I'm sorry this isn't much, but I'm feeling very under the weather today. I can't edit much right now and this seemed a good stopping place before getting into any more meat of the story. (Ha. Not an intended pun.)
Thank you for the wonderful reviews.
EIDOLON
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Emmett is sure he'll never forget the sounds of tonight. The medicine man's voice from within the hut, Edward's shouts, the unknown words of chants around the camp. The horrifying symphony it all created together. He'll never forget his father pacing in the pale light away from the activity, nor his brother keeping eyes on Sam as the Native raised his hands to the moon and stomped his feet to vaulted drums. The tribe had seemed to quiver in concert around the great fire as it flickered high into the night. How strange it all sounded, how otherworldly. It had gone for hours. Each time he pulled his thin pocket watch from the front of his waistcoat another hour had ticked by. He began to pray to God for it to end by the third pass of the hand. The silence came when six men carried Edward out on their shoulders, his body unmoving. Emmett remembers the look on his father's face as he ran to them, examining his youngest, frantic, and the firm man he'd always known broke into a helpless child.
Wolf had explained what Edward's body went through, how they had to hold his form with deadening herbs for the Spirits to enter his bones. At this, his father allowed his placated form to take up the entirety of the carriage, even permitting his dirty boots on the upholstery. Emmett had watched from his horse, his stomach an invariable mess of horrible memories from his childhood and his father's anger when he dirtied a carpet inside the house by simply walking on it with soiled boots.
Between the eldest son with a crown of glory, and the youngest with their mother's beautiful looks, Emmett knows he's caught in the middle. A simple, forgotten valley between a mountain and the eternal ocean.
It's early morning when they pull Edward's sheets over him inside the comforts of his lavish suite.
"I'm not sure what they did to him, but I think it worked," Jasper says. "He hasn't been this calm in days."
"Should he still be like that?" Emmett stares down at him, gesturing to his seamlessly lifeless form. His eyes are the only indicator of life when they blink every so often.
"I don't care. Let him lie there. I nearly fell from my horse riding back and I can barely stand now. I'm going to bed," Jasper says and retreats from his brother's room to his own.
Emmett builds a fire to stave off the icy draft from the window, knowing it's what his father would want, and when it's to his satisfaction he leaves, drawing the door behind him and leaving Edward alone with nothing but the flicker of the flames to keep him company.
It may be true, how calm Edward is. True, how the medicine man placated his form from further pain, but a new sickness took its place where cholera once beset his every throe. And in this sickness, Edward can't control his body. He wants to raise his arms, but they don't move. He wants to stretch his legs, but they don't stretch, and when he breathes he's fallen from the horse all over again. He's lain on the ground with the sky above and Hell below, fighting for air to enter his lungs and to bind him to the Earth. There are no words he can say.
No words.
There are no movements he can perform to rid himself of the weight in his limbs and chest. He wonders if this is death.
Could this be the finale? The way his existence will plummet from the small world? He had never imagined a dark room, a lonely blackness pervading his body into oblivion. His chest heaves with hollow air, the struggle unheard except in his head, the exigent fight for life.
Fire sets in his lungs. It crawls to his heart. Without air, he can't call out. His voice, his body, is useless. A fire without a flame, his form is changing. His sculpture is betrayed. His eyes meander the room, the shadows only broken by the silver moonlight from his window and the heated glow from the opposite wall. Obscurity prevails, and when he sees a shadow stretch and block out the small brilliance of light a knowing overcomes him: death isn't far behind.
Edward watches, destitute, as the black form bends a claw around the thick quilt at his feet. He can feel the weight of the creature pulling the sheets from his body, the cold night penetrating into his bones under his unchanged riding clothes.
A shoulder, an irregular head, akin to a broken log, emerge from the end of the bed, and he doesn't know why, but the form, he feels, is smiling. Hell-deep holes are where the eyes should be if it had eyes at all, and yellow teeth stretch from ear to ear. It's not a shadow, but mass. Real, palpable skin which can touch and be touched. It crawls, pulling sheets, quilt, the remaining warmth he felt from the bed. The contest for air, Edward understands, has been a duel with Death.
The dark, heavy creature, its arms longer than Edward's legs, hovers above his body. It's warmth is real, the heat it emits is a black pyre blazing above him. No scream can be found. No words can be spoken as he wishes to call for his brothers, for his father, for anyone who will hear him. Nothing emerges. No force can lift his arms or legs as he screams in his head, gasping, heaving, looking into the oblivion pits of the creature arching above him. It's yellow teeth dip into swords and the erratic struggle becomes mute in Edward's head.
The word forms without effort, the voice an abrasion against any natural sound he's ever heard. It's come from a place of everlasting fire, and he knows it to be the creature inside his head, speaking to him, indicating the nature of his intention.
MINE, it says.
It's long, torrid, briny fingers enter Edward's mouth, spreading his lips open, stretching them beyond the natural extent any human could possibly face, and the agony is so fierce Edward forgets the incinerating flame in his chest. He forgets mortal bearings, and all his rational thoughts. He is damned to the beyond; a dimple of dark opening to a chasm of woe as the stygian creature burrows into his cavity, boring what was once unspoiled. And the light which used to be the mind of a seventeen-year-old boy tumbles to ash.