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There’s no point in attempting to rest.
He gave up on the possibility of sleep days ago. Only catching fleeting fistfuls of shut-eye when his body fails him in the late morning hours before each new, impending dawn.
Collapsing over his desk when he should be working.
(Failing.)
No point in attempting to rest—it’s all too loud. He hears Eva downstairs at the piano. Playing her beautifully melancholic melodies. He doesn’t recognize the music, beyond it being hers.
He hears voices in the walls. They whisper to him. Their words are sweet. Sweet like molasses. Filling his ears, weighing him down. Clogging his thoughts. He can’t bloody think. He has become sick with the Plague.
He knows it’s melting his brain. Making him hear things, see things. Orderlies in their great bird costumes corporealize in his room out of the corner of his eye. Not orderlies. Something… else. He doesn’t know. There’s so much he doesn’t know in this fucking backwater town. Seemingly existing in a separate reality of folklore and demons and black magic all its own. He’s losing all his faculties.
(He’s failing.)
Without his mind, the Bachelor is nothing. He knows this. The brain is magnificent. It’s what separates man from animal. It’s where the rule of science was first birthed. Through the human mind, anything is possible.
The Polyhedron’s light caresses him from the annular window near his desk. Anything is possible.
He scowls.
This impossible Tower, this paper rose high in the clouds, it could be the answer to what he’s dedicated his life searching for. It could change the world. It could change the very course of human history!
Finally—at long last—there could be no more suffering.
Coming here was supposed to be his one chance. His last chance. The last hope against hope he held of saving his career. His reputation! No— no. It was never about him. His life is insignificant in it of itself. He is but one man. It was never about him. Not him, but his dream, his paramount goal: to defeat Death. He must achieve his goal. He had to believe he could. He was the only one who could. Had to make life worth living.
What the hell happened to it all? Daniil casts his vacant gaze to his open journal. As if to remind himself. As if he could’ve forgotten the date. Misremembered it. Gotten it wrong. Like he wasn’t counting every day, every somehow-much-too-brief hour since he discovered there was an infectious disease on the loose and feeding. It’s been just eight short days.
A week and change. That’s all it took. All that was needed to destroy his entire life and everything he was.
His one chance was gone before he ever even arrived. Taken in the night by a microbial assassin as he was only stepping off that old, rickety train.
(He failed before he had begun.)
The journal offers him nothing he didn’t know.
Daniil looks away. Turns to gaze out the window.
Below it, there’s a shelf. Filled with books and various, small tchotchkes. He hasn’t touched that shelf since before yesterday. A cozy dining tray rests upon it. The tray had been left by Eva. She took to sharing whatever food or other means she had with him. And he had done the same, for her. His tea sits there, in a lilac-painted cup, unfinished. It’s cold now. Gone cold. Her body. Cold.
(He failed her.)
(He failed everyone else alongside her.)
(He failed his allies back home.)
(He failed.)
It was all a lie from the very start. Chasing tales of immortal dragons out in the middle of the wretched, empty Steppe. What an idiot he was! He was being mocked.
It was a lie. It was horseshit. An illusion of potential victory that he fell prey to so easily. His one chance. Last chance. It was all he had left. Daniil loads a single bullet into his revolver. He spins the cylinder.
His last chance.
He holds the pistol to his lips; opens them.
The cadavers they had had at Thanat—
The cadavers he had researched on, before, back in the Capital, sometimes it was death by suicide. Their families too ashamed for a religious funeral. Shunning their deceased loved ones away for medical disposal, instead. (How pathetic.)
There is no heaven to be barred from.
Regardless, he has seen the trajectory of bullets piercing the brain. From the side or even the front, in rare cases. While quite likely to succeed, it is not the provably most effective solution.
Like everything he did, the Bachelor strived for unconditional perfection. He knew the best angle—through the mouth, pointed up toward the hard palate. Less skull to get in the way.
He pauses there. Barrel against his tongue.
This was his last chance. …And what was he doing? A single shot out of six? Only a 16.7% possibility of success. Foolish! Imbecilic! Cowardly! With odds that slim, why even attempt at all.
That’s not like him. He fights, he claws and scrapes his way forward to all his accomplishments. When the odds aren’t in his favor, he forces them to be.
Daniil hurriedly digs in his jacket pocket.
Two. Three. Four. Five—
Only five. That can't be right. He was certain he had more. He was sure he had traded…
It was seven. He had traded for seven in total. Gave that child, no older than ten years of age, a bracelet and a couple sewing needles for them. That much was true. But then.
Then he was cornered in an alley by a victim of the Sand Pest. They were delirious. Wouldn't listen to reason. He was backed into a molded-over wall and couldn't get away. Couldn’t escape. And he shot them. Him, Daniil Dankovsky—Bachelor of Medicine, a doctor, bound to the Hippocratic Oath!—shooting a patient. (As they begged for his help.) He couldn't risk them touching him. Couldn't risk catching their illness. So he shot them. Shot them point-blank. Shot them in cold blood. Shot a person whose only crime was believing that a doctor could aid them in their pain.
They fell.
Arms spread out before them. Darkened scarves and loose draping fabric fluttering off their limbs. Reaching for Daniil. Like a bird in flight. Like Eva. They fell.
He didn't even fucking shoot them right. He had panicked. Fired into the chest and not the head. Must have went through a lung. They were screaming; a shrill, gurgling sound. Spitting blood on his shoes and trouser legs, which he recoiled from. He wanted to help. He wanted to heal. He wanted…
The second shot was a loud wail through the night that brought absolute silence. He wouldn't call it mercy. He was their executioner. There was no mercy in killing the person whom he injured. He was a failure.
(Failure.)
Sitting at his desk, he has five shots. Nearly 85%. It would have to be good enough. For all his effort in avoiding the infected, for stopping that poor soul from touching him, he became ill anyway. He couldn't go out and trade with more children. Couldn't get them sick.
Like him.
(Failure failure failure)
He loads the gun. Spins the cylinder once more. He has five shots.
His last chance.
Burakh will surely find him. Who else would ever come here? In the town that despises him. To this empty house. He's a failure. He should write something. A goodbye. That’s what people do. (Isn’t it?) He should tell Burakh not to blame himself. That ridiculous, soft-hearted man (truly, the diametric opposite of himself) takes everything as a burden onto his shoulders. Yet as broad as those shoulders are, he can’t carry everything. Daniil sees him. He sees the way his dear colleague bends under the weight of it all.
He should tell him, tell him… tell him that he's a better doctor than Daniil could ever claim to be.
Tell him that Isidor Burakh would be proud.
Tell him he’s a good man. A great man. The best Daniil has ever known.
Tell… his feelings. So they won't be lost. Like the feelings he will never get to tell Eva…
Selfish. He’s being selfish. Daniil grips the revolver with chalk white knuckles under his black leather.
He can’t do that. What the fuck is wrong with him. It would only haunt Burakh. He mustn’t.
Artemy doesn't need that. He shouldn't have to worry himself over someone like Daniil. The pretentious Capital celebrity and failure. They are barely more than strangers, anyway. He doesn't need to know.
It will be easier this way.
It’s not as if suicide is particularly uncommon these days. Whether by his own hand or the Sand Plague, him winding up in one of the rotting piles of bodies lining the streets is far from unexpected or surprising. Doctors are typically the first to fall during outbreaks of mass illness.
For the Haruspex, it will undoubtedly be demoralizing. It may hurt him. But he will continue. Daniil knows Burakh will. He is a man who cannot be stopped by any rational, or even irrational, means.
If his back does break, he will continue. Pulling himself forward on hand and knee if he has to. Dragging his whole damn town out the fire behind him, if it comes to it.
Burakh is strong. Not merely in sheer physicality, but in spirit. It's beautiful. Daniil can’t fathom how to understand it, but it’s beautiful. He will forget about Daniil before too long.
Just as everyone else will. He shall fade into distant memory. An oddity of a strange and ultimately useless outsider, donned in black and snakeskin. Bachelor Whatever.
There is no immortality.
His goal unachievable, in the bitter end.
(He is a failure.)
He is a failure.
He straightens his cravat and pin. He places the pistol back into his mouth.
It kisses the roof of his mouth. Cold metal. So very cold. Daniil closes his eyes.
The piano plays softly from down the stairwell.
He breathes out, calm.
Click.
Daniil blinks. No crack of a gunshot. No smoke. No blinding pain. No—
He's still alive.
(Alive.)
Hesitantly, Daniil looks down at his revolver. Hands shaking. Opens the chambers. He drops the gun abruptly. As if the metal scorched his hand. Yanks off his gloves and looks at his palms. Covered in blood. Murderer.
He shoves his chair back so violently that it screeches across the floor. Scratching the elegant hardwood.
The Bachelor gets up and nearly falls. His legs made of hollow liquid. He stumbles, catches himself on the shelf beneath the window. The tea tray clatters to the floor.
His breathing is ragged, chest heaving within the bars of his ribcage.
He cries out.
It echoes against the high walls.
The empty walls.
Daniil had failed, again. But…
It wasn’t the end.
He had been ready. Been ready to meet Death, his life-long foe. To admit his defeat. And surrender.
But perhaps Death wasn’t ready yet for him.
He wants to cry; the tears won’t come. Eyes too drained dry from the Pest.
He stands there, leaning unsteady against the piece of furniture, bathed in warm light. Minutes pass. He turns.
Daniil looks upon the Polyhedron.
A miracle twisting in all around itself.
Beautiful.
He thinks of what Lilich and Burakh had been theorizing. Bits of conversations flashing through his dazed mind. The Inquisitor had requested its blueprints. She’s investigating under the hypothesis that it could be the very source of the epidemic.
Utterly preposterous. Such a conclusion would make no sense. The Tower had been built long before even the first outbreak.
The source is somewhere else. He knows it. Daniil’s sick with the Sand Dirt running through his veins—it’s no disease he could have contracted from the revelatory structure. Built, as it is, with dreams.
The Bachelor decides, then, if Death doesn’t want him: so be it.
He is a failure; and he will continue from it. He can’t even remember how many setbacks and defeats he had faced prior to arriving at this cursed, inconsequential, bloody nowhere town in his battle against Death. Daniil clenches his jaw. Why should this be any different.
Daniil will continue. Until the day Death claims him as its prize, he will continue.
His mission hasn’t changed. He didn’t come here to meet an old patriarch. He came here to grasp immortality in his hands.
And there it is. The Tower. Floating high, brilliant, in the sky. Touching the heavens.
The eighth wonder of the world.
He will study it, delve into its depths, understand its many secrets. He will learn how it protects life. Then he shall share that knowledge with all mankind.
There’s still a chance! He still has this chance to make right.
Daniil stands up straight and dusts himself off. He’s wasted enough time with this self-indulgent, self-pitying jeremiad of weakness. He has work to do.
Grabbing the pistol off the floor, he returns it to its rightful place in his jacket pocket. His momentum carries him back to his desk. Upon his stack of dog-eared books rests a decorative children’s box. He couldn’t make heads or tails of its contents under the microscope. An amalgamation of too many drugs—some he recognized, a few he didn’t—to discover its origins.
Before he can think on it any further, he picks the container off his desk, removes the lid, and downs its contents.
It’s as foul and chalky as he imagined. He claps a hand over his mouth when he coughs on it, not wanting to lose any of this extremely scarce medicine.
With struggle, Daniil manages to swallow it down. Taking several gulps of water afterward to ease his sandpapered throat.
It hurts. It really goddamn hurts. It’s all nails and razor wire on his nerves. His stomach immediately tries to reject the foreign matter, but he refuses. He cannot carry out his work if he is sick.
Daniil allows himself as much time as he can afford to try and settle his protesting body. Following the finished bottle of water, he risks a few bites from a heel of stale bread. It’s not much, though it quells his nausea for the time being.
He should be safe now. Putting back on his gloves and taking his carpetbag in hand, the Bachelor descends the stairs to continue his mission.
It’s not the end.
(Not yet.)
When he passes through the ground floor rooms on his way out the door, he hears no music.