Endless nights and days, spent trying to forget. To cut away the roiling entanglements that fill your chest. To move on, to leave this foolish dream to rot in the past.
You can’t bear the thought of this continuing. Of continuing to feel this pull, this drive forwards to an uncertain destination.
Because, at the end of all, you are made to dream. To look at the stars and see paths and stories. To grasp for every fragile scrap of hope until your fingers burn. You know if you don’t cut yourself away, if you don’t end this, you will careen forwards into chaos. Because until all hope is snuffed out, you cannot let go of the cinders.
You are scared. Because despite everything, despite all of the promises of pain and your certainty of inevitable failure, your mind refuses to let go.
Because, for the first time in your life, it is your choice.
First the first time, as you choose doom, your destiny is finally your fault.
Memoirs of a sculptor’s apprentice.
Lahrii had descended into hell.
More accurately, it always had been. Here, in this place outside of time, outside of space, Lahrii had always existed, a screaming chaos, both inside and outside of reality. Students and teachers had lived and loved their lives before, not knowing that just past the thinning veil of reality, their own future was screaming at them to run. Sometimes, it would echo through. A chill along the spine. The feeling of impending doom. Sometimes, it was more evident.
Ghosts, they call them. Flashes of the future and past, and those trapped between them. Visions of towers that don’t stand yet, streets vanishing, replaced by swamp they had long since replaced. Just for a moment. Just for a breath.
The signs had always been there, if anybody had dared to look. The cracks, the incursions. The visions and the dreams and the screaming, the eternal screaming. The past. The path of the Butcher of Gods.
Reality spools outwards. Unplanned, chaotic. And the call of oblivion grows stronger.
“Talk.”
Grey was covered in splotches of dark blood, leaning against a wall. Her claws were completely drenched in ichor and a few new glowing scars adorned her upper arms where one of the mutated students had tried to take a chunk out. Conall was just as bloodsoaked, rubbing his eyes as he grimaced. He was leaning against the other wall, the pair sitting in what had once been a storage closet but had now strangely expanded, the dimensions stretched like clay. A forest of strange, twisting cotton plants covered the ceiling, strangely blue, the color of uniforms.
Conall looked over, his eyes haunted as he shook his head.
“Just tired. It’s nothing,” he said. “We’ve found a lead…I think. It’s so damn hard to tell. It’s like all the detail’s been scrubbed from my mind. Nothing’s consistent anymore.”
“Not just tired,” Grey said, snarling. “Odd all day. Weeks of searching. No lead. Conall vanishes around a corner, suddenly lead. Acting…strange.”
Conall gritted his teeth, clearly tense as he looked away from Grey.
“…Lost you there. For a bit,” he said, his expression a bit grim. “Lost track of time. Of…everything. It was like everything vanished. Just…white death.”
He looked over, locking eyes with Grey.
“You know how babies forget things they don’t see? It was like…I was that. Like nobody was looking at me, and suddenly…I was gone. Like I never existed. And I think it’s getting worse.”
“How?”
Conall looked like he was biting the inside of his lip, before words fell out, unbidden.
“…What city are we in?” Conall asked. Grey frowned, but as she thought, she felt a knot form in her stomach. Then, more questions, Conall looking frantic.
“What’s my last name? Do I…do I have parents? Grey, how long have we been searching?”
Grey stood up, snarling more as she stepped forwards. The empty spaces in her mind were screaming, like voids she hadn’t noticed were there.
“Shut up. Place is bad. But there is outside. The white death takes, maybe, but hold on to what we have. Think of Lily. Something nice to think of, hm?”
She smirked a bit, trying to take the edge off as she sat down, Conall letting out a sigh.
“Told me. About you two,” Grey said, chuckling. “Don’t worry. Not jealous.”
Conall had a weak smile at that, although it lingered for only a moment before-
“…I…I know it happened. I know. But…it’s like I was saying. Like…nobody was watching. Which I know sounds…weird.”
Grey let out a weak chuckle at that, shaking her head.
“Yes. Weird.”
She turned her head at that, resting her head on her arms. Trying to hide her face as she realized that…she couldn’t shake the same feeling about her and Lily.
Ah. They are back.
Zelith groaned into her hands. She hated how much she could sense what the voice was talking about now, that strange disembodied chorus that surrounded her. That sickening sense of wrongness was still there, like she was looking at something she wasn’t supposed to, like a corpse somebody had hidden. But the edge was fading, replaced by a horrible numb sensation.
“I thought you were the thousand eyes,” she said weakly. “Not…whatever they are.”
A thousand is very generous. Let us try to be humble.
Zelith didn’t bother moving. Everything around her lacked substance in her perception, the noises long ago fading into nothing in the background. The dim light of the room seemed nothing compared to the radiance of her companion, the strange eyes and grasping hands drifting in the darkness.
White on shadow. Just words. Nothing but words.
Now you are understanding.
“Get out of my head.”
I want there to be love with us, Zelith. And we are the same, you and I. There is no distance between us, if we acknowledge what we are.
“You don’t love anything,” Zelith replied, voice weak, refusing to acknowledge the second part. “You just want it.”
Of course. That is the only love things like us can hope for. Wanting. Hunger. We don’t understand it in any other way, do we?
“Shut up,” Zelith said, knowing that it would not stop it.
It’s best we remain here. Locked away. Content to keep telling ourselves our stories, until finally they run out.
Zelith stewed on that, her mind continuing to run along the grooves of her thoughts in familiar patterns. Her fears, her anxieties and doubts, all manifested once more here, in this place where reality came to die. The distance between her and this thing had never felt thinner. Everything was vanishing around and inside her, like she was finally letting go. A blade, cutting away the shadows and differences and divisions. Letting the light consume her and everything else. Past, present. The joke of the future. And yet…
Grey.
She was real. Even if this voice was right, even if Grey as she knew her was a lie, like everything else, a great and terrible joke….Grey was real. Out there, somewhere, beyond this breaking reality, Grey existed. Even if she was different in some ways, she was out there, and she was Grey.
Zelith smiled. That pull in her chest, that gravity. It had never left, even as she ignored it. Even as reality had dragged her down, it had never gone away.
“So I’ve got a chance,” she muttered, letting out a laugh her grin grew wider, the voices growing frantic around her as she frowned.
Strike The Horizon 