Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Long ago, she had gone to her mother and asked the reasonable question: what is it that you do, exactly?

Her mind’s eye could provide her parent’s canvas. The starched white laboratory smock, her uniform barring those evenings of the little black cocktail dress or the incongruous patched denims in which her mother did her gardening; the lacquered nails, chipped and needing their next manicure. The lingering scent of Chanel and vermouth. In the hand, a novel; something modernist but not too too, a Cather or a worn paperback of Greene. The reading tastes of her materfamilias had seen her contrarily ignore that American brand of subjectivism until the next year’s birthday, whereupon her mother had gifted her Anne Of Green Gables and she in retaliation battled valiantly through Absalom, Absalom!. Rose Lalonde had been nine.

Back then the smooth transition of one stockinged knee sliding over to the other stockinged knee was nylon ballet, and her mother’s lipstick curved in a condescending smile. Rose would always recall.

“I meddle with dark forces, darling,” she said.

“Then so shall I,” said Rose.

“I wouldn’t,” said her mother. “It pays abominably. No, I’m sending you to Gainesville so that you can become a dentist. My hopes for you have always been in the realm of oral hygiene. Could you refresh my glass, Rosebud? Just a gin and tonic, and be judicious about the tonic.”

“Rosebud was a sled,” she said, crossing to the drinks cabinet, “and teeth don’t interest me. Aren’t you invested in your daughter following in your spoke-heeled, slightly intoxicated shuffle?”

“Not in the least,” said her mother agreeably. The afternoon sun made her coiffed hair gleam, threw her clever, lovely face into irritating relief. Her eyes were a deep real violet, less like Elizabeth Taylor and more like Phoenician dye: Rose’s by comparison were a particularly insipid lilac. And there was something about her hands that made one think of knives. “Dark forces are dowdy. Long hours and no payoff, and the deadline was always yesterday. One’s tools are insufficient, the yield’s disappointing. But there is a cold white light deep in the heart of dentistry. You’ll like it.”

“I’ll end up marrying a lawyer and our two-point-five children will live in Maine.” The ice cubes were sticking in their tray, and Rose made sure she added too many for dilution purposes. “Nobody will be here to look after you in your incipient dotage.”

“I’ll call every day from the retirement home. Maybe a kindly nurse will even lift my arthritic claw to the phone.”

“Then I’ll buy only the very best for your decline. Wedgwood emesis basins shall catch your dribble.”

“My, my. Sharper than the plaque-ridden serpent’s tooth is the ungrateful child.” The gin and tonic was deposited between the waiting fingers. Shrewish dipsomaniac. “Go run and play, darling, and forget about dark forces or the meddling thereof. Your sweet golden head should only have dear little thoughts inside it.”

Rose hovered by the doorway. “Before you discount me to fillings and root canals, mother mine, my acquaintance John has labelled me grimdark,” she said. “Surely that counts for something.”

“It counts for your acquaintance John making godawful portmanteaus,” said Mrs. Lalonde. “Order Thai for dinner.”

Of course, the Skaianet Laboratories directory listed her mother as a theoretical computer scientist, her degree from MIT and her laboratory experience from Sydney; her mother never spoke of either, and treated the past as behind a locked door too dull to bother with. She never shook the impression that her mother was something luminous taking refuge, having chosen quiet obscurity in a town with the excruciating name of Rainbow Falls only until the world next needed her to rescue it. She never shook the impression that she herself was an afterthought; a plain changeling daughter of Titania, chasing cryptozoological shadows. She watched her mother’s bored disappointment of her fill every room.

No talk of fathers (we Lalondes are a tragically upper-class Lifetime movie, she’d said once, but the bait wasn’t taken). No talk of pregnancies, even, as though even the circumstances of her birth had been discarded on the side of the road for someone else to pick up and hock on Craigslist. Only once did her mother slip: on a night when she’d imbibed more than usual of her de facto spouse, the dirty martini, sprawled in a chair with her glass glazed in unsteady lipstick smears. Her cheeks were flushed, and the dim light made her eyes as purple as blood.

When I first held you in my arms, you screamed, she said. You screamed like you were at the very mouth of Hell.

-- Mom --

Go to bed, Rose.

The sins of the mothers were visited upon the children. Rose Lalonde was woegothic proof.

TT: I am gone, never to return.
TT: We’ve had a difficult relationship, you and I. Let friendship be a vertical slide rule, and let us be the arrow pointing off haphazardly to the side marked “I Don’t Even Know.”
TT: But of all the things I owe people - and I owe a great many people so many things - what I owed you is and was nothing less or more than peace of mind. That pittance is yours and yours alone.
TT: I’ll even permit: I underestimated you. You frustrated me. You were overly literal, sardonic, alternatively too earnest and cynical. You’re wedded to archaic and interminably short-sighted ideas about duty. You are a breathtakingly irritating nag.
TT: Your intelligence was a breath of fresh air in what was, to me, a small cubicle fogged thick with the saccharin Glade-dispensed fug of other people’s shortsightedness.
TT: So was your humor.
TT: So was, ironically, your humanity.
GA: Okay It Is With No Sense Of Dismayed Personal Satisfaction I Point Out You Are Rambling
GA: I Will Not Even Touch The Statements Made Up There Due To The Fact That They Are Making Me Feel Simultaneously Awkward And Apprehensive For Different Reasons
GA: What Im Trying To Say Is
GA: What Is Your Location What Are You Doing Of All The Things I Thought Id Understood Regarding Your Inevitable Grimdark Death I Am At A Complete Goddamned Loss
TT: Emphatic!
GA: Yes Unbelievably Emphatic Take That Shout Pole Of Yours And Emphatically Ram It Down Your Protein Chute
TT: Uncharacteristically, aggressively emphatic.
GA: I Have Experienced A Number Of Changes And One Of Them Is A Significantly Lessened Ability To Cope With What You Are Doing In A Calm And Rational Manner
GA: Answer Me Please Where Are You
TT: Bzzt. Wrong question. Try another.
TT: Oh, I understand why he did that now. The feeling of vaguing it up is an intoxicating one.
TT: In any case, I will allow you the coup of an I Told You So. Insert a penitent statement here regarding my association with grimdark magics, and how I never should have been involved with them.
TT: In short: you warned me about the horrorterrors, sister.
TT: You told me, dog.
GA: I Dont Understand Not Even A Little Bit
GA: Is This Some Sarcastic Magnum Opus Youre Setting Up Here
TT: Or perhaps it was always a done deal. I was their creature even before the start, as I understand the start.
GA: ...
GA: Who Are You
TT: Better.
TT: I am Rose Lalonde and I dwell with my masters in the Furthest Ring. One day I shall speak for those without tongues and open doors for those without hands. I am the bridge. I will sing in their voices. I shall make the holes through which not even light shall escape, Rainbow Drinker.
GA: Oh God Oh God Oh God
GA: What Have You Done
TT: I am gone, never to return.
TT: The next time you see me, don’t trust my face. In fact, don’t trust a word I say. Every word of it will be a lie. I am lying even now, but it is a tactical torpedo of lie created to slip under a radar of those who watch me even in their unwaking sleep. Tell John and Jade and Dave I owe them everything. Tell them not to stay their hands.
GA: Oh God
GA: I Will Tell Them No Such Thing I Will Tell Them Youre Delusional And Need Their Help Ill Tell Them Youre Lost And Should Immediately Be Found
GA: Let Me Be Clear I Consider Myself A Newly Minted Expert Regarding Death Being No Final Word On Anything So I Am Less Than Impressed At Anything Ranked Below That
GA: Are You Dead
TT: No.
GA: Well There You Go
TT: I came only to apologise.
TT: With not a breath of insincerity: Kanaya, I am sorry.
GA: Stop
TT: The mantle of Snarky Broad falls on your respectably ready shoulders, as does the weighty crown of being one of the only really sensible people around. The pupil will outstrip the mentor in this case. Be good, be kind, be measured, be happy. Be righteous and brave. Be the inverse of myself and you’ll succeed on that rubric alone.
GA: Oh God Oh God
GA: Rose I Refuse Every Single Order You Have Given And As A Bonus I Demand You Stop Being So Melodramatic This Will Not Be The End This Cannot Be The End
GA: We Have Come Too Far And Lost Too Much For This Kind Of Pedestrian Human Horseshit You Would Have Told Me That Once You Would Have Denied Everything You Would Have Looked Into The Face Of Failure And Been Nothing Less Than Unimpressed
GA: Everything You Do You Make Resonant
GA: This Is No Type Of Ending Youd Settle For Its Inelegant Its Tawdry This Cannot Happen
GA: Rose Permit Me A Hysterical Tangent But How Are You Even Typing
TT: I’m not.
TT: You’re dreaming in a particularly strange medium, Ms. Maryam.
TT: Wake up.
GA: Wait

In the Furthest Ring her cell was wide and her windows filled with water. The damp got in everywhere. The stone walls were wet, the air was clammy and chill, and the strange bioluminescent ripples in the ceiling gave the darkness texture rather than illumination. In the center there was a raised dais for her to sleep on, the only mattress a bolt of mouldering black velvet, and otherwise nothing. She always slept cold.

The windows were simply open frames looking out on a great, terrible ocean of blue and black, held back by an invisible skin permeable to her fingers. Out in the water things would drift: large things, with many bladders and tentacles, with a thousand stingers hanging down in serried angel-hair rows, wobbly things with eyes. Enormous shadowy silhouettes. Despite everything that had passed her brain didn’t want to look at them, trying to place her eyes anywhere but at the denizens of her prison’s sea.

But her eyes were no longer her own. They had put her in the water and the tendrils -- there had been tendrils and the water had been salty and dark -- they -- the memory was piecemeal, eaten away. They had pressed at her eyes. Her heart had struggled like a caged bird. Pressed up against her cornea, penetrating and struggling through to the anterior chamber and then inside where each tendril was heavy with a thousand skittering secrets, bleeding black jelly --

Rose had screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed. When she woke up her gaze sometimes danced independently of where she put it, something else twitching her medial muscles, focusing on the abyssal currents outside her room. It nestled in her mind and was a pressure on her soul. Her eyes were no longer her own, and neither was she.

When she lay on that dais she tangled her fingers up in front of her face, watching the black-pearl shimmer of her skin, squeezing her eyes shut until the thing inside her head propped them open. Neither did it let her weep.

There was a horrorterror who worked as her attaché, and it wore her mother’s face.

In fact, it might have been many horrors in unison, or just the one, or a mix; it was hard working out what was independent and what was part of a general hivemind in the Furthest Ring. Gods brushed up against her, bumping blindly in the manner of worms in the earth, sniffing and drifting away again. They drifted alike, Smaller to Middling, and within them all the terrible promise of the Noble Circle who whispered unwoken in the deeps. An invisible umbilical cord attached them all to each other and she couldn’t identify a center, not remotely. It was probably pandering to her human conceits that they gave her an attaché at all.

Now it stood in her doorway. “Hello to You, Rose,” it said.

They were unable to fully recreate her. None of the colours were correct. They were subdued, off, the scent of Chanel mixing with sweet putrefaction and the everpresent ocean salt, the hinges on the arms not moving quite correctly and the bones too sinuous to let it walk right. Too inept. Too ineptly done to hurt. “I wish you wouldn’t,” she said.

It ignored her. “You have been looking into the dream bubbles,” it said. “You were concerned with the voided spittle of the Unwaking Blower. You saw into a dream. You were watched.”

“I’m to be your prophet,” she said, and swung her legs down over the dais. There was an unpleasant sodden feeling to her clothing now, all the time, and she was never warm. “There’s not even a little leeway? I knew you were watching, I told her nothing of interest. And for the record, this eldritch voyeurism is annoying.”

“You gave the Sylph warnings. You roused her.”

“I misled,” said Rose. “Look at me. Look at my contempt for her. She doesn’t know I came willingly.”

The horrorterror slowly swirled its tongue around her mother’s mouth, as though curious about the shape of her teeth. Its eyes were unblinking, and it took a while to pick over her naked mind and register what it thought was contempt; Rose had discovered they found it difficult to distinguish between the finer points of emotion, the little spectrums of anger or despair, the lines between hate and guilt. “No,” it eventually agreed. “You could not do anything of consequence. You did not try. You were contemptuous. You left.”

All of this bored her. “I want to go for a walk,” she said.

“You will walk and I will accompany You.”

The passages in this place were narrow and dark, angling up and down like shafts in an Egyptian pyramid. One had to ignore the insistent pangs of claustrophobia -- the thing behind her eyes let her see in the dark, or at least translated the darkness for her -- and hurry, not wanting the guide behind her to touch her even in accident, picking paths at random until they came to an open space. Today that open space was the Pit.

The Pit was an enormous basin filled a little with brackish water. Gloppy things with long, bony arms shambled there, in and over each other packed tight as sardines, opening their mouths to display blue teeth. Often you would see one idly devouring another, mouth oozing, without much alarm to either its victim or the rest of the shamblers around it. They made no sound except ragged, wet-lunged breathing, and sometimes a crunch.

“As armies go, I’m beginning to find this one a little less than terrifying,” said Rose. “They look like Halloween brine shrimp.”

“You will change your mind when You see them in battle,” said her attaché, hair bone yellow and matte in the dim light. “You will see they do not know fear or pain. You will see their intent when they smell living flesh. You will see they move as quickly in water as they move on land. You must realise they are a mere distraction for the Emerald Cohort, and that all the Noble Circle must prepare for is their Lord. Rose, You are apprehensive.”

“As I’m nigh-memetically told, he’s already here,” she said.

“You and We will flood him. You will make way for Our waters. We will cleanse the Game and close the Ring around it.”

“And feed on everything left in the unguarded universes.”

“You understand the payoff.”

She did. There was a great deal to understand now about what she had done and what she had not done, and despite this newly-found clarity hindsight was still an awful Disney Viewmaster kicking her in the pants with every assumption she’d made. As she stared at the writhing mass of her army before her, her desire to vomit grew. Rose carefully blanked out her mind by building up John’s house inside her head: duplicating each unsteady layer, stacking it up like one of his hated batterwitch cakes.

John. Jade. Dave --

“I’ve seen enough,” she said, and forced imperiousness. “Take me back.”

The thing inside her eyes wanted to swim. Sometimes she stripped down to her petticoat (one could not be a successful adolescent goth sans petticoat) and eased herself out of her window, pushing hard off the side and into the freezing water, and from there she could see the great grey rocks that housed the prison: an enormous underwater pillar that stretched as far as the eye could see. There was no surface to swim to. There was no bottom, either.

When Rose floundered out into the dark, it never took long for a black shadow to follow along silently behind her. It trailed at a discreet distance, a far-off glob in her peripheral vision. When she stopped, it stopped. Her bodyguard -- bodyguard or jailer? -- appeared to be a gigantic, smoothly-rounded jellyfish with lappets undulating, unconcerned. Its indifference matched her own at first, and nowadays filled her with a strange kind of dread.

The ocean was a fishless, featureless plain. Swim out far enough and there was only darkness, though she swore she saw stars twinkling off in the far distance; look in the windows of the carved pillar and they were empty. There was nothing to look at and nowhere to be. The Horrorterrors were silent now, and didn’t even whisper to her of the future the way they had on Derse: just her name as she passed, Seer, Seer, Seer, Seer, Seer.

When she lay on her dais and closed her eyes, it was less because she wanted to sleep and more because she no longer wanted her rider to flicker through her irises. In the privacy of her head she thought of the other three, because those thoughts were her own and could not be taken away: how much she would have desperately wanted Jade, who would have been buoyant and furious by now. im not sitting around in this lamesauce tower, fuckasses!!! rose. lets go! Dave. holy shit we could rent this place out to bauhaus fans for megabucks. lalonde i gotta get you out of here before you start swishing around in a fucking cape or whatever John. well this place is demented and gothy and also it is making you bugfuck crazy. let’s skidaddle, rose!

She had betrayed them all, and paid thirty pieces of silver for the privilege. She was a fool.

Back then her imagination also conjured up: Okay Not To Interrupt Your Self-Obsessive Gloom But The Decor In Here Is Terrible And You Can Still Mope In The Light To Your Hearts Content I Am The Sylph Of Space And There Is No Path We Cannot Travel Rose Lalonde

-- which was self-indulgent, saccharine, more than a little lame. Kanaya Maryam was chill and elegant and steadfast and she had betrayed her too. All sentiment was misplaced. The first time she had asked her questions of the Furthest Ring underdeeps to watch the others, to see Jade gnawing her lip to shreds and John unworriedly traipsing Skaia and Dave with his head in his hands, out of more than idle curiosity she had scryed Kanaya. She was her troll oracle, as it were. Rose couldn’t deny the urge to see what they looked like.

Scrying was an inexact art. The first time she saw her she was a dead girl. A dead grey girl with a hole through her abdomen, leaking copious quantities of what looked to be Spirulina on to a dusty metal floor. A dead grey alien girl -- behorned, sharp-toothed, her short hair lacquer-black and in slight disarray; well-dressed, she’d thought inanely, Kanaya was always talking clothes -- less dissimilar than she’d ever guessed, more strange than she’d assumed. And she was very dead.

“No,” she’d said, and stirred the vision in her window with one of her needles. “No, I was talking to her just a little while ago. This is stupid.”

The vision boiled over and reformed. The same dead girl with a swath of fabric tied around her abdomen to keep her insides chaste and private, epidermally glowing like a fistful of white Christmas lights. Kanaya walked as though each step were a precision knife thrust. This all made about as much sense as John’s psychological aversion to good cinema, and parts of her brain shut down. Other parts said: thank God, before she had much of a chance to silence them.

But how, this can’t be how all trolls --

And she touched her mind to the water, and the Circle responded. They were well-versed in subjects regarding undeath, a sort of eldritch Wikipedia, and although she no longer had the same cavalier attitude to letting them slither around her brain she was still resigned to it. They spoke in guttural languages. They showed, rather than explained, the invisible blood hunger settling over Kanaya’s skin like glitter. She was not their creature and never had been, even if she’d no longer ever dream Prospit, but undead would always be something they implicitly understood.

Vampire was one word she recognised. Another voice said, rainbow-drinker, and she thought it was perhaps the low atonal melodies of Gl’Bgloyb. Rainbow drinker, filled with hues. It shines! It moves flirtively. It gorges on the living. It too will survive. ‘Rainbow drinker’ sounded more like something a six-year-old girl would name a unicorn, but what would she know, she was a thirteen-year-old girl corrupted and swollen with unfathomable evil who lived in a pillartop under the sea.

The thing inside her eyes was interested in John, in Jade and Dave, and it was interested in Kanaya. When she had watched them shimmer inside the dark panel of her window it had not let her blink, and she could feel its pressure against her retinas as though it wished to burst through those white bubbles and reach out to touch --

Rose had jerked her head away, clapped her hands over her face. The rage within her was part-grimdark, part-panic. “Touch them,” she said, “touch them ever, and I will end you. I will end us both. Are you clear on this point? Must I elaborate?”

It gave no assent. For a while back then she did not watch John or Jade or Dave, nor Kanaya. Rose lay in her afterthought of a bed and simply practiced staring at her eyelids. She thought of nothing, just in case; these days she only craved privacy, and silence.

The horrorterror who worked as her attaché never knocked on her door. It would just appear, silent and sudden, though at least now the crackle of magic along her skin never let her be surprised by anything: “You are desired by Your patron,” it said. “Oglogoth and the Circle must speak to You.”

That had been different. The Lesser Circle as well as the monster whose thorns she bore talked to her whenever they wanted to, a Grecian chorus of unearthly mutters inside her head. Something was wrong. Before she could think up a snappy answer the thing wearing her mother’s face crossed to the window, pulled its long legs over the sill, and it gestured to her with a hand in need of a manicure. “You will be swift,” it said. “We are not patient in this matter.”

Rose would rather have swallowed razorblades than take that hand; but she schooled her face into blank condescension, as much as she could muster, and laid her fingers in its own. It was clammy as death. The attaché pulled her out into the water before she could say but my clothes and cut through the currents, swift and sure, churning up black bubbles as they went. She was rocketed deep into the abyssal oceans, further than she had ever been able to swim by herself, further towards those twinkling points she’d identified as starlight until she was able to see that they were not stars at all.

Dream bubbles, she thought. Those are the dream bubbles.

And indeed this far out she was able to see their Unwaking Blower. An unfathomably huge crab was arrayed in the darkness, a mandala of claws, chained between two equally unfathomably big pillars. A multitude of little squiddly things scampered up the sides of those pillars, her eye drawn to them until just the sight hurt her mind -- distracted only when the Blower began to make a perfect, rainbow-hued sphere, launching it with a pchooo out of sight as it was tossed far away into the distance. The dream bubbles were clustered on the horizon like little pearls. Rose could not breathe.

“You behold Oglogoth,” said her attaché.

Some of the Horrorterrors clustered into view, blocking out all else. It was dark. Oglogoth had teeth. Even then her sanity had been a tongue scalded by hot coffee, knowing it had been burnt but unable to taste the pain, inured to everything else but that sandpaper blankness. “I behold,” said Rose.

She had walked in on an argument. The Lesser Circle did not stop for her. destroy it, shrilled the earsplitting song she recognised as Gl’Bgloyb’s, though the presence of a Noble Speaker was a worrisome one. rend it kill it consume it encircle it end it

“Stop, I can’t understand -- “

Their voices broke over her, each voice its own innumerable number of voices. Even now, even who she was and the magic she carried, she could feel the pressure build inside her skull until her nose started to bleed -- the icy water carried the hot trickles away as nothing more than wet red smoke, but it still made her attaché hold up her mother’s hand and say something. The din quietened.

“A dream bubble has drifted too close and is causing a disturbance,” it said. “You will go inside the dream bubble. You will see if its inhabitant has a message. You will take the message. You will get rid of the disturbance.”

“But why can’t you -- “

“We cannot touch it,” said the attaché, and would not say any more.

What option was there, refusal? The Rose Lalonde of before might have created a refusal option when not given one, but the Rose Lalonde of before had broken down all the walls of this maze as some kind of trumpeting that the only rules she played by were her own. It had won her a great deal of rubble. Now she was the Rose of the Festering Tongues, and this Rose was curious. “I’ll go,” she said.

The attaché’s fingers on her wrist still made her bones feel like they were doused with liquid hydrogen, but she knew better than to flinch. The further they went the thinner the water became until it was more flying than swimming, until she was breathing more air than water, the darkness not receding so much as getting -- less dim. The dream bubble they went to had broken off from the far-off pack and sat at the border, shimmering like an oil slick in the sun, bits of its morphoeic eggshell broken and hanging next to it in burned-out pieces.

“You will move softly here,” said her attaché, “lest You attract attention of a passing time dancer.”

Nothing it could have said made her want to cause a ruckus more, but she filed that fact away for a rainless day. There could be no rescue of her by the Knight of Time. There was no map. There was no movement. If the Noble Circle got its writhing tentacles on Dave Strider there would be nothing left, nothing left at all, and she hoped to God he knew that. Inevitably he would: he was her brother.

Both settled down at the dream bubble’s membrane. It fizzled with white static, and when she reached out to touch it the attaché dashed her hand away. “You would not die,” it said, “You would however feel pain. You would be incapacitated. You will take comfort in shadow. You must be wily when You face this emissary, for Their power is unkind to us.”

“And what faction does this diplomat serve?”

It told her. She blinked. “Repeat that,” said Rose. It complied; she said merely, “I see. More things in heaven and earth than are understood in my philosophy. They are diametrically opposed to us, then?”

“You understand They are an ancient splinter of Us and form a concentric Circle,” said her attaché. “You must know They still bear Us nothing but ill will, though it would be unwise to not listen if They want to parley. You will protect Our plans and retrieve any message. You will be doing Our work. You will now go.”

“Gl’Bgloyb was opposed.”

“Immaterial. Gl’Bgloyb is being over-passionate. You will now go.”

It was a particularly tense game of Operation to slide herself through the crack in the dream bubble without touching its sparkling white edge. She had to tuck herself in like a piece of origami, until all of her would fit -- albeit awkwardly -- at which point she took a breath and jumped. Reality warped and curdled the moment she did, like overbeaten cream, and then Rose was standing in the burnt-out shell of some old house.

The roof had been ripped off, and the sky overhead swam a sickly cerise without clouds or sun. Glass and bits of paper crunched underneath her wet feet, and though the walls were made of stone they were charred black from some long-gone fire. Everything was black or white, or where the two had intermingled, a smeared charcoal grey: untidy heaps of bone were scattered on the floor, clean white vertebrae tangled up with long cracked shins. On the wall had been daubed a grubby white symbol representing something like a wolf’s head. She knew that symbol well.

Something else clattered inside the house. Rose drew the Thorns from her sodden skirtwaist and went on silent feet to the doorway, elbowing aside the rotten wood of the door to step out into the hall. Here was the same debris: bones, glass, torn-up textbooks, stone, char, the wind whipping through the broken walls and rattling its strewn contents. She went on tiptoe down a broken flight of stairs; here were the same spots of white, as though someone had trailed paint as they went down. She followed.

It did not take her long to locate her quarry. The clattering continued: the sounds of someone throwing things against the wall, showers of splinters interrupted by the less impressive fwumps and clangs of detritus getting kicked about. The noise had ceased when she crossed the broken threshold and into an atrium filled ankle-deep with mess, the air raining down little bits of burned book like confetti. Her emissarius was standing in the center.

As all ghosts did he had empty eyes: just milky white all the way across without iris or pupil, though that white stare was sunburn to her own. The pressure on her sciatic nerve as her passenger panicked was terrible. A cross of similar whiteness had been painted on his forehead, dipping down to the bridge of his nose, smeared a little like blood at his hairline. The white was terribly stark on all that grey. His middle was bandaged round about with a stained scarf, and though the snapped stick he was aiming her way looked benign she knew better: Rose had already raised a needle in response.

“I hear you serve angels,” she told Eridan.

Chapter Text

As screaming arcs of white rendered her shelter smithereens, Rose Lalonde reflected on the fine print of absolute power. When one signed one’s soul over to the unwaking broods, one expected nigh-omnipotent arcane knowledge; roiling clouds of hellcorrupt might, fearmastery over the flesh of the innocent --

“I’m not lettin you take me! I’m not glubbin through yet!”

One did not expect to be chased down by the panicked equivalent of Casper the Friendly Ghost on methadrine.

His first shot had gone so wide she had thought it better to disdainfully sidestep. This proved a dreadful mistake. A single spark had touched her leg -- touched her leg through thick, sodden black velvet and a thin cotton petticoat, divorced from the very thought of skin -- and it was like a thousand drills corkscrewing into the root canal of her calf. The pain sank into her heart. Her sanity experienced cardiac arrest as the rider in her eyes stampeded there, mindless with fear, and for a moment all she could do was sway drunkenly on the spot.

The troll boy was nobody’s fool. His wand was aimed her way, crackling with her death. Rose wrapped herself up in the shadows and fled.

Blistering bursts had trailed her as she skimmed over the walls, used her magic to make herself flicker from shade to shade and oozed out between the light. Unable to keep up, he simply used the tried-and-true method of spray’n’pray until she threw herself behind a musty pile of books and bones. “I know what happens!” the ghost screamed. “I know where I’d go! I know about who your masters are, right -- know where you’re goin and I know where you’re from -- ”

Rose flinched from the crackle of his wand even as it rendered her hidey-hole ash. She slithered through the holes in the light and shut herself inside a broken cupboard, reeking of rot and marrow, her breath jangling in her ears as she heard him stalking around. His own was nearly as loud. Ghouls kept old habits. She slowly sucked all the light out of the room between her teeth and down into her lungs, snuffing it out there, and listened to him floundering around in the dark and a panic and crunching bonemess beneath his shoes.

So she sent out a black tendril of herself and crept it along the dirty floor, sneaking-creeping-sly, until she could wrap around his ankle and therefore his trembling mind; it reeked of a salt, dead sea. When she said, Would you still like to know my secrets? he shrieked outright.

Rose was shouldered out of his brain by something sour and white. It was disquieting how her whole being shuddered from that luminiscent chill, as though it were the Cool Whip antithesis to herself: her calf ached in response, frostbitten with pain. This had not gone correctly. Grimdark diplomacy was not a subtle art. It was easier to destroy than it was to bend, much like peeling a twig with a fire axe. “The message? Think you’d stop at a message?” said the ghost, and its voice rose to a strangled yell: “You really want my message?”

Then there was no sound of him. She listened with her ears and listened with the thousand tiny rasping tongues that lived to whisper secrets to her, but they were no help at all. It was as though the troll wasn’t even a blip on their radar. The only sound was her pulse, pooling uncomfortably in her right leg. She considered smothering the room with festering intestines of shadow, etc., only such a thing seemed to lack panache when cornered; and because this dead boy she’d known as “CA” was a mystery, something from the outside that the Noble Circle could not touch, and in destroying him she was destroying a window to the outside. There was every chance the window might look out on a blank brick wall, but it was a window nonetheless. Not yet. Not until she knew --

The cupboard doors burst open on her, and there he stood with eyes and wand white and vacantly glowing like car headlights. Rose had made a tactical error.

“I don’t believe in magic,” he said raggedly. “But I know about hell.”

And he raised his hand to slay her.

From its place of ambush, her rider leapt. A thousand thin tentacles burst through mascula, retina and cornea, lashing as a many-fretworked thing out her eye sockets (nyurb! Nyurb-a! Throl shg’vtet!) rending her blind, gibbering and hollow, the world pulsing around her as a series of veins and arteries she only understood through her hunger. To her he was a glob of cold cream, as air, removable (ia Oglogoth! ia Nrub’Yiglith!) and to her the universe opened as a series of gaping holes. Rose could no longer scream as her jaw started to extend, down, down, down, her throat that gateway through which her quarry would be taken to feed the stomachs of the Great and the Many. And through that hole in her throat the Noble Circle looked at her, and she was made small --

Eridan shot her once in each whippy cluster. Her brain was suddenly full of fuck. Bits of tentacle broke off and smoked on the floor, squirming as he stamped them underfoot, and the rest of her tenant drew itself back inside her eyes to scream at itself. Muscle, vein and lens reformed as it hurriedly squirted home, black miasma still leaking from between her upper lid and lower, and Rose toppled out the cupboard gracelessly to the floor; there she proceeded to be sick. There was nothing in her stomach but a thin, brackish fluid, but she gave puking a good college try; after that, she passed out.

She awoke trembling and feverish, covered in a piece of mouldering curtain. Her head felt as though it had been set on fire, doused in drain cleaner and left to rest. Rose felt her face being tentatively mopped with salty water, but being touched hurt her. Her mouth chirrupped pain and she sank back asleep.

When she awoke the second time the pain was familiar, but a little further away. The room was cool and dark. Bright sparks danced in front of her eyes in the age-old waltz of a migraine. Rose’s stomach gave a dizzying heave-ho when she sat up, but she forced down the nausea and pushed away her reeking ersatz blanket. Her skin was slick and charcoal with sweat. When her shaking hands pulled up her skirt to look at her leg, there was a white-veined whorl on her right calf: swollen and sullen, bruising too in a dozen blue-black eyeshadow shades of bruise. Just doing that was enough to force her to lie back down again, utterly exhausted.

The dead boy sat with his back to the wall, eyes half-closed glimmers behind his glasses. His wand was balanced on his knee, held her way in the manner of a handgun. “I want to parley,” he said doggedly.

“Parler, to speak,” said Rose, with eyes closed and a dry tongue. “Forgive me if I take a moment to marvel over an alien from another universe knowing his parlez-vous Français.”

“We made your universe, pinkscarf. You’re a glubbin construction a us, not the other way ‘round. I want to make like a gamblignant and fuckin parley.”

There was a strange slurredness to his w, a soft Germanic v, but otherwise his English was as flawless as a British newscaster with years of elocution. One allergic to gerunds. It was disappointing how close to banal humanity their aliens were: but there were enough differences to make a faint track through to the valley uncanny, such as the strange frills decorating the sides of his face. They gave him the look of some grey teenaged dilophosaurus. “So outline your proposal. I’m on tenterhooks.”

“Safe passage out a here,” he said, “and in return, that message you wanted so badly.”

“Or we could swallow you down and rip it from your soul.”

“You won’t get it that way, then. You can’t touch me, can you?” She didn’t change expression. “Yeah, I knew it. Find me aversive. Can’t get inside my head. There’s only one way you’re gettin this thing, and that’s if I open my mouth for you and sing like a sweet fuckin chirpbeast. Raze me or free me, fakewitch, there isn’t any in-between.”

He’d had time to think. It was such a pity. “You only want safe passage? No demand for resurrection? I’m underwhelmed. Truly, there’s not enough whelm to go around.”

“I know the kind a eternal life you could promise me,” he said. “I know where I’d go if I died -- “

“I’m loath to rediagnose, but you’re already dead.”

“I know where I’d go if I died, so clam it,” he repeated wanly. “I know where I’d go if I died here, and they don’t let you damn well die. You know that, right? You know where they’d take you, who’d have you in the end? You know how glubbin long forever is, fakemage pinkscarf?”

“Helldump deepways psychosis permits no regret,” she said, and she closed her eyes to the burning in her brain. The migraine sparks were making firework flares, lighting up across the sky in a scrolling marquee of All Aboard The Pain Train, Choo Choo. “My only remorse is having to listen to your -- incoherent -- naysaying.”

“Pinkscarf?”

“Water, Caligula,” she breathed. “Water.”

There was a warped bowlful of it by his side, clouded and unappealling and old, and he slopped it as he knelt beside her body. For a moment Rose’s eyes fearfully shuttered themselves against the white, empty stare of his own, driven mad by the daubed cross on his brow, but she wrenched them open again to face him down. “Promises first,” he said, a trifle sly. “Tell me we’ve got an agreement. No lyin or eldritch trickery either.”

Her vision was swimming a marathon. The urge to pass out was one she hadn’t had in a long while. It was sort of refreshing. “Swear we’ll trade for the message or no water. I’ll fuckin end it right here too, so help me cod.”

“They want you dead, Caligula,” she said. Her pupils drifted aimlessly all over, making his ghost a shadowed blur with matchtip horns and white pits for eyes. All her body ached for was the water, water on her dry dusky skin and its terrible longing for the ocean. The thirst was in her hands and feet and neck. “Do you think my promise is -- worth -- so -- much?”

Now his voice was cracking and strangled. “Swear the trade, Seer! I’m not playin grub games!”

“I swear we’ll parley.” She licked her lips, tongue a desert. “Give me the water.”

He mopped her face and hands with it, splashed awkwardly at her throat. That was enough. The shape of her pain had a thousand jagged edges and was exquisite, but even though the water was unsatisfyingly old it chafed the points away until she could see. The darkness in her drank in its salt. Her thirsty eyelashes sucked up droplets of it in reverse tears. His fingers were on her fingers, filling her with grotesque graveyard Frigidaire chill. “You go tell them we’re havin a trade,” he was saying, though she was only halfways paying attention. “Go tell your fuckin tentacle friends to leave me be, what the deal is, how I get to go, then come back and maybe I’ll tell you my message.”

“Oh dear, oh dear,” she said through numb lips. “I have bad news. What a dreadful blow for you.”

“What?”

“I have learned a great deal in my new abhuman transition,” said Rose. “I have listened to the sound of the voidmoon winds brushing the surface of the black sea. I know the fifteen languages of the blood. But if I learned anything, it’s that I would have to be an unremitting moron to believe you actually have a message.”

“You said we’d fuckin parley!”

“Or to return to a crowd of Outer Gods with nothing to show for my efforts,” she said. The cold had seeped into her bones, and she realised belatedly she was shivering like a leaf. All her teeth knocked together, and her words had to vibrate through them. “You’re coming with me. We’re going to parley on my terms. I suggest you start thinking, and I suggest you start thinking... very... hard.”

Eridanus, bordered by Fornax, Phoenix, Caelum, alpha Eridani its bluest star. Her mother’s affection had been for every pointed-out ascension and declination of those charted bodies, given over entirely to remote spheres of flaming gas a small Rose could only squint at through telescope. Deep-eddying Eridanos, the green-banked river into which the burning body of Phaëton tumbled. Eridan Ampora: despairing, dead, and a douchebag.

“And have You yet retrieved the message?” asked her attaché.

Rose measured the days by that question. There was no other determination. In that dim damp room, time oozed up on you gradually like a glacier shifting down a mountain: she lived, she breathed, and there was no clock to cut up those long moments into more manageable portions. Six “days” had passed, and for all she knew it could have been six months or six years or six minutes.

“I require more time.”

Her attaché would stand there, shaded in the tongue-pink and bone-white offtints of her mother, and its gaze would meander east to find Eridan. Each time the troll folded himself into a corner as though this somehow meant he wouldn’t be seen. The Horrorterrors could not sidle into his white mind, but this hardly prevented him from going crazy in their presence as only a ghoul could really go crazy; sanity chapped raw, screaming, screaming, screaming, until Rose smothered him in black tendrils of herself and wrapped him away. This process bored her.

“This is taking You a great deal of effort,” said her attaché.

Replying to that would have been a mistake. When those communal teeth combed over her mind, all they found was a smokescreen of frustration and boredom: pain also, but the pain she tried to choke down with a stoic lip as its presence worried the multitude of minds in the Circle. Pain made them uncalm. Rose lay flat on her back on the dais and presented her focus instead, while she hoped like hell that passed for obesiance.

“Do you want to expend the effort instead?”

“You must do it,” said her attaché baldly, over Eridan’s needless sucked-in breath. “You will retrieve the message. You will consult with his Circle. You will carry this out.”

They had no need to understand betrayal, which was difficult, as she could have at least worked with suspicion and distress; those of the Furthest Ring had other imperatives. They complacently viewed betrayal as misapplied thought, and misapplied thought meant absorption back into the tangle until one was corrected by being many. Rose Lalonde did not want to be many any more than she already was.

“You will carry this out with due timeliness,” said the horrorterror. “You will be particular. You understand that the Noble Emissary allows this only under Her considerable duress.”

“But why does Gl’Bgloyb -- “

There was another harsh intake from Eridan’s crumpled corner, and it filled her with a certain annoyed dread. No feelers needed to be cast out to know that his mind was already juddering off its cliff from fear to mindless panic, which was why she cut herself off and said instead, “It hardly matters. Leave me alone, and I can continue with my work.”

Her attaché inclined its head. Rose also did not need to look to see the dull strands of hair falling across a cold white cheek, the familiar movement hijacked from her own brain of a long-fingered hand tucking those selfsame strands behind one ear. It made the world very quiet. “You are still wounded. You are sick. You are impaired.”

Curses. “I’ll live. And I’m not impaired. I can best demonstrate this without your constant interruption.”

Hungry instinct was what placed their communal, betentacled feet on the gas pedal. It was that same hungry instinct that made them anxious at her pain. On her right leg were telltale white whorls of infection, marbled over and under the stunning Matisse of a bruise she’d been given; even now she was wrapped in thick, reeking velvet, curled up fetally on that cold slab of rock, awash with chills and frigid sweat sleeting over her body as she shivered and suffered.

“It would be better if you let us mend -- “

“My answer remains no,” she said, headache slurring her, “no thank you. Count yourself dismissed.”

Another voice wobbled in, complete with pasted-on sneer. Oh, shit. No mental plea to the abandoned gods of mercy ever made Eridan shut up. “Well, you heard the girl.”

“Seer,” said the attaché, and with truly empty condescension, “Courier,” and it was gone again.

Rose allowed herself ten full seconds before she let herself be racked with coughs, pushing aside the damp coverlet and pressing a hand to her mouth out of useless manners. The ghost boy was crouched against the wall, watching her dismally as she stumbled around: white hair plastered to charcoal skin shiny with perspiration, her eldritch woe-senses useful only in that they let her feel every slow effort of her human immune system fighting its silly war. Her white blood cells flung themselves over and over at a wound deep and muddy with magic, the broodfester tendrils of her corruption trying to wind themselves round and about that magic and complicating the whole. It felt as though the angel miasma was tearing her leg apart. Incapacitated, indeed.

“Do you take some particular joy in being stupid?” she said hoarsely.

“I was tryin to help -- ”

“Do you take some delight in antagonising forces you don’t understand? Was there something unclear in ‘shut up and always let me talk’?”

“I was tryin to coddamn help! You can barely string two fuckin words together!” He was shaking, but in the wake of even the Smaller Circle he was left shaking like a tumbledryer on full bore. Yellow claws had worried the cuffs of his sweater into unravelled tassels, and her sympathy for him was proportionally inverse to his obvious sympathy for him: zero to infinity. They were not cordial roommates. “This is stupid, this is the stupidest plan, got nowhere to go and I’m a sittin glubbin shrimp -- oh, shit -- ”

Rather than catch her before she crumpled, which would have been useful, he scooped her up off the floor after the fact and awkwardly dragged her to the window. She was too far gone to protest at this indignity any more. It had been a very long six years, days or minutes. They did their routine: he hauled her up on the broad, stony sill, and arms anchored under her armpits he pushed her out the window into the water. There the ghost would hold her down, her teeth chattering with the relief of the salt on her skin and leg and mouth, totally submerged. The thing behind her eyes would strain beneath her lids in old, grotesque sea-yearning, lost in the dark ocean, wanting to sink down into its depths for ever. In this way did her pain ebb.

They were stubborn throes. It was hard not to succumb.

Soaking wet he would haul her back to the dais, and she would lie there and apply herself solely to the act of breathing. Rose would have eaten broken glass before letting him touch her, only necessity had soon proved the mother of skin-crawling invention. Eventually he said, “You’ll be another thing soon, pinkscarf.”

“I have told you,” she said, with difficulty, “I’m bored of taking this from someone who literally sold his soul to a host of angels.”

“I already changed all I was goin to change, transformed everythin I might’ve transformed into. I’m not sayin the skin change isn’t a better look from the stuff you had before, but you? You’re still fuckin descending.”

“And you are dead and didactic. Please, go ahead. Stave off all woedark with a priggy, hypocritical -- ” Another spate of coughing. Eridan loomed with his arms knotted into each other, shoulders hunched, white eyes phosphor trails to her squint. “ -- incoherent diatribe, worthy of Kanaya at her least eloquent -- “

“Oh, everyone glubbin wants Kanaya -- ”

“ -- as though I couldn’t throw you to the wolves in a heartbeat, and what’s that meant to -- ”

“ -- so, so you go ahead and you do it, magician -- ”

“ -- no, please give me an excuse to play chicken with your bravado -- ”

“ -- okay, okay, don’t do it, please don’t coddamn do it,” he said. “I have to get out a here. They left me here to get eaten, you know that. So I’d be bait for the Rings. Don’t do it, Lalonde, I am beggin you and you should know that seadwellers don’t beg. Even when I’m dead nothing’s fuckin fair and everything’s a big sack a goldfish shit -- oh, God, oh God, I’ll be stuck here with you.”

They looked at each other. In death he looked damp, soluble, lost: grey-skinned and alien with a shining cross daubed on his forehead, besweatered, besneakered, colours dimmed and desaturated, but he also looked like a very silly teenage boy. God knew what she looked like. She had wrapped herself in the velvet á la human burrito, skinning off her wet skirt a microinch at a time over her wounded leg. Her breath had slowed to a rasp. “Tell me another story,” she said, through gritted teeth.

“What?”

“Remain a troll Scheherazade. You were telling me about your overembroidered alien LARP. The story about the Marquise and the coat Kanaya made.”

“But plans, what about my plans -- ”

“I am making a plan,” she said amidst coughs, “and for you, immediately, that plan involves telling me a story. If I am to be a dark God I’ll be -- a -- demanding -- one.”

“You just sleep!”

“Consider that a compliment.”

Eridan feared her, loathed her, and clung to her in the manner of a drowning man. She was contemptuous and apathetic, and she found herself clawing him in the same despicable way, two unalike strangers alone in a desert with only each other’s company to bore them to death. It was this miserable desperation that edged in his voice when he started: “Well, Vris had gotten Kanaya to make her a FLARPing outfit, right, on account of the fact that nobody was takin it seriously and she’d go carping on...”

It was a convoluted account about buttons, a coat that had swapped hands three times between a girl and a boy playing a roleplaying game, a cast of what seemed to be thousands and a lot of him making himself out to be the hero of the piece. Preteen inanity at its finest, and a little heartwarming for that. She imagined Kanaya, head bent over a needle and thread -- and who could say if needle and thread were not a troll anachronism, she didn’t care, she didn’t care, why did she even bother imagining -- dutifully patching cloaks for a gaggle of trolls playing violent Renfaire games of fantasy.

“ -- was a total load considerin she’d asked for Tav and all so seriously, I was just polite actually when I pointed out how she was snubbin a seadweller senseless so unless she wanted it to be a thing that wasn’t on and -- “

Rose listened because it carried on above the voices in her head: listened with her head pillowed on her arm and pain washing over her in long, nauseating bursts of heat and tremor, closed her eyes as her rider dozed off from the aural assault of a language it did not bother understanding. In this way she kept herself an island. The words were a thick blackout curtain drawn around her, hiding her from view.

“ -- at which point she said she didn’t glubbin want it any more, and I was like yeah well then so what if I take it, so she says no she can use it for something else, so I was like yeah well then you just said you didn’t want it didn’t you, which was being pretty fuckin magnanimous and you’re not listening -- “

Walled in by his crisp vowels and his complete inability to relate an event, she would drift into an unwatched sleep.

On the seventh day as she knew them she said, “Feferi.”

Rose watched the bespectacled head whip round so quickly that it should have snapped straight off at the spinal column. Eridan’s hair had obviously been grown long so it could be brushed high on his temples in some purple-streaked pompadour: a mocking supernatural joke meaning that now it was soft and floppy without care, slathered over his cheeks and behind the buccinidae frill of his ear. This gave him the constant look of a hipster birthday candle half-melted in the heat. There were downsides to being a tangible spectre.

Rose was propped up in a corner with her clothes stiff with salt and the rotten bolt of velvet pulled over her like a blanket, hooded around her head to cushion it against the wall. He had been sitting on the dais and aimlessly cleaning his claws, digging underneath each pumpkin-coloured nail as though there were some point to preening, but now all he did was stare.

“Feferi,” she repeated impatiently, and he was suddenly staggering towards her with hands held flat before him: like he could shove the word back inside her mouth, eyes wide and panicked. In another blink of an eye they both had their wands drawn, his pulled out a few moments after her brandishing a Thorn.

“Touch me and I’ll make you into an armless ghost, Caligula.”

“Say her name again and I’ll -- I’ll -- don’t say her name, pinkscarf.” At her unrepressed snort, he snapped: “I mean it. I don’t blabber out about your human grubclutch all the time, do I? I could! How about I have a glubbin go? Egbert human. Strider human. Harley human -- ”

“This is just sad,” she said.

“ -- Egbert human, Strider human, Harley human,” he said. “And would you look at that, Lalonde? None of them here. It’d make me believe in magic how none of them are comin to rescue you, only magic’s a lie about rational scientific data ignorant people don’t understand. But it’s still pretty miraculous how they all just disappeared on you, right? How they’ve got a time player and a space player and everythin and nobody’s come for you, nobody at all.”

The troll boy’s voice had grown more throaty and strangled as he talked, and he looked as though he regretted it halfway through. His bared teeth and curled lip was no good veneer. It still made her think quite quietly about how best to kill him. “Please zip your psyche back up before we get more embarrassed,” she said. “Your issues are showing.”

“Don’t say her name.”

“I don’t even know who she is.”

“But -- ”

“You mutter when you think other people are deaf. Deaf due to torrents of weeping about how my friends aren’t coming for me, perhaps.”

There was pleasure in watching the squirm. Then he deflated like a balloon with all the air let out, and you could nearly hear the emotional phweeeee as it escaped. “She was my -- she was my best friend,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it. You’re not Kar. Wouldn’t know what a moirail was if one dragged you down to the bottom of the fuckin ocean. You don’t give a sweet sweepin shit about anythin but your own goddamn mess and Kanaya, it was always me being slapped around between you and Kanaya. I don’t know what you want from me. I don’t think you want shit, Lalonde.”

“I want to see if you can break the sound barrier through the force of your whining,” she said, and she drawled it out deliberately. Rose’s throat was sore with talking and tiredness, and her hand hurt as she tucked her needle away. “My God, you lived the saddest life. People must have clutched hands to their collective breast as you passed, whispering a sussurrus of there goes the saddest boy. They’re probably carving your epitaph of His Life Was So Unfair as we speak.”

“She died,” he said. “Gl’Bgloyb was her lusus. So don’t say her name out loud again. Get it?”

“Stop. One of you was raised by a horrorterror?” Rose was so interested that the dizzy nausea calcified a little, let her sit up straighter to take it in while tucking her hands inside the makeshift Snuggie. “Not a simple Smaller God, but one of the Noble Circle? Did she go through chronic throes? Was she one continual delirious blur -- ”

“She liked cuttlefish and saving the world,” said Eridan dully. “And she got excited about shit like snacks and letters and, like, desks. And she wore a lot of bright stuff, and didn't cut her hair. And she said that a hug was your arms’s way of kissin other people’s arms. When I was three sweeps I ate a shell for her.”

Huh. “Did this have the desired effect?”

“She made me promise I’d let her watch if I threw up,” he said. “Then she made me a frondship bracelet.”

There was not a great deal to say to that. He turned away, wand shoved uncermoniously in his belt, slumped on the edge of the dais once more. Then he added unnecessarily, “Fef was my best friend. She was -- she was my good girl. She and I were one great glubbin team. The greatest. Everyone liked her -- everyone -- she was funny as shell, taught me all the fish puns I ever knew. Just happy and shiny and funny and excited about every single goddamn thing in the whole universe, all the time, even when we just fuckin shouted at each other. You ever have someone who just understands you, Lalonde? Just sees you for you, right under your skin?”

“No,” she said.

“Don’t get one,” he said. “It never leads to anythin good.”

Eridan sort of dripped his way down the dais until he was sitting on the floor opposite her. Those candy-coloured kudu horns scraped a little against the stone, and though his eyes were whitely turned in her direction they weren’t looking at her. All around water plip, plip, plipped on the dank floors, and she wanted to be somewhere else so much that she would have ripped off her face to escape her skin. “Moirallegiance,” she found herself saying. “The bizarre friendspouse concept. The idea is based around...?”

“You’d hardly glubbin understand. Some trolls can’t function unless they got another troll who looks after them, keeps them from raining chaos and blood down on every fuckin other troll who gets in their way -- ”

“And did you prevent her from raining down this wanton destruction?”

“What? No,” he said. “No, it was her lookin out for me. Obviously.”

“I begin to see why it didn’t work out.”

“First off,” he said, and even in death his cheeks were starting to flush an ugly grey-diffused plum, “first off, how the fuck did you know that, unless Kanaya was gabbin and Kanaya wasn’t the gabbin type that way so I -- I don’t even know -- and second, I was coddamned ruinous, pinkscarf! I was diabolical. I was off the hook, you believe me. I would a brought righteous seadweller war to landdwellers and squashed them beneath my feet. I was plannin doomsday. They would a quaked at the shadow of my -- “

“Did you get very far with this genocidal mania?”

“Thousands, Lalonde, the seas boiled with their blood -- “

“And did she stop you?”

“Well, no,” he said. “I mean, yeah, like she was always saying don’t build that doomsday device Eridan it shore looks dangerous no I mean you might seariously cut yourself which was, uh, her jokin -- I mean -- she couldn’t, we had to feed her lusus before it glubbed out the whole troll population. You wouldn’t believe how much that thing ate. Except you probably could, now, couldn’t you?”

“If that was meant to be a cut, it didn’t quite break skin,” said Rose.

“No, I mean that you and me, we’re the same stripe of sargasso,” he said, a little more intent, a little more empty. “I destroyed everythin I laid fins on too. We would have made good kismeses, once. Notorious. A good match.”

“The first rule of a good genocide is total death and destruction, Caligula,” she said, and she drew her head back a little further into the tattered coverlet. “Having to leave most people around to admire your munificence is a crimp. I suspect your heart was not in it, but mainly I suspect that neither was your brain. My position as Seer doesn’t inform the obvious judgement call that you didn’t need a keeper.”

If Rose had expected his anger, she was left dissatisfied. Instead the ghost boy gave a shaky, moth-eaten laugh, and he pressed one hand over his face as he turned his gaze away. “She said that,” he said. “When she broke up with me, too. She said that all the time. That I was bad at true villainy. Said I’d probably never climb up the echeladder to actual scum, but that she’d be there for me if I wanted to try it. Then she -- high-fived me -- fuckin high-fived me, we had a special handshake -- ”

There was a shudder in him, one he was trying with due dignity to control. “There are certain people in this life who are unfathomably ridiculous,” she said, and she blamed it on the sickness and strain, blamed her lips for their disloyalty. “Their most unfathomable mystery is in how much they make us love them.”

“She could be majestic as fuck when she wanted,” he said.

Her mouth said, “So can John Egbert.”

If life had been a book they might have looked at each other properly, really looked at each other, and seen a shared and terrible grimness that made them like each other that little bit more. Thankfully for her gag reflex, life was not a book. They just sat as egotistic, embarrassed bookends, staring at the gulf between them and probably wishing it was bigger.

“When she died I couldn’t look at her,” he said, and he was no longer speaking to anyone in the room. “Just looked somewhere else. She died right there and I didn’t watch. I saw her just once, before -- when I left the room -- and it was stupid, I saw her lyin there and I thought, she has real little feet. Just how she looked so small. Tiny -- feet.”

It was only when Rose said, “I’m sorry for your loss,” that he turned away and abruptly buried his face in his knees. Eridan pulled his ruined jersey down over them and tucked himself up, just like a kid hiding, and after that he wouldn’t look at her again. They continued that way for a while. He was still curled in on himself at the end of the day, her quiet in her corner and the funereal darkness all around them, and for the first time her pity for him was honest. She hadn’t realised she could still feel.

“And have You yet retrieved the message?” asked her attaché.

“Progress is being made,” said Rose.

On the eighth day as she knew them, the Emissary of the Noble Circle of Horrorterrors broke.

It was her own overcurious fault. Rose lay in her corner and walked her thoughts down that long, dark corridor to where the Circles lay, reached out and touched her tendrils to the teeming masses of tentacles that touched her thoughts in soft antennae greeting when she passed. Something in her gloried when she sank into the blackdeath embrace of her brethren. Something in her was seriously broken. Nonetheless, her mind trailed their vast still lakes and beheld their bulging eyes, walked alongside indescribable dark voiceless things. And among them she cast out a name: Feferi?

They all parted for her like a fearful ocean. It was better than Google. She descended away from her body and down into terrible depths, and she heard the remnant shriek of music left over from the Rift’s Carbuncle. Afterwards, she wondered why she’d looked: curiosity, maybe, to see if there really was a troll ghost girl dwelling in the drifting mesh of minds she’d been adopted into, a troll ghost who had been the best friend of an equally dead dreadful boy who needed a haircut. Curiosity to see what she was like. There was no presence. Instead, visions, like some arcane photo album:

-- a skittering centipede thing with black button eyes and a fat fuschia body, munching on a fish --

-- a small, naked troll child asleep in a stringy nest of tentacles, thumb incongruously tucked in its mouth --

-- a little girl scraping barnacles off one grey leg, hair a black cloud in the water, gills cranberry ribbons on her hips; tongue stuck out the side of the mouth as though in deep thought, then laughing in a bubbly exhalation of water, splitting the barnacle with her teeth and sucking out all six feathery limbs --

-- a bigger girl in pink-edged turquoise skirts, sweet-mouthed, crouched on a beach and sticking pieces of driftwood in the sand: next to her, a sullen, squinting little troll with thick glasses, dumping out a sandy sweaterload of pebbles and dried seaweed --

-- reaching out a hand still braceleted at the wrist with slight traces of puppy fat, met with the tip of a pale, questing tentacle, tickling at the palm, touching each yellow nail, stretching back for miles and miles and miles and miles and --

-- cupping fingers out enthusiastically to the familiar fuschia glow of a kernelsprite, within contained a Gordian knot of feelers and barbs all rendered down to one glimmering glow of data just like Jaspersprite’s --

-- and a troll girl with a hole still smoking through her sternum, deathbed a disarrayed pile of bloodied horns; arms stuck out at awkward angles, tiny gold-ringed ankles leading to tiny pink-shod feet --

The scream rattled the silent grey tower. It bubbled through the dead oceans, made drifts of dust fall from the ceiling, shuddering its way into the bones of her jaw just like a thumping bassline turned up to max. Blood trickled out of her nose in a hot, itching rivulet, and then Rose was awake and stumbling to her feet as the scream rang out again. She limped to the window, leg protesting all the way: blocking out the horizon was the incomprehensible white breadth of the Noble Emissary. Spaghetti drifts of limb filled all the distance. Behind her eyes her rider rocked itself back and forth in ecstasy.

The only thing standing between the Speaker of the Vast Glub and Rose was a black blob: the jellyfish horrorterror who sat as her guardian, its long arms touched gently now with greenish phosphorescence. It undulated there, still patient as a stone, and as comfort went it rated an approximate zero. More blood prickled at her ear canals.

“I didn’t kill her!” she cried out, utterly losing her cool. “I didn’t kill your daughter!”

“She’s not... referrin... to... you,” said Eridan.

Rose turned around. There he was with a rictus grin of pure terror contorting his face, swaying back and forth on his feet. The cold iron spike attached to the end of the cluebat slammed into her much, much too late. “Oh, fuck,” she said.

“I didn’t mean to kill Sol,” he said. All his words had a kind of unreal calmness, the type you could only manage when you were obviously one bladder removed from being able to piss yourself abundantly. “I didn’t mean to. Even if he took her away from me. I just wanted to scare him, show him who I glubbin was. Make him hate me some.”

“Then she came right for me,” he continued, dreamy. “It was all over then. Over forever. It was so easy just liftin that wand and -- doin it, I didn’t hardly even have to look at her. Not one bit. It was quick, though -- it would have been quick for her, wouldn’t even have -- felt it -- ”

Rose felt her gorge rise. “Oh, God,” she said. “I felt sorry for you. For one single miserable moment I felt bad for you. Oh, God, I’m going to throw up.”

“I loved her,” he said, and his voice cracked. “I loved her so much.”

“Never pretend you know what love is again,” she said.

“I just didn’t know how to stop, it was like -- it was like it all had to go sudden, just had to shut it all down so I could go too, like there was no goin back from there -- ”

“Stop,” she screamed, and she shoved him as hard as she could. Eridan fell back against the slippery stone floor and lay there, limp and unresisting, the white cross painted on his forehead glowing like a warning sign. His sweater had ruched up around his waist, and Rose could see a massive ragged line separating his torso from his pelvis: serrated and ragged, and shining white inside like he was brimful with glowstick fluid. His face crumpled.

“I killed my best friend,” he said.

With eldritch coils she lifted him high, oozing from her skin in wriggling lattices. The dead troll was limp in her grasp and Rose Lalonde was relieved: burning with horror and hate, thrusting him inexorably to that window and out to the ocean where Gl’Bgloyb waited to give him justice. There he would be dissolved forever screaming into a tangle of tongues and teeth, consumed over and over again until his soul was debris and then that same debris would be glued back so that he could writhe still whole in the dark. There in the Furthest Ring would he wriggle like the most degraded forgotten worm in the most abyssal depths.

So it was with very real despair that she pulled him back from the window and tossed him to the floor, wiping the blood from her face and her mouth and nearly crying from rage. Rose’s knees gave way, and she sank to the ground with nowhere for her hands to go but to clutch stupidly at herself. She stared at her palms again: slick and cinereal, a little lighter than the rest of her, and she wanted to chop off her hands.

“Do it,” he said.

“No.”

“Do it! Why won’t you fuckin do it?”

“Because I need you to save this stupid universe from my stupid, wretched self,” said Rose. “I’m saddled with you, you utter imbecile -- ”

“The plan -- ”

“You don’t matter for the plan,” she snarled. “You’re my cyanide capsule, and I hope we rot together.”

They lay on opposite sides of the cell. After a while Gl’Bgloyb stopped, and her voice lowered in mourning instead: a wail, a dirge, a grotesque song of disappointment and despair. For her the Circles were silent. It made Rose realise her exhaustion, and she found herself collapsed in a heap with her feverish cheek pressed to the floor: dimly aware of Eridan a little way away, holding his knees and sobbing like a child. Outside the window a host of baby squiddish shapes drifted to and fro, far-off, and they sang counterpoint in high fluting voices.

Eventually she realised Eridan was choking out words: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I take it back, and she fell asleep to the sound of his weeping.

GA: I Always Wondered At My Inability To Manipulate Space
GA: The Realization Is That A Sylph Does Not Maneuver A Sylph Implies Being A Creature Of A Certain Environment Which Confers A Different Kind Of Advantage I Guess
GA: In That Space Was Always Something I Could Move And Breathe Through Which Is A Unique Ability And Pretty Useless Otherwise
GA: How Long Will This Take Do You Think
AA: youll only be able to survive a moment
AA: thankfully a moment is all you need to fail or not fail!
GA: Er
GA: What A Relief
AA: do you need me to point out what a bad idea this is or is that sort of irrelevant
GA: Pretty Irrelevant
GA: I Owe A Moment
GA: Nothing More And Nothing Less In The General Scheme Of Accumulated Moments
GA: In Any Case It Being Only A Moment Is Sort Of A Relief As It Precludes The Need To Inform Anyone
AA: yes it is going to be either instantaneous or forever
AA: there is not really any inbetween where we are going and i would go with you but there are other things i have to keep in motion so you are unfortunately on your own
AA: but i really hope you succeed!
AA: for everyones benefit
GA: Should I Not Return I Only Ask That You Tell Vriska It Was Simply Something I Had To Do And That I Hope One Day She Understands
GA: Only Try To Give The Impression That Was Not Said Passive-Aggressively Im Anticipating Her Here
GA: And
GA: In Regards To Karkat
AA: yes
GA: Please Tell Him To Take Care Of Himself
GA: Due To Well
GA: His Being Completely Shoddy At It
AA: youre pale for him arent you
GA: Uh
GA: I
AA: i remember when i first realized i felt white for someone it was simultaneously amazing and also not so much
GA: No Matter What Happens Dont Reveal That I Mean It Seems Needless And Also Uncharitable I Dont Know If He Reciprocates So In No Way Would It Comfort Under The Circumstances
GA: So Um In Any Case I Am Ready When You Are
AA: and i am ready when you are so that is a nice coincidence
GA: Okay
GA: Thank You Aradia
AA: and kanaya dont worry
AA: i think you should tell him yourself :)
AA: one last thing before we can get going
AA: so i am sorry in advance
GA: For What
AA: please put your face very close to the husktop and keep his sunglasses on at all times!
GA: This Is A Little Bizarre But Not Exactly The Type Of Thing You Need To Apologize For
GA: So Now What
AA: well you see it is really hard to get a rainbow drinker unconscious as is my understanding

grimAuxiliatrix's [GA'S] computer exploded.

AA: but that probably did it

Chapter Text

The truth about her was this: Rose Lalonde had been sent off to the Degrasse Academy For Girls agéd five, uniform beautifully ironed and tie perfectly knotted, and made not a single friend for seven years.

Teachers and students alike did not love her. Interpersonal skills are poor, said the report cards, despite no impolite word ever leaving her mouth to peer or pedagogue. Does not work well in groups. Yet she had done all the work. Yet she had often lead. One teacher had found her so unlovable she had received a B- alongside strong recommendations for the Girl Scouts.

At eight she had struggled quashing down that outrage, the unfairness, and her mother’s expression had alchemized to something like pity. “Tall poppy syndrome, Rosebud,” she had said. “Understand adults expect children to be frivolous. Do you want to join the Girl Scouts?”

“I’d rather choke on my own vomit.”

“I understand they provide a very important jolt in the cookie-selling industry -- ”

“No.”

At seeing her whey-faced, pinched and trembling thus, another mother would have reached out to take daughter into her arms and hold her there until she stopped. Mrs. Lalonde was not another mother. Instead she reached out to touch Rose’s cheek, to push her fingers back behind the curve of her ear and rest them there against her skull, as though in doing so she could cool the brain behind that bone. “Calm down,” she said. “On my desk now rests one recommendation for you to skip on through to sixth grade; simultaneously, two recommendations for you to not, on the basis that it will further warp you to never find a love of hopscotch or your fellow man. These are bypassable due to me making a lot of money and being very important. Which should I pick?”

“The grade-skipping, please,” she said. “I promise in my spare time I’ll long for the rural and domestic scene, for the warbling of birds and the prattling of children.”

“Nice quote, Rosebud. Now who said that?”

“Ronald McDonald.”

“Very good.” The hand was removed. “It won’t harm you, darling. You’ll learn to play the game. At your age I had already demanded to be put up into highschool physics.”

This left a bitter taste in her mouth.

There was no great improvement in her situation, though at least nobody now pressured her into Mother May I. The older girls were hateful in a different, sneakier way; being at first eager to take a tiny flaxen-haired third-grader under their wing, then acid and rejected when she didn’t want the honour. None of it was physical. Something tiny and white-hot inside had assured her that had they gone that far, she would have killed them, and this had been a kind of relief: she’d imagined murder for a few months until she realised that this kind of ideation was not productive, and read a number of self-help books as punishment.

Only one girl had ever taken to her with the distaste that germinated bullying. Names escaped her now, but the perpetuator had been a thin, sallow brunette, cornering her in the gym room with hate in her eye and volleyball sweat on her pinny. “Everybody thinks you’re really, really weird, you know,” she said. “You are bizarre.” She’d rolled the word in her mouth like a sweet.

“Yes?”

“Why do you have to be so bizarre, Rose Lalonde.”

“Genetic defect, I’m assuming.”

“You are so fucking odd.”

“My excitement for all these synonyms grows by the second -- ”

The girl had grabbed a fistful of Rose’s own pinny, the world suddenly molasses-slow, and she got up in her grill in a waft of body spray and prepubescent hate. “I must ask you,” said Rose, hardly finding her voice, “for your own benefit, to not do this.”

“Or what? You’ll beat me up?” The prospect was, indeed, ridiculous. “You’ll call for mommy? You going to cast a spell?”

“The latter,” said Rose. “I will cast a spell. I am pregnant with wizardry. In me is the sum of all witchitude. If you don’t stop touching me, I will knot together your intestines, rend your bowels, cut open your bones and suck out the marrow, I’ll open up your ribcage and Fluthlu, that foul patrician of misery, will let me do the dirty to your heart -- ”

“Jesus,” said the girl, and spat in her hair.

Serendipitously, two days later her bully had come down with colitis, and returned the next semester quieter and more thoughtful while giving Rose a wide berth. All the more serendipitously, that same semester her life had begun.

TG: what you let them skip your grades
TG: matilda why would you DO THAT third grade was easy street
TG: they wanted to slap my hot ass up to fifth but id give them sadeye
TG: no please sir i got my friends here ill get all withdrawn and start snorting baby tylenol
TG: worked like a charm and i never did one fuckin lick of homework again
TT: Dave, your language. I abjure you.
TG: fuckING
TT: Better.
TT: In any case, not having thought up the ample opportunities for myself and baby Tylenol, I grew bored of worksheets rife with Comic Sans and that same Microsoft Word clipart of a stickman looking puzzled.
TG: you made all the wrong decisions in life emily dickinson
TG: too bad you didnt meet me years ago
TT: I cry myself to sleep at night whispering the exact same thing.

Come eleven years old, she had begun wearing large quantities of black lipstick, and on the whole her schoolmates treated her with greater kindness. Genius they did not understand, but quantifiable gothness they could accept. An older girl even tried to discreetly slip her an album of The Cure. But something in her was gone forever, something useful; the ability to love lonesomeness.

In the Furthest Ring her cell was wide and her windows filled with water. Rose limped alone through the up-and-down passages, wandering to the Pit where she watched the shambling armies of her masters lunge and eat themselves, to the Observatory where the passages of stars she had never seen mapped themselves on the wide, painted roof. Malevolent red comets inched their way across the ceiling, destroying silent constellations in their very slow wake. She sat on the spiralling staircases and stuck her swollen leg out in front of her, breathing slow, and hobbled up and down until she was tired of it.

And in the end she came back to her room with her hungry ghost, and they sat down opposite each other in the dark. Eridan looked at her with empty eyes, white and terrible, limp hair and lightning-dash horns and a scarf tying together his bifurcated middle.

For Rose had nowhere else to go.

“Caligula,” she said. “Let me tell you the stakes.”

This is how they formed their plan:

(“ -- so step one, they use you to break through to the Medium. Step two, they unleash their armies on these Emerald Cohort people and kill a demon I -- who I never heard of. Step three, they eat the fuckin universe.”

“Universes.”

“Yeah, universes, how could I forget. Goodness glubbin gracious me.”)

At first, reconnaissance.

They’d travelled through the rough corridors that ran throughout the tower, and she took him to the Pit. There was not one flicker of emotion on his wan grey face when he saw those shamblers, though she noted his silence. They moved through countless, claustrophobic rooms, low corbelled arches capped with dripping rocks, and he was very taken with one stucco frieze: “The Poison Star,” he said, crouched and tracing a claw down a motif. When she pressed him further, he admitted: “That’s all I know. Fef, she liked that stuff... so did Megido, though who gives a sprat for her? Anyway, it doesn’t help us any, it’s all rubbish.”

“Don’t be an anti-intellectual. It might tell us something about the game.”

“What, Horrorterror etchin? This is superstitious horseshit, pinkscarf, it don’t signify.”

The combs were adorned with all manner of sea creatures, inlaid with jewels coloured pink, blue and green; broad rough walls gave way to tiny glyphed filigrees that could have been anything, a repeated pattern or written text. “You’re too much of a modernist,” she’d said, and she crouched down beside him to touch it. The way the glyphs were laid out next to the pictures made her think they were some kind of stele: a great octopus with empty eyes sprawled sinuously-carved tentacles over a number of screaming dolls. Text beside. Worms were amassed above and below these people, which could have also meant the artist was only really good at curved lines. “Everything signifies.”

“Not any more,” he’d said. “Not for you.”

Rose touched the worms, ached for one of the frescoes to warn about stairs.

(“The barriers between space and time are fairly piss-poor... nothing that the Noble Circle can’t break through like tissue paper, not once they gain that first access. The First Guardians are charged with universal defence, but not even they can show a winning fight against tangible Horrorterrors.”

“And their lynchpin’s you, Lalonde.”)

In another chamber they found a lot of hollow stone spheres, the size of cannonballs and arranged in pyramids. Eridan cracked one open, and found they were full to the brim of different horrible things: in one, dried fish-eyes, in another, tiny infantile fingerbones like matchsticks. There was nothing they could use. Fluid gloom poured into every alcove of the tower, and some flights of stairs seemed so endless that it was no good travelling to see what mysteries the bottom held. At one point she stepped off the side and floated gently down, the tendrils of her darkness wending into the shadows below, but it got abyssal that she felt her body begin to seize up with cold. Rose hauled herself up to the stairs and held her wounded leg until Eridan came down to meet her; and then, exhausted, let him half-drag her back to the start.

(“Fundamentally I’m a creature of my universe, not the Outer Ring. Being as I now hold dual citizenship, I can exist in both. Horrorterrors aren’t meant to be able to manifest outside dreambubbles and Dersewhispers, not even Emissaries: I go back, I change the rules, they will move through when I open their door.”

“You’re their anchor.”

“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”)

From the great grey tower that housed them, the Unwaking Blower sat in its cradle at a latitude of thirty degrees west; the broken dreambubble, forty-five. Rose clumsily opened a vein and they painted a piece of her petticoat with a map, including a rough estimate of where lay the end of the Ring. He’d looked at her blood like it was neat sewage.

(“ -- maybe the world should get an end to it. Maybe I don’t care. I’m dead, so what does it matter? Maybe it should all rot and get eaten and I wouldn’t give even half a fishy fuck.”

“But -- ”

“Do you really care, Lalonde? I think you even like it a little. You like being this big fakewitchy harbinger of doom with your xenoparadoxical alien buddies -- ”)

In terms of the distance from the tower, they were shit out of luck. It was just too far to run.

For the first time in forever she had taken off her dress and eased out the window, giving herself up to the ecstasy of water. Rose opened up her throat and drank it in, opened up her ears and scoured her brain clean, let it seep over the itching pitted wound on her calf and twisted up in its glories. Eridan’s ghost was a sullen, suspicious presence next to hers. One half-human, one dead troll.

She knew without needing a mirror that she had acquired a clamminess, a wideness to her eyeballs and a frog-flicker depth to them, and even dead Eridan with his gills flinched sometimes when he looked at her. “Horrorterror look,” he would call it, and his sneer was more fear than snide.

Rose felt this was a lot to take from a dead boy with a cross tattoo on his forehead. He looked like a wet Jesus Aquaman.

(“ -- just admit it, Ampora, this is magic, you were around a Horrorterror for most of your natural life -- ”

“ -- xenoparadoxical scientifically explicable alien buddies -- you like the idea of apocalypse. If you hadn’t you wouldn’t have gone to them in the first place. I think you want to see the world burn to a miserable glubbin crisp, and all I want is you gettin me out a here.”)

She discovered he swam like the uncoordinated child found in every gym class from here to eternity. He moved through the ocean with the grace and verve of a tortoise. “Seadweller,” Rose said, mild with astonishment. Eridan floundered, breathing huge anxious gulps of water he didn’t even need. “Seadweller. One who dwells. In a sea.”

“Shut up,” he’d said. For a moment his limbs would move as one, and then he’d remember himself and go back to doing a kind of marine interpretive dance. “I used to get algae allergies! I never had to damn well learn!”

“Seadweller, Mr. Ampora, isn’t this intuitive?”

“There’s a surprisin amount of shit that’s not intuitive, Ros!”

So with her disinterested swim-meet breaststroke and his drunken, seizing dog-paddle, they had made their way west. What the troll genetic bucket had not seen fit to give him athletically they had, at least, made up for with innate nautical direction, but it was only a short time before she was aware they were being followed.

(“ -- strange, considering your healthy sense of self-preservation, and the presence of what could be termed an enormous chip on your shoulder. This isn’t textbook nihilism. Nobody and nothing left to save out in the world for you, Mr. Ampora?”

“No -- there never -- “

“Nothing to prove, or to care about?”)

The rider behind her eyes had called out joyfully to her watcher in the water, the jellyfish Horrorterror that had nagged at her periphery since she was brought to the Ring. It did nothing but follow. If you didn’t know what it was, you could have mistaken it for some sea mirage, some speck in the distance. Her vision swayed a little. Just a quick spasm of eyeball.

When the pillar of the Blower formed on the murky horizon, the fat comma behind them swiftly became a fist-sized blot. This swiftness had intent. The handful of seconds this took informed Rose everything she needed to know about its swim speed. “Seven o’clock,” she’d said softly. “But don’t loo -- don’t look.”

Eridan looked, and swiftly lost his sanity.

(“... we can’t fuckin do anything, you said, you said it was all over and we had no plan -- ”

“I never said that.”)

It was the wand he went for, and for a moment she panicked herself before he was jamming it into the soft part of his dead throat; as though he could punch through the trachea and slam it into his brainstem. Eridan sank like a stone and she hauled her arms around him, slapped his face as hard as she could, got her hand between his horns and tugged out a handful of clammy black hair before wondering if he could even feel pain. Then she wrapped him up in her miasma instead, pressing its black thorns into his body, and Rose willed both of them dead from frustration.

(“Lalonde, they are never goin to let you go.”

“Then it’s a good thing that they’ll never have to.”)

It took dragging him all the way back to the tower and dry land before he came to. Before that he convulsed on the floor: Rose had to wrap her hands in old velvet to make a grab for his wand, and even then her palms felt as though she’d rubbed them in capaiscin. It slipped from his twitching fingers, and she pulled it away.

It was such a strange thing to look at. Wood, with a handle, just like Harry Potter’s, painted white with a big hairline crack in the middle. She found it more than a little malevolent. The wand made no echo on the stone when Rose flung it across the room.

When he stopped she’d bathed his hands and face in water from the window, grey and cold, a little too slippery for her understanding of skin. There was no layer of the fine hair you found on a human epidermis. Her contempt of him was a malignant tumour with far too much loneliness in it, and her panic had squamous layers of desperation. Without him, the plan could not come to fruition; without him, she would be terribly alone.

(“But you just said -- ”

“I am no longer going to be party to universal destruction. Not like this. I am awake now. I have made my bed, and I will proceed to jump on it. You were wrong, apocalypse isn’t my thing; I never wanted the whole world to crumble as homage to my exquisite teenaged sadness.”

“Go fuck yourself.”)

When he finally spoke, he did not say anything she expected him to say. Eridan kept his eyelids shuttered down and he said, “Twenty-three minutes, westward.”

“What?”

“Twenty-three minutes, westward,” he repeated, a little impatient, as though she were some kind of child. “That’s how long it’d take us to get to the Pillar, at top swimmin speed. I give us about nine minutes more to get to the bubble. Another ten minutes to make it to the edge... we’ll never run it.”

Rose was silent. He coughed; it was a wet, empty noise. She noticed with some contact embarrassment that his sweater was particularly wet around the middle, and that his abdomen wound leaked salt water.

“So what?” she said. “You give up?”

(“John Egbert and Jade Harley and Dave Strider are my world and I have never been ashamed... they are the only human beings that I have any esteem for, the other esteemed lifeform being my childhood kittycat. I would never be the tool of their destruction if I could help it. Now I can help it. Time to parley.”

“Less sentiment, Lalonde, more tactics.”)

Still half-mad with terror, the expression on his face seemed to be that midpoint between horror and indigestion. Of course, even normally anything one said made Eridan look as though has hearing deeply unpleasant horseshit; he simply had that kind of face. Now he looked ready to be sick. “When I make a promise,” he said, “ I make a promise.”

“Did any previous promises involve youthful regicide?”

“Don’t you fuckin dare -- ”

(“I get you to the edge of the Furthest Ring, where you’ve got a fighting chance to run to the dreambubbles. But before that, you uphold your side of the bargain:

you make sure I die.”)

They had devised a code for Stop, which was her hand held palm-out. He stopped. This was uninspired and should have been followed up only with in the name of love!, but it was quick and emphatic and it cut him off in his tracks. With her other hand she started rapping out the beats to nothing less inane than “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” knuckles smarting on the cold stone floor, and with the other hand she started tapping the song out in a round.

Rose had found that the presence of terrible, twisted suckers in her mind, the tap to her thoughts and conversations she couldn’t draw a blackout blind over, were confounded by listening when she activated other parts of her brain: the moment she felt any eye turned upon her, naked beneath the Smaller Circle and flayed of muscle from the Middling, she could jam the airwaves with a ground-out Gently Down The Stream. She even hoped it worked.

(“ -- that’s not fair, Ros, you can’t ask me to do that. That’s not the least bit fair and you bloody know it...”

“Stop clutching your pearls. As though it’s not the only thing you’re good at.”

“Why can’t you run? You get me to the edge, why can’t you come too? You said yourself, fighting chance. We take off in two directions, you could get picked up by your Time player, neat as you like.”

“With what’s in my head? With what I’m becoming? A Pyrrhic victory for my team, perhaps. But better than all-out destruction. We do this my way or not at all. I can’t exit this vale of tears myself without an eldritch crisis team stopping me, but you’ve got a white wand I don’t have any defense to, so it’s basically the safest way to go. Don’t pretend like you’re not up to the task. Parley or no parley?”

“ -- parley.”

“You take me out the moment I ask you to. And the very moment it looks like anything is going wrong, even if our mission isn’t complete.”

“But -- “

“Even if our mission is not complete. Swear on it.”

“-- I swear on my noble honour as a seadweller and devotion to the Mother’s Blood. By the violet and salt in my veins, human girl, or may I fuckin dry -- may I get condemned to the darkest deepest hell of my imaginin.”

“Good.”

“Too bad I’m already there.”)

After a few moments Eridan uncollapsed himself and his knuckles joined hers in mimicry, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, cold, empty music, a neat round to her own. Two sets of hands, one charcoal, one grey. Life is but a dream. Life is but a dream. After the ninth “merrily, merrily, merrily,” she felt unwatched enough to stop.

Both fell silent. Rose rocked back on her heels and sat on the hard floor, knees clutched up to her chest. The darkness filled with the brittle chirp of her breath and her breath alone.

“So what now? If we can’t make an escape for the border, what then?”

“What now,” Eridan said thoughtfully, “is how I finally remember my message. Mind like a glubbin sieve, Lalonde, you don’t even know.”

It was the first smile she recalled giving him, and as smiles went it was vicious.

And this is how their plan progressed:

They carried thirty-two of the clay balls down interminable stairs to her chamber. On the landing they dumped out whatever was inside, with bones, eyes, nails and crumbly dry organs tossed over the side like so much grim confetti. They filled these up with seawater and a single gobbet of her saliva, and with the tip of his wand Eridan turned this mixture into white-magic soup.

As they worked, they did anything they could think of to clear their heads: played the kind of games she would have not tolerated on any car trip with her mother, how many things can you list that begin with A? They soon found that two aliens playing this soon hit an impasse of lingo. I went to my lusus’ hive, said Eridan doggedly, and I brought an apple, a barkbeast, a Communist manifesto, a diurnal rest platform --

“You will describe to me again the terms,” said her attaché.

Rose sat with her back to the cool rock, hands folded listlessly in her lap. Down the long corridors, the windows cast still squares of sea-grey light. “We take the courier to the edge of the Furthest Ring, where the dream-bubbles lie,” she said. “He’ll give me his message. He leaves. That’s all.”

“You have not clarified,” said her attaché, “at which point he is devoured?”

She looked at her attaché, wearing her mother’s unscuffed sleeves. The attaché looked back. “Maybe I didn’t make myself clear,” said Rose, with a lot more confidence than she felt. “We take the courier to the edge. He gives us his message. He leaves. That’s the whole of the transaction. Is there some kind of confusion?”

“You misapprehend,” said the Horrorterror. It was so still; Rose noticed every lack of breath, not a single minute motion made that a real living thing might make. Even the mouth rounded over the words with overefficient stiffness. “You understand We would not let a messenge of the Ancient Ones leave. You understand We have no need to. We assumed in the Circle this would be apparent to You.”

“We have a bargain.”

“You will carry out the bargain if necessary. You will receive the message, and then You will apprehend the courier. ”

“I promised he’d live.”

“He will live for ever,” said her attaché.

“So the intent is to betray,” said Rose, but all the simalcrum opposite did was look at her: the Furthest Ring did not understand betray, and she heard the word ring throughout the many-tentacled expanse of her heart and brain to the Smaller and the Middling as they called out betray, traitor, betray, like children sounding out language they didn’t understand. There was only one voice that sang with bitter familiarity: betray, traitor, betray! betray the traitor? vengeance for my plucked flower, my fresh-blown spore --

“Rose,” said the thing before her, and to her terror it approached. Its walk was drippy and serpentine, and it ate up the distance between them before she could back away. There was no expression that it could make her mother wear that seemed familiar, but the voice was too good: a bluesy alto murmur, scratchy with too many cigarettes circa ‘82. If you closed your eyes there would be no difference. “Rose,” it repeated, and she shuddered like a washing machine on spin cycle.

“You don’t think We know all Your secrets?” it said, gently. “You don’t think We know the contents of Your soul?”

The rider inside her eyes rocked itself back and forth in a bath of fluid, nestled close up against a sinus. “You are Ours and Ours is Yours,” said her attaché, and smiled a brief Lalonde smile with pale grey teeth. There was nothing in her to stop it as it reached out and with one cool finger touched her cheek, tracing up her temples to crown her with its fingerprint. “You will not despair when the courier is eaten, for Your hunger will be assuaged also. You shall become stupendous and splendid, and We will dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.”

“What’d they say?” Eridan wanted to know, after.

Rose heard her mouth rasp, “Very little.”

When they finished, they had thirty-two balls of clay capped with wax: yellowing tallow candles provided the material, and a crypt filled with unused tombs provided the candles. The finished product was stacked in a careful grid at the corner of her chamber, and they surveyed their handiwork with a sort of suspicious relief. Rose sat with her back to one end of the dais, and he slumped as louchely as a ghost could slump at the other: a sort of mine-filled gulf of familiarity, an alliance staggering on one malformed leg. She felt deranged with exhaustion.

“What will you do?” she said, sudden and inane. “When you leave?”

“I’m glubbin dead, Lalonde, I haven’t really got plans. Unless you mean gettin the shell away from here as quick as possible.”

“Don’t you have anyone to go to?”

He gave her a look that plainly derided her as the world’s worst moron. “No,” he said, a bit gruff, “nobody who’d want to see me. I kernelsprited my lusus, Ros, he’s gone. Can’t think of a single other troll who’d bother with me, dead or livin.”

“You’ll find cold-blooded murder does that.”

“Clam it. You were the one who asked. It’s not my fault,” he added, a little plaintive, though Eridan was wont to add it’s not my fault to sentences it patently didn’t belong to like it added up somehow. It’s not my fault. Don’t look at me. But he said, “You’ll be dead too, you know -- you’ll be in the dream bubbles, maybe.”

“What optimism!”

“I’m fuckin great at hope,” he said, proving he was shitty at sarcasm. “But hey, maybe if we were both ghosts... you know, if we were put in the same place, and I was dead and you were dead, maybe...”

“ -- if this is some kind of romantic overture -- ”

“ -- maybe we could hang out,” he said, throwing up his hands melodramatically, the very Photoshop edit of hurt feelings. “Cod, let a boy finish. Maybe we could hang out together. Glub around. Give me the benefit of the doubt, pinkscarf!” (“No,” she said.) “It hasn’t been totally horrific, right? We’ve had some...” Rose could see him struggling around for an adjective, then giving up. “... times, right? We’ve had some... times, definitely.”

“And if I say no,” she said, “will you blast me prematurely through the heart?”

An unpleasant grey flush started in his dead face, and he stared at some midway point past her head. “I think in this scenario I would go and look for my brother,” said Rose, and his shoulders did not droop. Eridan Ampora had been turned down one too many times in his life to show his disappointment there. “In this scenario, I could possibly be accompanied. Unless the accompaniment proved himself to be too much of a douche. Do we comprehend?”

He didn’t look a gift hypothetical in the mouth. “Well, hell yes,” he said, and he beamed all over his face.

“Now that we have gushed about all the feelings we can tolerate, I’m taking a nap,” she said, and she hauled herself up to the dais. “I’d like to be fresh for my approaching suicide-by-wand.”

Rose knew she sounded more certain than she could ever be: when she wrapped the (now thoroughly mouldy) velvet wrap around her body, she was even a bit awed at how frightened she was. The reluctance seemed to start in her from the toes upwards and didn’t stop till the crown of her head. In the poetical catalogue of boys who had stood on burning decks, she was going to bottom the echeladder at Gibbering Wuss.

So she thought of John and Jade and Dave as hard as she could, calmly gave them the last message in her mind that she’d never be able to say in person: I love you, John Egbert. I love you, Jade Harley. I love you, Dave Strider. Precious, thoughtless, infuriating John and brilliant, inane, volatile Jade; and Dave, who she’d have no words for even if he’d been there with her. Loving them didn’t ease her fears.

She thought about --

“Ros?”

Rose didn’t answer. “I’ll make it quick, don’t worry,” he said, and he sounded like he was trying to be gentle as possible and failing anyway. Trolls were notoriously ungentle. Kanaya had been -- Kanaya had -- “I made it quick for all of them.”

As though that were the sum of her fears. Rose Lalonde was asleep before she could parse all of them, which was a great pity.

And this is how their plan was enacted:

“The courier has agreed to give us the message,” she told her attaché. “He will pass it to me and only me at the edge of our domain, whereupon he’ll leave and our business will be concluded.”

“At the edge of the Ring?” said her attaché.

Eridan played a good haughty agent of his Angels, though stick a haughty in front of any job description and he’d carry it out with aplomb. “The edge of the Ring, Foul One, in front of the Great Blower. Get my drift? I’ll negotiate no closer. We go right to the end of your demesne.”

“Demesne is a good word,” said Rose.

Within her tendrils she caught their balls of clay (“Drop one and we’re fucked,” he’d said, to her “oh, please, give me some credit -- ”) and gathered them into her, wrapping them in her shadow against the bonecrunching pressure of the water. Her attaché had paid these very little attention. Rose simply described them as, “the message,” and with the greatest of care and trepidation entered that barren ocean with them in her orbit.

The ocean roiled with Horrorterror jaws as she was pulled through a gauntlet of Gods, Smaller and the Middling. They called out to her in a hushed multitude of screams: Seer, Seer, Seer, and they brushed with soft worried touches to the inside of her mind. Their voices were familiar now. It was almost comfort. Something in her answered, Yes and always, and that particular filial piety was enough to make Rose bite her tongue bloody.

Their anxiety was contagious. She tilled the dead flesh of Eridan’s wrists up with her fingernails, and he in turn made big gouges on her charcoal hands with his claws. It was as inane as children slapping each other in the back seat of a car, but at the same time the sea was filled to bursting with Ring denizens and the pain kept them sane. In the presence of the Many he didn’t completely flip his shit: he just shut down, retreating to someplace in the back of his head with no appearance of being present. One’s classic disassociative ghost reaction. They’d forgotten to account for that.

When the pillar of the Unwaking Blower gained texture on the horizon Rose had to slither into his mind by force:

Past the pillar, the cloudy brine of the Furthest Ring thinned: oxygenated, somehow, until every breath felt like lungfuls of ginger ale. The light hurt her eyes. She did not like it, and it had once been her claimed aspect. Been. Remained. Something in Rose was withering. The field of dream bubbles glittered ahead in a vast nebula of pearls.

“You will see it is as You negotiated,” said the attaché.

It took a few moments for Eridan to recognise they had stopped. She had to slap his cheek before he came to himself, shaking, and then she had to forcibly turn his face away. Rose made him look at the bubblefield, so close and yet so far, and not at the ocean behind them. Waiting in the shadows were a host of teeth. Behold Oglogoth! said her heart. Behold my suppurating murklords of the deep! Her brain said, oh, for God’s sake.

The Horrorterror who wore her mother’s face beckoned her away, and when she reached its side it leant down. Rose noticed the earrings in those pallid ears: diamond studs. Her fingers had sifted through many an identical twin of them in the jewelry boxes of her childhood. It makes for easy matching, said her memory, and she was getting distracted, she was losing herself --

“You lied,” it said.

Her blood turned to solid Popsicle. “What?” she blurted.

“You roused, You warned, You bestirred,” said her attaché. “The Noble Emissary says You lied. Comprehend that the Circle worries. Please know They also understand. There would never be anger for what You have done. It will be fixed.”

It seemed impossible to keep her expression afloat, let alone thirty-two tiny nuclear reactors of white magic. Her palms prickled with sweat. “I have absolutely no idea what you mean,” she said.

“Gl’Bgloyb says it was never contempt,” said her mother’s mouth. “Take the message. Gorge on the messenger. He was very impolite. When that is done We are going to take You into the tangle, Rose, and there You will grow.”

On shaky legs she made her way back to the waiting troll, schooling her features into the world’s most flimsy poker face. It hardly rated at poker. It would not have held up at Go Fish. They had let her walk away, she kept telling herself. That was enough. That had to be enough.

It wasn’t enough. Eridan saw through her dread in all of three seconds, and drew her close. He squeezed her shoulders to give her a little shake, and then another when she did not respond to this truly infinite comfort. “What’d they say?” he demanded, teeth bared and white eyes wild. He drew his wand out of his waistband, where it trembled in his clenched grey fist. “What’s goin on? Ros, what the hell is up?”

“Order’s changed,” she said, through teeth she had to clench not to chatter. “Kill me, then set off the bombs.”

His voice rose, petrified. “You’re shittin me senseless, Lalonde -- ”

They were going to make her a tanglebuddy. “Kill me.”

“I’d never get a head start, I’m a goner -- ”

They were going to make her a tanglebuddy. “Kill me.”

Rose Lalonde bodily shoved his wand up underneath her chin, and then a lot of things happened at once. Some of them they’d planned for, meticulously. Others, they hadn’t.

What they had thought of was the obvious. The rider behind her eyes screamed like an eldritch car alarm. All Horrorterrors present reared up at once, which made for enough encroaching tentacles to satisfy any purveyor of niche Japanese animation. She threw out her shadows so that the clay spheres drifted in a wide grid before them, and waited for an arc of white to obliterate her brainstem: more frantic every second it didn’t, jabbing his wand up above her thyroid cartilage over and over and berserk with fear. The rider behind her eyes screamed again, and she buried her face in her free arm in an impotent attempt to rout it.

Eridan snapped her arms tightly to her sides, moving behind her and pressing his wand to her throat till she choked. “Back off!” he screamed, but the tentacles kept coming. “I said back off! Any closer and I’ll blow her glubbin thinkpan out!”

“Ampora -- ”

He was dragging her backwards, backwards, floundering as the water became more like air and swimming became more like drifting. Rose could see her Horrorterror attaché raise one hand, which slowed the host of twitching tentacles but did not stop them entirely. “Let me go and I’ll give her back!” he was saying, wobbly with hysteria. “Slow down, that’s it, that’s nice, let me go and she’s all yours -- ”

“You utter fucking heel,” said Rose.

The light was colouring everything strange tints of orange and red, grey to sunset colours, the endless drear of the Furthest Ring shimmering to transition. “That’s it,” shouted Eridan, “no sudden moves, you got me, or her skull’s gonna be a big white puddle with bits a hair, no fuckin joke!” She had forgotten to meticulously plan for Eridan’s loyalty, which had the structural integrity of Easy Mac. She had thought -- she’d thought a lot of things. She was an inutterable dipshit. “You want her, you got her...”

The attaché dropped its hand. The thought-defying enormity of her jellyfish Horrorterror broke through the line, stingers dragging through the retreating wave of its brethren. It bore down on them both like a monster truck. The dead troll boy removed his wand from her neck, took aim, and fired.

Not at the Horrorterror, of course. He neatly shot each hanging sphere, which shattered in the water in drifts of clay splinters. Thirty-two of these Molotov cocktails meant the ocean in front of them was an undulating curtain of white magic, and thirty-two took a crack shot like Eridan Ampora only a handful of seconds, and thirty-two meant her Horrorterror guardian careened through a sizeable patch of angelwhite.

It careened through much the same way that an asteroid might careen through a mine field, by which to say it didn’t. Its outstretched lappets smoked immediately with gouts of black blood, and huge chunks of flesh simply broke off and crumbled up. The white stuck to it like glue and proceeded from there, eating through Horrorterror matter like fire, and as sights went it would have been spectacular had it actually stopped the thing. The jellyfish spun a full revolution in the water and turned away, sending up showers of bubbles and gore.

And it screamed. The force of its awful, many-throated groan made her mad inside her head -- (Haughauuhthr'l!) -- and rocked the ocean with an explosive swell, pushing she and Eridan out towards the bubbles and also momentarily deafening her. Rose felt the tiny, telltale sting of blood bloom out her ears, choke up her nose, and the thing that lived behind her eyes beat at her eyelids until it stretched the delicate membrane to bursting. The dead boy was screaming something at her. The edges were smoothed off his words so that they became dull sound only, meaningless, incomprehensible.

She cracked her eyes open before the lids could split, and through the filthy water saw the Horrorterror come about. It was going to make another run. Next to her, Eridan took off immediately: abandoned ship and dove down, making a break for where the thinning seas turned to a sort of orange mist, and there he disappeared from view. Rose screamed every Strider word she’d ever learned to curse his sexual history, present, and probable future.

But she kicked off hard after him. There was no other choice. Seconds separated her from her pursuer and from there, a Rose Lalonde-enforced end of the universe, so she clamped her eyes down shut over her wailing parasite and absconded. As last stands went, it was not magnificent. She was bleeding from every facial orifice it was possible to bleed from, and when she broke through the mist she went ass-over-teakettle onto sudden solid ground.

This took about six layers of skin off her knees, but she hit the floor and lurched to her feet without pause. Rose ran. More technically, she shambled, as her right calf reminded her she had exhausted its resources and the rest of her was seizing up from the light. Rose had been in the darkness so long that leaving the Ring was a flush of hot acid to each nerve, and her surroundings were blotches of colour and shape her brain couldn’t parse. Bloodied, limping, gasping, forward momentum carried her on.

A fresh howl made the ground quake beneath her feet. The Horrorterror burst through behind her, and she made the amateur’s mistake of checking over her shoulder: its burning, dripping arms came first, pulling the terrible black bell of the body forward as it demonstrated dry land would prove no problem. Slower, now, but still quicker than Rose.

If luck was equal to sheer effort, she would have made it. It wasn't. The scream came again, and this one simply knocked her flat on her face. Her vision swam with a mix of sweat, blood, and caustic disappointment --

A new sound layered underneath the unearthly shrill. It was a low, gnawing rumble, and her memory placed the electric whirr even as logic refused to. It was the sound of a chainsaw mechanism being yanked to life. This, she thought dimly, was pure horseshit.

Rose wasn’t fully conscious when the sound neared, nor when it burred directly over her; not when the noise of steel roller chain graduated into the noise of steel roller chain cutting through meat, shearing through stingers the size of Californian redwoods. The low-pitched whine disappeared entirely as tentacles hit the ground like a seriously disgusting rain, and she still wasn’t fully aware when they were kicked off and away from her twitching body.

But she was aware of being scooped up into the tight circle of someone’s arms, wet clothes and all, aware of whiteness and an abrupt blotch of red. The air stung her skin as she was sprinted away like the hounds of Hell were at their heels, and so they were.

“You have impeccable timing,” she slurred.

“You have poor decision-making skills,” said the Sylph of Space.

There were probably worse people to pass out on.