Interlude [closed]
Deep deeeep in the city, there is a place where up is down and down is up, and left and right are inside-out. It's a place that's been blocked off by the crew for the good of everyone, after they decided it held dangers best left untouched. After all, they have more pressing concerns and if they can get off the ship rather than deal with it, it isn't their problem. Therein lay the problem with ignoring problems, however. They grow, like an infection left unchecked. In the city, an infection is growing, and only a lonely, tired guardian at the gate is holding a churning black sea of nightmares back.
He's so tired. His sanity hangs by just a thread, but when one has been fighting a spiritual battle with something dark and mind-shatteringly malevolent with no relief for a time so long it seems immemorial, that happens.
Give. Up.
No.
He's so tired, trapped in his waking-without-sleep, never needing it, always wanting the peace of it anyway. Sometimes he closes his eyes--and he needs to because while his enemy can't reach directly into his mind, sometimes he displays such...things in front of his prison, to throw him off, to disturb and horrify him.
You're beaten already, little spirit-in-flesh. Broken and hopeless. You know what I am, and what I'm going to do and that all your efforts will be in vain.
There is only a long sigh in response, warm and rebounding against his own face, as it has, once again, for time immemorial, for what he's certain have been endless days in the dark, the sun and moon rising and setting until they've crumbled like stone in the mountains in the passing of eons. He wonders if the stars are still the same, like they'd been after 100 years already, or if the sky has been blacked out by smoke permanently due to his absence.
I will break you. I will enjoy it. Then you'll watch as I break all of them. They will beg me to break them down, they always beg to be beaten and broken and destroyed. I make them want it. You want it as well--oblivion. I've already given you the gift of the madness that comes at the edge of the precipice--why not let yourself fall in at last?
no.
He denies Him. (More like It, really).
But he's breaking. He has been for so long.
Let go. Just let it all go. All that responsibility, that you surely never wanted. Why should you have to hold on for them? Faceless and nameless--they saw you even. They left you here despite it. No one else has dared enter. No one will help you. Why fight so hard? What's truly worth saving?
He...he isn't sure anymore. Except...
Except the entire ship is a living thing, even here in this place, and eons and eons ago (it has to be eons, right? It's been so long) he learned how to reach out much farther than himself to find living things through the tree in a swamp, far far away.
He's spread his roots here.
Right then, right as his resolve fails, right at that moment, something happens elsewhere, and he feels a twinge like something caught in a spider's web, something tugging on the roots, and there's a flash of a tan face and blue eyes and a voice calling his name, and there is a gasp like a man coming back from the dead or reaching the surface while drowning.
This is clear evidence that the universe has fortuitous timing, sometimes. As the crew searches for their captors, as the new league of their journey begins, as they worry about their other many problems, that little flash of a face, that voice, gives him the strength to hold something terrible back just a little bit longer.
I will break you.
Not yet.
He's still not giving up.
There are a lot of things worth saving.
In his mind's eye, he sees one of them edged in blue...
He's so tired. His sanity hangs by just a thread, but when one has been fighting a spiritual battle with something dark and mind-shatteringly malevolent with no relief for a time so long it seems immemorial, that happens.
Give. Up.
No.
He's so tired, trapped in his waking-without-sleep, never needing it, always wanting the peace of it anyway. Sometimes he closes his eyes--and he needs to because while his enemy can't reach directly into his mind, sometimes he displays such...things in front of his prison, to throw him off, to disturb and horrify him.
You're beaten already, little spirit-in-flesh. Broken and hopeless. You know what I am, and what I'm going to do and that all your efforts will be in vain.
There is only a long sigh in response, warm and rebounding against his own face, as it has, once again, for time immemorial, for what he's certain have been endless days in the dark, the sun and moon rising and setting until they've crumbled like stone in the mountains in the passing of eons. He wonders if the stars are still the same, like they'd been after 100 years already, or if the sky has been blacked out by smoke permanently due to his absence.
I will break you. I will enjoy it. Then you'll watch as I break all of them. They will beg me to break them down, they always beg to be beaten and broken and destroyed. I make them want it. You want it as well--oblivion. I've already given you the gift of the madness that comes at the edge of the precipice--why not let yourself fall in at last?
no.
He denies Him. (More like It, really).
But he's breaking. He has been for so long.
Let go. Just let it all go. All that responsibility, that you surely never wanted. Why should you have to hold on for them? Faceless and nameless--they saw you even. They left you here despite it. No one else has dared enter. No one will help you. Why fight so hard? What's truly worth saving?
He...he isn't sure anymore. Except...
Except the entire ship is a living thing, even here in this place, and eons and eons ago (it has to be eons, right? It's been so long) he learned how to reach out much farther than himself to find living things through the tree in a swamp, far far away.
He's spread his roots here.
Right then, right as his resolve fails, right at that moment, something happens elsewhere, and he feels a twinge like something caught in a spider's web, something tugging on the roots, and there's a flash of a tan face and blue eyes and a voice calling his name, and there is a gasp like a man coming back from the dead or reaching the surface while drowning.
This is clear evidence that the universe has fortuitous timing, sometimes. As the crew searches for their captors, as the new league of their journey begins, as they worry about their other many problems, that little flash of a face, that voice, gives him the strength to hold something terrible back just a little bit longer.
I will break you.
Not yet.
He's still not giving up.
There are a lot of things worth saving.
In his mind's eye, he sees one of them edged in blue...