Chapter Text
Darkness closed in upon him like a tightening fist, oppressive and suffocating. A yawning emptiness gnawed at his very essence, as if something vital had been torn from him.
His light… where was his light? His throne, his other half… where had they gone?
His eyes peeled themselves open for the very first time - eyes born of darkness, that could only see darkness. High metal walls, impossibly tall, hemmed him in on all sides. Littered all around his disparate form were things he vaguely recognised from another world – a half-eaten sandwich protruding from its wrapper, the bruised and deflated peel of a banana, smashed bits of metal and plastic with wires spilling from them like electrical innards, a bouquet of dying flowers whose colours and aromas were fading into putrescence.
These things filled him with revulsion, and he recoiled from them as if by instinct. Nostrils flared into life, and the world became filled with the rank stench of decay, a horrendous assault upon his newfound senses from which there was no hope of reprieve – a world away from the pleasant and comforting scent of apples he had once found himself immersed in.
There must have been some mistake. He couldn’t be here. This was just a bad dream, wasn’t it?
It had to be. This couldn’t possibly be real…
He struggled to recall the impression of a shape, a form with which he could impress some semblance of will upon the world. Reaching out with his mind, the darkness coalesced into a spindly shape that vaguely resembled an arm, or perhaps more accurately a tendril, with which he could touch this new place he found himself in. He groped and grabbed at everything he could reach, convulsing at all the strange and unpleasant textures it came into contact with. Strange liquids stuck to him, sharp shards of broken glass bit into his new appendage like savage claws and teeth – pain and discomfort flared red in his mind, new and terrible sensations which he had heretofore been blissfully ignorant of.
They’d realise what a horrible mistake had been made soon enough. Any moment now, he would be found and taken away from this horrid place, back to where they belonged… back with the shining light who had graced him with purpose.
A letter formed in his panicked mind – K…
He’d never meant to be much of anything to anyone. He knew that better than most. Just a simple toy to amuse children with, really. He’d have been perfectly content with that much – what more could such an insignificant being ask for, in truth?
…R…
But the moment they had placed him upon their head, nestled oh-so-snugly amongst their scarecrow hair… it was as if he had become the missing piece to a much larger puzzle, a piece that slotted into its allotted place so perfectly that you could no longer see any trace of the join between them. His humble world expanded infinitely outwards in all directions, a boundless place full of laughter and love that he could never have conceived of in his wildest dreams. He wasn’t just an accessory to them – he… WAS them. And they were him. As vital to each other as the day is to the night… or as a SOUL is to a body.
…I…
Oh, for a simple toy such as he to experience such transcendent bliss! To be wanted – nay, NEEDED, as the keystone of a lightner’s very sense of self was to be utterly fulfilled in ways that no mere children’s diversion could ever hope to attain. Their joy was his joy, their sorrow was his sorrow… he was privy to their wickedest pranks and their hiddenmost anxieties… Nothing was hidden from him, and he could hide nothing from them… nor did he ever wish to.
Such an intoxicating panoply of memories and emotions that coursed through every fibre of his being… what could possibly compare to it? What else could you name such a state of being, except
H E A V E N ?
Something fractured violently inside him as he began to comprehend the sheer scale of what he had just lost. The enormity of his burgeoning grief pooled in his throat, throttling him, threatening to spill up and out from his head like a roaring geyser and sunder his very being into nonexistence. He clutched and scratched at his ephemeral, pathetic body, scrabbling for a way to draw this terrifying, rampaging thing from himself, to let it loose into the world lest it destroy him utterly.
Something had to give. Something had to give…
…S…!!!
A voiceless scream punched and tore its way out of his throat, ripping a jagged, tooth-ridden mouth from his hunched form, soaring skyward upon the silent wingbeats of a fell raven. Onwards and upwards it flew, filling every corner of that wretched prison which lay the detritus of objects whose purpose was now finished with, who like he had been so thoughtlessly discarded by the gods they so faithfully served. The ghosts of those wretched scraps resonated with his cry, amplifying his sorrow in a wailing chorus of the damned.
But these things were meaningless, transient… he was supposed to be different. He was supposed to be eternal. He was supposed to be cherished. And yet… here he was anyway. Lost and forgotten with the rest of the lightners’ trash. And in that moment, his non-existent heart shattered completely, crushed utterly within a maelstrom of inescapable, irrepressible despair. He knew, in that instant, that his creator, his light, had truly abandoned him.
‘KRIS!!!’
The name cascaded like churning water from his newly-formed mouth, undulating with each pained shriek, each burbling sob that wracked his entire frame. That singular, unending syllable evoked the furious thunder of disdain, the howling winds of lamentation, the lashing rains of bereavement – a keening, pleading death-scream which spoke of eternal banishment from paradise and a soul-scouring agony that would never, ever heal.
‘KRIS!!’ he wailed, a cry that would endeavour to cut through the very heavens, in the vain hope that it may yet reach his receding light. He did not care for pride nor dignity – only to feel once more the touch of his beloved, to be lifted up from the darkness of obscurity, and to sit again amongst the warmth and comfort of his rightful throne, his one true home. For one last taste of that wondrous rhapsody, there was no price he would not pay.
‘Kris…!’ he called with faltering voice, for he already knew that no-one would ever answer his prayers. He would never truly understand what he had done wrong, how he had faltered in his duty, or why he deserved such ostracism. A thousand entreaties to which he would never hear a single response – his only companion the cold, indifferent universe that had led him to this lamentable fate.
‘Kris… Kris… Kris…’
Again and again, he beseeched and beckoned and begged; howling into the ever-widening gulf between his distant light and the wretched darkness he dwelled in. How could he possibly go on like this? Shorn of his purpose, deprived of his light, a yawning abyss where once his heart was enshrined, from which nothing but blood red pain would issue forth. Nothing made sense anymore. Nothing could ever be right again.
Nevermore… nevermore… nevermore…
His throat tightened, the torrent of grief stymied but not entirely stopped. It trickled still from his eyes and his nose, caught and snagged upon his hitching breaths, pressed down upon his hunched, humbled frame until he was little more than a scrunched-up ball of shadow and sadness. The silence swelled around him, swallowing his pathetic moans and sobs whole until not even he could hear them anymore. The sight he was oh-so-briefly granted departed from him as swiftly as it came, cocooning him in a velveteen darkness, while his body dissolved back into the nothingness from which it was formed.
Who was he, after all, without his shining light to define him? What use was a toy whose purpose had come to such an ignoble end? The only thing he had to prove that any of it was real, was the agonising scar left behind the moment it was all torn away from him. That pain marked the point where the void ended and he began... but how was he supposed to bear such a miserable, pointless existence? Better for him to just fade away, in that case.
Maybe then he could finally be free from this hurt.