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The Emanator’s blade strikes true. Pain, dazzling, sublime, finally incomprehensible, a null in his slumbering senses where he logically knows there should be rising screams. “Nihility” floods him with the antithetical of feeling. His blaring pulse no longer roars in his ears.
He wishes either of them had known her room number, because he would have loved to make arrangements to send some thank-you flowers after the fact. Too late, though,
as a key at last turns in the weathered lock that the universe had beaten futilely on the ground hundreds of times before.
Once upon a time, he would have danced and cried to see an endless plane of shallow water.
At a point in his aimless wandering of the calm before nothing, he finally indulges to look closer, though the waters are pitch dark and lit only barely by the bright halo burning around IX. He works one glove off of his hand. Skims his bare fingers past the tensionless surface - cool to the touch. Utterly thin and without grit. It feels pure, but he’s not in a hurry to lift any to his lips to find out.
All in all, it sure is … a puddle. He feels heartsore anyway. There is a sense-memory in his hands of stooping down to carefully shovel water into the mouth of a bottle gourd with a crooked neck; of not being terribly good at it, because he was still so small as to be innately discoordinated, and it took some bit of technique to fill the body of the gourd without the water spilling back out.
He has not escaped the ghost of that boy yet.
When they press their palms together, he realizes it is not a matter of escaping him, but more frighteningly - that he is the one and only caretaker of Kakavasha’s precious few remains. His every step is treading on his bones, and if he wants that small, bright-eyed soul to know any solace, all he can do is step with care.
If he can’t do that for the tired, stateless adult who inherited his body and fate, maybe he can think of that face, now; a sight neither of them had ever seen before.
Soon he is waving a warm goodbye to his innocence, as it hugs closely the symbol of his guile; he leaves both behind in big striding steps into the face of IX–
and then he is, somehow more than before, nothing and nowhere–
he has dwindled down to just a small lick of perception in darkness. All he is, a hand at the end of a numb arm, the meat of its palm riddled with buried shrapnel, burning hot. The pieces are burning out, burning down. Going, going, almost gone.
The worthless Cornerstone’s last cinders are just a whisper of warmth, when someone else’s gauntleted hand finds his, and firmly pulls.
The last thing he knows is the scent of flowers.
He is not fished out of the Nihility lucid, or even close to it. Those first few periods of ‘wakefulness’ in Dreamflux Reef are like this:
One.
Aventurine realizes he is sitting up on a chair at a counter, glazed eyes staring at a wall. There is a firm arm around his shoulders steadying him in his seat, as the owner speaks with easy candor to a separate presence that is not within sight, in the small section of wall his eyes stay riveted to. The owner? No, wait, that’s not right. Didn’t he kill – Didn’t he earn the rest of his –
He pats at his pockets, stomach sinking. The conversation happening around him goes quiet. His shaking fingers graze a tiny, palmable coin purse he (on good days) never has any reason to open, and without looking down from the scintillatingly understimulating patch of wall he’s kept staring at this whole time… He scratches at the zipper until he’s caught hold of it, delves in to count them all by the brush of his fingertips alone.
Sixty. There are sixty small, timeworn coins, just as there always are.
Relief crashes through his body so hard he teeters out of coherency again.
Two,
Aventurine realizes he is sitting on a ratty couch tucked into an alleyway, his gaze turned on a TV screen a few feet away. Cartoonish figures cast in sepia cavort around to the beats of a plot he cannot even hope to follow. They’re familiar. He knows that one’s name. Guy’s on the tip of his tongue. The arrogant leaderly type with charisma and a carefully downplayed vicious streak, fighting nobly against the big bad Stone.
“Whatever happened to that girl he was with?” he asks the air, and the air also happens to contain the warm and rose-scented presence that has been a steadying hand since his exeunt from the Nihility, because it - he - makes a wordless sound of inquiry.
“Princess… Feather? Mirror. Mirror Princess. Where did she go?”
“I must confess, I’m not sure! The mystery of it is very gripping!”
The thought of dealing with more mysteries makes him feel so tired he fades out.
Three,
He hears music, and from the sky above sees a great and terrible light.
He checks his watch, the face turned even more luminous since he’d crossed over into the Reef.
… Wasn’t about now when the Charmony Festival was meant to start?