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For a long, long time, she is nothing.
Nonexistence is not so much black as it is grey. Featureless and expansive and smooth; like coral trying to grow on plastic, if she had a consciousness, it would have nothing to hold on to. There is black at first, sure - the black of the blight that withered her body to ash as it did with the rest of her kingdom - but when even that drifts away on the wind, in the last of the long-dead world, of the graveyard that used to be Gilded Helianthia… all that’s left is grey.
Perhaps it is inaccurate to say that she is nothing for a long time, because there is barely such a thing as time in death.
She simply is not -
and then, quite unexpectedly, she is.
Sausage stands behind the fretting figure of himself and wishes that he hadn’t burnt his spellbook. It exists, in this past version of events, but himself is holding it far too tightly for him to get a look in, to see the right words appearing on the page. Sausage has come to save Pearl, after all, and how can he do that without a spell?
Her body weakens and withers in his former self’s arms, and Sausage grinds his teeth together at the helplessness. He knows what page he should be reaching for - can see the spell he should be trying plain as day in his mind’s eye, because he’d put a lot of thought into it in the tear-stained aftermath - but past Sausage is still helplessly flicking from chapter to chapter, looking for a way out, and it’s not helping and it’s not working and she’s still dying and he cannot interfere because he did not interfere but he is -
Pearl falls, again, to dust.
He will have to try again.
The first thing she knows, once she has the presence of self to know anything at all, is that it does not hurt any more.
Death was agony. A thousand tiny pinpricks as the withering picked away at the seams of her self, frayed every strand of her nerves alight with pain, turned her into something plagued and crumbling and weak until eventually the numbness came, too late to even be a comfort, and she was gone. Death was noisy and scary and happened too fast.
This is neither numb nor painful, although there’s nothing to feel in the nothing that is everything there is besides her. It’s just… quiet, and sort of warm.
It does not hurt. It is peaceful, here, wherever here might be.
And somewhere, she thinks, somebody is calling her name.
He goes back a little further. Before she stands bleeding and blackening in that tiny little tower room, before he tries to find the spell and fails. If Sausage cannot magic her back to life, he reasons, then the next best thing would be to stop whatever’s killing her.
He arrives in Gilded Helianthia a few minutes before himself and Pearl do. There is fire everywhere. The beanstalk is burning, the golden goose is running around in blind panic, the animals and the plants are dying, and Sausage quickly finds that his memory of warding spells and water-blasting incantations are nowhere near enough to quell the blaze. He barely finds the time to duck behind a crumbling bush before their past selves land on frantic running feet.
He watches, this time, the bush - a rose-bush, yellow and youthful - turn to withered ashes leaf by rotting leaf. The blooms spot and wilt in front of him.
When the whole thing’s dead, he stands, just in time to see his former self fleeing from the tower.
He will have to try again.
She fades in and out of herself. There is barely a self to be; just a weak sense of hope, of desperation and of pushing, she thinks. When she is, it’s fleeting, and when she isn’t, it’s incomprehensible. Who could perceive their own lack of existence?
But there is peace, and there is time, which she comes to know by the fact that there is anything to know, or anything to do the knowing, which means that there must be time to do the knowing in. There is what feels like infinite time. This non-place is observably eternal. Perhaps it is nothing but time, even.
It does not feel like the kind of eternity that just goes on and on in a straight line until forever, though. It feels more like a circuit - like this eternity is repeating, over and over again, looping and folding in on itself, always moving, never progressing.
Or maybe that’s just her mind playing tricks on her. She won’t fault it for that. She’s lucky to even have a mind.
Okay, so if he cannot stop the burning, he’ll have to stop the thing that set the world on fire at all. Jimmy had said something about - about Fwhip, and how he’d been killed by something, although since Fwhip had turned up with Gem a moment later he’s not sure quite how accurate that assessment turned out to be. Either way, he’s going to head for the Grimlands and see if he can stop the problem at its root.
(Every time, he thinks he’s stopping it at the root, and every time he realises there is a deeper-buried root that he’s missed. He does not let himself wonder how far down he’ll have to dig before it can be truly stopped.)
Sausage watches with confusion as Jimmy pours a bucket of cod into a fishtank of salmon and Fwhip flips a lever beside it.
Something explodes.
Something flies - a piece of shrapnel that he follows first with his eyes and then with his elytra, chasing the spitting ball of fire and debris that splits and spreads across every kingdom, lands among the sunflowers, sets the empire ablaze.
He watches the sky, and the smoke that fills it. Elsewhere in the kingdom, the last version of him is still trying to put out the fire. He casts away the flames on a rose-bush, just to put a good-faith effort into it, and abruptly realises that this only means the blight will be the thing to take it.
He will have to try again.
The best stories are the ones that are told over and over again. Pearl - for that is her, she comes to realise, after a long, long time of being folded in on herself - doesn’t know a lot of stories. She tells herself the ones she can remember.
Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there was a beanstalk, and a golden goose, and a house far above the clouds. There might have been a boy, too, and a woman who couldn’t see the magic in her back garden until it was a little too late. The details are fuzzy.
Once upon a time there was a little girl who dreamed she could be so much more than herself, and she wished with all her might to become something great, and she became an empress with sunflowers strung through her hair. There might have been friends, family, who helped her on that path. Their faces are lost from memory.
Once upon a time there were brothers - and once upon a time, long before that, there were brothers before them - brothers who fought and were never able to reconcile, brothers who could not reach the light within the other’s hearts, no matter how much they wanted to, brothers locked in eternal struggle. There might have been imprisonment and there might have been death. This one’s not a story she knows well, just one that she’s been told.
Once upon a time -
Sausage comes to the conclusion that if he can’t stop the explosion, the least he can do is get Pearl out of there before it happens. This way he can save her. If she doesn’t want to leave her empire behind, well, she’ll just have to deal. Pearl is more important than her lands. Pearl is more important than anything.
He finds her while she’s sleeping. Dawn will come soon, and she will wake and she will see him and he can’t risk that, so he’ll have to be quick. He stands just inside her bedroom and casts out a circle of teleportation, something that will get them somewhere, anywhere, just far away from this place. Then he casts again, a gentle kinetic spell, lifting the blankets from her sleeping form and raising her into the air so her hair cascades across her floating shoulders like a golden waterfall.
She stirs, then, the first cracks of sunlight filtering across the horizon and towards her face. She shifts in midair, and moves her neck a little, and he can’t move her if she won’t stay still, there’s too much risk to the integrity of the incantation -
Damn it. Sausage lets her drift gently down into bed again. Pearl rolls over and falls back to sleep without another sound.
He takes the teleportation circle himself and lands in Mythland, which is not as helpful as he’d hoped. His old self is probably sealing away the evil within him right now. He can’t get in the way of that.
He will have to try again.
Pearl was not, for a very long time, and then she was, and she is, and it’s taking a while, but she thinks that she is much more than she was before.
She’s started to be able to see herself again, for example. Envision herself - her hands, her feet, her hair on her shoulders and the dress that flows around the rest of her. It feels like it’s missing something, which would probably be the sunlight. Clearly there’s not no light here if she can see her body, but she misses the golden warmth that the sun alone provides, the sparkle that it brought to this sort-of-iridescent fabric and the gold trim that sits across her collar and drops off down her upper arms.
There is also that feeling again. Like somebody’s calling for her, trying to find her, trying to reach her. Whoever it is, they sound familiar. Pearl thinks she must have helped them out before.
She tries to send a response. I’m here and I love you and I hope you’re alright. She tries to send her strength, because it sort of feels like that’s what they want from her, but also because there’s not much else she can do.
Maybe, when it all loops back around again, she’ll be able to give more.
Spell after spell after spell. Sausage tries to dampen the fires and stay the blighting and save his best friend over and over and over and over again and it fails and it fails and it fails. Sausage blasts so much magic into this mission that it leaves him weak from the effort, makes him have to sit and rest for hours before he tries again sometimes, just watching the withering overtake Gilded Helianthia over and over again. There must be a dozen Mythical Sausages sitting in this empire, reliving the tragedy from slightly different angles, each watching a different piece of Pearl turn to dust and break away on the smoke-blackened wind. It’s a miracle he hasn’t run into himself - but of course he hasn’t, because he didn’t, so he can’t.
This time he’s trying to safeguard the tower, painstakingly lining runes into the wall with saltwater, keeping his circles as perfect as possible. If he can only keep the room that Pearl ends up standing in protected from all magic, then maybe she won’t die so quickly. Maybe he’ll have more time to check the spellbook; maybe he can save her.
His markings dry into the walls and the floor, and he casts an experimental firebolt into the sphere that they create. It disappears in a puff of inhibition the moment it hits the edge.
Perfect. A magical deadzone. Safe.
Too late he realises, watching from the top of a tree as the same events play out for the hundredth time, that this has only made it harder for him to save Pearl: even if he’d found the spell to fix her in time, he wouldn’t have been able to use it. He’s doomed himself.
He will have to try again.
Folding in on itself. The circuit, the möbius strip of eternity that runs round and round across the same singular path, is folding in on itself, and it’s doing it faster and faster. The end of forever gets closer and closer to the beginning, and she doesn’t know how she knows, but it’s getting closer and it’s coming towards her and the grey becomes a brilliant blinding light and the universe said WAKE UP -
and Pearl is somewhere.
She doesn’t recognise it, though she feels immediately at home. Perhaps because it’s like something straight out of a story book.
A house far above the clouds - or, at least, sitting right atop one.
She can see more than just herself, now. She knows more than what she left behind, and more than what she was told as a little girl. She knows a lot.
She sees everything.
The TV on the wall helps with that.
(The best stories are the ones that are told over and over again - and every god begins as a fairytale.)
He has tried and tried and tried and it is not enough. He has poured enough magic into Pearl, into saving Pearl, to make a whole new person’s magical signature out of it. Maybe more.
He doesn’t care. He has to keep trying.
Once upon a time, a man built a great empire. He filled it with sacred sheep and dark magic, but his heart was pure at its core, and he was able to defeat the evil that tried to overtake him. He called upon the strength of a power far beyond him - a power for which he had no name. He was strong in the face of distress and corruption, because he had his friends, and because he had his faith.
Once upon a time, a man painted himself a false angel. For his hubris, he was tasked with atonement - a great church was all well and good, but meant nothing if he could not stand by the meaning behind it. He was brought through nine trials across nine lives to prove his worthiness, and only when he showed himself pure and good inside like he’d claimed to be was he allowed to sprout true angel wings and spin a halo round his head. He was strong in the face of death and death and death again in the name of the goddess he was learning to love.
Once upon a time, a little boy sat at the window of a dying kingdom, all too aware that he and his father would be fleeing in the night some day soon. A mad king had overtaken everything the little boy held dear, and if they did not escape, it would surely mean their death. He sat at the window and he prayed to a deity that his people had worshipped for generations - nearly a thousand years. He was strong, although he was so, so small, and he was incredibly brave.
Once upon a time, a prayer came soft across the wind and whispered sweet in Santa Perla’s ear. That was the name she had, or is the name she has, or will be the name she is given. (She knows everything, and she sees everything, from here. Time is an afterthought now.)
Life after life after life after life after life, Sausage asks Pearl for her strength, and Pearl provides. The magic at her fingertips grows stronger every time he speaks her name.
Time folds in on itself, and Pearl is infinite, and she thinks it might have something to do with the fact that Sausage believes in her. He has never stopped and he never stops and he will never stop believing, and he puts all of himself into it.
Sausage gives her everything she is. The least that Pearl can do is offer back all the love that she possesses.
(No sunflower will ever wilt beneath his touch.)
It’s a fixed point. Her death is inevitable. No matter what Sausage does, no matter how much of himself he channels into changing things, it is always the same.
Pearl falls, again, to dust.
He does not have the strength to try again.
They made each other, and they keep each other strong.
Once upon a time, an old man grew tired and weak from too much exertion. Nothing he did could change the hands of fate. He didn’t know it, but he was trying to prevent himself from creating a goddess, and he blamed himself for every failed attempt.
Pearl tries, for the first time, casting herself down to the mortal realm.
It’s not the same, watching everything happen through the telly, though the memory of life is now long-faint. She’s missed being able to hold him, as he held her in the moment of her death.
She's missed him a lot.
Pearl and Sausage spar a million billion trillion battles and each one ends in laughter and in love. Pearl and Sausage watch the world below grow quiet one by one, the afterlife become deserted, the new world rise century by century until it’s time for him to go back down again anew.
Sausage puts himself to bed, and Pearl tucks him in.
It is quiet, and it is peaceful, and it is warm.
Maybe, in this life, she’ll be able to give him even more.