Dead Man's Logic

Asa Sanderson

asa0199@hotmail.com

I'm going to go out on a limb here and give you some advice. If ever you find yourself sitting on the Phantom Train, riding to the "other side," and you're possessed by some extraordinarily puerile desire to sneak into the engine room and start pulling the levers out of the wall and tearing the wiring apart just to see it all spark... make sure you know who's riding with you, first. If I'd bothered asking around a bit, I might have known Wrexsoul was on the same train as me, and then I'd have known he'd escape when that damned train derailed, and then perhaps I would have thought about that while I was standing in the Phantom Train's engine room with tangled, broken wire clenched in my pale fists.

I still would have torn it up.

If I hadn't been dead already, I don't think I would have survived the crash. One minute, I was shredding everything that I could get my hands on; the next, there was smoke everywhere, and the wheels of the train were screeching, and I was thrown out of the cab and into the Phantom Forest. I smacked into a tree before falling to the ground. I kicked it when I stood up, but that didn't accomplish much, so I took a look around. The Phantom Train lay in a heap by this time, crunched into the tracks like a broken caterpillar, white smoke wafting from its windows. I had to let the vision sink in. First day of my death, and I'd already broken something.

It was so funny that I nearly doubled over with laughter.

"That laugh." From the wreckage, a violet, luminescent mist had begun to rise. It straightened into a tall, shrouded form. "I've heard that laugh so many times, in so many nightmares." Its yellow eyes narrowed. "I didn't know I had the honor of riding the Phantom Train with Kefka Palazzo."

I brushed off my robes, which were still covered in tree-bark, and looked the ghost over. "Who're you?"

"Who are we, perhaps, being a better question." He folded his hands. "The only name I was known by in my living death being Wrexsoul."

"My name certainly being Kefka, but how did you know that?"

"Did you think there was an undead soul who didn't tremble at its mere mention? Seeing as how you sent nearly every one of us to this living hell which we now inhabit, and how it was you who populated this train and its destination with the souls of the innocent and unavenged?" He shrugged his draped shoulders. "Nightmares, as I said before. I once haunted Doma. Surely you remember Doma; an entire kingdom murdered by your poisoning hands?"

He saw I wasn't going to grace him with a response yet, so he continued.

"I once haunted Doma, a lone spirit. But soon, others joined me. Others who had been felled by your hand. And the hands of your dictatorial predecessors. Yes, I am the multitude of lost warriors whose lives were destroyed- in the most literal of senses- by the inane and inhumane wars that people like you imposed upon us. Known only as Wrexsoul, we haunted Doma, looking for more souls to devour, more battle-scarred lives to swallow into the abyss of ourselves. And it was there, from the few straggling vagrants who dared enter the haunted city, that we learned of your name. In their minds, we heard your laugh. Your mournful laugh of agony. I heard it over and over, echoed in so many souls..."

"Which you promptly sucked like the self-righteous leech that you are. Look, this conversation is getting boring. Is there anything specific that you had to tell me?"

"I wanted to ask you why you destroyed the Phantom Train."

"The seats were uncomfortable."

"Your only reason for destroying the train, and trapping the souls therein in Limbo for perhaps an eternity, was that you thought the seats were uncomfortable."

"I didn't think the seats were uncomfortable. The seats were uncomfortable. And flimsy. The metal was flimsy, there were holes in the floorboard, the wiring was half-stripped, and the widgets holding this rotting carcass of a vehicle together were ancient. They made it too easy for me; the temptation was too much to bear."

"Thrive you so greatly on destruction?"

"Talk you always this backwards? Making my head hurt, you are."

"I see." He tilted his shrouded head. "I shall have to kill you."

"I'm already dead, brainiac."

"Then I shall eat you."

"I'm not into that."

"I shall devour your soul, the way that I devoured the souls of those travelers. That way, you will be assimilated and entirely unable to cause harm to anyone else."

I didn't flinch as the violet vapor floated toward me. I put my hands on my hips, waited while he inched ominously forward, waited until he'd gotten about two feet away from me, and said, "You can't."

He ignored the comment until he wrapped his filmy tendrils around me and found that I was right. "How can this be?"

"You just said you could only devour those who had been killed or 'scarred' in some kind of war. I was killed because I fell off my tower. That means you can't devour me."

"I am to understand that you were pushed off your tower by a former subordinate after one of her friends took a rather large piece out of your wing."

I looked over my shoulder at the large, pie-like slice in my feathery wings. "But that still wasn't a war. I mean, the people who came to kill me weren't ordered to. They weren't an army, and they weren't under any kind of flag. Nobody dared oppose me but them. It wasn't a war."

"I am also to understand that you were created to be a human Magitek weapon."

"Yes, I was- before the Empire started heavily using magic and picking fights with every little hamlet it came across. That was preparation for war, not war. Get your dirty mummy wraps off me."

The phantom straightened his back and retracted his tendrils. "I cannot allow you to go back into society to create mischief. If I did that, others would suffer the same fate as I."

"Don't tell me you want to fight."

"I do not fight. I merely consume."

"Then how exactly are you going to stop me?"

There was a glint of determination and utter hatred in his yellow eyes. "Any way that I can, Kefka. Any way that I can."

He faced the totaled Phantom Train and then, looking at me over his shoulder one last time, framed by the burning, demolished metal, floated away through the forest.

Amusing, really, that such an oaf would think he could make trouble for me. Perhaps it was the insult that prompted me to follow him and make sure whatever plans he had for me fell through the instant they were conceived. I wasn't going to be harassed by a saintly soul-sucking specter in my lifetime. Or beyond it. I couldn't take the embarrassment.

Of course, if I'd known then, darting though the snaggled trees and sloshing through the muck of the Phantom Forest, what I was getting myself into, I might have left him alone and went into hiding instead.

...Nah.