NOVEL WEB Chapter 20: Mistakes
After staring at the message in disbelief for a while, her mind snapped back into reality, and Emika replied: I can’t. I’m cursed. If I visit you, you’ll die.
For some reason, she regretted sending that message immediately.
Dw ab that, Melisande replied.
And, at that moment, that was all it took to convince her. The truth was, there was nothing in the world that she wanted to do more right now than go to that place and fall into her friend’s arms.
In the end, she still had to wait on that small station to catch the connecting train for a few more stops to get to Melisande instead of her own home.
The rain was still going. Luckily, there were indeed only very few people there, but the only shelter on the station was occupied by a guy wearing large headphones, bobbing his head along to the music while air drumming with his hands.
She walked past him along the shoulder until she reached the very end of the road. The tracks were elevated; behind her was a deep drop into the forest, but she leaned against the railing anyway.
Against all better judgement, she still felt a very small spark inside of her. A small spark that just wouldn’t go out, that just refused to drown into darkness — the small hope that this time, it would be different. That meeting Melisande was not a mistake, that it wouldn’t make it all worse. And that, even if Melisande couldn’t help with her situation, she’d at least, maybe, still find a little bit of respite there.
And, for the moment, Emika really didn’t want to think about anything else. She barely managed to fight off the faces of her friends rematerializing in her mind, with all the little plants growing out from them, and all hope lost.
No, she’d hold onto that spark instead.
Just don’t think about anything. Melisande said it’s okay.
But. She had never told Melisande the truth about all that had happened to her. Bits and pieces, and some hints, perhaps. But never the full truth. So, how could Melisande possibly know that it was fine? Couldn’t she just be wrong?
After feeling the weight of that realisation, and failing to heave it in her mind for longer than a few seconds, she found a different way to look at it. Melisande knew full well that Emika hadn’t told her everything. It’s not like she had made a secret out of that. There was no way Melisande didn’t understand that Emika’s situation wasn’t deeply messed up. In other words, Melisande must have had a good, strong reason not to be worried. She must have thought, “No matter how bad her situation is, it’s fine if she visits.”
With that idea of simply trusting Melisande, Emika was satisfied. Not satisfied logically, though. Objectively speaking, that reasoning sounded terrible to her. Or, at least still full of holes, and risky.
But the fundamental truth to this entire situation was that Emika simply really, really wanted to go to her place no matter what, and she was ready to take this excuse and blend out everything else. Let’s trust Melisande.
Of course, reality was never going to be that easy on her. It was about ten minutes before the arrival of the train that Emika was torn out of her empty thoughts by a loud and pained scream. Emika’s first thought was that she must have really messed things up again. As a shiver ran down her spine, she elevated her umbrella to see what had happened, and froze.
There it was. Next to the shelter, a red, bright ring. The man in his headphones, still screaming, ran from the thing that had apparently just swallowed his hand. He pressed the remainder of his arm against his body, and through the light of the street lamp, Emika felt like she could make out a darkened pool of blood beneath him.
Then, after getting over his shock, the man ran away towards the other side of the track and disappeared into the dark.
Emika’s mind was absolutely blank when she watched the Well of Abstraction slowly approach her.
It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be. Had it been following her ever since?
A dark and all-encompassing realisation waved over her mind, occupying everything.
I shouldn’t have fed it.
That thought kept ravaging inside her like a machine. Time and time again, as the Well, ever so slowly, still approached her. She didn’t even try to run — or, more precisely, it didn’t occur to her that running away was an option.
In a way, she was in a dead end. The rails were on one side of her, the drop to the woods on the other. Of course, she could have still tried to escape, but that small mental barrier, together with the understanding of how deeply she had messed up, made no action possible.
She simply watched as the graceful being floated towards her. That same body she had seared into her memory, that same ring burned onto her retina. The familiarity of that creature that, just two nights ago, she had still so much adored.
And when it was in arm’s reach, as she still stood there, watching it, the umbrella over her head, amidst pouring rain, remembering what she had just seen… she had an epiphany.
In a spur of the moment decision, before her impulse control or rationale could have stopped her, she reached out, placing the wrist with her growth inside the ring.
She immediately felt its pull, as if her arm was magnetised and no force she could muster was able to move it out of the Well, and then it happened. An agonising pain shot through her body just as that part of her arm was separated away and launched into nothingness.
She let the umbrella fall and then wrapped the strap of her satchel as firmly around the wound as possible, hoping to stop the blood from gushing out. What the hell had she just done?
“Sorry,” she gasped to the Well, quite aware of the fact that she had probably just killed it.
She heard the Well of Abstraction thud to the ground next to her. Its entire body squirmed around. Clearly, it had eaten something bad. It didn’t take long for the vegetation to start extruding from its body, making its way around inside of it, visible through the translucent skin.
As she watched the being suffer, Emika realised that the pain of her hand had almost completely let off. When she looked back down, her heart sank.
Out of her flesh had sprouted new juniper growths. They grew quickly, as if in time-lapse. But now, instead of winding themselves around her arm like before, they instead became her new arm. Emika kept glancing back and forth between the growth and the creature. The creature that was sprouting into a garden right next to her.
After a while, the Well didn’t move any more. Her arm was now an arrangement of different intertwining branches that split into fingerlike structures at the end, even though it looked nothing like her hand had before. When she tried to move it, it did indeed twitch, however, not the way she wanted. The stirrings seemed random, the twigs jolting around disjointedly.
Again, she had gone and made it all worse.
The next moment, the body of the Well contracted, and Emika let out a surprised screech. In disbelief, she watched the being unsnap itself from all the vines and stems sewing it to the ground. When it was done, the Well just sat there, kneeling on its fours. The ring slowly grazed over the ground, feeding off the small pieces of vegetation around that had sprouted out from within it.
Crucially, though, it made no attempt to go after Emika anymore.
“Learned your lesson, huh?” she asked faintly. “Truth is… I’ve learned mine, too.”
Emika let go of all her bodily tension, leaning back against the railing. After letting out a deep sigh, she started sobbing.
“What a big, big mess I made,” she cried. “And that poor man. I lured you here. It’s my fault that he got so hurt.”
She kept trying to wipe the rainwater and the tears out of her burning eyes, but to no avail.
And then, finally, the train moved into the station.
Emika got up and made a few wonky steps, fetching her umbrella back up with her offhand, as her right one was now completely unusable.
Instead of holding it over her head, she just simply dragged the umbrella behind her. She looked through the windows of the train to make sure — absolutely sure — that the wagon was empty. Gazing back at the Well of Abstraction, now a few dozen metres away, it still showed no intention to go after her. Or anyone else, for that matter.
“Please don’t hurt people ever again, okay?”
She waved it goodbye, and then boarded the train.
Inside, she took out Lester’s phone. It had gotten dangerously wet, but still seemed to work.
Hey Melisande. I’m on the last train now. Will be there soon.