2020-07-04: As the Crow Flies
- Log: As the Crow Flies
- Cast: Gwen Whitlock, Isiris Shango'Ra
- Where: Gwen's Mind
- Date: July 04, 2020
- Summary: The Primarch of Fray has just been unleased. In that same moment, Gwen tumbles into the depths of her mind, where she makes a very desperate, but equally as willing, agreement with Isiris.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
You tumble through the partially-submerged lych-gate.
Falling past and through rows of wrought-iron and old stone, it is as if the world's axis were removed like a pin from the knitting, unravelling. Your body tumbles in free-fall, limbs and hip skating ragdoll across the surface of water that sits at a ninety-degree angle from where the normal laws of the world would have it settle. You less 'enter' the twisted space and more fall through a gate that doesn't exist, through a graveyard that was never there, slamming roughly into a bridge that will never be.
Cool water sluices gently past you. Where the water pools, small stream-like rivulets stretch and flow off of the edge of the implicit bridge, tributary to some great ocean in some unseen corner of space. Even now, you can feel the axis of balance sway, gently pulling at you as it tilts beneath you, slowly moving your weight beneath you.
No matter how hard you look, you can't see the bridge beneath the flow of the water that submerges it, with no evidence beyond the feel of a cold glassy surface just beneath the water's surface that there is anything beneath you at all. You can stand, but only up to your bare ankles in the water.
Where the sky would be, you see the earth far above, sunlit hills and countryside illuminated by something far below you, as if the twisted space occupies an inverted perch in the heavens. However, if you look over the edge of the bridge...
The drone of the choir twists your ears, vertigo suffusing you. Your eyesight reduces by a half, and then half again, as the bass of children crumples your attention, folding your mind like so much paper--
It is only almost as agonizing to look at the throne.
The black stone throne lay at the locus of all gates broken and mended, facing into the imperceptible black at the terminus of the bridge. A wormlike, unsettling black, quivering with unseen and nubile life, fertile with the infinite. You can see it shift, pour over the stone, empty directly into your eye, slipping deep into your subconscious .... luckily, the coruscating veins of marble are vastly easier to look at. The veins spread, broken like glass, across the back of the throne, silver threads shimmering and shivering the longer you look at them. They form some pattern or picture at the back of the throne, and trying to sort out what that pattern is is the sort of exercise that takes a deep and penetrating shape in the mind. There is no real 'space' in that direction or the next, nothing that the mind can focus on that doesn't grip on and pull back, pull in, pull deep. Each texture is itself harder and harder to ruminate upon as time passes without being seduced. Some, like the incomprehensible vanta, promises a malevolent end. Others..
The crow chitters audibly from its perch, watching her with piercing blue eyes in lieu of the man who is seated facing away from her at the throne.
<Pose Tracker> Gwen Whitlock has posed.
In one moment, Gwen stood before a massive figure, brilliant magma dripping from it like glowing jewels set in jet. Her body freezes in place, as the courier tries to calculate her chances. It was supposed to be a final push, which is why she freely offered up her energy to the Seraph Boudicca, expecting a triumphant result. She couldn't summon up the energy to deal with this being, not with her body still barely recovered from the last time she had used her powers.
His laughter booms in her head, and she flinches back, by instinct.
And in the space of an eye blink, she's tumbling forward, and down, the glowing magma and light replaced with a completely different scene, with dirt, sky, stone, and water. her body skids to a painful stop across the surface of a nonexistent bridge, and collapses there, dazed.
Blue grey eyes glance up towards an inverted sky, flowing grass and tranquility placed in the sky, lit by a source below her, like she were a cloud in the sky. She stands, looking around with bewildered caution. "Boudicca? Ida? Is anyone here?"
Her eyes naturally go towards the bridge like a curious bird, intent on understanding the how and why of it existing. She's rewarded with a chorus of voices, a webwork of black seeming to cast straight into her eye, causing the inverted world to pinwheel again, with Gwen collapsing to the ankle-deep water once more.
It's not so bad, here, laying against the cool water. A less staggered mind would have the wits about her to react more quickly, but as her curly hair fans out in the flow of the water, all Gwen can find, as she finds a restful texture for her gaze to rest on...
.... is blessed numbness.
"... It's you," she croaks, one edge of her mouth nearly dipping into the water from the angle of her head. "You never give me a name to call you."
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
Every eyeblink seems to crystallize reality. At the edges of Gwen's vision, she can see familiar iterations of the bridge she herself lays on, crossed and stacked upon one another in the far distance, obeying no particular orientation or consideration like a haphazard pile of tinder.
She can see him, that much is clear now. His hand rests now, not on the hilt of a blade or the strings of a lute, but at the arm of the throne. At the angle, it is clear his hand is raised ever slightly against the stone, the weight of his limb settled on the light curl of his fingertips.
"Do you know the name of the thing you fight?" he asks in reply.
No other answer materializes, and the familiar, inviting way that he speaks with her is curious, as if he'd said enough, as if the truth was self-evident in the observation. And his is undeniably an invitation. There is nothing about the blue-eyed killer that isn't inviting. Even looking directly at him -- no matter how painful it might be -- is too easy, a particular gravity that one has to consciously resist. The invitation to fall into forever is entirely too great.
"Pitiable linnet, clinging to her branch and her breath. Without even knowing it, she holds onto the idea of 'supremacy,' that a thing can be anything other than what it will inevitably be. She gives herself over, as if those who would use her were anything other than what they will be. That we are not all the same, in the end. That 'existence' itself .. is not evidence enough of what we will be, or what we are."
His fingertip draws an unseen circle on the surface of the marble. The crow chitters idly.
"Sad linnet. Firmament is so far away, for us."
<Pose Tracker> Gwen Whitlock has posed.
'Do you know the name of the thing you fight?'
"I can't really say," Gwen replies, softly. "I think it's-- or he, rather, is a Primarch. A little on the proud side, but needy in others, unlike the other I've encountered." She closes her eyes. "That one I've just encountered by the messes it left behind." She pauses, a hum escaping her lips. "... Ah. You meant that as a response to... right."
Bridge after bridge builds in the background, and the man himself is more persuasive just by his mere existence, his question perhaps rhetorical, but one Gwen seems ready to answer.
At a certain point, she has to look away, knowing that to look forever is to readily invite a certain kind of disaster.
"I was just in the insides of a hot lava pit, if that provides some context." The courier rises halfway with a grunt, water languidly dripping from her curls. "But you're right, I think. If by what you said, you meant 'get out of the water'." She'll just take it as that, as her reason to summon the will to move.
She curls the rest of the way up into a sitting position, folding her legs in front of her. The courier then chances another look towards him, considering him. "Should I give you a nickname, then? If I'm a linnet, then maybe--" She points her finger towards the man in his throne. "--you're a crow."
The finger lingers there, in the air, then slowly lowers, Gwen turning her eyes away.
"I guess I can't dance around it for too long. I'm not sure why you're here, but it doesn't feel like you are related to the Primarch appearing. You showed yourself, so... what is your reason? I doubt you came out of pity of my plight."
A businesswoman never is the first to announce a deal before she knows all the details. Even here, it holds true.
Even if she is tempted to.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
"'Supremacy' is the realization that you are far beneath someone. A collusion of helplessness and myopia. A beautiful state, submitting yourself to subjective truth. But 'the reality of supremacy' is something far beyond that which you have allowed above you."
His words bleed at the edges in her mind, weaving into the things that she has known and the things that she will come to know, Each word whispered is a promise of redemption, an invitation at some secret laying aside and ancient. The keening focus surrounding him shifts the world around her slowly, a rolling tilt beneath her legs causing a gentle undulation in the water.
"Everything too much in the sun is destined to be the same. Every self-described lord, every exalted god, no matter the name. All of them in this world, everything that occupies the world that is... is predestined to be that winsome, merciful selfsame."
Her idling chatter passes into the air between them, and the sound of it becomes lost, as if her humor were lost in a great chasm.
"You presume out of turn," he remarks, the mildest edge of ice creeping into his voice.
The distance between them grows at even his mildest displeasures, stretching something deep inside that there is no word for until it aches, distending beyond a breaking point.
"Unburden yourself from the trevails of the iscariot, and the subjectivity of this world that ties itself to rotting timbers beneath false idols and ill-fortuned names.. know that which you have always known." Each word he speaks begins to reverberate, various meanings hammered into her mind with the mildest, sweetest invocation.
"I have always been here."
The truth that we both share.
The mooring upon which you still live.
"Do you presume that this is a deal?" he asks, speaking to words she never actually said.
Doubt hangs from the sky, in miles of winding black chains.
<Pose Tracker> Gwen Whitlock has posed.
Frost edges his tone, and Gwen feels a chill, the water lapping around her now feeling cold against her skin. Her breath catches in her throat, and she swallows it, breathing.
It's as if she insulted a dearest person.
A betrayal, against a man who tried to murder her more than once, and showed her many deaths countless times more. But her mind's not in that state anymore, as its paradigm has long since shifted, aligned with different sorts of stars.
She betrayed her equal.
"... You knew, then."
He had always been there.
A statement that would made her blood chill now comforts her, setting her at ease as she stands to her feet, clothing drippping.
"... You came because I called." She just didn't know she had, except when she realizes, deep down. "Or maybe, I came to you, more like."
She steps towards the man, on this throne, each step casting widening circles as rivulets of water cast down her face, her sodden clothing.
"... Because you were always there. Because I told you, that no one needed to be alone."
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
Silence itself threads the loom between them, as if no further words need be said between them. The sweet, sharp words he shares with her are for that approaching moment absent, mercifully absent, because each word he speaks tightens the screw on the vise that much tighter. The consent he shares with her to approach is in the failure of agony to censure. Every baptismal step she takes is another opportunity to be pinned to the ground, tied to the post, betrayed by her own body, her own organs, her own perceptions.
Yet, approaching is not easy. The closer she comes to that black seat, the more the world twists off of its axis, and each step taken is another step she takes towards falling into that chasmal dark, falling into the sky forever. It takes a certain degree of courage to continue, despite the cicada buzz of unreality threading into her mind, into her dreams. It takes something that cannot be freely given.
But despite the pain, steel nor the moon find her.
"You could stay here at my will," her counterpart opines, lifting his hand away from her view, steepling them together.
"Here, the passage of moments is just a vanity. You could lose yourself in forever."
The world exists for her now at ninety degrees off-center, tilting despite every visual indicator instilling her with a confidence to the contrary. There is no mooring that any individual sense can hold onto, no objective truth that can be verified. He is far yet, and yet his voice is so close. The world tilts, though you cannot see the bridge move. There is nothing that is rational or real about the world she occupies.
And yet, his intention is pure.
"....or you could help set the world the way it truly is."
If you wish this, stand before me, and...
<Pose Tracker> Gwen Whitlock has posed.
The silence looms like a veil, like the grass that drifts overhead like a reflection in a placid lake.
Which is a lie, because every step is like a tightrope, where she could pivot off the edge at any moment. To turn back, to doubt, to be afraid--
It would be another sort of tragedy, a record scratched at the worst part of a crescendo. Nothing to kill her, but the world will be her gilded cage, one of her own making as she traps herself in that moment in time, in all its harmless innocence.
It would not be such a bad fate.
As long as she takes each step, the world will bend, but not break. The sword will not find her throat, the moon will blot out her sight. Darkness will obscure her, turn the world ink black. The world will tilt, and her body will fight to nudge itself further.
This has to be her decision, as much as the right arm is.
She doesn't say much of anything, her thoughts buzzing around her like gnatflies, nipping at her distantly with their concerns.
It won't matter.
If she does this, she will save Ida, her friends. And then it's simply a step towards a world where people like Volsung, Ganondorf, even Zophar...
They will all be made equal. The way the world truly is.
Like taking that final step off the cliff, she falls.
She kneels.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
"If that is so ... "
The climb is not merciful.
Past a certain point, the courier is in fact climbing towards him more than anything else, as all pretense of gravity is left by the wayside. The world turns around her with each step, the twisted space cinching tight into a knot. Ninety degrees contorts into one hundred and eighty, step by step, degree by degree, until the water dripping from her hair flits into the sky above, until the twisted space becomes the inverted space. Step by step, each 'iteration' of the cordwood-stacked bridges resists, each step removes one from the world, one more choice or decision left by the wayside.
He never looks towards her, but by the time she reaches the back of his throne, she is no longer facing the back of the seat.
Facing the man, he seems small, as if he were resting in a seat meant for someone else, something else, something far, far greater than he. That is the nature of him, she'll know. He is not the dominus. The man who rests on the throne is only the unimportant, the person who shows the truth of this thing. The world that passed us by. We, who are those left behind.
By the time she kneels, the knowledge is acid in the back of her mind.
She is not kneeling to him.
"... I will redeem your soul with my power."
The throne she kneels before is empty, in the next eyeblink. The throne is empty, and no one sits there. The bird perched on it eyes the courier. Spreading its wings slowly, its jangled scwark fills the inverted space. For a moment, there is nothing but that, the sound. The high keening whistle in the back of her head, a song that can barely be made out--
He takes your head in his hand, pressing your forehead against his chest kindly, soothingly. You feel it when the knife goes in, something white hot against the back of your neck. You feel it as if it happens to someone else, in some other world. You feel it, witness it. Something that happened to a woman a long time ago, in a space that doesn't exist, in a world that was never meant to be. A world that long since passed us by. You feel it, and when he twists the blade, something -- deep inside -- unlocks.
You are alone in the next heartbeat. Crows flood in from every angle, every chain that never hung, every doubt that never materialized, every bridge that never came to be. A thousand blackbirds from a thousand choices unmade, a thousand roads untaken. They flutter around you, until the silhouette of you becomes lost in black. Parts of you cease to exist, lost to fluttering black. Piece by piece, you are unmade. Or is the world around you that is unmade? Slowly, it all becomes black as the night sky.
It becomes black as the night.
Somewhere, the lychgate opens. And then you fall into the sky.