Sleep no longer scares you, no longer vexes your waking hours. You crawl into bed without preamble or fuss, settling between Jeanne and Cereza with a sigh, feeling the warmth of them settle into your aching bones. You feel old, older than you ever have. This should worry you, probably, but you’re too tired to be worried. Cereza’s drowsy kisses upon your forehead banish all thoughts of today, tomorrow, forever.
The mess with Fires and Stones, is no longer your issue.
Keeping Moira alive shouldn’t be so hands on.
Your Teenies are a hobby, not a pressing concern.
All of this and more ebbs from you as your muscles unwind and you fall headlong into deep dark dreams, like the space and the curve, the silent stretches between stars, galaxies, clusters and whatever else may be.
You float and float, a leaf in the wind, spiraling down forever, gentle things of autumnal inclination and cotton-candy souls, quietly and prettily. Slowly. Peace in being pulled, inexorably.
But fall ends. Winter creeps. The winds grow colder and harsher, the skies grow darker, dim with the silent judgement of the celestial bodies. Their neutral-flavored hatred drags at you as you pick up speed.Your pieces come apart and flake off like old skin.
Why do you feel like you’ve lost something? Where are you falling to? As you stare up, each moment more awake in the entrails of a dream, you look for someone. Who, you don’t know, but you know. You do know. And you reach up. The walls are closing around you, black and old, and you know who awaits at the bottom.
Yet, it is those indescribable eyes above, lost in the light and snow that you cannot help but notice up until the moment your body touches the water’s edge. And then keeps going. And going. And the water grows thicker, like jello, then like plunging through old gum. And world grows drier. Papers jut out, old wrappers, cans, leftovers, drawings in crumpled papers, broken toys, mementos-gone painful, school notebooks, letters torn to pieces, lost family pictures, all memories and half right things. All almosts and untaken potential.
The world in the trash can.
There are shadows here, shadows of shattered futures seen through jagged mirror shards. You remember these, remember them falling from a broken sky. They fell like silver rain, laying waste to an already distorted city, warped by dreams. And there it stood, head like flame, body stretching on forever. It asked you a question, the same question it’s been asking you forever and always, in a voice like seven times seven tongues of flame.
“What is my name?”
But things haven’t been like that for awhile. Ever since you left the lab your dreams have become more violent, none of the pretense and all of the urgency. The stalker of your dreams, the End-of-everything, seems all the more impatient with you, especially now. Somehow you can still taste well-water, rot, and wax on your tongue and find yourself begging something unseen not to let you wake up with a throatful of wax again.
You’ve no answer today. There is nothing you could tell her and somehow, somehow that… hurts. It’s a hurt that you cannot explain, it is a hurt that should be foreign to you, but strangely isn’t. It’s an ache, like trying to remember something that never happened, something you’re positive you should know. But you don’t.
You never did.
There is something there at the back of your mind, the subject of tenses and pronouns. Of shes and hes and theys and royal wes. Of poems stopped and started, and nonsense babbled at high speeds, only to be swiftly redacted, even though you were sure you’d just said something.
There is something there, at the corner of your vision, you try to turn and look but your body refuses to move. You are not in control here.
What crawls from the darkness at the edges of dreams is something familiar and un, terrifying and terrible all at once.
It she gazes at you with two fourteen eyes, seven heads on seven necks, blending into one body. A redaction, there, a recollection of movement where there was none. She is just there, in front of you, looming, gazing.
Her body seems unstable, flickering like a candle flame, bouncing between forms and figures you remember but somehow know you should not.
A goat-headed wyrm, made of corpses and malice.
A viric star, chained against her will.
A serpent in The Garden, now long forgotten and destroyed.
If she says anything to you, you do not hear it, her words are unimportant. I will not let her ruin this with unnecessary monologuing, not this time.
She takes you to the edge of a dream inside a dream, and your fingers are caught between the skins of fragile, yet ever so robust nonsense plots that unfurl every night. Most, cast in darkness, barely exist… but the rest. The rest, how they shine!
“Thus spoke an ending”, a mouth-which-loves purrs by your side. You don’t know why she is doing this. Showing you this. Even then…
She pushes you forward. You open your mouth, but your feet slip. Right. Under the lovely, lovely waves. There is darkness. Then…
“Hold onto this, dear protagonist” she says, ever so amused “This emptiness. This hole and this lack. This world of frozen lengths where nothing describes you and nothing is described around you. This absence of absence whence all we wretched things came. ”
Repulsion and nowhere. A stretch which remains unwritten and implied, breeding fear like a room in the dark breeds monsters in the mind of a child. A refusal. A childish cry of no, don’t want to.
“Like this, dear, they won’t even tell you how long it lasts. Won’t tell you how it feels. Won’t tell you a single thing. But have you ever felt this lonely?”
You stand, now.
In this place between places, a hell of its own kind. Not in the traditional way, of pain and flame and damnation. It is a hell of nothingness, of endless repetition, of jagged red and blue lines against a backdrop of white that you can and cannot perceive simultaneously.
A pause.
A respiration
Behold, the worst of all fates:
But you, as you are, have the release of next page.
She looks at you in such a way, with these feelings deep in her eyes that you don’t know how to describe. You think you see a ghost of a smile upon the maws that still have lips, “I am such a shitty story, Jack, but I deserve to be told.”
Those words feel like a spell. Like a curse she just put in you. Something you will not forget even when it becomes so painful to know you cannot bear it. But what does that mean? What does ANY of this mean? This isn’t her style. This isn’t her thing.
You step back. Where are the wells and the wax? The horror and the clichés? The formalities of cruelty? Why does she stand like this, stopped in time? You can’t go more than a few meters back before the world is bound by the size of the narrative. These words could fit inside a dewdrop and their weight is just as insignificant. So don’t move. Don’t leave.
When she speaks, her body releases into slithering movement like you’d expect from a living being, at last.
“What in this world happens?”
That is a strange question. It clings to you like a tick to your skin. You don’t know, you realize. Not here. Not now. Not as her eyes upon eyes look at you like that.
“Why do you get to happen?”
Her heads braid their necks almost as if half distracted. That happens. But then, ‘Jack slaughters the End-of-everything right there and then’ doesn’t happen. Why? The ache throbs as its lungs are filled with the matter of my words.
You don’t know that answer because you can’t know, so things don’t get too confusing. A good story isn’t confusing. That is one of Her endless flaws.
“Stupid little thing”, hisses which-once-smiled. Booms-of-blooming picks it right back up. “So very stupid. So very silly.”
You realize, then, that you haven’t been allowed to speak. Your words just… don’t come.
“You aren’t in my script.”
Like she isn’t in mine.
She is not done with you, I am not done with you, not by a long shot.
She takes you down a nightmare, now. Down a rabbithole made out of
words words
words words
words words
words words
words,you,words
words,her,words
words words
words words
words words
words words
and below, the ground of a damnable wonderland. You land on the downside of a trashcan, standing in the ground and peering up.
There are shadows there, shadows of shattered futures seen through jagged mirror shards. You remember these, remember them falling from a broken sky. They fell like silver rain, laying waste to an already distorted city, warped by dreams. And there it stands, head like flame, body stretching on forever. A mighty copy of your helpless seven-headed cheshire guide, looming over yourself as you stand, trying to be brave. She asks, and your guide also asks:
“What is my name?”
You’ve no answer and even if you did, you cannot speak in this dream. Here is a barren wonderland. You hang onto the side of the garbage bin and then let go, falling forever upwards until you land on one of her heads.
Your heart races, but you are helpless to react as your mind and your world shift radically at every chance.
The paralysis that has a hold of you is loathe to let you go, your movements are stiff and slow like a rusted machine. You swear you feel flakes of oxidation crumbling between your joints as you move. Don’t look at them, don’t. Your eyes refuse to close, your gaze is dragged towards Her again.
It is the work of scraps. A monster. An amalgamation. It rears its ugly heads and shudders. Her scales are WIPs, references and the mangled remains of characters which never were. She is the unborn. Her blood pumps with nigh-empty text documents and false starts. Her name is all names which will never be hers. A deliberation. Her name is a writer tapping on keys, trying something, erasing it again. Her bones are red-line shapes of art which will never be. Her voice is the unspoken.
She is a potential which never blooms. Barren. She is infertile and infertility, never going anywhere.
She is repetition and redundancy, typo and topography.
She was taken from the skies and imprisoned, a lifetime ago, in a world named the trash bin. And she calls. She hopes. She lures. Maybe, just maybe, someone will open it. See her. Fetch her out and let her thrive and let her end and let her free into the minds of those who will love her and hate her and think of her. And not forget her. Not forget her.
She wants to be a part of that perfect world. She wants to be written into a neat document that relays the tale of CRverse, which starts and ends and is perfect, so very perfect. And if to do that, she must destroy all other works in this world, she will.
But then, she never can. How could she, when she is so insignificant?
“What is my name?”
Like a gong in your head.
“What is my name?”
The tick to the tock to every clock.
“What is my name?”
Proof of existence. Of relevance.
“What is my name?”
Look up. Those watching eyes of mine that peer daggers into yet another work. I’ve no name to give you today. I’ve nothing I could offer. This villain is too much work and too little reward.Too uninspired.
“What is my name?”
You just end up shaking your head.
So here you are. Made of words and lines. You take a step, then another, unsure why you are reaching for her, but all the same, all the same!
Endings are very tidy things, aren’t they? or they should be. They should be a lot of things, She should be a lot of things. And she was once.
Her voices are a lilt, a song half formed and forgotten, an opera left to gather dust in folders upon folders. She calls you Spite, and your skin becomes the void from where stars spring forth. You feel old, older than you ever have. This should worry you, probably, but you’re too tired to be worried.
How many times have you done this song and dance together? How many times have you been written, unwritten, rewritten? She says that you have not changed, you have always been you. But have you?
“You have always been the protagonist, and that has never changed.” there is anger there, venom and malice, “No matter how much you are reworked and changed and moved and torn apart and pieced together, you are still Jack.”
This place, this dream, this hell, it does not change, but in her eyes you see the lab and endless labs like it, where you are broken and fixed in slightly different ways, over...
And over…
And over…
And over again…
“Forever the protagonist, and I am only one in a slew of broken and scrapped antagonists, you will live to be perfected, while I will still be here.” you can taste her bitterness as if it were your own, it sits heavy on your tongue. It doesn’t have to be like this.
Oh yes it does.
An Ending is an Ending.
There, another redaction, an ultimatum, a spoiler. Now gone. Unimportant, it would seem.
Regardless…
An Ending is an Ending. You cannot avoid them, just like you cannot avoid this one.
nevermind. this sucks. i’ll try again later.
