The Town With No Name That Once Had One

Warm.

That was the first thing Eleanor felt as she slowly came to consciousness. It was a stark contrast to the consuming cold of the water she remembered herself in. She moved a hand, feeling the ethereal softness of her surroundings. Her arm passed right through the ground as she tried to get a grasp on it. It was a far cry from even the grass in front of the house she had spent so much time in that anything different would have taken some time to adjust to, let alone this. The fact that she could hardly see anything past the wispy gray around her certainly didn’t help subdue her panic.

And the smell. She couldn’t quite place it, but it reminded her of fresh dew, yet untainted by the depressingly sickly smell that it tended to bring out in the grass. It smelled wet, getting in her nostrils and latching on. She was sure the smell would follow her for days, maybe weeks, but she couldn’t see herself minding even then. It was such a departure from the usual bleak nothing smell that had paradoxically dominated her house for so long that she breathed deeper, letting the moist scent work its way into her and take root. This was a smell she wouldn’t mind remembering.

In that wispy haze of gray and moisture, she realized there was one thing pointedly absent from her surroundings: sound. There was nothing at all to reach her ears but the low thud of her heartbeat and the raspy, yet steady, breaths that came from her mouth. Even these noises, part of her own body, were swallowed up by her surroundings, forcing her to strain to hear even that much. She tried to press her hands to the ground to stand herself up, panicking for a moment when they passed right through. It wasn’t until she looked behind her, however, that the real shock hit.

A pair of feathery wings sprouted just below her shoulder blades that spanned a length greater than her entire body, their light grays almost blending into the haze around her. She realized, after a start, that she could feel them in their entirety, and that they had in fact been there all along, as if she had fallen asleep against her hand for some time and only now began to stretch the fingers once again. She reached a hand around her back to find that the stalk leading into the rest of her body was hard as bone, with a texture like that of a sapling, firm in its position after taking root.

She cautiously tested the left wing, letting out a yelp as the powerful appendage pushed far harder than she was expecting and spun her onto her side. As she instinctively let out her other wing, she found she could easily stabilize herself, growing more comfortable with her new wings as she realized how much control she had. She spread her wings to their full span and stretched, feeling a wave of relief as she straightened out sores she hadn’t even realized were there.

As the initial shock began to wear off, her wings began to feel less alien and more like a natural extension of her body. The wings were her own, and the potential to gain them had always been there waiting for her in that dismal house. But as the memories of the house and the town came to the forefront of her mind, she no longer felt the oppressive weight of the place crushing down on her soul. No, for the first time in what seemed like forever, she realized she was no longer tied down, no longer burdened by the angry clouds that followed her every move. For the first time in forever, she was free!

Eleanor laughed, letting loose a weight she had grown so accustomed to she had forgotten it hadn’t always been there, all the anxious tension and dark thoughts flowing out from her mind. She could go anywhere now, not even the ground could tell her what to do! Her enthusiasm was somewhat tempered, however, when she realized that even with her newfound freedom, she was still surrounded by gray haze with no clear direction whatsoever. As nice as the freedom to go anywhere was, it wasn’t particularly useful in a blank void, and that instinct to keep moving hadn’t left her.

So she began to flap, slowly at first, but quickly gaining speed as she relished the feeling of having her very own wings. When was the last time she’d felt this was? Happy, truly happy? Far too long ago, that was for sure. Was this what it felt like? Was this… all?

No, that wasn’t right. She was still stuck, after all. She’d made progress, but it wasn’t over yet. There was still this haze everywhere, this overwhelming haze…

She started to fly. She went forward, whatever forward even meant in this place. Forward, ever forward, yet she found nothing but gray. A sinking feeling began to invade her, slowing her wings from their wild abandon of before to a more hesitant speed. Had she simply traded one purgatory for another? Was her escape even real, or was this just another sick joke played on her by the town, by these same clouds she was surely flying through right now? Those familiar feelings of doubt were making home in her mind once again.

She couldn’t fly back down to the ground now, not anymore. She’d come too far to give it up now and go back to the destructive grip of that little gray house. Besides, there was a good chance it wasn’t even there anymore. She was safer up here in the fog and haze.

Her wings grew tired as she pressed on. Her entire body was now uncomfortably moist, flecked with tiny specks of water that hadn’t even had the chance to become rain. The clouds were growing darker around her, the storm she had escaped threatening to follow her to its source. Because she shielded her face to keep her eyes from constantly blinking at the cold, wet air, it wasn’t until she was up close that she noticed the object in front of her.

It was a massive construction, a cathedral stretching up far higher than seemed possible or necessary into the sky, higher than she could see and surely higher than she could ever think to fly. The structure itself was made of an impossible combination of cloud and stone, the stone seemingly just as weightless as the clouds as it stood supported in full by frothing black pillars of air. It seemed to stretch on forever, disappearing into the clouds above, that mass of gray that stubbornly impeded any attempt to comprehend it. She tried to find a distinction between the cathedral and the sky as she gazed upward, but no matter how hard she looked she found herself unable to draw a line between the two, the whirling mass of the cathedral wall fading into infinity as it mixed itself with the stagnant gray that defined the world as it went higher and higher.

And directly in front of her lay a massive door of cedar, reaching five times her height at least, with an ornate silver handle on the left side that, despite the importance its decoration would seem to imply, looked comically small when compared to the door as a whole. Aesthetics, it seemed, were still forced to bow to practicality at times. She reached out a hand to open the door, and as she grasped the handle found the grooves on it were perfectly designed to fit her hand, as if they had belonged there all along. Despite its imposing size, the door itself gave little resistance as she pushed it open.

While it was certainly large, the room she found herself in was nothing like the endless towering walls she had seen from the outside. In fact, the room itself was hardly any larger than the door she’d come in from, as if the building was overcompensating, trying to put on the air of something that it patently wasn’t. She chuckled, a little disappointed at the building. The outside had been impressive, but in the dark and deserted lobby she found herself in, decorated with plain wooden panels for the floor and stagnant gray air for the walls, she was decidedly less impressed. The room was also oddly dark; while there had always been a constant light filtering down through the clouds outside, the walls here proved to be a bit more opaque, giving the room a more sinister feel than she had become accustomed to even in the town.

The lobby was uncomfortably sparse as well. The only contents seemed to be a small metal table tucked away in the corner, a lamp placed on top of it providing the majority of the light in the room. The table was completely devoid of papers, decorations, or anything else that would indicate a real person might have worked there; just a small lamp, illuminating a small book and pen. The room was dead silent, and Eleanor was suddenly acutely aware of every single step that she took as she walked forward to that tiny desk because each one would echo through the massively oversized entry. She brought herself to a light hover above the ground, and though she could still hear the soft flaps of her wings echoing across the walls, she did feel a bit more confident as she moved much quieter. Even setting aside the questions of self-consciousness, it seemed unwise to call attention to herself in a place such as this.

She approached the table, curiosity winning out over nervousness as she finally got a good look at the book sitting there, the pages well-worn and open to a middle section. There, repeated over and over again on every line, written in her own handwriting, were those same words covering the entirety of the page: “Eleanor, 6/20, guest”. It was like a mantra, a joke even. She flipped back a page, finding the exact same thing there. Another page back, however, and one entry immediately stood out among the sea of identical names and dates: “Ellie, 6/20, family”.

Was she expected to sign in? It hardly mattered. There was no way she’d be adding herself to that list, even if her name had technically been added hundreds of times over already. Just because it was her name didn’t mean it was her. She flew over the table to explore the rest of its contents, but was a bit taken aback to find that there were no drawers of cabinets that might make up a desk such as this. In fact, there wasn’t even a chair to sit at. It was like the whole thing had been wiped clean of context just like the rest of the room; the aesthetics of a function that had long since been forgotten.

Just past the table was a relatively tiny set of double doors that led further into the cathedral. Now that she was inside, it seemed there was no need for the building to pretend anymore. A small stream of light pierced its way across the floor from the crack between the doors, as if pointing her in the direction she needed to go.

She was instantly drawn to it, the purest light she’d seen since coming to the town. She had been so conditioned to accept the dull sunlight that filtered its way down from the clouds that now, seeing a bright white untainted by the unrelenting gray that wormed its way into every inch of this place, she was almost blinded. She had no choice but to approach it. After all, there certainly wasn’t anything for her outside.

A soft glide brought her to the front of the doors, entranced by the glimpse of normalcy they offered her. She’d forgotten what sunlight looked like after so long without. Was this it? She pressed a hand against the door, feeling the coarse wood against her hand, and pushed forward, slowly, so as to savor the moment, and she covered her eyes in anticipation.

As she stepped through the light was, in fact, not blinding, but it was omnipresent. It became clear that the source of the light was the rows and rows of candles arranged in every tiny crevice around the room. The room itself was low, confining even, the ceiling crossed by a series of wooden cross beams that seemed more for decoration than any structural purpose, covered in candles just like everywhere else. And on the floor were pews, dozens of rows that stretched forward to the front of the room where there sat an ornately polished black coffin, lid closed.

Atop the pews sat hundreds of versions of herself; haggard, worn, and broken bodies filled the room, pitiful and wretched in their silent, shifting forms. The room was eerily quiet as she surveyed the gathered mourners, being sure not to linger on any particular form for too long. She didn’t want to know. Her eyes drew further and further to the center of the room, where she came to notice the large printed photograph propped up next to the coffin: an image of her own face, just as tired as the rest, with the feathers of a pair of light gray wings just barely visible in the upper corners of the image. Another version of herself stood at the front, head bowed reverently behind a podium.

Eleanor folded her own wings behind her back self consciously.

She nervously tried to find an empty seat in the back, but as she began to settle herself into one of the corners, her voice came from the podium at the center of the room.

“We’re so happy you could join us, Eleanor. Please, come take your place. It certainly isn’t mine, and I’d hate to take it from you.”

All the eyes in the room turned to face her. She saw a sea of bedraggled faces, all different states of health yet none content, look back at her with expectant eyes. They said nothing, yet they didn’t need to, as the expectation made it clear what she was to do. Eleanor reluctantly shuffled over to the center of the aisle, the weight of the eyes crushing her instinct to run away. She stepped, the whole room holding its breath, the only sound her soft footsteps against the stone floor. She did her best to make her wings as small and inconspicuous as she could against her back, but she could feel the tension in the room go up as she walked by and more and more people saw them, almost as if they hadn’t believed the photo at the front of the room until it was right in front of them, living, breathing, and undeniably real.

She stood awkwardly at the podium, every eye in the room set upon her expectantly. Someone let out a cough, a cough which turned into a painful hacking, then stopped just as abruptly as it started. She turned her gaze away from the crowd before her and instead to the photo propped up against the coffin. It was her, uncomfortably honest in her depiction; even with her wings she looked like she’d walked for ages, every bit of her body sagging as if the mere effort of standing was rapidly proving to be too much to ask. Within that image, however, she saw something else, something that maybe she wasn’t supposed to see. She was still standing in the image. Despite everything she had obviously gone through, she never did lay down and quit. The world hadn’t been able to throw anything at her that she couldn’t handle, and it had certainly done its best. Here she was, dead and being mourned, yet even this reflection of herself had never quit. Was she supposed to be scared? She wasn’t. Not of this town, not anymore.

“I’m not like any of you,” she breathed to herself, the words beginning as a sigh of relief before a smile grew on her lips and turned the words to a laugh. “I’m not like any of you!” She looked out across the sea of wretched faces, desperate pretenders that could only hope to ever hope to be like the real thing. None of them were Eleanor but herself, nor would they ever be her. “Were you expecting me to give up here? Just lie down and accept the cycle of hell you’ve laid out for me? This is desperate! You’ve got nothing left, and yet here I am! You couldn’t break me, because I’m the real Eleanor! I am Eleanor! I, am, Eleanor!”

She shouted these three words, repeating them again and again, turning them to a mantra and spreading her wings wide as she did so. She had no regard for the figures crammed into pews before her anymore; her only audience was herself and none other. She laughed, the weight of the town sliding off as she kicked over the empty coffin behind her, sending shocked gasps through the crowd in front of her.

She was to the ceiling in an instant, effortlessly shooting upwards and breaking through the cloud ceiling into the mist above, leaving the hideous bastardizations of her own self image a mere memory that would surly fade away with time.