[open quest] they all go into the dark, round II [MATURE]

[jamie]

from the destruction, out of the flame

He is too immediately distracted by the absence of his fog to notice the otherworldly fog hovering up the beach. 


And then Beyza is there beside him and things are bleak here but looking at her is still so much like looking directly into the sun. He does not have time to greet her, he does not have the opportunity to speak, to test his voice on this side of death. There is no death rattle in his chest, there is no rasping in his throat because he does not draw breath. Would the voice reflect that or would it be just as thin as it had ever been?


Carnage speaks to them, injecting the words directly into their psyches. And Jamie tilts his peculiar head as he listens. If there were a heart -- if there had ever been a heart -- it would have leapt at the mention of fog. He turns those big yellow eyes down the beach and sees it and he can taste the relief on his tongue. It swells to fill his ink-black mouth. It consumes him so thoroughly that he forgets to heed Carnage’s warning. 


He looks to Beyza then and nods. “After you,” he murmurs and the voice is clear. Strong. There is neither tremor nor rasp when he falls into step beside her. Into his beloved fog. He bounds into it like a child, lets it wrap itself sweetly around his legs. Lets it creep up over his back, caress his neck, kiss his cheek so tenderly. How it gives him strength, his beloved fog. 


Until his fog becomes a thing with teeth and a vicious bite. He slows almost immediately as it consumes him. And he watches as Beyza moves deeper into it, seemingly unaffected by it, until she disappears altogether. He cannot call after her with the way the fog wraps itself tight around his mouth, closes it. Try as he might, he cannot open it. He cannot cry out for help. 


It seeps through his soft edges. He summons all of his strength -- rapidly declining with the pain that creeps through him, so familiar that even this feels like coming home -- and tries to command the fog to leave him. But it only wraps itself tighter around him. Binding him, rooting him in place. The pain of it makes his vision strobe, takes him to his knees. It robs him of his strength so completely that he cannot even thrash against it. 


How desperately he tries to gather what remains and summons a portal of shadow, something to deliver him from this hell to his destination on the other side. He staggers to his feet, lurching toward the portal’s yawning mouth, while the pain compounds. If he had cheeks, surely they would run wet with tears. But he cannot think beyond the pain or the roaring in his otherwise empty head. And he steps through the portal only to find himself back where he’d started. On the wrong edge of the fog. 


But he is not restored. The pain is blinding, all-consuming. He remembers, in some abstract way, the way the dark god had laughed. What was it going to do, kill them? And buoyed by the understanding that he is already dead, he plunges back into the fog. The pain is so profound and the noise so deafening that he is certain that there is death on the other side of death and that he will be the first to find it. 


He sees Beyza through the fog, glowing brilliant and he follows her like a beacon. Surely she will take the pain away, she’d done so before. He lurches and staggers and certainly would have cried out if the fog had not silenced him so completely. He reaches her and she looks at him, speaks to him, but he is powerless to answer. And nothing she’s saying is making any sense anyway. But he follows her still, each step agony. 


He is certain that he will have disintegrated by the time they make it through. He is certain that the pain and the noise will have driven him mad when they reach the edge. But they finally arrive at the cliff’s edge and the pain melts away as soon as they step clear of the fog. He sucks in a sharp breath purely for the effect it has on his pounding head, simply to prove that he can, maybe. He is dead, but he has not died a second, more painful death. 


He squints against the sound, freakish eyes narrowed in concentration when he looks to Beyza and shakes his peculiar head. He hesitates only a second before he tries to call upon his fog but nothing comes. Not even the fog at their backs stirs to lick at his heels. 

you need a villain, give me a name

Jamie

[frenzy]

There is no color here.

There is a faint buzzing in her ears as Frenzy blinks hard, trying to force the colors back into the world. It only takes a glance downward to realize that color is gone - the galaxy patterns on her legs are muted, the blues and purples faded into grey and white swirls. She trembles, panic flooding her as she looks around to the others, praying to find a familiar face among the other newly dead. Unlike several of the others, however, she doesn’t recognize any of them. Perhaps that is for the best - if any of her family had ended up here with her, she thinks it would drive her to the brink.

There is a thick white fog in the distance, and even without the dark God’s prompting, something draws Frenzy toward it. She notices the others moving into it as well, but quickly they are swallowed up in the distance and Frenzy can hear none of her plights. She only knows that there is something dark beyond the fog, something that drags her forward almost as if she no longer has any control over her limbs. The buzzing begins to grow louder now, but it is still gentle enough in her mind to push to the side. It is unimportant. All that matters is this fog, and the thing that awaits her on the other side.

She is alone for the first part of her journey - there are other souls here as well (of course there are, this is the Afterlife!), but she is able to ignore them for the most part. Most of them don’t even manifest as anything more than faint balls of light in the distance, but every now and then a muted grey mare smiles at her or a dark stallion pins his ears and turns away. It is unsettling, but Frenzy doesn’t mind the silent company.

It is the one who follows along, pleading at her heels, that has her twitching irritably and holding back tears.

“Frenzy,” it calls, the voice deep but familiar, “look at me. Please.” There is a warmth in it, but Frenzy cannot turn her head to look at the horse.
A horse that in life, had been known as the golden mare. Her coat had shone like a newly polished penny, but now it is a dull grey that reflects no light at all. It seems as though death has not settled well with her at all, as her scars from life have refused to heal. There is a new one as well, still weeping blood, from the teeth of Frenzy’s half-brother. Her guardian. The one that had sworn to protect Frenzy for her life, and yet had been forced to destroy the one thing Frenzy needed most of all.

Her mother.

Cress is crying, pleading, but Frenzy only picks up her pace, praying to put her dam behind her. The buzzing grows in her head, fighting to drown out Cress’s cries, but nothing seems to overpower the mare’s pitiful whimpering as she begs her daughter to stay with her, just for a moment. “Please,” she says, anguished, and Frenzy can’t decide if she pities her mother or despises her for the way she is crying, “please, stay with me, my dear. We never got to know each other in life, but we can know each other now. Please, my daughter.”

It is that word - daughter - that trips Frenzy up, and she turns to Cress, flames building in her throat as colorless tears flood her cheeks. “Stop!” she screams at her dam, tongues of flame tickling her gums as smoke curls around her face. “You are dead! I’m not supposed to be here! Just leave me ALONE!”

She accentuates that last word with a burst of flame, but the half-hearted attack backfires on her. Flames explode in her face and pain engulfs her as she is burned yet again by her own fire, but Cress has gotten the point. Blood drips from Frenzy’s ruined faces as the once-golden mare disappears back into the fog, her sobs growing quieter as pain takes over all of Frenzy’s senses. Carnage had said they cannot die again - they’re already dead, after all - but this pain is nearly as bad as being burned from the inside out, and Frenzy wonders what will happen if she falls unconscious here.

But she cannot stop moving through the fog.

Slower this time she continues on, the buzzing continuing to grow in her head. She is crying freely, begging to be freed from the pain, but eventually the buzzing drowns out even the agony of her ruined face.

She doesn’t even notice the fog anymore.
Just the buzzing.

“Please, stop,” she begs, eyes closed against the buzz of a trillion cicadas, ears pinned flat against her head as if that will help drown out the sound. There is nothing in the world anymore aside from the buzzing - not the other unfortunate souls, not her mother, not the fog, not even Frenzy.

She just wants it to stop.

Eventually her legs cease to exist as well, and she doesn’t even notice that she’s stopped moving and the fog has faded before a large cliff. It is here that Carnage, maybe, will find her, curled up tight on the ground with her head tucked firmly between her forelimbs.

Only, she doesn’t exist. This doesn’t exist.

Just the buzzing, incessant enough that it is all she can hear and feel. It almost has a taste as well, but that could just be the blood.

[Manikin]

She plays at his feet as though he isn't a monster. Or perhaps it is because she is one, too, though of a different sort. Her dark tail flaps wildly before each pounce, and the black claws in her white-tipped paws catch at the long strands of his tail which move in a breeze that she cannot feel, one of the living, one different from the empty breath that makes her soft edges ripple. It gives him an Otherworldly feel, even to the little ghost girl whose body still lies lifeless and cooling beneath the merciless hooves of her grandfather. She is purring softly and barely listening - again - when he speaks, when he directs them to the fog and she is not the first to depart, but tarries and delays as children often will. There is something that draws her into the fog, though, something nameless and delicious, and the buzzing of the ghostly locusts teases her ears, sometimes pulsing, sometimes not there at all, only to start again in a new place. Manikin does not feel hunger, now, not in the sense that the living feel it, but the hunger to hunt is not like the pang of an empty belly, it threads through her soul, and at last she leaves Carnage to creep into that thick and blinding white sea.

At first, there is nothing. Shifting, billowing clouds, a tapestry of ether, of tattered souls too thin and weak to hold their own shapes, they grasp at her softly, but the girl pays them little mind, no more than she does the morning mists of the Pampas. They shred across her feathers like cobwebs, she shakes them out of her ears like cotton, they gather like the tufts of dandelions gone to seed in the seashell curl of her ears and whisper stop.

She does not want them to do that.

"Stop," she parrots back at them, and the thin ghosts moan.

Manikin is listening. The buzzing stops and the world is too quiet when it does, it leaves her empty and alone and her feathers lift nervously, rippling across her neck and shoulders. She digs her claws into the sandy gray soil, waiting, tense. Nothing happens. The waiting is the worst.

bzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZT-T-T-T-T-Tuhhhhh

It scrapes in her brain like a cicada screaming its dry song and Manikin whirls around, falls into a deep crouch, a purr curling in her throat, ready to leap on the source of the sound like prey. Something dark winds just ahead of her like a snake - yes, a snake could make such a noise, and she is no less opposed to hunting them than insects - and her attack is swift and savage with claws that rend and a beak that aims for black flesh, yet they find none of those things. Instead, she lands in a stream of foul black liquid with a furious yowl. It clings to her like old blood, like oil, and the little chimera pants and gags and wades chest-high through the coagulate back onto the bone-dry shore. Just ahead, a real shadow moves, it lumbers toward her on soft, padded, feet. It comes at her fast - too fast. A giant rat as big as a grizzly bear - as big as a whale, she thinks, flattening herself to the ground briefly before turning to run. 

Manikin races, and something akin to fear washes over her, setting her back aflame with ice. The rat is faster, but less agile and she twists and turns, going Carnage-knows-where in that thick fog, and the thin ghosts howl mournfully in her ears. They told her so. She screeches at them.

Mind your own business!

Manikin runs, she runs her strange bounding gait, half horse, half lion, awkward. She runs forever, for no time at all, an infinity in a single second, and she does not tire in the normal way because she has no physical body to fatigue, but she grows weary of being the prey for a century. She grows bored and she realizes suddenly that her feathers have stripped away, that the fog spirits gather in the whiskers of her soft muzzle like dew. She feels naked with her neck and chest bare, the silky brown-furred skin exposed, her mane a tangle of short black curls, but she still has her paws. Until she doesn't.

Paws become long hoofed limbs in a blink and she falls, tumbling nose over tail again and again. The buzzing is so loud around her, but it is the rat that commands her attention. From a horse length away it leaps on her as she tries to stand, its incisors wicked, black, and gleaming too bright for the faint light within the fog.  Nimble hands grab her tightly and its touch floods her with a memory.

(It's her, it's Manikin, giant, a lion with a vicious beak and she pounces on a black rat on the filthy sands of the Beach. )

It's her, unmistakably her.

"No-no-no! That wasn't me!" One hard fore-hoof strikes out. It catches the rat's nose like a pebble thrown against the face of a cliff, it bounces off and throws her back to the ground. The rats tail sways back and forth, an unmistakeable threat and the little bay frowns just as fiercely. "It. Wasn't. Me."

Lies. The rat seems unconvinced. Sometimes Avocet is not afraid of her. He expects her to be aggressive. Manikin adopts a smile she could not wear in the waking world. It is sad, sympathetic. 

"Did she kill you? I'm sorry." She isn't sorry, little liar. The rat bruxes, she can feel it's indecision and stands again, "Do I look like her? Feathered and clawed and beaked?"

The rat comes more slowly now, snuffling and sneezing, a fine spray of putrid black raining across her smooth-skin pelt. The filly flicks her ears forward, her yellow eyes large and bright. She knows that she doesn't, she is almost identical to Avocet now, minus the bird catcher spots that dot across his body like stars.

Like bird shit, she thinks, but presses the thought away. Manikin is soft and quiet and lovely. She is friendly. She touches her velvet nose to the dead rat's cheek.

"I'll help you find her. We're on a quest, she must have gone this way, come on!"

There is a moment where he pauses and she thinks that her ploy has not worked, but then he steps after her more calmly. The girl thinks something dark about the creature's intelligence, but it is the beast's poor eyesight that has saved her. Manikin laughs and trots a clumsy circle around him, unsure of her new feet, but more than willing to accept the luck that stole away her paws and saved her from those murderous teeth. Behind him, black blood leaves a murky, putrid river to mark his trail.

"Come on!" She squeals again and tests a canter, pulling just ahead of the trotting rat, leading the way after the buzzing, buzzing, buzzing, and as the pair grow closer, it rattles every part of her until her limbs go numb and her vision swims. The fog itself seems to melt away from the reverberation in the air, revealing a cliff that looms threateningly just ahead. They are barely moving now, yet the noise grows stronger every second and Manikin falls sideways, dizzy, falls against rat, who whines softly. Black blood is pouring from its sensitive ears, and she remembers the way it bled on the beach and how the blood was sweet as rot on her tongue. It's a mistake to remember while touching the brute. He sees it, too. He screams, enraged, but the sound is barely anything above the droning in her ears, and she cannot move her legs in the proper order to shy away. The rat lunges weakly and she feels the sharp edge of its teeth graze across her cheek, and she remembers the way her grandfather chuckled over his final joke.

"What are they going to do, kill you?"

A crack, a wet pop, accompanies the bursting of the rat's skull around her as the drone become a scream. Manikin flinches back from the dark spray of blood in surprise and the rat collapses in a trembling heap. 

"Oh." She blinks, "Oops."

And then she laughs, too.

Image by Shevy-Art

[mae]

She blinks several times, trying to adjust her vision. There is nothing of the previous violence in her chest. There are no stones or shards; it is… empty. There isn’t even a beat though instinct makes her listen for it. Mae’s gray ears flick back and forth but they catch nothing. When she glances over her shoulder, she can see the somber waves raking over the pebbles of this eternity.

Mae realizes that she sees them lapping at the shore. It is her mind that is recalling the sound of waves, mocking the reality of the sound. There is another noise in the back of her mind. There is something else there but it is not the empty echoes of absent waves. Her dark eyes survey the others and she wonders, briefly, what they make of all this. The old who might find some small relief to have the weariness stripped from their tired bones. The young who (if they never get back) might mourn what they will never be.

The gray mare finds neither.

(There is a small consolation that he has dulled them all in their massacre. In the hereafter, the bright colors of life no longer seem to matter. They are all like her - gray. There is the small consolation that if they stay here long enough - if they get trapped - they could become like her. Forgotten.)

Some of the Shades pair together (as they should - it is in their very nature. What is a horse without the herd?). Some stand apart. Some scowl and some scorn. Mae does what she so often did when she had been alive - she stayed quiet. She did nothing to attract the notice of the Others and so she foolishly hoped, of Carnage.

And it is a foolish thought. He doesn’t need to take notice of her when he holds dominion over them all. Holds their minds and their souls hostage.

The Afterlife is rubbing against something, he booms. It is rubbing itself thin and raw. The Gates had been opened but what Carnage speaks of is different. This is not about opened Gates. This is about frayed threads and the unraveling fabric of this world; it could reveal a different type of linen entirely. He warns and he laughs and then like a fickle Fate, he leaves their minds and finally them.

Mae stares down the Beach where the fog looms. There is a moment where she considers staying where stands. There are far worse things than dying, after all. There is a chance she might find one of them at the other end of this phantom shore. But if she stays here? There is nothing here and the faint prickling sensation of fear creeps up her spine and then her neck, all the way to the space in her mind that Carnage had occupied.

What is worse than nothing? Emotions come harder here (or maybe just for her, maybe a tattered heart only feels in pieces).

So as the souls depart, vanishing into the mist, so does she. The fear of being left behind - betrayed by the need to follow the herd - becomes greater than what lies ahead. Mae walks ahead and into the haze of the Afterlife. There are pebbles beneath her hooves but she hears nothing when they should clatter together. There is a filmy sheen on them - like they should be damp - and yet her steps never falter. Mae never slips or stumbles.

A sound makes her stop.

Abruptly, her head jerks up and her ears move. Forward and back, forward and back, a poor imitation of the dark ocean water she no longer sees. There is no wind to move past her mane and so there nothing on the breeze to tell her what might be out there. Her emotions still feel dim, like all her Fear had been left on the Beach when she had still been living. She wonders if the shards of her heart drained all the feelings out of her, because when she hears the sound again and she stills, she knows that if her heart were still beating, it would stop.

It’s a bright, vibrant sound.
It is contrary to everything in this realm.

’You forgot me!’ the piping voice teases.

”No,” she (thinks?) speaks. ”No, I didn’t forget you.”

The disembodied voice giggles. 'You did,' it accuses, though there is nothing hostile about the tone. 'You did. You did. You did.' It giggles again. A girl’s voice. "No, I just-” Mae starts before the sound comes from another direction.

'Then what did you name me?' It asks, a question that hums with another sound. There is another noise that vibrates at the back of it and it distracts her. She named her, she thinks. It was just she was already gone. The breath and blood had already bled out of her. "I-,” she starts, trying to recall but the buzzing sound grows louder in her mind. The voice still doesn’t take a shape but she can imagine the smile; cold. 'You named my sisters,' it sings, a mockery of joy. 'Ashlynn and Liliana.'

Hearing those names makes her remember.
She remembers. Her time in the Dale and the sham it was.
Her time in the Chamber and the hollowing it did.

Her brow furrows and she tries to move ahead. Like before, she doesn’t falter but Mae knows she is no longer alone. The voice never takes a shape but sometimes it laughs to her right. Sometimes it tries to tease to her left, trying to engage her. 'Why couldn’t you name me?’ the voice chortles. 'What did I do to deserve to be forgotten?’ it speculates, tracing lightly over the question and yet it weighs heavier on Mae with each step.

"I did,” she says. "I named you,” the Shade pleads. "I told your Father. I told him what I wanted to call you.” It laughs again. 'And yet they said you perished over the death of another man.' Mae keeps walking but the sound in her ears is unbearable and it grates on her. Even when she pins them back into her neck, the grinding sound doesn’t leave her alone.

Much like the voice that dances from one pale side of her to another.
It mingles with the static. It says other things. She knows it does but the vibration in her ears almost drones it out. It keeps taunting her. It laughs at her. It calls her Selfish. It calls her Faithless. It calls her Weak. It - she - refuses to call her Mother. On and on it drones: 'Connor grew up to be like Pawn.’ 'Arabelle never forgave you for leaving her in the Den.’ ‘Jacob vanished.’ 'They remembered my sisters and I as the daughters of Coca-Cola. Your name was abandoned, as you abandoned us.’

"No,” she chokes with a heavy step. Those emotions - the ache she thought that had been left behind in the realm of the Living - had been filling her with each one she took. It threatened to make her heavy. It threatened to make her stop. It threatened to trap her here. "I named you.” The sound grows louder and louder, like wailing. It surrounds her and the more that Mae thinks, the harder she tries to remember, the angrier it becomes. "I-,” the mare of Old Beqanna whispers.

There is too much fog. Around her and in her, swirling through her mind. The voice continues to speak. It continues on and on and on, unbearable. Unbearable until Mae stops, almost brought to her knees. It lays her low.

The voice is still there, though she can barely differentiate it from the now-constant buzzing that rankles every part of her. All those torn, cut-up places inside of her rile with it. 'You didn’t name me!’ It screams, the voice rising above the vibration. It cuts her, much the same way that Carnage’s Magic had. But now? Now, she has had enough and she only wants the noise to stop.

She wants this to end.

"No,” she seethes. "I did not name you. Why would I? You would have been nothing but a harbinger of bad tidings. An ill omen. What name would I have given to a mother-killing child?” The voice is everywhere. It is a torrent and it is in the sound. Mae does not see that she has found herself at the top of a cliff. The shapeless thing blazes and the gray mare suddenly knows how to extinguish it.

She gives it a name; a word. "Murderer.”

On the tip of her tongue and given life here - in the Ether where nothing should be born  - it dies. Leaving Mae on her knees and on a ledge with only the ringing frenzy in her head that echoes of repercussions yet to come.

[Sabrael]

Sabrael

Their forms waver there, the very sad and very dead lot of them, on the shores of the Other Side.

It is darker, but not so much that Sabrael cannot see the effects that Death has on the others.  They are threadbare compared to what they were before: thin and drab and lacking density, as if one minor gust of wind could scatter their atoms to the corners of the afterlife.  Their eyes, too, seem like hollowed out marbles.  They are devoid of the brightness of life, lacking the spark of the alive.  He knows that he must look the same.  His once speckled coat is likely even more pockmarked now.  His once raven hair is now surely combed with grey from root to tip.  He feels the same, somehow.  As if his soul is unshakeable and unwavering at its core.

He supposes he’s glad beasts can even possess souls at all – he’s never believed it before. 

There is the softest susurration that starts between his ears, like a bumblebee fat with pollen floating and humming above him.  It is so quiet he thinks it could be the muted sound of the waves tapping on the sand beside them, if not for its close proximity to his brain. He looks to the shoreline anyway, follows it up the beach to where the fog begins.  There’s a place, Carnage intones, his voice a discordant companion to the gentle buzz inside Sabrael’s mind.  His annoyance with the dark god’s voice is immediate, instinctual.  He wants only the hum, wants to find the source of it – and he can’t hear while his murderer is monologuing.

He remembers a story, one told at his father’s knees as a colt.  There is a woman at the end of the world. I tried to bring her back, to make things right.  He remembers pieces of the story but so many others have slipped away like sand in the hands of time and youth.  He does remember the clanking, though (how terrible it must have been to hear it for an eternity, how sad that his father had failed in the end).  He also remembers that Ramiel is dead.  Could he be here, now?  Could he be trapped, too, caught in the clutches of the endless sound?  Is he finishing what he started all those many years ago?  The dead man draws away from the others quickly, his feet all-too-eager to drag him further into the nightmare.

The fog rushes to meet him.  It is thin, at first, translucent like he himself has become.  But soon (as the buzz expands to an unpleasant din) it thickens in the dead air all around him.  Sabrael relinquishes hold on his form and tries to draw the dragon out, intending to borrow wings to sweep the air clear, but it is as if he is locked in.  He quells the panic that starts low in his belly.  The open skies feel so far away in this moment, but he has plunged in and doesn’t intend on begging at Carnage’s feet for an easy out.  Beasts do not beg, only take what is rightfully theirs’.  And if his father is at the end of this, he will take him right back where he belongs, too.

There is no longer anything remotely pleasant about the sound pinging through his head.  There is even less unpleasantness as the fog continues to thicken around him.  He can feel it press against his greyed sides now, solidifying into a pulsating, waving gel that jostles him to and fro.  He can’t see anything: nothing ahead, nothing around him (besides the grey, grey fog), and not his own feet moving along the beach below him.  The stallion only knows he is going in the right direction because the buzz keeps growing as the fog keeps congealing.  Soon, the fog is so thick that it almost seems to move him along.  It presses against his legs as the grating sound scratches the inside of his skull.  He closes his eyes in pain and because it doesn’t matter if they are open any longer; he can’t see regardless. 

Panic floods him then and he calls out for the dragon in desperation.  His sides are heaving and he draws in shaky breathes, frantic for air.  Wings explode out from his sides, but they are puny, weak things that are a mockery of their usual selves.  They are still clawed at the end, however.  Seemingly of their own accord, his wings madly claw at him, reaching for every inch they can in their lessened state.  He feels deep furrows in his neck and at his sides, even in his ghostly state.  Blinded and shaking from the bone-rattling buzz, it takes all his willpower to shift the wings away before they do any further damage.  He is allowed a final breath in his dead lungs before the solidified fog presses into his nostrils and mouth. 

In the next horrifying moment, the fog dissipates.  With his eyes still closed, Sabrael only knows by the way it releases him as if by a mold.  He nearly falls and barely catches himself from then tumbling down the cliff he finds himself atop.

[sybella]

For a few moments she does nothing at all - even after he has spoken again through his pathway to their minds, given new directions to follow. He even laughs once, but she does not find him particularly funny. It turns out laughter is not as beautiful a sound as she had imagined it to be all these many quiet years. Sound itself seems to be the same way. He’s too loud and too commanding, and she finds that all she wants to do is fade back into the silence she knows so intimately. It does not feel like an absence any more.

She is obedient now, because she knows what it is to be broken, understands that her life is no longer her own - not even her afterlife. This soul belongs to him, belongs to death and perhaps, if he is right, something beyond. There is absolutely not a single ounce of curiosity urging her forward as those delicate violet ears swivel to catch that sound of distant buzzing, still just a drone at this distance. But the closer she draws to it, following the direction he had shown them, following distant tails as they disappear entirely into the fog, she finds that the sound is climbing to a new pitch.

It makes her feel like her heart is racing, like panic is reaching a crescendo in her chest, a clash of butterfly wings that never settle.
She feels almost nauseous with it.

Despite her obedience, she pauses when it is her turn to slip into the fog. The buzzing is loudest here, an almost ringing in ears she keeps pinned to the dark of her mane, keeps buried. But the sound is as much inside her head as it is in her ears. The urge to go back nearly overwhelms her, she is afraid of this thin-spot, of the fog and the buzzing, afraid to be alone in this death. But there is nothing to go back to. Nothing except Him, and she does not think he will welcome her disobedience.

So, like the rest, she slips into the fog, immediately uneasy with the way it brushes against her awareness, the way she cannot see more than two steps in any direction. She imagines she can hear more than the buzzing here - disembodied voices, imagines there are faces in the fog that do not look entirely equine, entirely anything she can readily recognize. So she looks down at her feet instead, and her skin crawls with a fear that trails cold, skeletal fingers all across her delicate spine.

She is alone, and she is certain something is watching her.

Her eyes stay down for longer than she has any concept of - she encounters no physical obstacles, no rocks or trees, nothing but a strange gray footing and the fog that swirls. It is as though she has somehow left the place He put her, as though she has come dislodged from the afterlife, from the in-between, and she will be walking forever. For eternity to the sound of this buzzing drone in her ears. She inhales sharply, suddenly panicked, suddenly hyper-aware of herself as her dark eyes jerk up to look around. There is nothing to see, just as she knew there wouldn’t be, but she is abruptly aware of a dissonance within herself. A wrongness.

She is aging.

She has been aging this whole time. Not with that impossible, beautiful slowness of life. She has been aging in leaps and bounds with every step she took, and now she can feel that age in her body as she draws to a wary halt again. Is she imagining it? She wishes for a way to see herself, a reflection in a pond or a puddle, a glimpse of a healthy face and bright eyes. It does not ever occur to her that it is illogical to be afraid to die of old age when one is already dead.

It is hard to feel dead while she still has this task.
Is it truly permanent if He waits for them on the other side?

Her brow furrows, transforming her face into a beautiful frown as she glances around with the wariness of being struck for her curiosity. Again she considers going back, maybe this ancient feeling will leave her if she returns from the fog. But there is nothing for her on the other side, nothing but empty beach and the memory of death, of the brutality of sound. So her attention returns forward, and there is pain in her eyes as she takes another step, takes a dozen more and feels that sensation of time slipping past. She isn’t sure how she knows, but the knowing fills her like a pit in her belly, turning her heart into a void.

It is more subtle at first, but eventually her bones creak and her joints ache, and each step is an effort she is losing faith in her ability to make. She is reduced to small shuffling steps, and her lungs make a rattling kind of whisper that makes her feel perpetually out of breath. There is an ache in her spine that makes her feel ancient, a swelling between each vertebrae, a fusing of motion that makes her short stride unsteady. Her eyes start to fail too, gummy and rheumy, shrunken in her skull - but before her sight leaves her entirely, she does not miss the ghostly faces of those she knows to be dead walking in the fog beside her.

At least she will not be alone in this second death.

But she cannot help the way she mourns the loss of every daydream she has ever had - every wish of a young girl dreaming of love and a family and a beautiful purpose. She had a crush briefly, a best friend she could have grown to love, but never love itself. No children, no family to surround herself with as she walked gracefully into these aged years. She had not expected it to happen all at once, and the loss of it feels incredible. An entire lifetime all used up at once. It is all she can think about when her vision is gone and there is only the dark and that wild insectile buzzing that makes her feel as though her bones may come undone. It settles like another ache inside her, as though it is more tangible than simple sound (which she wonders now why she ever thought she wanted to experience), and it erodes away all these last brittle pieces.

She stops when she has nothing left to give, no part of herself held back from this task - because at least there was purpose in this death, if only she had been strong enough to make it to the end for Him. This might all have meant something. But she is fragile and she is weak, and she is not brave. She was not enough even for death.

Sorrow fills her chest until her face is damp with it, with tears that slip from closed eyes. She knows she is crying, but it is a soundless kind of anguish because the only sound that exists anymore is the one that works to unbuild her. It is a perpetual sound, that buzzing, insidious as it wraps itself around all her brittle bones.

She blinks, wincing at the pain of it, and for a moment she cannot comprehend the world that suddenly appears before her, or the way that arthritic pain seems to slip from her body like a cloak. Only her mind remains unchanged, all those years and all that regret, every decade of imagined time passing having carved a scar across who she is. She blinks again, wondering at that heavy dullness inside her chest, at why she does not feel joy or relief.

There is only quiet inside her despite this impossible noise as she looks out across a view that is eerily unlike anything she has ever known.