And the Darkling Reefs Abide

Chapter 7

You remember the slow days, root out in the wild bogs, when there was nothing to do, and you reached for the spiders and scorpions and scuttler bugs, and, for no reason at all (or for dark reasons), you decided to pull off, one by one, the legs of the creatures?

Same principle.

The pit was deep, but not too deep. Crouching with my stalk, I could leap up high enough to see the opening to another pit across from mine. Still, I couldn’t reach the ledge even throwing out a grasping tentacle. It was just too high.

I”m reminded of where this all began, back in the cliffs. My levitation was as useless as always, and to climb back up the canyons I just had to do it the brute way.

But these walls were too smooth to gain any purchase.

Up at the top of the pit, by the ledge I so desperately wanted to reach, I was closed in by a mesh, a net of wires. Tightly woven, but (near as I could tell), with holes more than wide enough to wiggle a feeler tentacle around in.

All of these facts came together in my plan.

AS much as I balked at the execution, I knew it was a pretty damn good plan.

Mentally, I recalled the image of that yawning chasm beneath the cliffs, the winds of fate howling, the sun tending the horizon behind me.

Throw yourself off the cliff.

I should be easy, simple. A single deft action. There was no resistance – no real resistance — out in the real world. It was all imagined. Difficulty you assigned because a part of you doesn’t want it.

BUt I want it. I need it. I had decided.

So I reached for the puppet strings of my body, and I pulled them. It should be easy, simple. A single deft action.

I grabbed one feeler tentacle in another.

I absorbed a breath. I said a prayer — to death. I wondered, distantly, if I was entirely braindead, and my plan couldn’t work for some small reason I missed.

I did everything to push away that single blistering hot moment of blinding, incinerating fire that came next.

There are definitions of the fire of pain.

I agnnized them in their entirety. My bell was aching — and then I realized I was screaming and atonal cacophonous roar, and I stopped that. But the pain didn’t stop. The socket where my tentacle used to attach to my muscle ring, it still screamed. And if I didn’t let it out, it just build up inside me, bloating me until there was no room for other thoughts.

A screamed a moment more, raw, by membranes near sore.

I pointed eyestalks at the ground, and saw a slender, squishy mass, squirting blood and writhing mindlessly. There was something uncanny, that that meat was once attached to me, was once a part of me, was once me.

I absorbed another breath.

One might be enough. But I did not want to get to the climax of my plan to be thwarted by a few inches. This was magnificent. This was genius. It would work. I /had /to work.

I don’t care if I’m tempting, taunting fate with that. I had to. I assure you.

I absorbed another breath. Said my prayer. Wondered if I was wrong, and the plan would fail despite everything. If I had ruined my life for –

Nothing.

It couldn’t be. I couldn’t accept that. It was all for something. I had a purpose, and I would fulfill the purpose even if it meant tearing myself apart to do it.

Some time later, there another something slender, squishy mass on the floor, squirting blood and writhing mindlessly.

I feel back on the floor of my prison, and just stared up at the ceiling, overflowing with an exhaustion I could not quantify.

There was a ring of eyes painted on the ceiling. I wondered why.

I had to keep going forward. I was losing prodigious amounts of blood. That exhaustion — could it be lightheadedness?

Was this the small thing I missed?

I stood up straight on my stalk, and moved forward.

I put the hard part of my plan first. The arms would be the most difficult, and I knew once I got past those, ripping out feeler tentacles would be easy to work myself up for.

I neede four. I’d just pull out four. Then I could move on to step three.

The feelers writhed on the ground for a lot longer. I wondered about that. It worried me how alluring these backpaths of thought were. The lightheadedness? I didn’t want to fall into a loop now, this close to the edge of the cliff.

Even if it felt so peaceful, so relaxing, to just lay down and deform like goo, and should let the darkness in. Sleep the sleep of the suns.

I would not.

Step three. I arranged the tentacles on the ground. I stuck the first grasper into the second, at the part where it used to attached to me. At the end of the second tentacle, and scraped holes into the dead flesh, and stuck the feeler tentacles in like candles in a cake.

I fiddled for a moment more, to align the two grasper tentacles as straight as I could managed.

And now, step four. The part that was all out of my control. I slid back, just a tad, pointed a tress at the mass of dead flesh around on the ground, and I let the coldness fly.

The strange line struck a grasper tentacle, and there was a wave of desaturation flowing out from that spot.

I held my breath with the wave reached the boundary between the first and second tentacles (even if, probably, it happened in instants.)

It cross the boundary, and the desaturation continued.

I swelled. I swelled immensely with a kind of dark joy which I suspected was a dark shadow of what the gods felt, making medusa.

I was one step closer to the edge of the cliff.

Tremblingly, I reached out and took the cool stone implement from the ground.

The other end of it did not deform under gravity. I remained as rod stiff as I had labored it.

I, gingerly, tapped the rod against the walls of my prison to no effect. Then, with increasing strength until I was satisfied it would not break.

I was dithering, just a bit. Some of my eyestalks were starting to go dark, the blood loss situation is troublesome.

I crouched once more at the base of the wall beneath the ledge, and then I leapt.

Just before the apex of my jump, I swung out my implement, and with pureest glee saw it catch on the mesh of the doorway.

I gripped the rod with my other remaining tentacle, and held on for all I was.

And then, I began to climb.

I threw myself off the cliff, and now I would climb to the top.

A momumental step toward the brink, a step towards fulfilling my purpose against all the cunning of fate. It had been thought impossible; escaping the prison pits was not a known thing, it was not heard of.

I had it easy, I knew; there were special prisons for colored jellies, drugs injected that suppressed magic.

In a fair world, my story would have ended here.

Would have. It was unfitting, cocky wording. As if the mountain I had just climbed were the last, as if climbing to the top of this ledge were all i needed for my victory to be assured.

I everted my eyes, and gazed opposite the ledge, and the woven fibers of spider silk, the uncuttable mess that sealed me off from the world. It was glued down unpullably to its frame; the only breaks were up at the top, and on the opposite side. Only a guard could let a prison in or out.

My thoughts deflated palpably. It was a reaction, it wasn’t an emotional thing. I felt it like the key substance going suddenly missing. Blood. I was bleeding out, and I was starting to feel it. It was starting to hinder me greatly.

My gaze was blurry, and my eyes couldn’t seem to cooperate to resolve the world into a panoramic image. I took too many tries, but at length I focused several eyestalk pairs on the room beyond my cell.

It was dark like only a spaced walled in could be. It had that unmistakable alienating air of a prison, of a building with a single entrance or exit.

This air was complemented by its emptiness you could tell there was some great emergency pulling all the most qualified guards away; I spied two in the room visible from here.

Both had eyestalks trained me. Both held spears in their graspers there were lower.

Bother were floating closer, and then with greater speed.

I appreciated that the primitive side of me was in ultimate accord with my mind.

I called out, “Help! Help! I’m bluh bleeding!”

Perhaps there was something else informing the words, but the weaved into my plan.

The closest guard was colorless. Of course; the only kind of guard that wouldn’t have been called out to handle whatever was going on.

“What the heck happened?”

“The,” I paused breathlessly, thought whirring, turning themselves to words, “one of the colored bastards, used their ma ​-​ magic on my arms. Froze them solid. They fell off. They fell off.”

I stared hard to see their reaction. There was thought behind my words; they were colorless, like me. Emphasis that connection. They must have felt slighted by the colored too, right? It had to be at the forefront of their mind, having just been left behind.

“I — helped me please. Please. I can — it cant be good to be bleeding this much.”

They were still there, staring at me. I tried to move one of my ripped off arms — blood spurted up instead.

It was what it took to lurch them into motion. I saw them float up, put graspers on the latch where the spidersilk net hooked in.

My tresses raised almost without me. Pointing at the helpful guard, pointing at his just​-​now​-​arriving companion. It would be simple, it was be easy. Still them both, and throw myself first.

“C’mon.” the guard was saying. “We’ll get you bandaged up.”

That was what stopped me. I could still find use in them, couldn’t I?

I reached for the puppet strings, said something like, “they dont care, they didnt care. Just threw me in like this. I didnt have much with me, they probably threw that away too.” I checked myself there. I hadn’t meant to say that. I was lightheaded. I needed to stay in control.

The other guard spoke up. “Settledown, friend. We keep your things safe, we always do. Even if you pissed off whoever brought you in, they dont throw away possession.”

“I want to see them.”

“There you are. Try to move slowly, alright? Could only make the bandages so secure without immobilizing you completely.”

We were in a brighter room, walls of coral instead of tentacle shell, and sunlight stabbed inward. It was harsh light, but it gave the room a sense of reality and connection to the rest of the world.

It was long moment I spend, watching the doctor tie the spidersilk cloth around my bleeding stubbs, urging me to down glass over glass of water, and assuring me that it would all turn out ok.

I went through most of those moments staring at her bell, turning over the possibility in my mind. I could still here. Should I? It would make my path so marginally more convenient.

Did it matter in the end, if one more jelly lost everything, if i fulfilled my purpose? I sacrificed my arms. Would I sacrifice other people?

The doctor most of thought i was just some particularly angry criminal. Perhaps I was.

The guards sat in the room with us. They were at the table beside the tunnel own into the prison shell. They had rocks on a painted board, and played some game.

At a word from the doctor, they were escorting me back to my cell, and my time was running out.

“What did you do?” It was the first guard. The slender one. The one, I imagined, I made an impression on. “Why were the coloreds after you?”

“So called ‘prophet’ was in a bad mood, i reason. They told me she foresaw — something. She didn’t want to say what, just knew i was bad news for sun knows why.”

“Are you?”

My time was running out.

I looked at the two guards. I stopped floating forward, and their spears tentacles were already twitching, already on edge.

I raised my tresses. Realization might’ve flinched in their eyestalks.

I answered, “Yes.”