Chapter Text
You were warned. Told to be cautious. Told to not stand out, to never be yourself. This is your recompense for breaking that, for being everything they hated. The loops do not end.
Abandoned, your insides collapse and harden as time continues to loop again and again and again around you.
Your outside breaks over and over again, but the loop does not end.
Icarus, falling yet again. And again. And again. Why reach for the sun, when you could have stayed far far below?
Everytime you fall, the lesson cements itself in you. But the loop does not end.
You scream until your voice breaks, again and again and again. It’s a repetitive drawl now, of shattering further.
No one hears you (as always), and the loop does not end.
Hallucinate innocence, get lost in what could have been. But it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.
The delusions are overwhelming, yet the loop does not end.
Witch, demon, misfit, wrong, they slip the noose around your neck. Not once, not twice, but forevermore (or so it seems).
What more can you do, but fall and tighten it? Still, the loop does not end.
The sun is supposed to shine in your face, blessing you with light. It is nowhere to be seen, instead a black hole of void sucks up the light that remained.
You are empty and cold, but the loop does not end.
Sometimes, you wonder whether you’ll become just another bunch of bones, time finally letting go and imprinting you into the earth.
Wondering changes nothing, the loop does not end.
At least this cage is more straightforward than your last. At least this cage tells you where the bars are, what the bars are, and the fact that you cannot escape. At least this cage doesn’t enclose you until you are nothing but the skittish panic of being trapped. Instead you are forever falling, wings tearing, body burning, dying until it resets and you die again and again and again and again and
You are the caged bird, but what does truth matter when the loop does not end?
You were warned, not to be what they didn't want you to be. forever caught in a masquerade of masks and fake faces.
They watched it crack and shatter, and your loop does not end.
You were not what they told you to be, you were not a woman. You were not what they wanted you to be, you did not care for their rules against change. You were not what they tried forcing you to be, you loved who you couldn’t help but fall for. Even though it helped kill you, over and over and over and over… you would never change it.
The loop does not end.
It is harder to think. Harder to breathe, harder to drift past the fog consuming you. The burning has long since stopped mattering, your wings long gone. Wounds left by the ones who pushed you off scar each time, but does that matter? Scars are nothing.
The impacts of crashing into the ground, the inevitable killing blow, is almost welcome. A sweet release (if only for a second).
The loop still will not end.
You were supposed to pray to their god. You were an angel of the highest rank, you were supposed to be the model devotee. Gifting your life to one who even if existed, obviously did not care for you. The ‘Provider’, they were called. Providing nothing but silence and empty promises.
You could not say it, but you had never believed in this god. And that was the least of your crimes, according to them. This was a reason the loop does not end.
Like the stories of old, fairy tales told to soothe children, there was a mask stifling you. Hiding the inner truth, hiding what you were telling them, because that was what they put on you. You were the censored version, with redacted parts, and they still disliked you. If nothing worked, why not take off the mask?
The loop does not end, and you may prefer it that way. Rather than being back there.
Maybe you were never destined to fall. Maybe you were betrayed by the rot that seeded the hierarchy, maybe being different was too dangerous. You were never meant to live.
The loops do not end, because you must live, even when you are constantly dying. Even when they try their hardest to corrupt you too, to drag you down to where they belong.
The server aches for you. It wants you to live, it wants you to fight. It wants you to weed out the corruption and find a way to destroy the classes that sentenced you, that claim to rule you even when you were one of them.
It is the reason the loop does not end.
There is no escape for you. Or so you think. Or so you thought.
The Parrot shows up, extends a claw.
The loop does not end. But neither does the Parrot leave.
Like the cicada, you are reborn. Renewed. Revived. You survived, for once. The Parrot didn’t let the blood and fire and pain consume you.
The loop… ended. If only for so long.
It will end.
The Parrot invited you to a server he called ‘Lifesteal’. Where no one would care what you are, or why you are. Where you could be you.
It sounds too good to be real.
But you have taken down a corrupt angelic hierarchy with nothing but the server itself and the Parrot, if nothing else… you will survive.
The loops have ended. But you never will.
