The Weight of a Die

O.K. Mantz

“Roll the die.”

Grim snapped open his hand and let the die tumble onto the rugged surface of the bar table. He was leaned forward, his eyes stabbing gashes into Layla’s heart, and his open palm suspended above the twirling cube made of elephant tusks. Before him, Layla kept her gaze focused on the table rather than him; yet she played with a multitude of thin rods protruding from and writhing in the concave of her hand. These wires acted as their own entity while simultaneously seeming to be entirely controlled by the woman—the lights flickered, the wires produced a hiss, and Layla pinched her eyes as the die gingerly spun to a stop. She squinted harder, unable to see anything besides a hazy mist under the dim lights. The realization suddenly dawned on Grim that the scars on her pupils rendered her blind. So he clenched his jaw and gingerly lowered his hand to fit his palm flat on the table beside the die.

“Three,” he lied and kept his stare focused on the woman before him. Words, screamed Grim’s voice within the fringes of his mind, are perhaps the only things that prove so meaningless and carry simultaneously the weight of the cosmos on their shoulders. From behind Layla, a creature resembling a lizard crept up onto her shoulder, hissing and whipping its tongue in every direction. Yet both felt entirely comfortable with the other and the rods even seemed to gravitate towards the lizard as though reuniting with a friend. Layla stuck her own two pronged tongue between her teeth and hissed, stretching open her lids to expose the whites of her eyes.

“You are Dolos.”

The lizard on her shoulder suddenly erupted in a writhing orange light, while Layla remained unaffected by the glowing creature on her shoulder. Instead she stared forward, matching Grim’s gaze: he discerned the whites of her eyes gradually shifting to a darker hue until they were as black as tar. At this moment, he realized that she was the Devil…and he desired to be just like her.

“But even gods of guile must die!” she whispered and the rods of her hand extended outward, shooting toward Grim and wrapping around his throat like a starving anaconda. Thrusting his hands toward his neck, Grim struggled and kicked his chair back, tearing at the wires that proved exaggeratingly strong. From the inside of his coat, he finally managed to produce a shiv and began to slash at the rods, jerking his arm to slice off the crawling threads that, with every minute, increased in number. He gasped, flailing with every limb and with every fiber of his being.

Out of the corner of his eye, Grim suddenly noticed a hooded figure step through the doorless entrance of the bar. And then the entire world around him simply froze between the stroke of a second. Without misspending time, he violently cut the rods from his throat and stumbled away from Layla, unsure of which direction to train his eye upon. Naturally, his fingers grazed across his throat and he felt warm blood trickling from torn-up skin. And then a voice spoke up from the silence of the end of time, a voice he somehow knew came from the hooded figure murmuring into his ear.

“What number was it?”

There were no numbers on the die.