(Hylics) Here Friends Lament
Part One — The White Totem
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You were born from the moon, and just last night you didn’t think much of it. It’s been a long time since you did. Now you felt like you were abandoned at your own doorstep by a faceless mother. The feeling came to you suddenly, like a bullet turning back around and trying again after missing the mark.
You were a skinny yellow thing with a head shaped like the long-gone crescent. You found your eyes as dark as your favorite leather outfit, the boldest thing on your face when reflected in a mirror, sometimes the only thing that remained when you zoned out. But these eyes were useless, for they couldn’t find your mother.
You slept deliciously well, but you had an odd dream. The only thing you could make sense of was that you and a totem of what could be marble were on the moon. The totem was white, six-eyed, and horned. It was just the two of you.
You knew exactly what was missing, because all of your memories of the moon were vandalized by the cut-out of your husband pasted into the empty space beside you. That was exactly how it happened. He had glued himself to the moon’s surface and then glued you to his hand. The totem of quartz or something had opened a book and showed off your golden name on the front cover. They grabbed your twitching hand and ran your fingers over the hypertrophic lettering. “Wayne,” they said. “Wayne.” as if you didn’t already know that. “Wayne, it’s time to write this book.”
“I’m no author,” you tried to say, but the totem of limestone or whatever was adamant, and grotesquely so, for you had done nothing since birth.
The totem of clouds reached for your newly nude chest. They ran a finger down the middle of your shuddering thorax where the two plates met. As you feared, they sunk into the little divot of exposed membrane that divided stomach and chest. You gasped violently and tried to curl in on yourself. But the horrible totem held you in place. “Wayne, you have to matter now.”
“I don’t understand,” you hissed through gritted teeth, trying to squirm away. Your whole body tingled like it was being devoured by insects. Nothing worked.
“Listen to me Wayne, listen,” they pleaded through your pain. “You’re going to do this. You’re going to kill him. It is your time, Wayne.”
Irritated by the uncomfortable silence that followed, it pressed harder into your epidermis. You wailed and quivered like a leaf trying to withstand a hurricane. It shouldn’t hurt so terribly; this was only a dream. “Why me? I don’t want to!”
The totem of cruelty began to get angry. Their grip on your shoulder tightened, pushing it out to get a more agonizing inclination into your membrane. “You could have prevented this. You were there when he planned it! But you fell asleep!”
After a moment of gasping in pain with your eyes shut, you remembered.
Your husband used to wave his arms and talk about his satellite while pacing and fuming. He said that his satellite would make everyone “utterly useless, as they were born to be” and though you didn’t like the idea, you quickly forgot about it, because you indeed fell asleep. Your face turned red at the memory. Embarrassment joined the horrible feelings crawling under your exoskeleton.
“Do you understand, Wayne?” asked the totem. It must have noticed your shame. “Fix your terrible mistake.”
“I don’t know how,” you admitted, for you were not an author, and the idea of having to save anyone, the whole world, made you feel itchy; decisive fleas sucking your blood and leaving ugly bumps.
The totem of frost on a window stepped backward and mercifully removed their finger from your nerves. “You have no idea because you’re a shut-in. Travel the archipelago. You will learn all that you need to, and find everything that awaits you. Promise me that you will kill Gibby.”
You eyed their hands. Judging by the twitching, the totem would lunge if you refused. “Fine,” you said, averting your eyes.
The totem accepted this pitiful deal with a nod. “I am counting on you, Prime Wayne,” said the totem, but you didn’t really care, because you were waking up.
The first thing you did in the morning was press your shirt very close to your body. Then you sat up and made eye contact with the yellow cat at the foot of your bed. Your first ever friend, the blue girl who had found you on the beach, gave you this cat after helping you get a house. She thought it was the funniest thing how alike you and her two cats were and lamented about a fate you didn’t believe in.
“Meow,” you slurred, rubbing your dark eyes. “Willma, what year is it?”
Willma always loved it when you said that, but her reaction tended to differ. This morning she stretched with a horrible noise before crawling into your lap. Smiling, you lifted your hand and set it on her head, enjoying the feel of her short fur.
You two managed to sit there for maybe ten minutes, zoned out and gentle, before the cat jumped away from you and wailed about her hunger. Fine, you could go for some food.
At that moment, you couldn’t remember the face of the totem. It was simply a cruel thing that believed you should have a purpose. It wanted to operate you like a telescope, craning your neck, trying to train your weak eyes to hone in on the big white blot in the night sky. This cruel thing bit into your muscles and pulled you out of bed, shaking its head and muttering condescension. Fine, you were hungry anyways.
So you stole into your small kitchen and dug around for some cat food. Your cabinets were a desolate land that made it easy to find whatever you wanted. Sometimes you missed the full meals from the moon— meat and vegetables, maybe some bread, some juice, some wine to make you drowsy. Willma circled your heels, meowing at two-second intervals, watching you like a hawk as you added two tiny fish to her bowl. It was the closest thing to a fancy meal you’ve ever made.
“Here,” you grumbled, setting breakfast down on the floor. She stuffed her face without thanking you at all. Fine, she had to eat.
You didn’t feel like making anything else, and all that was on the counter was the cat food. As the bottom of a second bowl disappeared under a hill of dry food, you sighed in disdain at your worthless self and contemplated your husband. Those heavy meals, which you threw up many times before adjusting, were nothing new to him. He narrowed his eyes at you until you could keep it all down. “Wayne, eat your food,” he’d say if he caught you picking at your meat. “You’re used to garbage, aren’t you?”
That was wrong; you ate nothing at all. But he knew that, too, he just couldn’t decide which was more pressing to address. He would stand up and proclaim, “You are disgustingly skinny. The sages will think I starve you.” And he would lean over your body with his chest against your back. You’d blush and let him feed you. It was one of the only times you didn’t fight with him. Sometimes you would feign incapability just to be fed, which was pathetic, you didn’t even like him.
But it would always beat this cat food. Embarrassingly, you were only able to stomach it because you were thinking about the moon meals and your moon husband. You didn’t even like him. In fact, for some stupid reason, you were going to kill him.
You realized with a great deal of annoyance that your dream with the white totem was not a product of your mind. It was an intrusion, a demand, and it was painful like a dream could never be. You rubbed your face violently. How idiotic of you to make a promise of all things. You couldn’t even promise your body a meal! In a fit of irritation, you turned your head to the side and dragged your fingers down your face as hard as you could, remembering how it felt to be dug into by the totem of apathy and cruelty and expectations. You stared at the wall and imagined your dark eyes in the center, just under the window, burning through the foundation. Your breathing thinned out and you began to itch.
Your neighbor was a blot of ink in your fuzzy vision. They were pacing your garden conspicuously, waiting for you to come out and give them some vegetables. With a pleasant startle, you recalled how wonderful you were at being aloof. It was your favorite thing to do with your neighbor.
You didn’t need to write anything for that nasty totem! All you had to do was wander around! Explore the archipelago and find some junk or whatever!
Suddenly content and with perfect vision, you stepped around your cat to go locate your jacket. Hopefully it didn’t stink.
