Chapter Text
Truth be told, Mystic Flour cookie had not expected the soul jam usurper to still be around, or alive at all.
Had she given it a bit of thought she has no doubt she would have come to such a conclusion; after all, dying and defeated, where else would he go? His people would not accept him like this, utterly dishonored, bereft of all he once stood for — and he would crumble within a month or two besides.
The fact of the matter was that he had simply fallen far beneath her notice, after she had torn her soul jam from his shabby little sword. He was little more than another puppet ruler stepping the dance of so-called heroics. The only difference was that he was the one who coveted what had been hers, what was still rightfully hers; that much was apparent, from the ease with which it had been ripped from him. He was a walking archetype, existing in as few dimensions as one could feasibly inhabit.
And so he was forgotten, a footnote in the annals of her eternal history which churned on and on to no end -- a state in the past which no longer existed. An inconsequential phenomena, which would have remained so had she not decided to meander her way throughout her temple grounds, and find him standing directly in the middle of the path to the stone gardens, unmoving.
She does not feel the need to address him, and apparently neither he, her; she only watches him for a moment, slowly considering the not-quite-realization but not-quite-suspicion of his existence, the absence of him never realized but suddenly made readily false. The ghostliness of his presence. It seems as if he could, in this moment, walk through walls.
He is staring off into the middle distance, looking at nothing in particular — his line of vision ends abruptly at the wall, as if rudely interrupted, and she, without turning, knows that the wall is spotless. She has made all which is around them.
Instead, she takes the time to inspect him. It is, admittedly, somewhat remarkable he has not crumbled already. She supposes that that must be the bare minimum that one must be able to endure in order to bear even a half of her jam. Even so, white flour creeps up his wrists, splotches his armor and face in the messy powdering of a child’s painting, and she watches as the wind blows away a few grains from the tines of his crown. His royal raiments have been reduced to a parody of themselves; satisfied, she slowly navigates around him, redirecting her footfalls to the courtyard instead. The little haetae will surely be waiting there, and considering the newfound free time she has on her hands, it will do no harm to entertain their more impish whims every now and again.
She stops in her tracks when, upon crossing his line of sight directly, his eyes whip with startling speed towards her own and, in a single fluid motion, he reaches out and grabs a firm hold of her wrist.
He does not speak at all even still, but his eyes remain fixedly on her face. They are empty, and pale, and she recalls with startlingly clear imagery how they used to burn with untamable emotion. She tracks the spead of the plague from his left cheek, where she had once caressed his face, to where it creeps upwards steadily towards the hairline. It fans around his eye in a fine dusting of light beiges, and introduces an almost imperceptable milky sheen to his iris; his sight is, most definitely, already impaired. In a few weeks it will render the eye entirely useless.
He finally deigns to speak after the passing of what must have been several minutes, trapped in a silent stalemate of mutual studying.
“Mystic Flour Cookie,” He says, his voice quiet and guttering, and if there had not been a complete and ubiquitous silence within her temple grounds at all times she would never have been able to hear him.
He does not continue, his gaze drifting slightly to the left once more, but his grip is still firmly on her wrist, and although she is patient she is quite sure he has forgotten about her presence. She is debating on simply removing his grip and leaving -- she is fairly certain at this point that should she apply any pressure the entire appendage might simply snap off -- when he starts again.
“I am real.” He says. It is not a question, but there is a layer of incredulity to it, disbelief and disappointment and confusion and discomfort and most probably what is a thin layer of supposed joy running an undercurrent under it all. His eyes trail to the grip on her wrist. He squeezes slightly harder, and flour comes raining down gently onto the flagstones, the wind blowing it onto them both. It is unnoticable on her white robes, but it leaves a visible spot of pale on his armor. It blends in, even so. “Are you.”
It is not a question, so she does not respond. The grip loosens. She quickly works herself away and takes her leave.
--
She does not interact with him for a while yet, after that, but with the reminder of his existence she begins to notice traces of his habitation. A dust-free seat here, a burnt-out candle there. Like a ghost story. She has not yet discovered where he is sleeping. The attendant’s quarters are untouched.
She never goes looking for him, but his presence happens to be an inconvenient epiphenomenon with the revival of her free time, which she has been spending re-familiarizing herself with her temple grounds and the land around it, and so she chances upon his echoes constantly. This is a ridiculous endeavor, the slow retracing of her lands, because she has constructed and is constantly maintaining all of the temple grounds from miniscule grains of flour, and is thus at least somewhat necessarily aware of the state of things at any given moment. But she considers this awareness a bit too disingenuous; and besides, it had utterly failed to inform her of the usurper’s presence within its grounds for a full week, so she has little reason to believe any of her knowledge of her grounds is as precise as she thinks it is.
Several times she manages to catch a glimpse of him, always in still-life, like a fly caught in a web. Leaning against a tree, staring unseeingly out of a window, standing inexplicably out in the central courtyard. He maintains these positions for hours at a time, his body every now and then unexpectedly tensing and then relaxing just as quickly. It is more than a little pitiful. He seems incomparably more fragile; like the wind could pick up just a bit more and scatter him completely to the far reaches of the land. She supposes she has just revealed what he had always been, underneath the blustering and boastful veneer he took such great lengths to maintain. A lost child. Pitiful.
The haetae seems to have taken a bit of a liking to him, after a period of initial continuous umbridge. For a few days they grumbled and snarled about his aimless wandering, his empty expression, the apparent weakness of his highly-ancicipated resolve -- but after an incident in which, from what she had managed to gather from their somewhat meandering rambling, the haetae managed to coax him into dispensing a neverending supply of petting and light scratching, they had quickly realized his utility as a dual masseur and napping pad, and the fact that the armor really wasn’t so bad, if you just could position yourself correctly, which was easy to do because he never minded any wriggling or even the uncomfortable jab every now and again, and did you know that his big cloak was actually pretty warm when you managed to get it around his ridiculously wide pauldrons?
She did not witness for herself the incident in question, which the haetae has purportedly been trying to replicate every day since then with very little success, but she finds as they speak that she can visualize it easily enough, from the tableaus she observes in her goings-about. His eyes staring off to that unknown landscape, in his posture the constant stillness and emotionlessness with which he comports himself, the mechanical back-and-forth movement of his brittle fingers which must be the epitome of satisfaction for the itchy scalp of a haetae. She realizes that they have probably left behind traces of flour in the haetae’s fur, and considers, strangely, cleaning it away, before she realizes that they, too, are made of flour.
“But he doesn’t speak,” they complain, squirming about in her lap as she settles her hands soothingly along their back. “I thought he might make a better conversation partner after he let go of all of his burdens, but he’s even less talkative than before! I think you have to help him, Master. He’s hurting still. I don’t think he’s reached enlightenment.”
She does not respond, because she has nothing to say, and the haetae moves on to other riveting topics, like the specific shade of white they noticed the flour was today, as opposed to yesterday, or the day before. Sometimes she admires how much they find remarkable about the world. It has all become rather monotonous to her, as she suspects it does her former counterpart.
But nonetheless, despite the haetae’s flippant suggestion, the two of them still do not speak. She would be more than content letting him slowly waste away for the short rest of his days as little more than a passing amusement to the haetae and clues for her to piece together on her walks. Hints of a man. She has not yet seen him walk through walls, but she has not seen him move, either, save for that one quick lunge toward her at their first post-confrontation interaction, so it is entirely feasible.
--
It is once again him who initiates the contact.
“I don’t have anything to say,” he says in what would be an almost pettily contrarian fashion, had she thought he had the presence of mind to recognize or formulate the concept of contrarianism. As it is, it comes off as disarmingly genuine in its blank delivery. “But,” he says, with a sort of slow tedium that manages to bring a feeling of annoyance even to her carefully maintained calm, “It seems there has been a deadline set on my presence. I am working under time constraints.”
He is excellent at not leaving her any guidelines for potential responses.
“Yes?” She says, because he seems to be a bit more put together than he had been, and there is at least a thirty percent chance that he is waiting patiently for her answer rather than adrift once again in the sea of his own mind. His gaze is still averted, focused on the flagstones, on the wall. The left one is much more noticeably glazed now. She thinks of a seat without dust. He is not touching her, this time.
“I have been deferred unto death, I think,” he murmurs, with a slight furrow in his brow. “and I will not change course here. Know that there is no blame between us. But I do not think you understand what it is you wish for. It is difficult for me to explain in such a manner. Do you understand?”
She does not, but she cannot deny the slight curiosity which rises up within her at his measured pace, each word carefully plucked from a gentle mist, obfuscatory and deliberate. He, she understands, is trying to convey something which cannot be conveyed. This is the natural barrier everyone must run up against at a young age; to see him pushing against the bounds of his cage once again is, admittedly, somewhat endearing. It speaks to a certain innocence, which those who use language have often already lost; she can see now that he is rediscovering the concept of it, turning each word slowly around in his hands as he catalogues the foreign geometry of it. She can see why the haetae was so taken by him.
After a moment, he inclines his head slightly in acknlowledgement. “Have you been to the Peach Bao gardens recently?”
“I have not,” She says, with a sudden recollection of the peaches which grew plentiful in the ever-rare spring, of the soft-spoken, compassionate caretaker. The gardens were never part of her domain, but they were so close by they had practically been counted as one in the eyes of her followers. The length of their time to fruiting lended them a natural sort of mysticism, amplified by her presence nearby and the otherworldly composure of the groundskeeper. Peaches had been one of the more common offerings laid at her altar -- the most common had, of course, been nothing at all. “How were you made aware of them?”
His gaze slides up towards the sky, and he peers at the paled sun with an almost scrutinizing look. “I was expected, and so I arrived; it is not important. I will be there. Please come by.”
“For what purpose?” She inquires, but he only fixes his gaze firmly a little to the side of the sun, pupils darting to-and fro every so often-- a blatant dismissal of her presence. She quashes down the indignance and refuses to look up with him, standing for a moment with him in the neverending light of the day. His feet are planted firmly on the gravel below.
It is once again her who steps away.
---
He had signified no time for their meeting; had he, it would have been useless -- time is inconsequential and indescernable in her lands, at once the unassailable lion and the tame lamb. Even so, the lack of time meant a lack of possibility. And in any case, she has no plans to go.
But his words periodically are dredged up in her mind,which in turn dredge up other words, long forgotten and long dismissed, which dredge up emotions and faces and dusty old images, a billion places lost, billion things forgotten and one of them still here, after all this time -- and eventually the memory of the peach tree caretaker, his easy smile, the sweet smell of the blossoms; they coax her steps, subconsciously, up the path to the fruiting -- fruiting, she thinks again, with a distant appreciation -- peach grove.
It is as he promised; he waits, patiently, in the shade of a flowering tree.
“Mystic Flour Cookie!” Peach Blossom Cookie enthuses, when he spots her cresting the hill. “It has been quite some time since I have seen you frequent my gardens, Priestess.” The title is said with an easy familiarity born of a lifetime of adjacent coexistence; Mystic Flour Cookie had been baked for Volition the same way that Peach Blossom Cookie had been baked for his peach bao. One purpose more lofty, one more humble; but purposeful they had been nonetheless. And it was their divergence in purpose that led them both down their respective paths; the loftiness of Volition had broken it into two, where the peach trees stood hale and healthy, unchanged after decades of war and peace and war again.
She feels a sudden paroxysm of irrepressible jealousy, looking at Peach Blossom Cookie now; his purpose intact, his mind clear, his heart open. The focus within such a simple point has spread him outward, where she had been spread thin.
“Indeed, caretaker,” she bows her head respectfully, tracing the path of fluttering petals about her. “I see they have borne fruit once more.”
He laughs, an easy, high, note. “Yes, three thousand years have come and gone, haven’t they! I’m glad you could come by. These are the last few days of the fruiting weeks; I would hate to have to see them without you again.”
He hums and glances once over his shoulder, back where the usurper lies, eyes open and unseeing as always — gazing up at the gentle rain of the peach blossoms.
“If you may allow me to be so rude and comment on your guest, dearest Priestess… He does not seem well.” He gives a rueful smile. “I pointed him in your direction in the hopes that he would find a new understanding… I will confess I am more than a little disappointed he has not. But, it is of his own volition… so, in the end, if this is how he wishes to spend his life, I will not impede him. Please, listen to what he has to say.” He takes a deep breath in, and out, and turns away to tend to his charge once more. “He has been waiting for you for quite a long while.”
She blinks after him and feels a strange sort of disconcertion within her stomach; a childish guilt, like a gentle reprimand from a parent. The moment she feels this shame within her, she is overtaken by a sudden panic, a violent gut instinct to rebel against it — she is no longer powerless, no longer lost, no longer brokenhearted; she is the one at peace with the world, she is the one who guides, she is the one who sympathizes and is never sympathized — which causes her to take a single lurching step after him, almost falling over, reaching out to tell him — tell him — what?
Her panic stops with the sudden burst of uncertainty; it jolts her back to reality. What is she doing, having this infantile outburst, reaching out for another? She is not so crude a creature as to require connection or reassurance — she has ascended beyond. Quickly her insides settle, composing themselves in perfect harmony; she straightens with a quick grace, everything neatly tucked away.
Peach Blossom Cookie does not turn around. She watches his back recede, descending further and further down the slope, until she is at last left only to consider the gentle sway of the branches in the ever-present breeze. Suddenly it is all very mundane, all the desperate nostalgia which forced her steps here, in this grove where she once stood thousands of years ago, fading in tandem with the serene petals. Suddenly it is all very ridiculous.
Considering her lack of planning on her half-unconscious path over to the grove, she is more than content with a cursory observation of the ephemeral once-in-thirty-lifetimes beauty of the garden for a few moments before a swift departure back to her temple, never interacting with the usurper and his hazy edge-of-sense allusions at all. He still sits under the shade of a plum blossom tree, watching nothing in particular; insensate, barely conscious — utterly ridiculous. She has been distracted by his nonsense for too long. He will fade, and his words will fade with him — she, on the other hand, is eternal and everlasting, and has no need for such earthly matters.
She is just stepping away when, as if by reading her mind, the usurper’s gaze locks onto her, and she feels the vague echo of deja-vu crawl up her spine. A thought occurs to her at once, and quickly she feels a creeping and unwilling embarrassment — had he seen her unsightly stumble, earlier? He had not been looking over at the time, but his stare holds a strange awareness to it — a sort of implicit pity, a feigned understanding — as if she was the pitiful one between them!
He says nothing, but, as if the diminished gaze held some divine sway over her, and maybe, possibly, due in some small part to her current unbalanced indignation — she is perhaps more worked up than it is strictly appropriate to be — she feels compelled to make her way towards him. She picks a path towards the tree he rests under with a brisk and carefully measured step, winding gently around the sloping trunks of the arbor to come to a stop directly in front of him. She does not sit.
He gazes up at her in place of the petals. He does not ask her to sit.
“The peach blossoms,” he begins, and she finds to her distant annoyance that his voice is startlingly similar to that of the caretaker’s. “Do you find them beautiful?”
She is quick in thinking of her response, but is careful to meter it out slowly, to match his set pace, to not make her words seem emotional or overeager. “They are beautiful in their ephemerality, the same way a life is; pointless and futile, and infinitesimal.”
“Yes,” he hums. “infinitesimal. It is all quite infinitesimal.”
She is unsure of what he is trying to tell her still; she is the one who has bestowed upon him her way of thought, her enlightenment. He has nothing to tell her.
“Apathy,” he says, apropos of nothing and in the same deliberate cadence as before, “Is not a reprieve afforded to the living.”
She feels her slightly tested emotions be strained again. She did not come here for a didactic lecture on the philosophy she has witnessed firsthand time and time again.
“Futility is the end result of all life,” she bites out. “Life is a neverending tapestry of falling, of suffering. Here eating, here sleeping, here crying. And all throughout the thread of pain, the thread of termination. The tapestry ends, and the world goes on. What else can you do, when you recognize this futility, but embrace apathy?”
He stays silent in consideration for a while, and she cannot revel even in this tiny wellspring of triumph because he is always silent, and always in consideration, and so this small victory means nothing.
“Yes,” he murmurs, “even so. I only wish to tell you what I myself know. You have bestowed upon me apathy, and so I will explain to you what it is.”
“You believe me unaware?” The rebuke comes out as a hiss. “To realize the utter senselessness, the ludicrousness of wanting to have done anything at all--”
“Life is a series of changes,” He interrupts. “And a change is a series of deaths. And death is a series of lives; do you see how it is all interconnected? I believe you do not know what apathy is like, Priestess. I believe that you long for it, earnestly, and whether through compassion or a want for embodiment, you impress it upon others. Apathy is--”
“I do not know what apathy is like? Me?” She breathes out, and is overcome with some terrible seething feeling which she is intimately familiar with and has never been able to name. There is some leak that has sprung in her mind, and it is at once like she has been both deflated and filled with some incomprehensible divine hatred. She is emotionless; she doesn't know what she is feeling. It is anger, in part, perhaps. But there is something else which is propelling her forward, and which has propelled her forward for longer than she can imagine, which is bubbling to the surface now.
“In every step, in every touch, in every word,” he begins, slowly, something foreign in his voice, barelling past her overboiling spring. “a thousand more. All rippling out, out, out. In every moment a million choices.” He gestures outward, breathing coming harsher with every word, a note of rising panic within it all. “A million flower petals. A million clouds. Trees upon trees upon trees upon trees, and past that; a vast and unnamable ocean. For every one like me, a million more-- More things than I will ever, ever know--” He is gasping for every breath, hands wildly clawing at the ground, the air, the bark behind him. “And I can see every single one of them. I can touch every single one of them. Don’t you understand, the beauty--”
“Meaningless.” She stares down at the scrabbling figure in contempt, in disgust, in wretched, long-buried fear. “All of it -- not worth a whit. It goes on without you. The world churns onward carelessly, whether or not you are trapped beneath its ocean swells. It forgets you; it will forget you; it has forgotten you. Every move you make, every single decision you choose — they are eroded, endlessly, with the passage of immortal time. Do not pretend to know a fraction of what I have experienced, usurper, dethroned king — I have seen everything you have and more. The world, the people, the animals and the rocks and the streams and the great forests that tower above us all; they will see you to your death without blinking an eye. You can spend,” she snarls, “a whole life saving people, saving, saving, saving, endlessly — and even still, it will not be enough. Nothing will be enough for this world. Nothing you do will so much as skim the surface of the water; the mirror-smooth lake remains forever unblemished. We are not even worth a pebble, don’t you understand, you impotent fool — it is all worthless — worthless — utterly worthless.”
He reaches out for her plaintively for a moment, both arms outstretched, as if for an embrace, as if for an offered comfort, and she steps back in a sudden visceral repulsion. “But you can change it. You can change it!” His gestures return to a frantic sweep, an all encompassing motion of everything around them. “Who gives a damn about the worth! Even temporarily, you can shatter that calm surface — so what if the ripples fade, so what if the world moves on? You can reach out and touch it all, feel it beneath your fingertips, push and pull and prod as you please. Don’t you see? The world is yours to do as you please! This is apathy, this is the great and grand paragon of choice, the crux of existence. You can see it — Everyone can see it — everyone is brushing up against it at all times, brushing up against that invisible boundary. Apathy is the boundary — apathy is the pinnacle of understanding — Apathy is — is — Apathy is the tidal wave of beauty.” And suddenly he is settled, his voice calming inexplicably, tamed and docile like the waters of the licorice sea quieting underneath her will. Only it is not her will, this time, it is some pitiless creature which barely understands-- “Apathy is when the joy of choice is so boudless that it is easier to choose no choice at all.”
“Nonsense; nothing but idle imaginings from a half-gone mind.” she spits out, coiled still like a serpent to strike. When did she start trembling? She wasn’t this angry even when the usurper was directly trying to end her life. She takes two steps towards him, advancing like a soldier on the warfront — she feels a need to reclaim lost ground. “Nonsensical. Directionless and petty and small — each of us an insect. Sensation is irrelevant, choice is irrelevant; you are irrelevant. It ends in an instant; there in one moment, gone the next, everything ebbing and flowing incessantly, everything fading, everything gone. You will be gone, and I will remain. All will be gone, and I will remain — All will move and change and twist, and it will be heedless of your call. What are you not understanding? Is it love for your kingdom, for your people? Believe me; it will all end quickly, quicker than you could ever believe. Your grand kingdom will crumble to dust; your loved ones will die; your people will leave you behind. It will all, without fail, end. It is short. It is all so short.” Her voice catches in her throat; she has drawn close to him in her incensed rage, and she can observe every inch of his face, every pale-dusted feature, every worn line — she can see the way the milky white has completely crawled over the useless tumor of his left eye. “It is so very, very short.”
“My lifetime,” he hums, and lays a crumbling hand on her tightly clenched fist. The shaking recedes; suddenly she cannot breathe, and she does not know if it is from apoplectic anger or a sudden calmness or — something else entirely. She feels the flour run down her loosened fingers. “My whole lifetime and a thousand more.”
With a carefully placed touch, she takes his left eye out entirely.