had to find it before Arthur did something stupid.

A Deadbeat's complaints tugged at the edge of his mind. Pausing mid-step, he honed in on the Deadbeat's vision. He recoiled a step, though nothing was in front of him.

The Deadbeat harried one of the few things Lewis actually recognized; a centaur. Its human ribs pressed against painfully translucent skin. Gashes and gouges marked it from shoulders to flank, but the worst was its hollowness. The horse half dragged, nearly flat, as the creature pulled itself forward on bony arms and knobby forelegs. Everything below the forelegs had been hollowed out.

Lewis did not want to know what had happened to this creature, and he did not want to face something this wretchedly miserable.

But it would not be deterred. Lewis understood, from the Deadbeat's defensive yammering, that it had attacked this horse-beast every way it could, but it kept moving. The centaur was, Lewis could hear, mumbling about pink hair.