Austin’s near-death plunge into Aona’s abyss begins with a bullet to the chest, his soul clawing through a jasmine-scented void where tormented souls scream from a lake of fire. Bethere’s cryptic sword and a serpent’s whisper—"You are already dead"—force him to wield Queen Elinda’s forbidden power, tearing open a doorway back to life just as the priest of death’s car explodes around him, leaving his fate dangling between resurrection and annihilation. [Automatically generated summary]
The following contains strong language and adult themes and is intended for a mature audience.
Hi there.
How'd the speech go?
Oh, you know, the sane people think I'm a crazy conspiracy theorist.
The crazy conspiracy theorists think I'm a genius.
They keep insisting I've hidden all these secret incendiary messages in my story.
Have you?
Hey, if you can't trust a face like this, who can you trust?
Uh...
Never mind.
Should we do a session?
I'm ready.
We left off after you visited Queen Elinda in the homeless camp and were on your way to see your sister in the asylum.
Then your brother's assassin ran you off the road.
Right.
So there I was, stuck in the crashed Mercedes with the priest of death coming toward me.
Another kingdom, the final season.
Written by me, Andrew Clavin.
Performed by Michael Knowles.
Episode 11, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.
A fresh line of blood trickled from my forehead into my eye.
Quickly, I wiped it away with my palm.
Blinking, squinting, I saw the pistol in Death's right hand.
I had to get out of this damn car and run for it.
I had to try anyway.
I finally found the seatbelt button, popped the belt off, grabbed the door handle, yanked it, shoved the door.
It wouldn't move.
It was stuck.
The roof of the car had caved in over it.
I roared out in frustration.
I rammed my shoulder into the door hard.
It hurt, but the door budged a little.
The priest of death kept striding down the desert slope toward me.
Come on!
I shoved the door again.
Again.
The latch gave a painful cough.
The hinges gave an agonized screech.
The door broke the grip of the crumpled roof and swung open.
Escape Attempt00:15:21
But it was too late.
The priest of death was too near.
Still approaching steadily, he lifted his pistol and trained it on my face.
I knew what I had to do.
I had no choice.
I could only hope that Elinda was right and death was not always death in the 11 lands.
Because here, there was no escape from what was about to happen to me.
I focused on the open door and willed the veil of transition into being.
A white haze of light appeared.
Through it, I could see the black tunnel of the rock formation beneath the cliffs of Aona.
I could see the roiling black ocean at the bottom, spitting foam.
In this world, the priest of death came toward me, his gun upraised.
I tumbled through the open door of the Mercedes and back to Aona, where I plummeted through the hole in the rock and smashed full force into the sea.
It was a terrible thing to die.
A sad thing.
Very sad and lonely.
It was like losing a wife you were never grateful for.
A familiar old wife who kept your house, who brought you coffee in the morning, who set your dinner on the table every night, all unnoticed after so many years.
Then suddenly she's gone.
She's gone and you realize.
It was all love.
All of it.
The kept house, the coffee, the meals.
Every little thing she did was an act of fathomless love.
And only now can you see it.
Only now with the incomprehensible loss of it.
Only now can you understand the vast black loneliness her silent sweetness filled.
Yes, that's what it was like to lose my life.
Black loneliness where love had been, all unknown.
Elinda was right, of course.
Death wasn't quite death here.
Not quite the utter end of things I had expected.
But it also was.
That is, my body was smashed to a ragdoll corpse on impact with the concrete sea, and I knew whatever I had been before that moment, I would never be again.
And oh man, I missed myself.
The moment I passed away, it broke my heart to be severed from even the aches and annoyances of flesh and anxiety.
I wished I had the moment back.
I wished it was that instant again before I struck the surface.
I would have lived even that, even that one instant, over and over forever, anything in order to stave off the completeness of my destruction.
I was dimly aware of my corpse sinking into the wavery depths of the water.
I couldn't see it exactly, but I sensed it all the same.
My body, broken and limp and drifting down, while the flickering reef fish nosed the still shape of it and darted away.
But that dead body was no longer me.
I was gone.
Gone into a lonely blackness, so lonely and so black that words like loneliness and blackness could only suggest the absolute lightlessness and solitude.
As my cadaver descended through the medium of water, I, this lifeless but still imagined I, sank through this other medium, this lonesomeness, this blackness, into an expanse without end or sensation, a country of nowhere and nothing, no borders, no horizon.
I'm not sure how long I fell, how far I went, how deep I sank.
I'm not sure any of those words had meaning where I was.
But after a time, or after all time, after all my time anyway, I began to imagine myself as I had been before, as a form, a body.
Austin.
It was just an illusion.
I knew that even then.
It was a trick of my shocked imagination, which couldn't bear to face the loss of myself.
I told myself I was still a body, and I saw myself as a body.
And I came to rest on what I imagined as a shelf of rough anthracite, black, jagged, faceted coal, the surface flickering in and out of imagined sight, as if lit by some distant flame.
I climbed slowly to my feet.
This is how I described it to myself.
I knew my body was gone, but I had to think of it somehow, and this was how.
I climbed to my feet.
I found myself on a narrow ledge above an infinite descent into weeping nothingness.
Every fiber of me was in a panic to climb up out of there, away from the tortured crying voices I heard rising from the depthless depths below.
But there was no up.
The narrow path didn't lead that way.
I couldn't even make myself imagine up.
There was only the winding pathway down.
Down and down.
I did not want to begin the journey.
I so did not.
But I had to.
Like in a nightmare, my will thought what was happening at the same time my mind relentlessly created it.
I had to go down.
I went, step by step.
I hoped this wouldn't be like hell, but of course it was.
It was just like hell, because that was the only way I knew how to think of it.
As the anthracite path wound downward over the anthracite walls, the smell of sulfur thickened.
Yellow gas twined up out of the deep and swirled around me.
I felt the first heat of flames.
I heard the flames crackle.
I saw the flame light flicker.
The crying and the screaming of the voices in the hideous world below grew louder.
But I had to go down.
Even worse than what I knew was waiting for me was what I felt was happening to me as I went.
I was decaying.
Even this imagined me, this dreamed-up Austin, this illusion of physical being that I was forced to perceive because my nothingness was intolerable.
Even this was rotting away.
I could feel myself becoming soft and curdy, empty of inner life.
I could smell it too.
The smell of my flesh going bad like weak old meat.
It mingled with the suffocating aroma of sulfur.
The scarlet flames grew brighter on the sable rock.
Don't look at yourself, I thought.
But I had to.
I raised my hand before my eyes.
It was crawling with maggots.
The flesh was beginning to melt and drop away from the bloody sinew.
The stench was awful.
I wanted to weep.
I wanted to wilt to the ground and lament for my poor dead self.
But I had to go down.
I neared the end of the descent.
The ledge began to level out.
I saw a burbling lake of fire, which was the shape my mind gave to its own molten anguish.
The air was full of drowning cries of agony, deafening.
The imagination is an organ of perception like the eye, and with my imagination, which was the only living organ I had left, I saw the coal black ledge diverge from the infinite cave walls around me.
It stretched out in a narrow bridge over the immensity of embodied torment that looked like lava to me.
Now and then, a smoking, rotten hand reached out of the liquid flames and desperately seized the rock, then slipped back down again.
Now and then a face appeared, unspeakable.
Helplessly, I headed for the bridge.
I came to a stop where the bridge began, at the shore of the Sea of Fire.
I knew I would have to go on eventually, but somehow, for the moment, I was allowed to pause.
In the flamelight, I looked down at my hand, my arm, my body.
I won't describe what I saw.
It was too horrible, too disgusting.
Even in imagination now, I could not hold my shape together.
I was a long, dead corpse.
I sobbed with self-pity to see what I was becoming.
But then, even then, as I stood, as I mourned, I began to notice an unexpected sweetness in the air.
Was it real?
Had I conjured it in denial?
No.
No, it was there.
Beneath the heat of the fire, beneath the screeching cries of the impotent damned, beneath the stench of my own rotting body, there was the faint fragrance of a woman.
A wild, yearning scent, like night-blooming jasmine.
I whispered her name, and she answered.
Don't turn around, turn around.
She didn't speak the words.
They just appeared in my mind.
A soft but urgent command that cut through the shrieks of agony bubbling up from the bubbling lava.
Bethere?
My eyes filled with tears of grief and frustration.
Don't turn around, around.
She repeated, like that, a full stop after every word.
I managed to keep myself from looking at her.
It wasn't easy.
Try as I might, I could not remember her face, and I would have given anything, anything, to see it again, to comfort myself with the sight of her in this chill, merciless underworld.
But from the tone of her voice, I understood I had to obey her.
Something dreadful would happen if I confronted her beauty with my rotted, flesh-dripping horror movie of a skull.
So I stood there, my back to her, taking deep, helpless breaths of the hot sulfuric clouds.
Can you help me?
I tried not to ask, but the thought came into my head and she heard it.
No one can help you, Austin.
You're over.
You're not there to help anymore.
I would have wept like a child then, howled like a hysterical child, but even here, I couldn't bear to have Beth see me so unmanned.
What do I do then?
Just die?
Just burn?
While there's time, do what you came to do.
I couldn't imagine what she meant.
Do what?
The Emperor.
Find the Emperor.
The Emperor is here.
The Emperor is among the dead.
The dead.
Somehow these words put some spirit back in me.
I felt myself straighten a little, straighten and grow strong.
Everything was not yet done.
I still had a purpose.
Find the Emperor.
What then?
When I find him, what can I do?
Look at me, Beth.
I'm dead.
I'm becoming nothing.
What can I do?
There was no answer.
Just silence.
I was afraid.
I was terrified that she was already gone.
That I was alone again.
That I had to live out the rest of this death by myself.
But then, then the scent of jasmine grew subtly stronger beneath the choking sulfur, beneath the anguished flames, beneath the gurgled shrieks from under the lava and the smell of my own rotting flesh.
I felt her spirit on my neck like breath, and she slipped something cool and solid into my hand.
I stood very still, waiting, hoping I'd feel her flesh touch the crawling ruin of mine.
But there was only this cool metallic cylinder against my palm.
I closed my fingers around it, and I recognized the shape.
I lifted my hand, my skeletal hand with the crawling flesh dangling from it.
I was holding my sword.
The shining blade reflected the furious red from the lake of fire.
I heard Bethyray sigh.
The next moment, I knew she had left me.
I stood there, solitary, beyond the edge of life on the very shores of torment.
I stood there, the very image of death, and raised my sword.
I wanted to weep for myself, but instead I thought, find the emperor.
The emperor is among the dead.
I started across the coal black bridge.
It was a long way.
The path was very narrow, narrow and slippery and uneven.
The slightest loss of balance and I would pitch off the side of the faceted rock and plunge into the fire.
What's more, to make things even worse, as soon as I started to edge away from the black shore, the pitiful creatures trapped in the flaming sea began to reach up out of that seething, molten lake of pain to try to grab me, to try to use me to pull themselves up onto the bridge.
They were horrible things.
Damned things.
A screaming corpse of a woman with the corpses of infants sucking at every inch of her like burning leeches.
A headless man shrieking for help from a gaping wound just beneath his waistline.
A pudgy child fighting uselessly to tear away the reptile biting his face, its snake-like tail whipping back and forth with hungry glee.
A man and a woman locked together, struggling to disengage their insect-riddle loins from the disgusting ruins of each other.
And those were the ones I can describe.
The rest were nightmares beyond words, beyond imagining.
They mainlined into what was left of my mind without any imagery whatsoever.
Pure horror, 200-proof, injected straight into the soul of me.
All of them, all these things, reached up from the fire.
Their fingers clawed at the gleaming black stone.
Their eyes searched for me.
Their hands tried to get hold of me.
They fought to crawl up my body out of the bottomless lake.
And what could I do?
Each time one lunged up out of the lava, I nearly toppled off the bridge and joined them in their hell.
Pity for them would have killed me.
I had to fight them off, slash at them with my sword, kick at them, send them spilling back into their damnation.
What could I do but cut away at them, a corpse swinging his blade at corpses, a skeleton fighting skeletons as I inched forward over the black stone?
At first, I couldn't see the far side.
Just the seething red lake extending forever into yellow smoke, the anthracite walls rising on every side of me forever.
The fumes choked me.
The flames choked me.
A babbling zombie of an old lady suddenly leapt up at me, wildly flailing.
I kicked her and she went down, but I trembled there, off-kilter, fighting not to fall in after her.
Only with the greatest effort did I regain my balance.
Then, a rotting skeleton with a sword in my bony hand, I inched on.
Slowly, through the yellow tendrils of mist, the far shore came dimly into view.
Whisper of Dissolution00:12:08
I paused.
I took a cautious glance back over my shoulder and saw I was halfway across.
The knowledge filled my rotting guts with panic.
There could be no quick retreat now.
It was just as far to the end as it was back to the beginning.
I tried to steady myself, but my muscles were turning to mush.
I had no strength.
I was trembling all over.
I had to hurry before there was nothing left of me.
I started moving again, took another step, another.
And with that, something enormous sprang up at me on a roaring wave of fire.
It was a shrieking forest of personalities, all of them ablaze.
It was one man, a monstrous man, but with a dozen bodies of every kind squirming in the core of him.
In the split second I saw him before he struck, I understood each person within him was savaging the others in a murderous frenzy, and all were simultaneously hurling themselves at me.
I screamed once in pure terror.
Then the flaming beast washed over the crawling mess that I'd become.
My skeleton was suddenly drowning in gibbering flame faces.
On every side of me hung entrails gripped in gory hands.
Scorching pain entered my dissolving bones like acid, and I could feel my feet losing purchase on the anthracite as the many-headed waveman began to carry me away.
With all that was left of my strength, I planted myself on the bridge.
I struck upwards, hard, with the point of my sword.
The blade plunged deep into the babbling forest fire of self-murdering humanity.
I ripped at it, tore at it, all in a second, fighting the tide that tried to drag me down with it into the fire.
A black hole opened at the core of the thing.
I grabbed the edge of it with one skeletal hand.
I worked the sword with the other, sawing at the red-hot substance of it.
The creature tore open like a canvas sack.
Black bats with human faces flew out of it, flew up into the high shadows, cackling as they went.
The burning monster dissolved into lava around me.
The lava splashed down at my feet, then seeped over the rims of the bridge and dribbled back into the greater sea of flame.
But the jolt of it had made me stumble.
I was heading toward the edge of the bridge, tipping over the edge.
I threw my arms out to either side of me for balance, the bony fingers of my right hand still wrapped around the hilt of the sword.
I was on one foot, on tiptoe, teetering on the last inch of anthracite.
I steadied, got my other foot down, stayed on the bridge, just barely.
Just.
I remained where I was a moment, trying to recover.
It seemed the wave of fire, of fire and anguish and pain, had cleansed me somehow.
The stench of the sulfur was still thick around me, but my own stench was gone.
I no longer felt the carrion insects crawling over me.
They'd been burned away.
I was now just white bones dressed in the rags of flesh.
I went on, exhausted.
More creatures leapt up out of the lava at me.
I fought them off, but I was weary and I was growing wearier with each step.
Luckily, as I neared the far shore, the attacks grew less frequent.
The damned grew paler, weaker.
Their hands would begin to reach up, but then sink again before they even touched the bridge.
One skullish face grinned at me from just below the fire's surface.
Then the flames engulfed it and it was gone.
Stepping gingerly heel to toe, I hurried across the narrow path as quickly as I could.
Finally.
Finally.
I reached the far shore and collapsed onto the hard coal.
For a long moment, maybe an endless moment, who could tell?
I remained there on my hands and knees, flickering in and out of existence as my mind recoiled from the abomination I'd become and the emptiness I was rapidly becoming.
I tried to inspire myself to stand.
I looked at the sword in my bony white fingers, the bright silver blade laid out across the black anthracite.
Where had I gotten it?
Who had given it to me?
I could not remember.
I had a vague sense there had been some comforting presence near me.
I remembered the scent of jasmine.
But the face of that presence was gone, its name forgotten.
All that was left inside me was the one thought: find the emperor.
He is here among the dead.
I wasn't sure whether I had eyes anymore.
I suspected all that was left of my eyes was the jelly I felt dripping slowly down the front of my skull.
All the same, by will and imagination, I lifted the line of my vision.
I saw a narrow corridor threading between two walls of black rock.
I can't convey how forbidding the passage seemed to me, how dark.
I knew somehow it led to the final place, that once I entered, there would be no returning.
I did not want to go.
But what was behind me?
The lake of fire?
The bridge?
I glanced back.
No.
The bubbling red expanse was gone.
It had faded away and there was nothing left but thick yellow smoke and echoing cries of endless misery.
I could no longer remember what it had been like to cross the bridge or what the lava had looked like.
There was so much now I could not remember.
I was reluctant even to wonder who I was, afraid that too was already gone, that I no longer had even my identity.
I was just death now.
Just this death, or else nothing.
I rose.
I moved, moved without walking, drifted like a lazy daydream, like the fading memory of a man.
I went down the dark corridor, my whole soul sobbing, because I already knew what would happen next.
There was a deep rumble, like the growl of a waking beast.
The anthracite walls shifted, began to move, suddenly snapped shut behind me.
Bang.
The crash echoing.
Any possibility of retreat was now cut off.
I drifted on toward the end of the corridor.
The rock growled again.
The walls trembled.
Any second they would quake, slam shut, crush me.
I emerged from the corridor seconds before the quake hit.
Then the walls smashed together.
And there I was on the other side, trapped.
This, this last place of all, was more awful even than the lake of fire, more awful even than the creatures I had seen tortured in its liquid flames.
There was nothing, neither space nor blackness, merely an infinite emptiness beyond imagination and meaning, beyond language and thought.
It was corrosive.
The very fact of it was eating into me.
All that was left of me was dissolving into atoms of non-existence and becoming part of the nothingness everywhere.
Only that, only the fact that the void was devouring me, gave it any quality at all, gave it any aspect that could be described.
It was as if there was a great serpent twining all around me, slithering over me, ingesting and digesting me.
Cool and enormous, its writhing length caressed me, coaxed my being from itself, so that bit by bit I became part of its vast non-body.
The slow deconstruction of myself was like a whisper.
There is nothing left of you.
No flesh, no meaning, no hope, no joy, no life, no desire, no tomorrow nor yesterday, no memories, no dreams.
You are already dead.
You are already dead.
How weird was it?
How wonderful and weird that it was that whisper that saved me.
That whisper, which was nothing more than the way my imagination perceived this serpent of non-existence, this quality of black destruction, this acid of despair that was dissolving me within itself.
That whisper was the worst thing of all things, and yet, and yet, whatever was left of my mind caught hold of it.
It gave me one faint half sparkle of hope.
Fading, dying, dissolving there.
Somehow, in that evil hour, some everlasting logic occurred to me, some fabric of reason that had supported the world before even the world existed.
A riddle that had stood forever at the time before time.
The serpent whispered, You are already dead.
And I thought, Who?
Who's dead?
Who are you talking to, snake of death?
That was it.
That was what saved me.
That was how I found myself, what was left of myself, this dying, dissolving, former thing in the belly of emptiness.
The voice of utter destruction spoke to me out of total blackness, and I followed the voice and located myself and realized at some level I must still have being, some flickering spark of the eternal flame of life and love.
With all my soul, I set my being against the dark.
I used the power I'd gotten from Yelinda's book.
I willed a doorway in the black core of nothingness.
I willed that door to open.
There was then a wrenching tremor in the bowels of hell, a quaking fissure in the absolute night.
Blinding whiteness appeared.
Life.
Life-like light poured in through the opening, washed over me like a reviving tide.
I gasped.
Sweet breath.
I roared with effort.
I fought my way into the brightness.
I forced my way through the blinding white.
Every brutal step through infinite distance, I felt my being coming back to me, my body reconstituting, unrotting, reforming.
I forced myself out to the other side, and I tumbled from the crumpled, smoking ruin of my silver Mercedes.
I fell on my side in the red desert dirt.
I rolled away just as the car exploded into flames.
Bleeding, aching, I clutched my chest, my living, pulsing chest in my two hands.
I raised my eyes to heaven.
My eyes.
I had my eyes again.
And my body.
It felt good.
It felt purged.
It felt healed.
I climbed up onto my knees.
I cried out, sobbing, I'm alive!
I'm alive!
Then I saw the priest of death was there, standing over me, his pistol pointed at my face.
With a movement like a whiplash, he smacked the barrel hard against the side of my head.
A rocket of pain shot through me ear to ear.
I pitched forward, face first, into the dust, and lost consciousness.
Another Kingdom, the final season.
Written by me, Andrew Clavin.
Performed by Michael Knowles.
Executive Producer, Jeremy Boring00:00:35
Voice work for the secretary, Caitlin Maynard.
Episode 11, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, was directed by Jonathan Hay.