Work Text:
Water drips, loud in the silence of the caves. The drips pool gently in a dip in the rock; the lightest of splashes echoing against damp walls, and Poundy tunes it all out, turning his attention to the cobwebbed mineshaft; old lantern-light peeking through a gap in the rock. The rock breaks easily under his pickaxe, and Poundy drops into the mineshaft on light feet, tail curled to avoid brushing the rock behind him. Chains creak from further down the shaft, and the rails beneath his feet make his footing unsteady, but the reedy light of the few remaining lanterns show him two paths: left, to a gloomy crossroads, spider-silk spun from the roof to the wooden supports; or right, where the path turns sharply upwards.
Poundy takes a deep breath, and heads deeper into the mine. He takes one of the lanterns with him as he goes, holding it up to illuminate his path. At the crossroads, bones rattle from somewhere beyond the faint light, echoing against the walls as the glint of enchantments hitting light flickers further down the tunnel. He blocks off the path and turns right, down a flight of stairs. An old, shattered lantern crunches glass under his boots, and Poundy sweeps his tail to the side, unwilling to catch his fur on the broken glass and twisted metal.
Something about the silence sets him on edge. There’s somehow too much noise and not enough, and the dark that looms beyond the dim glow of his lantern seems to compress , far more than any other mining trip has. He shivers, and compartmentalizes; shoves the ever-encroaching emptiness to the back of his mind and follows the sound of groaning wood and creaking chains.
The sounds lead him to a bridge, stretching across the opening of an underground ravine; lit by guttering lanterns barely clinging to the remains of the spellwork that had once kept them functioning. The wood is surprisingly well-kept, solid and barely weathered, and in the warm glimmer of his guttering lantern, the chains hold steady. Brushing his fingers against those nearest indicates none of the roughness consistent with rusting, so Poundy steps onto the bridge with only minor hesitation. From below, the depths seem to creep up the ravine walls, beckoning with feathered fingers that writhe as his lantern flickers.
Poundy shivers, and follows the tracks on the other side of the bridge. As he steps into the opening of the mineshaft on the opposing side, his lantern gutters and dies; the last of its spellwork finally giving in. He curses, loud and echoing near the edge of this ravine, and pulls his flint and steel from the depths of his inventory, and fumbles for the small iron latch to swing the lantern’s glass door open. The wick within is burnt out, guttered and unlightable, and Poundy curses again, leaving it by the entrance.
He hadn’t wanted to use his torches — had wanted to save them for the caves themselves, but the mineshaft continues, the dark makes his head buzz; tripping fear and anxiety in a way it usually doesn’t, and Poundy’s curious. So he pulls a torch from his inventory, lights it, and heads further into the mines.
The torch’s open flame flickers, turning carved stone walls into lines of dancing shadow, but the light burns far brighter, illuminating a glint of metal further down the tracks. It’s a minecart, one that’s rolled off broken tracks and settled against the wall. It carries its cargo in a surprisingly intact chest, held shut by a simple iron latch. Affixing his torch to the wall, Poundy flicks the latch and lifts the lid, prepared for the usual jumble of seeds, replacement tracks and iron — maybe some glowberries or a name tag, if the universe is feeling favourable.
Instead, a neatly-folded woollen cloak sits in the bottom of the chest. It’s soft to the touch — incredibly so — and when Poundy pulls it out to examine it further, the intricate stitching glimmers in the light of his torch. It’s a deep blue, almost black, and the barely-lighter embroidery stretching across the shoulders and down the back gives it the appearance of the cosmos. The cloak is clearly hand-made, with effort put into every stitch, and in his hands, its warmth soaks into his very bones.
“Lucky find,” he murmurs, and wraps it over his shoulders, latching the button at his throat.
Something’s been buzzing in the back of his head. He doesn’t know when it started, just that it’s there — barely audible and never-ending, a constant- pressure, almost, that settles in his brain and builds. It makes his ears twitch; the fur along his tail prickles, almost like pins and needles but with no cause. He starts getting headaches, and at first, assumes it’s dehydration — he tries drinking more water, tries drinking less mountain dew energy, and when that doesn’t work he tries getting more regular sleep.
He tries healing potions, once, when it gets particularly bad, but when that doesn’t help he doesn’t bother anymore.
It’s not always pressure — sometimes it’s just buzzing, a building anxiety somewhere deep within him. Poundy doesn’t really question it. He’s not usually this anxious, but it’s not like it’s abnormal for a speedrunner to have a little anxiety, especially with how dangerous runs are. But it’s an irritation, so when nothing clears it, he runs.
The first few lead nowhere. No entry, no ocean — and if there is an ocean, there’s no shipwreck, no buried treasure, no way to get the things he needs to run. So he jumps from world to world, ocean to ocean, until he finally finds something he can use.
A shipwreck, deep enough that it’s just barely in sight, with kelp bobbing on the ocean surface just beyond it. A helpful dolphin gives him a speed boost along the way, helps him ignore the drag of water through his fur, his clothes and the brilliantly warm cloak he’s started wearing. There is something, though, still distracting him — while the buzzing has settled for the most part, Poundy must have been by himself for too long, because he could almost swear he can hear whispers, a voice near-silent even to his sensitive hearing, coming from somewhere in the back of his head. He shakes it off, because with the ten iron in the shipwreck’s treasure chest, if he finds an entry, he’s got a run.
But if it’s loneliness that’s the issue: the dolphin, playing with the gravel he’d dug up to find flint, pauses and watches him, with one coal-dark eye on the side of its head. Somehow, that eye seems almost- judgemental, as if it's smarter than any human ever has or will be; like it knows his language and his brain, and it finds him somehow wanting.
And, well- Poundy’s reaction to things like this has always been a little unusual.
His ears flick, and he grins at it. “If I’ve hit the point where I think you can hear me think, I’m dolphin-ately going insane.”
It turns away at his words; abandoning both him and the floating gravel around him to the depths of the ocean, with all the judgement Poundy had imagined of it before this. But beyond that; beyond the far-too-intelligent response from his dolphin friend, there is another response.
A whisper, louder than before — loud enough to be audible as words, slightly distorted but still clear;
this is awful banshee i regret being here
And, equally as clearly, he hears the response.
i fucking hate it here too cal that was awful
He freezes in place at the sound; spins to look for whoever’s speaking in a way that must have seemed insane, if there was anyone watching. But the sea lies as empty as it has been since he joined this world — even more so, with the dolphin gone — and there is nobody who could have spoken within a range enough for him to hear them.
His reaction is, in his expert opinion, a perfectly reasonable one.
“What do you mean?” he says, vowels exaggerated into a drawn-out whine. “That was a great pun!”
sure, poundcake, says the second voice, who should not at all know his name, and i’m not dead
banshee! The first voice — Cal, then — scolds. it’s not like he knew we were here when he picked it up. There’s an impression; like a weight in his head, and he knows, somehow, that they’ve turned towards him, in whatever other realm they reside in.
we’re the universe, poundcake, Cal tells him, and the other one — Banshee — picks up the line where Cal left off.
we are two of the infinite whole, part of the totality that is everything. to some we are the end poem. to others we are distant stars in the sky above. for you, we built your cloak out of the fabric of the cosmos, and we speak to you just the same.
And Poundy-
Well, he’s a speedrunner. He’s known the universe as near a friend; passed through it, crafted worlds from it. He has watched people — fellow speedrunners, friends and the friends of friends — step into the void off the edge of the end, and never step back out.
(This is, perhaps, easier for him to accept than most.)
“Okay,” he says, “d’you wanna watch me run?”
