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Under the heavy air in the Abyss, he compresses, comes undone. Lets the violence seep into his skin, burn through the hollow shell of a weakling that once was, gnaw at skin and muscle until only an echo remains. He lets the abyssal currents run their course with glee, with the fervor of a prayer.
Here’s a truth Ajax will take to his grave – the first life he extinguished has always been his own.
Even if it took him a while to deal the finishing blow.
The truth is, after the terror settles into his bones and bruised limbs, even the lost, weak Ajax who had yet to meet his master finds the Abyss beautiful.
The air is heavy, but there’s a sharpness to it like the first deep inhale after a thunderstorm.
It’s quiet, blissfully quiet.
Only echoes follow his stumble through the chambers, the rustle of his torn clothes, the asymmetrical thuds of limping footsteps.
He curls up in the dark, cornered like a weak animal.
In his sleep, the abyssal song finds him.
Each time he wakes, a new note hums in his veins, an answer given in a trail of crumbles, satisfying a question he didn’t know was embedded in his own soul.
His teeth itch.
A hunger within feels less foreign with each step he takes in the crooked hallways.
Two people make their home inside of him, the separation clearer and clearer with each night of uneasy sleep devoid of rest.
One of them is curious.
One of them is afraid.
He gets restless.
An itch he doesn’t know how to scratch, ache he knows no relief for.
Yes, you do, sings the Abyss, but he’s too weak and confused to make sense of its call yet.
Ajax wants to do something, anything.
His cowardly self is a traitor, a disappointment. He cries for his family instead, silent in his fear. Mouths their names like a prayer. Thinks of home, thinks of safety.
Finally, he falls to his scraped knees and begs for Celestia’s mercy.
No one answers.
The tide of the Abyss recedes, as if disappointed.
The Ajax that fears thinks this a relief, the fool, rejoices at the melody beginning to fade out. The protests of the other go unheard.
He stays where he is, hidden.
The wear and tear of the Abyss starts gnawing at his heart, unnoticed.
In the end, the decision is made for him.
A handful of hilichurls find him, one day, as he attempts to stretch his tired legs and explore his new surroundings.
He decides to run, but all of a sudden, the song rings out again, deafening in its demands. His legs refuse to move. Ajax grasps the sword instead, lucid yet locked in a trance all the same.
He lets his blood sing along. It’s easier than he expected.
Ajax thinks, fleetingly, that the realization should probably scare him. His heart finds only relief in the ease that he swings into action, blind in determination.
A moment suspended in permafrost, a duck, roll, a clumsy swing. An alarmed cry from the creature that thought him an easy prey.
Its companions follow, two, three. One of them has a bow. An arrow nearly rips his arm apart, piercing thick fabric instead and ruining his sleeve. A fiery club burns at his skin, leaving blistering, charred skin behind. The smell is nauseating.
For a moment that marks the beginning of his rebirth, the fight ends rather abruptly. The final hilichurl drops with an anguished growl.
Ajax waits for the shock to kick in, waits for the gravity of what he’s done to crush him. Waits for his own horror, disgust.
Waits for bile that never comes, shaking in the circle of cooling bodies.
The abyssal song quiets down, resumes its easy lull in the background. It feels like a croon, a praise.
He basks in it even as his knees finally buckle.
Skirk finds him like that, eyes shut, face tilted upwards in a ray of ghost-like, eerie light. His father’s blade rests in a clumsy, lax grip on his lap. She tells him, later, that he was smiling.
Nasty little bastard, she snorts, you were made for this.
In the beginning, Skirk mocks him.
“Do you really think yourself a fucking hero just because you got lucky with a handful of grunt hilichurls?”
Her cruelty makes him want to lash out again, the traces of the last fight egging him on. The blood on his blade has barely dried, the memory of that song still fresh on his mind.
The swordswoman laughs even harder at his dark expression, her sneer acidic.
“There’s nothing to flaunt about. You know nothing of the Abyss, brat.”
He opens his mouth, closes it. Tiny jaw clenching as he grits his teeth, fists balled, petulant.
The knowledge that this woman could kill him in a heartbeat is undeniable. He can taste it in the air, the danger that radiates from her, the complete indifference she regards him with.
Ajax remains on the precipice long enough that Skirk begins to turn away.
It’s the final spark he needs for a new clarity to unfold, bell-like and crystal-clear in the quiet of the Abyss. His anger washes away.
“Well,”, says Ajax, voice stiff. “teach me, then.”
He doesn’t falter even as Skirk looks him up and down with nothing but incredulity. Holds her gaze and stands his ground.
She says nothing and makes her leave.
Then, at the very edge of the chamber, her strides halt. Skirk shifts to face his direction, cocks an eyebrow. Gestures for him to follow with a jerk of her head, impatient.
“Are you fucking coming or not?”
Skirk is a brutal master.
She patches up his burns and cleans his scrapes only to make Ajax endure the worst aches and bruises in his life, correcting his pathetic form and throwing him at the easiest prey they manage to find.
His master never helps him fight.
She tells him that if Ajax is really going to die, she’ll intervene. If he’s struggling and overwhelmed and she doesn’t step in, it means that his answer is to suck it up and win.
His cheeks ache with the amount of slaps that reverberate his entire skull, punished for arrogance and stupidity. Sometimes just for the hell of it, to get him used to the pain.
Strangely enough, it doesn’t really feel like cruelty to him. Skirk is only doing what it takes for him to survive in the Abyss, and there’s always a justified reason for her actions. She’s fair, and never expects him to guess what she means.
After all, it’s thanks to Skirk’s brutality that Ajax stops flinching when he takes a blow, his body moving uninterrupted even as his body screams for him to take a breather.
It’s a lie, either way, a weakling's dying plea, telling him to halt when the cloying melody has barely rung out.
The ambition of a song as lovely as this wouldn’t taste so sweet if he was meant to stop.
He still doesn’t like the pain, though, so he gets better at dodging. Gets better at winning. Cutting off limbs so there’s no hits left to connect, deflecting arrows with a swing of his sword, rolling underneath the sluggish feet of a Mitachurl too slow to react in time.
Ajax stops caring about anything that isn’t the scent of freshly spilt blood, of victory.
Bit by bit, the boy that fears begins to wither.
He has never been meant to live in a place like the Abyss, never mind thrive in it.
Ajax feels a heaviness in his chest, like something has began to curl up inside his ribs, preparing for a slow death. A heady poison.
The headaches begin, hazy flashes that convey a deep sense of wrongness every time he lands a finishing blow, swings the body of a Samachurl over the edge and listens to its shrill screams as it falls to the never-ending depths.
Ajax begins to see in two.
There’s the boy that sings, who answers the call, who surfs the tide and the waves of brutality with the serene ease of a prodigy, yet at the same time drifts further apart from his memories, the riptide dragging his mind to an open sea of endless bloodshed. Who begins to lose who he is, who thinks less and less of Morepesok each day and feels nothing for it.
There’s the boy that shudders, screams, tells the other to stop, as if a coward like him has the fucking right to demand anything of him. Who tells the two of them to think of their family, to remember what they really should be living for. Who remembers, but his desperate grip is beginning to falter.
But he is both of them and neither of them.
There’s Ajax, then there’s Ajax, there’s a reflection split in two and the agony that makes his insides twist and howl.
“You have to kill him”, tells Skirk.
“Please kill me”, pleads the boy that was never meant to survive the Abyss, with fractured light in his eyes, frantic and tired. He cries blood these days.
“With pleasure”, says Ajax, and bares his teeth.
Ajax reaches into the mirror and eats his distorted, crumpled failure of a self alive.
The pathetic shadow that fell and feared, now eclipsed by the revelation of what he could be, of what he should be. The boy that holds his ambition back, drags him down, yet still holds the keys to the human heart he must keep safe from the Abyss, must treasure and hold close. That he has to salvage.
In the deep, to devour is to be reborn.
Everything that is of value and meaning that still remains in the wilting heart of his inferior self, Ajax swallows down with fierce determination. He lets that heart take root in the ribcage of a monster, even as the abyssal tide in him resists the intrusion, a crushed star glimmering back to life in a body that won’t shatter in the deep.
The boy can finally rest, his final wish completed. Their heart is safe now. The Abyss can only corrupt the humanity of the weak and unprotected.
Ajax picks the bones clean, brushes the blood off the corners of his mouth. He thinks he’s crying, too, the weight of their reunion settling deep into his core.
He resurfaces.
Skirk’s eyes meet his in somber approval.
The thing is: it’s not anger that he feels at the relic of his old life, the ball and chain that drags down his ambition, now that he’s finally gone.
Once the distortion of his mind ends, it’s a shameful, utter terror that grips Ajax as realizes how much of himself he had almost lost to the Abyss already, how much he owes to the weakling he thought he killed out of mercy, blinded by his own pride.
It feels like an admission of defeat, and he hates it. Hates knowing that the dead boy knew something he didn’t.
He feels like he is reliving his own life, memories he hadn’t realized had gone blurry at the edges crashing back to clarity in full force. It’s almost worse than the headaches before but relieving all the same.
Skirk’s uncharacteristically thoughtful silences make him think that she knows the feeling, too. Having to scramble for the remains of one’s own humanity before the tide washes them away for good, demanding its dues.
“This is what I meant”, she finally sighs. “when I said the Abyss is never truly a place for a human being. Good on you, brat. The ones who lose themselves for good never live long.”
Then she surprises him again.
“We will rest for the next few days. You need to regain your mental faculties before I trust you to try your wits with a Herald.”
Even her scoff of disapproval at his dejected scowl sounds half-hearted.
Days of rest pass, and he never thinks to mourn the boy, and even the conflicted rush of emotion smooths itself out.
He celebrates, instead.
They are one and same, but to survive is to adapt, and there’s nothing worth weeping over in the simple laws of the universe.
Ajax doesn’t feel strange at all, afterwards. He feels clear-headed, the mental dissonance and head-splitting migraines gone. His senses are keener, his body humming with the abyssal melodies in perfect harmony.
The thrum of the heart that is human is healthy, alive, seamlessly joined with the dark ambition embedded under his skin that is not. Bloodlust and pride make space for his father’s stories, his mother’s smile. Puzzle pieces slot into place.
Nothing has ever felt better than this.
He misses his brothers and sisters absentmindedly, yearns to go ice fishing again and falters at a sudden spike of crushing guilt once he realizes that in the months past, he has missed Tonia and Anthon’s birthday.
He walks through the hallways of the abyssal realm with his head held up high and splits the skull of a Lavachurl with a single, clean blow, and even his master clicks her tongue in approval at his smooth landing.
He catches his own reflection in passing, and blinks at a change he can't quite place his finger on.
"It's in the eyes, boy", says Skirk.
Ajax leans in for a better look, and realizes she's right.
With the cacophony of contradicting thoughts gone, the soul-split soothed and his mind mended, the melodies of the Abyss become clearer and clearer in his head.
He begins to pick up new notes, songs of tides and whirlpools that serve as a compass in the chambers and labyrinths of the deep.
Skirk seems impressed at how quick he learns and stops guiding him as they move through the abyssal depths. She tells him what to keep his ear out for, and he listens.
Skirk tells him when to listen to the call of the Abyss and when to shove the melody as far under as his hands can reach.
That thing isn’t reliable. It’s what causes the soul-split to begin with, you know.
Then she shows him how to weave his own notes into the haunting song, how to wrench back control so the claws of the Abyss cannot lay their claim on him. How to disrupt it, make it your own.
It's borrowed power, but doesn't feel like it at all.
This is his.
It should be his.
“But the melody is so much more than a few notes, Master. The song is a symphony of thousands of sounds echoing as one”, points Ajax. “Wouldn’t it give more power to simply take control of the entire... orchestra, I guess? Or whatever it’s called.”
Skirk’s eyes harden.
“You try that, brat, and I’m the one who has to drag your body back to the surface.”
“But it’d make me powerful?”
She slaps him so hard that his vision blurs. Eyes watering and wincing at the ringing of his ears, he grumbles a promise not to try it.
“Even I avoid using that thing.”
But she knows how, is all Ajax hears. It’s possible.
Three days later, he faces a creature unlike any monstrosity he’s seen and triumphed over in the Abyss.
Three days later, he breaks a promise for the first time in both of his lives.
It’s not like he has many options, Ajax justifies, and rips the abyssal song out of its masters’ hand in its entirety.
He doesn't win.
Ajax lies on the chamber’s floor, surrounded by the fragments of the newfound Foul Legacy, the bones of his hands and most of his ribs crushed underneath the suffocating grip of armor.
Skirk picks his limp, mangled body up from the floor, having scared the beast off with ease.
“How the fuck”, she spits. “do you still have limbs?”
He’s lost too much blood to register the meaning of her words. He feels high, intoxicated by the remnants of raw power that still lingers in his veins. He could get addicted to it, maybe, if he lives to see another day. He’s not sure if he will.
There’s so much pain he no longer feels any of it. He thinks he’s supposed to be dead, but something in him keeps tugging at his insides, stitching organs together, bones moving around with a sick, lurching sensation. He blinks at the blurry, disfigured fingers of his left hand and sees his index finger realign. There’s a hazy, aqua glow around his skin, the scent of the ocean lingering.
The last remains of a mask slip off his face, and with them, a small, circular object drops to the ground.
“No fucking way”, says Skirk.
Then she throws her head back and starts laughing.