09-04-2020, 09:17 PM
There is something about the new quiet that lulls her - or perhaps it is just an exhaustion that goes deeper than flesh and bone, deeper than even the furthest chasms of her mind. There is fear, because there is always fears now, but it does not feel as jagged as it had at the beginning of all this. Decades of fear, time imagined or otherwise, have, for the moment, dulled the edge that presses itself like a knife against the inside of her chest. It is still ready to split her open, this quiet, dull fear, but she cannot feel the edge of the blade pressed to her.
She blinks, and in the silence her eyes wander over things her mind cannot make sense of. Shapes in a dimension that is not her own, colors that force her eyes to constantly refocus as they search for something familiar - though she cannot pick out a single shade she knows. It makes her eyes hood tiredly, nearly closed against the pounding ache writhing beneath her brow now. It takes up the rhythm that the buzzing had, threatening to unmake her at her weary seams.
Is this her life now? She glances around again, gaze narrowed and squinting, finding nothing that feels remotely like home. It is a gauzy kind of reality, like viewing everything - color and shape alike - through the smear of a sludgy oil slick. There is no one here with her either, and she is surprised to find how unnerving it is to hear the fear-pattern of her own heart thudding in her chest. It gets louder the longer the silence goes on, like it is filling this emptiness the only way it knows how. She wonders idly if hearts can bruise, if they can beat themselves to a soft, frightened pulp like an overripe fruit.
She isn’t sure, but she thinks if the quiet doesn’t leave she is likely to find out.
Except the quiet isn’t the worst thing, she realizes a while later, when an odd sound shatters the space around her with change her mind stumbles to fathom. It is funny how long it had taken her to accept the quiet, to settle the pounding in her chest - funny, because now that the quiet is gone everything feels wrong again instead of better. But sound is still new to her, so when the shrill note explodes into every dark corner and rebounds back to her, she winces, but she does not feel dread. Nor do the clicking of too many legs against stone, or the wet snarls of ravenous beasts raise warning flags.
She doesn’t like it, but she does not know to run from it.
So she is like a fawn fallen before wolves when the creatures find her, waiting with uncertain doe-eyes for the strange, oily dark to show her something. She should have known that it would never show her something good. Sybella falls quickly beneath the bodies of beasts the size of bears. They resemble spiders the most, if she had to pick something from home to compare them to. They have long barbed legs that click and scuttle, but the bodies are stiff and armored, the feet speared at the bottoms. She knows this because there are many buried in her belly now. They search her with a hunger she cannot fathom, tearing at her skin like she is made of flower petals.
Roses, maybe. She pretends that is the red she sees spilling in her periphery, pretends the pain is someone else's. That she cannot feel the way her skin is sawed open, or the way her insides spill. These creatures eat someone else - though she isn’t sure how since they have no discernible head as far as she can tell, no anatomy she can make sense of. She cannot cry out because one of them has split her throat and her vocal cords within. Cannot move because another has cracked her spine and there is no sensation in any of her legs. They leave her with only complacency, quiet and obedient as they push her towards death, working with the frenzied efficiency of a hive mind. The only thing left to her is the tears that trail like sleepy beads of dew down the dark mahogany of her cheek. But then one of them plucks her eyes out, and she succumbs at last to the freedom of nonexistence.
In death she dreams that she can feel Him there, that when he reaches for her, her untethered soul reaches back for him.
Still, she is surprised when she opens her eyes again - surprised to have any eyes to open at all, and surprised a second time to find that Carnage is the one whose gaze had settled on her for just an instant. <i>“Thank you.”</i> She whispers, maybe not even aloud because sound has gone from her again. But the strange gratitude in her delicate bay and violet face is odd and unmistakable as she lays still in the sand and watches him. She wonders a hundred wild thoughts, each one like a separate leaf loosed in an autumn gale from the moorings of it’s branch. Is she alive? Or had he come to collect their souls from the never-place, the in-between. Would she be allowed to stay here, alive, would she be allowed to leave this place behind but never the memory of what had happened?
She tries to move so she can lift her head and find Him again, but her spine has only just begun healing and this body is little more than that of a doll with a conscious mind. Instead she sighs, closing her eyes so that the whole world disappears too. But then her eyes fly open again and her heart beats fast, because the dark behind her eyes is different now. There are memories buried like seeds and already growing monsters.
She blinks, and in the silence her eyes wander over things her mind cannot make sense of. Shapes in a dimension that is not her own, colors that force her eyes to constantly refocus as they search for something familiar - though she cannot pick out a single shade she knows. It makes her eyes hood tiredly, nearly closed against the pounding ache writhing beneath her brow now. It takes up the rhythm that the buzzing had, threatening to unmake her at her weary seams.
Is this her life now? She glances around again, gaze narrowed and squinting, finding nothing that feels remotely like home. It is a gauzy kind of reality, like viewing everything - color and shape alike - through the smear of a sludgy oil slick. There is no one here with her either, and she is surprised to find how unnerving it is to hear the fear-pattern of her own heart thudding in her chest. It gets louder the longer the silence goes on, like it is filling this emptiness the only way it knows how. She wonders idly if hearts can bruise, if they can beat themselves to a soft, frightened pulp like an overripe fruit.
She isn’t sure, but she thinks if the quiet doesn’t leave she is likely to find out.
Except the quiet isn’t the worst thing, she realizes a while later, when an odd sound shatters the space around her with change her mind stumbles to fathom. It is funny how long it had taken her to accept the quiet, to settle the pounding in her chest - funny, because now that the quiet is gone everything feels wrong again instead of better. But sound is still new to her, so when the shrill note explodes into every dark corner and rebounds back to her, she winces, but she does not feel dread. Nor do the clicking of too many legs against stone, or the wet snarls of ravenous beasts raise warning flags.
She doesn’t like it, but she does not know to run from it.
So she is like a fawn fallen before wolves when the creatures find her, waiting with uncertain doe-eyes for the strange, oily dark to show her something. She should have known that it would never show her something good. Sybella falls quickly beneath the bodies of beasts the size of bears. They resemble spiders the most, if she had to pick something from home to compare them to. They have long barbed legs that click and scuttle, but the bodies are stiff and armored, the feet speared at the bottoms. She knows this because there are many buried in her belly now. They search her with a hunger she cannot fathom, tearing at her skin like she is made of flower petals.
Roses, maybe. She pretends that is the red she sees spilling in her periphery, pretends the pain is someone else's. That she cannot feel the way her skin is sawed open, or the way her insides spill. These creatures eat someone else - though she isn’t sure how since they have no discernible head as far as she can tell, no anatomy she can make sense of. She cannot cry out because one of them has split her throat and her vocal cords within. Cannot move because another has cracked her spine and there is no sensation in any of her legs. They leave her with only complacency, quiet and obedient as they push her towards death, working with the frenzied efficiency of a hive mind. The only thing left to her is the tears that trail like sleepy beads of dew down the dark mahogany of her cheek. But then one of them plucks her eyes out, and she succumbs at last to the freedom of nonexistence.
In death she dreams that she can feel Him there, that when he reaches for her, her untethered soul reaches back for him.
Still, she is surprised when she opens her eyes again - surprised to have any eyes to open at all, and surprised a second time to find that Carnage is the one whose gaze had settled on her for just an instant. <i>“Thank you.”</i> She whispers, maybe not even aloud because sound has gone from her again. But the strange gratitude in her delicate bay and violet face is odd and unmistakable as she lays still in the sand and watches him. She wonders a hundred wild thoughts, each one like a separate leaf loosed in an autumn gale from the moorings of it’s branch. Is she alive? Or had he come to collect their souls from the never-place, the in-between. Would she be allowed to stay here, alive, would she be allowed to leave this place behind but never the memory of what had happened?
She tries to move so she can lift her head and find Him again, but her spine has only just begun healing and this body is little more than that of a doll with a conscious mind. Instead she sighs, closing her eyes so that the whole world disappears too. But then her eyes fly open again and her heart beats fast, because the dark behind her eyes is different now. There are memories buried like seeds and already growing monsters.