"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
All but one of them make it to the heart. Most of them are in the same condition as him, too sick or weak to stand any longer. As Carnage's voice echoes behind them, all around them in the murky water, Oxytocin forces himself back to his hooves, anger giving him enough strength to stand. The dirt from Pangea and the gravel from the Mountain buzz furiously under his skin and he trembles from the pain, but he forces the feeling aside as he looks around, wanting to set his eyes on the monster that forced them down here, forced them to bleed for this sunken wasteland.
Naturally, he is nowhere to be seen.
"Haven't we suffered enough?" he snarls, knowing the Dark God will here, wherever he is. "I have already sacrificed everything!" And in his eyes, he has. He has lost Kindling. Cress. His crown. His kingdom. Everything he ever thought he loved is gone, crumbled into ash or floating in rotten pieces at the bottom of the ocean.
Cement the bond.
Oxytocin gives in to the pull of the Dark God's magicks, and shudders as the fragments travel beneath his skin. They do not break through bone and arteries for him like they do for some of the others, but they seem to touch every nerve ending on his body, even the ones that his daughter managed to burn away. Within minutes, the black stallion is screaming underwater, rearing up as if to fend off unseen attackers. He had thought he was one of the lucky ones. He had thought he had made it through this relatively unscathed. He was wrong.
Eventually the fragments grow sick of their game (or perhaps that is Carnage who grows weary of it, but Oxy is too ill and distracted to string two thoughts together, let alone care) and burst from his flesh, leaving bloody trails as they dart away to join the dying heart. One leaves from his chest, just above his heart and thankfully missing any important arteries... the other one, however, may leave him a cripple. It is the piece of gravel from the Mountain, and it explodes from his fetlock like a bullet from a gun, leaving a mangled ruin of his lower left forelimb.
He groans as blood flows from both wounds, watching as the heart feasts upon his and the others' offerings greedily. His eyelids grow heavier as he loses more and more blood, and he begins to wonder if this is all that there is. Just him and the others, feeding their blood to this dying heart until they give all of their lifeforce to resurrect a kingdom that was never meant to exist in the first place. It is his last thought as he drifts into nothingness, too injured and drained to remain conscious.
~
He awakes, with the others, on the same beach where not long ago they had all plunged into the ocean together. They are all bruised and battered and separated, and Oxy cannot even look at them. He just draws his legs as tightly to his body as he can as he bleeds onto the sand, trembling against the light of the day. He has nothing left to give.
The words trickle like poison, melting through her flesh and baring her deepest fears. That unsettling seed stirs within her, coming to life as though drawn forward by the magnitude of Carnage’s power. It begins a slow pulse, but then it quickens to a tremble. A quaking of her muscles. This entire time, she has been fostering a seedling of this sickness and of his desperate need for power and influence over them. Shiya wants to object, to will herself out of this, but her meek nature stitches her lips shut. All she can do is listen and endure this pain – mental, physical, emotional – and nothing more.
You’re weak, so weak.
She doesn’t realize the breath she is still holding prisoner. It finally sighs past her pursed lips, rattled with trembling fear as his warning hangs in the air among them. A glance to her left, then right, but she knows no one. Lost and confused, Shiya merely lowers her head in expectation as the pebbles continue to stir beneath the skin.
So weak.
But nothing could have ever prepared her.
A scream tears from her throat, primal in its nature. The pieces burn like white-hot fire in the sinew, firing off her nerves and amplifying the excruciating pain. They do not escape quickly, or even cleanly. Their paths are jagged, desperately trying to destroy her muscles and lessen the beauty of her untouched (unloved) body. Her legs want to give in and to buckle, but even the idea is too much to endure. Her balance teeters until she widens the base, her legs spreading enough to prevent her from falling as the pebbles rip more.
But they aren’t just emerging from soft, delicate skin. There are scales, her reptilian, exotic beauty.
Her tie to Vulgaris.
The blood pours, no longer contained by her webbed veins and scales. The walls have been broken and her life drains into the cancerous heart. Two hollowed tunnels dive through her shoulders from where the blood is cascading down. When she sees what has been inflicted, she wants it all to be a dream. Shiya doesn’t have the strength to test the possibility – she is already so weak – and so she just stands there with exhausted eyes, the lids drifting shut.
Is she dying?
She sees mother and father, Vulgaris and Carnage… they’re all there as her world turns black and her body collapses.
All pain is not created equal. The sting of nettle does not hurt in the same way teeth sinking into flesh does. Nor does the burn of an ember ache in quite the same day as love unrequited. Likewise, not all deaths are the same. Each leaf that spirals to the earth knows nothing of what new life will arrive come spring. There is only hope that the end is not a final one. There was no such hope in this valley where the dammed had gathered.
Those who had stood struggling for air on the drowned shore now collected, bathed in the ill glow that pulsed from an undead heart. All seemed somewhat roughened by the journey. Streaks and streams of blood marred their hides, crimson gone black in the emerald light. In the midst of it all, the now familiar grey stallion's voice reached them all. It was felt as much as heard, reverberating through the buckskin's skull. Cement the bond.
"What the hell does that mean..."
Silver-blue eyes darted, trying to track the flickering shadows that snickered beneath Carnage's command. What was so funny? He was about to ask when awful, violent screams began to rend the air. Cement the bond. With blood and stone, he understood now. The laughter grew louder as a sudden jerking pain pulled from somewhere in the region of his heart. It was wrong. Like a fish hook catching on arteries, Raul knew exactly when Pangea's earth and Mountain stone met and began their journey up his carotid.
His own screams joined the chorus around him as the foreign bodies fought to be free. Like acid under his skin, his vocal cords strained as the fire inched along his throat. There was a moment of transition, when the shadows grew more solid, found menacing faces of long dead Pangean horses. "You are already ours, brother. Give us our due, and you shall be rewarded. Or don't. We'll have thee regardless." Words slipped like oil on water, running clammy fingers under his chin, over his nose. At last, the pieces found the weak point that they had been seeking.
They tore through muscle and membrane, finding escape in the contracting tunnel of his esophagus. Blood began to choke out his scream. It filled the space, flowing down into his lungs and carrying the dead matter up and out of his mouth. Everywhere it touched he felt the burn of it, blistering like nothing he'd ever felt before. A bone cracking cough spattered viscous blood before him. It stained his lips and teeth where it touched. A wad of mud was hacked up, spit into the verdant heart desperately. Glee painted the ancient masks that twisted in and out of sight, though Raul was blind to them now. Blood, stone, earth. And a voice that had yet to be tried.
Pain like nothing else he'd known darkened the corners of his vision. Viscera continued to flow from his maw, saturating the loam underfoot. Knees buckled beneath the weight of his agony. Finally, darkness found him, claimed him. The phantom entities vanished just as quickly, returning to the corners of his mind that had conjured them in the first place.
Pain woke him from involuntary slumber. Back on the shore that had drawn him forth initially, it was as though no time had passed. The only evidence he held was the raw flame in his throat which he felt with every breath. His muzzle opened, trying to call for the brother who was always nearby, or for anyone else who would listen. The only sound that came out was a whispery croak. His voice was destroyed, as surely as if Carnage had slit the vocal cords himself. He was alone with his experiences now, holding them to his chest whether he wanted to or not. How long the effects of tonight's expedition would remain hidden, well. He couldn't say that either.
The heart looms ahead of him like a broken, blinking behemoth.
It pulses, sickly, sending eddies of water to swirl against his chest with every movement. He feels connected to it, in this way, connected to something that would otherwise be impossible to empathize with. He feels invested in whether or not this Thing will die. Because it is obvious with each shuddering heartbeat that they are not infinite. Not anymore.
If they do nothing, Pangea will die.
If they do nothing, will Carnage perish with it?
Because their god is intrinsically tied up with this wretched kingdom, is he not? He poured a part of himself into the foundation of the darkland, shouldn’t its destruction be a part of his own?
Ramiel feels the omnipresent gaze of their watcher sweeping over him now (or perhaps it is only a cold current being pulled in from the deep sea beyond). Thinking of death, he shudders in the viridian wash of light that paints him the same as all the others. It does the lot of them no favors, all with sharp cheekbones and dour, hooded eyes. Most look downright reptilian. But it doesn’t matter what they look like. It matters what comes next for each of them, how they will survive what comes next. If they survive.
It matters little to the man who has been both dead and alive. He holds no preference for either.
(He has nothing to live for now, anyway)
“Pangea is sick,” the Resurrector says, so he listens. He owes Him everything. A girl fusses on the opposite side of the heart, but he tunes her out. “Pieces of Pangea,” He says, and there is pressure at Ramiel’s throat. “Pieces of the Mountain,” He says next, and his shoulder vibrates seemingly of its own accord. It isn’t painful. None of it is painful at first.
At first.
At first, the particles buzz inside of him like bumblebees fattened on nectar and harmless in spring. The sensation is strange and annoying - especially the bee that buzzes around in his skull – but not wholly unpleasant. He shakes his head, and that seems to set them off (it doesn’t, Carnage does). The bumblebees become more like wasps, agitated and eager to escape by any exit they find – even if one doesn’t yet exist. The second piece to strike him starts the journey outward first. Ramiel feels the sting of it sliding back from whence it came, almost as if it has grown barbs that catch on each and every cell it passes (or passes through, ripping and shredding as it goes). It seems larger somehow, too, as if being this close to the source has plumped it up for what is to come. It punctures his lung and he suddenly has a harder time breathing. Ironic, that; he’s been breathing underwater so long it no longer feels alien.
The piece bursts through his ribcage and he hears a dull crack.
The first piece, Pangea’s piece, bounces around his skull. It makes him light-headed at first, woozy as the sickly green light sets his stomach to roil like an angry sea. BUZZ. BUZZ. He stumbles forward towards the heart as the other piece begins to shred the delicate overlaps of his musculature. BUZZ. And then it starts to stab at his brain. The pain is unreasonable, unbearable. He thinks he will die from the pain alone, forget the pieces coming back from where they never belonged in the first place. His head feels ripe and water-logged, pressurized to the point of bursting.
BUZZ BUZZ. CLANK.
“NO!” Ramiel slams his eyes shut, squeezes them with pain. CLANK. But it doesn’t matter what he does. He knows he is losing something every time he hears it. Nothing can stem the flow (memories, life, blood). And oh, how it flows.
Pangea’s dirt exits the underside of his jaw from the base of his skull. It tears his carotid artery at the same time that the second piece guts his left shoulder and bursts free. The red blood pumps out of him into the green water, pulled into the greedy, recovering heart. His sacrifice made real and final. The pain becomes a distant thing, something that hardly matters in the end. He falls, but will never remember it (will never remember anything, now). Little pinpricks of light spark on his fluttering lids, and he thinks they are the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.
But soon the light is gone, all black, and no one is waiting for him at the end of this universe.
----------------------------
Ramiel wakes on the beach. The sand underneath him is warm and inviting, but he still feels so very cold.
