A man died. He died desperate. He died a human of an alien sickness. He died in the canyon between the desert spine of Galsia and the range called Clemency. He died on a holy pilgrimage called the Sword and the Stone. He died because he touched the stone. He died alone.

  A girl found him. First, she found the point of his consciousness, wayward, a wandering flame within inner reality – where dreams touch the edge of physicality. To the soul, she sang; and for the soul, she danced. For weeks, she did this nightly, depicted as her higher self, her awareness projected away from her sleeping physical body – the body of a child.

  Weeks later, physically, as the child she was, she found his physical body, the body his inner self had discarded.

  She was recently alone, escaped from both the prison of her childhood rearing and the only person she ever loved who loved her back.

  She was scared, but she knew the face. It was the same but milky white, gray-eyed, and broken under charcoal black hair.

  The body’s mouth was gaping, the eyes widened in a fixed expression of terror. But it was the face she grew to like, maybe even love, in the only version of probable futures she found bearable.

  And the body still breathed.

  “Rain,” she squeaked physically, unable to sound like the woman she'd always been in inner reality. “Rain?”

  The body gave no answer, and with her inner senses she detected no human presence. There was only a still and quiet awareness hovering just over the body, trying to force its way inside as it had done for weeks. This presence, she felt, was dull. It throbbed a steady pulse, just enough to keep the blood within the body circulating, the body breathing. But it didn't reach out. It felt as though it was waiting, waiting for a response from something – something somewhere far away and sleeping.

  “Rain?” she called. “Rain Gray?”

  She closed her eyes and sat beside the body. She leaned on its shoulder, rested her face against its cheek.

  It flopped over, an arm smacking the dusty stone floor with a thud.

  The presence became aware of her. It changed from a dull yellow to a brighter orange as it flinched and shrank away from her. It became red and then it extended so that it was the colors of the rainbow, only still, it wasn't human, and the colors weren't arranged in the human pattern.

  What was it thinking? Could she decipher such an alien frequency?

  It only wondered, a simple question: can I... infect... this host?

  “What?” she asked it.

  “May I enter your body? I will it if I may. I will it very much. Help me to do so? Will you help me to do so by leaving? Will you leave of your own volition so that I don't have to make you go? You do not need to be here. You can go away. You can. You can. You can do that.”

  “No,” she said back. “This is my body. You can't have it. I'm using it alone.”

  The presence brightened brighter, so she scolded it with a shushing look and blanketed it with a burning field of white light.

  It cowered back, diminished, and was gone.

  The body of Rain gasped, and one of the eyes tracked slowly until it met her astonished gaze. This was good; the bodily consciousness remained intact.

  “The body is still alive,” she said. “Rain! Come here! I can put you back! I know how to do it! I do!”

  There was no response. In the dark and rocky expanse, there was just Agnessa, a girl of nine years old, and the dead young man of nineteen.

  “RAIN!” she shouted within inner reality.

  She found him. He was creeping along one of the tunnels of the monastery she had fled, the rock-cut wonder of the ancient world she'd called home.

  He noticed her presence and looked at her. She shared her thoughts with him, and he saw where she was, though he did not see her there as her physical self.

  He was there in an instant.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked. “I was looking for you, but I couldn't find you.”

  “I'm hiding,” she said. “That's why you can't see me. No one can. I'm hiding from my brother. He's looking for me, I think.”

  “He must be hiding too, for I felt him not,” Rain said.

  She nodded. “He is. He's physically buried in the rocks,” she said, gesturing in the direction from which she'd come, a gesture he could not see but could very strongly feel. “But he's not hiding from me so that I cannot find him. He's wandering in some probable future. He’s looking for a probable me that can unwittingly reveal to him my secret: where I was hiding right now in this probable past. He will not find out.”

  Rain looked at his physical body when he realized it’d been his. Although it had distracted him, he got the gist of what she'd said.

  “I need you here,” she said, and he felt those words to the core, as she'd intended. “Rain, I need you to focus physically again for me, if only for a while.”

  He grimaced. “Why would I do that? I died. I'm dead. And it's great, better than before.”

  “To help me, Rain. I need your help.”

  “In what way could I help you? I'm like a baby while you're like God.”

  She looked perplexed. “In every way, you could help me. You could,” she said. “And I know you would. I'm not a god, or anything like that. And yet my task requires that I struggle against forces equivalent to one, and I can't. Not without you. Don't you see that? I see it clear as anything.”

  Rain crossed his arms. “I can't anyway. My focus is no longer physical. I'm beyond that now.”

  “Are you?” she asked.

  He flinched; the question was deliberately cruel, for the dead usually believe their death is some sort of graduation. That is, if they know they're dead. “Mostly,” he admitted.

  “Are you?” she asked again, sharing with him a flash of his very human desires, yearnings and despairs; all the things he’d kept at bay now hovered nearest to the surface of his awareness. These flashes were not in words but were momentary enactments during which he realistically experienced all the things he desperately wished he'd experienced while still physically alive. He desired to extend his being to assist; he desired to expand as a physical being; he desired to love through success and failure in ways only possible under a threat of life or physical death.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  He scoffed at her in scorn. “Shame on you for making me admit that. How selfish of you.”

  I can grant you this chance to play out these scenarios physically,” she said. “That's why I ask. That's the only reason. I am capable of realigning you with your body. Do you know that about me?”

  He nodded. He knew only her true self, the multidimensional entity from which the fragment she was, that called herself Agnessa Iadora, sprang. It was, her higher self, as far as he could understand it, a completely developed goddess compared to what was his grubbiness and ignorance.

  “Then let me help you help me,” she said. “Isn't that what you want? To be as helpful to me as I've been to you? I feel that too. Feel it, Rain.”

  “I'm afraid,” he admitted, and it was true; who knew what he would be reunited with broken flesh?

  “I can do it,” she said. “I can make you whole and strong.”

  “But how will I appear? My body is broken.”

  “I can try...” she said. “I will try...” she said, “...to make you appear to be who you were before.”

  “I'll be a monster,” he said.

  “Not to me,” she promised. “I'll love you more and more.”

  “But to everyone who looks at me,” he said. “How can I bear this?”

  “For a while,” she said, even then searching through probabilities like one flips hurriedly through a book. “There are many examples you live out during which you're beautifully whole again,” she promised. “We can steer toward that. I can help you with the power of my deepest intent.”

  He sighed, a strange thing to do without a physical body, and yet something he found himself frequently doing nonetheless. “I want you to know that I do this only under pressure. I want you to remember that I do this against my will.”

  “Thank you,” was all she replied.

  He didn't say anything for a while. In a moment, he felt a cold rush move through every aspect of his awareness. It quickly warmed, and he felt weightless as he floated, as his inner vision faded. Stars rushed past; universes surrounded him. With a pop, he was outside of all known physical space. He was in an area within inner reality throughout which nothing had ever directed a thought. The space was fresh, completely unused, and yet directly at the center of an overlapping point where all realities coincide.

  Everything black became a warm blue, like the sky on a sunny day without a sun, cloud or world to blight it with anything but it itself. There was a warming sensation of endless love that stretched on for eternity. A feeling of blissfulness seeped into his every being until he forgot that he was anything more than bliss itself, for that bliss, the bliss of love toward the possibility of endless creative expression, was what fueled existence to begin with.

  He heard a familiar sound, that ringing pitch in the center of awareness that rises in clarity the more one focuses on it. It overwhelmed him until he breathed it in, and breathed it out, and his heart beat slowly, and then galloped faster.

  He gasped. His throat hurt like knives had cut slices within him, from his mouth to his lungs.

  Agnessa felt the pain within him and soothed it.

  His eyes cracked, dry and pained. She soothed those too.

  His lungs were shallow, and she helped him to expand them.

  His skin was bruised all over and she made it smooth and relaxed.

  She relaxed his muscles, from his head to his toes.

  She evened the frequency of his brain so that it synced with that of his inner being.

  She stretched and calmed his nerves.

  She reminded his cells of who he’d been, and they immediately went on the attack against alien intrusions.

  He quaked in fever, and she sped the process in confidence that he would live.

  He did live, and she tried one last thing:

  She reached within herself and painted his appearance to look as beautiful as the man he'd been in inner reality.

  But his cells paid her no heed. Cells are shaped by who we are, what we see ourselves to be.

  In that crucial moment, as he gasped, he remembered only that he'd been dead, broken, tarnished, and abandoned to lie unattended for weeks. He believed it in his core, that that was his reality.

  This is how he appeared to be.

  He stood, his head rushing, the world of darkness spinning.

  She steadied him and assisted him as he left the place of his death.

  They wandered alone together, in the caves, slowly, for days. Eventually, they found the light of day through a small hole in the rock.

  They both blinked, blinded by the light.

  He looked upon her in horror. She was facially beautiful like a cherub, pale and feeble in the sun, silver-headed and with eyes that matched, just like within inner reality. But she was a child, very unlike the spirit he met in the afterlife, that fleeting dream to him now, that memory of a memory of a memory he could only remember to try to remember in vain.

  “I didn't know,” he began to say, only his jaw would barely move.

  A wave of fear crashed down upon him. Had they not been speaking all that time? Had he not seen her? Had they not climbed rocks and ventured tunnels in the dim light of her being? Had they not been in full view of one another?

  She grabbed his arm and steadied him, pulled him lower so that he stared at her in horror.

  “We were speaking with our inner voices,” she said physically, in a voice he didn't recognize. “We were seeing with our inner eye. Yes, I am a child. I'm sorry that I couldn't show you that. You'd never have come back with me if you'd known.”

  “A child?” he said. “So what?! Look at me!” he said, feeling at his face with his fingers, tracing every deformity, hiding it from her expressionless gaze.

  “I had to hide this from you,” she said. “I can make you feel whole again if you want. You'll forget it, the truth. I promise.”

  “Why did you ever stop?” he wept.

  “Because I was distracted,” she said. “I've never seen anything physical outside of the monastery. I've never seen the sky, or felt the wind, or shielded my gaze from the sun. I've been a rat in a hole, alone in the cold, for nine years. You understand.”

  He cried a pitiful cry of agony from his twisted and gnarled mouth. “Why didn't you fix me like you said?” he asked. “Did you not say you could fix me?”

  She shook her head, staring distantly at the oceanic horizon. It seemed to go on forever. Endlessly west. “I couldn't,” she said. “Not wholly,” she admitted. “I tried; I swear I did.”

  “You tricked me,” he groaned inside.

  She closed her eyes. “It's true. I did. I won't trick you anymore. You look like a walking dead man. You do. You really do.”

  “Show me,” he said.

  She looked at him and he looked back at her. She implanted within his thoughts an accurate depiction of his physical body as seen through her physical eyes.

  “I don't use them to see you,” she admitted to him. “I don't use them much at all. I live on the edge of two worlds, and the inner is so much prettier, even now.”

  He ignored her thoughts and fixated on his appearance. His nose was crushed. His mouth was gaped, and his chin was cocked to one side. His naturally tanned skin was milky white, and the vitality within his blue eyes was gone, a fade to a dark, dull gray. Despite his bodily strength, he could barely move a muscle in his face, and the result was a fixed expression of deathly horror, truly hideous to behold.

  “I want to die,” he cried, “right now. Dammit, I want to die! What did you do to me, you disgusting demon child?!”

  She shook her head. “You're lying. You want to live. Even still, you do.”

  “I want to die!” he said. “I do, I do, I do!”

  “Fine!” she yelled. “There is the cliff and there are the rocks,” she said, pointing. “Fall. I won't stop you, and I won't plead for you on the other side again.”

  He looked at her and she was gravely serious, her expression without feeling.

  Shakily, he stared at the cliffside. A breeze rose up just then, salty and clean, running through his hair.

  He looked at her and she stared at him with an unwavering intensity.

  He felt shaky all over. He felt nauseous and suddenly bent over and spewed.

  How could he not force himself to die? How could he be so scared to do so? He was dead just days ago! Dead! Not sleeping, dead!

  She reached up a hand to comfort him and he batted it away before collapsing. He heaved in and out, in sheer panic. He was hideous. Hideous! Ugly, putrid, dead!

  She eased him asleep and cleaned him up, put him into a deep trance in order to share with him a dream that depicted their probable future according to their matching unyielding intent. This was the last time her inner self would allow her outer self to glimpse these things, as this was and always had been its intended moment to separate itself entirely from her conscious awareness. That is, until she was to fulfill her task.

  It let them experience themselves wandering the world, sneaking, at times hiding. It promised them an end begotten fruitlessly according to every earthly measure of riches and glory. Theirs was an uphill battle to fight against forces much greater even than she would become. And he saw that, at best, he could help her very little. He was cursed to live life as a dead man, albeit slightly enhanced by the invasion of alien cells, the very cells that had evicted his personality from his physical body in the first place.

  Satisfied, Agnessa’s higher self turned its focus away from her. They both remembered very little, she little more than he. Little by little, he forgot his bitterness and distrust toward her, and she forgot her wisdom. She became a silly girl, and he became her quiet and reluctant companion. As she grew, she grew little on him. And as she grew, she grew to love him. There was always within him something she sensed as repulsion to her, although she knew not why. She only knew that, should she one day find it within herself to make him beautiful, he might allow himself to notice her beauty too.