Author’s Note: This is the eighth part of a series about Farren’s journey through a limbo world where everyone is trying to reach the peak of a mountain but have a rope tied to their ankle. Catch up by reading Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and Part 7
Farren gasped for breath. The air was salty and cold as it filled his lungs. Then he began to cough, again. He felt like he was heaving buckets of salt water out of his lungs even though only a few puddles landed on the deck of their makeshift boat. After a few more cycles of breathing and coughing, Farren finally had recovered enough to take in his surroundings.
Gesa was sitting on the other side of the boat with her arms wrapped around her knees. She stared at Farren with bags under her eyes. Farren didn’t know if this was because she was tired of seeing him die and come back to life or if the expression on his face from dying and coming back to life was twice as bad.
He tried to put on a smile as he looked across the deck at her, but it quickly faded. After drowning and recovering the first time she asked him what it was like.
“It’s just looking into blackness, complete and utter blackness,” he explained. “My mind felt like it was being stretched to infinity. It wouldn’t be all that bad if I weren’t also burdened by a sense of, I don’t know, self. Like how I know I’m me here and now but in the blackness, I don’t think I’m supposed to be me, I’m supposed to be,” Farren paused and looked out to sea. He suspected that whatever void he passed into he was supposed to enter with his ego broken down to its component parts. Unfortunately, when he died in this world and crossed into the black, he was still himself, and his mortal psyche was not equipped to ponder the expanses of infinity.
Gesa had been polite enough not to push the subject further.
“How are you feeling?” Gesa asked, with the in a meek tone that was as subtle as the waves that patted the side of the boat.
Farren didn’t have the energy to lie. They had tried to reach the knot at the bottom of the ocean three times that day, and each time it had ended with him coming back to life up on deck. “I feel like shit. In case it wasn’t apparent drowning isn’t enjoyable,” he cracked a small smile, but reality quickly fought it off. “It’s like experiencing everything and nothing at the same time. My mind can’t do it.” He paused at his phrasing, “Not that I have a mind, brain, or body when I die. I simply have the sense that I’m one speck in the infinite blackness.” He shuddered as an evening breeze blew across the deck and cooled his soaking wet clothes.
“Curse the gods for doing this to us,” Gesa said with a fury in her eyes. “They’re bastards for torturing you like this. It’s what we get for going about there challenge in an even remotely intelligent way.”
“It’s our fault, not theirs,” Farren replied calmly. “We didn’t prepare for every eventuality. We should have kept our rope underdeck, where it wouldn’t fall off.” Farren looked at the sun’s position in the sky.
“I don’t think we have time to try again before dark,” Gesa said knowing how dedicated he was to
“I don’t know how much good it would do,” Farren finished her sentence, “I haven’t made it deep enough even to see what my rope is stuck on.”
“I seem to remember someone saying the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
“If anything is going to cause me to go insane it’s that void. I don’t know how the hanged man does it.”
“The hanged man?” Gesa said bewildered.
“I met a man who used his rope to hang himself from a tree because he saw this whole existence as pointless. He woke up every morning merely to choke to death again seconds later.”
“
“Me neither,” Farren nodded with agreement. “Knowing what I know about death in this world now I am even more impressed that he continued to throw himself into the void. Our minds weren’t made to understand the infinite darkness on the other side of that,” Farren merely gestured behind him without completing the thought.
“You said he woke up every morning to die again. Why?”
“I assume this world does some sort of resetting at sunrise or something. Everyone that died gets brought back to life to keep everyone on equal ground to compete for the mountain.”
“How benevolent of them,” Gesa said with a tone that indicated she thought the exact opposite.
Farren stared across the deck looking at the boat they built and contemplating what he would do tomorrow to unstick them from their current problem. “I’m never going to make it to the bottom of the ocean in one breath. It’s just not possible.” He stated this as a fact so Gesa wouldn’t argue it. “But if I died, sank to the bottom and resurrected in the morning I might be alive long enough to fix our situation.”
Gesa stared at him in horror. It was as if a pound was added to each bag under her eyes. “You want to die to fix this? I thought the whole point of making it to the top of the mountain was to achieve immortality or at least get out of this hellish world.”
“It doesn’t matter what the point of this world is. It matters that we get unstuck from where we are right now. And the best plan we have to solve that problem is drowning me.”
Gesa looked at him formulating an argument to avoid agreeing with his wild plan. However, before she could contest, he continued.
“I am not a big fan of the idea either. I’m not eager to go into that void where I have to contemplate infinity again. But I’m even less eager to sit here for eternity. Drowning is an option, and we owe it to ourselves to explore all possible options before we give up.”
“I still can’t tell if the ridiculous situations you find yourself in are your fault or someone else’s,” Gesa said with a small frown.
The sun was setting as they finished tying a knot that would keep Farren attached to the rope that tethered them to the ocean floor. Gesa had suggested wrapping Farren in the remainder of his rope to keep him submerged after he drowned. “You look like a ball of rope grew arms and legs,” Gesa pointed out with a small laugh.
Farren smiled and looked down at how ridiculous he looked. “I hope this works,” Farren said. He looked over the side of the boat, and the waves shone orange in the dim light of the setting sun.
“Me too. It’s going to be lonely up here without you.”
“It’s going to be lonely down there too,” Farren said. He was actively ignoring that he would have to face the void alone as well. This time for longer than before, if that was how time worked on the other side.
The two travelers double check the knot that would keep him on course as he sank. Then Gesa checked that his wrapping was tight enough that he would sink but loose enough that Gesa could pull it up and let him float to the top after he was done.
Farren stood at the edge of the boat, the sun was gone, and the dim light of dusk was fading. He was as ready as he’d ever
“Good luck,” she said with a smile then gave him a short kiss.
“Thanks,” he said, as a slight grin grew across his face. He took a deep breath of the cool evening air and stepped off the side of the boat.
The rope harness that Gesa suggested helped immensely. He was sinking far faster than he could have swum. He even thought he might be able to make it to the bottom before he’d run out of oxygen. However, as he sank deeper and the ocean got darker the rope that ran to the ocean floor showed no sign of stopping. Farren began to lose hope of reaching it on his first breath.
His lungs burned for air he had used every molecule of oxygen in his chest, but he needed more. He fought the natural urge to inhale, but he began to get tired and confused. He was still sinking, it was nearly pitch black now, and the pressure of the water around him was weighing on his eardrums. Farren couldn’t fight off the urge to breath anymore, and before he knew it, his lungs were filled with water as he gasped for air. He sank faster, but by then he had drowned.
He faced the black void bodiless and incoherent. He was being pulled to fill the dark vacuum of infinity around him, but he couldn’t do it. His ego was stretched in every direction for eternity.
After what felt like moments and eternity at the same he faced darkness with an unbearable weight on his chest. His chest he thought then he took a breath. It was a small one, but his mind was working slower than his reflexes. He inhaled salty water and coughed it back out. Air bubbles followed, but he couldn’t see them he just felt them slip by. His lungs burned for fresh air, but he knew he might be miles away from them.
His hands went to the rope that was tethering the boat to the ground. He felt his rope locked around a rough solid piece, likely a rock. My rock? his mind wondered. He tugged at it, but it was tight and wet.
Farren felt himself begin to lose consciousness again. He frantically fiddled with the rope before his body forced him to inhale a deep breath of salt water. He wedged his fingers between the line and the rock then he faced the void again.
The expanse was all-encompassing. Not only was his mind a mere speck in the vastness that was the void but he had no frame of reference to face it. He wrestled with madness, lost his mind in his own thoughts and memories and forgot everything only to remember it again. He came to grand conclusions but had misplaced the original problem. Then he was back being burdened by a massive weight on his body. He noticed his finger ached as well.
Fingers, he thought, and before his body took a breath he stopped it. He pulled and tugged at the knot that was wrapped around the rope. He wondered if it was his rock, and knew if it were there would be a problem. However, he didn’t remember what the problem would be.
He continued to work at the knot for seconds or an hour he couldn’t tell in the blackness. Finally, he was exhausted, he hadn’t found any success. The knot’s size was hidden in the darkness, and the loops were hard to trace with his fingers. Farren had no way to gauge his progress. Finally, his body couldn’t take it anymore, he inhaled salty water and faced the infinite blackness again.
Over time his sense of self eroded. The mind that was once so confidently Farren was lost to the void. It didn’t remember what it was. Memories and ideas were thrown out into the void. As his sense of self eroded so did the knot’s hold on the rock. The being that worked on the knot didn’t know much except for the fact that it had to undo the knot and couldn’t breathe. Countless times it failed to do both of these and was thrown back into the empty void.
Then after countless attempts the being succeeded. Its success was rewarded by being thrown once again into the dark void. The consciousness that had been starved of all its input except for a rope and a rock at its fingers lost all hope in the infinite darkness.
Salt water was wretched onto the hard wooden slats. A stomach and lungs heaved to expel the water it had absorbed. The man vomited and coughed all the water he could. Exhaustion overwhelmed the mind. When it had completed the wrenching and the coughing, it laid back on the deck and stared at the blue expanse in front of it. Robbed of light for multiple eternities it felt sensation come back to it. He was a man, and the blue was a sky, and the wood was a boat. His mind came back to him, his self returned. He was himself; he was Farren.
Farren looked across the deck at Gesa. Her face was worried, and there was damp rope laying everywhere.
“Are you okay?” Farren asked.
She looked at him bewildered, and then a slight smile crawled across her lips. “You’re in a hell of a place to ask that. You’ve been underwater for a moon’s turn.”
“A what?” Farren asked. He looked at the sky knowing it had something to do with that. “That means I was gone a while, doesn’t it?”
She walked across the deck and sat down next to him. Her arm wrapped around him and he felt her warmth. The sun was warm, the air was warm, and she was warm.
He had been so cold down below. The depths of the ocean and his mind had been cold, lonely, and dark. He huddled closer to her warmth. She had saved him, and she had helped him. If it weren’t for her, he would be stuck. If it weren’t for him, she would be stuck.
“Curse the gods for doing this to you,” Gesa said as he lay in her warm arms.
It took Farren a moment to make sense of her statement. “The gods didn’t do that to me,” he said. “These gods you keep blaming saved us from that. We aren’t prepared to enter that black void. They saved us from spending eternity alone.”
“By doing what? Holding us back here with ropes and rocks?”
“By letting us be ourselves a little longer. And giving us a chance to be with others, because that seems like the alternative is loneliness in infinity.”
He nuzzled into her warmth, glad to be in a body again, with another human being near him. He didn’t want to be alone, and he could tell she didn’t either. He turned in her arms to look at her then he kissed her. Her soft lips were the most comforting things he had felt in a long time.
Farren’s rope came up easily after his dark descent to the ocean floor. His mind soon came back to him, and his long experience of the void faded like a long dream. It hadn’t been attached to his rock as he thought. If it had been, he would have never gotten the knot undone. He and Gesa had plenty of rope to continue to follow.
It took them months to pull in the rest of Gesa’s rope, but neither of them was in a hurry. They fought a few more storms but none as bad as the first. They were prepared now and kept their rope under the deck where it wouldn’t roll off.
Neither of them could understand how they had traveled so far without the other. The sailing brought the couple closer together. Farren was actively ignoring having to eventually be separated from Gesa if he ever wanted to reach their goal of the mountain. He could tell she was doing the same.
When the day came that they ran out of rope for Gesa to pull in neither of them had been expecting it. If they had counted the rope balls, they would have known the ship was getting close to its destination. However, they were both too preoccupied with the other to notice.
They tried to heave the rock up from the depths of the ocean, but after hours of effort, it still wouldn’t move.
With a deep sigh, Gesa sat down on the deck of the boat. “Am I going to have to go down there?” Gesa asked aloud.
Farren’s memories of his time at the bottom of the ocean had all but faded. And like a painful wound, all he remembered was his fear and pain and knowing that he didn’t want himself or anyone else to have to face the same thing. Least of all the woman he had come to love.
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