2021-04-02: We Suffer This World
- Log: We Suffer This World
- Cast: Loren Voss, Isiris Shango'Ra
- Where: Elam Base Shore
- Date: April 2, 2021
- Summary: On the shore at Elam, Loren receives a Visitation. (Violence warning.)
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Something is going on.
At this point, Loren practically has a sixth sense for these sorts of things -- not that it's hard to notice. Command's never all that clear about long-range plans to begin with, and when they become even quieter than usual, that's when something's about to happen. No doubt, they're going to be planning who they're going to send where.
And more than likely, whatever they're doing is going to involve medical, which of course means he's going to get to be the last to know. Or, to be more accurate, he's going to get to know and then get to organize the people who are under his own command for whatever needs doing.
These days he just wishes that they'd tell him sooner. It'd give him more time to plan. Or, more likely at this point, worry.
"Won't be long," he tells the guard at the gate. Elam Base is on an otherwise abandoned island, scattered along the Deku Islands in southern Aquvy. The forest -- jungle, if he's being honest -- and the terrain helps keep it out of sight of nearby ships. As such, they're supposed to keep clear of the coast unless there's a reason otherwise.
During most of the day, that is.
The sun's low on the horizon, and nearly tucked under it. Night won't fall for a little while yet all the same. But visibility's lower, if anyone's even around to begin with. Mental health, as the monthly messages they send out keep on reminding him -- ha ha and that poster in the one clinic room too -- is everyone's priority. It's honestly a joke at this point.
But, fine. He has his own reasons to go out walking, ostensibly for 'mental health'.
Even if nothing will be there but the ocean.
He stands there on the shore for a long time as the sun continues to slip over the horizon. It's just him and the waves for now, and... he's fine with that.
After a while yet he sits down heavily on the sand as the sky continues to darken. It's a little damp here -- right, high tide. Wasn't it earlier? He doesn't remember.
He digs his hand into the sand absently, letting it fall from his hand, then, shifting his position just a touch, begins to write a name in the surf.
Sometimes he wonders if they can see things like this. If it's like a message from a long distance, kind of?
...And sometimes he feels foolish for even thinking about it like this at all. His hand hesitates over their name, as if he's considering whether to wipe it out, to add more to it, or...
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
'Health' is a curious calculus.
At least, it is when the earth itself is ringing.
It's a provincial tone, of the sort heard as alarms or alerts in Etrenank and on some of the larger ships, when the commander on the bridge needs to contact the people in the engine room. Certainly, it's not the same tone that plays when the taskmaster wants to contact the third class deep in the hive. Certainly, it's not that tone.
Certainly, it's not the same tone that plays when the masters want to contact the slaves.
The sound begins faraway, singsong for only chance moments, sounding like a distant woman singing before the mind can truly focus on the source of the noise, after which the shrill warbling becomes louder, more distinct, separating the sound from the more distant, softer clarion dulcets of the undercurrents. The ringing is at once clear and at once muffled, a hard thing to pin down. A sound so like the vagaries of the eye, the floating, barely-there strands of not-there-at-all that steal away from the eye even as fast as the saccade, never directly perceived but everpresent all the same.
It takes a time to determine the source of the sound, buried only just so in the shore, at the point where the shadows cast by the sunset over the dunes cross. The ringing sound, as muffled as it becomes upon closer examination, originates from only a few inches or so beneath the very sands he writess in, the unknown name scrawled out long before the ringing has a moment to start -- or stop, in truth. And, in reality, it doesn't take much digging to find it, the handset being unearthed with more than a few moments of digging.
The handset is absolutely ancient, of a model long since abandoned in Etrenank design. You would recognize it, if you looked closely enough. Do the details truly matter? It's hard to tell what it is. After all, a phone is a phone, though those on the surface world may never have seen one. Those such as you must have seen a hundred, a thousand such handsets in the city. It's something easily taken for granted, until you hear a ringing from between your own ears. And, after all, what does the phone itself matter, so much as the voice on the other end?
"Imagine a world where you returned to me," the voice on the other side would say, if you only listened.
It doesn't take much at all, really, to hear him. It almost takes nothing to hear what he has to say, and less so to lift the handset to the ear. The liquid, inviting qualities of his sunset voice have never faded, not even an iota, with time. But when he speaks, he speaks with you, with no question in the matter.
"I've called from very, very far away. Can you feel it?"
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
In the end he--
Scrambles onto his feet as he hears the alarm going off. It's not the sort of alarm that would suggest that someone untoward or unfortunate is happening at base -- for one thing, it's the wrong tone. For another thing, it's coming from a short distance away. Hardly the distance at which the base is set.
And then there's the fact that it's muffled. Like it was buried, very close at hand.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Loren's first thought is that he's lost it again, somehow. Or that he's hearing things. But the sound doesn't stop. He can still hear it, singing somewhere in the surf. Loren after a moment more paces in the direction from which he thinks it's coming. The directions from which he thinks it's coming: it sounds like it's coming from everywhere and nowhere. Maybe he really is imagining it. Maybe he really is falling apart again, whatever stability he's wrought doomed to be fragile because he'll never have stability.
He kneels on the sand at last upon pacing to a particular point, at a loss, bewildered, and overwhelmed. Here. It's coming from here. ...Right?
With trepidation, he begins to dig into the sand. Which, would be worse, finding nothing, or finding--
Ah. He swallows, hard. It... feels real. This is a real thing. He's seen something like it before. Was it during the class trip to the Third Class level? Did he see it in a book somewhere, or on the intranet? He can't remember. This feels unreal. It feels real. His hands are shaking, even as he brushes sand off the phone and lifts it to his ear.
It's still emitting that tone, after all.
"Hello...?" The illogic of this is stunning. Why would someone even be on the other end? But then, why would it be ringing? Sometimes reflex takes over where logic fails. He can curse at himself all he pleases in the depths of his mind, but he still takes the call.
Loren's heart sinks when someone speaks on the other end.
It's... him.
Don't think about it don't think about it don't think about it don't think about it DON'T THINK ABOUT IT
He has a memory, after all, that doesn't belong to him. But ownership doesn't matter for things like this.
"Why..." Loren croaks, into the receiver. "Why are you..."
He's nearly a statue where he sits on the beach, the phone gripped tightly in his hand. At present he may not make for good conversation.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
"It's been a long time. I've been thinking of you."
The connection is like night and day when you lift the handset to your ear. Truthfully, there is no wire, not like there used to be in those days. Even if you inspected the receiver cradle, even if you dug it loose and turned it over and over in your hands, you would find no cord, no explanation for the choice that now chills the very memories you've worked so hard for. And that's what they are, you know. Memories.
There is a secret that your mind has been keeping from you all this time, to keep you safe.
The very same secret that whispers into your ear so delicately.
"I've been waiting all this time. Were you not pleased by my gift?"
You can still feel the aching wound on your finger, though can you remember from what?
"If you've forgotten 'this world' for a time, be guiltless. It is what we are made for, people like us, who were left behind."
You feel a droplet of moisture on your hand, though one could scance tell where. His voice is massive, moving against you in muscular grand, a constrictor slowly winding around parts of you you were no longer aware you had. It's easy to forget the details - the where, the what, details that escape the self as easily as moths in the wind. But thinking about a thing makes it real. Thinking about a thing makes you feel it, somewhere deep in the parts of you that belong to ..
The world tilts at a strange angle, just enough that it takes all of your thought to stay standing straight. The reason why is that the sun is setting, right? Or is it because it is raining? The droplet of water forgotten, it is soon joined by others in aplomb. The water comes to the lonely isle in staccato grace, wetting the sands beneath your feet as it begins, a long, harsh drizzle pounding you relentlessly as you hold the phone to your ear.
"But leaving something behind doesn't make it cease to exist."
The shadows cast by the dunes have lengthened, into smooth, jet black stone. A throne, some ways away from you in the rain, cut from obsidian. The same as his face, a smooth thing, though expressionless. You can't see it now, because the throne he sits in is facing away from you. You only see his hand. One hand, gentle on the rest. A bird calls to you, briefly.
"To the contrary. The things you leave behind come to think of you all the more."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
"..."
There is no answer at first on Loren's end of the phone, not as he exhales a breath and closes his eyes. Even that breath feels hard-won for him, as if he had to struggle to do what comes naturally. But then, this is hardly a natural sort of situation.
The phone shouldn't work, after all. And then there's the simple matter of who is on the other end. Is all of this even really happening? Is he succumbing to some sort of madness and the next thing that will happen will be him turning towards the advancing darkness, for him to wake up in some submerged tide to be pulled apart--
Stop stop stop don't think it don't think it don't think
Maybe it's understandable if his breath catches again. He has to wrestle with his own mind, after all.
"Gift...?" is what he finally manages.
He remembers, after all. --Not just the things he shouldn't remember, but all the things that as near as he can tell, really happened. The slow pitch of reality towards some impossibility. Steel, sliding through his gut through his throat taking his arms off taking him in two, again, again, again.
What he'd done to the illusion of his brother, in the wash of the Primarch's influence deep in the abyss of his own mind, had been in part done to him. He'd only refined it, honed that impossible massacre, and turned it on his own memories.
And he also remembers another time. His own body, his own end, an impossible repeat within the halls of Gethemane. How he'd fled, and not because he'd wanted to -- but because that was the order he'd been given.
"...I remember," Loren whispers, and only the sudden drop of water splashing against the back of his hand prompts him to open his eyes, to turn his gaze up towards the heavens. Rain? But...
The world is tilting. His gaze settles on the slow rhythm of the tide for a moment more. He breathes in, struggling for air, and suddenly and abruptly rises to his feet, turning away from the sea. The dunes are... he is...
As if in a daze, Loren takes a step forward, towards that black throne. But his hand clutches that much more tightly on the phone, still in his hand.
He'd been laying flat on some bed, some table. Operating table, his mind supplies to the memory, fleshing it out. He'd struggled as the hands held him down. They were not gentle to him. One pressed firmly across his mouth before he could even think about screaming. Standing there on the sand, Loren sways, his gaze unfixed.
Stop it stop it stop it--
'The things you leave behind come to think of you all the more.'
It's impossible to run from something when it's in your own mind. But he still tries, slamming the doors shut behind him as he runs from what hunts him.
"Why did you... hurt her?" he says into the phone, quietly, almost as if he were afraid he would be heard.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The downpour is torrential now, great peals and sheets of rain breaking against the sand, though the fat droplets do not break the drawn shapes in the sand, merely well low in their hip like pooling tears. The sky is an endless grey, shot through with electric threads of everpresent blue. Like lightning, the light is hard to look at directly, but lightning is an ephemeral thing. The cracks in the sky are long, my lord, and they seem to go on forever, to the end of all things.
"Do you," he remarks over the phone, in your mind. Provocative, he is pleased.
"Do you remember what it felt like to have my hands on you?"
So you flee. So you shut the doors. One by one, each gate is slid shut. One by one, until you are alone.
Alone with him.
At the end of it all, the rain still peals down from ahead as far as behind, though the bird chatter is distant now. When you run as far as you can go and no further, to the lonely space between the two of you, you are granted the succor of the cool touch of obsidian, the great wall that is the back of his throne, though you cannot see him on the other side, the confessional that separates the two of you. For a moment, you have freedom. Freedom to say into the phone what you really want to know. Why it is that he hurt her.
"Do you imagine that you could have done her any better?" he asks quietly, over the phone.
Then you can feel him take you by the wrist.
His old Solarian coat still catches the light from his alien blue eyes, though to look any higher than his lips is to invite eternity. Come, look at him, and find every way a man can fall. His grip--tight and soft at the same time, squeezing as a father for his child, a lover for his love, is almost inescapable for his insistence, and the wall of the throne separates you from a freedom he no longer gives as freely as he does the sky. The rain soaks you both wet, though it never seems to bother him.
"Do you think you could have hurt her any better than I could have?"
His lips move soundlessly, even as the voice slides into you over the handset.
Even as he takes a piece from you. It is a piece you wanted for yourself.
"Or is it simply that you wanted to try," he wonders.
The parts he makes of you are the things he's done to you. The parts that he took when he killed you. The parts he took when he looped the rope of your own history around your neck and pulled tight. The parts that he took when he made you love something that was all yours, and just for you. The parts that he took when he sent you to kill your friend. The parts that he took, piece by piece, as you laid there naked on his table. You can see her, as she bleeds for him. As he replaces bits of her with porcelain, fine and beautiful and hard and sharp. You are hard and beautiful, fine and sharp, aren't you?
Your hand touches her as you pull the strings tight, sewing what's left back together. Her skin -- what's left of it -- is soft and bare for you, even the parts you thought you'd never see. But you look at her differently from when Loren does. You look at her as something to be made yours. Because the world obsesses it to be so. Because she is something more whole than most.
Because when she cries out under your steady ministrations, the whole world hears it.
"She is a thing that is made to suffer," he explains to you, as the space between you shrinks. "Did you not know that, when you felt her?" You can see her dusky skin, helpless on the table, as helpless as you are just now, your back to the obsidian. "Doesn't it please you, to know that I will do to her what you will not?" He asks mildly. "Or do you imagine she wants you to hurt her, most of all?"
"Do you think that's what she thought, when she held you close and kissed you?"
You can feel the black ribbons as they slowly cinch around every part of your body, slithering around you as she cried. The touch of those ribbons on your lips, the weight of your hands barely fighting her off. The weight of her body and her warmth on yours. The whisper killer leans in, pushing you against the obsidian, his lips only a breath from yours.
"Is that a thing you want to relive?"
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
There wasn't a storm like this in the forecast.
...Was there?
He's soaked to the proverbial bone, wind lashing at him and his sodden uniform, suddenly insufficient in this weather. Even when he runs.
In the end, he's just here again, facing the back of the throne. Involuntarily, Loren reaches out one hand to touch the dark glass. It comes as a shock and yet hardly any at all that a hand closes around that hand's wrist the moment his fingertips brush against cool glass.
And he turns to look, even knowing that he shouldn't. Slowly his gaze tilts upwards, even though he knows he shouldn't. He looks into his eyes, even as he knows he shouldn't.
'Do you think you could have hurt her any better than I could have?' says the voice -- his voice -- filtering in through the handset alone.
"I..."
'Or is it simply that you wanted to try.'
Loren, himself, doesn't say a word. Only his body -- always more honest than he is, whatever his protestations about lies -- tells any story at all. The way he tenses in the grip that holds him, for example. Or that strange look on his face. Is it misery? Horror? Or some play-acting at either emotion?
Or is it simply a realization of another thing he has been hiding all-too-well from himself?
He had known the moment that Solaris had found her in the hold, precisely what her fate was to be. She would die. She would be unceremoniously killed, having learned too much. No. Then she would be used as a sacrifice, ensuring their victory over Mother. No. She would be deployed in the field again and again, a piece played to be lost should some future gambit require it. No, no, no.
Leah, after watching him and guiding him for so long, requests that he's the one to do it -- eliminate the thing that isn't needed anymore. She's just a surface-dweller. Just a Lamb. His responsibility. So he's the one who should--
He'd wanted to prevent that. Stop something like that from ever happening.
But. She wasn't his. Her fate hadn't been his to determine. But he'd wanted to. And not for her sake.
'She is a thing that is made to suffer,' he's told, as he takes a step back, cold black glass against his back. He gazes at her, he gazes at all of her, and his first reaction is to jerk his head away. She looks... broken. Looking at her like this now -- he doesn't want to see her like this--
She had told him what it had been like in Etrenank, while he'd spent an entire month asleep. She'd told him a lot of things, and he hadn't been listening, not really. Because the thing he'd wanted... the thing he'd wanted from her... he'd wanted to--
"She... wants...?" Loren utters, gazing at the man, now close to him, so terribly close. Ribbons snake about him. He can't move. He can't even turn his head. He has no choice but to look now.
At all of it.
He can't run.
And that's when it finds him.
They're delicate when they come for him, those hands. They hurt so much when they peel him apart piece by piece in the memory, when they pick him apart and take those pieces of himself that he wanted to keep for himself and replace them with something else.
Loren screams hoarsely under the grip of the memory, trying to thrash against his bonds.
And in an entirely different sense, he lashes out at his captor. The force is a strange one when it leaps from Loren's body: orange and green and yellow, all twists and angles and strange fractal recursion. It's a mandala of flame, and the only way that anyone would know that this is fire is because it has heat and it burns.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
"I think you know what I'm talking about," the whispers agent confides in his little blonde.
The ribbons crawl over Loren, winding into his clothing, across his neck, slipping into every dark until every shadow cast on balmy pale skin belongs to a velveteen sensate, cool to the touch but slowly winding in muscular constriction. "Don't you find it exciting?" he asks. "The hiss of pain, the slow realization that you have utter, absolute, uncontested power over a person... that all you have to do is say a few choice words, put your hands here and there, put your lips on this place or that place... that they will worship you, greater than any God."
The girl lay at his table behind him, dismantled by the same hands that pluck Loren to pieces. She is just a drifter after all. Just a Lamb, who cries when she suffers, just like the rest. You can only see his lips, as you avoid his eyes. no you don't you just looked didn't you make it stop it hurts to see help why can't i remember what anything looks like
"Drink in your sin," he whispers into your mouth.
And then, madness.
and then you see his eyes
The flames of the mandala spread like a virus, burning and crawling through the velvet. It guts the creature before you, cuts you loose, free of the cold, free of the wet, free of the stone. The shadows themselves burn when you awaken, and the lash's bite is so sweet.
they are so blue
A rush of flame, myriad in color. A wash of heat, the thick crack of air igniting.
and then you see his eyes
A scream, long and loud and wretched, wet and half-muzzled. Lan, the gutted creature, burns in her bonds as the unwitting focus of Loren's trauma. Hair singes and turns to ash, skin blisters and crackles as she pulls at the hands chaining her down with mindless, fresh panic, her body twisting as she arches her back, bridging away from the lashing tongues of heat as they crawl up the ancient black moss and stone, the coruscating blue taking its time to eat her whole and alive.
they are so blue
But she is as bound as she ever has been, to the table and to the nightmare and to he and to Loren. There is no escape for her.
and then you see his eyes
It's almost a mercy that Loren's flame burns blue-hot.
it will never be quiet again for you
In the space of several breaths her shrieks turn to sobs, and soon enough to a quiet keening, hardly louder than the crackle of flame.
You remember, now. His eyes, those wretched, crystalline blue things. Beyond color, beyond sapphire, the astringent ice numbs every part of you merely remembering it. His eyes were easily the most horrific part of him, even worse than his touch, the hand that slowly sets on your shoulder, as if it were only one of a thousand hands that touch every part of Loren. He is beside you, now -- what remains of you, anyway..
And he is pleased.
"A cruelty," he congratulates you, as if you have done something good, as if the screaming ever stopped. "Done as a true child of she. You will find her again. And what you do to her will be my gift to you. That is my 'tithe.' For we could never truly be God."
She never stops making that pitched, helpless sound.
Some parts of her never stop burning.
"But we can taste what she tastes."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
"What... what are you saying," Loren utters, and soon he can barely move, soon even breathing promises to become an effort. That which binds him pulls tighter and tighter after all, cinching him into immobility against volcanic glass. "That isn't... that's not what I, what I want...!" His fingers spasm the once, as if seeking some impossible escape from this, what binds him.
"I want... I just want--"
Does he even know what it is that he's seeking in others, though? What it is that he wants?
The man -- Azazel, the Stranger -- then in that moment makes up the whole of Loren's world, occupies all his senses.
There is nothing other than madness that can exist in a place like that.
And so, Loren screams.
It's answered by another scream, a raw scream and almost animalistic in its intensity. His head jerks in the direction of the screaming.
Her screaming.
In that moment the world falls out from under Loren Voss for the second time in his life.
He drops to his knees, his face slack with mute horror.
This can't be... this can't be happening. What did he--
Oh no.
No. No, no, no, no, no.
no
He remains rigid like that, more parody of a statue than man, for what seems to him to be an eternity. He's here and he's not here, his gaze wide and fixed on that spot where she sobs as she continues to burn.
And then a hand comes to rest on his shoulder.
He congratulates Loren for what he has done. And slowly, Loren rises to his feet, his gaze still unfocused and distant.
The movement is sudden when he tries it: he whirls about suddenly, one hand curled into a fist as he swings at the Stranger. Azazel. Whoever he is. It doesn't matter, really.
There's not even any thought in the action: he's barely more than an animal himself in this moment, rationality stripped right from him.
He doesn't even stay for more violence than that. He's off and running for her, where she's bound. "Lan! No-- Lan!" he screams, as if she could hear him. "Lan, please, I--" As if he could do anything.
"I'm-- I'm sorry!"
After all...
When has he ever been able to do anything for her?
When has a reality like this ever been anything but the end that was fated to come?
He'll kill her. He is killing her. And it only had to be like this in the first place because she was nice to him once.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
"It is kind of you to say."
Loren's fist cracks into jet black stone, hard enough to crack the mirrored surface. What reflection the whispering voice had in it is gone the moment flesh meets stone, replaced only by the reflection of the Solarian's face backlit against the howling pyre. As the world tilts, the prophet sits in the dark throne, which stays at a constant degree. Or is it the other way, where Loren and the back of that abominable thing round a pin like a clock, and it is the rest of the world that stays constant? It is a matter of submissivesubjective observation.
"We suffer this world a day at a time," the Solarian's elder explains, opening a gloved hand. "As if we were guilty of some great crime, we were abandoned. And each day is another day gone, another thing that could have been, were we not left to our own in the world that is, rather than the world that passed us by." Though you can no longer -- never have been able to -- see his eyes, you can feel it when he shifts humorlessly, when he looks over his shoulder, as if he could see everything. "You were someone who was left behind, as were we all."
"But.." the prophet starts slowly, relaxing as blood drips down the edges of the vacant throne. "It is kind of you, to want to give my angel peace. Even you, as broken as a child of heaven can be, could have given her anything in this world. A friendship, a kindness, the pure love she desperately wanted from you..from anyone. And yet, a day at a time, you thoughtfully starve your friend of all of this world's 'light.' Soon, there will be none left of that."
"Unfortunately, your will is not commensurate to mine."
The sand and silt turns black beneath you, shifting beneath your feet. Absent a fight, it pulls you away from the burning table as a tide, towards the water, the frothing tide of gripping, grasping hands of the drowned and the dying. Just trying to remain standing is hard, let alone trying to make the impossible climb along the tilted land towards her, who cries and writhes in a flame that pulls her apart thread by thread.
"It is a kindness to send someone who calls you a friend into the world beyond," the nightmare notes succinctly. "But she will suffer under me, as she must. She will suffer and bleed and be torn to slender pieces. She will live on and on, to see the day, and the night that follows. On and on, her body will be broken under the moon-kissed hammer, until she feels the truth of the world that has abandoned us in every part of her."
"Did you think you could make amends by killing her?"
It is a tough fight -- hands will grip onto Loren at every angle, at every juncture. They will try to pull him down, and the sand will try to pour itself down his throat until he can no longer breathe. The tide will try to pull Loren under, to be pulled apart by incomprehensible machines. But despite it all, it is possible to make your way to the table, the burning blue smouldering now. She lay there now, shivering from the sudden cold. There are parts of her that didn't burn, nonsensical and mad, a hairless and scalded thing before you, a raised leg gleaming in patterned porcelain. Her eyes look up, her face covered in anxious whip scars, as she breathes slowly, harshly, reaching out blindly as she wheezes.
"You cannot make amends, because you are subordinate to me."
Her eyes stare at Loren. They are horrifyingly blue.
The porcelain mask is eyeless, and smooth to the touch, like her skin should be, not unlike the miserable wreck Loren's made of it. The mask is in his hands, as if it were always there. "You will remember this, one day," the older man points out, his whisper just barely carrying over the soft of her wordless mewling rasp, the only thing left of her voice after Loren's fire did what it willed with her. The porcelain reaper's mask could be affixed to her face, and that would end it, this dream. "And you will remember the gift I will give you, and know all of the things that you will do to her are the things that I allow you to do as my will. If you want to do more with her..."
Of course, the mask will fit her perfectly, and put an end to it all.
But if he looks at it in just the right way, it will also fit him.
"....then come before me."
The realization will drop Loren into the sky, and out of this place.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
His knuckles are bleeding as he veers away from so much cracked stone. He doesn't notice. Or, it would be more accurate to say, he notices so much more than the sting and the blood oozing from his hand. The world rotates on a sort of axis before him -- or is it more accurate to say that he himself turns?
Perhaps this is also unimportant.
The words, too, are unimportant.
His pace slows before he can even so much as get near where she lies, writhing and burning. It's as if the sand were transmuting into a state between liquid and solid, neither one nor the other but containing the essences of both. He can't easily keep his footing in a place like this.
"Why... why are you-- doing this?" he gets out, fighting against the sand. It's black, he notices, black as a starless sky. "Why her? What's the purpose of-- why do you need to make her suffer like that?!" He's being pulled away from the table slowly by inches, try as he might to struggle against the sand and silt. Even attempts to make any sort of gain end in his failure and a growing exhaustion: there is only so much he can do as the surf rises up to grab and catch him. "She's just a... she doesn't..."
She's still making sounds.
After all, the flame is still burning.
And Loren is, still, inexorably drawn towards a wine-dark sea. "I didn't mean to..." he utters, feet slipping from under him. He can't, he can't keep his-- The last thing he says is little more than a gasp:
"No--"
No, he's never been much good at keeping his balance. Here is no exception. He falls, into the sea. It tries to drown him. It drowns him, he sinks beneath the surface as he struggles and flails. It's not water that fills his mouth, of course. It's sand that pours down his throat as he thrashes again for the surface, fighting against so many grasping hands. He wheezes, spittle and sand spraying from his mouth as he coughs violently against the intrusion, his struggle redoubling.
He can't... here...
It might end up being on his hands and his knees that he does it, each inch of this campaign hard-won, its toll etched into his body. But finally his fingers close over the edge of that table, that altar, and he, with trepidation, lifts his head to see her.
He's made a mess of her.
He coughs, hard, straightening where he kneels by her altar. "I'm... sorry," he wheezes.
And he nearly recoils when she looks at him with those blue blue eyes.
"...I don't... that's not... what I want..."
He has more voice than she does, but only just. His throat feels raw, scoured.
And his gaze shifts, by millimeters, towards the mask she bears -- unmarked by the flame. Unmarked, it seems, as capriciously as parts of her body have been. It of course looks like it would fit her perfectly.
But...
One hand, finger by finger, leaves the edge of the table behind. It hovers a mere fraction above its surface as he regards only the mask now.
But when he tries to speak, his voice fails him. Is it just because of the sand he's swallowed?
Of course not. The fact is...
...on the most fundamental level, this isn't a sacrifice he's actually willing to make.
This, too, is the realization that sends him plummeting into the sky, away from this place and her.