Work Text:
“Stop that.”
It is the first time I have spoken since we have returned. My voice surprises me. The long diphthong, the trace consonants, the shape of it. But it always surprises me. Meaning cutting the air as something true, sometimes to the point I feel I can reach my hand up and cup the phonemes, weigh their worth between my fingers and lament the wasted energy. Yet I cannot stop. Cannot go back to before. How long have I possessed a voice? Seconds? Hours? Millennia? I have spoken more recently than I have for the rest of my entire existence.
But it is not just the act. There was something different. An unfamiliar catalog, a more worldly timbre, scintillating like icicles and chimes. A change in my form, my essence? My kind’s nature is protean, impossible, inconsistent—exactly what it needed to be: adaptiveness itself. I am not sure what it means, if anything at all. I am not sure of many things now.
There were times I wished for the ignorance I once had. I think it is the simplicity I crave. I know, if nothing else, I had been a simple being like all the rest. I lament having this thought: they are the definition of pointless. But one’s nature is difficult to refute. I can accept that, but that doesn’t mean I have to be content about it. Or can’t be irritated at others.
“What?”
“You know. It’s distracting.”
It ceases its listless patrol, but not out of obligation. The orrery of it’s being draws together, coalescing, honing into a single sharp point, like metal melting then cast into a speartip. A kind of glare.
“No.” Aven says in a voice like twigs cracking in the teeth of a wildfire.
Aven. I’d forgotten again. We have names now; revealed to one another in accident. And once something has a name, it can no longer be called “it”. No matter how strange or esoteric.
Aven is as his namesake—a solid core, like a newborn sun caught in the moment of creation, around which shadows and embers spin. A pyrophoric deluge condensed under stellar pressure into a single being. As the Dark begins its circuit anew, steps echoing rhythmically, its movements recall the flicker of firelight, its pulse-voice breathy and hollow as wind through a mountain pass, often possessed of a ragged, hoarse quality that I initially found very grating, and still did to some measure.
I pulse a bitter reply: a crystalline sound sent and returned without acknowledgment. I suppress the desire to shift my focus skyly and try to lose myself again in the ground, but its steps continue to echo. It proffers nothing to draw my focus to, emptying my mind of all but perfect clarity. This place was right and truly somewhere else.
I say “since we have returned” because time—if the concept even applies to this place, which I assume to be outside the common continuum of relativity, or at least adjacent to it—passes strangely, in sunrises and dusks we cannot contemplate.
The Mirrorways flattened into a canvas: a chiaroscuro of midnight-char and sieved starlight. Its moor is broken up by slender columns only visible from two directions, front and back. Trying to look at them from the sides revealed nothing but dead ether, though I still tried occasionally out of curiosity, and often saw Aven doing the same. Tint bled from those lacerations: bright golds and purples and somber blues. A forest of doors, each to somewhere new. Some were already charted. Others were not.
They were the only way to and from this annexed uterus that went on and on—snaking in on itself like a temporal anomaly. What color exists fades forth from those rents in wire-thin filaments. Crystal shades and sounds mellifluous and alien. The wings and contrails of quasiforms no larger than the specks lurking around me: moths of Light and butterflies of Dark fighting and cannibalizing one another in miniature. The petrichor scent from the place that never stops raining, where we’d met and formed our augur pact. Shivelight through a nighttime glade. The smells of the forge and tick of arcane machinery over cubic hills.
There was nothing here except for us, the doors, and the strange white specks that flit through the air. Thousands of projectiles rain down out of the twilight, spawning from nothing and returning to it once the wick of their existence runs out. I reach out a hand to try and catch one—to discern if it was hard or soft, hot or cold—but they decay to nothing on my fingertips.
It is like being in a bubble, or a room, or the heart of a singularity. And it is all so quiet. Quiet as the birth of a universe, when there is not yet matter to transfer energy into sound. A spectacular event stripped of its prodigious coda, instead silent to the newborns waging war and vigil, fueled by blind hate and ganglion-hunger. It is not fertile, but neither is it sterile. It is simply empty. Empty aside from us and… it.
There is another reason I no longer look up. There are no stars overhead. Not even the suggestion.
Above, pulsing like a beacon, daring me to look, the sky was falling apart.
Giving up I uncoil from where I float. The blades of my thin legs, like the slippers of a dancer, touch the floor, which looked like glass and felt like nothing beneath my efficient stride. Every step echoes with a crystal tap, the faintest trill of melodic harmonics. A sharp backset to Aven’s blunt, procedural footfalls.
I stop a distance away from its path. I find myself doing what I always do, eventually: analyzing my antonym always led to the apostillation of myself. Streaks of luminous blue and white pulse from my center—a blue nucleus ingrained to a body of lunar current, a fitting corporation for the in-between. My body sidereal: swaying between this world and one whose rules were much looser, not entirely under the jurisdiction of one. My scarf, which is as much a part of me as my shield or sword, sways even without a breeze, tugging. The strange purity is spectral, but the graceful perfection could be said lost amid the monochrome bleakness. It is only when placed next to Aven that I can fully be seen. In the Dark’s shadow, my Light shined all the brighter.
“I think I was supposed to kill you—”
“Nothing we can do about that now.” Little glowing motes follow in its wake, like rosaries of burning petals. I do not like many things that would be called earthy and honest, but I like flowers.
I emit another bright pinging noise. I dislike being interrupted. “—but I’m not sure why. Can you please stay still?”
This has been a long-standing argument between us. It may have been seconds since we returned to this sarcophagus or stars may have died while we bickered, but I at least know that. Either way, I felt like we’ve done it enough times, one would think we’d have grown sick of it. I have no idea why I persist. I think it amuses me, even if it annoys me.
The Dark’s desire to move is like a musk, and I find my composure strained. But at the core of the matter I know it cannot help it. Aven does not like this place. It’s emptiness, it’s lack of…everything. I found its vacuum tiring and unserene, but it went against its nature—even if such a thing had proven more flexible than we had ever known.
Aven never said this aloud. Somehow I just knew.
Aven stops again. Its being coalescing, billowing like smoke. The protostellar object sheathed at my antonym’s center beats like the supergravity coal of a dead star, fury-bright. There was a certain feeling that came with being the sole focus of its attention. To stand in the presence of a Dark was to be in the presence of a force of nature. A being that embodied an unmatched virulence of life, and the promise of explosive motion. It wasn’t just that they held an aversion to remaining stationary. Rather, they were movement. Boundless energy spun tight around limbs that could cleave teak and pile-drive through diamond.
We stare at one another, Aven and I. It is just like the first time. A moment of hesitation—a flash of uncertainty, new and terrifying—before our natures reasserted and we were tearing at one another. Claw to sword, nature to nature, Light to Dark. Why couldn’t we simply resume that course of action? I see it in the darkling creature: a flex of the claws, elemental forces coruscating between their tips. I still remember having those wrapped around my center. The feeling of unraveling.
Simple. So, so simple.
And yet I find myself uneager to return to that state. Not right now, at least. Once one had become aware that there was more , even just a scintilla, it was impossible to go back to the way things had been. I was forever changed. We were changed.
Aven’s claws retract, angular prisms folding back into their form with asymmetrical ripples. It feels the same, and that confuses and frustrates it as much as it does me. Perhaps more. The Dark’s own reprisal follows it like a caul of soot. Compromise was a sin, one it lacerated itself for. Perhaps my willingness to indulge in it too was a sign of my own altering?
A chime builds in Aven’s center: the harsh dual-tone intonation that supersedes displeasure, reminding me of slow, glowing embers. It rips from its angular quasiform like a pressure wave. “We’re leaving.”
“Why?”
“What’s here for us?”
“The same could be said of any of these.” I gesture to the doors, none in particular. “Where would we go? Why?”
“Anywhere. Anything. Why do we need a reason?”
The we were fine without one for who knows how long went unsaid, but understood.
“Impulsiveness got us into this. Whatever this is.”
“Therefore, impulsiveness will get us out.”
“That is not how that works.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
I did not.
I understand Aven’s unrest. To stay here was, in of itself, a waste of time. We would have to leave eventually, to do…something. I wasn't sure what. I held little affection for most of the places I’d traveled, and without my former allies, without purpose, I was still shackled partly to the rudimentaries of the Light. I think I was scared of what I’d find—both without and within—if I examined either too closely. Regardless, it instilled a certain kind of anxiety—a pensiveness that came with waiting for something awful to happen, that I was eager to dissipate.
Aven, I knew, felt the same. But true to its nature it manifested as a want to fight, run, kill, do something. Probably something impulsive and shortsighted.
I concur.
It’s subtle, what we do. Natural. A shifting of our bodies, a pulse sent and returned. Slowly, we begin to circle. This feels right. Familiar. But not in the way either of us are used to. My sword trails behind me in one hand. It is weightless—an extension of my form, not a true weapon. I am liquid with it, even knowing the Dark does not intend to harm me in any way that matters truly. Aven, likewise, is equally non-committal.
Parsecs gap between us. A few moments. We wait until the other is ready. Something flits between us, thin as motings of wan light, but I can’t say what as we ready to lunge.
“Not here.”
A voice like plangent stone’s whisper. A crack of ice and murmur of onyx fabric, we turn as one.
It steps forward, rising from nothing like a forgotten relic, soundless, gangly on long limbs. I don’t see it move, but Aven steps between us, the Dark planting itself in a defensive stance. Its claws are voids dark as volcanic glass, but it does not raise them fully like last time. It had never shown outright hostility, but there was still the lurking thought that neither of us knew what it was capable of, should it ever attack. I peek around the scarf in front of me.
“Not here.” It repeats, pulse-echo more a suggestion than something real. “Please, not here. There has already been so much violence here. Can you not see?”
Our host—for lack of a better term. What I assumed was once something, was now a creature, and was on its way to becoming something even less.
The Neutral has an air of incredible age to it. A novel in this timeless place, a being already ancient in a galaxy so young. Its form is a study in archeology. Taller than either of us by twice, long of limb, a crown-of-thorns head. The color, such as it was, has gone. I am a stellar white, Aven a burned void-black, the ink between stars. But the Neutral was nothing. Not just monotone, but sucking the color from its very surroundings into its myriad cracks and cuts on eddies of almost invisible current.
I am unsettled by it. It decays. When Grays perished, their husks remained, consumed by the landscape. It looked like one such husk brought reluctantly back to life. Its figure is riven with faults that only seemed to grow wider and more numerous every time we met. If our kind’s fate was to burn out, then it was to fade away. How or why it still bothered to persist was lost on us. I don’t think I’d understand. I don’t think Aven even wants to.
It came and went seemingly at random, as if crawling from and returning to the rifts between places. Normally I would ignore it. It would sit, or stand, and always stare at some distant eternity in solitude, at a twilight only it could see. Occasionally it would speak a drowsy soliloquy, devoid of meaning. I had never heard it speak like this before.
And this time it had brought something with it.
What it held in one curling hand, sheltered behind itself as if to protect it from us, is wide at the sternum and long at the neck. Taut wires lace it in transcending patterns above etchings and calligraphics. Its composition reminds me of the alabaster arches and mossy plinths of the Gardens, gentle, sweeping, floral, and I am reminded of that place's silver song, bubbling from streams and rivers. Water was anathema to my kind, distorting our forms, but I found myself enchanted by it. I wonder what it is like to swim as Aven does.
I somehow know that this object is older than me, Aven, the universe, by eons.
Aven, perhaps a little too late to really be worth anything, is finally still. I can ignore the Gray, but the Dark has always been suspicious of its intent. Their kind do not trust anything that does not attack first.
“What do you want?” Aven pulses. Piercing, blade-keen.
The creature tilts its horned head. “To understand.”
Aven glanced at me. I return the query.
“Understand what?”
“I have brought something.”
“Stop prevaricating. Are you listening to me?”
I step out of Aven’s shadow. I stare at the Dark from the side. After a moment, its claws retract with a prismatic hiss, and it stares away, limbs crossed, as if chastised. I face the being, its focus drifting to me. I wait until I think I have its attention. “What did you bring?”
Carefully, the being holds the object out between us.
I say nothing. Aven tilts its center, as if the very act would wring meaning from ignorance. As expected, its curiosity holds no contest against its impatience. The Dark pads forward.
“Is it a weapon? Something we can use?”
“ No!” The neutral retracts its hand protectively, long digits curling around the object. Was it disappointed? Confused? Enraged? Aven flinches back, guard up, already flickering to evade. I don’t move an inch as its head, antlers shedding flakes of decaying light, turns again to me. “You understand. Don’t you?”
I didn’t.
The creature shudders, its being existing and un-existing before us, the same way it had when I tried to strike it down initially. Its antlers looked ready to break off, crumbling to dust around its hooves. “Of course.” It mutter-echoes. “ Of course you do not know. How could you?”
“What is it?”
“I do not remember. Something lost. Like me? A relic. From before. I recognize it. I found it, down there. The Ones From Above missed it. They do not miss much. But they missed it, like they missed me. Missed you.”
“Why did you—”
“Bring it here?”
Aven and I looked at each other.
“Stop that.”
“Contextualize.”
“Finishing my sentences.”
“It isn’t on purpose.”
The Gray made a sound I've never heard from it before. A bell-like chortle. Disgust? That was not right. Amusement? “I do not know. It felt important. That it be seen. It survived this long. Would you see it too?”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“We should leave. We’ve lingered.”
“You are the catalyst for this impingement. You hardly have ground to make demands.”
“Are you saying that this is my fault?”
“Even so, it would make no difference. You are the only thing that changes.”
I turn to it again, suddenly unsure. Aven is doing the same. “Which one of us are you referring to?”
"Both. You are the same.”
I stop, startled. “We are antonyms.” It feels redundant to say, but the Neutral was clearly broken—in more ways than one.
“What is an opposite but the same thing viewed from another angle?” It shakes its head as if disappointed in the simplicity of my reasoning. “Light and Dark are two sides of the same pane. A canvas on which anything can be made. Even time.”
We stare at the cracked creature.
“What?” Aven wonders.
“You’ve never spoken like this before.” I say carefully.
The creature appears surprised. “It is…not often that clarity finds me. I do not know how long it will persist. Please, would you indulge me?”
“That depends—“
“On what you intend.”
“ It would be easier, I think, to show you. Please, would you indulge me?”
Flickers of light ooze from its smoothened epicenter. Its pulses were mute; impossible to read, its moods pointless to gauge. But the tenderness in its voice-echo, the gentleness of its motions, conveyed a longing. A grand grief and gratitude that made my core fold and break. That alone was concerning. I had never cared about anything before. One of my earliest memories—from this life? Another?—was of a wisp of Light grasped in the palm of a lizard of Dark, metallic talons sinking into ephemeral flesh. I felt at the time I should have wanted the other Light to live. But in the end decided I did not care either way. No mercy for our kin—only disdain for our burning enemy.
Emotion and thought were momentarily trifles amorphized from a common inconsequential. Only the cosmic framework itself—the war, the slaughter, another universal nothingness against the vast black indifference—had been of any importance at all.
What changed?
I pulse to Aven, a wavelength only we can interpret.
After a moment, Aven echoes back.
“We will.”
The Neutral bows its head, supplicant. “Thank you. Thank you…”
And with that, it starts.
Though a habitual smartness—or perhaps just suspicion—caused me to hold most of my thoughts to myself, at the core of my ephemeral person and, as Aven might say, heart of my resolve, I was becoming a curious thing. That is to say, I noticed things I was sure I had never noticed before, and despite my nature—or because of it—I was growing more tolerant of the facets of this world we inhabited.
In any case, I was unprepared.
Sound—fragmentary and nonsensical—is the first to arrive, dribbling into a twilight existence. Uncertain, with too little dexterity and too much eagerness. Discordance ruptures the silence like a thin membrane. A growing struggle building to a swan-song, sputtering out, curling in to extinguish as soon as it began.
It stops then. The brittle thing does something at one end of its tool. At first I believe it is frustration, then despondency. But then it starts again, and this time it is different. There is intention, that I can determine without fault: it repeated, diversified, this time into more orderly harmonics. Patterns develop. A stanza swirling away into the leaves of the Garden, silver notes reminiscent of the stream of the Glade, and more ephemeral things. Algebraic and geometric equations fizzing away and reforming, more complex than before, more whole.
Noise whispers through my mind like the ghost of an echo. I allow the subtle skeins of perception and concept to break me from my focus, shifting my state of mind from some inner vantage to mundane outer realities and back again. It continued to curl, to adapt to my attempted understanding. It was as if it was somehow offended by our bleak surroundings, and recoiled in a storm of activity, sweeping me up.
I do not know what it is. I do not understand, but I know this is not the work of a lunatic, or a being that has let its spirit go cold. I don’t know how, but as it exponentiates—changing like us Lights, but always grounded, always possessed of something traceable and repeat, like a trail of energized dust—I can taste the Neutral’s disposition. Troubled. Bitter. Betrayed. Haunted.
Relieved.
I cant a look. Aven, dark, mercurial Aven, has drifted closer in its reluctant vigil, gliding like a vengeful elemental. It does not return my stare. Instead I read my answer in the tension lines of its form, the vibrations of quadrilaterals swirling out from the Dark’s onyx body; minute paroxysms most visible at the fingertips, claws demurely withheld. They nearly brush the back of mine.
For one incandescent moment we look into one another’s centers. No words pass between us interlopers—a reluctance to interrupt holds even Aven in vigil. In this house as big as forever, our host has decided to show us something from its small past. The distillation, I feel, of its mythoclast, made by hands that still retained the eloquence its mind had lost. And perhaps was regaining a shadow of.
I feel it then. It was hard to imagine a being more painstakingly grounded in the material realm than Aven. In all likelihood because the Dark was the very manifestation of it. A tame ghost of the marshes and deserts, the forests and ash wastes. An embodiment of the savage beauty I was slowly coming to appreciate in the places we visit. To sense hesitation from something as fierce and bold…
Before I know what I am doing, I reach out.
It is like a trance as, for just a moment—a single moment of pure freedom—we grasp it. We are gouache smoothed over subtle blends of oil-smear joy, grids and sweeps done away. Two candles in a windstorm. An anti-spiral twisting away into nothing. An emptiness at the end—or beginning—that I realize, terrified, was not absent, but simply blank.
Our hands touch as I take Aven’s grasp in mine.
Our fingertips flash brightest green.
And right at its crescendo, the sound stops.
Before I can even utter that I am unharmed, Aven snatches away, the Dark liquid in its slithering retreat. My hands and core are left curiously cold.
“Why did you stop?” Aven asks, a tremor in its lilt, an edge of concern and outrage flashing in the Dark’s core, like a texturing of teeth bared, feral.
“That is it.” The Gray utters. It has taken a kneeling position, nearly level with the zenith of our cores. It thumbs the strings of its instrument, offkey and playful. “Or, at least, that is what I remember of it.”
“Do it again.”
“Why?”
“Because—” Aven faltered.
“Why does it need to sound again? If you listened to the same pattern, forever, you would grow bored. Worse, you would hate it. Is it not better that it remains singular and preserved?”
“What was it?” I ask.
“A…song.” It raised a hand, long digits curiously unscarred, and waved a single one through the air. Dissecting the sound as if ensuring it’s reality. “Nothing more than an teleological arrangement of sound in a sequence known to evoke certain sensations.”
“It was…I’ve never heard anything like it.”
“You have not heard much. I forget, you are still so young.”
I pulse in accord, still too flummoxed to be chastised.
“Turpitude nor ignorance bear no responsibility. By nature you were careless and unquestioning. Fighting to survive—if such beings even are, in some sense, alive to begin with—until you united. Without purpose, other than to exist.”
Its long digits curled back. There was something there in its plangent echoes. A venom-echo of some past horror that clung to it like an aura. Perhaps it had always been there, but I could only notice it now.
“What—”
“Are you?” Aven finishes for me.
“I am—...” It makes a sound I cannot identify. An edge of discordance, as if it has suffered a blow. “I do not remember that either. I am from before.”
From before. The doors stand like a tribunal in judgment as I recall the structures we’ve seen. The harsh angles and geometrics of the Foundry. The green facade of terraces and waterwork of the Garden, overrun by creeping vine and effulgent flowers, petals translucent and delicate as starlight. Always, even running from my kin, in the back of my mind, I knew they were not natural formations. With new insight, I contemplate the Neutral and the spectral lore imbibed in its thousand fractures.
“You are the architect of this world?”
Another one of its harsh chirrups—shorter than before, sewn with empty humor. “ No. But we lived in it. We built. We discovered. No conflict arose—we were stagnant too. Surefooted and arrogant. For that we were punished. Cast down. Destroyed in the most beautiful oblivion this universe has ever witnessed. Only I am left.”
A unique quietude follows. The figure suddenly appears thin as the turn of a waning moon. I find myself glancing at Aven, and find the Dark doing the same.
“What did this to you?" Aven pulsed, sounding as disturbed as I felt.
It raises fractured shoulders. I do not know what the gesture signifies. “The Ones From Above.”
“Why?”
“We are becalmed. Light, Dark, the in-between. We were not the first. But we fell into the cycle like all the rest.” I feel tense as it passes scrutiny of us. “But not you. You’re different. You change.”
“Who?”
“Which?”
“Both.” It repeats, patient.
“You said that before.” I find myself tracing the fissures in its form. I feel Aven doing the same, the Dark’s judgements and perceptions bleeding into my own. I keep finding myself staring at our entwined hands. Such a curious configuration. How perfectly it matched with my own.
“What are we?”
“You are paradoxes within a universe of endless paradoxes. Death and rebirth. Struggle and fecundity. Progression before stagnation. It is not either of you that are the root. Merely symptoms. I have seen this cycle time and time again. This world is a song. It wants to end.”
Aven bristles, claws keening forward, a glassy slither.
“You want revenge.”
The Neutral fixes it with a stare that would have crushed a lesser aspect. “I want this to be over.”
Aven turns to me, claws still parted. “We’re just going to trust it? Because it played us a song? It's nobody. It’s nothing.”
“And what are we?” I query imploringly. “We are not what we once were either. We have…” I struggle for the word, it’s contours unfamiliar, incongruent with my being. “changed.”
The ancient looks at me. “You feel it too. This world wants to die.”
“No.” I pulse, weak, revelation finally finding me. “Not die. Transcend.”
We are silent, all of us. We had only encountered one such being in our travels together, and another by my own. A fragmented thing that took from the frozen volatiles of both Light and Dark. Engendered perfection attempted by an imperfect species. We had escaped its gestalt embrace—barely.
To absorb was to make an irrecoverable choice, for it would swallow you, mold you, until you are abhorred by both. The power was undeniable, but the more time I spent in this realm, steeping in the brine of the material as Aven did the ephemeral, the more I understood that this existence is built on mutual interest. The universe is run by extinction, extermination. By howling black holes swallowing suns. By the collision of volatile antiparticles as it discharges its weapon into itself, deciding what it should be. The only arbiter in this apocalypse was the self to judge the merit behind a little bit of this for a soul-full of that. Existence at any cost—even the self.
I know what we are now. We are parasites: beings of pure instinct and desire. Or at least, we were. So what did it mean when something went beyond symbiotic? More than mutualism, than the loyalty owed by being the only other one?
Why had Aven pulled away?
“I see.” The Neutral steals my thoughts, sounding pleased. “You are frightened.”
Aven tenses but says nothing. I say even less.
“Of change. Of loss.” It looks at me. “And you feel the same.”
The creature carefully sets its instrument aside. It stands on haunched legs, ambling to us with what initially appears to me as a great deal of effort. Languid from its grief, hampered by perpetual ennui, but sloughing off in layers with every long stride. The only reason Aven does not move to create distance is because I remain rooted to the spot. The Dark’s hands are up, claws extruded, mind blocked to me, even their cursory thoughts elusive.
It stops before us. It cranes its horned head down, and I see for the first time its heart: a bezoar like a dull gemstone lodged in its chest—utterly inconspicuous aside from the occasional glint of green, but unlike any I had ever seen before. Not the vibrant dreamstone tethering me to the corporeal, or the malevolent smolder of Aven's own core. Like something born of the intense fusion of fire and water, and all the more stable for it. It resonates in my mind: a deep, familiar stillness.
“How long have you existed?” This it dares Aven alone to answer.
“I…do not understand.”
“How many times have you assumed this aspect? How many times have you been broken on the spears of your counterparts? Scattered, only to coalesce again, that random arrangement of forces returning to the beginning, before you became what you are now? Before you were united?”
It reaches out, extending a skeletal arm. The gesture is surprisingly deft, almost gentle, as if reminded recently of their own capabilities. I give it mine, my palm small on its own. For the first time I get the impression this was a creature of benevolence and wisdom—not a wretch barely holding onto existence. A forest-god wilting over eons, remaining here to pass on the last of its melancholic gift of knowledge before decay took its memories in a trade of dust. It was right to call us blind. I saw only a half-broken thing and never thought to ask what it once was.
I reflect at Aven. I pulse warmly. Maybe I was desperate for direction, purpose, and my trust was naive. But in me was an eagerness to see where this led, and what we would achieve.
Aven stares at us—me—for a long time. Slowly, I see the hard angles of the Dark’s aura blur before snapping back to their diamond-like lines. its claws recede, their arrow-edges extinguish. It is tentative setting its hand on the back of mine. At its touch I feel its mind subsumed by hypotheticals. There is fear I would distort, devoured entirely, until all that was left was a faint existence in the back of its own, like shadows cast by the light of memory. That I would seek vengeance once edited, parasitizing it from within, our polarization tearing us apart. Above all: simple fear that it had no idea what would happen.
To feel—much less understand —the half-formed fears and inferences that clustered on the margins of its thoughts was enough surety for me.
I turn my palm up to the skyless ceiling of this place and entwine its claws with my fingers. Green light flickers, but the filaments do not lash to skewer us to one another. Like the surfaces of two mirrors touching, we are reflected but repelled.
“What would you do for one another?” The Neutral pulses softly.
“Anything.”
They both look at me. It took me a moment to realize I had spoken.
The Neutral nodded as if expecting the answer. It returned its focus to Aven. “What was your first thought upon seeing your counterpart?”
I feel the Dark’s hesitation draining away. It looks at me with a curious tilt of its cubical head, its core glowing fervidly.
“It was after the fall. You were ambushed by one of your own. I watched from a cliffside as you annihilated it for the attempt.” Aven pauses, its core flaring brighter. “You were so beautiful.”
I do not understand the emotion that blooms in me, but I have to look away for a span.
At my nonplussed state, the Neutral makes a sound like the chuckle of wind blowing across a plain of dust. “The line between Light and Dark is so very thin, when put into perspective.” Its immense claw-like hand recedes, leaving us to hold one another on our own.
“What is this?” I ask, staring at our entwined digits.
“There are many names. Devotion. Loyalty. Attraction. Love.”
“Why are you doing this? Really?” Aven postulates.
“I do not know. Perhaps you remind me of something I once had. But I think…I think such a construction does not deserve to endure in this world of stagnation. If there is a world where you can exist as you are, and as you want to be, then this is not it.”
“Then we must make a new one.” Aven says, voice-pattern firm.
“How?” I say.
In the hand not entwined warmly with mine, Aven's claws sparked like bits of flint as if to say the Dark knew of at least one way.
“It will not be quite so simple. ” The Neutral cautioned, much to Aven’s dismay. “Or without risk. If you commit, there will be no going back. Everything will be different. Everything will change. Including you.”
“Into what?” Aven asks, lowering his hands, flames dying into ember-tipped crystal.
“I think it has to get there before we can find out.”
“Were you not advising against impulsiveness a few moments before?”
If bickering was a crucial aspect of attraction, then many things in hindsight now made sense. “Perhaps a little could not be counterproductive.” I concede. “How do we do this?”
“It has already begun.” It raises one crooked finger to the sky of this place, like a pane of broken glass frozen in time. “Crack the firmament. Summon It from Its sullen den and force It to actuation.”
Here, we hesitate. To look into that fractured membrane was to invite a feeling like destabilizing. As if the very act of looking into it was to have it look back, and find yourself falling, sucked in, absorbed and drowned in enlightened madness.
Another thought finds us both at once. I look up as my own dark clarity finds me. “What about you?”
It’s surface ripples and quavers. It drops its hand, straightens. “You opened the door, now something remembers that I exist.” A tremor infects their lilt. “It is coming for me after all this time. This will only hasten its approach.”
“You said we had time.” Aven protests.
“You do. I do not.”
Silence as the motes fall. What do we say? What can we say? We have brought back its mind only to bring ruin to its sanctuary.
“Do not concern yourself with me.” It says, waving our worry aside. “That would be a waste compared to what you now have. This…cherish it. Protect it. Promise me that.”
And then Aven squeezes my hand. The Dark pulls me closer, and I feel like we can do anything.
“Easy.” Aven pulses, fierce and bold.
The Neutral’s horned head falls, slow. An eagerness I’d not heard before enters its echo. “Until then…would you like to hear another song?”
“Yes.” We both say.
It supplicates, a half-bow, and then vanishes from the spot. It reappears, instrument in hand, and begins anew. Delicate strings, sombre and warm, are a symphony of chasing daylight. It is a song of seeds springing. Of long winter done.
“We would dance on frozen lakes to this, two a piece, and fall in love.”
“Dance?” Aven asks over the music. “How?”
“You will figure it out.”
There is no hesitation at the rubicon. I plunge into my Aven’s embrace.
Our clumsy advances lacked all the finesse and grace that our bonding shared in combat. My steps are too short, my Dark’s too wide. But these bodies are mere shells for the energy within. We shed our skin. Become something new. We are a raven and dove rising from a plane of stardust, a ragged wind and unkindness of others spiraling around, aporetic with sapphire and ruby eyes.
Nothing else matters. I hold Aven. And Aven holds me, my pulse metered by the diminuendo of theirs. It is just as before. Just as before. And for a second—just a second—we converge to single, shuddering points of perfect symmetry. We are exposed. Revealed.
You read the secrets in metal and dust. Everything makes sense to you.
You know how to look within. You notice what I miss. And are always willing to take the first step.
You are passion.
You are calm.
You are my strength—
My support, my sanctuary.
I wish I was more like you.
And in this world, without purpose, against my nature, in the hands of my eternal enemy, I have never been more sure of anything in my life.