"You ready for this?" Lucy's question reverberated across the incredible breadth of the rift. She was standing at the edge of the opposing half of the ruined bridge moored on the floating garden of seraphic Elysian fields, "Leap, and you will forget everything. Prove that you belong to this harbor. Leap, and you will be free. That's what you want, right?"

Daniel was at the other bridge segment, looking down at the meadow's minuscule details underneath his feet, teetering on the cusp of making his mind up. He stood at the tip of a broken link, fearful he would make a wrong move, a wrong decision. He was fiddling around in the back of his head.

Lucy twirled her umbrella. "Look at me, Daniel," she said, her irises staring at the boy's silhouette a kilometer away, "Know when to quit and free yourself from all lies that have frozen your heart. Then and there, you'll see the beautiful things you care about the most."

His senses flickered in and out. His eyes projected mists of his fifth birthday and other memories. Mirages of impressionistic pictures materialized before his goggles, like when his mom and dad were romantically dancing underneath the mistletoe. Next, he saw his hands clasped with other tiny hands while running round and round with his friends in cute furry animal costumes. His ears began to fill with echoes of merriment and melodies; his nose followed the aroma of meaty and saucy spaghetti; his tongue drooled over the sweet taste of it. He was stuck with beautiful memories. Too vivid, he reached out for them. Then, as his fingernails clawed the projection, it vanished into thin air. "I swore to myself not to look back," he whispered, looking down.

"Does abandoning them make you happy?" she asked.

Her puzzling question made his throat constrict as if someone was strangling him. "No," he answered. His lungs were paralyzed in indecision. "Yes?"

"Your mind swam with guilt and hatred at the very thought of giving up on them, thinking only of yourself. You are too fixated on ideas of the need to belong and the need to love and be loved. You—"

Daniel raised his hand, cutting her off, seething in ire. "Who are you anyway?" His inquiry crawled through the vines linking the ruined suspension bridge. "You don't know anything. This is my life," he went on with a bile tinge in his convoluted belief.

"I am Lucy." She angled his chin to the fore, her eyes set alight, "I am your friend."

"Friend?" he chortled in derision at her reply.

"You weren't the same Daniel I remember before, living his brain in a cloud full of innocence and purity. I've been watching you all the time."

"Well, I'm not a child anymore, and obviously, you're not my guardian angel because they don't exist. I don't believe in fantasy!"

"You have suffered a lot, but that was because you had been living up to promises and goals you engraved into your essence."

The boy smirked. "Sometimes, I am as riddled as the tide listening to your words. You are like my deranged mother talking in tongues," he rolled his eyes, "And I don't have even the slightest idea of going back."

"Rage dishevels judgment, disparages sentiments, and despises truth."

"I am not angry. I am a grown-up!" he pointed out.

Lucy looked at her free palm, where the lad's toys nestled at peace. "But you were comforted by Mr. Lens and Lady Mondragon, your friendly toys, that together you will defeat Umbrae," she pitched them back to Daniel at blistering speed.

The boy stopped the racing toys through the air with the adroit catching skills of his hands. "How do you know about the Umbrae?" he unclasped his palms and examined the objects.

She smiled, fluttered her eyelashes, and did not give him an explanation, "There was a design written for everything."

"A book of happy beginnings, suffering in the middle, and extreme sadness at the end like my life—like the apocalypse around," he fathomed the rusty steel stretching endlessly behind. "You are talking about our rotten daily lives!"

She clapped her hands. The clapping sound traveled throughout the solid structure. The bridge groaned. "Bravo! However, I wonder if the Umbrae, those ruthless fiends, have already spotted your cliff and started searching for sources of light from the people hiding from them."

Suddenly, the sun over the horizon was obscured by clouds of disorder—corpses, ruins, and rubbish. In a wink of an eye, it blanketed the lands in shadows and fear. A perilous onslaught was about to wipe out his hometown.

Daniel's pupils dilated, and his gaze was hazed with worry. "The Umbrae flourished unchecked, and now they engulfed Helios," he whispered, then cocked his head, staring at the invading gloom. His solid composure sapped.

"You said those things were snatchers of light... of love," she placed a palm over her chest. "Look back! Remember the promise you've told your dad that you would take care of her until she is okay. Well, she is not okay, and you left her inside your home all alone, counting the remaining minutes of her existence. She was lost—too lost—and she needed a victor who would guide her into the light."

The train of words started to become distinct, hammering his eardrums.

She continued, "It is painful that you now know that you are not her child, but it is painful for her, too, to tell it to you. Your mother, you, and even your father longed to be released from the curse you had cast upon yourselves after the infant died. You forget the bond that had made you as a family," she paused, "But the three of you always keep thinking of her, of Luna."

Daniel burst into tears and glued her palms together in contrition, penitent and downcast. "I am just a human, a stupid boy... just a helpless and nameless orphan."

"Just a helpless and nameless child. No," she shook her head, "You are wrong!"

The boy lifted his sobbing face slowly. He parted his lips, allowing some fresh air to enter and sharpen his hearing to heed what she had to impart.

"Look at me," Lucy adjusted her huge white floppy hat to expose more of her composed face.

The syllables of each word that had fountained from her mouth echoed through the deep valley like a metrical beat of a drum, synchronously matching the pounding of Daniel's heart. "You gave yourself entirely to those you love. You readily bore all things for the sake of whom you love. You served only those who showed you love. And you distinguished that their love has more value than your love." She painted a curved line on her face, "You, Daniel, are love. What you choose will quench those tears forever."

He cupped his crestfallen face with his palms, kneeled, pored over simultaneously, and sobbed over his made sacrifices. His eyes witnessed how he exhibited bravery in the face of adversity. Afterward, he felt a warm glow thawing his frozen core. He realized that everybody cries and hurts, feeling on their own and cursing their puny existence at some point in their lives. With all was said and done, he held his head up high, faced in defiance what had made him weak, and hung on.

"Dredged up your memories and remember what you felt when she cradled you in her arms," she blinked her eyes rapidly, "She chose you! She loves you!"

The corners of his mopey lips turned winsome. "I'll keep my promise. I'll love them until the end. And I'll lift the curse and revive what was lost!"

"Good! You've chosen a virtuous decision," she smiled, "Because, Daniel, it is not your time to cross the great divide," her voice trailed off.

A colossal landmass hovered over the terrains of the suspended oasis. Birds and insects flew in different directions. The flaking anchorages and pylons convulsed, and a few corroding cables snapped. The perpetual torrent of sparkling water swelled, flooding its hallowed jurisdiction with different sizes of globoids of holy water. It made the gap between Daniel and Lucy like a sublime breadth of a glittering mystical sea. It took his breath away as the bubbles inside each globoid fizzled with empyrean music. Slowly the floating utopia drifted away as if the tides were pulling it.

"Daniel," Lucy called his name, "A humble child. Go on. Go back." These were the last words the boy heard from her mouth, overflowing with paradoxical lyrics.

The lovely sprawling vines broke abruptly with a sharp sound. The poor boy hurriedly grabbed the rail while his eyes were fixed in steady intent on the girl whirling a parasol with her playful fingers. In a flash, Lucy disappeared. Only a few snowy feathers pirouetting were left in mid-air. Her snowy parasol was caught by a blast of air and carried into the amber skies. He rushed out of the collapsing bridge, but it was too late to gather the barrette, magnifier, and cube. He forgot to put them back in his knapsack. The three items close to his heart rolled over and over, bouncing up and down until they fell and were consumed by the crumbling architecture.

The scenery was shockingly frightening. Splinters flew in all places, and it could blind his eyes. He pulled himself to get out of doom. He drew in huge breaths, dodging the handicraft of the spiteful Umbrae victoriously. And, of course, these monstrosities would never give up until they devoured all kinds of light in this world. They wanted to put him in darkness for the remainder of his existence.

The gigantic landmass had invited more fiends trailing behind, ready to loot the left beauty of San Maler. Daniel sucked in a startled breath when he observed the giant chunk of land traveling toward their house. He thought of his poor mother.

Debris from it plummeted into the dusty ground, draping the forest of defoliated birch trees with a thick haze. He fixed the goggles and the handkerchief snugly against his face. Then he traversed through the zero visibility hinterlands.

He needed to figure out what he was doing, asking himself if he was moving inland. His arms reached out, searching for some hard things to grab onto. His hands were getting sweaty underneath the tattered motorcycle gloves. He clawed the dirt below, pulling and pushing himself until numerous lanky things were slightly visible through the haze. It was the timberland of leafless birches. He wedged, birch after birch, getting nearer to the limit of the murkiness that the Umbrae had set to impede his plan to save his mother. My love for her will bring me closer to my vision, he thought as he moved away from the shady part of the woods.

Debris, such as automobiles and aircraft, were free-falling like meteors and asteroids, smashing houses, asphalt roads, and fences. He didn't linger to watch the awful destruction. He lurched forward, flying like an arrow, and coursed past the airplane with a missing cockpit, the leveled townhouses, the solitary milestone at the side of the road, and the towering roofless mansion overlooking their humble home.

From nowhere, a majestic islet crafted from moss-covered white sedimentary rock, a colossal limestone, emerged dramatically from his left. The base of it had a protrusion of a semblance of a dagger. His jaw dropped as the tip of the limestone blade touched the cliff grazing the topsoil. The scraping shook their streets tremendously. He snaked his arms on a post holding it firmly. He cocked his head to the left and witnessed three houses destroyed in a single hit. The wrecking continued demolishing the concrete footpath and the asphalt road. On his right, other wooden houses were demolished too.

Wails and shrieks agitated his anvil, hammer, and stirrup. He wanted to help those frightened people screaming out of breath, but he couldn't locate them in the bedlam before his face. He mouthed his sorry in the air for not trying to lend his hand to them. What he could only do for them was utter a prayer. He sighed.

The limestone islet of death finally intersected the precipice leaving an abysmal fissure in the ground. Daniel was still clutching the steel post with his enwrapping appendages. He poked an eye to take a look at his situation. He was lucky that the post did not detach from the ground. However, another obstacle sprouted. He craned his neck and looked carefully below. The sight quickened his pulse. He needed to cross over a hundred-foot crevice. He closed his eyes and persuaded himself that he could reach the other end. He swallowed a lump of saliva and snapped his eyes open. The boy positioned the sole of his dirty sneakers against the metallic pillar while his hands held the post, countering the opposing force made by his legs. Then, he bent his legs, released his hands, and kicked the post with all his might.

Daniel made an excellent catapult, and he was gliding smoothly headfirst. He traversed the rift effortlessly, but it was unmanageable, for there were no brakes, for there was less friction nor air resistance. He needed to do something to slow down. He jerked his head from left to right and up, looking for something to reduce his speed. The things he needed were all spiraling and reducing into pieces in the dusky dome of mayhem. He stretched his neck to the fore and saw their iron gate. It would be a few seconds away until he slammed his body against it. He curled like a ball getting ready for the impact. His legs bent, pressing to his chest, and his arms squeezed, looping like a pretzel. The aviator hat was his only armor from a fatal head concussion. I overcame some of the great pains known to humankind, and this one, I think, is not painful at all, he thought.

He rammed his side against the rusty gates. "Oh!" he groaned in agonizing pain.

Daniel bruised his right trapezius after the crash. He fastened his eyelids together, feeling the pain. He then pictured comforting things to numb the injury, which was remarkably helpful. The dying luminosity of the four o'clock tangerine sun dyed the skyline with drabness. He lifted the latch and opened the gate. His eyes widened because the old apartment building was gone, and the sidewalls of their bedrooms and part of the roof and ceiling of the attic were missing. His heartbeat rose at an incredible rate. "Mom!" he yelled, rushing towards the main door.

The worrying kid could not open the door even though he had already twisted the knob. He decided to break it. Crashing and thudding sounds boomed afterward when Daniel belly-flopped into the floor, pinning the abstract painting down that he swore he disliked. The living room, dining area, and kitchen were a mess. He collected the art from the floor, sprung up, and momentarily became apparent to him the "The Mother and Child" on the canvas.

It dawned on him that Nurse Samuel was right and that he needed to look at another angle to unravel its perplexity. Now that he was holding its frame upside-down, Daniel's eyes welled with tears, for he saw his mother's name, "Ynsia," on the upper half and his name, "Daniel," just below her name, stroked by paintbrushes in a fancy way of overlapping strange shapes and lines with a figure of somewhat a stretched tiny pinkish shape of a heart between their names. There was no signature on its surface, so he flipped the canvas and discovered that it was Ynsia's masterpiece. He got the wrong idea about the art's underlying meaning and the painter's intention. He was wrong about the painting. It was honest and genuine. He puffed out his cheeks and let out his breath. Then, the lad quickly ascended the stairs and tossed the abstract painting inside the undamaged study room.

Unceremoniously, he barged through her door. The main bedroom was untidy, and she was not there. The mellow orange light and the draught of warm air surged through the torn walls. He unzipped his leather jacket to cool his sweaty torso. Then, he looked for her in his room. It was cluttered too, and likewise, she wasn't there. His study desk by the missing windowpane was gone. Perhaps now, it was wandering up in the skies.

Fortunately, its drawer was dawdling on the edge of the ruined floor. When he was about to scoop the drawer to save the letters, a whirling wind, like a dust devil, snatched the rim of white papers and his written letters held in it. The papers flew randomly like confetti sprinkles outside. Some were descending like snowflakes wanted to touch the half of town below, and some fluttered like satin moths in the open air, going up and up, falling into the firmaments overshadowed by confusion and grayness.

"Mom?" Daniel spotted a silvery gown flapping like a flag caught above the cradle of decay. She was closest to heaven, and Daniel would not let her go again. Sooner or later, she would be deprived of air and scorched by the yellow star's harmful radiation.

"What should I do?" he asked as if speaking to himself, moving only his lower lip. A brain wave tickled his mind, an impossible amateurish plan popped, and it would be a dangerous wager. He returned to the main bedroom and plucked the floating small oxygen tank and the chain of leather belts. Then, he slid them inside his knapsack. And just around the corner, the large parachute bag with an albatross insignia caught his attention. He reached out, positioned the bag over his ribcage, and put all the straps on. He slid along the gray walls, pressed his shoes against the floor, hunkered down, angled his chin upwards, and aimed for his target.

There was boldness in his eyes. Adrenaline spiked and flowed through each blood vessel of his thin frame. Sudden as a lightning strike, he kicked the floor with all his strength and relinquished his foot on Earth. Daniel did a good trajectory—an ascent for the atonement of sins, of his imperfections and failures. He couldn't reconcile with his parents if he didn't offer his life. The sacrifice he made was pivotal for redemption. This one time, this last time, he wanted to make it right, to restore the shattered bond. If he bled because of this venture, it would be all right because his mind was all set. He affronted life and death to bring himself closer to his dream, believing he was fighting for something far more than mere survival, perhaps, for truth, concord, or could it be for love.

Now, the boy was at the nucleus of the cloud of chaos and imminent death, ready to be battered, bruised, and maimed. Other than the different sizes of rocks and rubbish revolving around him, there were uprooted trees, Greek and Roman statues, volumes of books, electronic gadgets, naval ships, tanks, artilleries, and kitchen knives. Trouble was as near as a shadow. He effortlessly dodged every single obstacle on his way as if he had in him a powerful amulet that enhanced his agility. He was defying weightlessness and slaying physics.

The debris kept smashing and crushing into smaller pieces, gradually declining into more disorder. The dearth of predictability of the churning deterioration gave a chance to a flat iron injuring his knee. He shrieked in excruciating pain. He kept rising, rising inch by inch, just to save his mother. Then, a ballistic missile exploded half a kilometer away from him. The blast startled him. He glanced back to see its spectacular fatal blaze.

Unmindful of what was ahead, a grand piano surprisingly materialized from his right and slammed into his side. He screamed inside as the keyboard instrument played a discordant tune. Several piano keys were hurled into a mass of dirt on his left. He headed towards it and hung onto it for dear life. He grasped the hammer stuck on it and used it as a mattock to aid him in crawling up the side of the mass. He then took a hurdle through a narrow zone without the vortex of obstacles. The smashing noises, a chorus of horror, intensified. He pressed his hands over his ears as if trying to crush his cranium. Then, a glass tank, an aquarium the size of a coffin, held him confined inside. Every side was made of thick glass. He was trapped. The aquarium, fortunately, didn't have water. However, it was spinning out of control. It was impossible to escape. With the hammer he had salvaged, he hit the glass with it, shattering the aquarium into shards. The shards made deep cuts on his face and his left arm. After a second, a sharp metal bar from a billboard clawed the left sleeve of his khaki leather jacket, baring his bleeding wounds.

The macabre went into slow motion.

A small voice told him to give up. Bugging him why he was doing this for love was an illusion—a vagary of perception. He cocked his head to the left and saw the rotting corpses by his side. Perhaps they whispered the words into his ears. Well, they highlighted that people were desperately trying to justify their existence, and it was foolish to put someone's life at stake. He unheeded their odes of temptations of defeat. I will never give up, he thought, shaking his head.

An ecstatic anthem in his heart cheered him up. He oriented himself upright and kicked the cluster of carcasses of different chordates, boosting him up and away. He flew like a bullet, but the odds never favored him. He plunged into a pellucid orb of water. He swam and swam as hard as he could. The clear liquid washed his cuts, turning the water to crimson. Until he came up gasping for air, trying to avoid swallowing the blood-stained water.

Peculiarly, the universe took his side, showing a speck of benevolence. He got a good hold on the dangling anchor of a gliding motorboat, but the rusty fluke cut into the meat of his hand. It helped free him from the wobbling globe of water and the roiling cataclysm. With his last strength and trick, he swung the rope, released his grip, stretched his arms and legs out, and hugged his mother snugly. Reunited were they, at last.

There was a moment of silence.

"Mom, I am here," his head ticked, "I am sorry." He shielded his mother with his body from the last shaft of light of the setting sun, providing enough shade for her. In consequence, it scorched the bare flesh of his arm, nape, and earlobes. The boy didn't complain. He resisted the waning minutes of the torturous heat.

The firmament turned purple, then indigo.

Cautiously with his shaky candle fingers, he fruitfully secured the straps of the parachute bag on her, and then he put the knapsack on his front, sandwiching between them. He unzipped the knapsack and put a hand into it. His fingers fondled a leathery texture in it. The belts, he thought, pulling them out. He bound the belts around their midriffs, pulling their bodies closer. This high, the air was too thin and bitterly cold. Thus, he searched the inside of his backpack for the cannula, inserted it into her nose, and adjusted the oxygen tank's pressure valve.

The sun was completely out of the horizon. He smiled. The adrenaline diminished throughout his system. His vigor expired. His frazzled body was burning up with fever. He surveyed around and found in surprise that the magnifying apparatus, hair barrette, Rubik's cube, and Potti were watching him from each direction. He took the blood-spattered goggles and hankie off to check if he was hallucinating. And it was real! He thought they had left him. They kept true to their promise of staying beside him until the very end. "Thank you," he whispered.

He reached out for her beautiful face, stroked the wisps of hair at her temple, and kissed her goodnight. "I love you, Mom," he said sweetly. Then in a tick, he blackened out. And in the starry nightfall, the poor kid and his dear mother simply floated away.