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In this moment, there is no one Nine hates more than Cythila fucking Weebius.
Because the same person who had a sword sticking out of their thigh and acted nonchalant about it was now staring at him with wide eyes as pain shot through his arms, his legs, his chest tightening as his breathings came faster, because his organs were apparently going to disappear and she was taking a photo.
“Say cheese!” She said cheerfully, a flash illuminating the dark cave, making him close his eyes for a moment, the light glowing behind his eyelids. He sputtered, staggering back, feeling his ears flatten against his head as panic filled his chest.
“What’s going to happen to me?” Nine asks- pleads, almost, although he would never admit that out loud.
“Well, you’ll experience one of the five worst pains!” Cythila grins, sounding far too happy for someone who told him that every part of him that made him human was going to disappear literally twenty seconds ago. “The loss of your humanity.”
“I’m not a human anymore?” He almost yells, because what the fuck?
“Well, technically, yes,” she drawls. “You’re slowly becoming one- by day two organs will be on the ground and it will be a mess, then day three means no blood at all, then day four you start to adapt to only being a brain. And then, day five, you’re an eldritch! Stay away from caffeine, though, it tends to hurt.”
He does not take the last piece of advice into consideration, instead processing Cythila’s words, because if he isn’t human, then what is he? A trickster, yes, a liar and a traitor and so many labels that he will perhaps never shake off. Nine was fully, completely human once, yes, like everyone else, but his form was twisted and warped, like everyone else’s. Like how shadows coil around Nirvan’s heels, and horns poke out of Avis’s hair, and how Star’s freckles glow slightly whenever night falls.
Yes, two grey ears poke out of messy, unnaturally blue hair, and yes, a long tail striped with black and white drags behind him, but Nine is still, unarguably, unequivocally, human. He’s human in the same way Lightning and Tatia and Valkyrie are- human, yes, but just a little bit left of the general definition of what a human is supposed to look like, what a human is supposed to be able to do.
And Nine has been clinging to that shred of humanity, because in a place where everything he’s ever read in stories or watched in movies is real, his humanity is one of the last things he has left that he can still call normal. The act of laughing, eating, sleeping, breathing, feeling air enter and exit his lungs in a rhythmic pattern. Because, even if the people he’s laughing with and sitting side by side with, weaving flower crowns, have horns poking out of their hair or eyes with unnatural colourations, they’re still human.
(Mostly. Paige and Cookie are different, even though they arguably look the most human out of all of them.)
But if he doesn’t have that, then what is he? If all his blood is replaced with air and skin and muscles and teeth replaced with approximations of what they should look like, then is he even human anymore? Is he even Nine, whoever that may be?
“Where do I go?” Nine asks, instead of who am I now and what is the difference between a blood born monster and someone who became one and why have you done this. “No one can see me like this, I mean- ” he stumbles over his words. “Nirvan already hates me, what if she decides to finish the job?”
Nirvan, Nine knows, would not kill him. Despite the wisps of shadow that coil around her like a second home, and the sharp, glaring blue-grey gaze often sent in his direction, she would not kill him.
Nirvan, despite everything, is not a monster.
But now, Nine is.
Cythila leaves, for a moment, after murmuring words he does not register, before coming back from a world Nine does not know with something cradled in her hands. She gives it to him, a request falling from her lips, and he takes it.
It is a crystal.
A small yellow one, glowing ever so faintly, warm in his hands. It’s thrumming, almost like a heartbeat- but inanimate objects do not have hearts.
Phoenix, it reads, in small scratched writing that forms on the surface, like something swimming up from the depths of a pool. Potential: unknown.
She hums, taking it from him, talking about things he’ll be able to do, creatures from fairy tales painted in water colours. He says something in return, but any amicable conversation that is shared sounds like it’s submerged, deep underwater, like it’s buried in the pool lurking at the cave’s entrance.
And then the pain begins.
It shoots through him, his chest first, burning and freezing at the same time, clawing at his skin, let us in, let us in.
“Oh, fuck,” Nine curses, the pain building in his throat, burning and freezing and clawing and tearing, breaking everything apart, shattering his humanity, change is not always a good thing for those it changes for. “What was that?”
“Probably your fat and muscles being absorbed,” Cythila responds, walking closer, strands of her black hair falling over her face as she leans over.
He doesn’t even have the heart to protest right now, as the taste of lemonade and cotton candy fills his mouth and his nose. “I‘ll-” he starts, before stopping, the sweet and sour taste closing his throat, threatening to choke him. “I’ll look the same, right?” He asks, almost desperate, because he doesn’t want to change.
“Pfft,” Cythila said, red eyes (when were they red?) glowing slightly in the darkness. “You’ll look better.”
Five days, she said, earlier. Five days.
“Can you… can you speed it up?” Nine asks- pleads, as he falls to the floor, sinking. Five days. He can’t go through five days of this.
“I can try,” Cythila responds, something like pity in her red-brown eyes, hand gripping air like there should be a sword there. “But I’m not entirely sure how to use Time Magic.”
Those last two words sound so important, like something ancient and old and unwieldy, but all Nine wants is for it to be over.
“Just do it!”
And then she’s scrawling something on the floor- a circle, around where he’s collapsed, lying on the floor with one hand pressed to his mouth and his tail wrapped around his legs, a symbol scratched onto the floor.
”Are you ready?” Cythila asks him, and Nine wants to say no, of course not, how can I ever be ready?
Instead, he says this:
“I guess.”
Cythila’s hands and eyes glow for only a moment, the markings around him thrumming, and then-
and then-
everything hurts.
(The magic that changes you when you are pulled from that precarious balance between life and death is new magic. It is kind- you do not remember any changes that your body undergoes. The colour of your eyes, your hair, your skin, may change. You might sprout horns, a tail, hooves, even. It draws on memories of your life. Sometimes, it’s tamer- only small differences. Sometimes, it changes you beyond recognition- into a skeleton, a frying pan, a carrot.)
(New magic is kind.)
(Everything that involves the eldritch is old magic. And old magic is not kind.)
(Old magic coils around seeds and takes root, growing, growing, overtaking everything. It does not stop, not even for a moment, to consider the concept of pain.)
(Five day’s worth of pain at once is a terrible fate, but a necessary one.)
(Because, of course, to be born again, first you have to die.)
The only sound in the cave is screaming.
It echoes across the slightly damp stone walls, crafted with magic and dreams, walls which have seen more horrors than anyone would suspect. It shakes the verdant green leaves of the Edan tree, bouncing off of the golden-brown, slightly glowing bark.
It is over in five seconds, realistically. The sound does not leave the cave, does not reach the riverside grove where three people sit, blissfully unaware of the suffering occurring in the cave deep in the forest at the edge of their field, and of the parade of ants slowly marching over the edge of their picnic blanket.
The transformation, and the pain, is over in five seconds. But to Nine, it’s an eternity captured in mere moments for everyone else, quite literally a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment. To Nine, it is the embodiment of Hel itself. It is the embodiment of every single moment he has spent in the purgatory they call the basement. Of Glitch’s startled yelp when the guards around the Warp Amulet shimmer out of existence under his touch, of Nirvan’s hardened eyes as she aims a gun directly at his chest with more expertise than a twenty-one-year-old should logically have, of lightning crackling around Paige’s fingers, unbound by the restrictions placed on it for centuries upon centuries.
It is everything he hates, in five seconds.
Don’t misunderstand this. Nine hates these things, yes, but does he hate Glitch? Nirvan? Paige? No. Not at all. It’s the experiences they have to endure- Glitch’s, well, glitchiness, Nirvan’s shadowed expression, the way Paige’s eyes will flick to medicine bottles, searching for a label.
And then it is over.
It’s cold. That’s the first thing Nine registers, the feeling flooding through his cheek and palms, the knitted jumper Mary made for him and weathered denim dungarees hardly providing protection from the temperature.
He’s gasping, he registers faintly, each breath barely bringing enough air into his lungs to compensate for everything he’s lost. It burns. Breathing isn’t meant to burn.
A hand reaches out, and he grasps it blindly as the owner tugs him upwards, pulling him to his feet. It’s Cythila, he realises, after a few moments- her lips moving as she says words he can’t hear over the blood rushing in his ears. Slowly, it filters in- confident and firm, a steady rock in the crashing sea of everything.
He only hears the end of her sentence: “…the orchards in the western garden, where I’ll bring you to the Cradle of the Hope.”
However grammatically incorrect that name sounds, Nine nods blindly, opening one eye, then the other, wobbling where he stands before tipping forwards, Cythila catching one of his hands and helping him stay steady.
“You can stand, just think about the nerves in your feet.” She says, as Nine makes a concentrated effort to a, breathe, and b, resist the temptation to punch her in the face.
Cythila lets go, stepping back as a smile forms on her face, red-brown eyes glittering with something- amusement? Sorrow? He doesn’t know. She folds her arms, a slight clanking of the silver and gold armour she’s wearing accompanying Nine’s gradually slowing breathing. “You,” she says, “would be my fourth. The fourth of the New Generation of eldritch.”
“I…” he gasps, words running through his brain at a hundred miles per minute, as he attempts to collect himself.
”You?”
“I want to be a human.”
“Ah, yes,” Cythila hums, leaning backwards. “Everyone’s good old desire after becoming an eldritch. Don’t worry, it’ll stay there… it always does.”
“What?” Nine asks, blinking, unnaturally orange gaze suddenly wide as he looks up at her.
“I used to think about what it was like to be human,” she admits. “To have the air in your lungs, the tensing of muscles as you strain, your heart beating as you run. But most of all, I lost the one thing more important to me than anything else…”
“What did you lose?” He prompts, after a moment of silence.
“I lost my scars.” She says, and stretches out one arm- which doesn’t really prove anything, because her skin is hidden by armour. “The tales of each and every adventure I had. I used to have one that scarred my whole arm.”
“…is that going to happen to me?”
“It might, but I lost it due to my first time going into my mania form, so.”
Nine is silent for a few beats, squeezing his eyes shut as his heart beats rapidly in his chest. Is that even his heart, anymore? Are those his lungs? His eyes? If he’s not human, and everything has changed, then is any of it really his?
“…I’m scared.” He admits, quietly, softly.
“Why?” Cythila asks, tilting her head to the side like an owl would. “There is nothing to be scared of. We may not be gods, but we are those of which the gods once feared. Beings that were so old and ancient that we made the mighty heavens tremble.”
Her use of the word we made him shiver.
”And now,” she continued, “you are one of us. May it be by accident or not, you are one of us.”
And yeah. He was.
Accident or not, he wasn’t human anymore, and that hurt. Because from the moment he was pulled into the basement, he was different, but he was still human. His hair was permanently blue, and his feet were paws, and his eyes were a bright orange, and lemur ears stuck out of his hair and a long striped tail swept the floor behind him, but he was still human. He was still himself.
And now?
He wasn’t.
“What do I do now?”
Cythila grins, teeth just a bit too sharp.