CHAPTER I

Mort

Episode I — Two Lives. Two Hearts.

Dzhimala said I couldn’t die. I was already dead a long time ago, and I had two lives tied together with two hearts beating in my chest. I didn’t understand it at the time. Now — I can. I killed him as I did many others before and after. My life was a spur-of-the-moment madhouse. My insanity increased with the power that I felt growing in me every day. I couldn’t cope with negative homicidal feelings. Death loved me and kept me in Her service as I brought the new freshly squeezed blood of my victims to Her.

Death and I were on good terms then. I was Her devoted brother, and She was my beloved sister. We help each other even now. I still feed Her, but now it is mostly dark-in-between-travelers. She makes my pain sharp enough to keep me moving. We only had misunderstanding once: I wanted to die, and She didn’t want to accept that sacrifice. Later I realized how wise She was for not letting me disappear.

I was born in an angry world, with jealous people and cruel rules for survival. I hated it and almost destroyed it. When I realized how much love I had locked in me, there was just enough time to diminish the disastrous chain reaction that I’d started. Remorse squeezed both of my hearts and I wanted to go into internal darkness. Death forced me out of it so I could repay the debt I owed to this world.

My memory is my most cruel torturer. I can control almost everything in and out of my body except for it. Memory and Death coerce me into fighting my way out of insanity.

I remember the blinding red of innocent blood I caused to be shed and the bitter taste of betrayal, the intense smarting pain of a loss and the disheartening feeling of loneliness. I lost my closest friends, and the reference of myself was gone with them. I knew who I was only by knowing the reasons I loved them, and they loved me. The war with the powerful creature that killed them transformed me into a brutal madman.

I am a dark-in-between-traveler myself. The most skilled, I believe, as I met no one as welcomed by almost every reality as I am. The minutes spent in any of them used to be limited. It happened unconsciously at the beginning. Later, I became more experienced. Now I control my time better and choose the place I go when I happen to enter the dark emptiness with multiple doors to different worlds.

My first attempts to exercise my power in those realities ruined a few small ones, which is bad by itself if not for the fact that I created a couple of my own realities from my nightmares, and that was much worse. Now the unfortunate travelers that don’t know how to navigate themselves in this black endless desolation may find themselves in one of my terrible creations. I need to deal with it someday.

The reality I was born into seems to me what suffered most from my intrusion. My destructive influence started with my mother. I loved her and that is why I harmed her just enough so she would abandon me. I never knew my father. My mom named me… but who cares what the name was. The record of it disappeared at the time I burned the place we lived in. My mother was in a semiconscious frenzy when they took me from her to reveal my name. I made sure she wouldn’t remember me. At least she had a break till the day I’d force her to evoke the painful memories.

Mort is my name now.

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