I get up, assessing the situation.
It’s carnage – weirdly poetic and macabrely beautiful, but carnage still. There’s so much blood, both red and black, swirling together underneath their bodies in a way that feels too intimate, too tender. A glass wall must have exploded, raining down shards on them. But the most bizarre sight of all is the flowers from that garden to our right, stretching and moving and crawling towards them, as if aiming to entomb them in rose stems and thorns and something else, something white and upsetting, resembling a ribcage.
‘Your works are coming to pay tribute, Will,’ Anassa tells our fallen friend.
I want to hug her, comfort her.
I also want to slap her.
‘We don’t have time for this!’ I yell. At her, at the flowers, at this crumbling world in general. ‘We need to remove this rod first, or push it up partially at least, so we can move him. One of you help me lift this, hold it long enough until the rest of us get him out of there.’
My words stun them out of their grief. Even Ophelia stops crying. Wiping the tears from her face, she nods.
‘I’ll help you,’ Helene offers. ‘Like when we were kids and tried to move that boulder, to prove to our brothers we could be as strong as them.’
‘Just like that.’ My heart is strangely warm. ‘All right,let’s hurry. The rod is hollow inside, see? If we grab it here and here –’ I point to both its ends ‘– we should be able to …’
I don’t say the rest. I don’t want to think about my friend’s torso, flattened under so much metal. Will he be in one piece, or are we removing the one thing still keeping him together? Helene heads to the other side of the rod, squats and locks her fingers on the hollow part, her thumbs on top, knuckles white with effort. ‘On your signal,’ she manages.
I turn to Anassa and Ophelia. ‘Are you two ready?’
Anassa nods. Ophelia mumbles, ‘Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven.’
I’ll take that as a yes.
A sole red rose in the periphery of my vision inches closer, a beating, blooming heart. Shakespeare’s face has an ashen colour, his lips moving non-stop, reciting poems only he can hear. We don’t have much time. ‘Signal,’ I say to Helene, and we both lift the rod.
A burning pain, as if my wrist is slit open anew. I stagger but don’t drop my burden. I taste something metallic in my mouth, something like fury, power. It sustains me.
‘Argh. This. Is. So. Heavy!’ Helene must be in as much torment as I am.
I grit my teeth, let furious tears fall. ‘Hurry up!’ I urge the other two. I can hear their hands shuffling, pulling gently, Shakespeare’s murmuring turning to groans then to screams. I can’t do anything but ignore the noise and pain, both inward and outward. I keep holding on to my end of the rod, my vision blurring at the edges. Then, finally, Anassa’s voice.
‘We removed him. You can let go now.’
‘Quick, Shepherd is trying to crawl out too,’ Ophelia adds.
That’s all the motivation I need. I drop the rod with a clang, hoping it will crush her fully. A second later, Helene does the same, a savage smile on her lips.
‘May you choke on my death, you vultures,’ Shepherd comments. How is she still alive and lucid? The rod has fallen diagonally on her, from shoulder to hip. It must have decimated all her internal organs, if she has any. Perhaps if I slice her throat –
‘But if you don’t get him out of here, he will die,’ she adds, eyes on me as if she heard my thoughts again. ‘And if he dies here, while I’m in no state to heal him, he dies everywhere. All my work with him will be for naught. And your two friends here … poof. Disappear.’
What is she saying?
I look at Anassa, but she avoids my gaze. ‘Is that true? If he dies you die?’
Ophelia sniffles. ‘We are not sure how it works. Nothing might happen. We are our own people now, both of us. But if not for him, I wouldn’t have existed. I wouldn’t have come here, I wouldn’t have met …’ She blushes, her eyes finding my sister.
‘And if we don’t get him help, I don’t know how long he has,’ Anassa says, and only then I notice she’s applying pressure on a deep wound in Shakespeare’s chest, trying to keep his breath from leaving him.
Damn it all. I take out my cloak on a whim, wrapping it in a bundle and pressing it over Anassa’s hands. ‘Let go, I got him.’ Maybe the cloak will stop his haemorrhaging. Maybe it will thread his wound together. But the fabric sits on him idly, glutting on his life’s blood.
Anassa gets up and starts pacing, hands erratic. I can see raven wings in her shoulders, as if she yearns to shed this human form, to leave all this behind. ‘Keep it together, please,’ I whisper, both to her and myself. My eyes flit from Shakespeare’s wound to Shepherd’s face, to Helene and Ophelia, to Anassa. I don’t know what to do next. I don’t know how to save him.
Anassa stops pacing mid-stride. ‘I’m such an idiot,’ she says. With a triumphant flourish, she takes her key out of her pocket.
Flashes of me trying to unlock the prison cell in Gruoch’s dungeon come to mind. That key was useless, then. ‘Do you think this will work?’
