Chapter 19: Chapter 19 – INSTINCT

Returning to my apartment was an eerie feeling. My luggage had appeared next to me as soon as we returned to Toronto, and I was carrying it as I eased the door open. Eli was still at my parents’ house. It was awfully still and quiet: the silent feeling of one in the morning on a holiday.

I’d been through so much it was effortless to fall asleep, even in that atmosphere.

My dreams brought me to a place deep underwater, sand and strange ruins. I looked around blearily. It felt like a long time since I’d been here.

“Well, at least you managed to save him,” Leviathan commented. I looked up and saw him swimming some distance above, his eyes casting green light around him.

“I guess I did,” I said. My mind felt a little sharper than it usually did in these dreams; I could almost remember all the questions I had to ask him. “Have to wonder why the Grey City chose us two messes of human beings instead of someone more capable.”

“The best suited is chosen for the job,” Leviathan said. “Do you understand that you cannot leave the Grey City whenever you want?”

“I guess so,” I admitted, looking around for the giant sword that had been here last time. It was gone. “Look, I have a lot of questions.”

“That is what I am here for,” he said.

“Can you explain exactly why I can’t leave? Did all those demons appear because I left?”

“Yes,” he nodded. “They will take advantage of any weakness they find.”

“If one of us leaves, the other will get overwhelmed immediately,” I said.

“It’s so. Why didn’t you consult with me before you left your city?” Leviathan demanded. “I would have told you that.”

“I feel like you have a vested interest in keeping me here,” I admitted, trying to meet his shining eyes. “What would happen if I convinced Huang to leave the city, too? If we both took off?”

“Firstly, you would leave me to die,” he rumbled.

I winced. Definitely a vested interest. I was suddenly very aware that I was speaking with an enormous predator who could kill me with a gentle swat of his claws. “Er…”

“Secondly, you would open up the very real risk for demons to finally break through the Grey City and enter your world.”

I nearly choked, despite being underwater and seemingly not needing to breathe. “Wait, are you fucking serious? That can happen? Why didn’t you say so before!?”

“I have been telling you vital information as it becomes relevant,” he snapped. “Yes, once the demons destroy the Grey City, it’s likely they will move onto the next dimension. Yours. You Knights are the last line of defense before that happens.”

“No way,” I stammered. “I can’t… What if we fail?”

“Do not, and you will not need to find out.”

“But… our world is different!” I protested. “It’s made of real things, not thoughts, it’s not like the Grey City at all.”

“Perhaps the demons would not take the same form as they do in the Grey City,” Leviathan admitted. “Then again, perhaps they would. The only thing I am certain of is their mindless destruction.”

“You could just be making all of this up!” I declared, starting to feel the panic rise. The separation between the real world and the Grey City, the divide between the supernatural and the natural, had seemed concrete until that moment. “You have every reason to lie about this to me.”

“I have never steered you incorrectly before,” Leviathan said. “Do you wish to test the truth of my words and leave?”

How could it be that my survival, the survival of the Grey City, and even the entire world relied on Huang and I’s success against these insurmountable odds?

“My world…,” I stammered, “We have weapons, we have armies. We could handle an invasion of monsters.”

“I know little of your world. It may be the case,” Leviathan admitted. “Unless they strike only among the weak. Or they take a non-physical form you cannot fight. I cannot guess.”

I placed my head in my hands. He’d trapped me. Even if he was lying, the fact that there was a chance he was telling the truth made it very hard to just walk away. How could I stomach being responsible for demons being unleashed on a killing spree across the world?

“Please ask any more questions you have of me. Our time grows short.”

“Okay, okay,” I swallowed, struggling to master myself. There was more I needed to ask that had to do with surviving day-by-day and not the horrifying existential threat of demons overrunning the real world. I needed to deal with that later.

“How am I supposed to fight the demons back if I can’t even stay in control of myself?” I demanded. “Your instincts are overwhelming; you won’t even let me do things that you’ve told me to do. If Huang had fallen in the water, I might have attacked him myself, even though you told me to go save him.”

“What I said last time is that there are many things that fall only to you,” Leviathan said. “Dealing with the instincts of your form is one such thing. The form you take was once mine, Second, but I am not there. It has all my base instincts, but not my mind to control them.”

“So where… are you, then? The you I’m speaking with now?” I asked.

“I am a part of you. I am also a part of the Grey City,” he said. “There is no physical plane where I exist. You are speaking with a spirit.”

 “All right, whatever. There has to be a way to keep a hold of myself when I transform. Turning back is almost impossible, every time. Huang doesn’t have to deal with that at all!”

“I’m afraid that’s one thing I can’t advise you on,” Leviathan said. “I am not human, so I don’t know what it is like for you. I can only offer you this: you cannot remain fully human when you take my form. You must find a kind of balance between those two selves, human and Leviathan.”

I had been afraid of that.

“The First Knight does not have to deal with this because he doesn’t have a living host.”

“Meaning, he can’t speak to the Gargoyle’s spirit, like I’m speaking to you,” I said.

“Correct,” said Leviathan. “That spirit died long ago. So much of this is about balance. If there are no other living guides, which there aren’t, there is a certain imbalance of power directed at you. The instincts of that form must be all the more powerful for that imbalance. I can only say this: you must persevere.”

Or everything I cared about was destroyed by demons. Panic later, I reminded myself again.

I drifted up toward where Leviathan was swimming. “Okay, fine. Another question. What are those currents in the waterfront?”

He paused and looked back down at me. “… I feel that is something you should find out for yourself.”

“Why?” I demanded. “You just told me what the stakes are here! How can you withhold information from me now?”

“If I explain it to you now, and you don’t experience it yourself, you won’t understand it properly,” he said. “Investigate them with caution. That aside, any more questions?”

“Fuck you!” I exclaimed. Some part of me realized it was stupid to cuss out a giant dragon, but I ignored it. “You’re incredibly unhelpful.”

He growled, but said nothing.

“Who are you?” I asked him suddenly, now close enough to see his face. Listening to him talk and put thoughts together, he sounded almost like a grouchy old man, albeit one who spoke in a weird, formal tone. But Leviathan’s face was so clearly that of something inhuman and emotionless. Something you might see in an illustration of a sea monster rising from the ocean to devour a ship. He occasionally nodded or shook his head, a strange imitation of my own physical communication, but displayed no further emotion.

“What do you mean?” he asked. His jaws did not part with speech; it was the same telepathic communication that Huang and I could employ in the Grey City.

“How do you know what you know?” I asked. “What exactly are you?”

“I am a part of the Grey City. Like all parts, I was drawn from your world,” he said. “Once there were many individuals like myself. There was a calamity that twisted this place into its current form. Many died at once and, as is the way of this place, their minds, their wills, became a part of the fabric of the Grey City itself.

“I am old and cunning. I survived the initial calamity. I survived as the others died, one by one, giving their spirits to the fight against the demons. Now, I am the last.

“For many, many years, I have observed. Never before has a guide known so much about the nature of its own existence, and with my help, you will be the best-informed Knight to yet be brought into this dimension. This iteration of the Grey City will be the final.”

The world around me was beginning to waver and fade away. As my vision darkened, I stammered out: “How can I contact you? How do you contact me?”

“There is no exact way to force it, but I will endeavour to be there when you need me,” he said as he and everything around him blurred. It was useless to try and stop it. Everything faded into darkness, and I awoke to sunlight streaming into my window.

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Merry Christmas, I thought.

I worked up the courage to call home. My mom picked up on the second ring and immediately started lecturing me in loud half-Spanish, which I took with a sheepish smile. Loud lecturing, in her case, meant she was only frustrated. It was the quiet, cold voice of hers I really feared.

“I’m so sorry I left without saying anything,” I said, then continued with as much truth as I could manage: “One of my friends here had an incident. I had to come back and talk him out of something.”

“And why didn’t you tell your mother about this, eh?” she demanded. “You know I don’t like you leaving on Christmas Eve, ave Maria! But if it was important, we could have given you a drive to the train station, at least!”

“I know. I’m really sorry,” I repeated. “I don’t know what came over me. I panicked. Everything was going so well.”

“You know, Camilo, I forgive you for everything,” she said. “I’m just happy to have my son back, I’m happy you didn’t go kill yourself before you even started your life. So you don’t worry about that, okay? You don’t worry. How is your friend? And who is it?”

Man, I was lucky. It was heartening to realize how much I had earned her trust back. But now came the assault of questions. All I had to do was skip around the part where Huang and I were friends because a self-aware dimension had kidnapped both of us earlier this month.

The resulting story came off like I’d travelled back to stop a suicide attempt, which was only peripherally true, but it was the only way to explain what happened in a way that conveyed the gravity of the situation.

My mom still had a lot to say, but accepted the story, and assured me once more that I could just have told her. As I hung up the phone, I felt a rush of relief. I’d been sure I wouldn’t get out of that one scot-free.

Well, maybe not exactly scot-free… my dad hadn’t tried to contact me at all. I frowned at the phone, wondering if I should try to talk to him. If he had been in a talking mood, I had no doubt that my mom would have forced him onto the phone. And I’d have to wait until Eli got back to get his impression of what the rest of the family thought of my disappearance.

Why do I even care about this now? A strange wave of disconnection washed over me. The demons will enter this world if you can’t stop them.

I should probably call Huang. But fuck it, he had enough on his mind just now, and I really did not want to have that discussion right away.

What was I going to do with myself?

Thank God we didn’t keep any alchohol in the apartment.

Eli came back around noon the next day, while I was seated on the couch, numbly flipping through TV channels. “So, you’re here!” he declared, setting down his bags. “What the hell happened?”

I went over my story yet again. Eli, who is more privy to my personal life than most of my family, raised an eyebrow. “Who’s this friend? I’ve never seen him.”

“Just started hanging out with him and some others recently,” I said, trying to think of some plausible situation and coming up blank. “They’re University kids.”

“And you rushed all the way back from the family Christmas dinner to help some random University kid you met a few weeks ago?” Eli frowned.

“It’s… I dunno, he’s going through stuff I was going through a few years ago, you know?” I said, glad I was able to fall back on something more or less true. “We agreed to help each other out, and he was in some real danger that night. No one else was going to help him. It didn’t seem like I had a choice.”

“Wow. Is he okay?”

“Yes. He made it, he’s fine,” I said with a sigh.

“So you’re adopting troubled teens now, huh?” he said with a grin. “You just like to act like you’re something tough.”

I scowled at him. “I was just helping out a friend.”

“Introduce me to your teen posse someday,” Eli said over me, still grinning at me. It occurred to me that I didn’t really know Huang’s age, so he very well could have been eighteen or nineteen. I continued to scowl. “I bet you’re like their grumpy older brother, that’s adorable. I should send some more troubled teens your way.”

“I don’t have a posse,” I repeated. “Also, don’t do that.”

“Yeah, I’ll warn everyone to stay away from big, bad Camilo Santos.” He continued ribbing me for far longer than was necessary before disappearing into his room to drop off his luggage. I sighed in relief. Scot-free. This time.

The next two days were a welcome respite but, of course, no break from the Grey City could last too long. Starting to go a little stir-crazy, needing to go shopping, and aware that avoiding the Grey City forever wouldn’t do me any good, I ventured outside in the afternoon.

I had a feeling I wasn’t going to just get to grocery shopping in peace, so I mentally prepared myself as I walked. This time of day felt safe, somehow. There were other people on the sidewalks, the sun was bright; it seemed impossible that it could all change in an instant.

But change it did, as soon as I turned onto a smaller, empty street. The change was both sudden and gradual. My spatial sense got a hit of vertigo, but visually it was simply like the sun disappeared behind a cloud for a moment. The street looked the same as when I’d turned onto it, but when I moved to the next street, the fog and blank buildings made it clear I’d entered the Grey City once more. Silence closed in on all sides.

I’d tried to prepare myself, but a shock of fear still went through me.

I started to work my way to the Sanctuary, like Huang and I had planned. I hadn’t gotten far before a bright, glowing shape appeared overhead, then alighted onto the street. “Yo,” said the Gargoyle.

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t say ‘yo’, I can’t take that seriously.”

The Gargoyle still looked beat half to hell, but with a definite improvement since the last time I’d seen it. It had patches of missing feathers and areas almost like scabs where its body didn’t glow at all, but it seemed to move freely enough, and it was no longer bleeding.

“What’s the plan, to the Sanctuary?” I asked. “We, uh… need to catch up. I had another Leviathan dream.”

He shifted. “I think we should return to the waterfront first. You should make sure no more demons are emerging underwater.”

I sighed. He was right, of course, I had just been hoping to get out of it. I should have known there was no point in entertaining those sorts of thoughts. “…Yeah, all right.” The fact that he had been able to see our best course of action was promising; maybe he was feeling recovered from his spell of depression. Christmas was over, he’d been through the worst.

We started to walk there, for once in no great rush, following glimpses of brassy pipes on the buildings.

“You said you had a dream?” Huang asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Uh… I have news.”

The Gargoyle’s beaky face tilted at me. “What’s wrong? Let’s hear it.”

I explained to him how little room for error we really had.

He was quiet as we continued walking, but after some time, he gave a kind of shrug. “I figured it was something like that.”

“Are you serious!?” I demanded. “You’re going to try and tell me that you already knew?”

“I didn’t know,” he retorted, “but I always thought there was some purpose to this that went beyond just trying to survive. There’s layers to this place… I didn’t know that the demons would definitely cross over if we failed, but I suspected.”

“And you’re cool with it!?”

“Nothing changes, Camilo,” he said. “We still have a job to do. If nothing else, this is some motivation.”

I could only stare blankly ahead. Motivation. Sure.

“You talked with Leviathan about other things?” he asked, moving right along.

I muttered my way through the rest of the dream and Huang nodded. “Interesting… he says there was a spirit belonging to this form, but it’s dead?” he gestured to himself.

“Seems that way. And there was some kind of calamity that killed it.” I paused, thinking over what that could mean. “I should have got more out of him on that. Knowing him, he wouldn’t tell me.”

“I guess some advice is better than nothing,” Huang said. “I’m still inclined to take what he says with a grain of salt. He’s motivated to protect his own life, not necessarily to protect us, if our interests stop aligning.”

“He is completely unpredictable,” I agreed as we emerged into the Waterfront district, the buildings growing sparse as the lake approached on the horizon.

I paused. The water was calm, but the Gargoyle was still hurt and I knew the Leviathan wouldn’t abide Huang stepping into its territory when I transformed.

We quickly worked out a system: Huang would stay in the air, acting as a sentry and as backup if I needed it. I would dive down and patrol the currents. After all, it had seemed like that was where the demons were coming from last time.

I’d never transformed without a demon nearby to kick off some instinct, but peering into the dark water seemed to do the trick. The Leviathan’s instincts bubbled up in my mind until my whole self and all my thoughts were boxed away in their midst. Before I could decide to, I had changed forms and was diving deep into the still, dark water.

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