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Rhulk’s body lies disassembled on an onyx slab, parts sorted and aligned neatly like doll pieces waiting for the puppeteer to thread the wires and strings through their empty insides. The Witness moves in fractures and resonant hums, and the static-filled space seems to ebb around them as the infinitude of hands cut through it with blades of resolve, shuffling and rearranging the components, reshaping them, tearing apart at the seams and willing them shut. The motions are sharp with purpose; the form familiar, pieces lined up perfectly; but the resonance still ebbs and does not echo, sutures rippling and fading until the components flop back into pathetic disarray and the meticulously cleaned up reddish goo spills onto the stone. Frustrating futility, enhanced further by a sudden shift in pressure to which the pyramid responds by rumbling quietly in warning. But who would she be if she cared for such subtleties, they think, and bristle.
A voice flows in, like birdsong though an open window.
||What is this test of the strength of your will against the strength of your nature?||
The Witness looks up from their wretched work and watches the golden hawk circle just below the tall ceiling, then dive and harmonise with the space around it on the other side of the slab. The Gardener holds up her radiant hand and gestures to the parts scattered between them.
||I thought it my task to meddle with the broken husks of champions.||
—-It is not your place to roam and not your husk to meddle with.-—
The Witness glares into her pathetic bright eyes, but she holds their gaze only for a moment, her attention fixed on the body laid out on the slab. Her hand moves to touch it, and before she can, the Witness flicks a hundred arms and sends her flying towards the other side of the room, back hitting the wall. She sighs. Physical forms have its downsides, but this at least was direct enough as she could hope for, and her song rises to engulf the room and echo in its dark walls, rippling across the floor in chaotic bursts. The Witness counters. She holds strong against the static that crashes with the waves of her melody, stone underneath cracking, but she is drowned out and pushed further away, and a thousand voices rise in joint whisper to murmur over her singular tune of piercing colour. The cacophony shakes the walls, and she uses it to her advantage, squirming into the cracks and filling them with herself like liquid gold—and she is next to the slab again, and the Witness harmonises their voices but the infinitesimal amount of time it takes to pull back the resonant echoes is enough for the Gardener to manifest again, dripping gold and with hands already outstretched over Rhulk’s corpse. Physicality does also have its upsides, it seems. With infinite care she begins to spin a thread from his one broken finger to the other, joining them with the palm, then the wrist, then is sent hurling across the room again before she can get to the elbow.
—-NO.-—
The voice rumbles through stone.
The Gardener shakes her head with gentle annoyance. This, too, is physicality; what the Witness picks up is the meaning under the metaphor, the quiet frustration laced with compassion laced with non-malicious amusement.
||You do not have much expertise with dead things, my dear.||
—-Yours is not needed here. -—
||What do you hope to achieve, then? A gruesome experiment? Is it not a folly to try and salvage what has failed, a being who deserves no thought, a shape broken and disregarded as all other shapes you have taken from me and mutilated beyond recognition, and honed them until they snapped?||
—-You would offer us your wicked gifts, shape the lie of his weakness so that it looks like truth, and flaunt it in our eyes? We will pry it from your blasphemous talons.-—
She sighs. They have had conversations like this one so many times it’s basically just playing out rehearsed roles. It is nice not to scream the words at each other in the frenzy of an escape, for once, but it still feels awfully stagnant, a battle with every strike predetermined the moment the players enter the arena. If she wanted, she could draw the features of each vaporous face staring down at her across the room from memory.
But this macabre puzzle on a slab is a new development, and she weights its true meaning in the tension between them. The Subjugator has surely been a great asset, but no greater than the Taken King, whom the Witness let go of without much grief. This, though — playing life-giver, lashing out angrily as if she has caught them red-handed, such protectiveness over a handful of organs and limbs laid out and organised meticulously into their old shape, as if wish alone could mould them back into Rhulk-form. It wasn’t principle that has led to this.
Steel-cold eyes watch her watch the Disciple, and the Witness considers.
Maybe they should allow her. Maybe, for all her chaos, she could yet come in handy in her ridiculous fondness for life’s most useless creations. There used to be some sense in what she did; once, long ago. They could not winnow what she had not sown first—they needed her, like sunset needed the sunrise just to have something to chase off the sky and bring forth the night. She had bred something good and potent, and they rendered it eternal.
But it was different, then. Infinite faces twitch in an infinitely imperceptible scowl.
She changed the game. She took the thing they made, a beautiful thing, and doomed it to an existence of pain and grief and horror. She bent it out of shape and tossed away on the universe’s vicious tides, wimpish, unable to defend itself. And then she claimed it as hers and fought, and ran every time they came to fix and save what she had ruined. She is a usurper. She is a blaze of destruction, sowing chaos wherever her song resonates, undoing their majestic work. The Witness looks down at what was once Rhulk — the twisted limbs and hide all burnt and cracked, coiled branches sprouting from between the broken bones. The Light did it. Her children—she calls them hers, ha, those tiny oozeballs that they have created!—they came here and ruined their work, not in the name of perfection but what? A selfish challenge? What is this vacancy that they have left, dark and yawning in the spaces between Rhulk’s disassembled components?
The Gardener moves her hand over the corpse, not even touching it, and yet the void closes and blossoms. The Witness watches, both with resentment and held-back fascination.
Her song—the wound-closer, scar-healer—trails up Rhulk’s body as the tattered pieces fall into place, a golden thread fusing bones together and suturing the skin. Cartilages pop into joints, vertebrae line up and snap like a bone whip uncoiling, the soft, meaty padding spreads over the skeleton frame. Punctured lungs expand and stitch shut, veins swell with blood. And the thread trails further, up his spine, fanning out into nerve-branches, burning out the charred tissue—
The Witness flinches. They know what she is trying to do. Resonant hands lunge forward, locking her wrists in an iron grip.
—-You will not take him from us.-—
The Gardener looks up, almost sadly. She oh so wants to fix the broken things, the shattered toys and puppets cut from strings and discarded in dark corners, to fix them through scrubbing them clean of all signs of wear and painting over with new, glossy coating of blissful irrecognition. Thinking she is making them better. She would wipe away all his majesty, his perfection, she would argue his truest form is but a seed of what he could be instead of the shape he has grown into...!
But this is her, in the end, and so she gives up the fight. When the Witness releases the grip her hands move aside to allow them to join her song almost in harmony, and the double thread strings the Disciple together. He shivers, breathes in out of habit in the non-air around them, then stills into a motionless rest that could be mistaken for death but most certainly is not.
The Gardener is brimming with pride and love as she glances up from their work. Much like the old times, her bright eyes speak.
The Witness’ voice is not angry anymore, and they watch their Disciple lie frozen in slumber with their expression unreadable.
—-How like you, to assent out of weakness.-—
The Gardener smiles (physicality; metaphor), and her hand reaches out above the slab to touch their cheek. A resonant soundwave pushes her away.
Much like the old times, maybe; not this much.
She sighs, then, and retreats (she always does; always fickle and on the run, cowardly, slipping away from her creation before the thousand hands can reach her, weak—) with a flutter of golden wings sending a gust across the Witness’ many faces as she rises. Before she disappears, again, like a song through a window, she whispers, and the whisper is resonant and meant for their ears (physicality) only.
||This was a gift.||
And she is gone before they can snap her so very physical neck for this betrayal-which-is-not-a-betrayal but merely an act of reckless accordance to her nature. Her song quieting, ambient static fills the chamber as spacetime shifts to accommodate a suddenly solitary, multiplied but singularly-sharp Will. The pyramid rumbles, the cracks in the floor beginning to seal. Rhulk sleeps peacefully.