Work Text:
He is.
Before he even knows what he is, before he remembers his own name, he knows that he’s excited. Or maybe a better name for the feeling is relief. Soon there will be sunlight and cold water, squeaky swivel chairs, a game of chess still in progress.
Then the memory of their last parting surfaces, and it leaves a bitter taste in his mouth. He recoils from the idea of feeling at all. This shouldn’t be. He shouldn’t be.
Darkness presses all around him, so thorough and complete that he could be nothing more than a disembodied mind, cut off from itself. Then, lights flicker at the edges of his perception: darting ribbons of red, blue, green. The next thing he becomes aware of is a breathless pain as the world convulses. He becomes aware of his body as it is wrenched violently into existence. Coils of darkness cling to him for a moment, then fall away with sharp stings of pain.
John is spit out into a shifting world he doesn’t recognize. Everywhere he looks is dark as ink, lit only by brief flickers of opal light. The air is dense and electric, singing in anticipation of a storm.
“Where—”
His voice is dead from lack of use, and there’s something in his throat. He keels over coughing, hacking, wishing for nothing so much as a glass of water. Black bile pours from his mouth. It’s threaded with colors that mesmerize him briefly.
Shuddering and breathless, his suit all stained with bile, John looks up and asks, “Where am I?”
The voice that returns is a thunderclap. John feels his ears pop.
“You stand in the realm that you created.”
Black coils surface from the roiling landscape and pull at John like puppet strings, forcing him to his feet.
“You stand accused.”
Now John sees the figures towering over him, so tall that they nearly vanish into the abyss. They are carved out of darkness as if it were stone. Dimly, John remembers tasting a cold world full of grit, where everything—the people, their laws, their past and their future—was set down in stone.
John stands at the feet of the four Judges. They are a part of the Hunger. And he is not.
“You have failed to claim the Light of Creation.”
John holds his head. It’s hard to focus when he’s been shoved into such a small body. He can’t understand how the Hunger has forced him to exist, separate from itself.
“You can’t…try me,” he manages. “You’re a part of me.”
“You have failed to claim the Light of Creation. How do you plead?”
It’s not one voice, not four, but millions speaking in unison. White eyes open all along the surface of the Hunger, stretching into the infinite. John feels the piercing weight of their attention.
Something of his old theatrics snaps to life inside him. Indignant, he shouts, “Not guilty! We are closer than we’ve ever been.”
“The Light has been missing for twelve years. And before this, we spent a century chasing, with nothing to show for it. John, your leadership has been called to trial. If you are judged guilty, you will be stripped of your power and merged with the body of the host.”
Before John can protest, the first Judge speaks. “John. In your previous life, you were a public speaker. A performer. You claim that your work was motivational, in service of your audience, but it was you who fed on their attention. When you discovered the nature of eternity, you never doubted your own conclusions. And you took it for granted that people would listen. You took it for granted that they would follow, not because it was for their good, but because it fed your vanity. Your need for attention and validation poisons your leadership.
“Your sin is pride. How do you plead?”
“Not guilty!” John repeats. “Obviously! We wouldn’t have gotten this far if people didn’t agree with me! I was merely the lightning rod that focused our discontent.”
John resents how small he feels, forced to look upward to address the Judges. Whispers flit back and forth around him, but he can’t make out what they say.
After a pause, the Judge’s voice returns. “When you spoke to the intruder in parley, were you not desperate to know what he called us? To know that, in his eyes, you were admired?”
The air leave John’s lungs as if there’s been a sudden drop in pressure. It hasn’t occurred to him that they might know about his conversations with Merle.
But of course they know. John has never held anything back. Even now, thinking of himself as separate from the Hunger is a strained endeavor, made worse by the phantom pains where black coils parted from his skin.
Why, then, does it feel like an invasion for the Judges to speak so casually about Merle Highchurch?
The worst part is, they’re right. Merle refused to tell John what they called him for years. It maddened him to the point that he’d wasted an entire question on the subject. Merle had stalled as if embarrassed, assuring John that he didn’t call him this name anymore. It was with a tone of apology that he’d said, “ The Hunger.”
At the time, John had laughed. It was a poetic title, but largely inaccurate. He had hoped for something grand that would befit of the gleaming tapestry he’d woven across a hundred planes. But now that John stands inside the Hunger without being a part of it, he can see what Merle saw.
The Hunger stretches into a shapeless infinity, dark and uniform. Nothing disrupts it aside from sparse, lonely lights and John himself, one lonely man. When he had first begun to question the nature of eternity, he had occasionally dreamed of what it might look like, in all its horrible arc. In those dreams, it had looked not unlike this.
John realizes that, without meaning to, he’s already been referring to it by Merle’s name. It’s just that Hunger doesn’t seem like such a bad name anymore.
“We ask again: how do you plead?”
John can’t bear to look up at them, so he looks at his face reflected in his shiny shoes. After a pause, he says, “No contest.” At the very least, he won’t give them the satisfaction of pleading guilty or not.
Without pause, the second Judge speaks. “John. Across a hundred worlds, you have consumed. But while you feast, the body starves. We have only ever needed one thing: the Light of Creation, which will allow us to undo the cruel laws of existence. Without it, no amount of bonds, no number of planar systems will nourish us. And yet you continue to consume, growing ever larger on an excess that cannot nourish. We will starve even as you feast.
“Your sin is gluttony. How do you plead?”
John is still swallowing his bitter pride. This time, he honestly considers the accusation. He considers the worlds he’s ripped apart in an attempt to make something beautiful, only to end up with the empty darkness around him.
Slowly, he says, “You’re right. When I was in charge, I took more than my fair share. But why wouldn’t that also be true about you?”
The never-ending whispers hiss in response. John stands taller and straightens his jacket’s crumpled lapels.
“What do you plan on doing, if you do get rid of me? You’ll let this world go, I suppose? Take the Light peacefully and forego all those bonds?”
For a time John thinks they won’t answer, but then the second Judge says, “We will do what you have failed to.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Something like wind whips the air around him. John feels the weight of the Judges’ gaze, trying to intimidate him.
“Our judgment encompasses deeds to come. The future is already known to us.”
“Then tell me what that future holds. Tell me I’m wrong.”
John doesn’t realize how persistent the whispers have been until they stop. The silence is so complete that it echoes.
He doesn’t need the Judges to answer. The Hunger has done this a hundred times. It sends it spies and then its vanguard, it throws down its pillars, and whatever stands in its way is torn to bits. This is true even of worlds where it was successful in claiming the Light. Not everyone in a planar system survives to join the Hunger; occasionally, not even most.
Yet the silence continues, longer than John expects. At last, the second Judge says, “You are a pariah. Your future has been excluded from our providence.”
John can tell, as a speaker himself, that these words are deliberately chosen. It’s not that the Judges won’t tell his future. They can’t.
They are a part of the Hunger. And John is not. Their foresight has been limited to only the things that they control.
John realizes then that it doesn’t matter how this trial ends. In forcing him to manifest, the Judges have already decided that he’s no longer a part of them. He will never again be able to control them, let alone stop them.
He imagines what it must look like from the outside, what it looks like to Merle, when the Hunger feasts. He imagines, with a twinge of pain, what sort of life Merle has built down there in the past twelve years. And he knows, because he’s felt it himself, that after such a long, lean decade, the Hunger is starved. Whether it finds the Light or not, it won’t spare a scrap of the world below.
“You can’t lie to me,” John says. “We have to take everything. That’s what we are. The Hunger will feast just as often, whether I’m a part of it or not.”
The whispers have returned, as insistent as wind pulling at every inch of a coat. John folds his arms tightly against himself.
The Judges don’t acknowledge him. They only ask, “How do you plead?”
“Only as guilty as you are yourself.”
They seem to accept this as an admission.
Unrelenting, the third Judge says, “John. In the face of eternity, you see only despair, which has clouded you in a fog of inaction. Once, you had hope of escaping the cruel limits of existence, but you have lost it. You fear to claim the Light. You fear to ascend. Instead, you have given up on the goal we share, condemning us to an eternal chase.
“Your sin is sloth. How do you plead?”
Though the trial is a farce, this somehow still needles him.
“How dare you!” John cries. “I sacrificed my own existence to make something beautiful, in spite of the rules that shackle us! A century of effort, you call that sloth?”
It rings hollow even in his own ears. He can see the results of all that effort, and they aren’t beautiful. But something in him still clings to that shared goal, that hope of transcending an indifferent eternity.
The Judges watch him blankly. The white eyes stare. The voices whisper, whisper. There is nothing beautiful about what John has made.
But then, ribbons of light dance across his field of vision. They weave in and out of the darkness, brightly-colored glimmers of red, blue, green. John is wrong. There is one beautiful thing about the Hunger.
The bonds.
John remembers how coming to consciousness had filled him with excitement. He had, in the moment before he realized where he was, wanted to exist, as nothing more than himself. He had wanted to drink water, play chess, and talk to Merle.
Maybe the Judges have a point. They may have been the ones who forced John to manifest, but they aren’t the reason that he is no longer completely a part of the Hunger.
Merle is the one who planted that seed. He planted it like a weed in concrete, where life shouldn’t be able to thrive. And yet, despite the odds, it has not only survived but sunk its roots into every crack, wreaking havoc until the damage was too great to fix.
John feels it now, a bloom too big to fit inside his chest. Thirty years apart, yet somehow the feeling is stronger than ever. Is this what Merle meant, the one time John gave him an opportunity to explain? Is this the joy that Merle gave him?
“How do you plead?”
He can’t say it to them. John closes his eyes against the Hunger and pictures late evening sunlight across a table. He pictures the man grinning at him from the other end.
You can apologize and tell me you were wrong.
“I plead guilty, of all charges.”
And the fourth Judge says, “We accept your admission. You have fallen short of glory. So it is known, and so it has always been known. Our judgement is decided.”
That’s all they’ve been waiting for. The surface of the Hunger surges like waves in an ocean storm, throwing John off his feet and into its embrace. White eyes blink at him like stars as a thousand hands drag him down into the oily surface. They claw with such a vengeance that ink-dark cracks tear across his skin. John knows that, this time, if he submerges, he won’t come out again. The borders of his consciousness will disappear and John will no longer exist.
He can hear his own voice coming back to him: Existence, Merle? Life, Merle? Is horrible! To exist, to live, is horrible. The Hunger was meant to be his answer to that horror, but now that he’s the one being eaten, he realizes that it doesn’t matter how beautiful the monster is: he still doesn’t want to die.
“Wait!” he screams. “I can help—wait!” As the Hunger closes around him, John cries out instinctively for help: “Merle!”
And in that moment, the plan snaps together. When John fights back, he finds that the Hunger parts with ease. Choking past the ichor in his mouth, he says, “Let me parley with Merle Highchurch! One last time. He knows—he must know where his friends hid the Light.”
Coils of living Hunger still chain his arms behind his back. The Judges are, for a moment, silent.
“Never, in five decades of negotiation, did the intruder trust you with the whereabouts of the Light. His very influence has corrupted you. Why should we allow you to return to him?”
“He never told me because I never asked him, not directly. But if I do, he has to answer. Those are the rules we made. He won’t break them.”
In truth, Merle is the least likely person to know or understand his friends’ plans. But that doesn’t matter, because John isn’t really planning on asking. Bonds gust around him, continually weaving together a realm that strains under the weight of its own impossibility. John’s mind moves just as quickly, weaving together the loose ends of the plan.
If the Hunger wants to make him a pariah, he will use that to his advantage. The Judges can no longer peer into his mind any more than they can peer into his future. John reaches for the old scraps of his stage presence and leans into the performance.
“Parley does pose some risk. If I’m the one to initiate, I can’t harm him, but he would be at liberty to kill me.”
Merle explained the spell to him, once. How it originated on a world that overcame war. How it required startling vulnerability, to offer your trust and your life to someone who has no reason to love you.
“Regardless,” John continues, “parley may give us a chance to claim the Light before his friends even know we’re coming.” He draws a breath, summoning an air of solemn sacrifice. “I admit my guilt. Please, give me this chance to make things right.”
The hitch in his breath is genuine when he adds, “All I wanted was to do something that matters. At least let me see this through. You know I’m the only one who can.”
John knows he’s played the part well. He can feel it in the whispers that rumble over him like distant thunder. If he’s already a condemned man, what harm is there in letting him risk his life? The chances may be slight, but so are the risks. And the Hunger has gone so long without feeding that it is desperate for an immediate reward.
Millions of white eyes turn their gaze upward toward the Judges. The first Judge says, “You would humble your pride in service of the greater whole?”
The second Judge says, “You would sacrifice your place at the table in order for the body to feast?”
And the third: “You would once again seek ascendance?”
And John lies, “Yes. I would.”
The final Judge says, “Then we will grant you this reprieve: parley with the intruder. Bring us the Light. Then may we allow you to return to the fold. So it is known, and so it has always been known.”
With that, the four Judges dissolve into the infinite chasm of the Hunger. As they do, bright flashes of bond-light fall with them like raindrops. The storm has broken. For the first time in a number of years that John can’t begin to count, he finds himself completely alone.
One last chance. He likely won’t survive it. And yet, as the thirteenth plane descends after twelve lonely years… somewhere inside of that living plane, we see a smile flash across someone’s face.
It’s not of malice, nor of spite. It’s a smile of relief. Soon there will be sunlight and cold water. Soon, he’ll see his friend again.