And the Darkling Reefs Abide

Chapter 6

There had been a sort of general store in the greater bog reef, when I lived there. It was a run down business in the expendable part of town, the district that seemed to be nibbled at by sinkholes eclipse after eclipse.

You knew it wasn’t doing well — it let ephyra bounce around inside. I hadn’t thought much of it, back then. Instead I simply luxuriated in having another building to play around in. I didn’t see the guards who watched my every move; i wasn’t tall enough yet.

Before long I noticed all the shiny trinkets and curios that tended the shelves of the store. I knew I wanted. Hadn’t pent down the specifics yet, but of all treasures of the store, one of them would be mind. That much I assured Friy.

There was a molding of gold there. Shape of a swamp cat’s ridged skull, tarnished by time. (It wasn’t gold, I realize). I would come by each day the shop was open, root my little body down in front of it, and just stare it.

I must have picked up on a vibe or something — seen how none the other medusa were grabbing all they wanted, perhaps, and mimed them — because I stared at it without picking it up.

A span of days went by like this, and my obsession must’ve have kicked up in intensity somewhy, because I told Friy, as we bounced toward the shop that day, that I would have the skull.

She was keener than I, because she completely halted at that, asked me if I was sure. It took me a long time to learn how not to be sure, so of course I replied the affirmative.

She sunk down out of the air at that, and spun round twice. Then she left.

I had to go to the store on my own. Built my courage up for a few moments before the gold skull, then swipe it.

All of this is coming back to me, because what happened next then, is exactly what’s happening now.

Jellies see all around them, so about everyone in the shop knew immediately what I’d done. The guards Coiled first, like cats ready to pounce. And pounce they did.

It was luck I came late in the evening, with all the people that entailed, it really was, because I when I was escaping I was missing a few eyes, at least one tentacle, and I had been lucky.

I was counting on that same luck now, hoping it could use the confusion of the crowd to make my escape.

I absorbed in a few breaths, and let all the distant corners of my mind catch up to what all had happened.

I lured the green jelly guard over into the shadows by the raven, and finally activated the gift death had given me. Aimed right at the guard, my first test pointed at a medusa. Couldn’t have been the recommended procedure, for sure.

Nevertheless, I fired, and the jelly froze. Not in shock or fear, but bodily, entirely.

I reached out now, with a feeler tentacle, and felt the cool hardness that once was flesh.

Friy had never read of a Gift like this. I had never tangled with it.

It felt nice. I felt a match to the obstacles stacked up against me.

My brain oozed liquidlike out of it’s utter focus on the image of a few eyestalks, and I regarded the rest of the space surrounding me.

Time seemed to slow in monumental moments like these, and The guards were just react. The red guard was still stuck motionless, gestureless at my betrayed — I had to call it betrayal — but the medusa of shifting colors (some kind of prophet, I tried to remember) was started to strafe, tresses lifted to fire.

I didn’t move. I had decided my next action, and affected some kind of shock seemed appropriate.

I called out to the civilians that dwelt in the space, who had just come for a bite to eat the diner. Tried to feel their confusion and fear, and reached for the puppet strings.

I said, “Get out of here! Run! We don’t know who’s next!”

Without any idea what’s going on, without anything to hold on to, this first impression counted for a lot.

Now I berated myself for deciding to do all this in the center of the diner. Farthest from any exists.

I dodged — my body dodged, rather (I wasn’t paying enough attention), and a few of my eyestalks watching a glass orb strike down, penetrating where I had been. It shattered and released a cloud of dust. It couldn’t have been good to touch, or breathe.

The nearest medusa were the waiting staff crossing the space between tables. Whatever they’d been holding, plates with or without food, was dropped moments prior. When one searched their visage, tho, you didn’t see terror or bewilderment. There was some long suffering in the sigh of one, or the way another rooted down and deflated themselves.

They wanted to be over, I imagined.

I darted over to one, the deflated, rooted.

“Let’s get out of here.” I reached out with a grasper tentacle and with force yanked them from the ground.

I darted over to another, and another, along the path toward the table. The more medusa around me, the better. One of them had just been a customer enjoying the shade here. The other had held a broom.

We were the center of all the attention in the diner. Some of the civilians had heeded me, and were fled or fleeing. But some stayed to gawk, or moved away slowly.

I lifted two tresses, found two targets, and dither for a breath, and then I fired.

Two more medusa turned to stone. Screams flying up from the jellies around my victims. They pulled attention toward them.

I angled all my eyestalks away from the red guard, lest I glimpse some new species of betrayal growing there.

Panic, disarray, pandemonium.

It but dimly matched the chaos of that day as a ephyra so many years ago (I’d costed the shop far more than a golden skull.), but it was a nice hit of nostalgia. And it should be enough to carry me out of the diner, then orient myself toward the sun spire.

It’s the little things that get you — I said that, right? I wish I had the dignity to say it was some small oversight that cost me, this time.

I forgot about the colorshifting guard. She was some kind of prophet, I’d assumed. I’d written off her gift as something entirely passive, of no use in a fight.

But why else would she be a guard?

All I saw was one, two, three tresses rising in my direction. The four, five six, and gone was any possibility of dodging.

I saw light gathering there at the flutes of her tresses, and my eyes were dazzled, and I saw no more.

It was like the darkness before the world was created. It was like a warm snug cave from which a god might rise and make a world.

It was, I realized, night.

There were dazzling points of light scattered like the [sand of beach] and they covered the sky entire. I was reminded of the sun, but these lights were tiny.

Below me a a massive cyclopean reef of a straight lines and squares encrusted the land, and spires rose out of it like teeth gnawing the sky.

There were forms that ran, flapped, perched, all across the expanse. They were not alien, for all their motion perplexed. Any medusa could recognize these forms. The tall avian forms limned in the ruins of the ancient folk. The people of the ruins to which we clung.

It was a — special, to see the them in motion, in the flesh.

And then a light issued from nowhere in particularly, and it was all

Motion ceased. An entire civilization was sealed in stone, sprawling, bustling cities turned as if with a snap, to ruins.

It hurt, on some philosophical level, to see the avians become the statues we knew.

I looked up, uncomprehending, at the sky, and lost myself in that sea of light.

I awoke in darkness. Across my was stone, and before my eyestalks everted my tentacles were reaching outward, and were stopped by the curving walls of stone.

I opened my gaze, and decided this must be a prison.

Not every angle was a wall. To one side, higher than I stood rooted, the stone gave way to a fine mess, and on the other side, a red medusa looked down upon me.

“Why did you do it, Ruwene?”

I looked away, traced again the rooth stone of this carven pit. I must be in the dungeons beneath Avelt. I must have been captured.

I must have failed.

“You could have worked with us, Roo. You’re innocent — you were innocent. You could have stayed that way.

“What happened now?” I pulled the strings to ask, but it was not a question born out of a inciting desire to know. I had failed; what else was there to do?

Exile, again. Avelt could do things too differently than the greater bog reef. I suspected. I hoped.

“That all depends on your gift. It’s not listed on your records. What is it? Can the jellies you froze be recovered?” I was silence. What was the point in answering, really? I felt my own puppet strings, but I didn’t venture to pull then once more.

“Answer me, Roo.”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

Silence. I decided to speak. “I just got it.” Damn it, I didn’t want to release that info. I gripped my strings. “I mean, this is the first time I’ve used it.”

“Death gave it to you.”

“I”

“Don’t lie, don’t shit on my trust any further.”

In silence, I complied. I went through the motions of considering escape. I fired a stream of telekinetic at the ground. The stone just absorb the flow. I couldn’t levitate out of here; I didn’t expect to levitate out of here. I Sighed.

“What did death say to you?”

“I told me the story of the gods — how it really happened. What the sun god sacrificed for the all this. He’s going to free them all. I’m going to help him do it.”

“WAs going to, I mean,” I quickly added.

The red guard peered down at me from beyond that mesh net. He had the look in his eyes like hw as looking at me without seeing me Or at least it felt that they.

I saw his bell membrane tauten once or twice, like more melodies would come spelling out more questions or [criticisms]. It was for nothing, in the end. We were both silent.

My eyestalks couldn’t stop tracing the walls of my prison, against and again.

It was smooth stone, polished enough that even in the stickiest tentacles could find no purchase. They were tall. From his bobbing, I guess the red guard was levitating to be able to see me down at the bottom.

I cast my gaze around the bottom of the pit, and saw no help items sitting around to solve this puzzle. Anything I might’ve had — the friendship band, the sunshield — was confiscated.

I had nothing but my flesh and essence.

And the Gift death had given me.

Would it help at all if I put the red guard into stasis? Would I have done it if it could have helped?

My conscious mind was starting to sink into the familiar loop – vaguely, abstractly anxious, knowing something was wrong, something was going wrong, and yet there being nothing I could do about it. Yet still it was an object of fixation, something thought spun around like satellite some star.

Whatever lower mind really animated my body, though, didn’t give up so easily. I felt in a seat in my mind, watching my body like images projected onto a screen. Panicked eyes cast around against and again, search for some crack, some erosion, some intruding moss or vine, some bug or rat scurrying about, some water dropping down, some tapping like a prisoner sending a message, so sign from the gods, some magic twist of fate that might deliver me from this prison — anything that might possibly restore some control into their grasp, something he could pin a hope one.

He didn’t find it, at all. He was stuck in here with me. Not just in the prison, but in my body too. He’d get the message eventually, give up like I had. For now I was content to let him exhaust himself.

I watched on my seat at the back of my mind, looping in horror or dread or nihility, and i figured his puppet strings, and wondered what to do with them.

He didn’t tire out. Still he searched around, but it must have been [dawning] upon him that this quest was futile. Some of us take longer than others, I didn’t really hold it against him.

Time passes on, though, and there eventually did come some exterior change that might break the loop.

It was a deep, commanding voice from above. Ignorant, uncaring at me, only carry down into my polish pit prison as an accident.

Still, I heard it.

“A rogue Gifted individual is approaching the reef. All able​-​bodied gifted guards, after me.”

The red guard lurched away at that. I’d forgotten he was up there, truly — even my lower mind knowing that he wouldn’t, couldn’t help me out of here. Sensing that letting him even know we were planning some manner of escape would betray the plan, in spirit.

He was gone now, though. Didn’t even say goodbye. Maybe the rogue Gifted was that important. Maybe he wouldn’t have said goodbye anyway.

I had forgotten he was there, I had. But why did it feel so … empty without the red guard on high, staring down at me.

Why did I feel a new depth of helplessness and isolation rise up and engulf my like an abyss?

The nihility was becoming unbearable. I should have remembered, I”d learned it at some point, for sure. That pointlessness, meaningless, worthless existence, devoid of any guiding purpose, it wasn’t something my mind could linger in for long. It was a poison or acid eating at away and whatever was submerged in it.

That wasn’t a bad thing ; it could be used for good. Dissolving chains and walls, aimed at the bad things, destroying them with the might of an uncaring universe.

But you shouldn’t dunk your whole self into it. I should have learnt that.

So I rose from my seat at the back of my mind, my lower mind’s puppet strings firmly in my grasp, and condescend to act again.

It was glorified surveying, really. I was doing the same futile striving as the lower mind, but I decided to be a part of it.

It should have made a difference, it really should. I was trying. That was all i could do, wasn’t it?

The source came to me after some thought, like a splinter lodged in me. It still believed it was futile, that I could never escape. I still didn’t dare to look into the future, for fear of what I’d see.

Once I’d named the fear, it was easier to just negate it. The future, what did it contain?

What I’d really wanted, following after Death, was something to cover up the hole where meaning should be. I was a tool in service of some higher purpose — that’s what we all wanted, wasn’t it? That’s what we were searching for. Some end that we would be a tool, a cog, for.

But right now, I was a broken tool. I could not meet the end ordained. I decided I would kill the high priestess of Avelt. But what was a decision you couldn’t act on?

I felt — I felt like a traveller, solitary, in search of some vast promised land. Seeking, and then I come upon a high cliff past which I cannot proceed. I haven’t found the promised land, and but two choices remain for me.

I could give up the search, and return to wherever it was I came. But I knew that choice. I had no home, there was nothing waiting behind me but the acidic nihility.

Or I could throw myself over that cliff, and let the unfelt winds of fate whip and wuther me, and deliver me to some doom or destiny.

There are a lot of choices that aren’t choises at all.

I looked around me, again. It seemed I saw with fresh eyes, cleansed by some revelation. I saw, of course, the empty, secure prison I hadn’t left. That hadn’t changed.

And a spinning around, and upturning of the gaze, and I saw nothing else had changed. It was the same empty, inert prison. No escape, surely.

There was something I missed, of course.

AFter all, it’s always a little thing you overlook.

The guards had taken everything from me, hadn’t they? All the things I’d brought with me, or been given.

No, not all.

Death had given me that Gift. That power which would endlessly even the playing field, balance the scale.

I stared down at my tresses oozing with the cold Gift of death’s power.

I thought a long time, looking at those tresses.

Considering, reconsidering the options.

But some choices weren’t choices at all. I said I’d throw myself off that cliff, didn’t I?

(When you piss life off, it really doesn’t give you the easy way out, does it?)

I took a breath, and I knew what I had to do.

I decided.