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The wind sings its gentle melody, the water ripples with a humming coming deep beneath its surface. The movement of shifting stones are rhythmic, to be able to properly cross one has to match the rhythm, by the end of it often finding themselves with a tune stuck in their head.
The ground shifts beneath their feet as they run and deep beneath they feel almost a pulse deep beneath the earth. It sings, not just the rustling leaves or the chirping birds that perch atop the tallest branches.
Paradise is breathing, just like any living creature, things are only silent when they’re dead.
If that is so, then this must be the afterlife.
Cyan’s footsteps echo through what seems to be an endless void, their feet across what they assume is solid ground the only sound in a world otherwise devoid of the gale’s choir or the quiet humming beneath the dirt. Any moment they feel like the ground is about to give way, the deafening shatter of glass the last sound that’ll ever cross their audials as they fall endlessly, even their descent and desperate panic completely void of noise.
But they’re still here, still walking like normal. Cyan must still march deeper into the quiet.
A quiet ringing makes itself known to them as they try to drown it out with any thought lingering in their core. The abandoned buildings it and Cube used to explore were quiet, the extra padding from concrete and the like thick enough Cyan could momentarily escape the pulse from the ground.
She told them of days when Paradise didn’t sing, when forests too could be this quiet, even the leaves didn’t chime when the wind passed through them. He missed it sometimes, as a bot built before its revival the idea that the ground could ever ‘slither’ came as a surprise to her.
They wonder if she would’ve been less unsettled by the void they find themselves in, an eternal escape from the noise to finally be embraced by the quiet she’d been born into.
Cyan quickens their pace hurrying faster and faster, if not to reach whatever destination may exist, just so they hear more of their own sounds, to drown out the ever-growing quiet. The ringing within them grows, is subdued for a moment, then rises again in a repeating wave pattern.
This can’t be it.
Cyan was familiar with death. Their body was a prototype, not fully built up to code, shattered with the right amount of pressure, even if this was everyone else’s afterlife it wasn’t theirs.
They know a gateway of echoing tunnels, each of their footsteps hitting like a drum against the crystalline surface. The light floods their vision and again they wake up at the base of The Tree, lying there in the grass as they’re mesmerized by the faint patterns across The Tree’s surface. Sometimes they’re alone, most of the time Cube is standing above them bawling their eyes out.
Even that has sound, a promise of a return.
They remember the streak of purple in the grass that’d been drained of life, even the dirt beneath it was silent as it’d begun to adopt that odd shade of pink.
Maybe that was it, corrupted beyond repair The Tree could no longer find the strength to bring them back again. This was it, the death they were always meant for, and as soon as they’d realized it was truly over they’d stop running and succumb to the silence as if they were one.
Cyan’s feet only beat against the ground harder, practically at a full sprint as standing out against the void they see it,
A light.
Not something made up by their head to fill in the black, a light at the end of the tunnel like they’ve always had.
Their hands outstretch, fingers already flexing to grab at the triangle humming a familiar tune, breaking through the quiet of the darkness.
Cyan can almost feel it, the comfort of sound just at their fingertips.
Shards of random color and noise pattern flash their vision as suddenly-
Cyan shoots back up, the glitching fading just as fast as it’d appeared as they take a second to correctly process and identify the colors and sounds that surround them. Though the gentle swaying of the water was an immediate relief from the eternal silence, it was still quieter than it’d ever should’ve been.
The ground beneath them is still, cold even, not even the slightest sign of a buzzing or a thump like a heartbeat that’d tell them Paradise still sang the way it used to.
Is this truly the quiet Cube longed for, unknowing just how dead everything truly was?
They pull their knees into themselves, readying their audials to pick up even the quietest melody Paradise could muster, only met with a wave of disappointment.
The heaviness in their core makes itself known and all they want is to make it go away. They hum, some quick and momentary distraction from themselves, something to fill in the quiet.