in the month of darkness
EYYYYY IT’S THE @dishonoredgiftexchange
i come to you, dear @willowc aka @amostdishonorableblog, with mild void horror vibes and the beginnings of a curious god -- hope you enjoy!!!
includes: an inordinate amount of rock, two vague mentions of blood, some sensory weirdness, and a whole lot of loss of self
---
He hasn't opened his eyes yet.
There's something wrong. Hearing came to him first: a shrill whistling, like wind through gaps in a wall, and a thudding so shakingly low it leaves an ache at either side of his skull. It had sounded like a heartbeat, before he realized how it came from somewhere deep, deep below and echoed in his bones. That was when he knew that feeling had come back, too.
Clothes made of rough fabric. Stone, scraping. His fingertips are damp and almost numb with cold. Then, the smells, mineral and salt. They started out faded but now they climb up his senses into his eyes and unfold in something almost like color, black wine-red slate-blue dawn cyan.
The thing that is wrong is inside him. It's this: before hearing, there was nothing. Only him. No body, no stone, no colors. Until he remembered the other parts that go with awareness, and they became—like the memory had made them.
His eyes are closed and he is afraid. It's a little like memory, too, what tells him to be. It knows he isn't alone. It knows that they're waiting for him to open his eyes, that they're hanging, not yet made. That once he sees them they'll be real.
He can feel the breaths jerk in and out of his lungs, short and burning. His feet are bare and stiff and the stone digs into the backs of his heels.
He keeps his eyes closed for a very long time.
*
He thinks he wakes. There is no dreaming here.
Or maybe this is the dreaming, because when his eyes finally open he is lying in a tomb.
Stone, curving, the inside of a great dark dome carved around him. The wind-whistling has died down, or gone distant, muffled through the thickness of the rock. Is it rock? There's no light in here that he can find, but everything glints like something faceted, hard shining flecks that shift when he moves his head, and once his stiff body thaws enough to sweep an arm out the movement is reflected in a million pinprick directions.
He drops his arm and closes his eyes, the echo of light ringing in his head like dizziness does. After a minute, goosebumps break out on him like his skin has just remembered the cold and discomfort. The sensation is distant. It's not really his.
Maybe he is the dream.
He opens his eyes again and the dome has shrunk around him.
His hands slam into the rock before he can think and it's so much closer than he thought, the distance shorter than the length of his arm and his palms slide across sharp stone spines and smooth patches but it's even worse at his sides, closing in, barely wider than his shoulders and no cracks or seams or holes or anything he is trapped in here and he can see his face like a white fish in water reflected and its eyes are dead pits too close up to him and no, please no, his own breath is washing back on him, the dome is a coffin and it's coming down around him and he braces his forearms on it wrist to elbow and pushes—
Stone shatters in great lightning faultlines and resonates like the titanic crushing of ice against ice, like every broken bone after a fall, and then the dome crawls back from him in jagged, crumble-edged chunks.
There is light. Falling in curls, fog-like, from the tears in the rock.
He's sitting up, rose from the floor when he... when the stone backed away from him. He remembers that his forearms should be scratched to bleeding and the sting comes to him, half-hearted, then fades.
He lies back down and doesn't close his eyes again.
*
Sometimes he rolls onto one side or the other. It's not because of an ache, or any urge to move. He thinks this is boredom. At least if he turns he can look at another set of faceted black surfaces, another pattern of light-dripping breaks in the curving wall.
He makes to roll onto his back and stops. When he moved, something brushed his hair.
Craning his neck, he looks over his shoulder at the broad dark hand reaching for him.
He flips onto his stomach and scrambles away, the Knowing inside him screaming this is why you should be afraid as he finds, sprouting from gleaming stone, a horror of arms and hungry hands, fingers outstretched, the closest cupped as though around the back of his head.
Only bad endings here. There are so many of them, and every one empty and still. He keeps expecting to see something shine out of the corner of his eye, but not like the rock does. It's too late. You waited too long and it's already too late.
He puts his palms over his eyes.
When he takes them away, they're all gone.
*
The stone floor is cold under his back. It gets colder, then less, fluctuating in no rhythm he can recognize.
His thoughts wander down and up and across the cracks in the great stone dome, stepping outside of sight to where there is the wind, whistling again, then past that into a corridor of maybe that he isn't sure is there, is just following like a man in the dark, one hand on the wall, shuffling until his foot hits something unexpected.
The stone floor is colder again, and still colder. It burns even through his clothes. They feel thinner, lighter than before. Lying here, hands crossed over his stomach, he realizes that his hands are heavy with cool, thin bands that tick together when he shifts his fingers. Rings.
He raises an arm and peers at them, the range of metals and designs, no decoration but what is etched along the sides. It's nothing he knows, but they shine in a way that is almost as familiar as the cold hard floor.
There is a tightness in his throat. He touches it and doesn't know why it isn't wet.
For a moment, it is: wet, warm, sticking to his fingertips—then it isn't anymore. Again. Wasn't, ever. He puts his hand down.
*
The change happens so slowly that he only realizes it has come to pass once he lifts his hand again and the rings don't have enough light to shine.
There is still a little; just enough, coming from his left, that he can catch it on the rim of the pale ring on his index finger and make it run around, and around, small glinting circles.
The cracks are gone. There is a single dust-gray shaft of light falling from somewhere high, high overhead. This new dome doesn't gleam or glimmer; maybe it's made of some other kind of stone, or maybe it's too far away to see at all.
He thinks of time: the time it takes for a beach pebble to wear smooth, for a droplet of water to shape a stalagtite until it reaches the floor, for a cave to become a cavern and for a cavern to become a void. He is unsure how long he has been lying here.
It's only when he realizes he isn't alone that he rises.
There's someone else here. She's crouching at the bottom of the shaft of light, holding very still, her back turned to him. He opens his mouth, but doesn't know what name to call, and closes it again to stand instead.
He can feel the grit of the floor under his soles, yet his steps make no sound. For a moment he thinks they should and the grating of sand on stone chimes in; then he decides against it, and the silence folds back around him.
She doesn't move. Her dress is washed-out yellow, muddied at the hem, her hair chopped short. She's looking down at something in her cupped hands. Something small. He steps around her carefully and kneels down at her side.
The something is a frog, soft green striped with brown, slick and damp—but when he goes to touch its ridged back it is neither of those things, instead just slightly smooth and edged, like there is only more stone right under the surface. The girl's face is still bent over her treasure, eyes wide and mouth all round with wonder. She is no more here than the frog is.
The puddle she is lifting the frog from, at least, is real water; it pools in his palm, sloshes when he stands again.
He watches the drops fall upwards, out of the light shaft and out of sight.
*
The ground he walks on isn't flat; it slips, just slightly, down and down—yet somehow, even long after the shaft of light has been obscured behind the curve of the slope, this place grows no dimmer.
He thinks his legs should feel tired: a while has passed, a long cycle of bare stone and sand grit and small, skittering rocks. He can't remember what tired is meant to feel like, though. Instead of stopping to think on it, he keeps going: onwards and forwards, down, always down, until the far-off dome around him feels more like black space than limit. Until he sees something up ahead.
From a distance, it looks like a cluster of fingers, breaking through the floor and standing still, now, still and quiet. Nothing isn't quiet here but the wind. Or him, when he wants to be.
He remembers the hands, reaching, and hesitates—but they didn't catch him. They held nothing that could have hurt him.
Closer, and while they remain far they look much bigger now; closer and he knows those aren't fingers at all. They look like people, but not like the girl in the light, holding a perfect green frog. Closer.
The tallest of them have a head on him. The smallest reach his nose. All of them are gray, skinless shapes, hardly more than a suggestion, and none of them have faces.
Except, he finds as he steps in between them, for one. The boy's face is detailed, fine, his clothes simple, a tunic and short pants held with rope—and his hands are curled in the air, his arms in a lift and curve, like there should be someone else there.
Those eyes are. Familiar. But the boy is colorless, as gray and black and sleek as the faceless crowd around him. He stands in front of him, as though waiting will bring the colors in.
The boy remains. He reaches out, touches that curled hand.
He remembers what breathing feels like—remembers because there is a breath filling him now, falling in him like the light did through the cracks in the dome, like the water dripping from his hand, except it isn't a breath—it's the Knowing, or another kind of Knowing altogether—
And then it runs back out of him, and he is only holding tight onto a stone boy's hand, awkward and half-aware that he should know the first step of this dance but doesn't.
He lets go; squeezes back through the crowd.
He walks deeper.
*
Somewhere, the ground flattens out and he lies down again.
His sense of feeling flickers, aching stone turning to absence turning to stone again when the nothing goes strange and unwanted in him. Flat on his back, arms folded, he decides to let hearing happen, and listens to the distant wind-whistle; further, the sound of a rock dropping, hitting more rock; of a trickle of water, winding; further still, a whisper. It comes from below him, cradles his head like a touchless hand.
He opens his eyes and feels comfortable despite hard edges digging into his shoulders and lower back. It takes him a while of idle thought to figure out that the stone has changed shape under him.
When he sits up to look, it's still as unyielding and cold—but slabs of it have shifted down or sideways, slanting, uncovering faint blue-gray-black striations. The new landscape feel natural under his fingertips, everything still fused together around carved-out spaces shaped exactly like his body. He touches his palm to the middle of the largest depression.
Something far under the stone touches back.
He jerks away, the jolt of surprise a shock in itself, and where he was there is the upraised outline of a hand. It remains there, unmoving, as though it always was.
He has no name to call here, either—but then again, maybe he doesn't need one. He moves his lips, moves his tongue in his mouth, trying to remember how this works.
“Hello,” he says.
He's never looked very closely at what in the stone makes it glint like a beetle's back, but now that he's crouching, looking down, it looks like there are small sharp specks all through it, sometimes iridescent and sometimes smooth and reflective as the skin of a water droplet. He turns his head a little to the side, and instead it looks like the angled polish of a quartz.
A little more, and it looks like soft, staring eyes.
“No, I don't,” he answers. Thinks of what it used to feel like to frown, and instead he smiles, thin. It comes more naturally. “But you know me?” he asks.
The breath he had thought he felt, standing before the stone boy and taking his hand, billows up in him, neither warm nor cold nor really air.
“... I can try.”
He stands. He hadn't noticed: just a few feet from the flat ground where he stopped, it breaks off and dives into nothing. Far overhead, on the ceiling of the dome—he takes the time to wonder if it is a ceiling—if there was ever a dome—there are strange, barely-visible patterns flowing, like a ripple in the rock catching the light. Or the underside of water.
He stands at the edge of the chasm and lifts one foot. “Do I just...?”
He is afraid, still—but more than that, he is curious what will happen. He takes a step—
And stone, ragged as though ripped from its rooting, rises to steady him.
He searches for something that might fit what he's feeling. Whatever the word is, he doesn't have it yet—but he knows he will find it. The certainty is as much a part of him as the fear has been.
He takes another step, and walks across the void.
