The Mantis Corruption - Book Three - 9. Chapter 9 - Sumi

It was night when the countless hours of Sumi’s torment in the black cell finally came to an end. She was released and hosed off beneath a half-moon before being sent to the empty dormitory.

Harakin’s space and possessions brought fresh tears to Sumi’s eyes, and she fell onto her prison mate’s bed. She rolled on her back, looked at the grey ceiling, and she heard Harakin’s words in her mind, What else can you do?

“I wish I knew more about my powers,” Sumi said aloud. Then she thought, I wish I could open a door that told me everything about them.

The eldritch energies within her activated of their own accord, and Sumi could feel one of her doorways. It did not open at her command to step through, it just simply was. She did not know why it was there, but it almost seemed to be waiting for her. Sumi rubbed her eyes, sat up, and swung her legs over the side of Harakin’s bed.

She stepped through her doorway into an office. It was empty.

Sumi was positioned directly in front of a filing cabinet. One of her hands was holding the handle of its second drawer. She pulled it open, and Sumi immediately saw her name.

Even though she thought that she did not know how to read, the letters and symbols revealed themselves to her probing eyes. She pulled out the file and stared at her full name printed across the top of it. The last time she had heard it spoken aloud was thirteen years earlier, and more than half of her lifetime. Sumi barely remembered it.

“Oligana Nisumi Mong,” she read aloud. It felt strange to say her old name, the name her parents gave to her, but it was as dead to her as they were.

“Sumi,” she whispered, as if to reassure herself who she was.

A large sticker with red letters took up much of the folder’s cover. Sumi read it aloud.

“Preliminary findings too extreme. Experimentation canceled.”

She opened the file and continued, but the words were confusing.

“One,” she read, “subject possesses the ability to enter a congruent dimension that appears to exist solely for subject.” Sumi paused.

“What does that mean?” she asked the empty room, and she continued.

“Two, subject can remain in congruent dimension for an indeterminate amount of time with no adverse effects. Three, subject can bring multiple other individuals through congruent dimension. Four, subject can bring individuals into congruent dimension for extended periods of time, but others are neither conscious nor aware of time spent therein.”

This is really repetitive, Sumi thought, and her brow furrowed as she read aloud.

“Five, subject can utilize congruent dimension as viewing position. Subject possesses capacity to peer into reality from congruent dimension before stepping out of congruent dimension back into reality.”

Sumi turned the page.

“Summary: Subject possesses capacity to teleport anywhere, limited only by subject’s imagination and also driven by it. Subject enters a unique realm, can exist in it, and can see the real world from within. Recommendations: One, instill fear of congruent dimension in subject, or alternatively, subject should be trained to immediately step through dimensional portal, spending no time in congruent dimension. Two, limit subject’s teleportation distance by training subject to only travel by line of sight. Three, train subject to use dimensional portal to remove portions of targets for efficient elimination.”

What I really want, Sumi thought, is a door that will bring me to Harakin, and again, she felt a doorway appear.

Noises outside the office startled her, and without hesitation she stepped through reality.

Sumi found herself standing in a waist-high labyrinth of overgrown hedges. The office, the filing cabinet, even the compound were gone. The file, however, was not. Sumi was still holding the folder.

The cultivated rows of plants that now surrounded her were left untended and on the verge of going wild, but they led to the ruins of a large stone structure that loomed against the sky. The moon glowed down upon the old broken stones.

Sumi was right in the middle of the scraggly maze, and surrounding the entire courtyard were trees. The wooded area also appeared to have been planted deliberately, and it stretched up to the ruins on either side, encircling the area. Its trees were overgrown but seemed more recently tended where they grew nearest to the dilapidated ruins.

It looked to Sumi like life at this fort had come to a crashing halt.

The old stone building was buckled in the middle. The majority of its two sidewalls still stood, but the center and roof were collapsed. It appeared that whatever wooden support beams used to exist must have rotted away long ago and caused the ceiling to cave-in. The ruins looked ancient. Their grey stones were bleached by countless years beneath the hot sun that beat down on the lands of Xin.

Questions swirled in Sumi’s brain. Where was she? Why was she there? What were these ruins? Maybe more importantly, why were her doorways now opening seemingly on their own?

Sumi decided that the trees and labyrinth would not reveal much more to her than they already did, and she began to weave through the paths. She climbed over a few sections where the maze led away from the ruins, and more questions arose in her mind.

Who planted the hedges and weeded the pathways in between? Where were the gardeners? What formerly great families used to keep these lands?

Leading up to the collapsed structure stretched a wide set of stone steps and a grand patio. When the old building fell, its crumbled masonry spread out as a jumbled mess into the space that seemed to be once clean and organized.

Sumi headed to one side of the ruins and made her way through the trees toward the front. A moment later, she came out on the sprawling terrace that led up to the fallen stones.

The devastation to the old structure appeared even worse from the front than it did from the back. She thought it looked like a terrible barrage of cannon fire pounded against the building until it was destroyed.

Sumi did not know why, but she felt a familiarity with this place. She did not recognize the ruins, but there was a nagging in her that they were something; the ruins were important.

There was no way for her to enter what remained of the structure, but Sumi walked up to where its front doors may have once stood. She looked over the stillness and tried to imagine what else could have caused the castle to fall.

Castle! Sumi thought.

The ruins became clear in her mind. It was the site of their royal assassination mission.

Sumi was shocked. In her mind, she could see the picture that the Voice showed her. This was that building, but mere hours earlier it was an immovable and imposing edifice. Now, it was no more than ruins.

Above Sumi’s head, there was a flash of light, and she was even more shocked.

A symbol that she recognized was floating in the air as a three-dimensional object. Not only did Sumi know the meaning of the symbol, but the very appearance of the thing was known to her.

Despite the way that the printed words on the file revealed their meanings to Sumi, neither she nor Harakin knew how to read or write. However, each of them developed their own symbol that they used to represent their names.

It was Harakin’s symbol. It was flickering and slowly rotating, and it bore a similar appearance to her luminous blades.

The symbol vanished.

Can I open one of my doorways to Harakin? and before Sumi realized that the thought was in her head, one of her doors appeared. This new occurrence of them generating on their own was a mystery, but her doors now seemed to be more than they had ever been.

Sumi stepped, in the same way that she had always stepped through her doorways, but she was not able to appear at its other side. Something was preventing her from using her teleportation ability completely, yet her door still remained. Sumi tried to bring her full focus to her doorway.

Her eyes gazed at the fallen stone, but suddenly Sumi could see Harakin. She was surrounded in a pale light that looked strange.

“Harakin!” Sumi cried out, but Harakin did not reply.

Whatever was keeping Sumi from stepping through her doorway, was not preventing her from looking through it. She wished that she could touch Harakin’s cheek, and when she reached out, she found that she could indeed do just that.

Harakin’s eyes flashed open and she looked around, but she seemed to see nothing.

“Harakin!” Sumi yelled.

Without thinking about what would happen, she grabbed Harakin’s hand. Sumi pulled her through the doorway and out onto the front terrace of the destroyed castle.

Both of them were stunned.

Harakin’s knees were weak, and Sumi grabbed her as she started to fall.

“Take me somewhere safe,” Harakin said in a raspy voice. There was a light emanating from her neck where the royal guard had slit her throat.

Sumi knelt down and cradled Harakin.

I don’t even know of anyplace that’s safe, she thought, or if my doorways could find somewhere like that.

Again, as if responding to her command or desire, a doorway revealed itself to her.

“Somewhere safe,” she whispered. Bring us somewhere safe.

Harakin and Sumi vanished.

The doorway led them to a dark space that was warm and smelled of spices and cooked food.

“Where are we?” Harakin asked in a hoarse whisper.

Someone sat up in the darkness in front of them.

“What the fuck?!” the person squawked.

Another silhouette shot upright and a second voice asked, “What is it, Dozi?”★