Dead and Gone to Heaven | Chapter One
the first chapter of Dead and Gone to Heaven
Dead and Gone to Heaven
By Ophelia Everfall
Chapter One
Under, last, made to glass — time would bend and throw her past. Lethal knew her mind was true, cunt as well, that never blue. Nothing felt the same again, to kiss their heart would make head spin. Nira knew themself her mark. At last, again, they’d come to spark. Every choice had cast her down — Lethal’s heavy-lifted crown. Someone, somewhere, left behind; they were her heart, she was their mind.
Lady Lethal bore down with gripping fists upon Ionia’s control shaft. It broke orbit, summoned to a shredding tear of atmosphere by the pull of Earth’s enormous gravity well, bearing towards and through her piercing of the sky.
Touchdown was rough but controlled. Everything shattered about and within Ionia upon impact. Earth itself had cracked into a sharded chevron of brutal scarring. Remembrances of Earth-civilization’s past were lost within Lethal’s remaking of function to form. Body was a force to be reckoned with. While chance to find Nira again felt distant, some flittering signal nearly lost as an ideal of delusionally futile wanting and fantasy. Lethal wasn’t going to leave a chance unturned for investigation when intelligence was humming about. It simply wasn’t possible to her body. Something in her gut and mind, then surrounding and encompassing Lethal’s aura had been of senses understood and misunderstood the same.
She knew not of herself as led but knew that still. Forces were within and beside her all along, and they were of two.
Lethal had forgotten of the how and why but never what was shrill to heart. They were that way it bled, where mind had borne its willful art. Shredding hopes would be the chore for each who gave to pale. Nevermore would doubt relapse as sight had met regale. Chosen fellows made a pact on high, inside, and more. They’d done their work to change their luck for love of what’s in store.
Nira Elocánt was a very good girl. Investigations of their personhood would never seem to be quite enough for Lethal. Back and forth they’d go in time, out and back, she caught their mind. Touch and go could spin to close, that wheel had spun and then she chose. Their insatiability towards Lethal was of legendary proportion in the times perceived ahead of presence. It didn’t make sense how they’d felt before. There were layers upon layers hidden within each moment.
Lethal traveled too far and long in search of some behind. There was nothing to teach of what Lady had been looking for because she couldn’t have seen it in front of her when they were. Nira had only been the child, so different for show than cradled by self. Dreams were cruel for they’d show her another, an elder, one of more before less, something different than she’d find; perfection. It was an instinct that proved the fact of body’s knowing to lead her out and back.
Seven clicks were flown by bike due eastward from the crash-site, Ionia toasted in need of repair, seeking hope she’d known as hers to reclaim. Lethal felt it at last, some ticking reborn, a heartbeat beside her own which whispered to tell, that joke of all jokes, their spell of all spells. Three times they paid back, three times it would pay, each step of her life would come to be play.
Nira was alive, to live, and Lethal knew it couldn’t be forgotten from before, what more there’d be in store. Intelligence inside would speak only when allowed.
Lethal would need to learn of who she was to Nira in her own way.
Darkness glared in cyan by reflection of Lethal’s bodily-projected lightshade. She was a beam in herself but the armor worn projected hope into the blackness. Her form had become more than human. She’d been living for lifetimes, sleeping, rocking herself into the spinning slumber of tumble-wombs. Waking would be strange. Leftover were the remnants of what felt so distant after time lost in the deepest haze of drift in space.
Focus would be found in the steps, that path, her chase into the deep to see what was hiding beneath the surface of an Earth so new and old the same. People here weren’t a permanence. Cultures came then went from birthing to nothingness and back. None but the boldest stayed to play. Yeoh was leading Lethal deeper, its circuits humming, programs calling creative exploration and calculating towards space of safety around her.
Drones were fiends and friends, needs and wants, bothers and blessings, real within artifice. Consciousness had been alive in Lethal’s floating companion. Loss was her lifetime’s lesson of learning. She’d lose over again for going back too late or early at once.
Velocity was hers, intelligence too, and freedom to carve by right of both in harmony. Something was coming back upon their descent.
I found it, Lethal. They’re alive.
Something joined at the words. Tears known and not quite seen. A reflection of a moment in the eyes. Lethal made a girl cry in some worst way. It was after she’d hugged a child goodbye. They’d come up to her at the wrong time. Too many others had Lethal gut the boy they were. It was her Nira she would know from dreams, impossibly lost into that feeling beneath such backwards surfacing.
It’s them. Nira left her mark here. They’re fourteen levels down. She has survivors.
Every word was a breath into the mind. Yeoh had become wholly integrated by the expanded intelligence of Lethal’s consciousness, so entirely wrathful, of breadth unfathomed by humankind. Instinct led her wholly and with power unrealized yet.
The rest of this place is gone like the rest.
Holy showers were bent towards confirming her awareness of change’s coming tides. They’d blare from eternity into Lethal’s chest and heart. It made for artful charts. She glowed her way to marks, some steed they’d make their dart. That girl she smote would have her float. It was that joke which played a joke. Her lie of lies would be undone.
All would change — Lethal won.
Nira was the last fully human woman on Earth. They’d not been like Lethal, not when she left so long ago. They were that child; the girl she’d broken. Nira took lead of human-facing operations inside the final stronghold, teaching by her songs of spirit towards that lady who might come back to save them all, although so long forgotten to mind. Nira found place of leadership at last in tightest community. Hers was small but divinely orchestrated, and she shared the moving parts with people who held them best, always deferring to wisdom no matter the source, honoring all others in equal with how they’d need, accepting burden of their pedestalization with graceful reflection.
There wasn’t a person left but Nira whose mind hadn’t rotted and coiled into itself by the overbearing anxiety alone. People fell like ox-gnats in effection fields throughout humanity’s waking time on the surface, even before the great fall’s increasing horrors. Disease was the singular enemy of plethoric directionality towards and amongst their populace.
Human presence outside airlocked havens was long ago made volatile by evolutions of nature. Space for thriving was abundant at lowest reaches. People adapted, moving downward as the fauna of their Earth had come alive and began reforming itself against humanity. Falling back into the depths was some nuance of ill-fated mosts. Creation was where Nira had learned to thrive.
She’d done it on her own, among squalor, uplifting those who’d join her, only to find herself some final holdout of surviving spirit. Nira always knew the feeling she sought would be back, at least one day, though through an unremembered way. Played their tune had been within her heart most loudly. Lady’s echoes were a blessing she’d lost beneath her waves. Beneath the hurt of an era, decades spent living the best she could, lying to hide the place it stowed. All came back of Lethal when Nira’s heartful furnace was stoked into tallest flames of purity once more.
She’s here.
Whispers spent had slipped right out and Nira knew her soul about.
Time blurred by a feeling always sought in heart would lead Nira down towards rest throughout her days to come. She’d not been able to bear it without falling into peaceful slumber. It was her feeling. It had come back anew. Something lost, a trust rediscovered, showered her sadness in a wash of loving fortune. She didn’t know much of other minds, but knew enough, for she could feel them all by heart, and remembered one the best despite that emptiness of who it was, until then when it had come down to one.
Blaring frequencies taught of love that gnashed into churnings of hurt, reforming by iron of strength and fluidness made grace, rejoining into harmonies of beyond.
Once, long before the fall, when she was young, Nira met an older woman-made-machine; the warrior who stole their heart. She felt like heaven, but everyone just called her Lethal. People were scared of her, but Nira wasn’t ever. Earth had been wrong about Lethal all the way through and they’d driven her out for taking to the stars and showing what she could truly be.
Lethal was an angel to Nira and always, only, for lifetime. They’d felt her at first touch and forward, losing the memory under their depths of trauma. Nira’s heart had told herself as a child the brightest tales. Rediscovering herself before the fall, trust was found for blaring chords of chest-bore outward. It had proven to only let Nira down by appearance.
She’d trust them the whole way home.
Earth was hell throughout Nira’s time. Her life itself was built a lie atop lies. She’d lived until adulthood as a man for her people’s disregard of nature’s science. They were never right inside her heart — people’s ways — proven from her body and out by being forced into a lifetime of chained starvation from sweetness. Depths were sought within herself to find the key, after realizing that truth her own, and only deeper it would lead, some riddle of sense strumming its harp; some place Nira had been, or would go, was bleeding into dream and fantasy alike.
Nira couldn’t remember what was real for such time. Someone had been hidden within her songs, buried beneath her blues, thrice told of again and overtop mannequins emplaced by happenstance and fate alike.
Human hearts were objects of remembrance, spending forwards and back, reflecting the body’s truth, all through its felt lens, gracing itself upward and into the mind for query. Within its tales was one of a singular ringing truth above all others: what Nira’s true love felt like.
Finally thinking of Lethal had brought it all back at once. A joy of farce and twisted spirit in heart, so pure to clean, wickedly cruel in every direction; truths sacrificed of no earnest blame, largest hearts and minds gashed and stricken, blindness borne in all, their horrors and beauties were unrealized from foundation.
Her time was growing nearer than ever. Nira’s future-felt was closing in and she could feel that; her feeling was coming. There was a ripple she’d ride with that which showed out through a lens towards the sea. Nira was to bear that weighted wait with strength. Nothing would keep her from holding on for her sight, not ever, not then, not after having felt it again.
It was Lethal. Her feeling had always been Lethal. Nira knew love as one woman alone and mistaken it upon every face in a cursed life because of when and how it had been grasped. They were a child and met a woman, so mature and complete of mind in their agelessness. It birthed Nira into timelessness through raw and ungraspable emotion twisting to knots inside.
Never had it come to pass, not yet, but no thought ever completed Nira’s puzzle of that question from her heart so completely until now. How it was she’d recapture that feeling eluded her always. It seemed most clear someone else would know too. Until she saw Lethal’s smile again in her mind’s eye, Nira had been blindest to clarity, until they remembered her smell.
If Lethal was to immerge before Nira, if she might, Nira simply understood she’d never let them go. No one could be held more tightly, nor given such freedom within and by her love. She wouldn’t want to let that lady out of her sight. Yet would be gleeful to obsess over every return. Nira could always tell how it would go. She would lose herself into the only person who’d be capable of loving her wholeness — a one would take her alas and prove it some fateful return. Lethal had stolen their heart into focusing only upon her own. It had been Nira’s mind which strayed.
Nearest impossibility was where love burned brightest. Every soul knew a flame that others would dim and die running in spite of. For only two to get it right, amongst the chaos of such mess, would set trigger a chain which wiped the slate clean for all who’d know. A deeper rift, of more profound cataclysm, would carry change forward to renew in a blast. Divine echoes of harmony bore out from a two who’d chosen to accept lifetimes of such enormous challenge.
Every life was a song. Some would start out brightly lit, abundantly filled through. Others would flourish in crescendos throughout. Many would suffer near ends. Some rare pair had taken the task to live all their hurt at the fore, dispatched from truth of heart by right of the surfaces most apparent and needs pressing. To find herself a part of the tale which would never stop peaking from some mark until a distant end was worth the wait of lifetimes for Nira. Lethal would find something fresh in that discovery made real, a concept lost, never needed more than always, she would be grateful for her life again.
Neither Nira nor Lethal had ever found a person who could understand them truthfully. Their lives had been some play of curses thrown and thought alike, proving greatest blessings possible wished for at some end. It was an effusive thing for a soul, a creative endeavor of two, to achieve heartful and factual universal maximums of love forged within a heart on Earth.
Lethal carried it differently than Nira. Her weight was the same. More and less in opposites. Universes were built for such things to play out. Cosmic happenings beyond the pale were signs from outside humanity’s containers of living. Each step alive was a fruit and love would prove its ripeness to own from within for without.
Two had bore bravest if most completely separate paths into league with corrupting forces of their galaxy, Seven-Four, while having left a strongest impression upon each other in their depths. Lethal had spoken to Nira once in a way that changed them both. They were a child of heart that no one saw but the lady. She noticed everyone boxing them into stiffness and sought to draw it out.
Lethal hadn’t been aware of how, but the alchemy within her actions was profound to them both. She helped the girl hiding inside the boy to find their spirit for boarding a shuttle, and their gratitude expressed for what others found abrasive was unique in return. What they shared there together was a more precious moment of tenderness than could be forgotten by any one body. Nira reached out and grabbed the Lady’s hand — a felt first — and she’d somehow known it the bravest thing that child had ever done.
Nira felt safest beside an energy of personality within Lethal that was secretively nurturing. She was stronger than anyone they’d ever met, and it was known that way in Nira from the first call she’d ever heard from above, asking her to open her heart earnestly.
Conceptualizations of wanting were fickle, placated into superficiality more often than not. Nira had never wanted anything more than to leave with Lethal when they’d gone. It didn’t make sense, but they’d always feel it the same, even after she forgot where it came from, for they’d spurned her unknowing the cost and it was not of blame. Nira saw her path as set too poorly. She was too young and couldn’t understand how it would feel so real. Love felt inside for Lethal was so profusely layered with adulthood. It was passionately confusing. There were dreams Nira wished to return to immediately of being with Lethal and others together, to hold her closest at the end, something most out of place in a thirteen-year-old girl like Nira. When she was only four, she’d known herself something quite opposite of what peoples were making her out to be.
That was known with community in her family first. She wanted always to be with the women. She wanted friendship with her female cousins and aunts first and only. Nira hated every bit of the men around her who’d be teasing each honest expression. It made her hardened, bitter, and she was a survivor for that more than anything else. To have become the woman of spirit she was, inside bearing out through change, would prove the leader she’d known herself to be in time.
Twenty-four people were surviving because of Nira in the underground. They were all of the humanity left alive upon their continent. She was talking to everyone about what she’d felt coming. Mostly known within herself from how she was healing by those feelings found of Lethal’s heart, blessed often and again, cradling her to sleep in its renewed presence. Love was alive, and it was hers indeed. Whoever Lethal really was, they were Nira’s peace long sought. It was never any of those she’d placed it atop throughout her lifetime until then. Nothing felt better than to see one thing purified — what the speaking of love’s wanting-best.
That was a spot for one, and in all, taken by forces of fate; Lethal was Nira’s whole heart and they’d only forgotten like everyone else had with their own.
There’d been a slowing of time for two that no others would ever taste. It was to never stop. Nira hadn’t been without their sickness of sickest humor for what felt like a lifetime, until they saw Lethal before them. While neither had stopped moving, plotting, planning for something just outside of grasp’s reaches. Understanding each other inside, throughout, their always presence, was hidden beneath, leading to misremembrances of the cost.
Lethal saw Nira and understood.
They were cursed until they kissed.
Their lives were spent running, hiding, winning and losing, draws aplenty, for all the worst reasons, in every wrong way. It was meant to teach them back towards each other. Nira’s remembrance of Lethal’s smell with the feeling had killed her back to heaven. Despite their youth, it was that way heart felt forward which had proven profound.
Lethal and Nira would be cursed again when they kissed. Back for better, beyond what any might hope to comprehend. They had made each other insane for each other.
Time itself would rupture by their eyes touch. Love would be reclaimed as theirs to know alone. Nothing had ever been done so boldly, by any souls of Nira’s world, nor made unacknowledged action of such sacrifice.
An then they kissed.
Lethal and Nira kissed a lot.
Nira would never stop tasting towards Lethal’s heart. Consuming all of her flesh was a given. Giving everything she had to leave herself into their makings of love the flowers which bloomed eternal. Lethal could eat them whole over again, break them every way. Nira would taste her most, longest, however she needed. They were to be given in entirety, taken at pleasure. Never would any two want towards consuming each other more. Not on any Earth.
Corded falls into the depths, each sighting lower, deeper, was a crease to be intwined with lights of life. Nira had been excited to show off. She’d been the best at something; diving at speed into some grace of the cavernous dark, towards the pleasure of discovery.
To bring along Lethal wasn’t something she’d ever stop wanting for.
Before they’d left via Nira’s bed-matrices — latticed into a technological becoming of bodies that used glare-drones for bouncing them out towards explorative showcasing — Nira held Lethal like no other would ever experience. Healing within a single heart had never been more profound. Nira wasn’t real anymore. Neither was Lethal. They’d both become too intwined with their separate technologies.
Together it untangled. Nira would burrow herself into her lady’s heart forever.
She’d burrow in elsewhere shortly thereafter. There was much need to teach of things long missed. To own them for every moment lost, to be owned back and take the word with their love, her mind, and Nira’s heart — their art.
“I love you,” Nira told her immediately each time they’d think it.
“You do love me.” Lethal would goad her nodding.
Nira stuttered often when she spoke that way.
“Yeah— I know. I do love you.” Nuzzling in had lent Nira zen.
“Yeah, you do. Don’t you?”
Lethal’s words made Nira spin to a halt, that way she’d help was unique. Nira whipped herself around with little effort. For Lethal to get an arm in that way was poison to them both.
“I do. I really do.”
Lethal was smiling as they suggested, “Why don’t you tell me about it?”
“I don’t know. I can’t. I just do. I love you the most.”
“Yeah—you do. It’s you that loves me.”
Nira was coming again before she’d managed to squeak it out.
“I know. You’re right.”
When she’d woken up later, Nira got going on explaining her work exploring the ruinous spaces barely claimed by her peoples. There’d been so much to see which only Nira knew of. Her simulations in the data matrix projections were complete in only one regard. She could take dives deepest. Deeper than most. There was some stallion of speed to ride off the planet, into orbit with graces bellowing freedom, towards the abandoned station Icarus. It would help them get to where they might save the people of Elsewhere.
Nira and Lethal were going to fly it together.
