On a particularly cold night, a ghost came to him in the nexus of dream and reality. Somewhere in the twilight of consciousness’ leaving, hums and whistlings of the phantasm graced his mortal mind that echoed from a deep primordial unknown. Fear in the shape of cold sweat rolled down Adone’s body as the specter slipped through the bars like pillars of smoke. Looking at the cell opposite his own, he could tell that it was from the skeleton with a myriad of mathematical equations scribbled on its skull. The ghost exhaled with the force of a furious wind and enveloped Adone’s senses to make him perceive a world of clouds and light from all corners. A sliver of heaven showered the harlequin with its divine warmth that healed him for only a moment. Without the exchange of words or even sounds, the formless fog began to metamorphosize into a humanoid figure whilst drowning the mind of the malnourished man with its strange history. A tale of hope and tragedy sank into Adone, giving him a sickeningly sweet feeling of empathy.
Like a dream, no matter the profundity, merely teased his consciousness before slipping away into the unconscious, in the dark realms where perhaps the truest reality lay hidden under the veil of unrealities. What did remain before Adone was the figure that entered his mind, traversing it as if it were just another piece of land. While he was a completely foreign entity with an unknown identity, he didn’t feel out of place in Adone’s mind. There was even an impression of the figure belonging there, as if it was his home for a very long time. Long before Adone inhabited it.
There was no perception of temperature, yet the perfect amount of warmth radiated all throughout the area, including through himself. As he got closer to the figure who began to emit a green glow, he could feel the heat more strongly, understanding that it came from him too. Slowly, the green glow localized over his face and wrapped around his head, together with a dancing fire made out of an impenetrable mist. The metal plates interlinked with chains jingled like wind chimes as he turned around, his ragged cloak melting into the cloudy terrain.
“Durante...”
Adone said his name with the familiarity of moving a limb. The longer he tried to understand the creature, the more he entertained the idea that it could be a part of his proprioception; a part of him. But the very next second, he realized how foolish that was, overwhelmed by the alterity of the emerald creature standing across him. Looking around, he could only see parts of Durante in the surroundings, blurring the lines between his mind and Durante’s. Before he lost his grip over his mind, the green glow of the creature began to shimmer and shake as he spoke.
“You poor thing,” he began. “You were simply at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
A palpable compassion laced his voice which boomed throughout the entire eternity, as if every lactescent and iridescent cloud spoke with him in unison. Even the light of what Adone could only conceptualize as the sun joined Durante, piercing the mortal man’s heart with profound warmth. Tears capturing that same irisation bit his skin with warmth as they rolled to become one with the vapors below his feet. In a thunderclap, Adone saw how the sublime realm was composed of all the tears life longed to shed, vaporized by the blistering heat of a cruel will.
Without even blinking his eye, his entire universe became dark for a moment, returning to its sublime state as Durante appeared next to Adone with a large arm over his shoulders. Only in such close proximity did he realize how large the creature was. Lightning crawled up his spine from the surprise. As he pulled Adone closer to him, the harlequin saw just how strange his body was. His arm, at least, was composed of machinery that was far too complex to be made by earthly hands and made of a material that sounded like a type of metal, yet shined with colors he didn’t know existed. The colors from Durante’s shiny knuckles whispered into Adone’s eyes, infiltrating his body in a waterfall of awe. The emerald emitted from Durante’s head almost blinded Adone when he tried to turn his head towards him, so he only peered at him with a side glance.
“It happens far more often than you think, so don’t feel too unlucky.”
Durante’s voice contained such a tender crackle that he thought that there was a hearth in his chest. Its balmy depth pierced the ice that crystallized over the cracks of Adone’s heart, the only cure he was able to find to keep it whole. Every word he spoke disintegrated his doubts, piercing the veil of his aversion to reveal a wholesome truth, a truth he couldn’t deny whatsoever. Faint rattling noises scintillated from Durante’s arm, as if a million ants were fine tuning the mechanisms every second.
“I was once unlucky enough to find myself in the hands of that dreadful fire-eater. Most of us encounter that awful creature in many different forms. It must be luck that brought us together in this particular way. All the choices you have made and all the life you have lived landed you in my presence, and all that I have ever sensed and experienced brought me to yours. The existence of such a sublime luck in the wake of such disgusting unluckiness is quite beautiful, isn’t it?”
As Durante turned around, he could feel his entire body moving through the space as if he were able to feel the blood go from his heart to his hand. The abstract intimacy of the green creature’s movements sparked a wild fascination in Adone’s psyche, intensifying the irisation of the clouds they walked upon.
Strange sigils shimmered on the discs he wore over his cloak, similar to the mathematical formulae on the skull he saw in the prison cell. However, the marks on the discs were more detailed and seemed to change every time they shimmered, similar to how one would leaf through a book and see the waves of symbols flow from page to page. Wisdoms Adone knew were potent but which he couldn’t process flashed on the plates Durante wore, intensifying the mystery of the specimen in front of him. The plates moved and the chains connecting them rattled as Durante stretched his other arm out, seeing the strangeness of his design in the light of his own ghost. His fingers, each digit molded in dramatically curved shapes, spread open to receive Adone’s hand, cracking and creaking in its motion.
“Don’t be too alarmed by my appearance: I specifically chose this shape to show you a shadow of my power. The human body is a highly complex organism, but the body of a fairy is beyond that of the human and that of all of earthly nature. I can choose how I appear to others using the limits and limitlessness of their imagination. Durante is my ancient, human name, before I became a fay. I’m glad that our paths have crossed.”
To see a fairy with his own eyes, with full awareness and consciousness, would have made him faint if he already wasn’t in a delirious state. Adone gladly shook the hand of the emerald fay, overflowing with euphoria and excitement. When he wrapped his hands around Durante’s, the green smoky glow around his head slowly faded away as the cloudy landscape around them also began to fade, showing him a glimpse of Durante’s smile before enrobing his whole psyche into nothingness.
From oblivion, Durante stepped back, and when he let go of Adone’s hand, the colorful vapors completely disappeared to reveal the surrounding area: the stone ground of a dilapidated church with an open roof and but a shadow of the glorious walls that once supported a mural. Now they supported the ether and the coruscating stars in the ebony heavens, left in the care of the forest that surrounded it. Ember-like lights floated in the air, illuminating the surroundings and the fiery redness of the trees’ foliage in the black of night. Adone stretched his hand out to touch one of the floating lights, but it disappeared when he got too close.
“The small fay are very shy, especially to humans. Even the most experienced human beings can’t maintain a stable connection with them for long, which is why they make technologies that hypnotize them into slaves. Fay like myself also do that, so I won’t judge you humans for doing the same; it’s because of them that we are who we are. The difference is, we can bring out the fullness of our fayhood, while humans can only use them according to their limits. Their fullness is far too much for the mind to digest.”
They slowly moved through the air at the speed of dripping honey, caressing the void with their luminescent grace. Up close, Adone was able to see the kaleidoscope of colors from one of them, together with the kaleidoscope of events that had the potential to unfold. As he studied the others more intently, he started getting dizzy with the immensity of potentiality they carried in their light, glimpsing at the infinity of possibilities they revealed in his human cognition.
Durante’s hearty chuckle cleared the fog from Adone’s mind, pulling his focus towards the emerald fay again.
“It always amuses me to see people grow starry eyed and blissfully lost in fayglow, seeing lives they can’t hope to fully comprehend flash before their minds. I experience this every second, whether I want to or not. You will learn to tame them someday, but you will need to tame yourself first. And I am here to help you with that.”
Adone forced himself out of the hypnosis and latched his gaze onto Durante’s face, whose human features only intensified his alterity. His green eyes like shattered emeralds captured all the faint lights of the night, blossoming like viridescent moonlight whose beams penetrated straight through Adone’s ghost. Whether he wanted to or not, he believed every word he said and also believed in the future implied in his words, already tasting it as if it was as real as the present. Still, an all too human edge cut through his reasoning, carving a smile of disbelief onto his lips.
“You can tell me I’m dead if you want, I won’t be scared. That’s probably the one thing I can believe to be true while being presented with… all of this.” he said as he spun around to look at the wonderful red forest steeped in starlight. Durante suppressed a chuckle as he shook his head, appearing charmingly familiar to soothe Adone.
“There’s so much you don’t know.” He said with a happy tone, hinting at the possibilities they will have together to explore the mysteries Adone always yearned to explore. He twisted his neck and popped its digits like fire crackling wood, speaking in a voice of a similar style.
“And there is a lot you have to know, or rather, you want to know, you need to know. Because if you don’t, you’ll crumble to dust. Isn’t that right, curious spirit?”
In such a simple message, Durante kindled his awe and aroused his desire to unearth it from its buried shelter, using it against him without giving him the chance to retaliate. Unable to defend himself, he lowered his guard and allowed himself to be not only honest with Durante, but his own heart.
“Yes, there is,” Adone began in a saturnine tone. “Of course there is. I need all the hope I can get, and if I am able to know that there is a place like this where all the terrible shit in my life can be justified somehow, then that’s enough. I’ve always wanted a possibility where I was free, from so many things. This place and these things you show me reeks of that freedom I’ve always longed for, and in the quietest parts of me I can hear her voice whisper through these red trees and her smiling eyes glow in the little fay that float about. I feel like I am closer to a place I always should have been; a true home, a proper paradise without any strings or chains.”
A wide smile grew on Durante’s lips as he took his now human looking arm and tore the chains and cloak off of his shoulders, turning it into a gust of heavy wind and impenetrable smoke that oozed throughout the entire exposed chapel. When the smoke dissipated, Adone had to continue squinting his eyes when they landed on the well-formed armor plates all over Durante’s body, leaving his head and parts of his neck as the only places with his once human appearance. The rest of his body’s design transfigured into an aesthetic shape that screamed perfection to the human brain and moaned with a guttural groan of terror beneath the beauty. Ethereal gems were embossed on nearly every surface of his body, flowing well with the folds and waves of the shell. With organic symmetry, Durante rolled his shoulders and tried to ensconce himself in this form Adone knew to be his true one, or at least one closest to a truth he can comprehend. Wings of emerald fire blossomed out of his back, growing from the darkest depths of his ghost in an act of primeval rebellion against the everlasting darkness of the universe. In awe, Adone helplessly stared at the unveiling of Durante’s horror-inspiring grace, lost in the beatific smile on the emerald fay’s lips.
“You really are not so unlucky after all, and neither am I. Mangiafuoco has been an enemy of mine for a very long time. I have seen you work for him for most of your life, but you have no idea how much life he has lived and how many lives he has harmed.”
Adone couldn’t tell if Durante’s flickering smile was one of heightened excitement or if it was waning from poignant melancholy.
“Even after countless years, my memories of seeing my precious Osanna decompose slowly, day by day, in the same cell as me because he wanted to see me suffer in ways that defied any notion of goodness… Have you ever had to see the one you love rot? To see their lifeless body eject all its fluids and see the filth of the earth devour her bit by bit by bit by bit. Piece by piece, I saw ants tear at her muscles and maggots swim between her ribcage. It was almost beautiful how the universe so violently yet tenderly stripped her of her flesh, feeding itself as it killed itself in a cycle of violent inertia. To this day I can smell that awful scent that shredded my brain to pieces and made the acid in my stomach tear through my insides.”
Describing this awful scene while being engulfed by the sweetness of fresh blossoms and gentle iridescent lights filled Adone with an indescribable sublimity that his higher faculties couldn’t translate into words nor sound nor mental images. But it was there, simmering sweetly and bitterly, faint and all-consuming.
“When nothing but her bones remained, I used all the knowledge I possessed at the time of the arts of aria and carved formulae and runes into her bones, hoping to reconnect with her somehow and find a way to exact justice on that monster you and I worked for. I used her femur bone as a flute, inscribing runes to the outside of it to make the wind I blew through it connect with the fay. My lungs fluttered like the skin of a war drum as my breath and her bone produced the most sublime notes I heard, sublime enough to wash away my corporeal existence and fully submerge myself in incorporeality. That is how I became welcomed by the fay, and the next thing I knew I gave myself the mission of retrieving her because I knew that she was somewhere there and I knew that he was still trying to find ways to torment me. Then, in the most disturbing corners of Fairyland, was Mangiafuoco’s primeval shape as that of a vile, rotting serpentine-mammalian abomination with an open ribcage. In the center of his blossoming rib cage was an amulet whose chains were wrapped around the petal-like bones, containing her trapped soul. Still, even the most honest parts of himself became another tool for him to tear me to pieces.”
Durante sauntered around the area as Adone stood still, following the narrative he understood far too well as something etched in the primeval scripture of his own life. Bit by bit, pieces of armor from Durante’s upper body peeled off, revealing his robust human flesh. As his upper body cracked open, it transformed its matter into something clothlike and vaporous by the edges, extending the faulds of his armor with the flag of an extinct nation Adone couldn’t recognize.
“And to this very day, I clobber, slash, and cut through that foul form of his and all the monsters his droplets of blood create to get her back. But I know that it won’t be possible to fully bring her back, because to fully annihilate him, his incorporeal and corporeal body both need to die at the same time. So as long as he’s breathing on earth, he will continue to breathe in Elphame.”
His graceful steps echoed with a satisfying click as they touched the stones which went back to the place they both started, a few paces in front of Adone. In spite of the vitality the emerald fay radiated before him, he could tell by the clicking of his body’s mechanisms and the impression of his heart’s narrative upon the harlequin’s own heart that there was an indomitable weariness that was paired with his immovable energy.
“Why do you keep slaughtering him in that form when you know it won’t bring her back?”
Adone studied the musculature of Durante’s broad back before lifting his eyes to his when he turned to face him. Before his eyes reached the fay’s viridescent gaze, he noticed the grin of a soul that knew itself all too well, igniting the fay’s green eyes with a fire Adone revered but retracted from.
“Why? Because I know that I give him unimaginable agony every waking hour of his life on earth whenever I rip his head from his body and cut through his limbs with this!” And Durante stretched his arm out, inviting the mist his faulds’ produced to swim into his hand to form a giant halberd with an axehead the size of his upper body.
“For as long as I breathe, I will find any opportunity I can get to eviscerate whatever part of him I could. It may not be virtuous in general, but for him, it is the purest form of justice in the wake of the vile injustice that is his very existence.”
What stood before the harlequin was something beyond anything he had ever seen before. Based solely on legends and depending on the politics, fay were depicted either as benevolent creatures invoked for blessings or wicked spirits designed to torment all living things. To Adone, a fay was a creature that inspired awe and euphoria, something that defined good and absorbed every part of the essence of good. But as Durante hissed to exhale and his wings grew fiery and broad, he could only see a human, all too human dissatisfaction with the nature of things, a rebellion fueled by rage.
Adone leaned back slightly when Durante pointed the speartip of his halberd to him which instantly won his attention. When he knew that the harlequin was looking at him, he gave a smile Adone didn’t recognize as one of a noble fay, but of a part of himself he wished he entertained with such passion.
“Our hearts have aligned for the same purpose, Adone. At the duel, his soul will be connected to Martino, that awful puppet pulled by wickedness. If you kill him, you kill Martino, and if you slay his corporeal self and I slay his incorporeal self before he can get a new body, then he will be gone for good.”
A profound hope radiated deep within Adone, showering light upon an old desire he tried to kill for so long, for it caused him intense disappointment every time it went unfulfilled. But with Durante’s power, the desire awoke from its abyssal slumber, reignited and reborn as a wild conflagration wrapped around his soul. Perceiving the indomitable fire with clarity, Durante’s smile grew wider as he held his halberd in both hands, ready to engage in combat.
“While you are not in contact with the real world, I will gladly build your strength in the unreal which will translate to the real with the help of my fay abilities. Don’t be afraid, however, because unlike the real world, you can let your heart sing with all of its might here. So allow me to give you a taste of fayhood while we duel beyond death.”
In accordance with his long lost desire, Adone summoned a side-sword, simple yet elegant with designs he could only assume to be aspects of fay aesthetics. The silence of the dreamlike night shattered with the sound of footsteps striking the stones and metals rolling over one another; a mimesis of his heart’s turbulent flows and eerie ebbs.
Throughout the duel that surpassed life and death, Durnate’s halberd would morph its shape as Adone’s blade also changed to accommodate for a better approach. For an impossible amount of time, their bodies adapted to the fire of the heart without succumbing to ash in its wake, kindling it with grace and letting its rage grow in abundance. All the vitality he had to suppress under the rule of Mangiafuoco now blossomed into vicious strikes and wild fury, transfiguring into something nurturing instead of damaging.
No matter how much Adone tried to comfort himself, he understood in the realm of fay that the damage he had received did not make him stronger nor better. There was no justification for its existence in his enlightened ghost, filling him with a blind panic he was able to express throughout the duel. While there were a thousand reasons for the wounds, there were no thousand ways to close them. So in the wake of all that went unmet, of all that cannot be, he rejoiced and rebelled in the space where all such things could have been possible, that which entertained the impossible. Enraged by the existence of a possibility to glimpse at what could have been but will never be, Adone let it flow through his veins and hiss through his skull as he unleashed the primeval cruelty of the cosmos which revealed itself to his fragile heart. Yet there was no perception of its fragility where infinity presented itself in every corner, aiding the music they composed together through the mimetic dance of life’s violence.
Fairies, the giver of dreams, watched as the two traded slices with ever changing blades and dealt each other cuts that always healed, yet the pain remained and stung as if every one of them was real. The sensation of his guts spilling out of his abdomen, muscle tissue hanging from bare bones soaked in warm blood that felt the touch of frigid winds ever so often, sudden blindness on one side after cold steel got shoved straight through his eye and brain. All of those sensations that no human should experience in their life was felt by him with perfect clarity. It was the closest thing to freedom Adone could think of, but he questioned if it was the freedom that his heart longed for. The freedom to experience half of his body getting ripped apart, with the rough edge of Durante’s axehead pulling muscle tissue like dry cloth and bones like wood as a generous amount of blood poured out of him. Never was he able to feel the winds of night caress his exposed lung tissue and liver, nor ever able to rip a rib from his ribcage to plunge it through the fay’s skull. The madness Durante’s head split open into scattered brains and iridescent butterflies with that absurd smile on his lips oozed out of every part of their ever escalating duel to transcend the flesh.
The duels dragged on for so long that his mind began to warp even more than his surroundings. Flurries of swift strikes with their blades challenged the borders of dreams and revealed mythical realms that felt so real that it was like living another life entirely. One of the arcs of Durante’s halberd sliced Adone clean in half, forming two separate Adone’s: An Adone that fought for an ephemeral eternity and an Adone that talked to the fairies that greeted him and introduced him to the ways of their world. In the blur of infinity, that one moment changed his entire existence, standing out as a rebirth into a supreme reality. The taste of freedom became palatable, gracefully caressing his heart with the horror he always tried to conquer, a horror that lurked in the shadows of every inch of life.
When the night got greeted by the light of day, All of the fairies would fall from the sky like a rain of light and inspect the two of them closely. Visions of praise, lavish halls, kingdoms, ballrooms, royalty and a crown flickered in his mind before the rattling of the bars of his prison awoke him. The guardsman’s metallic arm crashed on the bars several times until Adone’s eyes began to show signs of life.
“Ah, good. I was beginning to think that you died.” the guardsman said, “You’re not going to die just yet; not in a graveyard like this. Someone as hated by Mangafuoco as you will die a beautifully painful death at the hands of his favorite toy. Don’t think that you’ll make it out alive either: Mangiafuoco always discards toys he has no more use for.”
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