[Chapter 1] — CHURCH OF OBSIDIAN

Obsidian is an igneous rock formed when lava erupts from a volcano and cools rapidly with minimal crystal growth. It’s a natural occurrence all over our planet, but at a church outside the borders of Lyfe City dwells and organization that worships a different kind of stone. A stone unknown to them will be the beginning and the end of everything we hold dear. They have come to call this stone Neo Obsidian.

“Hey, Soojin, want to hear a joke?” says an excited Spamn from his place beside Soojin in the grass.

“Do I have a choice?” Soojin asks. 

“How does the moon cut his hair?” he asks with a straight face.

Soojin glares at Spamn. “How, Spamn?”

“Eclipse it.” Spamn says with a grin. Soojin pulls her hoodie over her head and groans in embarrassment. Spamn reaches over to pull it back and away from her face. “Come on, Soojin, that was good!” 

She shoves him playfully while pulling her hood back up. Laughing, they pass shoves back and forth for another few turns as the sun begins to set. A sense of joy and love radiates from the two from their place under the giant willow tree just beside their church. To their other side a sign reads “The Obsidian Church and Shelter.”

Obsidian Church. A looming cathedral casting long shadows in the setting sun. On the facade of the church sits three arched doorways. The two archways on either side sit beneath a sloping stone roof lined on either side by a parapet. The center door is set under two large, stained-glass windows flanked by two smaller ones of the same rectangular shape. Above the center windows, a smaller, circular window. The center stoned roof meets at a point, with a small tower resting above.

This is where the homeless, the lost and the weary can stay and live peacefully among friends. A sanctuary, one could say.

Silence lingered between the two young souls as they stared up through the canopy of the willow tree, watching the light of the sun change from a stark orange to a soft pink. The company of each other more than enough. 

Spamn thinks back to the sermon he sat through earlier. “Interesting speech Father Kingston gave today, huh?”

“It’s all the same to me,” Soojin says, uninterested.

“I’m just saying it was strangely optimistic. It’s a nice change of pace to the usual doomsday and new world talk he gives.”

“Well, do we really have a choice in what we hear?”

Spamn glances away from her and back to the darkening sky. “It’s cliché but it’s nice to hear.”

Spamn jolts up, remembering the bag laying next to him. He reaches in and grabs an apple. “Before I forget, I brought us some apples to eat. After lunch they were going to be thrown out before they could go bad and it was kind of sad.”

Soojin laughs softly, asking “So you rescued a bunch of sad apples?”  

“No!” Spamn answers quickly with embarrassment. “Most people never touch an apple if it’s with a bunch of other food. Basically, it spent its entire life coming go from farm to warehouse then on to a truck and so on, eventually just to be thrown in the trash. It’s whole life just one long road to being thrown in the garbage.” Soojin tries to hold back her laughter at hearing this but fails miserably.

“What’s so funny?!” Spamn asks with a furrowed brow. 

“That you think an apple has a life!” she replies. 

“Well, doesn’t everything?”

From a distance a woman’s voice calls out to them. Spamn and Soojin lift their heads to see Apostle Onamika Sleepwalker walking towards them, her walking stick helping to guide her steps. A patient woman with a constant smile and eyes permanently shut. The wind blows her white and black Kurti as she walks. By now the sun has fully set and the moonlight illuminates her long black hair and brown skin. Beautiful yet oddly haunting, as if there is something hidden deep in her soul. “It’s getting late and I’m not going to deal with you two if you catch cold,” she says. 

Spamn and Soojin stand, beginning their walk back to the church hand in hand. The two walk with Onamika back inside. Onamika looks at the bag of apples in Spamn’s hand. 

“Thank you,” she says.

Confused, “For what?” Spamn asks. 

“For giving them a home.”

I wish I could tell you the story begins a new the next day. I wish I could tell you all the happy things that would happen between Spamn and Soojin…but, sadly, Spamn is too busy holding a dying Soojin in his arms, hands pressing to the stab wound in her abdomen. The walls of Obsidian Church ablaze all around them. Chaos at an all-time high as those who came to this church for hope trample over the bodies of those felled by the fire to reach escape.

Father Isaac Kingston stands before Spamn and the dying Soojin, blood dripping from his blade. Fire blows through his black trench coat, blood dripping from his platinum white hair and suit. “You two have interfered long enough with the plans of this church. Did you think I wouldn’t notice your plans to stop us?” he yells.

Kingston’s words don’t reach Spamn. The sight of Soojin slowly leaving this world, leaving him, is too great. His hands rattle, clutching her body in hopes that the harder he holds, the better chance of keeping her with him.

“The Neo Obsidian will burn this place to the ground and lift us to the new world. A world you still refuse to understand. Regardless, I cannot let you leave without being a part of the reckoning of a new age. Soojin was stubborn. I don’t understand why you chose to lay with her and think the pleasures of the flesh were more critical than becoming what you are meant to be.” Kingston sneers.

Spamn looks up at him, tears lining his eyes. “And what was I meant to be?” he asks, holding back a sob.

“Sacrifice.” Kingston says, hate clear in his dark eyes.

Blinded by rage, Spamn charges Kingston. 

“After all I’ve done for you, this is how it ends? With you dying ungratefully?!” Kingston screams. 

Spamn unleashes a sea of punches, each hit growing stronger in his grief and rage. “Don’t you dare try to play the victim. You used all of us so you can play god! Or maybe you thought playing the devil was more effective!” 

Flames grow higher inside the church as Spamn tackles Kingston to the ground. 

“And if that’s the case, I’ll see you in hell!” Spamn yells through his punches, his knuckles breaking from the force of them. 

The blows stop abruptly as a sudden sharp feeling stabs into Spamn’s guts. He looks down to see blood draining from his shirt. His blood. Everything starts to darken around Spamn, the world becoming more silent as he falls to the ground. The last thing heard before all goes black is Kingston’s voice, “Counting on it.”

Walls crumble as the columns within the church begin to fall, the church collapsing in on itself. Whatever this plan Kingston had for this “new world” was creating a devilish hellfire. The bodies of all those inside, those who trusted and believed in him, nothing but tinder for his inferno. He encouraged his followers to be what they were meant to be, which to him meant sacrificial fuel for this hellscape he calls the new world.

Twirling clouds dance in the dark void smothering Spamn as he lays suspended in what seems like infinity. No sound or air. No feelings bathe him as he remains still in this space. “Where am I?” he thinks to himself, but there’s no answer in sight. “Am…am I dead?! No…it can’t be. It can’t end like this!”

The thought swirls in Spamn’s head and his feelings return in a panic. The panic turns to screaming as the thought of him losing everything becomes more and more apparent. Spamn didn’t have much in life but finding her, finding Soojin, and having her in his life was more than enough. Now she’s gone, taken from him. 

His feelings are coming back stronger now, deeper. Pain. His heart beating a thousand times a second, a rabid animal trying to break loose from its cell. Unable to breathe, his lungs feeling as they might burst. 

This is it. This is real.

Spamn is dead.

“Spamn.”

A soft voice in the darkness.

Spamn stops his thrashing when he hears it. “Who’s there?!”

From the void, a hooded figure approaches. It is covered in head to toe in black tattered cloth. Slowly, the figure walks toward Spamn, gently taking his hand and pulling him towards it. Suddenly, Spamn’s panic is melted away by the touch of this figure. “Who are you?” Spamn asks warily. 

“Funny,” says the figure. “I haven’t thought about that. I guess you can name me.”

The confusion shows strongly on Spamn’s face. It’s not everyday that one meets someone who knows your name and asks for one in return. He thinks for a second, but all he can think of is what’s standing in front of him, not a name for it. 

The figure cocks its head. “I’ve wandered this place of death and ash for so long things like names and titles have long since left my thoughts.” 

“Death and ash?” Spamn says to himself and thinks for another moment. When he finally speaks to the figure he has a name for it. “Ashe?” he asks.

“Ashe? Very well. My name is Ashe.” 

Ashe turns its head, directing Spamn’s gaze to the world of death that surrounds them. When he looks its no longer darkness that he sees, but an endless sea of clouds, dancing around fields of illuminating gases. Stars beyond them as if it were from a painting, spotlights on a stage with one platform to stand on. A cosmic beauty.

“Spamn there isn’t much time to talk, but there is a way to get everything back.” Ashe tells him. 

His eyes widen at the words Ashe just spoke. “I can get everything back? How?! Didn’t I die?” he says almost frantically.
“Yes, you did. What you will soon learn, Spamn, is death and our universe aren’t what you thought at all. Even with your knowledge of the Neo Obsidian.”

Spamn yells, “That goddamn rock is the cause of all of this?”

“Yes.” Ashe says assuredly. “What if I told you the very thing that caused your fate is the same thing that gives birth to your destiny?” Ashe’s words, as cryptic they may be, have Spamn’s undivided attention. 

“The Obsidian Cup is the answer, Spamn.” 

Blinking at Ashe, Spamn asks “What’s the Obsidian Cup?”

Ashe points into the distance, a faded structure coming into view. A tower that reaches the heavens, covered in black stone. “The Obsidian Cup is a massive structure built to bridge the world of the living and the dead. Whoever reaches the top will be granted reincarnation. With that reincarnation you take back a piece of your life from before, but there is one problem. Reaching it requires you to fight. Fight the others who seek it and the people that are guarding it. It won’t be easy, but I think you have the strength to do it.”

Soojin is the only thing that came to mind when Ashe spoke of bringing a piece of your previous life with you. Is it possible to go back and have Soojin as well? What choice does he have now? A sliver of hope is greater than no hope at all. 

“I’ll do anything!” Spamn shouts, but then another thought comes to mind. “Wait, why are you telling me this? Why are you helping me? What do you gain from any of this?”

While he’s almost sure there’s no face beneath that hood, Spamn swears he can see the ghost of a smile. “Let’s just say we both have a common goal at the end of all this.” Ashe admits.

Thunder strikes in the distance, and the clouds open beneath Spamn’s feet, sinking as if it were the ocean he was falling in to. “Wait! I have more questions!” he begs, falling deeper into the abyss. 

Ashe looks from above as he falls, “Spamn, the world you’re about to enter will be one of great darkness, but you have the brightest heart I know of. You will be the light that brings all of us back from the darkness.”

The clouds swallow Spamn completely. All sight is lost, and all he can feel is a sudden pressure encompassing him. It tightens to the point where he can’t move anything. He tries to push against the pressure until he feels what seems like an opening. It’s solid and soft like the ground, so digging appears to be the only option out. The soil gives way to a small light in the darkness. A small bit of hope jolts through him. Spamn digs as hard as he can until he breaks an arm through and as quickly as he can works himself out. Gasping for air, he emerges from the pit. Finally pulling his legs free, he stands slowly and looks around trying to grasp what is happening. 

Covered in dirt with his clothing ripped apart stands a Spamn unlike before. An undead Spamn. His now blackened eyes stare out to a world of death. Gray clouds cover the sky with lightning striking in the distance. He stands speechless. And with his first step into this world of death, his journey begins.