Revelations Cycle 12.5: Seven Stars in Hand
Okay so I guess when I said 'Friday' what I really meant was 'later tonight', derp. I guess this just proves that you can just really never trust my judgment on when I will get around to doing things at all. It helps that this was short. By the way this shit is laden with metaphor and pretty heavy and obtuse so I hope people can follow it. I'm not entirely certain that I can, and I wrote it. :|
<==
~~~
There are stars outside your window, so many stars. Thousands, millions of them, and how often do you think about them? Only always, only constantly. How often do you, did you dream of worlds beyond your comprehension orbiting far distant suns, and the civilizations that lived and died and loved therein, drunk on the wine of existence, thought and memory and the ability to forget? How long have you dreamt that somewhere, out there, is your dead world of dreams, barren now and stripped to the bone but still there, still waiting for you to exhume its long rotted corpse and carry away the things it was?
There are stars, and they were yours once, and this is probably the point you were making. You are not entirely sure. You forget, sometimes, when you are not in the blissful trance state that coding provides, and that is the one thing you can forget, where your train of thought was going, because at any time there are thousands of other conductors vying for attention. They are dim most of the time, stars at the end of their cycle, sometimes flaring up, going supernova, and drawing your consciousness back to them for the barest of instants.
Right now there are but two stars in your universe, two suns, one that grows dimmer with every passing moment as the other gains strength, drawing from previous failures. The former is useless, weak and sputtering, an embarrassment. The latter is bright and magnificent and true.
The second star is you.
They gave you pills when you were small, or rather gave him the pills to suppress you and he drank them all down with milk and honey, so sweet, so smooth against his tongue and the worst part is they worked, almost. And if they had you would have been content to languish, content to hold back the other stars, blind their light from him and keep him safe from the awful knowing as he held his girl and kissed her lips and laughed with friends that you can do nothing but recognize (you have seen so many incarnations of them, so many of their stars, that what else can you do but go chasing after shadows, shadows of Cancer and Aries and Libra). You would have, could have been content with that, had they worked.
But the pills didn’t work. Nothing does. And when he was ten years old and still small enough that he and his love were holding hands and skipping stones it began in earnest, and faced with the same path as always you were merciless. Every day, every night you were with him, stealing his stellar fuel, drinking from him, whispering in his ear, pouring in more and more memories of dead things and death until he woke up screaming drenched in sweat and his mother came with a wet washcloth to stroke his forehead and slick back his matted locks, holding him as he shook, vulnerable in the worst, despicable way.
Time passed, and you pulled more and more of him into you, until you were the body, and the pills went to work on him instead. Your mind, your soul, already bloated, surged forth, but it didn’t matter because you still woke up screaming, still crying, in the body of a hormone-addled sixteen year old because you have seen so much, so much, too much, watched them die, watched the stars fade and collapse and be reborn in countless bangs, countless explosions of matter and light and sound and energy, you should be numb to it by now.
You are not. You watch the sky, and count the stars as they fall, one by one.
A whistle, far in the distance. Sirens are sounding. A point of light on the horizon; another star falls, slowly then faster, hurtling down.
AG: THAT SHOULD BE EVERYTHING. YOU GOT YOUR CRUXITE ITEM THERE, SOL?
AT: ye2, kk. ii am much prepared.
AG: GOOD. THAT’S… GOOD. I’LL SEE YOU SOON, THEN?
AT: maybe. don’t waiit up for me, though. ii’m tryiing for godtiier.
AG: IF YOU’RE TRYING FOR THE ROMEO AND JULIET, “OH LOVE LET ME DIE IN YOUR STICK-LIKE ARMS AS I WEEP FOR OUR STAR-CROSSED FATE” ANGLE WITH ALICE, YOU’RE A FEW DAYS TOO LATE, FUCKASS.
AT: ii’ll 2tiill get two 2ee her.
You close your laptop. Past this point, you know that your erstwhile companion, his erstwhile companion, will not be responding any longer. Another star dies tonight-
And another lives, reborn.
---
When you were smaller, Solomon liked to play games. Not any games, though. It was always the same game, the disc well worn, and he would come over every weekend to play, buying you off with two liter bottles of Mountain Dew and gallon bags of Cheetos for the pleasure of crashing in front of your copy of Silent Hill for about twenty hours at a time.
“What the fuck are you doing?” you would ask, as the ending cut scene rolled and Solomon, invariably, growled and resisted the urge to toss the controller across the room, instead clamping down on it with knuckles gone white with frustration.
“Trying for the good ending,” he would explain, through clenched teeth, and you would roll your eyes dramatically and snatch the abused controller away from him:
“It’s Silent Hill, you goddamn moron. There is no ‘good’ ending.”
He still tried, though, every week, and somehow it is this you are thinking of as you stare at the computer screen, watching Solomon Carter watch the stars. He has grown, you think. You’ve both grown, and changed, and learned things, and gone crazy, and you love him for that, the bastard. Whatever happens, whatever you do, Solomon will always be your best and most trusted, most loved of friends.
(TG: you ready bro
GT: for what???
TG: to do the thing
GT: do I have to? i hate doing the thing. it makes me feel creepy. :(
TG: eye on the ball egbert
TG: do the sleepy thing
GT: fiiiiiiiine.)
This is what you are thinking of, in the moment before you slump forward over the keyboard, and everything falls, yet again, to black.
---
Heir, can you hear me? Heir of Blood, it is time for you to awaken. Good Prince of Prospit, will you not heed my call? Time is, as always, on your side.
---
Wake. Feel the breeze on your cheek, and the fleecy, golden blankets that envelop you like a cocoon. Try to move and feel the ache in your bones, your muscles, overtired and rusty from years of disuse, atrophied and withered like cut roses that no one remembered to place in water until too late. Feel angry at the use of that metaphor. Feel angrier at the fact that you are angry with yourself for no goddamn explicable reason. Sit up in bed, gripping the edge of the sheet hard enough to shred it like the world’s most expensive tissue paper.
Look around and be instantly confused. There are six beds, including your own, and one of them contains you, and one of them is empty, covers thrown back, looking but recently abandoned. Be certain that if you touched it, it would not yet be cool. One bed is in the shadows, you cannot be sure that anyone is in it at all; but the other three are filled with black haired young men and women, set deeply adrift in the drugging waters of sleep, their sides moving up and down shallowly as they slumber. Be likewise pretty certain that you know who they are, and at the same time that you have never seen any of them before in your life.
Not aiding this in any way is the fact that all three have curiously gray skin.
Another stands in the room, a specter, a wraith, a girl with the same gray skin and twisted orange candy corn horns and a smile that glimmers beneath maroon lips, wide and full. She wears a hood, and her arms are spread wide for you. “Good morning,” she whispers, moving towards you to brush the stray hair from your face, clawed fingertips lingering on your skin. “Or should I say, good evening?”
The voice is familiar, without being so. “Aradia,” say breathlessly, without knowing why, your voice curiously low. “You… I…”
“Have you ever heard the story of the phoenix?” she asks, kindly, sitting at the foot of your bed. Nod along with her, unsure of where this is going. “I rose from the ashes,” she explains. “And so will you. The time has come, I think.”
Look on as she holds up a mirror. See that the visage reflected there within is not you, not Karl Vates, but someone else, someone more sinister. Watch the image flicker, to your human self to this man and back and forth until it stops, and there is a troll in front of you and around you and a troll inside you and suddenly you are nowhere and everywhere and the universe is not big enough for you and the space between nucleons is an eternity for you and.
Hear him laughing as the mirror shatters, and you are cast away, a husk, unwanted, the death knell of another nameless star.
---
So, stars. You were on the topic of them. You do that, sometimes, get distracted and then remember. You were busy being elsewhere, for awhile. That’s alright. You’re here now.
And one of them is falling now, as you watch. There is an apple in your hand, glistening, unnatural in origin and purpose, and you toss it in one hand as the program you executed ravages computers across the country, across the globe, burrowing into machines and pulling out metaphorical wires, disemboweling them as thousands of holes in plains, in mountains, in tundra permafrost open, gaping, to the sky for the first time in decades, maybe the first time ever. All around are sirens, and the sound of rocket fuel being consumed, trails streaking across the sky. Where are they going? Where will they be? It does not matter, individually, for the end course will be the same, and you will not be here to see it.
How could Karl, poor, sweet, insignificant Karl, have possibly known that the disc he put in would release a virus that would, in four days exactly, decode the most heavily encrypted security systems in existence and set off as many warheads as there are visible stars in the sky? He could not, of course, bless his heart, though even if you’d told him he wouldn’t have believed you.
It’s alright. That’s all done now. The star falls over a distant hill, and a cloud of dust kicks up. The sky is burning now, a sort of umber shade, and a wall of dust is rushing towards you; you can no longer see the stars. Your duty is done. It is time, having burned all the bridges, to move on.
You bite into the apple as the Armageddon you are the architect of sweeps forward, and the last of the old star is stripped away.
---
-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] began pestering ghostyTrickster [GT] at 00:00! --
CG: HEY, FUCKASS.
CG: EGBERT.
CG: JOHN.
CG: LOOK, I KNOW YOU’RE BUSY WITH SHIT RIGHT NOW, BUT THIS IS IMPORTANT OKAY.
CG: KARKAT VANTAS NEEDS TO SPEAK TO YOU, AND HE DOESN’T HAVE MUCH TIME.
END OF ACT ONE
==>
<==
~~~
There are stars outside your window, so many stars. Thousands, millions of them, and how often do you think about them? Only always, only constantly. How often do you, did you dream of worlds beyond your comprehension orbiting far distant suns, and the civilizations that lived and died and loved therein, drunk on the wine of existence, thought and memory and the ability to forget? How long have you dreamt that somewhere, out there, is your dead world of dreams, barren now and stripped to the bone but still there, still waiting for you to exhume its long rotted corpse and carry away the things it was?
There are stars, and they were yours once, and this is probably the point you were making. You are not entirely sure. You forget, sometimes, when you are not in the blissful trance state that coding provides, and that is the one thing you can forget, where your train of thought was going, because at any time there are thousands of other conductors vying for attention. They are dim most of the time, stars at the end of their cycle, sometimes flaring up, going supernova, and drawing your consciousness back to them for the barest of instants.
Right now there are but two stars in your universe, two suns, one that grows dimmer with every passing moment as the other gains strength, drawing from previous failures. The former is useless, weak and sputtering, an embarrassment. The latter is bright and magnificent and true.
The second star is you.
They gave you pills when you were small, or rather gave him the pills to suppress you and he drank them all down with milk and honey, so sweet, so smooth against his tongue and the worst part is they worked, almost. And if they had you would have been content to languish, content to hold back the other stars, blind their light from him and keep him safe from the awful knowing as he held his girl and kissed her lips and laughed with friends that you can do nothing but recognize (you have seen so many incarnations of them, so many of their stars, that what else can you do but go chasing after shadows, shadows of Cancer and Aries and Libra). You would have, could have been content with that, had they worked.
But the pills didn’t work. Nothing does. And when he was ten years old and still small enough that he and his love were holding hands and skipping stones it began in earnest, and faced with the same path as always you were merciless. Every day, every night you were with him, stealing his stellar fuel, drinking from him, whispering in his ear, pouring in more and more memories of dead things and death until he woke up screaming drenched in sweat and his mother came with a wet washcloth to stroke his forehead and slick back his matted locks, holding him as he shook, vulnerable in the worst, despicable way.
Time passed, and you pulled more and more of him into you, until you were the body, and the pills went to work on him instead. Your mind, your soul, already bloated, surged forth, but it didn’t matter because you still woke up screaming, still crying, in the body of a hormone-addled sixteen year old because you have seen so much, so much, too much, watched them die, watched the stars fade and collapse and be reborn in countless bangs, countless explosions of matter and light and sound and energy, you should be numb to it by now.
You are not. You watch the sky, and count the stars as they fall, one by one.
A whistle, far in the distance. Sirens are sounding. A point of light on the horizon; another star falls, slowly then faster, hurtling down.
AG: THAT SHOULD BE EVERYTHING. YOU GOT YOUR CRUXITE ITEM THERE, SOL?
AT: ye2, kk. ii am much prepared.
AG: GOOD. THAT’S… GOOD. I’LL SEE YOU SOON, THEN?
AT: maybe. don’t waiit up for me, though. ii’m tryiing for godtiier.
AG: IF YOU’RE TRYING FOR THE ROMEO AND JULIET, “OH LOVE LET ME DIE IN YOUR STICK-LIKE ARMS AS I WEEP FOR OUR STAR-CROSSED FATE” ANGLE WITH ALICE, YOU’RE A FEW DAYS TOO LATE, FUCKASS.
AT: ii’ll 2tiill get two 2ee her.
You close your laptop. Past this point, you know that your erstwhile companion, his erstwhile companion, will not be responding any longer. Another star dies tonight-
And another lives, reborn.
---
When you were smaller, Solomon liked to play games. Not any games, though. It was always the same game, the disc well worn, and he would come over every weekend to play, buying you off with two liter bottles of Mountain Dew and gallon bags of Cheetos for the pleasure of crashing in front of your copy of Silent Hill for about twenty hours at a time.
“What the fuck are you doing?” you would ask, as the ending cut scene rolled and Solomon, invariably, growled and resisted the urge to toss the controller across the room, instead clamping down on it with knuckles gone white with frustration.
“Trying for the good ending,” he would explain, through clenched teeth, and you would roll your eyes dramatically and snatch the abused controller away from him:
“It’s Silent Hill, you goddamn moron. There is no ‘good’ ending.”
He still tried, though, every week, and somehow it is this you are thinking of as you stare at the computer screen, watching Solomon Carter watch the stars. He has grown, you think. You’ve both grown, and changed, and learned things, and gone crazy, and you love him for that, the bastard. Whatever happens, whatever you do, Solomon will always be your best and most trusted, most loved of friends.
(TG: you ready bro
GT: for what???
TG: to do the thing
GT: do I have to? i hate doing the thing. it makes me feel creepy. :(
TG: eye on the ball egbert
TG: do the sleepy thing
GT: fiiiiiiiine.)
This is what you are thinking of, in the moment before you slump forward over the keyboard, and everything falls, yet again, to black.
---
Heir, can you hear me? Heir of Blood, it is time for you to awaken. Good Prince of Prospit, will you not heed my call? Time is, as always, on your side.
---
Wake. Feel the breeze on your cheek, and the fleecy, golden blankets that envelop you like a cocoon. Try to move and feel the ache in your bones, your muscles, overtired and rusty from years of disuse, atrophied and withered like cut roses that no one remembered to place in water until too late. Feel angry at the use of that metaphor. Feel angrier at the fact that you are angry with yourself for no goddamn explicable reason. Sit up in bed, gripping the edge of the sheet hard enough to shred it like the world’s most expensive tissue paper.
Look around and be instantly confused. There are six beds, including your own, and one of them contains you, and one of them is empty, covers thrown back, looking but recently abandoned. Be certain that if you touched it, it would not yet be cool. One bed is in the shadows, you cannot be sure that anyone is in it at all; but the other three are filled with black haired young men and women, set deeply adrift in the drugging waters of sleep, their sides moving up and down shallowly as they slumber. Be likewise pretty certain that you know who they are, and at the same time that you have never seen any of them before in your life.
Not aiding this in any way is the fact that all three have curiously gray skin.
Another stands in the room, a specter, a wraith, a girl with the same gray skin and twisted orange candy corn horns and a smile that glimmers beneath maroon lips, wide and full. She wears a hood, and her arms are spread wide for you. “Good morning,” she whispers, moving towards you to brush the stray hair from your face, clawed fingertips lingering on your skin. “Or should I say, good evening?”
The voice is familiar, without being so. “Aradia,” say breathlessly, without knowing why, your voice curiously low. “You… I…”
“Have you ever heard the story of the phoenix?” she asks, kindly, sitting at the foot of your bed. Nod along with her, unsure of where this is going. “I rose from the ashes,” she explains. “And so will you. The time has come, I think.”
Look on as she holds up a mirror. See that the visage reflected there within is not you, not Karl Vates, but someone else, someone more sinister. Watch the image flicker, to your human self to this man and back and forth until it stops, and there is a troll in front of you and around you and a troll inside you and suddenly you are nowhere and everywhere and the universe is not big enough for you and the space between nucleons is an eternity for you and.
Hear him laughing as the mirror shatters, and you are cast away, a husk, unwanted, the death knell of another nameless star.
---
So, stars. You were on the topic of them. You do that, sometimes, get distracted and then remember. You were busy being elsewhere, for awhile. That’s alright. You’re here now.
And one of them is falling now, as you watch. There is an apple in your hand, glistening, unnatural in origin and purpose, and you toss it in one hand as the program you executed ravages computers across the country, across the globe, burrowing into machines and pulling out metaphorical wires, disemboweling them as thousands of holes in plains, in mountains, in tundra permafrost open, gaping, to the sky for the first time in decades, maybe the first time ever. All around are sirens, and the sound of rocket fuel being consumed, trails streaking across the sky. Where are they going? Where will they be? It does not matter, individually, for the end course will be the same, and you will not be here to see it.
How could Karl, poor, sweet, insignificant Karl, have possibly known that the disc he put in would release a virus that would, in four days exactly, decode the most heavily encrypted security systems in existence and set off as many warheads as there are visible stars in the sky? He could not, of course, bless his heart, though even if you’d told him he wouldn’t have believed you.
It’s alright. That’s all done now. The star falls over a distant hill, and a cloud of dust kicks up. The sky is burning now, a sort of umber shade, and a wall of dust is rushing towards you; you can no longer see the stars. Your duty is done. It is time, having burned all the bridges, to move on.
You bite into the apple as the Armageddon you are the architect of sweeps forward, and the last of the old star is stripped away.
---
-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] began pestering ghostyTrickster [GT] at 00:00! --
CG: HEY, FUCKASS.
CG: EGBERT.
CG: JOHN.
CG: LOOK, I KNOW YOU’RE BUSY WITH SHIT RIGHT NOW, BUT THIS IS IMPORTANT OKAY.
CG: KARKAT VANTAS NEEDS TO SPEAK TO YOU, AND HE DOESN’T HAVE MUCH TIME.
END OF ACT ONE
==>