The sun had not come out that day.

Or the day prior.

Inescapable dreariness settled upon the world. The buildings that should have towered into the sky were cut into short trunks, hidden by clouds and thick blankets of falling snow. The snow muffled sound as it fell, taking away the echo and noise of a city. The effect was claustrophobic and isolating, as if the ceiling of cloud were a solid thing that pressed incessantly downward. The ground level was empty of movement and traffic, abandoned entirely, a ghost town covered in layers of snow and ice.

When the sun vanished for weeks, the city moved underground. It was a controlled, enclosed space–nothing so dingy as a tunnel–an entire living space, brightly lit and open, simulating as best it could a more ideal day. A city under the city, carefully maintained, for when life needed to continue through the long northern winters. One could spend the day standing in their office, looking out the window and watching endless sheets of snow and gloomy gray sky, and then come down into the sun-yellow light of the underground when it was time to move on. It was not an entirely perfect simulation, there is something about the body that knows the difference between the real day and the manufactured. You could be standing in the warmth of the underground, careless and navigating the tangle of a crowded plaza, but some part of you would always know that overhead was twenty feet of snow and empty street, and your muscles would still ache with the remembered misery of cold.

Winterwing Flashblade could have chosen to do the majority of his work from home in any case, but the decision to remove himself from the apartment had been an intentional one. It was a matter of mindset, where the separation of the two places and the travel time between them, had proven useful. He liked being able to sit down and have a space that was solely for focus, and an entirely different space where he didn’t have to think a damn thing.

The journey between office and home wasn’t a long one, though it did take a few unusual twists and turns this evening, owing to a community theater with a boisterous overflow of now entirely inebriated audience, and a pop-up emporium that had not been there in the morning, selling distressing flavors of cheese.

The undercity held a tantalizing number of things that, on a better day, could have easily taken a few hours of his attention. The city displayed all manner of messy, organic life, with different paces and aesthetics and emotions, occupations and hobbies. Not today. The stream of people swirled around him, a constant flow of energy and noise. The artificial light of the underground seemed to have its own noise, a tinny ringing that screamed when he looked upward. He had thought too much today, and there was a throbbing behind an eye that was going to turn into something worse if he let it continue without rest.

It had not, by any stretch of the imagination, been the worst day of his life. He had enough perspective to know that would have been a gross exaggeration. He was still standing, the headache would pass, and tomorrow, even in the gray light of storm, things would look better.

Tonight he was thoroughly sick of having to exist.

The elevator ride up to his floor was blissfully quiet. The energy outside still permeated, a tolerable and muted hum. But the people inside with him seemed to react to the dark, enclosed space, and became more insular, transitioning to a quiet evening now that they were rising out of the underground. They looked down at screens to check messages, shuffled through belongings, or adjusted bags on shoulders. He thought he recognized a few of what, technically, were his neighbors, but no one that he actually knew by name. If he had ever spoken with any of them, it would have been the sort of inane conversation that acted as an acknowledgment of two adults in a shared space, rather than anything important.

He stole a look at his own screen as people around him jostled on and off, lengthening the ride.

The top notification was from his sister. Dabble would be out late with a group of friends, and to her credit, had already sent three more messages throughout the evening checking in.

The next in the pile was from the office he had just stepped out of. A verbal message was left as well, marking something important enough that he couldn’t put it off until morning. Not so important, however, that he would be able to recollect it later. He would only remember that the message was there.

He waited for his floor, broke away from the quiet mass of people doing the same, and listened with one hand while fumbling for a key-card with the other. He wouldn’t remember who left the message. He would be certain he called them back.

He would imagine, when he finally had time to rest and reflect again, that at some point, whoever it was on the other end of the call would be questioned about it. Asked about his phrasing, his mood, his exact words. It wouldn’t make any difference, and certainly wouldn’t do any good, but it was an interesting thought experiment.

What he would remember was being asked to take on someone else’s workload. He would have been reluctant. But the other party on the call would remember that he eventually relented and agreed. Maybe they would have even overheard the sound of him finally finding that key-card and unlocking his door, and then the sound of it latching behind him.

The call disconnected, and he leaned against the door, drained, the last bit of his ability or desire to think locked outside.

Winterwing enjoyed a moment of quiet, where he could close his eyes in the dark, breathe the air of home, and listen to familiar clicks and hums of the apartment, and begin at last to decompress.

This was interrupted nearly immediately by the remark: “You look like shit.”

Her name was Emily, and she was not supposed to be there.

The agreement had been a couch, for a night, and that turned very quickly into the spare room for, near as he could tell, the rest of eternity. Winterwing could not quite explain to himself how he had let that happen. He very clearly remembered it not being his idea, yet it had also turned, over the last couple of months, into something that was entirely his fault.

Even now, he still could not find the right way to tell her to leave.

His eyes slowly adjusted. The only source of light was the glow of the city outside, reflecting off the falling snow. It was surprisingly bright for the hour of night as a result, and everything was bathed in an unnatural green glow. Her shape was mostly an outlined silhouette against the window, except the strange points of blue light at her eyes. It was the only remarkable thing he could say about her appearance. It was not the most radical body modification he had seen, but it was one that twisted his spine strangely when he tried to imagine the procedure.

And she was still on that couch.

There was a small display on the smartglass window behind her that looked forgotten, as if she had been aimlessly looking for something to occupy her time, and given up without even bothering to dismiss the search.

Winterwing took a deep breath. He had been so set on the idea of collapsing into an evening of quiet, that he could feel just a slight bit of anger beginning to bubble in reaction to the delay.

“I have had-” he began, and then stopped himself. Finishing that sentence would lead to a conversation he did not want to have. He looked up, squinting. “Why are you sitting in the dark?”

Emily blinked, as if she had not noticed until this exact moment. “Couldn’t sleep, I guess.” She fidgeted as he watched her, but all she did was tap a fist to her chest, as if to indicate indigestion, or maybe heartburn, and offered no other explanation.

He unceremoniously dropped his bag to the floor, kicked it to the side, stood up straight, and decided this was not his problem.

“Kind of a late night for you, though, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Emily,” he said, deadly calm, “I’m going to bed.”

“Is that job even worth it?” she continued. “I get that you need to do something, but it seems like for all that effort you could be doing something better-”

“I have spent the majority of my day not doing my job at all. It’s all been dealing with shit you caused,” he interrupted.

She finally seemed to grasp his mood. “Me?”

He took a tone far more casual than he actually felt, and strolled toward his bedroom door. “You grew up in Bridgebane?”

She paused before answering.”Yes?”

He stopped abreast the couch. “The ident code you use for everything is the format assigned to off-world immigration.”

“Okay?” she shrugged. “Still grew up in Bridgebane.”

“Sure,” he agreed. “Except the code you gave me was generated last year.”

At last, she finally had the sense to remain fully silent, with the wide-eyed stupid stare of someone beginning to realize they have been caught in a lie, and there was no way out of it.

“I don’t care, by the way,” Winterwing cut off her attempt at rebuttal. He turned and walked, rubbing the buzzing pain at the side of his head. “I’m just not interested in whatever you, specifically, have to say right now.”

He would have left it at that. He would have probably even apologized for it in the morning. She had needed that couch to begin with because she had no where else to go. Her worldly processions had been in a single thin bag, and anything more she had now had been acquired since. Whatever event had taken everything else form her almost certainly had eaten her legal identity, as well. That did not bother him. He had surmised as much at the beginning, when they had first offered her the space, as a complete stranger.

But it did bother him, in a way that went beyond what he logically should have felt, that she would lie to him. That he had spent the entire day miserable, struggling over problems that she had caused, that he shouldn’t have had to deal with. And that she would just lie again to his face when asked directly.

Winterwing stood at the threshold of his door, half in the dark and half in the brightness of his fully lit room. The mental fog that had been pushing in for hours was finally overtaking him, and he could not think beyond standing there and staring at his bed.

He thought he heard a noise behind him, something that may have been a whispered rebuttal to their conversation, or maybe just her getting up from the couch. When he turned, she was standing, much in the same frozen pose that he was, staring deeper into the dark, rigid. Her fingers flexed oddly, as if she were trying to grasp at something invisible at her sides.

“Can you hear that?” she asked him, without looking at him.

He strained, but the world was quiet aside from the hum of kitchen appliances. “I don’t-”

She fell to the floor, displacing a table in the process. She said nothing else, only curled up in visible pain.

From here, Winterwing would have a hard time recalling exactly what happened. It would be a series of incomplete thoughts, of unimportant things remembered and vital things completely forgotten.

He did not remember traveling the distance to her on the floor, but must have. He asked something, and she did not answer. No, that wasn’t quite right, she had stared at him, with those strange blue eyes, and her mouth had moved, and no sound had come out.

He would remember that she was not wearing shoes. She preferred to be barefoot when she had no where to go. She had told him it was a holdover from a childhood of wading in places that shoes did not belong.

He would remember that she wasn’t breathing.

He would remember the way those blue eyes drifted, unblinking, transfixed on something just beyond and above him that was not there.

He did not remember pulling out his screen, but he must have, because he remembered calling someone and demanding help. He could not describe what was wrong with her, only that she wouldn’t breathe, and that seemed like motivation enough for the person on the other end.

She seemed to regain awareness, and her eyes refocused, and she finally did take a breath – a big long coughing gulp of air that belonged to someone that had been under water for far too long. He was briefly relieved.

Then came be the part that he would permanently carry with him, replaying unbidden and unwelcome on a loop if he let his mind drift too far. There was a crumbling, cracking sound, and a blooming black wetness that appeared in the center of her shirt, just under the collar. Under his hand on her shoulder, under her feathers and skin, he felt something roil.

He must have dropped his screen there, as he jerked back in surprise. It was gone the next time he thought of it, some hours later.

His face was wet, and his hands came away with that same black slickness when he scrubbed at it, reflexively.

Winterwing was not a person who believed in the fantastical. This could have been the result of a great many things, from expectations of maturity as the older sibling, to losing most of his childhood awe in the same incident that ended his hockey career. There were some things in the world that were immutable, unchanging, and fixed. It did not matter how sideways everything felt, the sun rose in the morning, and the ground you walked on remained solid.

This rigid worldview had to change, if not outright shatter, at the moment that the hardwood floor began to part like silt, and slowly swallowed Emily’s body. He thought, surely, he was imagining it, that it was a trick of the deep pools of light in the dim room. But she seemed to agree with his perception, and began clawing at the floor, unable to pull away from it. Her fingers left rivulets in the wood, just as if it were soft mud.

He instinctively grabbed for her arm. There was still that feeling, the angry march of insects under her skin, but he made himself grip the wrist anyway, and she tried her best to hold on to him in turn.

The floor became spongy under his feet, and he could feel it shifting and threatening to buckle and fail. For all the pulling, she still sank. His shoulders–or perhaps hers–were likely to separate and give way long before whatever it was that pulled at her from underneath gave up.

Emily realized that he was going to lose his grip. In the aftermath, everyone would agree that the story he told was ludicrous, the result of a mind that had been overworked. The floor does not swallow people, skin does not twitch and bite, and clothes do not bloom black oil. She had left, yes, clearly, they would say, but he imagined the manner. Dreamed it.

And in calling it a dream, that look she gave him when she realized he was going to lose his grip was still going to be enough to haunt him. There was a sudden slack to her body, as she gave up on struggling and sank. A corner of her mouth quirked a smile, almost invisible. She knew he would let go and forgave him for it.

She closed her eyes, tightly, and waited to be pulled under.

The shame of it burned at him fiercely, a gnawing pain that came from no where and he could not explain.

He did the only thing he could think so do, dropped to his knees on the floor, and wrapped his arms around her. He shouldn’t have done it, knew it was insanity, and that all he had really managed to do was doom them both. He expected the floor to feel heavy and pinch in around him, a million hands squeezing him. But when it parted and swallowed his legs it felt more like subsuming in warm water. Gentle, without resistance, separating painlessly.

He had chosen to do this over a split second of half, maybe imagined smile.

He followed her lead and shut his eyes tightly as the ground level reached his shoulders, instinctively took a breath, as if it really were just water coming up over him.

~~~~~~

Eventually Winterwing realized that he had been holding his breath for too long. That he should have, within fairly short order, felt that increasing burning urge to expel it. Or he should have passed out. Neither thing happened.

When his eyes opened, around him was the sort of blurry gray of murky water. Above was an impossible black, to be sure, but far below his feet the world lightened. The dark ocean of space even seemed to have its own brand of weed–giant, towering trees of arterial red that swayed and bobbed, and branched in every direction. They did not make a thick forest, but they did reach and entwine with each other, branching again and again with ever smaller red threads. He could not see their tops; they all branched away into the deep dark above. He could not see the end of their roots, as they blurred away into the water below.

He thought, perhaps, that some of those thread-thin branches held fruit. Not all, just some. Tiny objects that dangled at the end of their lines, floating downward to the brilliant floor.

No, not fruit. Bodies, bodies that were being drawn down by the roots. None were close, not enough that he could see faces, but they were certainly people. Distinct arms and legs, the unmistakable shapes of people.

He tried to shout and remembered that he could not breathe.

His body did not respond to anything–were it not for the light, he would not have been able to say for sure that he still had one. He seemed stuck in an unnatural rigidity, floating with all the grace of a log down a stream. It was only by the gentle tickle of her hair that he could tell Emily was still with him at all. It danced in the corner of his vision, an occasional golden glint reflecting from the light below. The world around them was absolutely silent, and the more he thought about it, the more sure he was that he could not hear or even feel his own heartbeat. There is a strange terror in that, in losing one of the first and most constant sounds a person will ever hear.

At least this strange cessation of time and movement came with the benefit that he could no longer feel whatever was trapped beneath her skin.

That buzzing behind his eyes was back now. Worse, it seemed to be on the edge of forming words, consonants and rise and fall in tone, little snatches of conversation just beyond the edge of hearing.

He thought perhaps this was death, the last few moments before the mind finally went to its final rest. He had flirted on that brink once before, and this felt very similar. Perhaps he had drowned in the mud that should have been solid floor after all, and had simply failed to notice.

The feeling of falling became more pronounced, and he recognized it not as gravity, but that familiar fall that comes with a rushing wave of sleep. The panic began to subside.

He had been exhausted, when he came home, and he wanted so badly to take sleep up on its offer.

It did not matter that a partition of him insisted that he could not drift off, that he would not be waking up again if he did. It screamed at him, a last fiber of sense, but it was drifting further and further away.