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Chapter Text

Everything was going nicely at first. Drowsing, simply, forming highest disregard of needs that hardly seeked attention, and otherwise promoting somnolence. Perhaps, eyeing the virtual rear a moment, there may have been some...  lessened ideals, by negligence of the hour, but there lay scarcely a need to consider the such. Regarding the moment, all must’ve performed as faultlessly as any past.

So what needed be wrong?

In regrettable fact, the evening prevailed nothing tailored to her indispensables. The beneath held bleak, almost as if sheets withered to a heartless metal, her shape held unparallel to any surface, her shying breath seeming almost frosted from indifference. To simply state, it was inexcusably unsatisfactory—yet without the blink of an eye, she merely shuddered another pant to her pillow.

Perhaps, if to stretch description, it was simply the ajar window crying awfully to the night. Tattered, might likely, it’d hardly been inspected for much any span recallable—regardless its defined interest at all, the land was certainly chilled throughout the latter hours. Merely a misconduct of the very sheets she slept on, or, as hated to admit, an aftereffect of neglect to shut entirely. Quite...  dissimilar, in any regard of understanding, though not implausible.

In the wretched silence, Susie dragged her grip, readjusted a fist, and nuzzled her pillow. For all then, she just churned with the hollow holding cavity, felt one last time the twitch and easiest texture of her grandest, softest, and most soothing appliance of anything, and sighed a last to her personal pad, scrunching it to maintain all her last warmth.

All swell—almost in vague eye of certainty—barely to some tentative comfort, all for the half a moment she let slip the wriggle of comfort absolute. The threat hummed its own falling monotone, perfectly setting all departments necessary to shove some sense in, finally, but she just sighed back and squished her pillow even more.

And suddenly, the squeak arrived as exactly the unforgettable obscurity necessary to knock a fog from the clouds.

Her eye broke open—the other too pressed to care—met to the spiral of a shadow, and at last, the breeze returned, sighed across. In a hurried jolt, her hand fell to the turbulence of the skies above her improvised eyeshade, but she was hardly concerned for more than rubbing her face simple again.

The simplest fact—it was too warm. Hardly so as she’d wished, but as an absolute, her oversized cushion almost shedding its body into its captor, she blinked an expression, sobbed another breath to the bulk of the blurry world, and stared, long and open into the distinct pallor of sunrise so wrong.

Rest assured for her pillow, Susie glimpsed a last warmth with a palm, pushing herself up, into the landscape of cold, dark—at the precise moment of light’s edge. Wobbling, she immediately thrusted a palm to the ground, only to wince as soon at the frost. She snuck another breath, scrambled a hand, and dropped a knuckle forward; though the wind was so close, so breathtakingly indeterminate, sucking, she just collapsed.

The hardest squeak—a droning thump—she could only stare so lifelessly toward the tranquil moment. With the last mind of strength, her head lifted, saw the perfect opportunity of the round, and breathed back into her stuffed sheet. One hand twitched, the other in tiered turmoil, but with the polar zephyr to lull so intently, she just sagged. She reached, back, down to her inventory, only for lost comfort to revive in the worst moment.

By some self-miscommunication or other solely, she just stroked, soothed, and tickled her pillow, however regretfully, obliviously, or disdainfully to her own sense of sleep. Time by an instant, soon an hour, her eyes dripped, seething above how enormously cozy her cushion lay, cradled beneath her head and the freezing air, simply. Dispute as she’d wished, she needed hardly a reason to conflict the passing dreamscape, frost sparks in the air—as much blatant as the first noticeable bound of the underground—and she dozed.

The rest lay at least appreciable for all the moment until the dawn of a shudder so much greater, colder, and, in some indistinct regard, feeble. Her eyes burst, exploded back between chill and nigh light, and as sudden, her hands trembled without her. She lifted wholly, trailing the last fingers across her wobbly pillow, and, by turn of an instant, a blink, and a flinch, she gazed down to the unfathomable drowned blue—prone as any shadowy rock to peripheral.

Her pillow whimpered once more, then twitched, lifted a pallid palm in its front. Gawking, fumbling around the desolate rock face lining the beneath of them both, the hand stood, only to sigh its last and collapse again, an eased sigh returning. She followed in breath, dropped her eyes, and stood, at last, as nothing among the chasm.

Nigh indescribable—her first conclusion—not due to any sole regard, the exponentialized shadows crushed worlds in finding any solid face beside the core. Shallow crags, a sodded outer ring, all to speculation she guided something like breaths synthesized with blankness to the mooned shadows and inanimate creatures of the vaguely dome-shaped gloom. She just rotated for whole seconds, winded by the pale breeze, then, patting her incorrect outfit of nothing, shielded her eyes for the imminent rise to first certainty.

Immediately as the ceiling saw back to her, a high shattering echoed from rear, only to face extinction in a merest beat. Before the first blink she only stood, silent in the unalterable position she’d last lost her head into, then a feigned warmth broke loose—an impetus braved for her. The wind brushed with its own dearly meaningless intent, timed and tested for patience itself, but as all a slap of air it just pushed her hair and sighed back. However eased, however misintended her face must’ve appeared to  the band that couldn’t even see, she concluded beyond mind; in the faintest sign of a shadowy shape, all suddenly bothered was a stare back.

With all the precaution she minded for, she collapsed to the ground beside her sheer pillow, expelled a breath, and dripped her face to the sign of conflict. Dark as damageable, the faces of a backhand, blue, and breathlessness drew near, though nothing as so the parasite overseeing it all. She stood, herself, picked a hand around the shape barely half her height, and stuck a grip to the spongy blob.

The first tug was as doubtlessly futile as aggressive. After a whole second more in sight of her seize, she dropped her palms back to cold air. Both tumbled to the ground, the mellower blue falling hands lower, limper by the instant. Immediately, she felt back the squish of the parasite’s smooth skin—by the pat of some youthful palms against the ground, the time reminded. She dropped it, again, scrambling one formation of fingers behind another, trying a press, a push, a brute power against the tightest leech’s strangling of the trapped eyes beneath, but ultimately, she came to the last conclusion of a vexed breath, mixed waters of her own form of moments past, and a final, futile struggle for dominion over eyesight.

By some unanswerable miracle, the blue blob exploded off, nigh perpendicularly to its host for the sole second she savored her attention. A dart thumping the air of rear, she hushed to a curious pant. Though its chest was too dampened by darkness for distinguishability, she snuck a finger, a palm all the way to the faint patterns and drowned shades of its garments. Ever-smooth, as perfectly envisioned of the past, for an instant her wish to shut her eye atop its smooth form almost resurfaced sincere. A path drew atop the lump without guidance, some line of how smooth and simultaneously chilled it lay over the cavern floor, while it soaked some air to its stomach.

A sudden shiver, a flinch, and a whimper—by conclusion to the indefinite second tailed, she lay back, seated, trembling on balance and breath herself as the spectacle suffocated some more among the shadows. Coughing, first, then choking, a hand parted barely enough into the light for visual; it splayed, thrashed against the floor of the fossilized air as she nearly collapsed. Instants, seconds, she must’ve verged the lack herself by sight alone, the vaguely ellipsoid shadow stumbling from the ground, breaking balance, and crashing back with a last sputter.

Susie watched, blinked, whispering to the silence. Once, twice, beyond, she stared through the coatings of every whatnot, somewhere into the core of a stellar ray, rounded, trapping the sole pillow of the past in its cage of sight. The crags cried their hollow melody, tearing drops to plops all anywhere not hers, and she suddenly groped the shallow plantlife holding her. As lifeless and unseeable as it was, it carried her breath after the entirety of seconds she lasted.

Somewhat intricate, could be said first for the figure’s linings. Wheezing, dropping, it made difficulty in attempting recognizability—the mere fact wasn’t her interest, regardless. She dropped through the frontier of plantlife and pallor, to some press of her fingers into her own palm, then all the way into the blindness. For all her breath could still be strained, the dweller even looked to some degree of live, in first notice of its face.

Almost warming, its closed, cozied pair of blank eyelids reflected as; by time of its looking back, its eyes shone enormously. Another gasp flew, then immediately backed, the scant face parting farther from her palms, down the slightest bump of the center of the pit, and off into the opposite void, whimpers, all the way. Before dropping even her own posture, it cried again, flailed a hand around in its choked pattern, then slumped to expressionlessness all around.

She nearly paused a breath to see its scant puffs the tightest sliver more, but its sole illuminated backhand spoke enough in its position otherwise. Sighing—straying some sound the same herself—a finger extended to the hush of the sobby air, pulling frost and warmth down simultaneously to the unfathomable package of an appendage so similar. Nearer, a breath dropped, her other hand splayed ahead of her face, and finally, she scuffed the grounds of the mirror of its palm. A fire of frigid, it immediately called as, she almost couldn’t let go its tiny edges and frail shivering.

The platform was as soft and smooth as the rest of itself, so much so she hardly noted its floorward pants before the first scurry returned. Her hand dropped as a blue so equally minute to its own reach tore into the light—scraped clothing in line, golden eyes appearing almost to belong to nocturnality—wheezing again, crying harder with the force of breath exclusively into the ground before her. It collapsed again, only to lift its face to the skies, whimper some more, and scrunch its hands into its chest, hyperventilating to the sole onlooker of fused confusion.

The culprit was only imminent; a hopping gazer of the spelunked squished its roundish body with every step, looming from the veiled outer ring. Her hands parted immediately, down, level to the bare rock lining the beneath, around the lifeless silken entity to her ground, and lifted into the air. Backing, she fumbled a readied grip somewhere to her rear, an unmoving breath signaling all cold to the cave, but nothing returned her request. A squint adorned her, and by the time her hand had scrambled into place, she was tumbling.

Toward the ground, somehow she turned however much enough to sop the pressure to herself. She panted with the collision—a whimper coinciding—but for all any noise stung, her eyes only kept on the approach. One last time, she fought for inventory, wherever it was, though all left in her command was a softest, smoothest pillow imaginable.

A puff, a drop, and at last, a brace, she scrunched her breathless cushion, an eye lost between transmission of darkness. The thudding reigned, cheered itself around; higher, a creeping whip flung to the skies, crying its own song of spit and inexplicable sound. One more squish, her whole body shivered from hold itself, and she blinked.

The final stare was fairly aimless, in least regard.

She broke her eye a moment more from her crushed cushion. A parasite stood the ground before, goggly-eyed and blank in its stiff-styled wave of sheer steel, secreting noticeable saliva each span of seconds it stood. In its first blink, it sagged, roping its tongue down to its own head, and gazed the ground. Before its googly stare, she could almost recall her eyes to their smooth subcavern and twist some breaths back out, among the rather peculiar spectacle it appeared to be attempting.

Even passive, neutral, at minimum, the creature impressed as. Spinning, endlessly, its eye and gaping tongue sparred with the silence every fling of its spit it shaped back around with, a lifeless pair of eyes to nevertheless remind of a smile soon to lack beneath its front. Nothing stylish, nothing remotely considerable, the sudden task seemed merest comparable to the jitters spawning from her hold.

With a struggled support, ill keeping her entire extended form accurate to balance, she finally glimpsed. Precise as was regrettable, still, the deep rocks, green, and juts of round emphasized in something, sulking in silence. The breeze rushed with a shiver in conjunction, a skip of rear imminent, though for focus, she lay adrift. Around, nearing her bulk’s lower tip, her hand suddenly stopped, scrunched, and sank, again, almost feeling the true climate of void.

Drowning somewhere, more, she sat to the far reverberations, the frown approaching. She sought a midst of soothy something, perhaps, but her own pillow just stared somewhere, indifferent. Harder, louder, the caverns echoed back, a dome of twisted truth—she couldn’t bear reinspect her own inventory—and a wheezing spoke back to it. First...  unintelligible, so disorienting she just shook her head and rubbed it with her sheet, next breathtaking, but she didn’t even mind.

“Well you guys ain’t much the talking bunch, are ya’?”

Hardly, she even noticed the impending spoke of a blob prodding her from level stature; it was a whimper, of all things, to distract her.

She was upright in another second, extra caution ensured for her hold to remain admissibly afloat. Panting, herself, she turned to the sag of an odd face so devastated beneath her, the round ground of pale light and its nonexistent beyond, and finally, the gaze of darkness. Somewhere, she could feel the gusts returning, torching the silence with chill breaths of their own, but nowhere, the otherworldly, almost cosmic formation of first sound lightened any sense of hers.

“Over here, ya’ dingus,” the voice mirrored of somewhere in the rear; she turned to find nothing. A few stutters and sudden syllables sequenced in the seconds succeeding. “Eh, fine. Since ‘parrently I gotta be the one doin’ this stuff ‘round here.”

An unequal sigh broke of somewhere in the shadowed sidelight. Staring, soon backing, slightly, she turned her eyes anywhere fathomable of the general front, squishing her hold the slightest more as breath continued sparking in, out, and lost, infinitely. Seconds spanning, a sudden gleam spoke from the rock, high, dull, yet piercing in some inexplicable nature—crystal echoes. Louder by moments, the solidification only scraped following, nigh the point of discomfort by its finale, and with a merer pant, a broken spy, the air lashed forward, so hard it trued winces by its calling.

Virtually everlasting, the wind brushed before as, but the shield of her palm stood so much longer. Whether to merely silence herself, shush her held being of its nothing gasps, or whatnot else, she couldn’t faintly describe, gazing in through the core of an only light, silent skies, and wings of uncertainty.

“Shadow Marx!”

A face sunk into its palm beside. She could hardly move, herself, but even relatively she was a statue to the blob’s even bob.

“Yeah, whaddya want now?” Shadow Marx huffed, his face tilted.

The curved one just continued a facepalm, breaking a sigh. “You neglected the beginning of your opening sentence.”

“Then why din’cha tell me that before, hmm?”

“I am a subordinate, not a seer, sir.”

“‘Ay! Don’t you...  call me that!”

The grayed ovoid bowed, slightly, drooping his hands to his stomach in a fashion almost reminiscent. Backing, himself, his gaze faded into the slightest shadows as golden wings spared the rest of the breeze forward.

“You seein’ that?” His jester hat drooped as he turned back upward. “Man, just trying some opening stunt for some specials here, then he’s gotta come along and bat me for it.”

He turned, popped his tongue to his sole company at level. Again, only met with a backhand and audible exasperation, he twisted back, surveyed the landscape—all a giant grin eager with something like a drooly wave—then dropped his smirk back to the only weight it’d been momentarily known.

“Yeah, what’s it now with you?”

It must’ve only seen nonchalance in the skies of forward, slapping its tongue against the specks of abyss itself before a mouth so carelessly gaping. Droplets rained, soon, alongside scrapped trails in the air, bright buoys from the stars; she flinched far enough in some sole, distant travel. Floaty, fluent, they journeyed, the blob journeyed, adventuring forward toward the face of shade until an unfathomable flinch quieted the whole spectacle.

“‘Ay!” he barked, face back. “Servant! Get this little slobby-er outta here!”

There was nothing. The blue creature just sagged, and scooted off—by some mark of the moment, it was the mindless motion, of all things, to restore the first warmth. A face’s rear crying out in such the whine it seemed only he’d ever possess, she finally stared. Far, where only a sphere and a shadow purged the pallor, she could almost see some distant shape forming in a mirrored hand, like a handle, a pulser, the steadily rearing illusion behind a faded suit. Reachable, doubtless, the only obstacle in her path stood the only stare back to her.

She blinked with the careful rub of an eye, then the other. All light patch and the cavity scurried back, against her with two gazes of vague and varying indifferences, but the only pulse it seemed was left lay in her very hold.

Shadow Marx glanced up from the exact frigid panting. “He always like that?”

She glimpsed a narrow breath, traveling her eyes from the floor to the only face above.

“I can hear that all the way over here, you really not care?”

Turning, beyond the face, she just whispered nothingness to herself. In tune with breath only, she shifted back, expended another moment more in the futile silence of her only expressionlessness in hold, and finally parted gaze. The whole scene squished before dampened curtains, and, dropping a hand from the superabundant sighs of her portable cocoon, an entire eye reformed the enigma of its hand-patterns—she felt back to inventory, snagged the first trace of solid anywhere, and drowned before her aim, a second flinch of anything.

All at once, everything had stalled. Her pillow hushed in a final gasp, its floating doppelganger simultaneous with the sudden lack of hands, but her sole target was the only one existing—a bloated blob escaped the wrath, somehow, but she just stalked among the ice. Hardly, it mattered to her the feel, the weight, anything perception stated so blatantly wrong about her dearest pointer of the moment. Just the silencing gaze was all left of her, and her mind for even it had expired.

“You have exactly ten seconds to begin explaining yourselves and your intent before I set this weapon to mark seven and blast your entire wing off. Timed now.”

With a smirk, a giggle too sudden, then stark fangs enveloping the gawk of his mouth, he just laughed. A breath exploded before her, somewhere a goo resounding its melody of bounds again, and suddenly, she’d lost the sense of silence.

“Oh?” Shadow Marx cried. “What’s this? The girl, of all of you, is the one standing up to me?”

He bounded in his station, laughing before little anything beside a signature sigh and something like a faint click against the cavern echo. For moments, seconds, whatnot beyond, she stared so deeply; she could only see time clocking, lurking right behind him.

“Match me impressed!” He chuckled a good several more seconds. “Y’know,” he said, verging what looked another hysteric in the eye of a pistol, “I just recently had someone like you, here. She tried the same thing! ‘Course, there was a shebang to be done, but she really wasn’t going without a fight. Oh, and I stole all your stuff, too. Keep trying stuff like that, I may just have a new jester to class.”

Her squint fell. “I do believe you quite misunderstand the definition of your words. Now, answers, please.”

“Still so sure of yourself?”

He reared what looked half a step for himself, his face following. With only an expected slap to return, he tilted back with a samey grin, eyes almost woozy.

“Wanna do the honors?”

The subordinate echoed himself, then approached from the nigh of shadow. Instantly, she shifted her grip, tilting, flinching it a few times between the two until finally settling on the eyes more aimless than unfazed. He bowed, grasped his thumbs from their spots over his stomach, then lowered, barely.

“I suggest you provide your handheld arm a thourougher inspection, ma’am.”

She tightened her balance and scrunched her pillow once more. Against the face of a wobbly pistol, the gray eyes blinked, long, intently, then hovered back to their prior position.

“Man,” Shadow Marx droned, “even she wasn’t so dense. You’re holding a hunk of wood right now, you know that?”

In texture, she’d long noted something, but only with the next faint of her cushion did anything resonate beyond the frame shielding her consciousness. She felt a finger around the grip, the trigger, anything she could recall—all as intact, meticulously designed as another, if not a bit much convex around the barrel—a first cold seeping in by mere touch alone. Bursting with quality, seeming with design, color, shape, smoothness, everything, the foolish tool stared her back with the eye of a lacking logo, filling by laughably distinct imperfection; she turned it so many times with the opportunity of silence standing before her. Tainted, entirely, almost...  to the brim of fury.

By next instant, her hand raised behind her own head, a target seeked, locked by the stupid grin on his deep gray face, and flung back, down, then all around again, hurling in direct path toward eyes still oblivious to the impending weight. It spun, thrashed against the air itself—she squished all any sense of heat she had left of herself, her very pillow into the whirlwind of the soaring decoy by stare alone—and by first, most luscious sound, her squint sweetened.

However armored his scales may have appeared, he flinched, barely still under line of fire. He instantly refaced with a sharp hiss, an exact inducement of a whimper and a prevailing whine, then an explosion of a monstrous grin so unfathomably forbidding. Lurching back to a statue above ground, a shrill terror intended and missed entirely, he sputtered some cosmic enigma, sparred with sound one last time, then disappeared behind the mere coating of a sheathed spotlight. With one more facepalm, a shrug, his only other approached from the darkness for a last groan of some sort, snapped his fingers, then disappeared the very same.

Then it was quiet, at last. Still, she couldn’t feign drop of her searing breath, her mind, so meticulously bent on one last scorch of anything she could find her hands to. A crazed look, she must’ve held, grim, laughable, but none of it mattered. If just to settle her last breaking squint on something alive, nothing would alter her decision—all, somehow, until a lesser quiet, somewhere among the subground.

It was her pillow, blinking, for once, shivering even noticeably among her hold. Each second pant of its carrier, it whined, shook again, until finally, it noticed the pallor of her exterior—the true char of eyes so scrunched and shaped—and sobbed. Inexplicably, she just watched, silenced after a faint, falling gasp. Not anything that she understood what it was, its intent, its doing, even, she saw straight into the darkness where its face once stood, but all still remained was the rock fossil of its cavern.

She seated herself, equally cold and vigorous as it, blank confusion. Hardly, there lay need to see into it, but she couldn’t look away. It was empty. Weightless. To provoke mere decency back to the air, she could’ve simply tossed it back into the gape of darkness; its immense smoothness couldn’t yet faze her touch. That she still held it at all should’ve stood the greatest mystery, but in a sudden cold, a sweat in her palm, the gooey mess wandering in its endless circle disappeared alongside everything.

She raised her grip, held it upright, leaning against herself, but it just continued its sorrowful expression, dropping tears every moment it still existed alongside her. Even, she stared the great smoothness of its head, the cheek between its elongated ears, but in simplest reality, she truly saw nothing in it. In regrettable fact, she didn’t even mind her gravitation of the droplets, the nonexistent face of whatever eyes so faint and hollow before; she just tilted her head to the moonlight through the only hole in the roof, contemplating alongside a distant confusion and a specimen she’d somehow roped herself into.

Chapter Text

It was extensively frigid.

Above the unwilting underbrush and all else captive to the cavernous crags, she served the only neglect of the subterranean climate. With a sole hand, she grasped the spokes of the air, the other perched with softness to silence; the grass, hardly needing it, pleaded so dearly to the one who didn’t care for some strayed drips. That she needed feel the stark surface stood the least of concerns for the moments against sheerness—by constrained shivers, faintest reflections of the moonlight, there was a formula among the unknown.

It was only certain—her basis had stooped to sheer guesswork on the matter, but there was no other option. By another blink, Susie could see the glade of the yawning dome, some crude flooring, the specks of cracks and impressions spiring either half an instant to the crust or deep into some magmatic enigma, all, of course, without the switch of her head. There was a rock to be exposed, and she was pinpointing it.

Her hand darted between juts, across the shortest stone plains, by each ridge of the corner she came across—all the while, her hair breezed in quite the least relaxation it was, ever. Her grip swished, shied of looseness several times among the scant breath she paid it with, but her carry-on was no match for the single palm rested along its silken back. She couldn’t even care to look down a smidge to tell its short-lived whispers to the onlookers so equally nonexistent, for if she dared see such a futile cavern again, she’d have more likely lost herself against another stare to the eternal night.

Her hair flew again. With another purr from the frozen draft, she breached along a faint corner of the inner crag, and sighed. Her creature winced the slightest, absorbing her entire breath, though it returned to stiff shivers, soon, as she groped the next bridge of darkness. The air roared against her back again, even more ferociously in the slight pat it brought to its affliction. She stopped, suddenly, and turned to the spotless patch of the path she’d been tracing. On the farthest outskirts, a blobby bounding reigned among the silent stimulation.

It seemed even realistic, she noted, turning back—only for that instant, even, before seeing open. Surely, the tingling must’ve said worlds in whatever complex she’d lost herself among, though with its deep, almost glowy goggle faced into her, barren eyes, she paid no mind to the last seconds or so she’d just expended into the mindless sensation.

Among the pallid light reflecting its scathed attire, its stare was stark.

Its head flew back to her own subground upon a click and a initialization of rock grating. With another flop of its head, it shook, shifted away, leaving itself as far from her as it could among her grasp—truthfully, she could hardly note a difference in her hold. Somewhere, a block and a blue face frizzled and grated among the damp deepness, but before the unheard squirm of her specimen, it fizzled.

The sole cragface finally completed its crumble from some far corner. Her glance felled upon the relative shade, somewhere, a moment to lie as the soggy tongue responsible rose from its planed rock undersheathing, skipped a whole half its bodily height toward the invisible ceiling, and flew, droning its mess of tears behind every pat toward the new opening among the wall. She could barely recognize what it’d even done, truthfully.

With another peek toward her trembly dweller—its eye desperately hung between the last tips of her hair—she dismissed the unspoken presence, and followed the blobby being’s last tangible step from the cold-cored chassis of whatever excavation so primitively deficient, somewhere into the new, narrow darkness.

She nigh struck stillness at the slender air. A squeak murmured of the farther underground, again, though she could hardly recall whether it was a first for herself or it. She gazed it, its shivery ears—the endless hall of eternal flames spiring from their stands along the scant brick walls, all the way into a vertical slab. The blob, frankly, didn’t care, and just hopped right by the impediment, into invisibility.

She nearly hesitated upon the end of the corridor. Stark into a shallow pillar, a spiked breeze bumbling from beyond another forever of torchlights, she lost, retook a breath at the first sight. Without another spared moment, she brushed the breeze, heading by the first central pillar of the dilated hallway.

Truthfully, she was nothing shocked or startled of the rusted metals, the bruised bars piercing the winds into their eternal home—however primitively criticizable, she could bear a meager glance, at most. The shivers grazing her palms and the sheer face of her outfit, her eyes wandered along the dustway, one cell upon another stacked, laterally, one box beside the next looming beyond unfazed tradition, forever.

The blob kept bursting across the opposing end of the cages until finally, bumped into a dim pillar twelve times too many, it strayed. Her grip nearly tumbled by the approach, but it was nothing of its aura, she was certain—one unfathomable peek away, her carried kept breaking shivers, so hard she almost felt a difference since leaving the dome-room. Its face plunged into nothing, it felled its winds to the air, shying slightest breezes by its beneath; somehow she couldn’t look away for all it panicked.

With a frown, the googly face skipped into the abyss; seconds, minutes, she held the unsubsiding shudders. She swished against the shadow’s habitat. Dark clouds littered, the limitless essences holding each their burning pledge, she, for once, almost felt to wave a hand beneath her face. With an inward breath, she started down, into the only line where torches didn’t dwell.

A first instant into the narrowest strip, a cold plating fell over her. The air immediately fretted its will across—a wince and a shield of eye the most of its infliction—but she started beyond the chill. Shivers slipped nigh, breezing by each breath of the desolate exhibition, but for all she noticed, her grip was tight on her only pillow. Far, yet simultaneously tangible as the dawn of her own lifelessness, the first touch of new light taunted behind the miniscule patch she still found herself among, but she just trailed the first dense spark, however mindlessly.

It was no colder than among the shadow’s band, yet she almost felt ready to sigh all the breath she’d neglected, after the briefest journey—then spoke a monstrous metal screech. Her head was so instantly tight with coldness she nearly started for her inventory at the sound. Her held quaked quite more so than the precise moment prior, pants by every wandering blink her own; she couldn’t help but miss the point of the entire spectacle drooling at her from its sudden explosion from the dark. It took no long to notice the veiled blue responsible for such a startle, but for all the moments she lingered behind the very end of the walkaway, she was befuddled on its doing.

Without another skipped beat, the blob hopped from ahead the only creaking cell, garnering another whimper as it started into the truest finale of blighted light—a planked door so great and looming to the hall barely twice her height. The gate croaked to the nudge of a tongue, then lay silent for the rest of the bounds toward immediate unknown.

The steps loomed of beneath as she rose the whole moment into the face of the doorway. A breeze swiftly shushed the opportunity at her slightest lean; the rightmost of the duo of doors clicked shut, suddenly. She poked her face toward her beneath—the being’s head still lost, rigid beside her—then the spiring gate, then the whole hall past until nearly dizzying herself. The only torchlight served from seconds back, yet she latched a palm over the sunken handle unerred, all the traces of containments listed to nowhere in mind as she started into the new dome. The gate thudded behind her.

She was blinded by the instant fog. She raised a hand, inexplicably, her eyes wincing as she attempted notice of any sort of surroundings under the dimmest lit dark. Her hand looped between her forehead and her grasped, so many times, sparse flames tearing from the dull distance, but she just mistook a look behind herself and fell into the colder abyss.

A stiff spoke, a rising plate, the rugged floor sighed before the brushes of the wind, crying a name every moment she stared forward. The springing rained from all corners of the hollow, one instant a breeze swished, another a pebble slipped across the scantly smooth floor, all the way to the vague tip of noticeability by motion alone. So stamped in silence, outright indifferent, she stopped, nigh the tiniest plateau of a rock palm, and stood the inevitable tests of all else sighing a title together—one with the darkness, a grain skipped before her, zagging so close she soon lost it behind her horned shadow.

The first crack spoke so suddenly, distinct enough to each form and line across the swerving fissure—the rest following in suit soon enough to force a wince out of her. The outlines of ears drew, then its corresponding rings, then blues, a gooey stare, dripped from its dizzy abyss, suddenly the brink of a light so bright she needed rear as a burst felled from its celestial skies.

“Gah!”

A horrible breeze chilled across her eyes, though she didn’t need to raise her hand to recognize the only face who hexed vexation.

“Wait, wait—just hold up a second. You guys ain’t s’posed to be here. Nuh-uh.”

A similar sigh broke of the higher skies. Without what looked half a care for the morphing drone aboard the wings’ captor, the subordinate slithered back, his palm strapped to his face.

“You guys miss me that much, or what? Be more than glad to serve to ya’, if all you wanted was—”

He barely slipped away from the same hurling blaster in time to keep himself unscathed. After staring the decoy to the ground, he refaced with another shrill, a tireless squint among the only stare toward him.

“Keep it down, will ya’?” he barked.

“I will not be tolerating your likeness scarcely among my audience.”

He gawked for all an instant before her hair swayed and her grip tightened. “It’s Shadow Marx! C’mon, gimme—”

Shadow Marx held his mouth ajar, then drooped, slightly.

“What kind of audacity is that? Think you’re a boss around here, or something? Lemme a break—you’re under this roof, and you’re nothing a standout from your very kind, y’know that? What’d you think you was doing, tryna’ escape from where I left you? No, no, you were just supposed to live in that little-bitty dome forever and ever, and you’d get hungry for all the rest of your lives, and you’d go crazy or something, and—”

“If you may pardon the interruption,” the subordinate said, sliding from his bold shadow, “might I reiterate that you promised to decommission your secreted switch among several prior occasions?”

He whirled aback. “I was gonna get to that!”

“You were going to do it yesterday.”

“Well, uh...” Shadow Marx swished his wings around, fronted, his huff nigh indiscernible among the stretch of his glimpse. “Anyway! Since you guys are dying to see me so much, I guess I can let you some of the ‘special treatment’, hmm? Nice you got your kiddo here for this, too, ‘cause the ride’s gonna be all the best.”

Her hair faced another breeze. Among the silence, she nearly recognized the greatening shivers sighing over her—its consequent whimpers and mumbles screeching, all the way.

The subordinate drooped his face and reared as Shadow Marx pointed his cheek forward.

“Man, I know this place inside n’ out, and where you guys coming from ain’t far—but what’s up with him, hmm? He a block of ice, or what? You a block of ice? What kind of little mess did you guys even freeze yourself with? Jeez, I mean, I’m not all...”

A finger darted once more into its deepest confine, then felled as far forward as he could reach—strung all the way across the distance between both of the pallid sky without so much a sigh to coincide with his unearthly stretch. The length was only inevitable, but in all the blink and chore of a pressing weight upon her forehead, she only barely saw the haze of two murky faces, clouding from the high skies, roaming from each their nightly stall.

It was so damp and dark, looking into the pale strike of ears facing her back. Intangible to the drips, the mist of a zigging droning, a scorchingly exasperating tone, it churned, it waggled alongside the whole swirling face of itself—only a mudded breeze scribbling across the dizzying skies as her head fell from its own cosmos, plunged into the blue moon keeping her hands aligned, her eyes lost.

Or, perhaps, a deeper satellite would suffice. Certainly, there was some impellent to scouring some one-off craters, decrepit seas yet untainted, pleading glances by every sweep across the stars. If, only, to see some sedimented grounds—if to once take a hand, scrubbed from its machinal dispensing undeterred, and sigh it over some vaguely discernable pales—there were metals to be expended. There were plethoras of faceless gazes apt for any duty, even. Such a mild investment, it was only what purpose it’d ever have, regardless...

A broken eye for all a moment, Susie stalked her fingers across the uneven plane, marched in a final few clicks and a button, then sighed alongside the clasp of her screen. Staring dusted binds, whole shelves of mindless voraciousness cramming well over numbness, her head only fell. A hand reached, instantly, a sludge hurling toward her face until seeing, too, the utter reach it was nothing capable of; she needed not a case more to steam into her stiff bristles.

It wasn’t even that she was neglectful. She’d managed plenty—whether in self-etiquette or actual work. The places were dry, the curbing pools were rich harvested; all she ever needed was another glance. Just a breeze of her head, really, where all the tireless grays, the purposeful bays still stood so simply, brushing all the baleful breezes like it was the only color that could never associate itself with such a deed.

Her laptop dreamed all a sigh of its above before being abandoned in the pallor. She was hardly even sure where she was going, herself, but in a moment, she’d found precisely what it was—at a perfect sill to hold an appliance some time or other, she sagged her hands, huffed, and eyed nowhere. As far as nowhere, as reachable, as inexplicably enthralling as nowhere, she stood and stared.

A strand of grass croaked to itself, followed by another, and onward. She leaned laterally. Somewhere among the sidelines, where a shadow could’ve pinched itself without all of her minding the slightest, she fixated her head over some vague hills, rolling thrills lining the endless, mindless plantlife of an eternal corner. She swished again. Among another front, a level trail extended all the same, deep, tiny, relatively, somewhere into the exact line of unlabeled woods. For a moment, some stark sleep sounded the nicest thing fathomable.

Between the stars, she gazed so carefully, tree to tree, so listlessly, dot to dot, as she continued to sigh about every notion recallable. She blinked a prolonged second. Somewhere beyond the exosphere, a planetoid aged in silence, flickering to her, solely—somewhere, a plant twiddled from its direct beneath—and finally, she set her hands flat, her head dripped, and eyed the indefinite darkness on her own will.

It wasn’t even herself, but for once, she couldn’t tell what it was so substantial among the view. To hold such capability, there were uncountable nights to be reheld and sessioned, bidings to be nourished and plummeted until nothing lasted of her own well-being—all considered, she wasn’t even sure what she was trying to fathom it being. Her own eyelids may have been quite the greatest thing to dawn for each sparing moment, but even she knew she could only blink so long under such a shivery substance.

All a moment and the world left to care, she just listed an egg, and stared her mind until the landscape faded back to its eternal shadow. Great, shying wills, perfectly unputrefied planes and elevations to sap, some time or another...  she just froze over again.

Beyond verdant blankets across lands, beneath the tricky tries of stellar lights unheard, and atop the shortest hill able to hold such distinguishability, there sat an egg. Among all roles of the wind, it shook.

She finally sighed, parted her hands from their rest, and slogged through her null grounds. Without so much a twitch of her fingers, she groped around the blurry table carrying her laptop until trudging over the blankness she needed, then plodded into the forever before the doorway. A final sigh and a sag to the world, she slid her hands to her sides, drooped alongside her hair, and whirled into the next brink of silence.

Suddenly, she stopped. For a moment, she couldn’t even tell what’d warmed her, but in another gaze around the spinning lab, the exact color breathed again. Stumbling to the correct orientation, she held a hand to her cheek as she blinked long enough to keep herself upright. Among the far forward of the unfathomable corner stood a good-sized, tinted tube, bubbling in all absolutely nothing and itself. A couple else crowded it, but she was hardly focused anymore.

She’d have had the most despisably exasperating look on her face, all giddy and nonchalant as she’d have never been under any decent circumstances, but she didn’t care for reason. Out the first seconds, down, through the rest of the hall and the entry, she slogged into the depths of deepest darkness, only to finally stare nothing of ahead. She almost forgot what she’d been doing, truthfully.

A sudden gust brought her round to the right orientation, and she started so clumsily into the faint distance where the captivating window always led to. It’d have taken more than an incredulous rarity to keep her forward—much less on the right track—but somehow she got everything necessary to stand up the shortest angle of the hill unpopulated, staring into the exact shape of an egg shivering far from the moonlight.

A dropped finger, then her entire form...  it was extensively frigid. She reared her face upon latching herself to it. With an unfathomable breath, she twisted back around to where the wind once lulled, the plating of an accommodation that could see as well as she could for all the night. She slid, so smoothly and sluggishly toward wherever she was hoping, dropped somehow into the face of soothing lights—brushed right beyond the first door she just sprang from—and finally slogged into the finest room she’d have liked for the moment to collapse atop her bed.

Tomorrow...  just tomorrow...

Regardless if it’d been an entire twilight trued, some sleep would’ve seemed the greatest feat manageable for ever—had it not been for the blinding sunrise hurling so mesmerizingly. She suddenly woke, twitched before the dawn still emanating its ever spectacle, her face precisely parallel to a dizziness and a dazzle before jolting in place. The blob was already scooting among the wasteland, yet its sight was all the stamp she needed to blink the last against a blazing orb, gasp, and lunge so far she toppled to the ground.

The sphere painted the fleeting light for a moment as it rammed the ground  she’d just stood. Staring, prone, she couldn’t even notice how close her specimen was to knocking the rock against her backhand.

“C’mon, that was a perfect shot!” Shadow Marx cried from his stance above. “‘Ay, Blobby, lemme get this one.”

The subordinate just sighed, and pointed toward their entrance with his only free hand of ever. Shadow Marx cackled to the ceiling as she stumbled into balance, then furled his wings forward, a crackling sphere instantly darting through his line of sight. She sidestepped in a moment.

Another bolt spiraled toward, then another, again—finally, she bothered to recall her nonexistent inventory. With an instant of sour warmth to savor as she turned behind another projectile, she followed into a sigh and finally swished around. Immediately, more sparks hailed upon the field far, beside, anywhere but her uncurved path toward the farthest and simultaneously most gratifying door to soothe for all until she could actually reach it.

She was remarkably intact for the straight she was heading, even. Each poorly constructed shot, each pitifully pathetic aim toward the ring of grass and its lining stone spokes, she almost could’ve stopped for a moment to break a merest giddiness. Despite the invisible shivers, eternal whimpers, she bothered a check of her specimen—above all the grained stare, reflected share of eyes so starkly blunt, somehow she felt to turn around to exactly the sun’s gaze that surely wasn’t there.

Surely, she’d known how to reinforce her attire. For all the moment, however, she surely knew the precisest glimpse she was ever to take before the final word of doors so close, a flare so enormous and tangible hurtling behind her back—silently eyeing the blue lump hurling from hold in a pity, itself.

She screamed. She couldn’t move, she couldn’t even see beyond the realm of her eyelids—stark numbness, pure null, all the way down. An enormous cloud thudded alongside her resurfacing, though she was so simultaneously lightheaded and stinging she couldn’t bear look to wherever she’d just tossed her hands.

“Double hex!"

She raised a palm among the stilled sunrise, but it was far little, far late; the whole grounds paled by the turn of an entire new star forth. The gaping hole gazed her back, almost tentatively, contemplating its choice of color between hazing purple and cosmic soil, until she strained the last sight of a perfect pillow in hold and sighed into lifelessness. The puncture of air itself slipped a scale, then a countless civilization of them, together, protruding so far into the sky it led chills down—only to truly slam down a moment after, grasp her with force so feeble against that of mechanism, and sign her whole body into the sky, the lasting contract a final faint against the softest spot of the crags.

“Woohoo! You see that?” He led some air alongside the shivering of luminescence. “Hey, bring the Hefts out here, won’cha? I got places to be, so catch you guys later! Behind closed doors—ooh!”

A vague sheathing arose of the thinnest air, then the whole skies dwindled to a dull moon. Even after the crack of fingers, the graze of an air levitated so near for the moment, she could only struggle among silence.

“I’m only doing—” The subordinate suddenly stamped a hand to his side. “I’d best be lending him some assistance. You guys should probably get going.”

With a repeated snap, the final moonlight dissipated into dark matter.

Even after so long of stillness to revive herself, she could barely lift a finger from her painfully mudded hand. She couldn’t breathe without stinging herself all over. So many times, she attempted so much a blink, but be it the dust in the air or the chilling breeze, something wasn’t cooperating; the whole world stung as a blurry gray, brown all over. After all, it was so, so close...

There sat the slightest mention of blue. She nearly huffed at the sight, but for the moment, she was struggling more with the sense of pain than sight. A finger flew to a whole hunch of her knuckle, then dropped, defeated. The wind breezed back by. With another scrunch of her eyes, she stole a final pant and reared her eyelids as far as they could ever stretch—beside the myriad mire, before the stout door, there sat a prone ovoid, lifeless as herself in such a pale stare.

She almost suffocated herself, but she pressed so much she was let no choice but braindead fortune to continue sustaining her own look. As far as she could see, it wasn’t even blinking—at least, not distinctly enough for her to tell—but she just took all a moment’s glance into her head to see the lining of her flat palms. It was prone to anything, of hers or subterranean’s, it was in such an inexplicable indifference, doubtless, but most of all, it was eyeing her back.

She struggled against concepts and her own breath for some minutes until finally breaking her hand’s energy supply. With a feeble flop, it scooted as far as the wind was willing to carry, then sagged a surrender. She shut her eyes for presumed age, only to suddenly bolt her face open at the distant thumping. The door was so far away, but already, she was scanning the second of land she could see for what life remained among the wasteland.

Beyond a skip and a gooey drool behind, it was still there. She budged another hand forward. There was no path, even, but she couldn’t stop. Mind after mind, second past moment, she begrudged all her dwindling strength into each her fingers for any vague cooperation—if only to the point she could get the motion across—but in all, they just stared, eternally.

“Go.”

She sagged. It followed, falling limper.

“Leave,” she whispered, finally, then the door burst so loudly alongside a hurling of steps she was instantly floored.

The grass panted under so many flattenings, but she couldn’t tell what was supposed to be a hand or a foot, even. A soothing warmth flew under her, then another pair alongside a distant crowd of hands, and she flung into the air with only a breath to savor for herself. Down a single step, then another in perfect coordination, she finally breathed, blinked, and sighed with the otherworldly travel of her body.

Then there was the surest glance—a pale blue, wobbling upright. It backed a single instant for as long as she could see, then she drew limp in their hold. Somewhere, it’d be safe. The analysis could wait, even, sometime until beyond confines. After all...  it was only a native.

It was scurrying, rearing, first, then bumbling off, as far as its puny palms and feeble fingers could touch, as long and tirelessly as some upright stature she could’ve never possessed. Sometime, it’d make it across the rest of the dome-room—somewhere where the blob also stood, even. She was fine, herself; just a drop of her head, a sigh of her own fingers toward the ground was all she minded.

Somehow, it’d be as fine as she was—carried through a familiar swish in the breeze, hefted across an unforgettable click among the enormous doorway.

Chapter Text

The wall spiraled its gaze from all wheres. It was so slow, so silent, so mesmerizingly disparate from the angles of reach, the sheer measure of time between rock and fossil—a cavern of unrivaled illusion, itself. It tore through sound, it shattered the mere breaks of skips and scuttling, all the way until his first thrash of hand, his only attempt to reach at all.

Magolor slapped flat to the ground. A bound flew through the sidelines, the flat fork of darkness and rock together ripping the ability to blink from his eyes. His palm shook without his hand. An enormous doom thumped from the rear of an even deeper darkness, echoing, turning the heads of limp stone itself. He tried reaching again, only to fall to another squish.

His back screeched, suddenly, and his face tore upright—there was green light. A palm splashed into the shallow grass, and he crept forward until the wind smashed him to the floor a second later. The grass spikes instantly reached up, writhed around in his gaze to nowhere for a shiver and an exposure of a well he couldn’t bear consider anymore. He could even see the wood.

Steps crowed to him until his sheer revival; he exploded upright to nearly just stumble to a slope again. Frigid stares, a splintering barkface—the wood just stared him back until the wrath of an enormous, goggly pair of eyes loomed into obstruction. Another step traced of behind. He stopped as the gooey beast scooted toward the trunk, almost shoving him down. It gawked. He bunched his fingers into a palm. The stamps were so nigh they were rolling under his very breath.

A tongue flung through the air, into the bar across the wooden panel, and out showed an entire cavity through the wall the blob couldn’t bear resist. He almost turned back; he almost drifted, even. He shivered as he stared the blue back through the narrow chamber. The approachers stamped closer, shining an entire storm across him, but only when it resonated real did he finally think to move.

Through the stonewall corridor—stabbing winds, all the way—he made it seconds before collapsing again. The entrance exploded of behind. He tried reaching again, he tried twiddling fingers among each other just to see he was capable of it, but it was nothing; he scathed the ground with his palm like a boulder in the breeze. A blue face skipped and twirled ahead, on contrary a wild scurrying kept bursting toward, but all of a sudden, he just shut his eyes, scrunched up, and wept.

Then there was nothing.

It took until his back pained again could he see, though he hadn’t a clue where to look. He shivered to nothing, he didn’t blink so a pebble could come along for its duty, but all that existed was a rising blue hump.

The stick scratched his head, then suddenly disappeared behind his wince and an impossible tongue’s smack. There was a snap of a twig to a trunk’s stead, then the scuttling stopped to make way for a higher, squishier bound. He attempted rearing at the next crack and awe, only to just wheeze and reach a hand to where his head stung.

He barely turned around in time to see the facelessness of a being so colossal—towering the same level as the blue blob—so stiff in waddly feet, so stunned in the final moments before its stark eye and greenish form fell right into a monstrous gape. The blob reached and scratched its own head with its tongue among the haze.

He picked himself up after the next chilliest breezes. A creak fell from behind; he jumped, spun, and sparred breaths with the wall while he stammered among the blurry world enveloping. He almost saw his own shadow in the wooden firelight.

The gooey being skipped into the wall some five times more, then gaped all around with its tongue. He spun his hand back, nearly scathing himself on one his wall’s stands of fire. The shut bark eyeing him from back, dulls, burning pledges standing from everywhere, he stared the ground long enough to notice where he wasn’t headed—the darkness still wrapping him.

He scampered so suddenly down the hall, against the wall, he nearly tumbled right into the next rockface. He wheezed some more against the line’s fork. Somewhere, a blue bounding continued its march, farther by each instant he continued biding. Rubbing his eyes, nearly collapsing under the weight of his own robes, he tumbled toward without second thought.

The gooey being just stamped onward without face—he was fumbling too much to notice even its color, but a dedicated way would’ve sounded the nicest thing. Its tongue twisted alongside it, hurling equal drools to the enclosed skies of nothing. He was so far behind it, already, but he didn’t dare reconsider.

Stumbling so fast, he suddenly lost himself. Slapping another hand against the wall—the scrape of some wood patch so unfathomably comforting—a hollowness thudded a response, and he huffed. He limped forward, only for his stomach to hurl more dizziness from the world. He couldn’t eye back, anymore. He couldn’t see, anymore. He gasped for breath, nearly let a drop spill from his mouth. His hands locked, and a stiff spoke stepped aboard his back, a shadow’s blink towering from right behind, but somehow, he scraped by with only whimpers.

The slit cleared long enough for light to somehow burst through, and he exploded so far forward—out from darkness’ flare. He fell right to the ground, but he was more than prepared. With some more haze spat to the scathing soil, whines spent to his coarse course, he sapped all the rest of his strength out for another second into the skies, free from rungs of his own stinging head and the coldness of a blinding rear, ever-nigh.

Something clacked; he shivered against another trunk. The pebble skipped right by him, under his lackluster shadow and into eyes of aged blaze. He lapped a first drink, and nearly looked back. The blob skipped on without him. He was keeping up horrendously, but the herd of silence bumped him so suddenly he scurred across the rock-splintered wall with only blue on mind.

The gooey being gazed all around—soiling him to an upright puddle by whirl—until settling over his very writing chest. It threw its tongue, bouncing its eyes, then exploded toward. Instantly, he lashed his hands out, and somehow he groped a cold stub of the wooden wall before gravity’s full plot. He was enough a hanging apple by the time it arrived to settle himself, though for all a creak could contend him, still, he couldn’t see its departure.

Another was already being attempted by his revival—a skip and a hop, then again. Across the huge hole, walls exploded into obstructions, huge gazers gaping to him with only cares he could see so well; all that existed was the most putrid water he couldn’t dare taint himself. He was soaked in the silence as he started again, trembling stiff before every breath. So hardly close, he nigh smashed one of his audience with such tossed attention.

He tried reaching forward, but they never stopped. They didn’t creak, but they loomed—almost twice his height. Things like bars over them, they squeaked their frost splinters unrivaled, they cracked spires from the towering targets above, eternal flames. They didn’t care his attention to his only hands of ever, not his breath expelled to never avail, nor anything he could’ve hoped to attempt in their favor; it was water, all over.

Then...  there was something to drink.

He sipped, all the way. Every bark faced him, he trembled. He almost wanted to slap himself back to the floor, muster his hands to nothing to take a gaze into the eternal burners so curious, but there was an audience. There was something he couldn’t satisfy—whether to complement darkness, even, sounded the nicest thing to consider.

There was a skip behind the farthest dark. He shook, and bunched his hands between his only wall and his chest. Something bounced. He mustered a breath, then another. Something echoed from wherever he’d just lost his last sense of sight. His hands picked around himself, pricking by each print his fingers twitched among, as the sole, faintest light crept to a pole in the blindness. It was no less than a second until the creak passed, but he was an ice fossil long before.

Bright beads, spined sticks, all the way, the blob just bounded through the entrance, stood for some skips and spit, and reemerged licking its head. The wood thudded without its input—under the spoils of its situation, he hardly sniffled enough to follow, much less turn at all.

His stomach writhed in conjunction with a tear. A hand clumped, instantly, rose its very face to the sound of all its source, only to utterly crack against a wind and sear among its seers. He finally blinked. There was a whole hole dazzling him, a cavity to forever seethe above, but he was long gone into the pit; there was no looking up anymore.

Time itself had surrendered; he was an inhabitant of its wrath. He was the only other basking in the strike of heat he didn’t even deserve. Behind the wooden world of a stare and a goggle forever, he’d plummeted. His hands were lost. His eyes were fallen into their drift. For another second spared, a terror shaken of planked thunder, he spattered his own breaths from their cold storage, not a life between his hand and another, and blinked his last seconds away from the unfading void.

More creaks were cracked, blights from the very tips of his head to his ears, and finally, it’d had enough. With a line so much more direct than it could’ve spoken, the blob skipped right by, into him, and shoved all the last sense of height he’d ever had over nothing into a ditch as he hovered across the endless stone.

Right into another bark, he nearly tumbled at the sight—the gooey being was unfazed, licking the wall right out. It shoved him in. The stark pallors froze him, piled to the stone sky and back, but it just didn’t care. His eyes strayed further every pass as he burst aboard the circling charge around the room, the pallid maze, so much he couldn’t make a corner from a shadow by when he tore into the tallest pile.

He exploded off and into the floor. Already, the bounding was embering again. He was staticized. He couldn’t budge his fingers if he wanted; the last energy he’d ever had was sapped. Deeper, damper, colder, the eternal wisps felled their guidance upon him, but he didn’t dare break from the frost.

The frail boxes thrashed, and rain raged; every droplet flocked to his back for its only comfort. He winced so many times, but soon, it didn’t even matter anymore—another breath, and he whimpered. His whines shattered against the roaring waves of above, and, as he sagged to a true puddle, his eye lost its hundredth dweller.

It hurt—his back, head, and hands, they couldn’t stand the weather any longer. The heat burned in its nonexistence, a sudden rock flew over his chest, his back, and his head, all over, so all he could do was stop under the crashing and tumbling of an entire forest upon him. He could see it so gently, all of a sudden...  it was so blinding, so mesmerizingly smooth, simple, and scorching, but he didn’t care for morality.

The next flurry fell, but he couldn’t feel it. He couldn’t lift his fingers from his hands anymore. It was so loud—it was so hard to try any longer, but somehow he kept gasping. Somewhere, in the remnants of broken spires, the greatest challengers of pile-highs to the scorching skies, a calmest heat broke over, then a tear, almost a wipe of his eye as he continued shivering in the most miserable corner.

Behind the reckless charges and back smashes, an unpaled shadow, there was a whine of pink so sudden he had no choice but to tuck his hands in, reface the floor, and cry all his fullest.

Perfectly unworn, just fluffed enough for disregard, all was sublime. Matters were nonexistent for the morning, looks all negligible, and comfort was absolute. Her hands were so limp, pressed, and warm she truly didn’t mind the lack of a sheet for substitute an oddly enthralling cushion, bordering herself from the bed she could hardly consider herself even on. Of course, there was some test tube in need of its prime audience, but with all another breath swelled, she couldn’t see to bother.

Her pillow shook, shoring some tainted heat to her face. Susie lifted her head, sighed, then rubbed an eye. A faint wall greeted her. With a few stagnant blinks, she pressed a hand to the pillowy ground, stretching the other. Blurriness tainted the view until she finally sagged, then she tapped a palm to her face and reached with her other hand—she wasn’t even bothering with support, doubtless, but at very least she didn’t mind the fall much.

She winced with the landing. Her pillow puffed in response, though only upon the air breaching contact did she look it deeper. She stole a breath, herself, and shot upward. After collecting herself off the bed, peeking between the limp cushion, a stark gaze, and her bed wrongfully occupied, she smashed the light switch. Fumbling barely nigh the void of her sidelined cabinet, she flung a drawer outward, a cold-stinging grip hurled from its hold, and darted her hand around the borders of a blurry blue.

It instantly halted its scuttling at the sight. Its head fell frozen, its hands locked over the mess made of her bed’s prime sheets, then it blinked its last. She didn’t budge. Panting so long, so intently in the savoring gray that just didn’t mind the commotion, she couldn’t bother to see past her blaster—right to a live mirror of a lifeless, vaguely egg-shaped form.

Somehow her hands loosened. Her blaster fell into a singular palm, then beyond her waist as she noticed her own tightness. Its face still hadn’t moved, blinked, or even shivered. It was breathing, still.

By her return, it still hadn’t shook its head from against the wall—some half a second upon her contact with the bed, its gaze fell to the ceiling. She neared enough to notice its chest rise once to her; she was fully leaned by the next second. Her shadow splayed across its decorated blue shape. It stared her back. She poked a finger nigh its veiled face. Nothing happened. With a hand struck against the wall, she fell to the bed and dropped a rod to its forehead.

A second torn, the beep recalled her grip, and she sat on the edge of the cushion. By moments and beyond, she stared the nothing of a flickering light on the device’s tiny screen, a faint, endless panting sputtering of behind; it took until a rear of her face until she recognized the necessitation of her tablet. Still, it was breathing.

She stood, then a buzzing instantly struck her. She peeked downward, toward her outfit she of course hadn’t changed from the prior evening. Whether once, whether however many times she was to be recognized by her name, for a moment she simply wished to sigh an entire breath over the next face she met.

There was a guest to greet.

Surely, he could’ve made the acquaintanceship. He could make black from blue—he’d just keep reminding himself—a tint of wisp on a horrid eye from any other mound of the pallid collective. He was littered with so many, squashed, fragile, intact, and whatnot other to destruct him, but despite how much he should’ve seen the damage, he couldn’t blink. He couldn’t even stand if he wanted to.

Somehow, he was spared. The boxes doubtlessly cared, their plotted doom ready before any spot not his, but the most he was afflicted was a brush of a corner. The air whispered alongside, to with cold, from with fret and tears—anything to sap of his very eyes to whatever sky—the doom spires fallen long before its wrath, but he was fine. He was far warm enough.

It was just so soft.

That one moved, he didn’t even mind. It could’ve been the wind, and he wouldn’t have cared; there might’ve been darkness’ appeal that he couldn’t tell. None mattered. Under a simmered sky, its shivery lines and coldest aura, his chest cried with its deepest, faintest longing it never deserved, and he breathed, still.

A draft flew to his littered shelter; he shook to the softness. Something squished, then slid, then sighed all the way by, to his very eye. He tasted his own breath for all he could prolong it, then settled on spit when plethora came to exhaustion. He tightened his hands—nigh breaking them, they were so stiff. In a subtler gash across the ground, there was a creak.

He whimpered. Nothing happened; he whimpered again. A box slid, suddenly, then stopped from its fleeting departure. He shut his eyes even tighter than they ever could’ve—there was no response. Everything fell darker, then his fingers writhed, tapping ripples across the static pond crept too near his back. He could feel it, doubtless, he could hear the whisper so close, the dreamscape never envisioned, but he couldn’t budge from his freezing rest.

Then he whined.

He whined again, only to be instantly shushed by a swish and a perfect, if not soothier emulation. All of a sudden, his hands fell so far they could brush the ground from his sky, and his eyelids drooped their last droplets. A sway churned across the place of his head, a descendent from the stars themselves, just to swab and poke, faint and stroke the very tingling atop himself, and he sagged.

A blobby skip rose, though his eyelids barely crossed the halfway mark before being lulled by another patting. He wore a heavy blink, then another for the next hint of warmth, barely suiting himself long enough to see the most eased sway of a stark red, swishing, calling his hands to nag it as it carried him out the darkest place he’d ever seen. Another plop nearly startled him, though he was so warm, pressed, and comfortable he couldn’t dare consider another glimpse from the perfect platform aboard his back.

It was so much warmer; that, he liked.

Chapter Text

It was so much softer. It was so much tighter—but in the freshest manner. It was so much higher, above the gaze of trees, mellow breeze, and the subterranean’s never grasp. It was so much lighter, like he could just lift his hand up, blink to the soaring stars, and rise, so far beyond the chills and moons of the lowest glade, the fathomability of his own hands’ feeling; that, he craved.

With a far echo to guide him, Magolor let no time to bide. His hand darted overhead, and he rose right along. He spoke first with a breath, then a whine, then a hum to hope; he was invisible, holding hands in the darkness with himself. It was so cold, but it was simultaneously the most soothing weight pressed aboard him all. It was undoubtedly spacious, a great hole to simmer, all the way down, but he was so far into the skies he couldn’t care.

He was burning. His hand drooped, his chest writhing into the entire sight, and he eased into stillness. There was an entire breeze in stead of his blink. His hands nudged each other, gritting for each their better elevation, but he just stared them both to nothing. He could hardly hear himself, but with a palm to block the star from his face, he reached toward, and adventured forward.

It was closing. He didn’t budge. Another chill softened his hand, and suddenly, he puffed to the great gaze of a boulder back to him—the whole mass soaked into his face. He tasted his best creation; it was the most succulent scratch he’d ever had. A hand fallen, a loomer risen from the scrap trailing of anywhere outside his breach, all of a sudden, his ears, too, were lost to the core.

He snapped, somehow—a log tumbled and crashed from an hour off. The wasteland stood before him, something so horribly cold, frigid, and loud, all over. His head shifted everywhere. He tasted himself again. His hands snuck into each other; he thumped himself. It was so much colder, suddenly.

He blinked in a breeze’s stead. There was warm light, and he turned. Instantly, he was blinded, but with a far shield padding his face from the scalding sunrise, he pushed his plight further.

He held no choice in the matter; he was already hungering toward. The tumbles trickled in as he stooped his hand even further forward, first into the lushest breeze, then, as it disappeared, the coolest stream—dried up, yet ever-thirsted. His fingers fell first. He was so well into it, his ponds gazing with glares in each their murkless corner, but his fingers had fallen. Without a mind for it, he just bolted his other hand and took the thump for himself.

Then it was his other palm, fallen just the same. He had nothing left but a brightest light to see, forever, an aura of rolling fossil, cavernous rock. It was blinding, but he only winced a moment. Without himself, his chest swelled, his palms felt one last time, then he was absorbed into the farther air, so much tighter than ever.

It was the greatest gaze—it stole his air by the second. His eyes soaked it all for him. He was nowhere, but he so close he had to stray, just the slightest bit nearer. He was so much warmer, so much more comfortable, but there was always more to see.

With all a breath to himself, Magolor started, again. A second—his eyes didn’t fall—a moment’s beyond, he prepared all the highest hopes of his chest to the star holding him, but he’d been blindsided. In another instant of rising beyond the sphere, his face unfaltering, a thud doomed of above, and, without him caring long enough to see the rise of retribution, the sound echoed all the way to his head.

Suddenly, the air had caught up with him. He was extensively frigid, nothing a remnant of what he’d ever been just a moment before the boulder’s bluntforce, but the sign was always there. The wind had picked its path, shifting him from rock to fossil, then sheer cavern as his face felt one last time beyond the hollow of a hum. He was all fine. His greatest sight never faltered; that, he stared. The darkness standing for him, the last hope of a taste to once settle himself lulling, he was plummeting, freezing, yet fine.

Breathless, but fine.

It was always fine, even. If to point stagnation from its stead, there’d have been no guise letting her misrecollect a rearward sigh from the monochrome hall—she couldn’t have bothered but to follow suit, herself. Her hands sagged nigh a strain of her eyes. She was fine; any could’ve told it. Sifting fists through her face, then balancing beside the most spacious floor of pure blurriness, she followed into sighs straying mutters of herself.

She couldn’t have had a pleasant morning. Not any time she’d have liked there struck the allowance of efficiency, but it was hardly purposeful to counteract the notion with confusion. Her hand settled forward, first, bewildered for its own direction a moment forward as her eye was kept rubbed. She almost brushed the doorway’s sense, so far into her void. With another sigh, a modest tap of her fingers’ rears against her attire, Susie blinked, long, and started the last second outward, hands clasped over each other by her front.

“Good morning.”

All of distant sunlight stared her back. She nearly blinked, but turned in time to wake herself. There stood nothing. She glanced the other way. In the farthest distance, down the vague line leading through dirt, shadows, and shrubbery, the top line of trees fluttered to her, particularly—one to not ever mind the blankness of her face. With a breath to herself, she dropped her face and backed, barely.

Instantly, a glowy goggle broke to her—rolling and huge—and she burst backward. The blue blob stared her, then a wobbly squish jumped from its staticity. She stilled. For all the moment she cared enough to eye it back, the land dweller kept with an even bob.

She swished aback, bolted a breath to her palm, and reached for her inventory—an air whirred from rear, side, and forward before she managed even tucking her fingers. Something vibrated, then a beep stung into the blurring world of a tainted gray. By the time she could distinguish her own breath from dizziness, the blob had reached the end of the hall; it was eyeing her, a dribbling rope outstretched from its gape to above its entire form.

She cornered it in seconds. Its tongue dropped, and it looked to her, eyes rolling. Her hand lifted, started toward for moments onward before crumpling at its lifeless twist and hurling back. A quiver to its minute shadow, her fingers settled toward her side. Groping with one grip, seizing indistinguishability with the other, her moments spiraled to seconds as she reached around herself so futilely.

The blob reached, with a squirt, then exploded back down the hall. She barely backed enough for the lingering drips to rain in silence before her, breezing her thumb, stretching until the untouched pallor of below. Another bound blew from behind, but she didn’t budge.

Nigh enough to spot the murk among the saliva, her hand nearly flung into the droplets at the next noise. She turned back; there, it stood. Face full, she took a sudden breath and backed, a moment to savor until striking the wall with a palm. She glanced her obstruction, then refaced to the line of an approaching stump. All either side of its blunt blockage allotted to pass, its stare stark to the ground exclusively, she could do none but fumble so futilely, all over.

With a hand’s loosening, she’d found her first breath. Of course she’d set her blaster alone. Of course she’d had to have ignored the gooey dweller so long. Steadily, its face groped around the patch of its influence, rising and trailing in a forever lump. Hands scrunched before a squint, she breathed the calmest ready she had to herself.

Its eyes reached upward—the glimmer of determination locked behind bare grips—then, with a sag, it scooted off into the entry room. Her face fell. Promptly, it disappeared behind the edges of the halls’ hiding, then rearrived from the other end; indefinitely, it continued circling the room. After glancing the saliva another moment, she started into her bedroom.

Blaster in hand, she bothered for a glimpse at the creature bound to the bed—still, it was breathing. She hesitated before the doorway. Her hold tightened, then met with her free hand. With a blink and a deep breath to herself, she started outward.

A blaze toppled aboard mind, and suddenly, she was eyeing all around, panting, then shutting her face in the span of two moments, barely keeping a backhand from her forehead. There was hardly enough air in the hall to keep her upright, though she managed a peek behind her aim. The creature never faltered.

Sighing into the next room, hands stiff, she eyed around the trio of tables and outskirts of equipment until finding the glassware necessary. Another beep stung in conjunction with her picking, though, noticing the abandoned laptop of all a memory past, she only exhaled in response.

She nearly held her blink at the end of the hall. She crouched, reached, letting the dropper a dab of fluid from the unchanged lump. She plodded through another doorway. Still, the blue blob was rounding the same path by her reemergence, unfaltering, unfazed, and unminding. She neared until the end of the hallway.

The blob stopped ahead of her to swish and stare; she needed nothing more. With all another breath to herself, she bent toward its oblivious gaze, hands flat, and plucked it off the floor in both her hands. It frowned upon her touch. Holding its face through her trudge to the final doorway, the start of an entire sunrise, and the release before eyes she couldn’t bear hold simultaneously, it only bobbed. A glare off her face, she hardly minded the sidebound skipping, all the way back to the front of her house.

A moment inside, a breeze blindsided her—skipping to the end of the hall—but she just sighed. A sample still awaiting its purpose among her laboratory, there was a sudden smoke in mind she could only continue huffing out; the data of then made two was already brimming her last spark of energy.

It was stark; it was sudden. Round and bulky—dull, yet forever glistening—an enormous weight rose and thumped in a stretch and a squish, brightening his eyes to an immediate forever. His breath exploded outward. He gasped, instantly, managing all an inward throb until he cried all his wind out again. A vine strung from his chest to the sky, the very clouds, itself, he collapsed into the density of leaves.

Magolor barely made it another moment before its face spun, lashing droplets to the world beyond as he kept panting in the darkness. His hand raised upon a free moment, writhing at its first move, only to sag as soon as he’d dared consider rebellion. The wind kept bruising him, flaunting its will with each turn of the blue tornado over him, beyond soreness, beyond dizziness, every sense of a goggling he could comprehend mixed blurs until so far after he blinked his last.

There was a random bound, and the boulder atop him flew off. He nearly choked on the very air he soaked. His stomach burned—his back was somehow spared, even faint. The line burst over him, and he shivered as hard as he could tell blue from blurriness. If not plunged into the darkest pit already, he was fast sinking.

His hand wiggled by his side—faint and throbby. With another pant mustered of himself, he strained his head, lost a mound of air to the sounds of a snap and bounds, then tumbled to his side. His fingers struck the cold, dusted abyss below, then sagged to a hump. The darkness grazed him, but he just stared the chunks and compact trunks back.

It was suddenly watery. There was a return of color, rolling eyes, and, rising with a body so lively, the space closed. He bolted back—his hand striking an echoey stiffness containing him before flailing, all the way down—but it was far too late. An otherworldly unsheathing broke loose with its rise, a googly glare purging gray from far purple; all he could do was breathe, still.

“Hey!” it whispered.

He shut his eyes, bothering to lift his hand. Managing all a tug on his hood, he jittered his last wind to the tip of his palm.

“Hey—you hear me? Out here.”

An echoey draft flew over him. He tilted, crumpling an ear even further into the squishy floor. The same wobble rang; a footing fled to its calling. In a final crush of the surface at his end, a bound burst from nigh. He tightened his face.

His breath was mirrored—deep and lengthy. A few sounds were brushed by, but all he cared for was a gaze to the center of his fist. Through more murmurs, hums, throbs, and thrashes of the very feeling of sound, he shed his tears into audibility, shivered once, into eternity, and whined.

“Please...” The air struck echoes. “I’m sorry for all I’ve done, but I’m really short on time here, and I’d appreciate it if you just opened your eyes, okay? I...  I don’t mean to hurt you.”

He rolled his fist against his face. A sigh returned, softer.

“Look, I know this isn’t where you’d been hoping to wake up, and I know how much I’m the worst person you’d want to meet right now, but I’ll tell you something. You’ve seen me floating around my ma—Shadow, huh?”

He sobbed. Another chill prodded him, and a sudden grating of bounds twisted round. Droplets lashed across him; he tightened more.

“He’s really not the best guy to get along with, even for myself. I’d give anything not to see him again.”

There was a sudden burble, then a breath, a pat, and a hum. The wind ravaged in its routine, a droning whistle sounded to suit the ambience of another echo.

“That doesn’t mean a word from me, but please trust me when I say I’d rather not see you in here any longer. Shadow’s been looking hungry lately, and there’s nothing I can alleviate from that feeling anymore. He sees you in here, and he’s gonna snap.”

The breaths flew over his head, two by two.

“Oh, I...  wasn’t trying to scare you with that. Just...”

The trunks turned another reverberation, following into an exhale of their own. Mumbles blown of afar, a sigh of dust skipped across his palm, right beneath his fingers, and into his eyes; a roaring thump arose from the wreckage.

“My old spellbook. I’ll hardly be needing it myself, and I’m sure you could find a lot more out of it than I ever could.”

The whistling struck back. “Servant!” a far tone cried.

He crumpled from whatever looseness he’d accomplished. His hands bunched, eyes more than the pond they could ever know, but all on his mind was a sudden shadow.

A throat cleared. “Yes?” the closest voice droned back.

There was nothing but chills. The sticks struck from their silence once more.

“I need to get going now, but one last thing.”

A call strung again—a breath flew from somewhere beyond his very mouth—and the breeze tipped him from all sides. He sank further, a bounding skipped his ears from their only rests, and he whined once as a puddle dripped from its otherworld. Droplets smashed, his breath lashed, and, under another sound of annoyance, somewhere far, a voice unheard cracked, plummeting to the floor with a resonant tone no other.

“I’m in this with you, okay? Don’t take any of this the wrong way—I’m just following orders. Again, I’m so, so sorry for all this.”

“Servant! Get over here right now or that’ll be a week you’re going with table scraps!”

He was plunged by a breath.

“Don’t go alone, please.”

There was a blinding light, an otherworldly unsheathing, and, under a spark of purple, a crack of the very air before him. He just whimpered before the champion of chaos, squishing right under him.

It was so, so cold.

He knew well what he wanted, but all in his ability was crying. He couldn’t feign it to himself any longer—his face and fists were soaking in the largest puddle he’d ever known. There was all the opportunity beyond comprehension to soak some leaks up for himself, to satisfy his ever-soggy stomach with a scent of himself, but it was too cold. Chiming, creaking, and creating, the outer wilds stretched the coldest smoke before him, handed him bounds and blows to savor forever; he was all its audience, drowning to its breath.

It was too cold for him, but he didn’t care—that he had such a pool to suffocate himself, he couldn’t dare avert his attention from. He didn’t mind his own ruckus, for all he’d ever mattered among the territory of wind; he was their only scourge. He couldn’t care for it. Just to peek beyond, toward the countless illusion of towering trunks, a cornering creak, he’d have never considered.

But after all, the words never left. A face never disappeared. The string lurked from behind, waddling all around the tips of his back, stormy skies, before he could finally see the faintest light—for once, it wasn’t green.

He gasped with the last of his energy, tumbling off the edge of weightlessness and into another. His other hand toppled to the ground. There were cries, bounds, topples, and turns, but he just sheathed his eyes. For all the trunks stared him from above as he traveled in rain’s wrath, the dusty wilderness, he never opened—he traveled alone.

The outer winds were relentless; his eyelids couldn’t keep with the forest’s fury. His hand scarred the floor as he faced above, the skies of nothing, turning, plodding through each second he bounced. His plateau swished with every step. The tongue roped by every turn. He must’ve been sopping by the third second, but he never bothered to save himself from the pool.

As soon as he saw, they’d returned. There was a dull trunk—he stole a breath—then another, two, ten, an entire gateway leading from an upright frame to the faintest light of a book. He shivered by every one, if already so far beyond numbness, he strained his fists by each vision of the towers from floor to somber sky, eternal flames pitching the only starlight spectacle. He could reach up and touch one if he wanted, graze the light of all he could never breathe in front of, but the tall trunks had him stuck.

He was panting, a jittery cube by the tongue’s next toppling—sobbing, all the way. To a landmark of motion, a skittering halt, and a tumble so terribly familiar, his face showed none but nothing; all he ever wanted was to touch one...

The trunks sighed him back. The bounds abandoned him. He wasn’t alone, anymore; he had a pool over his face. There were winds to silence him every moment they crowed around. Darkness, countless spires, a jar of apples from light’s very edge, they surrounded his breathless body. All closing, suddenly...  and he was warmer.

“You truly are a lost cause, aren’t you?”

A tear dripped between the side of his head and his hood. Down his face, guttering alongside all the dirt and sod bordering him from his only wrapping, the droplet trickled deep, to a mutter itself, then an eternal silence—one with the cold floor.

“And he settled on you, of all candidates?” The voice blew a breath all the way to his chest. “I don’t know why I even bother anymore.”

The sigh floored him. He sucked the edges of his pool among the silence.

“You must’ve been his favorite, I presume? Oh, I’d never mistake where he found such a notion. If even she feels just the same about your little eyes, I suppose anything is possible.”

Even...  it was such a warm breath. It was just the slightest mix of blue and pale, nauseousness, hail, and pink, all over; that, he watched, all the last wills of his mind gone with a shiver to nowhere.

“You miss my voice, do you?”

He sniffled. A hand waved, and a cold breeze hushed him instantly.

“My hair, I’d assume?” The duo of blue stars blinked, then sighed. “Perhaps you’d like someone to treat you as something slightly more than a merest specimen?”

His hand crawled toward his chest, then collapsed alongside his wheeze. He held a tear long enough to stare the stark pallor, standing just before the next line of trunks.

“A moment to cry? Is that all you wish for?” The red ropes breezed by a backhand’s brush. “This is a terrible place for someone such as yourself—but, oh, if only she would’ve ever realized.”

He latched his fingers into a fist. The wind drifted back by, a sudden wobble challenging from the farthest depths of the infested hall. Bits and burning pledges soaked up so many times by his tingly face, his hopeless stare to the eyes of abyss, but he was the only one to ever mind.

“Come here. This prison is no suitable stead for a youth.”

The palms reemerged from behind the branches, ever-still as he just stared. It was a burning sunrise, right there, half a second of soreness to stomach as his very eyes tremored against the glare from nowhere. It was perfect, seeing something like red and blue, deep hues, all together again. It was silent, steady, cool, and comfortable, over the floor he’d have always wanted to know since leaving into warmth for the first time...

And it was the greatest thing, watching the stars stare him back for a first since forever—into eternal twilight, beyond the otherworld of weightlessness, all over again.

But he didn’t mind, staring the face away from a breach of fingers lost. He never minded. Somehow, he was floating; he was higher than all he could’ve ever dreamed of making it. He was the coldest thing in existence—but night never left him, anyway. He was all the more manageable of seeing, red waves, a long-winded sigh sparkling as all the world he’d just known disappeared behind a tongue and a wobble.

Even, the gasp stuck with him—the turn of a stutter so soon. The sun instantly reached to him, thumped to his sunken chest with a charring, but all he ever told of it was a blinding ray. The tongue poked him back upright, another gasp broke free, and he stared, suddenly; the starless sky was so captivating. It wasn’t even that he may have liked what it was telling for him, something like the first boast of color, an enormous creak, and a sigh into the next aura of frigid wind. Maybe...  that was pink.

He had all the capability of a blink.

Chapter Text

Dents of text and titles in hand, her sighs blended into the foreign breezes as she stood, still. All a blink brushed, she was closeted from any winds further as her eyes dripped around, vaguely floorward. Unto vicinity of detail, inventory, then goggly glare of nowhere, her stare never strayed, to a hollow at her stead, until last possible glimpse behind her departure from the hall.

Susie lowered her eyelids. A sole shade returned a look from the horizon down. Readjusting her thumbs across her backhands, she sighed. Behind a bloated blink and a mirror of her breath, she soaked into the space half a second forward. She hardly noted the pseudo-window—staring the floor in a square of daybreak—by when her eyes returned upward.

Bound to the bed sat a blue sill and lifeless air; still, it was breathing. She slid until nigh enough to make the covers’ each wrinkle beneath the figure equally limp aboard. Her hand fled to the first sheet, then, alongside another palm to softness, she settled onto the mattress. The creature sank.

A clasp settling, somewhere far, she rose a fist toward the being until scrunching short at its skyline. As she unfurled her hand to a point, a palm, then again an outstretched finger, the creature’s chest sagged. Her hand descended, unto nigh a considered reverification, soon an outright twitch of herself as she breached a cold aura. A wobble singed the silence before she could blink again; a second to swish and stare, she plucked the goo and set it by the hall’s end—reemerging with a terribly casual form.

With a recheck of the stagnant doorway, then a sigh, she dropped her palm further into the creature’s air—fingers scrunched, all the way. She nigh winced by her return to its air; loosening, almost, she restrained her self-urges and thumped her palm through its atmosphere. It panted. Its temperature was bitter, though in seconds past, blinks and breaths traded between her and none, she splayed her hand in fullest.

Her finger traveled first. Pointing her energy across its coarse skin, she frisked all it within her stiff reach, her palm spelunking seconds to a wobbly subground upon each the creature’s breaths. Through its forever imbalance, she felt its same texture with the rub of a fingertip, past its minding to make a scarce whisper, beyond her own hunch and deeper dig.

The silence spoke, again, but she was already leaning. A simple set, wobbly eyes almost appearing to belong to nocturnality staring her, it only shivered. Her palm drew forward. Into another hollow whisper, her fingers suddenly stopped their crawl at the top tip of its chest.

Something throbbed.

A breath struck her cheek, and, stiffening, she retreated her face from the appley fetor—waving a hand before her eyes. As she turned, pilfering any decent scent of the chamber, a bound stung the silence off, once more. Goggly eyes, a tongue soon to the sky, the blob shone a great gape of saliva to the floor in its forward. She stared it back, vaguely frigid. It took seconds until she recognized the only other blue of the room, prone and unminding to the last presence among proximity; she started upward.

Nigh halfway to stature, she stopped, suddenly. Her palm quaked. Rising and sinking, shivering, yet unafflicted, her own color had her captive until she blinked the veil of false heed off and stared a true blue beneath her palm. Still, it breathed—a sound somehow more distinct every repetition. Almost...  she was lost in its wobbling.

Another odor stretched to her stilled face, and she blinked, suddenly. Her palm sunk, but even after seconds didn’t again find its way above—sagging, the creature gasped again. She flung off her seat, approaching to all a stare until a rearward bound recalled her attention. She couldn’t move. It was insultingly stark, it was hardly something to stall over, yet it took until a warmer aura’s approach did she finally stare the sidebound blob, glance the stagnant entrance, then burst from the choked chamber, a skipping beside her, all the way.

Scorched through the hall, she flung so fast into the next room she almost collapsed into a table. Staring the first patch of nowhere along the wall, she stopped—somewhere, a bound broke, and she and her sole cohort dashed to an edgebound shelf. She fumbled around the rack, fever fast turning to an otherworldly unsheathing across her forehead, only to come empty-handed even seconds later. Hands barreling behind as she examined the desolate laboratory, she panted, faintly eyeing the tip of a blue blob swishing around the room, until striking some miracle and noticing just the abandoned rod she needed, limp across the farthest table.

The device slipped to grip in some inexplicably fortunate groping, and she exploded past another trio of tables, burns, and signs of life. Out the doorway, she and a bounding flew through the congested corridor, paleing eyes imaging, all the way, and into the silent bedroom—only to be met with an otherworld of gray.

Its stare was stark.

“Hey, how ya’ doing!”

The creature slumped in an enormous barbed wing, hands and eyes dangling over the floor. The colors silenced her, at once, orange and purple of a twin-spiring headwear over the shadow one’s head, gray all over—she almost blinked.

She dropped what remained of her sole grip, letting a thump serve against the enigmatic shining of the hovering figure, then fumbled around herself for all a second. With a sudden squint, a tongue in blur, her expression fell to nothing behind her tightest hold—an aim unbreakable—only for a sudden sunrise to materialize, uncaring. It was so close, suddenly, so reflective and radiant, so mesmerizing...

She was struck, silent. The blaster reigning over her palms, she pressed a finger to affliction, but there was nothing. With a blink, a slump of her own eyelids against numbness all over, she stared the side of her weapon. The silent wind had picked its path, her hands settling from scrunches to splays, and, among the falling light of a monstrous grin, closely caressing the lifeless face in hold, she toppled—a sole sight to savor as a squish questioned her direction.

Still, it was breathing.

A bark scratch—a pallid puff. An eternal wheeze; a bleak scorch.

The air choked. His whole body bloated to the upside down breath. The ground leapt in perfect tandem alongside him; he was kept onward.

It was so...  empty.

Magolor retaliated; he croaked from somewhere. Among the land of dimness, he twitched, and blinked again. The air fazed him. He tried something, suddenly, he shook once, all over, but he was none beyond a pebble.

Stark, smooth, the thuds reigned on. The air cleansed his eyelids relentlessly, to a soften, a scraping, then a stillness. The eternal sky dribbled its starless sap, scorching soon the entirety of once chills across his eyes. He shivered aboard the adventure forward. He tripped, somewhere, stumbling and falling in the forever sunlight once churned so effortlessly by whatever make of his unlasting mind.

It was an eternal night.

He creaked aboard his weightlessness—he towered, for all he imagined it. The first fell from just the side, off where his fingers skimped their ability to tell. So sudden, yet dull, the air thumped the ring of outer wilds beneath the ceiling that never ended. For all he could ignore the shrill of his own breath, it...  was nigh pleasant.

The next was only expectable. He toppled in return, rose and thumped alongside the ground itself; he blinked before a wind blindsided him. It was stark, somehow, almost as muffled as the groundscape of the drowned ridge. Somehow, it was a little squishy, like a blued bounding stamping forward was all it took to sabotage silence anew. Somehow, he almost meddled with the waters.

Bubbly it was, and raining it dared become—he tripped again. He barely recognized the grass spearing him from every ridge of his muffled sides. The sound strayed to his ears. It was all...  weightless. It was scentless, as ever, tormenting as much was indifferent; he couldn’t feel a thing.

He blinked; he toppled. He stared—he soon shifted with a pat. All around was hollow. All anywhere he put his eyes, it was void. Where he blinked his next, he stumbled his last. He tumbled, still, he rolled, right alongside the venturing of wherever the rising liquid was taking him. He could’ve stretched and squished, right alongside it, he could’ve touched its head, its eyeless reach, but somehow, he was fine enough.

To a readjustment upon the center slab, he was suddenly suffocated into the gray world still staring. Through the last picture of the farthest star, a bound from the dizzying world crossing his path in his stead, and a tumble all too familiar, he blinked.

Against freezing, he blinked. On the soggy walkaway, the barely bleak corridor of chaos that just didn’t exist anymore, he simmered. He sat. He breathed, shaving the ground through each stilled pat. Nothing grazed him any longer; nothing carried his neglected energy of whatever he couldn’t bear do himself. It was still lively, even, so goggly and blue, in whatever its shining rope to the skies and back.

He was promptly deserted.

It was just as blank as before, but simultaneously, it was so...  shaken. In whatever kind lived in his front, there were breaths to be spelled—every corner of every stone. Every ridge, he tracked through the cornering chills. Every slump captivating his breath, he specked his glance off to another pebble or two, a brink anew of the sole stone slab staring from its same desertion.

He breathed. It stared him. He blinked, twice, then so many times. The slab made no move. Still, it just stamped its sound—something dribbly, almost. For seconds staring the new platform, breezes each more soaked than the last, he was still. In the burning speck plastering his head, cuts and aches contemplating from his hands, he could almost see what sense of an otherworld really existed.

It crowed alongside his breath; he blinked it right back. It sparkled with sunlight, suddenly, and he was instantly captive. It shied color, it collapsed to the brink of the same echo he could’ve only wished never roared before him again—the size of conquering purple.

“Someone miss me?”

All at once, the world shone and shook, roared in mellow upheaval of light’s edge—then, with blindness everlasting, there shone a monstrous sunset above the center rock circle.

“Heard you called?”

The slab stood the weight of a terrible grin. In a second, the grayed sun started growing from its setting grounds.

“Maybe not?” Shadow Marx hummed, unfurling an enormous, thorned spectacle from his sides a second later. “Too busy getting warm with the wall? That’s a real smooth bit you found, I’m not gonna lie.”

He wanted to turn, he wanted to blink everything away, but all he mustered was a gape before stealing his last breath—the breeze echoing from behind him even moments later.

“Now,” Shadow Marx whispered, a face stark enough to make the contrast off his cheeks, “I’m sure you got a lotta explaining to do right about now, but just this time—”

His back cried against a flurried crag he couldn’t be more certain of.

“—I’ll spare you some stress, hmm?”

He breathed in stead of a blink.

A wind scorched across the rest of his back, binding him—all a final squeak his word. An eye shone even closer, to the point every bit of its quaked look could be made through any haze he so spelled for himself. His sides tightened, he panted to the world of wrapping heat, and in time unfathomable, he slumped to the sound of a sucking squish and a swish to the skies.

“Y’know,” Shadow Marx murmured, scraping a stem between his unstilling ears, “ya’ really shouldn’t be here. All this rock and fossil, just staring ‘round these caverns—just waiting to look a little closer. Wouldn’t wanna get...  petrified, now would you?”

His head was pinched; he squished his eyes through time’s relentless tally, whimpering.

“What might a little buddy like you be doing around here? Couldn’t bear see your mommy so quiet? Wanted to tell me my deary little servant’s been running off, hmm?”

A wind drew, and his sides scrunched from the very warmth that held him. His eyes exploded open, he burst even lower into the abyssal ground, and suddenly, he swallowed, still, staring the ceiling as the silent bellows of breath below whispered in the firelight—thirsted for tears.

“Don’t worry one bit for him. I truly have to commend you for being so courteous as to want to let me know, but he’s already in the queue—next in line, even.”

Weight itself boiled from his head, and the roots loosened across him all—a forever face, all the way down.

A slice of dust dispersed from its grounds as a remarkable blue spun from the sidelines. His every sliver of inside ached, beneath it all his back crying over all the stabbing soot. Barely breathing, he stared the watered skies of a shooting star crashing to the dreamscape of his side; he blinked.

“But I have a confession, truly.”

Powder boomed back from the ground beside—there came the softest sight of eyes so still, then an enormous spoke knocked his bottom. He scathed the plateau a short distance, holding a stagnant gaze, all the way.

“I really don’t know what he’s like.”

He burned, again, sliding farther. His face brimmed with water towering so high he bore to take a sip with his look.

“What might be his sweet spots? What might he do if I gave him a little itch?”

His pond spilled with the next blow. His eyelids loomed tighter than ever in the moment before breaching the grace of dewy spikes.

“Oh, what could be under that hood of his?”

He broke his mouth open, again.

“What’d be the best service for him?”

He whimpered, again.

“What else could he spit out?”

He burned, all over. His hands crumpled, once more. He had all the shelter he ever wanted, in all the bits he’d have never dreamed being satiated, but it was only his head that couldn’t feel—it was his sole keep that didn’t sting so much.

“Might he reconsider disobeying me?”

By his tearing puddle, seared skin, and face all spared their seconds to burn, he heard his own sobbing. In a draft blown, every sound of his shone to the charred dome—his clamorous chills, his thoughtless soaking, and above all his else ruckus and insistence, his awful, boiling cries from the most whiny abyss of his throat.

He was knocked into the face of a dull, yet shrill edge of nowhere. In his tiny corner, he just cried, knocking every throb into a sob, just for each to be restored in his tears’ soaking. He whined so incessantly, he stared his sooty vision so intently; he was the capsule of every wind that shouldn’t have existed.

A squish sounded in, then an enormous hull thumped from afar—just as sunrise stemmed plump onto his face. He stifled the root of a sob, if that.

“But you’re not one of mine,” he whispered—so close to his gurgles and squeaks he could feel his hairs rising to breath’s conquest, “are you?”

He choked, shivering so devotedly to the stone carrying his head.

Mustering a faint cough, he planted a breath before himself—then another, and onward, until it came reflected so close he could do none but squelch at such a soothing warmth. The ground trembled, and a scorching rock stamped into his chest.

“So what might I need with you, hmm?”

A vine crept across the tips of his hood—its very mouth—as he burned before daylight.

“Have a guess—take three.”

Breathing against the face of a sun, he pressed himself against the spokes guarding the ground. His ears fluttered, his head sounded still under such a scorch; in moments, his head was crowded in creepers. In packs, they slithered across each desolate road of his body, razing every drifted droplet and towered territory of air that once existed aboard him. He shivered downward as sunrise drew nearer.

“Nope.”

A vine thrashed shut, and he whimpered, instantly. As overgrowth kept inching toward, warmth burning the slightest higher per his bothering to recognize it, he sank. By another pant, he was submerged into the rock turf. He could barely hold his breath.

“Nuh-uh.”

His head burned under another, tighter contraction. He whined everything out—tears, breath, sound in all—but somehow, so determined to keep silence from its rightful stead, he didn’t falter. Half a moment came, then another; specks of sunlight grazed so much closer. Pants spanned, he drew tears ahead of eyes towering so close, biding his last times away past a final wince against the grass, through all the third second by.

“Wrong again.”

He yelped. Warmth loosened its reign atop him, but all he could care for was how immensely his head writhed against him.

“Man, you’re not much for talking, are ya’?” Shadow Marx breathed across his head, between his ears, then down the sides of his hood. “Aww, you must miss your mommy so dearly, hmm?”

A star stamped down, then scorched back across his head—so much higher than he could ever dream. A trail of chars, all the way, it crept toward the tips of his hearing. He tried to cry, only to be instantly shushed.

“She’s not coming,” Shadow Marx whispered, stabbing his ears down to the center of his head.

A strand of overgrowth crept from its spot over the gape of his hood, into to a darkness even he couldn’t tell anymore.

“Don’t worry, I’ll take extra good care of you.”

The vine lurked to his soaking hair, stabbing so slightly—yet expelling all the whine he was capable of—and as it continued its journey to reunite with the sun, he sat, sobbing in his eternal night. Across each strand of shrubbery lining his head, scathes tolled all him; silence never failed to spectate. He touched his eyelids with a tear, only for them to tightened so much it had no choice but to seep from a fresh-faced ravine.

He was sopping so much, searing so highly—drowning in the eternal heatwave—but all became nothing to him in the second starting as something poked his ear. As far as he could ever reach, as lowly as his grip could contend with the neverending fissures stringing across his head, when he gawked with his mouth, boiling a brightest breath beneath, he couldn’t feel.

All at once, he couldn’t tell where anything was—a vine from its chasm, his warmth from his hair. Another gape crossed, and a boulder thudded onto his chest; he screamed, again. He curled his fists, only to slump them under barely an instant of their efforts as he watered the breeze. In spouts, his tears kept pouring from all everything that existed, but all they bestowed him was more heat to burn with.

It tore so much, it doused so extremely; he echoed himself to the void that had never cared. He almost craned his eyelids wide enough to feign lack of will over them, but the next tear had already started—beneath his veil of overgrowth, beside a gleeful sound that never stopped shrouding his ears, a thicker thorn stuck. At once, all sense of droplet and else spelunking submerged into bluff as his cheeks tore into their last breath, scorched and sobbing, indefinitely.

He screamed once more, and finally, he’d grated himself to silence. He held the next tapped gasp ready, thrashed it into the world around, but it just faded into the darkness. The gorge continued eroding, slashing every supply of tears left open—down his face, it spoke every torn fabric sounded with another spurt of pain. His mouth clotted with droplets, but even for the ones to journey inside, the taste was bittered deep.

A word burned beside his ear, and finally, drenched in his own liquefying lake, he was spared a rainstorm—if only for the second until he screamed his last. At the corner of the dribbling valley, the peak beside the tip of his eye, the splinter crept down, free for its bidding on his blindsided body. He almost let a breath by when the first dent spoke into his very mind. He almost shivered by the next second’s wrath, a bore so deep into his forehead; out was let all the lost spoils of spelunking he could finally feel in more than drops.

The thorn kept digging, so sluggishly, and finally, mustering all the breath he never had, he shrieked. A gleeful crow barely sputtered from the sidelines, and he cried under his exotically sundered shade. He couldn’t keep anything together, anymore.

He couldn’t keep his mouth together one instant; he couldn’t hold his eyelids high enough to make anything beyond blackness. He couldn’t make one sense of where he still stood—the soggiest being of any existence. For once, scrunching his last breaths together to make just another gasp find its way before he drifted away, he couldn’t bear blink if it meant the brink of an eternal night and its forever beyond.

Yet somehow, he could break his ears long enough—hardly long enough—to stand before the sound of a creak, a yelp, and an expulsion so sudden he could only yank a final air into his squished stomach and topple into the highest sunrise of ever.

Then he was burning, all over again—but with the clouds to savor his tears. With the wind picked its path over him, every sound of smashes, screeches, soon sparks thrashing, all around, he had all he’d ever cried for.

A monstrous shout exploded, then another creak, a returned boom. One breeze donned, he rose with a slighter scrunch; another breath soaked, he rinsed his palms with his fingers. Radiance sifted from every crack of his eyelids, and through a hall of blight he knew, forever, he was chilled deeper—a stagnant swamp.

It was so tight, suddenly. It was so rainy; it was too close, loud, and tingly, all over. He whined so incessantly to the cloud that carried him, to the very skies of distant sighs, gasps, and sporadic breaks of thunder, all over. Through burning shouts, pure magma dripping down his tongue, he held every image of pink and pilfered soul by the tips of his very gaze, tight as he ever could, as he let his trail of tears into darkness, forever.

Chapter Text

In a sun round, the world turned underground. Hacking until he paled, Magolor scrunched on the tip of an eye—with vitality renewed, he just sat. Time stopped just for him, blinks faltered as prods and nods shimmered against him in all; a tremulous sight, he witnessed in stupor. By every crag and dirt spike roughed from the landscape, he creaked and twitched, by the first blindness showing competition in the scenery itself, he coughed, again.

He blew his own spit so many times before breathing a flurry to his head—he quaked, right with dawn anew. Before making a first wipe of his eyelids, a bleakness craned resonant, blurry and colorless, sucking his stomach by just the gaze. He didn’t try reaching; he winced, sputtered, and bunched to a lump beneath the stone loomers. Like trunks piercing the sky, they gazed him to the ground, murmuring from the stars, as he was struck a splinter into his cheek. He broke something by the first sting, crowing, all the way, but by the time the boiling breeze had fluttered from him, he was a hump in the darkness.

Dim, gray—it was exactly what he expected. He exploded so far out his cumulated puddle he could feel his hairs itching to every sticky tear for all the moment he made it. Static, he huffed all his breath out every moment he was graced it among the forever stone. It was all cold and dribbly, and he burned with sweat; it was the best while he’d had, even.

Starkness struck.

He panted the silence off. Still, he stared the new, blue stars right back—blinking by moments. He couldn’t avert himself. He wasn’t stuck, but with how pallid and pink the staring skyline was, he was drowning.

At palms forward, he thumped from his journey of a second. His back flat, chilled, the dark clouds left him a brilliant stargazing. He croaked, tapped a finger to the tip his stomach, only for it to grope the ground back as soon as he’d dared consider it. Blinking, gulping, he shivered among the plateau as faint blades descended into view.

“It is finished healing?”

The breath blew all the way to his face; he shivered number.

“Yeah,” a farther voice said after some seconds.

A sun flattened by his sides, searing off some of his stomach by aura alone. By falling stars—paired, against a pallid and pink sky—descending barely before his face, he couldn’t creak.

He winced, whined. Somehow, he stretched a finger.

“Is this of its typical behavior?”

A far tap echoed—pure rock—through wind’s faint whistle. “Yeah.”

Both flares blinked simultaneously. A drip trailblazed his throbbing cheek, and he twitched in his pool. The sky itself shone him a breeze—soft, expansive, and freezing. He winced to his new heat.

With another sigh, two blurs exploded through view, and the skyline whirred around, pale and blue to pure pink. He spawned a jittery breath. It was only a voice and a second dawn until he fed his puddle again.

“Is it safe to touch at the moment?”

The rock voice echoed itself. Before another stone tap could recur, sunlight scathed the tips of his chest and head, simultaneously, then dug through the cracks under him—firm, yet effortless. He gasped, only to be cut as his back was groped by fingers underground.

In a swish to the skies, he breathed his last as all his sweat flung to the tips of his hair. There, firm and centered, stood the same duo of burning stars, unparalleled. By a minor hunch, a twitch into the sun he could’ve never believed again, he stared.

“Y’know—”

Her head spun; he was sheltered, but he just whimpered. Somewhere among the burning breeze, the pink vineside bordering a sliver of air from his own hair—stretching at the sight alone—a grayed gaze struck from the corner.

“We are prett—we’re counterparts, but...”

A sensation churned across his back, and he whined to himself, again. A hand afar, exactly his own, writhed, stretched to a head no different save color, scratching as the eyes he barely stuck himself toward approached the ground.

“I think you should be asking him these things.”

His palm jittered, so close to the ground he could feel the brink between chill and warmth. Despite how prevalent such a reflection should’ve been, how much his head was burning so hard it was a horizon, itself, he cared for nothing but stiffness of himself

“I beg your pardon?”

The subordinate crumpled, rubbing his head. “I’m...  sorry...”

“Oh, I apologize if I did not state myself clearly. I do not understand whom you request I inquire in your stead.”

Magolor panted—naturally, then deeply. With a gurgle in his stomach, a twitch over his head, he stole a last breath, yet still, the winds churned of forward. Stilled, he hardly stared the corner of the gray-eyed form, shivering faintly deeper into the darkness. It was almost the embers that stood louder than whatever pants he kept mustering beyond himself.

“He...  doesn’t like that, does he?”

“I’m sorry?”

It was too late for him to reopen his eyes. Before making back his stolen breath, a second star loomed behind, towering, staring; he could do none but continue his weep.

“Hey,” a levelless voice whispered, toppling the hairs over his head. “Buddy?”

A soothy cheek drooped to the tip of his head, nudging him a moment. A breath flew across him, then again, so many times he couldn’t tell whether to be greater shivering or still. He could’ve struggled against his hold, he could’ve steadied his eyes with the abyss of pink, staring him not a blink away, but he just whined.

A heat flew behind his dangling hood.

“You mind?”

Magolor shuddered. Sighs flew across his barren head, down his face, across his back, then, with a rub of his hair until he slouched in his weightlessness, a hand darted over him. His ears crept under his damp hood first, returning to shivers as all his loose hair was swept by a sheet no less mudded. A breeze stirred his eyelids, moments later granting him the greatest memory—a chill over his face.

His eyes opened as his head was patted and flattened some times. All warmth straying his back retreated, leaving him in half-whines, half-mumbles as he twitched among his newfound darkness.

“It prefers to be clothed?”

Faint rose faded into the skies beneath each a duo of blues—blinking, breathing over his coated head.

“Uh...”

A rock pat, then a squeak fell of behind. He faintly resisted squinting any further.

With a sigh, the subordinate slapped the wall again. “You know what he is, right?”

“I’m sorry?”

The voice trembled, then cut, shortly. “You...  know what you’re doing with him, right?”

“I apologize, I cannot...”

A breath stoked his hairs to trunks. Between creaks, crackles, his own silent sniffles, and hollow bounds, somewhere off, he couldn’t keep his glance on anything—even his own eyelids.

“You know what I am...  right?”

Her hold stiffened. “You are an assistant, no?”

Breaths, then murmurs; the whole shadowscape shifted from firelight to dim smite. A breath shattered what little of silence existed upon the burning pledges, but there were no rock echoes trailing.

In a far, far bounding, a faintly familiar groan, and whistling winds, sound had escaped. He was crushed under his ears, doubtless, his eyelids were slumped so much under the weight of his hearing—there was hardly a fire sputtering to keep any of his senses company.

“I’m...  sorry for all this,” the assistant murmured.

A wood image crept to mind; an enormous thud soon thumped him from his stare to nowhere. His eyes broke, only for him to be dizzied so swiftly he couldn’t bear keep more grays in vision—much less his hands anywhere near supporting himself.

“There you are!”

He hunched in her grip, and a palm drew a moment across his back. A bounding filled the moment of air and firelight, so congested and close he just froze.

“I’ve been wondering where you ran off to,” the figure said, her voice growing. “Oh, what a predicament this must appear for you.”

His back was pressed, and he lurched rearward. A breath drew from the wall itself.

“What do you think you’re doing?” the voice holding him said.

His ears burned, spreading flames all across his head.

“Approaching?” A sigh—a sliver deep—fell, behind wherever he was. “This child is already acquainted with me.”

He was pressed into the corner of an eye.

“Oh, my apologies—you still have yet to familiarize yourself with the care to understand him.”

“State your purpose.”

A breath broke, so close he must’ve felt the feigned sunlight against the hollow breeze. “I am merely an intruder, I presume?”

He was squished barely tighter, then hunched into his cloud. A wind spoke—barely deeper than his own—though where from he hadn’t the first clue. The forward wall echoed its last, a bounding stung from all wheres; he stuck his eyes into their holdings and hoped in silence.

“Parallel. It is a pleasure meeting you all.” She sighed something—too distantly to distinguish. “Should such an introduction suffice?”

Crackles and skips filled the imagined firelight. For seconds, he whimpered the only noise of anywhere.

“I suppose not?”

A breeze strung nigh, and he backed, aboard his carrier. Something like a gurgle spoke—a sound he was close on emulating by all save deepness—then the sigh echoed.

“But a lowly servant such as yourself may pass unintroduced?”

Almost a whimper leapt. “I—”

“You have proven your allegiance, no? You go so far as to take mercy on all but a sole prisoner of such despicable regions, then bide behind the skirmish for your own freedom—oh, but I suppose since you cannot pose a threat, you are free in my counterpart’s eyes.”

The stutter droned to nothing; there was just a swish and another sigh. As rock stood silent in the audience of faces far too many, he barely maintained breath.

“Define yourself,” his carrier said, spattering a warmth over his head.

“Yes, I suppose such a time is due.”

He backed, alongside his cloud, deeper into darkness.

“If I may state myself bluntly, you have proven yourself a terrible guardian.”

“I protect nothing,” his carrier retorted, raising a palm over his back.

A bounding flittered around the tips of shadow, spreading drips across the floor.

“I will admit to my biases, yet I find it difficult to believe you managed to regather the boy after your stays here.”

“I hold no such entity.”

His back burned under a second sun’s gaze. He poked his palms into his fingertips, though it was nothing—he dug his thumbs deeper into his self-underground, yet it was all down below.

“I cannot tell if you are being wishfully ironic,” Parallel sighed, spreading breath faintly across his back. “What a pitiful thing...  the poor boy is terrified. You believe yourself to be his keeper, however deniably, yet you have done nothing for him—I hold no doubts I could see his skin if I stared his back.”

“You reference my specimen.”

She stopped at only half a sunrise seared over him. “It took until now to recognize this? I am simply appalled by this...  this...”

He squinted from sleep, suddenly stole a shard of a huge breath—a new grip stole the reign of his head. A wince, a crow, he tugged his palms a moment into himself before falling from his cloud, high above the nonexistent floor. Something like a gasp, bounds breaking among the sidelines, he stiffened at the sight of starkness reborn, palms flailing so swiftly toward he hardly recognized it when all his last wind was wrung out from both sides.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Release it at once!”

He was yanked to one side, only to be returned to his middling grounds. He puffed, yet it was all soundless, he maybe blinked, but there was nothing of his capability keeping blue on pallor from view—whichever way he was made look. His hand ached with a tug, only to be instantly counterbalanced with a scrunch across his chest. It was impossible to keep a breath any longer than a moment; it was a reach from sod to starlight making one sense of reds, all over, one dangling behind a squint unheard, the other crusted crimson beneath a face no different.

In puffs, sighs afar, whimpers, and tears, all about, he finally toppled to the ground—two identical grunts spreading from both sides. A hand reached over him with a pant, only for the ground to scrape something with such speed he was whirled right back to the skies. Another breath broke, and he lurched back, bounds, a perplexed hum simmering from the new sidelines. The wind echoed itself, and so did his cloud; sunrise chased him all around as a hand strung from his back, fumbled by his farthest end, and, with a swish toward its front, instilled silence.

“Leave immediately.”

“Must you rely so deeply on your appliances?”

His carrier panted over him. “I will not adhere to fair play if you insist on introducing violence.”

More stares struck him—to the point his back writhed in its stiff spot. He must’ve creaked the dark regions themselves from their habitual hindering just to watch, but his whimpering was all he could tell of himself with his eyelids renewed their pressure.

“Oh, fine.”

His stomach burbled for fill, and his throat scratched. In sighs, an aura of heat unsettling from its place just beyond his back, his cloud stood silent as he whined so obnoxiously—her face seared his skin, regardless if its only contact was against his hood. A huff over his head, a creak reemerged from the farthest depths of what darkness he was stranded in.

“I will be seeing you.”

His carrier panted, again, and, a sigh drawing, the creak crumbled to a slam. For seconds, he succumbed to the toughest winds of above, shivering through and beyond her caring to lower her hand.

A falling star, a sun’s rise, the world spun; he wasn’t given a moment to orient himself before being placed a finger’s full across his back. The assistant gasped, hardly, mumbled, yet nothing disturbed silence or else for a while.

“I’m...  sorry,” the assistant whispered.

His carrier's face drew nearer his head. “I shall be departing.”

Rock taps, blue boundings surrounding, he breathed once last before being whirled to another stupor. A whimper shed, but none came of it. He furled his eyelids, whined to the recurrence of a creak, a crack, and a pallid puff from the outer wilds. At the sound of a storm, a tongue raised, thrashed, and treaded out, into the wilderness—moments countable before such a fate was to loom again.

By the border of barren regions, there was a reflection of sound—he had to have at least told the tone was too different to make, himself.

“Hey.”

A soggy taste crept to his stomach as he was twirled aback.

“You...” The assistant made something between a breath and a syllable. “You’re not making it home like that.”

She pressed a finger onto him.

“I—I mean...”

“I possess the console to my armor. I have noticed a bore sufficiently large enough among a chamber of these premises to commence departure.”

“Yeah, but...” The assistant repeated the mixture between sounds. “It’s just...  we’re not exactly in the place you call ‘home’ right now.”

“I have noted this.”

A wind breezed all him that wasn’t coated in cloud.

“No, no, I mean—”

There came a distant sigh.

“There’s this mirror. You guys come from the other side of it. I...  I’d rather not get into it, but I’ll help you find your way to your homeworld.”

The far rock tapped, spilling a chill. A speck of dust cluttered his eye, but, all of a sudden, he couldn’t blink.

“You know the room you first saw yourselves in down here? Meet me there—when you’re ready, I mean. I’ll be waiting.”

“I will take that into account.”

The assistant mumbled. Among palms grating, a slide, a shuffle of fingers into locks over his back, the air stiffened. Far, far away, a bounding and a deep breath could be made among the relentless winds.

“I don’t mean to overburden you, but...  in this room, you found your—”

Silence churned.

“N-nevermind, I’ll just...”

A breath, a click, and the sound of an otherworldly unsheathing past, a sparkle filled what bits of the twilight he stared through. He almost couldn’t tell his crying until the far light had been specked from its stead.

He lurched, only to stop a moment in front of the wild winds. His back ached with frost. A breath spattered over his head, and he shivered—a clasp so much deeper, harder, and warmer struck his top with a thump. His head craned without his input; there stood a stare, parallel to his own. A splinter stuck his cheek, but he hardly winced. The fingertip rubbed around some tufts of hair, spilling pain each second it dwelled as he scrunched his eyes the tightest they could be.

After the umpteenth of chills, his face was finally freed. He wheezed, instantly. His head was pressed down, then the hand reached for his back and he halted his wobble. Darkness crept from the farthest of vision, a sigh purging any last remnant of sound from the snaps of eternal flames, and he cared to cleanse his eyes under their forever puddles. A pink abyss halted his glance, instantly; for moments, he stopped breathing. Breezes swayed it, speed picked it, though as she struck a reorientation sudden enough to reveal a corner of darkness, he bothered to blink—behind a wall of trunks in a gape, in the center of the unlit cube, there stood no jar of apples.

Through the chilled channel, into a chasmal chamber—a stretch of damp green vaguely discernable—he held his whimpers at highest order. He poked himself by next wind, tore his eyelids further than they’d ever go, but shadow marks only lurked behind the silent arena. Faced floorward, clefts, pebbles, strands, all so familiar, he felt the passing sights with barely eyes, each, until breaching the rise of gray consumed under true blight; a shadow traveled through the circle alongside him, indifferent, unstilling.

He was too numb to make anything by first calling. He hunched, was let a palm off, and, with a scorching surface complementing his head, he bothered to share his eyes. A muddled word, a bountiful bound strang from the blindness. He scrunched from his moment in stupor.

“Right here.” A garbled breath shone. “Just a moment.”

Her face brushed his vague forehead. Sounds, then seconds sputtered without anything to supplement void, he croaked, only to be hushed by a spattering of the breeze anew. He shook, but no warmth had left. The wind swished around its corner of the frigid chamber, falling to the shape of a sigh, a recurred grunt, then, in its blow to him and all the gaping skies, a crumbling—a rock unsheathing.

“Right this way, mis—uh, ma’am.”

His head was felt, then stuffed into her faint face—a sound nigh spoken of him, if he could tell beyond pink and a dream so far beyond. Breaths shyer by the swish, he wobbled down the tight chasm. The silence almost creaked his ears. In a crackle’s might, a bound exploded through the stonewall corridor, swishing him to stillness beyond that of his face.

He picked, breathed, and stopped, words high and far guiding away the moment. Shivers subsided, his spit gathered and plateaued in the midst of his biding, and, with warmth, yet not position, anew, he puked a putrid breath. A tilt in tandem with his bothering for his eyes, he shook, shifted, somehow, then drooped his gaze—a half-shadowed fabric platform, stained with dust, clear goop, and dried crimson.

“Another moment,” the assistant said, a fading voice.

The wind patterns, however more minor they may have been, reduced him to a clump. Something sharp, something no brittle, it was a clean sound that spoke the incantation to its feat—none familiar in the slightest, there sat not a snap on the sidelines. A terrible chill shook through, the sheathing echoed itself, then everything burst into wind, a sun’s bluntest stare, and, ultimately, a crackling silence.

“I guess I’ll...”

Bounds struck, then breezes.

“Oh!—Sorry, you must have no idea what this is. No offense, I mean. Just hop through, and...  you’ll be good as now under the sun you know.” The assistant mumbled. “I don’t expect something like these caverns is what you’d like to return to, so I’d be more than fine helping you find your way, if that’s something, maybe...”

“I shall suffice.”

Needles stuck, then afflictive null.

“If I may inquire, how, precisely, does this mirror provide its means of transportation?”

“Oh, well...  I don’t get it, myself. Really, though, it’s fine to use.”

A whimper shone, then a wall of wind. He hurled another breath to the surrounding bleakness, but there was such a gale before him it just faded. Swishes, whole skips sputtered to the ring around all, the sounds of bounding flopped by so many times, drool flinging between blunt ends and dusted corners of what nowhere they were—twirling, wobbling, the storm crashed in his far rear, letting a blinding sunrise about, a second unsheathing to spawn among the midst of silent powder.

With a mumble, the assistant snapped, sent a swish from the otherworldly abyss, but he was already silenced beyond every brink of stiffness. It wasn’t staticity preying him, it was hardly chills still his afflictor; creeping from the fissure of forgotten time, there stood a shine so far-fetched he couldn’t have cried to it if he wanted. Something...  pale, fine, nigh cornerless, yet all but contained.

Somewhere gloomy, he still shivered—somewhere of sunrise so wrong, he stared. Not a blink could contain him. Not a refocus to upper skies could break his spellbinding, albeit his claim to such a feat was shattered at soon reface of blue eyes. In his shove back, an approach to blinding brightness, he could tell what he was glancing at, so suddenly. It was no figure to fare amongst, yet he could just disregard all trespassing considerable and seethe among it.

“Wait!”

A dire gasp tore into the far firelight—a faint warmth stood in the silence, panting.

“He forgot this.”

A second, then a breezing heat swept his head. “I’m sorry?”

More croaks struck, soon the corner of a word, the shape of it, but only wheezes spoke.

“This...  belongs to him,” the assistant said between breaths.

“I...  apologize. I have now heard the allusion there dwells another individual among my presence from multiple sources, though I still do not understand the basis of this notion. May I request clarification to this claim?”

“Oh, I...” The assistant panted a while, halting breaths to make sporadic syllables. “I’m sorry, teleporting around so quickly really takes a toll. About the—”

A deeper wheeze struck, then a palm to a rock fossil cavern.

“You’re holding him.”

She stopped a breath, her hands’ roll—even if they’d never been moving. His head seared, yet he made no mind of it.

“His name’s Magolor.” Mumbles broke. “Anyways, I’m sorry I...  have to go like this, but I need to get on freeing the underlings. Be seeing you. ”

A char off his back, a breath mixed in midsts down his vague face, the final front sheathed into the otherworld—at once, it was silent. He burned, he shivered, yet the sole illusion was all he savored. He toppled among the one cloud that dared hold him, winced under winds, cried with the cold creation of all wheres, but somewhere, somehow, he kept his gaze.

Upside a blinding curse, he spent his last breaths for a cause all invisible, sponging winds just to never pull them out.

Down the spiral of his own blinks, he simmered in his haven, however hopelessly; the scourge of movement struck him, the last time.

Below, he shook. He kept his eye to some high, forever burning under something only magical—he could tell.

He could only tell motion if he tried, yet it was too impossible to muster—he hadn’t a clue where he was, what’d yet not bore his bulk, even if, still, he was breathing. He was half-burning, half-frosted, half-dull, half-null, but the gape in the sky of the past craned his flooded face like there couldn’t have been another night if he promised; the waning crescent looming among a brilliant ocean, he gazed the eternal moonlight, starbound.