The Thousand-Eyed Crow (#Wattys2020)

Chapter 5 (Fields of Asphodel)

Caoimhe's eye opened, and they woke with a start. Reaching out next to them to their night table, they felt around for their prosthetic eye. Raising an eyebrow when they felt nothing, Caoimhe rose and looked around, noting that their eye was nowhere to be found. They gave up on that search for now and looked around their bed to see where they leg had gone; but it, too, was nowhere in sight.

"Kallias? Have you seen my prostheses?" Caoimhe asked, turning to the other side of the room where their twin normally slept in their own bed.

Silence greeted them instead. Where Kallias would have been lying asleep, the sheets lay folded in a neat pile, as if they had been untouched for a long time. Caoimhe strained their ears to hear if there was any activity around them, and noticed that there were no sounds. Literally nothing around them indicated that there was a sign of life. The burrowing birds no longer sang, the frequent humming of the underground had ceased, and the sounds of people walking outside and chatting to one another had been essentially shut off from existence. Caoimhe peeled back the thick curtains from the window next to their bed and peered outside into the bright light; all they saw was the dry, cracked earth stretching out for miles, and all the neighboring buildings that were usually spread out were also nowhere in sight. They pinched themselves and rubbed their eye, but still saw the same stretch of desert before them.

Where the fuck am I...? Caoimhe thought, feeling under their bed for the crutch they kept there in case of emergencies, and was finally able to struggle to a standing position. The flat looked the same as it had when they had left, and even the bloody circle they had drawn on the floor days ago remained, the blood somehow still a bright red despite no longer being fresh.

Wandering out of the room and down the corridor, their crutch squinching against the wooden floor, Caoimhe felt that deep sense of unease coursing through them. When they saw the familiar nest of red hair on the back of their sibling's head as they sat on one of the cushions at the table in their living room, Caoimhe sighed in relief.

"There you are, Kallias," Caoimhe said, hobbling over and sitting down on a cushion next to them.

But Kallias did not answer, and instead, looked to be ignoring Caoimhe.

"Hey, what's wrong with you?"

Turning their head to face Caoimhe, Kallias raised an eyebrow. Where the eye below that raised eyebrow should had been, there was only an empty socket that exposed a black void. Kallias smiled, but said nothing.

Caoimhe slowly looked down at Kallias's legs, noticing that instead of having two thin, twisted legs, they had only one leg and it mirrored Caoimhe not only in which one was missing, but also how much of it was missing. They were both missing most of their right left leg, with the stump about the length of half of the femur.

"You're not Kallias," Caoimhe stated, eye widening as they sized up their doppelganger.

The doppelganger grinned wider and when it spoke, Caoimhe felt as if they had recorded their own voice and simply played it back. "Took you long enough."

"What did you do with my sibling? And where on earth are we?" Caoimhe asked, their expression hardening.

Chuckling, the doppelganger shook their head. "Wouldn't you like to know... Well, too bad I can't tell you that."

"Why not...?"

"You really do ask too many questions..." the doppelganger replied, poking Caoimhe in the chest to punctuate.

"I wouldn't ask questions if you would just tell me what's going on..." Caoimhe retorted, poking the doppelganger back. "I'm not scared of you anyway, you're me. And I'm you. So if anything, this is just my brain being stupid and not telling me what I know..."