Epilogue

Epilogue 1.13

---Em---

     "Bryan... can you hear me?"

     Comma's lips move, but it's Olivia's voice that comes out of them. I try to answer, but I choke on a mouthful of blood. Everything sounds muffled, as though I'm underwater, except for the sound of her voice.

     "Don't say anything," says Olivia, speaking to me through Comma somehow. "Just listen."

     There's an explosion. Lights flicker above me as two thick beams of energy ram into each other. The temple starts to come down around us.

     And the pain... it's like someone flattened me out with a rolling pin and then ran me over with an iron. But more than the pain, there's... a void. A weightlessness. Like a pumpkin, after you get through scooping all the guts out.

     "Can you—?" Olivia begins.

     "—hear me?" Comma finishes.

     For a moment, everything's clear. My vision floats around the collapsing temple, through the shower of debris. Tahj's decapitated body lies crooked on the cracked stone floor. Through a hole in the ceiling, I can see two levitating figures, their auras glowing so intensely that they light up the blackened sky. On the one end, there's the fake Comma with the blonde hair, the one who punched a hole through my chest. Clutching the zillbane with her right hand, she shoots rivulets of electrified shadows from her left. The shadows converge at a single point, swallowed up by a sphere of hot pink light. Gail, maintains the sphere, nullifying the fake Comma's magic. Gail's aura is fused together with Miu-sama's—I recognize it from when the shikigami possessed me.

     Then everything gets blurry again, and Comma's voice dissolves into Olivia's.

     "Bryan? You with me?"

     I start to tingle all over, as if my body is made out of millions of grains of sand, all of which are bumping into and rattling against each other. I can feel each grain begin to dissolve. There's no fear; I close my eyes and accept whatever's happening. But then I jerk back into my state of semi-awareness. More disjointed visions. Topher and Mya squaring off against the were-tiger. Torn up segments of Miu-sama's paper doll body floating in the wind, some of them burnt black.

     And then Olivia again...

     She keeps repeating this word, but I can't make any sense of it. Gan... Gani... Gana...? Gam...? It's no use; it all just sounds like gibberish to me.

     And then something mixes with the taste of my blood. Something thicker. There's a hint of sweetness at first, like tree sap... followed by an explosion of bitterness. My body convulses as I attempt to throw the stuff up. Comma slams be back down, pressing her wrist against my throat. It's her blood... she's feeding me her blood...

     A brick plummets from the ceiling and smacks me on the head. I black out for a moment, and when I phase back in, I could swear it's Olivia who's hunched over me.

     "Ganeden," she mouths voicelessly.

     Then I black out again, this time for good, I think...

     That'd be nice.

     But when does anything ever go my way?

     I perceive now only in snapshots. Colours, splashed together in an incoherent mess. Faces I can't recognize. No movement—just moments, isolated from the flow of time. In random sequence. Each is a mystery to me, impossible to make any sense of. I see shapes and colours, but I don't have names for them. It's like the entirety of existence has been translated into some foreign language that my brain isn't capable of processing.