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When John had looked beyond eternity and pondered death, he hadn’t seen it like this.
Death, to him, was always an unsatisfying pseudo-ending. There were, he had thought, so many paths one might take upon the moment of their death, all of which stretched on and on in constant maddening eternity. All of which, he’d decided, were mere facets of what constituted an existence too tortuous to bear.
Once, he’d hoped that when he died, there would be some true cessation of life for him. He’d wrought something beautiful and terrifying in the wake of his time as John; and whether Fate decided that he be blessed or punished for it, he had thought that perhaps he would finally reach some sort of ultimatum.
Fate, however, seemed instead to have taken up a habit of proving him wrong as often as She could. John wouldn’t have guessed in a million centuries that he’d be clinging to the last gasp of his existence as himself, grateful for being able to have it back in some unusual way, if only for a brief series of moments. He would’ve laughed at himself, perhaps, for this - for the oversight in his so-called omnipotence, something all too little and all too late.
But as the sunlight fades over the horizon, so too do the last facets of the life that holds this final Parley in place, and for the first time, John hopes for something different.
All at once, he’s back in the familiarity of drowning. It’s as if the great sea he’d beheld not moments before has taken him back and swallowed him whole. A chill runs down his spine - the dark and the drowning and the nothingness of it all is all too familiar, and his mind races with the thought that perhaps this is his recompense. Perhaps the Gods wished to prove him right - if you believe existence to be a curse so vehemently, then so it shall be. A cruel joke, but a well-deserved one, he thinks; to continue suffering with the feeling of the being that he had so foolishly brought upon himself and lain with for centuries beyond his control.
The voice of that being rings in his memory, then; what point is there in finding something to live for if you won’t have the courtesy of living for it? He’s haunted still by how it sounds - millions of dissatisfied voices, and yet he can distinctly pick out his own among them. Thankfully, though, there isn’t much time to think on that particular note before the sound is swiftly replaced with the sharp, sudden feeling of resurfacing.
Instinctively, John gasps for air. The gasp trails off into an amused laugh; both at the small remnant of his temporary humanity and at the fact that in his situation, such a thing was entirely unnecessary. And he is human again, too, in death; it feels strange, still, to be no longer tethered to the Hunger in any margin. Not whole, not yet, but lighter. Unburdened. He holds out a hand and flexes his fingers, one by one, just to note the feeling of it.
Then, he looks up. It’s a little difficult, at first, to make out precisely where he is. He hasn’t been anywhere in so long that the names for these things are faded and faint in his mind. This place is dark - not Hunger-dark, thankfully - with high walls that stretch upwards to a ceiling John can’t see; walls adorned with dimmed lights and intricate designs that call to mind both the sight of endlessly crashing waves and countless staves of written music. Below, there lies a veritable sea of velvet seating, deep blue and empty and stretching out for what seems, from here, like miles. The lights gently blink to life one by one as they paint the theater (this is a theater, John remembers) in a pale, otherworldly glow. It’s cavernous, both in the literal and metaphorical senses of the word, and a sense of awe washes over him as he gazes down at the sight of it all.
And in the distance, heralded by the faint sound of rushing water, there is a stage.
The base of it is adorned with the same patterns as the walls; notes playing silently upon the lines formed by the tumultuous rise and fall of the ocean’s tide. The curtains; formed by the cascade of a waterfall that flows down from above and seems to fade off into the foam where it meets the stage, deathlessly. As John makes his way down one of the aisles, he can almost make out stars dotted in the water, as if it were a great, deep expanse of liquid space.
The seat he singles out is one somewhere in the middle of the darkened audience. It isn’t entirely clear exactly if he’s supposed to sit at all, but there’s not much else to do, he figures. And so, there he sits, hoping that the shadows and the distance keep him relatively obscured from any leering eyes. (He knows the ones he’s thinking about are long gone, but even so, he can’t help the fear. He wonders, quietly, if he’ll ever be able to.)
As if on a cue, the lights lining the walls go dark, and the ones that dot the edge of the stage go up. The curtains of water part at their center, their dull roar quieting as if they, too, are waiting with bated breath for what comes next. For a lingering moment, all is still.
Then, slowly and silently, a man walks out onto the empty stage.
On first glance, this seems like an ordinary man - a deep blue bard’s cap sits askew on his head, the rest of his clothes paralleling its appearance in both color and unkemptness. He makes his way towards the front of the stage with an almost tentative pace, the only certainty in his posture carried with the way he holds the polished violin in his hands; something akin to an exhausted determination. As he lifts his face to gaze out into the audience, he blinks at the light, almost disoriented at whatever sight had caught his eyes.
However, as he regains his composure and begins to walk nearer to the audience, it becomes increasingly clear that this man is something other than ordinary. There are parts of him that seem to be made up of impossible galaxies; the same stars that dot the curtains twinkling among the faintly swirling mass of his dark hair or the ends of his sleeves. They trail off into the darkness, in some imperceptible way, as if they were somehow connected to it, joined as one. As he walks, his feet almost glide across the polished wood surface of the stage, untethered by the full weight of gravity, until he finally stops still at the edge of it.
And then, the man lifts his violin to his chin, raises his bow, and begins to play. The melody that follows, to put it simply, is otherworldly.
It’s been eons since John has heard any music at all; much less anything like this. It stirs something deep and unfamiliar within his chest as each note reverberates throughout the empty hall, something far different than the sad indifference that such a thing might have brought about in days long past. It reminds him of Merle; kind and strange and forgiving, who had brought him up from oblivion and who he had learned to love and loved and lost, all far too soon and far too quick. It tells of everything that has inspired him to try and redeem himself from his own undoing; to save the world from what his creation had done.
Don’t give up on the hope you’ve found, it says. There is still much left for even you to learn.
There is no applause when the song finally reaches its end. Instead, John simply sits and watches, still struck dumb by the phenomenon of it all, and the man takes a small bow before looking out into the audience to match his gaze.
Far more casually than the situation seems to demand, the man straps his violin back onto his back, sits down, and swings his legs over the front of the stage with a slouch. “Guess this is new for you too, huh?” he asks John. His voice sounds bitterly amused.
“I’d say so, yes,” John calls out to the stage with a tense little laugh. A pause. “Am I dead?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“What is this place?”
The man cocks his head to the side and leans back on the weight of his hands, considering the question. “Haven’t really decided on a name yet, if I’m gonna be honest,” he says. “But, uh - I guess the best answer I can give is that this is where you - like, you, specifically,” he points to John with the tip of his violin’s bow; “get to come hang out for a bit when you die.”
Already, John is piecing things together in his mind. This man must be some kind of God, he surmises, with his spectral form and voice that seems to come from everywhere at once; and this must be some sort of intersection between life and death. Perhaps he will be judged here. (The water hasn’t stopped worrying him.)
“You wanna come on up here, or something? We’ve kind of got a lot to figure out,” the man offers.
“On the stage?” John asks, dumbly, still half in his own head.
“No, on the ceiling,” he replies, deadpan. “Yes, on the stage, c’mon,” he gestures with his bow, moving his legs back onto the stage to stand.
John obliges, though not without a fair share of caution. He makes his way back down the aisle and up the wooden staircase, only stopping when he finds himself standing not a good few feet away from the man. “Hello, there,” he says simply, offering a wave. (All the proper reverence owed to a God, wasn’t that, John? he thinks to himself with due sarcasm.)
“Hey,” the man responds. Up close, John can tell that he is, in fact, floating a few inches above the ground, as if walking on the surface of the moon. He raises a hand, and the harsh brightness of the stage lights dims. “I should actually introduce myself at some point here, shouldn’t I?”
“That might be a good idea,” John agrees.
“My name is Johann. You probably haven’t heard of me, uh, with your whole Hunger thing and all, but,” he gestures with a hand, vaguely, “I’m kind of a big deal now.”
When Johann mentions the Hunger, John winces. “I can see that,” he responds, attempting to be amicable despite still lacking in any real conversational practice outside of Parley. (God, does he miss Parley. God, does he miss Merle.)
“Yeah,” Johann laughs languidly, toying with the astral ends of his sleeves as if to emphasize his point. “I actually haven’t been doing the whole God thing for very long. Dunno why they didn’t get Pan or Isthus or someone to do this, but,” he asides under his breath, shoulders slumping, “well, here we are.”
“Can I ask what ‘this’ is, exactly?”
Johann thinks for a second. “Getting you situated for the afterlife, basically. You’ve got a bit of a weird case going on, so you’re gonna have to, uh, bear with me a little.” He sounds almost apologetic for that fact.
“That’s not entirely promising,” John says with another strained laugh, feeling himself wince again despite his attempts to keep things relatively light.
“Eh,” Johann shrugs. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it, honestly. Seems like you’ve done enough of that for a good couple of lifetimes.”
The hint of sympathy in the man’s voice takes John by surprise. “What do you mean by that?” he asks.
In response, Johann gestures out towards the audience, the lights on the walls glowing back to life in turn. When John turns back to follow his gaze, the fact quickly dawns on him that sometime between now and the last time he’d looked at them, the patterns adorning the walls had shifted. Where once there had been patterns of music, crashing and swirling upon the ocean’s current, there now stood scenes that were, all at once, hauntingly recognizable.
He sees himself, standing in the middle of a crowded bus, a look of realization on his face as he waits for what he would later come to call the moment he tried to first understand the full scope of eternity. He sees himself talking to a woman he'd never met on that very same bus not months later, sharing in her dissatisfaction with the world and unwittingly planting the seed of what would soon be known as the Hunger. He sees himself poring over his thoughts and research and conversations, trying to find some way to escape - for everyone to escape - the so-called penalty of existence itself.
He sees himself sitting in Parley with Merle (and even now, something in the reflection of the old dwarf’s face makes him feel), coming up with the idea for the question game. He sees himself offering to play chess, bantering back and forth in the first human connection he’s had in God knows how long. He sees himself, standing in the aftermath of the conversation that had made him experience sadness for the first time in eons,
(and he remembers the Hunger’s dissatisfaction with him, and how it began to tear him limb from limb as it swallowed him back into itself. It was in that moment that he fully understood the horror of what he had created. It wasn’t the last time it would consume him. Still, he swore he would make things up to Merle.)
(He would make things up to the world, if he could ever be capable of such an impossible thing.)
“Pretty neat, huh?” Johann says, the omnipresent echo of his voice cutting through John’s thoughts.
John turns back to face him silently, expression colored with equal parts questioning and disbelief.
“Oh, uh, I guess I should explain what those are,” Johann amends. “So, y’know how like, I’m basically the God of Inspiration now?”
“I don’t believe I do, no.” John shakes his head, baffled, before raising a brow curiously. “Should I?”
“Nah,” Johann replies, ever-nonchalant. “You were all Hunger-ed up when the whole ‘Day of Story and Song’ thing happened, so like, I’m pretty sure you’re the only one who’s out of the loop on this right now.” To himself, he adds, “Guess we both kinda ended up here by being Hunger-ed up, one way or another,” and he laughs, with his bitter bemusement, at that.
It doesn’t take long for John to catch the implication of his words. He feels his stomach sink. “The Hunger consumed you.”
“Killed me, but yeah, same difference,” Johann affirms, though again there is a sympathy in his words that strikes John as unprecedented. He sighs. “Happens to the best of us. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about, is it?”
John steps forward and inhales, but not before his reason kicks in- it would be foolish to argue with the mercy of a God, especially in a situation like this one. He hasn’t forgotten to know when and when not to speak - after all, speaking used to be his job. Even so, he feels the weight of it settle in his chest, though not without some surprise at the fact that he has been granted such a mercy at all.
"Anyways, let me fill you in here real quick," Johann continues, taking his violin out from behind his back once more and tuning its pegs absently. “You up for another song? This one’s a bit of a doozy, but it’s a lot easier than standing here and rambling at you, honestly. Plus, I’ve never really been a words guy.”
“That’d be a good idea, wouldn’t it?” John agrees with a sheepish laugh, taking a seat on the edge of the stage and neatly folding his hands - scarred hands, he notices - in his lap.
And once again, Johann raises his bow, but the song that he plays this time is far different.
The things that this song speaks of are both familiar and new, the same otherworldly presence about it that colored the song before it. There are parts he recognizes from the stories Merle had told him in Parley; of Merle’s ship and his friends and their strange little game of cat-and-mouse that spanned nearly a century. He recognizes the Light of Creation, too, at least until the story tells of it splitting in sevenths, pieces the Hunger couldn’t sense in all its desire and desperation. But then, the story continues beyond John’s knowledge, telling of forgotten bonds and discarded melodies and a fight for the fate of the universe, heralded by the recollected memory of this very symphony. It tells of Johann, too, who worked tirelessly to compose a song for all those who had been forgotten; the first beat in the melody of the Voidfishes’ rebroadcast, that had inspired the world to hope, to fight, and to remember the story it had told.
(And perhaps that in itself is familiar, John thinks, looking back at the pattern of himself poring over the studies he’d conducted on the expanse of mortal existence, wondering in his naive and innocent days if perhaps he would be the one to band the world together in the name of something better. Something greater.)
"Everyone in the world heard what I’d written on the day I died,” Johann lets out a tired exhale as the song reaches its end. “When your name goes down in history like that, I guess people start talking about you.”
“Don’t I know it,” John agrees. (He does know it. He wonders how long it’s really been since he’d died, or if he was in a place outside of time itself.)
“People started thanking me for their inspiration,” Johann continues, “asking in my name for it when they needed it, that sort of thing. The Gods, well, they knew when someone was shaping up to be one of them.” He looks back up to the walls, then. “Looks to me like you’ve been your fair share of inspired too, huh? How’d, uh, how’d that work out for you?”
John turns his gaze towards the image of himself engulfed in black flame, and purses his lips in a frown. “Not - not particularly great.” He looks to Johann, then. “I feel like it’s got to be a little telling that your inspiration saved the world and mine tried to, well, destroy it,” he admits.
“You think so?” Johann questions with a raised brow, and John is taken aback by the small spark of boldness that alights in his otherwise resigned tone.
“Yes - yes, of course I do!” John counters in shock, though not without due caution. (He knows what the power of his words is capable of.) "To be so narrow-minded to the nuances of life so as to doom thousands upon thousands of universes, to create a self-fulfilling prophecy that only shut me out from learning the errors of my ways, to have done what I’d done - Johann, you of all people have to understand that my inspiration was nothing but a curse!”
“Woah, woah, woah,” Johann holds up his hands, taking a small step forward. “I’m pretty sure you actually did get to the whole ‘learning the errors of your ways’ part. It’s like, on the wall and everything,” he says, ever-conversationally.
And again, John looks up. He hadn’t paid it mind before, but brighter and closer, there are images that echo more recent memories; ones of the last question he’d ever asked Merle, the final Parley on the beach, the all-too-soon and all-too-late that hadn’t left the back of his mind.
“That’s actually the point I was trying to get to,” Johann elaborates. “You figuring out that the whole Hunger thing was bogus was a moment of inspiration all on its own. Plus, it actually helped take the Hunger down in the end - y’know, ‘breaking the bonds’ and all that. What you did, trying to change your mindset even if it was at your own expense, to save the world - that’s a pretty big deal too, y’know.”
“I had to do something.”
“Yeah, you did. But the point is, you did do something,” Johann points out, pointing to John with his bow. “We up here -” (and he gestures vaguely to the ceiling with that,) “- we figured, hey, what exactly’d be the point of letting this guy get some miserable death when that would only ruin what’d helped him change his ways in the first place? We don’t wanna prove the Hunger right, y’know?”
“Is that why I’m here?” John asks. He isn’t entirely sure what the feeling that follows is - it seems, at first, like sadness, but there’s something thankful and warm about it too. Bittersweetness, maybe.
“Yep,” Johann nods. “Pan even put a good word in for you,” he adds, with a wink that might’ve been playful on someone with more enthusiasm in their manner.
John laughs, at that, and feels that bittersweetness turn to tears that prick at the corners of his eyes and threaten to spill over. “Of course he did,” he says.
“You’ve got a lot of people rooting for you, John,” Johann says. “You’ve still got a lot to learn about life, but hey, now you’ve got a whole afterlife ahead of you to figure it out.” With that, he gestures back to the double doors that mark the back of the theater. “You think you’re set to go live it?”
John looks between Johann and the doors. It feels strange, still, to be granted this mercy, and as he turns away he feels tears beginning to dot his cheeks. “I’m ready as I’ll ever be,” he laughs, wiping at his face. Then, he looks at the door again, feeling his stomach turn at the uncertainty of it then. “What’ll happen to me? Once I leave?”
"Can't tell you that one. Pretty sure that's somebody else's job." Johann shrugs, and John laughs again at his oversight. Istus watch over me, John prays.
“Anyways,” Johann continues simply, his celestial form fading with the light. “See ya ‘round, John.”
“See ya ‘round.” John answers, before turning back to the doors and making his way back offstage, back down the long expanse of the theater aisle. Before he can get far, though, Johann’s voice stops him in his tracks - although as John turns back to face the stage, the man himself is nowhere to be seen.
“Just one last thing, actually,” it says. “You sure ask a lot of questions, huh?”
John smiles. “I’ve had a lot of practice.”