I will face god and walk backward into hell
| lord, I fashion dark gods too;
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(because responding to a large group is silly and time is weird, assume here that time splits and Gail responds to each of them alone, so I’m writing each person their own drabble, with a verdict at the end)
Wrynn:
Too fast, too alive, too sweet. She is close and touching and Gail does not know what it is like anymore, it is strange and alien.
Her own name aches in her ears. She thinks of how he’d say it, how there was almost a sweetness to his voice when he did.
(He didn’t say goodbye.)
He sent us to find you, she says, and Gail supposes it’s true. She supposes he finally thought of her, in suspended animation, the hours resetting again and again until she almost loved it the same way she loved him – because it was all around her, all encompassing.
The earth can’t help but love the sun.
She mentions things – grass, forests – that ring faint bells in her memory.
You can always come back, Wrynn says, but can she?
Would she?
She mentions children too, but they are dead, all of them (perhaps not the child, the one with the caul, whose has two fathers and no fathers. Perhaps it is alive, but she does not want to see it).
But then. Then.
I’m not sure we can leave without you, Wrynn says, and Gail is sure it’s true. He would think nothing of sending them to their death, killing them for not bringing her to his feet.
And she is not a killer, even if she loves one.
One step. Her legs are leaden. She is a statue, ebony (the ridiculous, overplayed contrast to the marble statue he once was).
Her leg twitches. She watches the girl as if she has forgotten how to walk. Maybe she has. She’s forgotten a lot.
One step.
One step, and her leg twitches again. The sand shifts. Behind them, the ocean is falling away.
One step, and she is almost falling, unbalanced, but instinct saves her, she catches herself.
They go on.
(verdict – congrats, onto the next round)
*****
Nymeria:
Beautiful, whispers the bay woman. She sees the poetry in the langoliers, in this world’s end. The sound of radio static is new to her. Gail feels a strange, twisted sense of pride, like she can finally show off children.
Lord knows she’s known the end of the world longer than anything else, this same set of hours, the same collapsing world.
She speaks his name, the one Gail holds dear.
“I haven’t seen the end,” she says, “not yet.”
She is not their savior. She does not want to go back and preach to them about end times. They will all be dead long before the langoliers come, anyway.
(verdict – Nymeria did not quite convince her, sorry!)
*****
Ramiel:
The boy comes out of the waves and she watches because movement still fascinates her.
He says her name and he is quiet, barely heard above the radio static, but she listens.
He tells her his trials, shows a raw wound from a monster she does not want to envision.
(She’s had waking dreams of what came to pass, of the Great Old Ones, Cthulhu rising from the sea.)
He tells her of Carnage’s summoning. She almost smiles. He always had a flair for the dramatic. Could never resist playing the deus ex machina, the god in the machine.
Maybe you can influence him, Ramiel says, and she wonders. She wonders if she could. She wonder if she’d want to.
(Part of what she loves is the way he wears chaos like a crown.)
Ramiel touches her then, whisper soft. He speaks of other worlds, and she wonders.
But he needs her. He needs her to get through. Even says he won’t leave her, but she won’t hold him to that. She never does.
(verdict: congrats, onto the next round)
*****
Kellyn:
The strawberry girl is bloodied and soaking. She speaks of their entwining – how she cannot end if he persists. She doesn’t know what it was like, him less a god and close to mortal, her, mortal as she ever was, but a goddess in his eyes.
They always played pretend, her and Carnage – he sometimes pretended he loved her and she pretended she was something a dark god could love.
Truth is she doesn’t know what they are, there’s no word for them, for the things they share.
He is part of her, sure – she knows this, knows she cannot change it – but she does not know if she is part of him.
(But they came here. He sent them. He misses her.)
“I don’t know if I’m angry,” she says to the girl who presumes to tell her she is. And she doesn’t. She’s never been an angry woman, though she has every right to be.
And this woman is different, playing with time, jerking it back and forth – she is powerful, and maybe Gail resents her for it, but the stutter-stop of time makes her sick.
(verdict – onto the next round, congrats)
*****
Trekk:
The winged boy is close but does not touch her. Part of her aches for him to, because she wonders what it feels like, muzzles on skin, their hides wet from the ocean, from blood, from whatever hells they have trounced through.
The way he says her name is lovely and a petty, bitter part of her hopes that he in watching in the tiresome way he does.
But the boy is wrong, wrong, wrong.
“He’s gone on without me for decades,” she says. He has found playthings and victims and worshippers – even these before her, acolytes who may not have praised him as a god but have trusted him enough to fling themselves through proverbial hell and back.
Try, Trekk implores her still. Don’t give up without knowing.
(verdict – onto the next round, congrats)
*****
Rhy:
A lion turns to equine. Funny, to see magic here. His had been almost depleted when they were here, wasted from something (he thought it was because he had ended the world, she’d thought it exhausted from sending them here, though she would have never said it – ah, how much stronger he must be now, to send so many of them).
She sees the allure. It’s tempting, isn’t it, she asks, and Gail does not need to speak to show her assent. It is tempting, to see how what she’s spent years crawling toward in that slow sludge of hours.
She tells of her the kingdoms (she knew only the valley, centuries ago when she was his queen, in the first iteration of him, of them both). She tells her he will never die, something she may have always known, but to hear it from someone else clicks inside of her, and she follows.
Maybe it’s not for the wonders of the world, maybe it’s not even for him, but she follows.
(verdict – congrats! Onto the next round)
*****
Lagertha:
The warrior looks familiar, and despite it all, she almost laughs. She was there, in the cult with him and Grim Reaper. She had never fought as they had, but she had watched, his good little queen.
Funny, to see them now, etched into this girl. Either she is immortal or Grimmy was (it doesn’t occur to her that he would reanimate her into another being, that thought will come later and she will laugh and laugh until none of it makes sense anymore).
She is commanding, the way both of them were always commanding.
You could be queen, says the mare, he is still king.
She knows that to be a lie.
“He’s a god, now,” she says, “or he thinks he is. He hasn’t settled for king in years.”
She’d liked being queen well enough, had enjoyed the respect, had loved her valley. She’s sure he would make her queen of anywhere she asked, but isn’t sure she’d like doing it so much anymore.
A lot’s changed since those days.
The woman grows angrier, but rather than meekly obey to the commands, Gail stiffens.
She is not a warrior, but she knows a dark god like they never will, she is a thing he’d kill them all for.
“You don’t know what it was like,” she says, her voice flat, her eyes flashing, “it was the same few hours, over and over again. Time didn’t start again until you came.”
“I asked him to die,” she says, because he has brought her back before, back from the dead, and she hadn’t wanted to come, “I begged him. He never obliged.”
She moves, but it is not to follow.
“I have a choice, now.”
But the warrior does not listen, instead, she threatens. She grows thorns, and for a moment Gail is fascinated. She threatens her with them, and she feels the thorns indent her flesh. Not yet piercing, but part of her wants it.
“I’m not—” she begins, and the thorns sink in.
(verdict – unfortunately Gail could not be convinced to go with this method.)
*****
Nihlus:
Because Carnage lied, says the boy with bark on his legs. Of course he lied. He always does, it’s his game, his long con, all of them players in a game where only he knows the rules.
And on some level she knows that, doesn’t she?
But there had been something in his eyes, those years ago, and she believed – still believes, after all this – that in that window, that precious, tiny window, that he had believed they would die together, consumed by the langoliers.
(He did not come back on his own accord; he’d been pulled back by another magician. Though once he’d been there, she had not heard from his again.)
He turned into the stars, Nihlus tells her, and she smiles. She wonders what he looked like, dressed in nebulas. They’d spent nights together, young, her full of romance and him of chaos, mapping constellations while he listened to her heartbeat with a queer look on his face.
(“I want to love you,” he’d say, “but I want to kill you, too.”)
Carnage is going to end the world in Beqanna the boy says next, and god, she wonders if he would. If maybe this is how it actually started, that she was mulish enough to refuse so he burned their forests down, called forth the Great Old Ones, set all this in motion.
Time is a flat circle, after all.
And maybe it can be changed, maybe she can step through, stop this. She doesn’t want to be a hero, mostly she just wants to feel. She wants to remember a world where there is warmth and air that doesn’t taste of burnt plastic.
“He would, wouldn’t he,” she murmurs, “always has to have his way.”
(verdict – Nihilus goes on, congrats!)
*****
Kratos:
It is too late.
The spotted boy comes out, and he smells of lightning. The langoliers move forward, chewing through the earth, through reality, and there’s such a disgusting romance about it, the end of the world.
Come with us, he implores, but she can’t, she can’t.
It’s too late, the langoliers eat on, and all around them the world ends.
(verdict – last to reply so unfortunately automatic elimination)
Eliminated:
Nymeria
Lagertha
Kratos
Eliminations were based mostly on Gail's reaction, plus timing.
Those eliminated may choose/create a marking (any color, any material within reason (so like, ice or iron or diamond would be fine, an awesome laser blaze that shoots people is not) to remind them of their quest.
Continuing on:
Wrynn
Ramiel
Kellyn
Trekk
Rhy
Nihlus
The last phase will hopefully be up soon once I recover from this novel and get some real world work done.
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