Chapter 4: The Black City - and - The Eyes of Her Killer

Tommy lay in his bed recounting what he considered a successful day. What? Whitney thought to him after they retired from the second part of their session. I let you get to seventy-two! He couldn’t help but to laugh with her when she made that comment. She was finding a part of herself that neither of them previously knew existed. His baseball coach referred to that part of her as the ‘spirit of competition’.

He could relate to it because he had that himself. That part of you drove you to be better than the person or people you were up against. That part of you wanted to win and drove you to strive to become better. She had it and it was no longer dormant.

Her last move was so quick, there was no way he could match it. He didn’t think he would ever be able to match that kind of speed and she told him why she did it. She didn’t want him to get to seventy-three. She wanted to make sure her score was one better than his was.

She was out of shape. If she trained her body, she would be lethal. There was no doubt about it.

Blake noticed the change in Whitney, too, and he realized it almost as soon as he walked through the door.

“I see that someone’s in a chipper mood today,” he commented as Whitney gave him a hug. The fact that she greeted him that way was probably enough to clue him in. Whitney wasn’t a hugger. More often than not, she would greet him with a simple “Hi, Uncle Blake,” and leave it at that.

They were heading into a new chapter in their lives. Tommy’s only hope was that it would be enough. Lately, he dreaded sleeping because every night dreams of his sister’s future death filled his dreams. This night, he was looking forward to going to sleep, because they had done something that might just have the potential to change that.

Tommy closed his eyes and quickly drifted off to the city of black.

When he opened his eyes again, he wasn’t in Burnsville anymore. Burnsville was so far away that he would have no idea of how to get back home again—if he had to walk.

When Tommy’s eyes opened, he was back in the Black City. The entire city was black. Every wall, every tower, and every conical spire was made of the same black metallic material. It was a city, but the city existed as one humungous castle. The castle itself was as big as the entire town of Burnsville and the city was cut from a mountain that seemed to be made of the same thing.

Tommy didn’t have a body when he awoke. He never did. His existence in the city was just the perception of it. He had no control over where he went or what he saw. He saw whatever he dreamed of seeing. He had seen different things at different times along his dream life. As he began to float through the dark corridor, he couldn’t see any people, but that didn’t mean that there were no people.

Some of the people were a little different. There were some normal, humans, but there was also an older looking man who looked like he had torn bark from a tree as skin. There were insect looking beings, resembling praying mantises but their chests opened and closed whenever someone was close to them. Tommy always had the impression that these creatures were going to eat the other residents, but they never did. Then there were the grey women.

Most of the residents in the city wore armor as they moved about. Sometimes the residents in the city would have blood on them, or sometimes wounded, and all of them had black swords that seemed impossibly sharp, but the grey women were especially impressive. All of them seemed to be at least six feet tall, and some of them as tall as seven feet. Their grey skin looked smooth, as if it should be shiny like a dolphin skin, but it wasn’t shiny. Some of the grey women wore their hair shaved on one side of their heads, but two of them did not. They wore their hair behind their heads, braided in large loops, brought back up to the backs of their heads and secured there, giving their heads a butterfly look. Other than their height, the only real difference that Tommy could see between these grey giants and humans, were their ears. They each had three little antennae protruding from the tops of them.

Prim? his dream-self thought.

They never wore armor, but they always carried more weapons than anyone else did. They wore skintight tunics of varying color, with military looking belts that crossed in front of their chests before wrapping around their waists. The belts had weapons mounted to them and the grey women displayed their personalities through their weapon choices. Some of them carried bows, some had crossbows and swords, all of them seemed to have at least a few daggers and one of them had a whip mounted to her waist. A few of them had a bolas and all of the blades on all of their swords and daggers were black.