Anathame Book One: The Pentagram

By Izumi Earl

Embraced by endless sky. Life—to fight or fly

Every nine years, under the noses of the world, the Vessel War commences. A battle between nine supernatural beings—each infused with a unique magical power, each fighting for the ultimate prize: True Immortality.

The First Class Vessels: Air, Earth,

• Language: English
• Publisher: Izumi Earl
• Release date: Oct 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9781999755317

Izumi Earl

Izumi Earl is a writer and a pagan witch from England. She was interested from a young age in both writing and the supernatural, and could always be seen with her head in a book. She started writing when she was 14 and is not planning on stopping any time soon. Apart from writing, Izumi enjoys an excessive amount of hobbies, including playing seven musical instruments, photography, play-testing video games and loving anything Japanese. She promises that her psychotic side is a little more subdued in reality. Follow Izumi on her website: www.knittingfury.com

Book preview

Embraced by endless sky. Life—to fight or fly

Meet my eye.

…

What do you feel?

I feel the shimmering of the air, but only around me. I feel the constant chill, but only by the hairs standing up on my arms, cold that would aggravate me if I could feel cold. I feel my hair moving in my constant aura. It gets wilder when it is near you, Master.

And what do you see?

I see the black dust clogging this realm. I can see it gather at the edges of my vision, blacking out the corners of the room into darkness but—

…

I can see the bottom of the walls and floor. I can see the light from your flames. I can see in black-and-white. It gets darker when I am near you, Master.

And what do you smell?

Only smoke, Master.

And what do you taste?

Blood, Master.

You have failed again, Anathame.

I am a disappointment, Master.

You know what to do next.

Yes, Master.

I see the knife in my pale hands, arms extended out in front of my body. As I lean my head back to look up at the ceiling, I feel the fear coursing through my veins. I am a disappointment, Master.

As I bring my head down onto the knife, the darkness grows.

Prologue

When I wake up, I feel it. The fracture. Like a huge hole in my heart that my entire body threatens to collapse into. This feeling is new to me. Maybe I will tell Master about it. Or, maybe I will not .

Black blood surrounds me, cold as ice where I lay in it. For a moment, I run my hand through the pool, separating the river of blood and staining my hand dark. Then I touch my hand to my neck, checking the ever-present scars. Vessels don’t always flawlessly heal if they can regenerate—at least, my level does not—but, in Master’s opinion, it is a pointless exercise. If it does not impair your ability to Channel, then there is no reason to be bothered by it. The lines on my neck form a pattern not unlike that of a ladder.

My heart stabs once again, filling my eyes with tears. It’s not unlike that of a knife, but it feels like it’s coming from inside, tearing me apart, like something essential to my existence is being scooped out and pushed away from me. A head-pounding, heart-numbing ache for something. It’s like...I don’t have a purpose anymore.

Master would not be pleased.

I push myself up onto my hands and knees over the pool of my blood. I can see strands of my black hair dipping into it, waving in my invisible aura, kicking up tar-like shimmering droplets that fall without making any sound. Slowly, I lean forward, closing my eyes as I rest my forehead down in the red centre of the black pool, marking a gradient where my human ends and Vessel begins. I guess that it is red—I’m colour-blind. The black pool is bigger. When I open my eyes, my forehead feeling the cold of the floor against the colder blood, the black at the edges of my visor-like vision makes it seem as if the black pool is an endless ocean that I could be in the middle of, waiting to sink down, down through the waves and to a peaceful dark black bottom of oblivion and nothingness, where nobody knows your name. Maybe Master would follow me there.

I breathe in the stuffy air around me, but it’s like breathing in cotton wool, blocking my lungs—I can’t take in air. The slow dizziness that had surrounded me begins to sweep the six-walled world around me in huge swaying motions. My vision, unstable at the best of times, is lost in the whirling together of the black and grey and dust—somehow, I just can’t focus my eyes straight. I’m standing on the ceiling and the walls and the floor simultaneously. It’s only the feeling of ice on my cheek that lets me know that I must still be lying, fallen, alone, forgotten in that black pool of blood.

It’s only instinct that guides me, memory as I get up, drunkenly, on my hands and knees. I feel myself retch and cough up black blood from deep in my lungs, but I must stand for Master. The thought drives me upwards until I am standing upright, only knowing this from the cold on the bottom of my feet. I try to use it as a grounding point, but even that is slipping away from me, into the black hole in my heart. I begin to see colours other than black-and-white.

Bad colours.

I know something is wrong. In the middle of that hole, there’s a jarring sensation. Now I can separate it, and it’s a sudden realisation that it’s not as if someone has pulled out my heart, but as if they pushed it back into the wrong place—which is odd, because I have no heart.

Slowly and carefully, I focus and disconnect my hearing Sense from my physical body. Drifting, floating, I hear the disturbance; nearby, footsteps hit the floor. More than one set of footsteps, heavier and lighter of foot, respectively.

Master has no footsteps.

When I pull myself back together, the feeling of slight completion begins to tie down my swinging sight and, gradually, my eyes focus on the wall opposite me, rotating and undulating in appearance, but it’s there. Maybe this is the day, the day when I get to show my skills. The feeling spreads like a sickness, sludge in my veins, making me want to cough up more blood, waste more time that I don’t have.

I have not heard footsteps here forever.

But for a being that has nothing, what have I lost? What do I have to lose? What did I have to lose? There is only one thing that holds everything for me. One thing that I could never lose. One thing that I would live for.

Master.

At that exact moment, the wall in front of me shivers and then breaks into a thousand pieces, shattering into itself, revealing that paradox of a doorway, and that word is all I can think, over and over, Master, Master, Master. And then I disconnect my senses and I focus on the physical and visual aspects in front of me.

Two figures appear in the opening. Both human. Not Vessels. Not Master. As the doorway fractures into a simple, unhidden arch, they become clearer; one is taller, female, the other only slightly shorter, male. Against the lightless backdrop of the doorway, they almost look as if they are just floating heads, and the darkness hides their eyes and intentions in shadow. Anathame’s never seen anything like this before. It’s a cruel jolt from my limited, six-walled reality that leaves me feeling even more jarred, offset. I have no idea how to react, and so I just stare straight at them. They both look back at me. For an eternity, we stand there, reacting to each other, humans against demon in a small black room with blood on the floor, as they break my world.

Scared immobile by their presence, I’m frozen until they take a step forward, crossing some sort of invisible threshold that throws me out of my shock. I grasp the reality of the situation. Two unknown figures are walking towards me, Master is gone, and I break.

I scream, turn around, and run, run as fast as I can, straight into the wall—pain spreads like a cracking sensation across my face as I fall onto the ground. I can feel them behind me now, drawing closer, coming for me, and I curl up into a ball and rock backwards and forwards—Master, Master, Master—I’m shaking. The footsteps come forward and I feel something in the side of my neck. And I stop panicking. And I am silent.

Part I

When the lights go out, I don’t even know who I am running from anymore. Maybe all I run from are the things I want to forget. Because doesn’t everyone have things that they want to forget? Somehow, however fast I run, the echoes still follow me. They follow me…

Chapter 1

Iam blind when I wake up, as always. But there’s an odd split in the middle of the black of my vision and, for a terrifying second, I think my vision is clearing, and Master will punish me for that. I don’t want it to be true. But as I blink the rest of it away, the white keeps expanding, so bright, so bright. All I can think of is, where has Master taken me? It’s different from my usual room, my world; I am instinctively frightened, but Master said dead people have no emotions, so I am emotionless as my vision expands to three dimensions, and I see that I am in a room unlike anything I’ve ever known—it is a place where people live. I am in a room with a white ceiling and walls and I am lying on a bed and it has a bedside table next to me and I am frightened— emotionless, I have to remind myself. What is this? Why are things changing now ?

You must stand, Anathame. I hear Master’s voice in my head. No matter what, you must stand for your Master. His hand tightening on my face, flame eyes burning into mine, pain coursing through my veins.

I must trust in Master, always. I sit up from the bed, whipping my legs around quickly, but as both my feet hit the floor and I try to lever myself onto them, my knees completely collapse and I land hard on my legs. I sit there for a moment, looking at the floor, fighting back the black blood in my throat. Tiles. I had forgotten they existed, like this, on floors. I shake my head a little. No, not tiles. They are called carpet tiles, aren’t they? Little squares of fuzzy things that you walk on. My hand slides over them, forgetting for a moment. If I Sense Master, I think, I will stand. I stretch my hand out over the fuzzy tiles. Why am I in a room with fuzzy tiles? Is it another test, to draw out any human-like emotion still inside of me?

Well, in that case, I failed.

I don’t want a Day One again, I don’t. It hurts, but I slide my hand back from the fuzz, feeling it spin all around me. Bad fuzz, bad fuzz. Lay down on me, Anathame. Become human again. No, no, no. I try desperately to stand for my Master but my knees collapse again, and this time I knock the feet out from the little table and send it crashing down to the floor. Was that Master’s table? Why would he have such a pretty wooden table? He wouldn’t need it—I should not question Master’s needs. Of course, he would need a little, pretty wooden table. Of course, he would; it is very useful. No, it’s not pretty, is it? A meaningless slab of dark wood, perfect for killing on.

No matter what.

Should I pick up the table? It seems like a wise, but human, thing to do. No, I don’t think I should. I should wait for Master to order me to pick up the table or leave it or punish me for knocking it over. He will punish me for the tiles, too. I hope it wasn’t enough for a Day One.

Focus, Anathame.

I open up my senses to Sense Master. Surely, he is nearby?

Then I realise. The black hole in my heart. The tearing, unbearable pain of losing something that you’ll never be complete before you find.

The scream, running back, the cracking pain, something, something sears, sears in my veins, and—

I hear clicking. Click, click, click. Then a muffled thud, thud, thud. Louder, click, click, thud, thud, thud. Click, click, click, click, click. Coming towards me, footsteps on the floor. Steady, the clicking, reassuring repetition, but it ices my heart all over again; Master has no footsteps.

Then who is it?

The clicking stops outside the interesting white door in the interesting white room. And then I hear a faster, click, click, click. There is more than one. It stops outside the white door too. Then I hear murmurs and I think, head down, head down. No matter who it is, head down, don’t look.

My feet move a little in the bad fuzz.

Where did all that blood come from?

Never look up Anathame, until I tell you; meet my eye.

That applies to the black room. Can I look in the white room? Master has not told me how to behave in a white room. My personality stretches to four black corners. This is alien.

I hear the click of locks being slid and twisted. Master doesn’t use locks. Who does?

I hear a final slide. And then I hear a hand on a doorknob and a turning sound. Someone is coming. Could it be Master? I reconnect my Sense, pulling myself back together through broken and overused strings, loosely strung like a doll that has been pulled and thrown too often, forgotten after years of neglect and expected to disappear.

The door swings open, I hear it bang against the wall next to it, and there are two humans there; I can feel it. Sensing them, my mind filling in the surroundings visually out of sight. The table has a secret broken leg. The door has slowly started to make its way back to its original closed position. But the two figures stand there, still and silent, and I am scared, and I am frightened, and I want Master, and I recognize them.

I hear a human female voice. It is low, no known accent. It has fear underlying it, and I remember and nearly drop to the floor, but I stay upright and still and she says words. ‘Hello. Can you hear me?’

I try to say it, try to say the words, but—‘Master?’ I can’t stop it. Where are you? Where did you go?!

The female. ‘She can hear us!’ Her voice is oddly breathy with the hints of panic bordering on hysteria in her voice, and I hear her feet back up steps with a shuffling sound. I know exactly what shoes she is wearing, heavy boots with little heels.

The male voice. ‘Pele. Stop.’ Firm, but I can hear his uncertainty, hidden behind a roughly constructed façade that could collapse with a look from my eyes. Their fear is so directed at me that I feel like Master would be so happy with me, and I can feel him in front of me now, patting my head affectionately, letting me breathe, for a moment, the same smoke-laced air he breathes. For a moment, maybe mine and Master’s thoughts are different.

The poor table has been through a lot today. I want to fix its broken leg, but some things can never be fixed. It will never be perfect as it was again. Poor table.

Silently, my mind wills the person in front of me to do something worse to me than I have already experienced—go ahead, I dare you. I struggle to find my hearing Sense, six feet under, pull it back to me, and I hear the tail ends of a million different words. I have to re-adjust, caught on the line between oblivion and reality like a person on their deathbed that could go either way.

It hurts.

‘Are you there? Can you hear me?’ The tongue is familiar, but it’s the voice that speaks it. With my mind no longer clouded by fear, I hear the gentle tones in his voice as it falls and rises, so animated, terrifying on a whole new level. I force myself to keep calm.

‘Where is my Master?’

It hurts.

The icy tears burn my face again as I see the blankness in his eyes, the endless oblivion stretching out in front of me.

‘He’s not here.’

The words that I already knew, could already feel, they still stab my soul in places that I can’t shelter; my Master is not here, no he is not. I realise it then—I do not miss his shadow, I do not miss his connection to me, I do not miss the constant fear and pain. I miss my life—what life? I’m dead—the purpose that Master gave me. The feeling that whoever I was, whatever I was, I could have a purpose. That someone would look down on me and smile. The feeling that it was worth living, just for the rarest chance of that smile.

It doesn’t hurt.

I want the pain to go away.

I feel the tears drag tracks over my face to the floor below me in a steady stream. He’s not here. Why am I here, if he is not? My entire world has been tossed over on its axis once again, for the millionth time, at the thought of having to make my own decisions. Has he really moved on? I really thought Master…I really thought he cared for me. The barely-concealed pride in his voice when I mastered another skill, the overjoyed exclamation that was music to my ears on the Chosen Day—I remember then, looking at the black scar Pentagram on my hand, seeing the blood running down my arm, and wishing that I could relive that day over and over, the Days over and over again, just to hear that sound again. No, I was the best. I am the best. I was going to fight for the best Master in this War. Master would not settle for second best.

Master has not left me.

Master has not left me, but he is gone.

I finally get a good look at them now, my mind unclouded by darkness or helplessness. I can’t read their colours or their emotions, but their expressions portray them clearly. The girl with the pointed face, the face that looks as if it would stab me in the heart and twist the knife, her closed fists, her defensive frontier. Is she afraid of me? Or is this just more hatred that I—

Never happened.

The boy with the impossible hair. Wide-eyed, he reminds me of prey. Behind his stance, he watches me from those eyes, waits for me. He does not hate me. He does not like me. He is indifferent, until I make the first move.

The thought of that, it makes the weight lift from my heart for a moment. My non-existent, far-away heart. I remember Master, and his indifference towards me, the reassurance of never being judged until I made the first move.

‘Why am I here?’ I implore. I feel the tears filling my eyes as I stare at the humans—scared, yes I am, terrified, but it’s almost drowned out by confusion. This entire situation is just too dream-like, too surreal. I keep expecting to be thrown out of it at any second.

I feel immortal.

Maybe Master would be more pleased than I think.

It hurts. I press my hand to my chest as if it will fill the hole left by ripping Master’s soul away from me. Somehow, I’ve been staring at the floor for the last few minutes, although I can’t remember why. Something about human eyes staring into mine strikes me with a deeper fear than I’ve almost ever felt.

‘He’s gone, isn’t he?’

‘Who?’

‘Master.’

‘We’ve already told her that!’

‘She’s not like us. I don’t think she can hear us properly.’

I turn my head up away from the fuzz, to meet their staring, inquisitive eyes with my own, black and soulless. Suddenly, I realise it.

‘He’s not here.’

Anthropophobia. Chronophobia. Thanatophobia.

‘He’s not here.’

Atelophobia. Phobophobia. Pantophobia.

Echoes—

It’s closing in now—fear streaks across my vision.

Meet my eye.

I feel their fear through me like it is my own, etched in my mind—a fierce stab in the half of me that feels empathy but should not feel, and I feel it all over again—

Running—

Now, backs to the door, they watch me. They do not meet my eye. I shudder when I remember the boy’s eyes looking into mine, the warmth that I felt. Cherophobia. The girl catches my attention. It’s you, isn’t it? How much more of this do I have to face?

Master, I have done well?

Yes, Anathame. You have done well.

You won’t throw me down the hole, Master?

Not yet, Anathame. Not yet.

You are smiling, Master? —

There is a paper-thin line separating the human mind from insanity; I have no boundary, just a black hole pulling me back. I struggle against the force.

Focus, Anathame. I shake my head a few times, getting the hair and black dust out of my eyes. Breathe in. Now breathe out, immediately, because I can’t retain air—I cough away more of the lining of my throat, coughing out my time left. The droplets fall to the ground, creating more ink-like stains on the fuzzy flooring tiles. I’m sorry. I try to keep myself controlled as I speak, not taking my eyes off the floor.

‘Why am I here?’ I’ve asked it so many times now I can hear it echo.

I look up through the strands of hair moving like spider’s legs across my face. There is a pause. Words are said and debated. Some Days in Master’s training, I would simply stand and wait for him until I collapsed from exhaustion. So, this does not bore me—the thing that bothers me is my inability to foreshadow what they will say.

‘You’re here because...We rescued you.’

My eyes instantly flick back up from the floor, straight into their faces—blown wide. Both humans immediately jump back a distance of at least three meters in shock-induced fear, but I’m hardly paying attention to them. I can only stare at them, shaking, as I think about the statement. Rescued you.

Is it hope or fear I feel?

I dissipate the rising heat in my veins, calm my mind the best I can, move my hand away from the empty pocket that would contain a knife. My breath is too fast, considering I can’t take in air. It’s a bad habit. I exhale and try to hold in the breaths that only make my head dizzier. This is the point where I have to make the choice. Do I speak and trust their first statement? Or is this just another test? Should I be reaching for the knife that isn’t there? Should I just concentrate on trying not to fall apart in this hell?

They say Hell is cold.

I close my eyes slowly, letting the tears that were about to fall trickle down my face, powerless to stop them.

I am cold.

Then I open them, my vision considerably clearer. When I open my mouth, the words are choked at first, but then I form my question.

‘...What do you mean?’

Again, the words echo around the space as if it is a cave, forcing my own words back on me. I stand there, still, waiting for an answer. Suddenly, my own crushing uselessness rebounds upon me—I can’t even communicate properly, I will never be good enough, not for Master, not for myself. I feel my hands shake and try to hold myself steady, fighting the fear that rules my life. Call it paranoia, call it appropriate, call it what you like, I’m a wreck.

What do you mean? The echoes say.

Rescued you.

‘You are

that girl who went

missing

right?’

Missing—

Running—

The words shake and tremble in my mind. I can feel my vision closing in, threatening to plunge me once again into darkness. I struggle to clear my throat as if I need air.

‘No...You’re wrong.’

I did not mean to say that. Did I? Of course, I did. As soon as I think that, the pressure, the weight, the drowning goes away. My head should feel clearer, but it is oddly cloudy—I don’t try to clear the clouds, riding peace. Without listening to their response, my mind speaks on its own. And then terror grips me—I’m being controlled—

Missing.

That word doesn’t scare me at all.

How...Did you get it wrong? Did we go through all of this for nothing?

Look at her Pele. I don’t think she remembers—

I knew it wasn’t that girl. It has her face, but it’s just a demon wearing her skin…

I suddenly realise the male is going to speak to me, and flick my head up to look at him (too fast, he flinches). It’s the look in his eyes that startles me. Even in emotionless black-and-white vision, his eyes feel like they’re looking through mine, as if he’s trying to connect with me. I stare back, emotionless. ‘You stayed