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“What a shame,” Belos says, voice thick with calm disappointment. It’s an achingly familiar tone. Utterly devoid of forgiveness or regard for whatever excuses Hunter might cobble together. “Out of all the grimwalkers, you looked the most like him.”
“W-what?” he stutters out. That was not what he had asked for, but his thoughts are circling too fast for him to pin one down with any certainty.
The ground beneath him bubbles with a familiar glow of artificial magick as his mind races. His feet have already disappeared, the boiling quicksand of the mindscape being pushed by the man he would call uncle .
The human— Luz tosses him the lifeline of her jacket and jabbers out something about everything being okay if he can just hold on. But mindscapes don’t work like that. His legs are completely submerged now, and the muck is hungrily crawling up his torso.
At the last moment, Luz is the one to let go first; Hunter holds his breath as he sinks under the tide.
The dark is as deep as it is wide. It’s oily and suffocating, and he has to consciously remember to breathe. The blackness he’s mired in insists it’s optional, but he clings to the sensation of a normal body like a blanket as the warm, primordial ink tries to ferment him as a single grain of malt.
An inordinate amount of time passes and a different awareness creeps up around him.
There is another mass, hidden in his dead angle. He feels it by gravity alone as it pulls him through the formless nothing. Thinking on it will only lead to more awareness of the bloated, fleshy thing. This is a terrible, inevitable line of thought—and it's absolutely ensnaring.
It’s a ball of meat, a teratology of bodies merged at their centre, limbs and faces sprawling towards him as they reach out.
And then the thing speaks.
“Do you yearn for something to set you apart?” the voice is like his, strained by more earthly years.
“Wake up with an aching to be special?” the voice is his, raspy and stilted as if chewing through stone.
“Y ou don ’t have to do an y thing an y more.” this voice is also his, but the words are chipped and broken by sizzling, and for the first time he can smell the lurid sauce the mass soaks in.
“All that wanting only begets pain.”
Their soft invasion has the smell of sweet decay. It's tempting; this isn't the kind of place where one can simply be . If he had more him right now he might be able to crawl up and out.
And then somewhere in the sore, bloated mass, there is a new sensation. It tugs on his fleeting consciousness like a fly to honey and then pulls its trap out of the ball of meat.
"Stay together now–those things like to eat!"
With nothing else to hold onto, he throws himself forward and the jacket in his arms extends a cotton arm out to the voice.
"I have you! Hold on to yourself!"
His doppelgangers below tug at his belt, his cloak, his feet as he is yanked out. He's wrung out from either end like a wet towel before snapping loose.
And then he's falling and collapsing. Onto a ground that he's sure wasn't there before. A kneeling shadow crests over him, but the person casting it doesn't touch him.
Instead, he waits for Hunter to climb into a sitting position and holds his gaze.
It’s nearly impossible to focus on anything else when the figure in front of him is so… broken . Like a painting warped by moisture, nothing lines up quite right. His eyes are disjointed, looking at him from different vertices. In some places the person even breaks like a mirror, patches of skin duplicated across his limbs.
"Child, follow my breaths if you can."
In and out. In, hold, and out on a long breath. They repeat this until Hunter can speak long enough to break the otherwise quiet limbo.
“Th-thanks, um, uh, I think those were—who, what are you?”
The person, a man Hunter realizes, smiles a cracked grin. “I realize I must seem rather unsightly to someone not from this demesne, but I assure you that I mean no harm. As for what I am…” He pauses, looking over Hunter’s shoulder a moment. “That’s a little harder to explain.”
“And those, that thing, those were the other Golden Guards—“ his heart flutters again, dropping back into its frantic pacing. The man in front him grips his shoulders with gentle firmness that braces against the shivers.
“Only echoes. Breathe. Stay with me. You’re safe so long as we’re together.”
“But—this is his, his subconscious and now I’m trapped. ”
The man hums and Hunter can feel it ripple in his bones. “You mean to tell me that you’re already giving up?”
“What? No, just…” He’d spent many nights studying the nebulous physics of mindscapes, the subconscious a persistent point of speculation. A phantasmagoria of discarded wants and ambitions only governed by its own, amorphous rules. With only a porous relationship with the waking mind, the conscious host could not ascertain it directly, its nature forever a foreign entity lurking underneath more intelligent thoughts.
The space itself was so far from reality that anything lost in it would inevitably dissolve by virtue of being too real.
“Why are you helping me?” Hunter says.
Another broken smile. “Anything for family.”
“Family…” Ha. What family? His only remaining living relative had condemned him down into the abyss.
The man cocks his head. Or at least, Hunter thinks he does; it may have been simply a shifting of his marred visage. “Walk with me?” the man says as he stands, pulling himself up more smoothly than Hunter would have expected.
Hunter blinks, glancing around at the now…gray nothingness. He can scarcely see beyond a small radius around them, his sight-line fading into the charcoal darkness. “And we’re walking where exactly…?”
“Anywhere. It’s more for your restlessness than anything.”
Staying still did sound like the worse option with the skittering feeling under his skin. There’s also the phantom scent of rotten meat lingering in his nostrils. “Fair enough.”
Hunter rises from his knees, making quick work of any traitorous tears with his glove. He’s not quite eye-level with the man now, and more than a little glad for it.
They walk an indeterminable distance in silence. By Hunter’s count, it’s one lap around the main floor of the palace, but without any kind of other reference it feels more like walking in place. They’re anywhere—and nowhere.
“Thanks,” Hunter says quietly.
“Of course,” the man replies without another word. He seems content to let Hunter stew in his own thoughts, but right now his mind is racing like a scared rabbit, running into things that feel too much like traps.
“Do you uh…have a name?”
“I do. Would you like to know what it is?” the man replies blithely.
On another day Hunter’s face might have burned with exasperation—some denizens of the Isles could be so frustrating to pull information from—but right now it’s easier to follow whatever weave his rescuer lays out.
“Yes?”
“Oh good. This would be more awkward otherwise. I’m remembered as Caleb. ” As the name leaves his lips, there's an edge of another voice underneath that sends a shiver through Hunter.
“Hunter.”
“Ah! I see some things haven’t changed. Unfortunate.”
“What do you—“ The other Guards. “…were the others also…?”
“As far as my awareness is, yes. Any novel learning I have is limited—I only have what the greater light of this place lets filter down…and despite how intimidating the thing you faced was, it was once a bit bigger.”
Hunter gulps.
“But I am confident that it won’t be growing much longer,” Caleb says lightly.
That’s almost a comforting thought, but Hunter isn’t entirely sure what that might mean for him. If he can’t escape from this plane—no, don’t even entertain the thought. His heart nearly skips a beat.
Change the topic.
“So that breathing thing…”
"A little trick I learned from Ë̸̛͙̜̺̺̠̼͎̂̅v̶̡̱͔̫͇͘͜e̴̡̛͇͈̣̠̲̠̻̞̅̈́l̵̡͕̦͇̤̦̂̑̈̿͒̑̚y̵̨̞͉̼̗̺̦̪̜̙̮̖͌̎͌͑̐̓̂̉̿̎̓̍̈́̕͠n̵̹̭̝͋͋̕ͅ." Caleb pauses mid-step. Frozen a moment before appearing again as having finished the step. It reminds Hunter of switching channels on his cracked crystal ball.
He wants to press further, his curiosity piqued. Caleb is the only thing keeping him together right now and if something’s wrong…but of course it’s wrong. This is the subconscious: anything that lives here would be delicate, ground down by the overwhelming gravity. This Caleb looks like he’s been stitched back together several times over.
“Earlier, you said that who-what you are was… complicated. ”
“Yes, I’m not like you, though I suppose that much was obvious.”
“Kinda, yeah…” Hunter murmurs. If Caleb hears him, he doesn’t even bat an eye at it.
“I am something that bears the resemblance of what the greater light calls Caleb, which as I have come to learn in my sparse waking moments is both who and what. An old friend resented, longed for. But above all, I am…a reflection with many stones cast into it. A very old idea,” Caleb says. “I am broken and re-molded every time he thinks on me—and it is never with complete fondness. Which is how I’ve come to be in this state,” Caleb finishes, drifting off on the last few words as he comes to a sudden halt. Hunter falls out of pace, coming to a stop a step and a half ahead of Caleb before turning around.
“And while I will never know my ortet, I know that if I am even half of what he is thought to be—that I am, on behalf of so many distorted echoes, so, so sorry.”
“I’m— what ?” Now face to face with Caleb, Hunter is dumbstruck by the apology. They’re a rarity, and genuine ones in even fewer supply. Mouth nearly agape, he braves making eye contact with Caleb—and meets a familiar loose bang now plastered across the broken glass in a small multitude.
Caleb flickers again. “In a better reality, neither of us would exist.”
It’s so, so much, enough that it invokes the pattering wererabbit of his brain. “I-” an unfertile ground littered with broken golden masks (had his ever looked so rusted?) of an endless parade of little blonde friends toys soldiers with no family no home beyond a gilded mantle—every bruise and beating reaching for something behind his assailant’s eyes—the only time growing inside him like mold, bitter, harsh, exacting and deserved—and here was some distortion of the man being chased for centuries and centuries. Apologizing for his existence, as if there was ever a choice.
As if he ever had a choice.
He was only ever eating mold.
It is only by years of training he holds his composure—mostly. At least Belos can’t hear him down here.
“But. We’re here. Or at least, you’re here, and whole. Which means that things are changing.”
It doesn’t seem terribly relevant whether he’s ‘whole’ or not. Either way he’s stuck, left to rot.
“Even as butchered as I am, I can see that there is a glimmering in you that other things here do not have.” Caleb’s grip tightens. “Most things, even me, are just shades of dark. But you, you —have something. Something that…” Tentatively his broken gaze drifts to the sweater Hunter is nearly puncturing with his white knuckle grip. “…doesn’t belong to you.”
Following Caleb’s eyes, Hunter sees the imprint of his knuckles in white cotton sleeves. His panic folds over into a tense realization as he finally spots his hope—hand-drawn glyphs, situated in a loose pocket. There’s only a handful left. He tries not to think about how many might have trailed behind them, lost to the eerie dark mist.
A faint warmth creeps into his chest as he sights plant genesis symbols. Under his breath, he whispers “ Wild magick…” but it might as well be thunder, for how it punctuates the utter silence enveloping them. Hunter stiffens as if he’s just let out a great, dark secret. Caleb simply grins.
“Just magick.”
Hunter’s heart sinks as his gaze trails back up along Caleb’s frame. “But where can I go?”
“Anywhere. You are untethered, and I believe you fell down to arrive here, no?” A wan smile crosses Caleb’s lips.
“So I just need to go back up,” Hunter says softly as he looks above them for the first time in some while. Nothing but inky blackness greets him—and who knows what else, that might be lurking? Silence. And then:
“I believe so, yes!” Hunter almost recoils at the sudden shift in tone, wrenching a hand around the tiny papers. It shakes him just enough to brush off his last thought and create space for a new question.
“Earlier, you called me, um, family?” A missing piece in his burgeoning narrative.
Spreading his hands as if delivering good news, “Indeed! Caleb and Pip were quite close, once, and you, as a derivative—a descendant, of sorts.”
Hunter is beginning to doubt that he and Belos were ever truly ‘close’. Intimately familiar, but distanced by more falsehoods than Hunter can even begin to count.
Just then, there’s a shift in the blackness, a hole of sorts that evaporates nearly as soon as it arrives—but not before letting a terrifying shriek echo through.
Hackles raised, Hunter stiffens back to being ramrod straight. Time, even here, is fleeting.
Nodding, Caleb takes a step back. The darkness quickly begins to crowd back in as they separate. No time to waste.
No magic—no matter, he thinks as he slams a glyph down in front of him. Belos, and the strangeness of this place should be plenty enough. Eyes closed, he imagines a mighty wall of vegetation rising up and out, raising him with it. It’s intent, focused to hard edge as he slaps an open palm on the paper.
And whether by his volition, the weariness of this subconscious, or both, the glyph explodes with greenery, sweeping him up by its thorns as he’s propelled upward.
He closes his eyes, and hopes.