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The thing is that Theseus had loved his ship. He sailed the world with its reins, and it was the moniker that crowned him as a hero when he sailed back with the rescued Athenians and the Minoatur’s head in his hands. The ship wasn’t only built from wood, but of its memories and tales imprinted as it lays open its bilge. What other ship has greeted Theseus at shore as he crawled out of the labyrinth, so relieved at the thought of spreading its sails and returning home? What other ship is capable of being such an unflappable vessel of his love?
Then, let's say this: if every part of the ship was replaced – the planks and bolts that had once so tenderly held it together, reprieved of every spider-silk thread that Theseus had etched his very essence into – is it still the same ship?
EIGHT HOURS
So this is it.
Over time, you’ve learned how to wrangle the red haze; the right way to seize this hunger by the horns and steer it towards the path of conquest. Still, you can’t fight the buzz that creeps down your spine as your timer strikes the eight hour mark. That indescribable thrill of a veil being lifted off your eyes, as if turning red reveals a certain clarity of the world that the low thrum of yellow and green try to conceal.
Coral crawls along your skin like arteries laid inverse, and the kelp has turned to rot. There’s a flag that hangs like a carcass from your waist; you run your fingers along its seams and think of gods and kings and try very hard to ignore the way your chest pangs.
You stare into the hourglass and through the fractured glass your reflection looks back, and you know, as intrinsically as the scars nestled deep within your flesh, the red humming in your veins like a rushing river, that only one will survive. You know that it will be you.
SEVEN HOURS
“So this is it,” you say to Scott. The night is a blot of ink, and instead of stars there’s a nebula of gunpowder and smoke and the taste of ash on your tongue. You sit with him atop the Coral Isles, staring at everything below. You trace the anachronous lull of the sea, and you pretend that if you were to fall in, the waves would catch you kindly instead of swallowing you whole.
“This is it,” Scott agrees. He’s making a point of not looking at you, but it’s okay, because you’re not looking at him either. After all, yellow still sparks bravely in his eyes amongst a sea of red. You think, faintly, about driving a blade through his neck.
“Hey,” says Scott, and you turn, then. He doesn’t smile, but there’s something subdued in his expression. “You and me to the end, yeah?”
For a moment there’s a lingering smell of rot: your king’s head on the altar for one awful moment as it hangs on the trepidation of respawn. A testament of loyalty, of love. Your heart heavy in your chest, Dogwart’s walls closing in–
You blink away the memory, nails digging the shapes of crescent moons into your palms.
To the end – like there is no betrayal, no absent kings and serpentine halls that lead to ruin. You’ve never been a paragon of loyalty, and you understand well that vows cannot be made without being broken. But the issue is that you have your tail caught between your legs; no matter how hard you try, you cannot kill that incessant itch for a sense of direction, so you nod your head in lieu of a response. Scott fixes you a look, before nodding back.
SIX HOURS
Jimmy slips off Skynet, and the voices within you stir.
Perhaps – perhaps it is not good, that you do not have it within you to care, not in the way that Scott tries to hide his white knuckles from gripping his communicator at that crack of thunder. Not in the way that Grian and Joel move around the map as if lost without their third.
Jimmy had been your friend. Still is, if you’re being technical about it. But this game has a way of twisting death into a shape it was never meant to take. You’re not as bothered by the dry blood rooted under your cuticles as you once were. It’s just the mantra of a place like this: you adapt, or you die.
Scott still has that far-off look in his eyes, so you take the time to gear up for the next fight. As you keep your hands busy with sharpening the tip of your sword into teeth, you wonder if you will mourn Scott in the same way when he dies.
FIVE HOURS
You cannot help at times but feel like you are lost. There is a winding labyrinth beneath your feet, and, like the drawl of the sea that is endlessly blue and endlessly deep, it grabs you by the ankles and pulls you under.
See, what lies at the crux of the labyrinth is that you must slay the Minotaur first. No amount of Ariadne’s string will keep you safe, because the Minotaur is the nucleus of iniquity that holds up the maze’s walls.
Theseus strangles the beast to death with his bare hands to rescue the girl he loves. He is drenched in blood, but he is a hero: the red is crowned like a circlet of leaves upon his head.
Your myth, if you even believe in those, looks a little more like this:
You take your hands and rip open his chest. Peel back layers and layers of tightly wound skin. You lift out his heart, gently, intimately, with such devotion that you don’t disfigure a single bone, that you don’t disrupt the blood flow. In the fractals of light, his beating heart, so wonderfully alive, looks like a pearl. There is no deed more sacred than the fragility of his life in your hands, to lay himself open as long as it's you handling the coffin that he will be laid in. And he smiles at you, then, and something in you is set alight.
But this blood wasn’t earned in conquest, and he knows this. So he presses an ax into your hands, its edge sharp and curved like a spinal cord. The wood of the handle is so unlike the intricacy of a heart; it splinters your palms like fire swallowing cotton. You shudder out a breath and look into the eyes of the king that is your god.
FOUR HOURS
Or, wait, that can’t be right – you could’ve sworn he looked more like Scott.
THREE HOURS
You will not hold on, because trust is like time – it slips through your fingers before you even realize it’s gone. But you do know how to dig the tip of your blade into the dirt and kneel down with every scrap of devotion you can muster. (The Dogwarts flag hanging from your waist is a painful reminder). It’s this that keeps you by Scott’s side as your timers whittle down, both of pretending that you do not have a knife pressed against his back.
TWO HOURS
Scott takes down Pearl, and then there’s three.
You think you’ve come to understand the labyrinth, just a little bit, so you and Scott split up to find Impulse.
It’s only until Scott takes four of Impulse’s hours, always unrelenting until it’s him who holds the cards, that he offers a proposal.
“An eye for an eye,” says Scott, “We all get to under an hour, and from there, we’ll have a fair fight.”
Impulse is quick to agree, but it isn’t enough to conceal the desperation in his eyes. For a moment, you feel sympathy; you know what it’s like to carry the burden of surviving, clinging onto legacy and wishes of the home you’ve carved for yourself, and how that pain is nothing compared to watching your god crumble before your eyes with an arrow lodged through his heart in the walls of your home. You remember the crawling loss that fractured with every step you took, every time you yelled out his name, until your own final life was torn right out of you moments after.
The Dogwarts flag is an iron weight against your skin.
And, really, a fair fight sounds a bit stupid, because when has this ever been fair – an extra thirty minutes for a kill versus a lost hour for a death – but Scott has this oddly resilient look in his eyes, so you’ll humor it, sure.
This will all end soon either way.
“I guess I have some time to spare,” you shrug, letting your sword clatter to the ground and unstrapping your armor. You turn towards Impulse and smirk. “Alright then. Kill me, and make it count.”
THIRTY-SEVEN MINUTES & THIRTY-THREE SECONDS
As your hand moves towards your sword, your eyes are fixed on Scott. The flesh of his neck is exposed underneath his tuft of hair; your king’s image is superimposed over him ( if all its parts are replaced with something newer, stronger, is it still the same ship? ), and you remember everything your king has ever told you. The silver lining wraps itself around your lungs and squeezes. This is it. This is it. This is it–
You strike.
ONE HOUR & SEVEN MINUTES & TWENTY-SEVEN SECONDS
You drive your blade through the chest of Scott’s corpse one more time, just for good measure. A knife driving through coral and fins like frozen meat.
You won. God , you won! There are lava burns on your skin, and the lip of your sword teeters with blood, and there’s that knowing that everything you’ve ever done has culminated to this very moment – it comes clambering into you all at once with all the force and impact of a waterfall, a broken dam spilling open. You laugh until your throat goes dry and you’re nearly choking on it, and even that’s not enough to satiate the taste of victory.
The added time is ice cold against your skin, and you suppress a shudder at the sudden spring of life. One hour is a lot of time, you realize now, with no one else around to threaten your peace. There’s a lot you can do in one hour. There’s a lot you can do with this much time on your hands.
You let your gut guide you: you wander across Skynet, poke your head around T.I.E.S.’s underground base. With no one here to stop you, you trample over the fields of Bread Bridge and set fire to all of BigB and Pearl’s gear. And it’s fun, to hold the entire world in your palm. To conquer the labyrinth. But everytime you loot a chest or kill someone’s animals, something within you perks up as if waiting for the other shoe to drop, for a corpse to jump out of the shadows and take the bait.
It’s fun, for a little while.
You sit down very carefully on the grass, sword abandoned at your side, and stare out into the horizon.
The thing about being Red is that it cannot exist without the blood; a wolf only being roused from slumber by the smell of meat; a snake with its own tail down its throat. The world is quiet, and you think, vaguely, that this silence crowned by the dead is an unnatural hymn in your bones. The red haze has washed out into a pale pink, and it sits uncomfortable and unnatural in your chest.
You’re starting to hate the silence.
There’s a flash of movement in the corner of your eye.
You jostle, focus sharpening into the edge of a knife. You whip your head around, before spotting a figure hidden behind the foliage in the forest. You narrow your eyes, trying to make out its features through the darkness of the night, and suddenly, your king is standing before you.
Your breath catches in your throat. You are suddenly all too aware of the taste of blood in your mouth.
You can’t see his expression behind the veil of his sunglasses, his frame concealed by the cloak that had always seemed larger-than-life, even back then. His crown, studded with gems that would always glisten when the light hit it just right, now seems to coalesce with the shadows. You don’t know how long he stands, watching, motionless, your heart beating thunderously in your ears.
And then he raises his arm, hand extended towards you. His fingers curl, every bony knuckle visible under the moonlight, as if beckoning you forward. His lips part as if to say something. Me Hand, perhaps, from the way his lips move; Martyn, if he were truly cruel.
You think of ships that have had all its parts replaced. You think of memories that are no longer yours. You are not sure if your king’s hands will hold you gently or rip your face off. You can’t move, can barely breathe.
“Ren,” you croak out, and your king dissipates in a tendril of smoke. Your hand fumbles for empty air.
You tilt your gaze towards the sky and press the Dogwarts flag against your face, breathing in its seams. You remain unmoving for a long, long time.
You still can’t quite see the stars from here, not with all the smoke. Skynet was always more trouble than it was worth. What point is there in standing over the entire world if it means you can’t see every star in the sky?
Perhaps, you think, royalty isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
You stand back up. Instead of moving towards gates of victory and laurel wreaths and bastions that will honor your name, you let your legs carry you forward. The world seems to blur in and out, as if caught in a timelapse, and when you blink again, you’re sitting on the pier of the Coral Isles.
There are craters all over the ground, and one side of your house is completely gone. But this was the place you and Scott had built together, all those moons ago – doesn’t that mean something?
You glance at your wrist, tracing a finger over the countdown faintly etched into your skin. Not much time left.
Well, you suppose that this isn’t a bad way to die: staring at the sea before you, that infinite, unknowable world beyond the border, waiting for the ship that will carry you home.