Book 2 Epilogue (1/2)
”So he is not outside, but he's not inside either,” mumbled a familiar yet heavily distorted voice a couple of parsecs past the edge of my hearing. Maybe it was precisely because he sounded like he was auto-tuned by a walrus, but it piqued my interest enough to 'wake me up', in a manner of speaking. I focused my attention on the source of the voice, and my consciousness slowly reached out towards it until I was all of a sudden inside an alien yet very familiar not-dark not-room, just in time to experience the full brunt of The Man abruptly exclaiming, ”Then where is he!?”
”We don't know. That's the problem,” came the chiding answer in the voice of The Woman, currently nothing more than a distant twinkle of crimson waters barely beyond my sight, and if she had eyes, I was sure she would've rolled them very derisively.
”Maybe it's another one of his pranks,” The Boy proposed, though his own tone made it sound like even he thought it was unlikely.
”And he completely disappeared for that?” The Man argued back, his words all but dripping with incredulity. ”I couldn't do that even if I tried, let alone do it for a 'prank'!”
”Yes, but that's you,” The Girl chimed in with a disinterested voice while masquerading as a glowing dune of sand (or was it the other way around?), and The Woman... nodded? Undulated? Gestured, let's go with gestured. In an up and down motion that was like nodding, except completely different.
”He was always an odd one, but also quite ingenious when it came to causing trouble,” she noted with a tinge of nostalgia coloring her words. It was purple. I don't know how, I don't know why, but apparently nostalgia was purple. Or maybe a bit closer to violet, now that I think about it.
I would've probably spent about half an eternity pondering what color emotions were, but I was cut short by The Boy timidly raising his voice.
”But... Isn't that bad?”
”What are you talking about?” The Man growled, and for a moment I could clearly see the face of a mustachioed middle-aged man's frowning face overlapping with a bolt of thunder illuminating the pitch blackness of the night on the dark side of a barren moon. It only lasted for a split second, and then both melted away until I was once again only vaguely aware of the direction the voices were coming from.
”I mean… If he isn't in here, but not out there either, doesn't that mean he's missing?”
The word 'missing' immediately made the tension in the room freeze over by about four octaves.
”No way. He must be just hiding,” The Man said a tad nervously, as if he was trying to convince himself, but The Boy pressed on.
”But what if he's not? What if the ********** look into his disappearance and...”
Whoa there! Slow down! What was that again? **********? I repeated the... well, it wasn't really a word per se, but I repeated it in my head again a few times to get a 'feel' for it anyway. It was something like a concept, that had another concept in it like a giant, metaphysical Matryoshka doll, and if I had to transliterate it, it was something along the lines of 'a/the thing/things that have emerged from/in the process of emerging from the state of not emerging/vacuum'. It also had an extra qualifier attached to it, so after some more finagling, I decided on the rough term of 'Venerated Emergents'. It wasn’t entirely accurate, but at least it was classy.
So, with that new bit of revelation in mind, let's listen to The Boy's words again.
”But what if he's not? What if the Venerated Emergents look into his disappearance and it turns out we were the last ones to see him?”
”Oh, don't be such a worrywart,” The Girl spoke up with a fittingly girlish giggle reminiscent of underwater birdsong. ”Even if the Venerated Ones send someone to inquire about his whereabouts, we honestly don't know where he is, and we don't know anything about his disappearance. We'll be fine.”
”But we do know something about his disappearance,” The Boy pointed out a tad impatiently. ”He disappeared after he hit the trap we set up. If they look into it, they might think we are responsible! No, I'll go even further! They might think we made him disappear…”
There was a very long, thin, and slightly elastic silence in the not-dark not-room, ultimately broken by The Woman breaking out into barely stifled laughter.
”You cannot be serious! Us? Accidentally killing him? That guy!?”
”Yeah,” The Man jumped on the bandwagon with some gusto. ”He's four generations ahead of us! Five, for you! Sure, he might not be a Venerated One yet, but even if we ganged up on him at once, I would be surprised if we could even inconvenience him!”
”Yes! That's why we set a trap for him, remember?” The Girl followed it up with an indignant huff, as if the mere mention of the idea was absurd.
”I know, but… I'm just worried,” The Boy relented after being thoroughly brow-beaten by his companions.