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His mind was clear. He was in the middle of an open space, predominantly filled by green and a dark blue, one on the ground and the other in the air. It was quiet; he was the only being around. In the distance, he could see the vague outline of trees, foliage, the jagged peaks of mountains. He stood, motionless, while the sun slowly creeped up and into existence behind him; it warmed his back, and slowly lightened the land around him. The stars were fading, now, and slowly being replaced with strokes of red, orange, a faint purple tinging the edge of everything.
There is another source of light to the left, just outside of his peripheral vision, a warm, orange-yellow glow. Different from the sun warming his back. It emits smoke, a translucent gray that is just barely visible in the light of the rising sun.
He cannot move. He cannot turn to look to his left, even though there is the beginning of noise coming from the same direction. A soft murmur, a call of a name, a laugh. Another call of a name. It is louder this time, like it’s calling out to someone. He wonders who they call to, for there is no answering response.
He feels light. Like his feet could lift from the ground, and he could join the endless expanse of colors above him. He can look up, and so he does, while the voice to his left calls out once more, louder and maybe moving closer. He stares into the void above him. The stars he thought were gone are back, blinking at him in a jarring rhythm.
The stars begin to move, slowly at first. They streak through the sky, bringing a glow to the other colors that make them stand out in a harsh neon glow. They circle around each other, creating a vortex out of the void above him.
To his left, the voice from before screams the same name once more.
But he is lost to the chaos above him in the sky, which bursts into a supernova before everything goes dark.
—
Clancy jolts awake, but with how little energy his body holds these days, it is less of a jolt and more of a quick movement of his eyelids. His breathing speeds up a little. But he does not move more than that.
He used to be able to count the days that passed in this bleak, gray lock box by carving a line into the corner of the walls. He timed it by how many times they would bring meager rations to him through a slot in the bottom of the door. Back when he knew what time was. But then he noticed they would change how many times they would bring something to him. They used to bring him something twice in a day cycle, which soon became smaller portions. Then they brought him something once in a day cycle, or what he thought a day cycle was. And then they switched it up, bringing him food and water multiple times in a day cycle or none at all for several cycles.
Or maybe, his sense of time was off. He lost track of the tally lines he had carved into the wall, in between weakened sleeps and without a window to reflect the natural day progression.
Although it seems his spatial awareness has not been as badly affected, because there is a jingling noise by his door. He stares at the doorframe while the door swings open, blinding him for a moment with the sudden flood of brighter light from the hallway outside. He blinks his eyes open once more, squinting them until the figure backlit in the doorway comes into focus. He recognizes the red before anything else, the striking difference between that and the endless grey making it easy.
It is not a bishop coming to collect him, but one of the Glorious Gone. They stand unmoving in the doorway, before they open their mouth to speak one word to him: “Come.”
He can do nothing but follow the command; he shakily levers his arms beneath him, and pushes himself up from the cot his body lays upon. When he gets to his feet, the Glorious Gone turns around with a motion to follow them.
He follows.
He wishes he had the capacity to mentally map the path they take through the tower he resides in, but even the moderate pace they move with is too much for his aching body to keep up with. He focuses more on putting one foot in front of the other than the many twists and turns and stairs they steadily pace through. When they finally slow down, and come to a stop, it is in front of a blue door. It is the only other splash of color that Clancy has seen, besides the endless grey ocean around them and the red of the hood of the Glorious Gone.
The Glorious Gone extends a hand, opening the blue door, and moving a step out of the way for Clancy to walk through first. He does, taking in the blue table the same shade as the door set in the middle of the room, empty except for the chair sitting on one side. The walls, ceiling, and floor of the room is the same shade of grey as the rest of the tower. Once more, several cloaks of red invade his vision as an unwanted focal point of this blue room.
Three bishops.
The door closes behind him once he has stepped through the threshold. The Glorious Gone does not follow him in.
The bishop who speaks to him is recognizable through voice as Keons, his bishop from before he escaped the walls. “We ask you to do something for us, child.” The same voice, the same soft tone that he remembers hearing as he grew up in the third district. “We ask you to write in the name of Vialism. To promote the teachings in such a way to bring joy and comfort to the citizens of Dema.”
He pauses, like he is waiting for a response from Clancy. Clancy does not respond.
Keons continues, “We request that you use your Voice to give the message of Vialism to the citizens.” Another pause, shorter this time. “You will be brought to this room, and given papers and a pencil. Your work will be reviewed before it is allowed to leave this room, to be heard by the people of Dema. You will sing for Vialism.”
Clancy thinks he can hear something crack inside of him. He wonders how the bishops do not hear the noise, with the silence that hangs in the room. He longs to pick up a pencil and let his creativity flow once more. But is it really worth it, if it is to spread a false message, one he does not believe in? He has seen outside of the walls of this circular city. He knows what waits for him on the other side, the people that wait for him on the other side, waiting to welcome him home.
He needs to survive long enough to see them once more. He could do better for himself than to fall within these city walls, alone, as just another vessel for the bishops to seize and use for their bidding.
His silence must stretch on for longer than what the bishops desire, because one of the two who have so far not moved reached for the chair. They pull it from the table in an obvious gesture.
Clancy hesitates for a moment more, because if he sits at this blue table he knows that his Voice and words will no longer be his. But really, what choice does he have, if he wishes to survive? He moves closer to the table, and sits. There is paper and a pencil set onto the table before him, and the bishops retreat to stand behind him. They do not breathe down his neck, but they are not so far away that he forgets they are there.
His hand trembles, and while it is a small motion, it feels seismic as it travels up his arm. He reaches for the pencil, and puts it to the topmost page.
He prays for forgiveness in advance, to the people that took him in when he escaped the city. He hopes they can understand that he has to do whatever it takes for him to survive until a time comes that he can escape once more.
As he begins to write, he dares not think that they will come for him again. They have already done so once before, and he knows what their resources look like, the numbers they have. He is not worth the risk that transcending the city would bring.
No one is coming for him. He will have to do this on his own.
And in the corner of the room, a humanoid shape fizzles in and out of existence, trying to get through to the boy sitting at the table. He is a figure made of yellow, invisible to the eyes of the bishops. Invisible to the eyes of anyone in the tower, including the only pair of eyes that he is desperate to meet; the only ones capable of seeing him.
This figure lingers in its static state for the entirety of the time that Clancy sits at the table. It watches, and mourns, because it knows what this will take from Clancy.
—
Time passes in unsteady sessions between his grey lock box and the room behind the blue door. Clancy writes. The bishops group together in the room with him in various numbers, but never less than two, and never more than five. In larger groups, some of them stay for the entire time he is in the room, while others leave throughout the time spent there. Keons is a permanent fixture. Clancy does not see Nico at all.
The pages he fills with writing are scrutinized before he is allowed up from the table. They are monitored closely for wording and intention, and while most of what he writes is scrapped, there are still parts that are accepted. He is told to forget what the bishops do not approve of, but to improve it. To infuse his words with the teachings of Vialism. To promote hope to the citizens of his city.
It is not his city. This is not what his words and his Voice are meant for.
He continues to write. His days continue to blur together.
Clancy registers consciousness in sporadic bursts. His body moves without him most of the time. He floats behind it, a ghost in the room, haunting himself. He is smaller now. Compact.
The bishops have allowed him to create once more. But they force it upon a body that is unwilling and lacks passion. The same hands that once scribbled endlessly across journal pages, surrounded by laughter and the smell of burning embers and woodsmoke, hesitate when creating letters. His hands stutter through sentences, thoughts, phrases. This outlet, a form of expression, has been bastardized by this room and all it contains. It is no longer his, and that is evident in the disconnect he feels watching his hands drift across the pages.
He can not see it, but his skin is dull and dry. There are deep, bruised bags beneath his eyes, a haunted look to his face. His eyes are blank and empty; the shine cultivated under tree canopies and open land is gone.
He is a living corpse, trapped within a blue room in a circular tower, in the middle of a grey, walled, circular city.
He is a ghost haunting himself.
The ghost haunting him, or his body, with dark curls and wide, scared eyes, tries to catch his attention once more. This ghost follows his body constantly, from the blue room back to his grey lock box, in a continuous cycle. This ghost fades on occasion, but comes back often. It cannot speak to Clancy or make contact with him, not yet. But this ghost desperately hopes for a time in the future that he will be able to. He can feel the strength increase in his phantom appearance every time he comes back.
That does not stop the attempts it makes to reach out the empty shell that sits at a blue table, or moves through the halls, or lays upon its side in the grey lock box.
This ghost does not yet know that it is a shell it is reaching towards.
This ghost, with a yellow bandana covering its mouth and nose, believes that it can still reach Clancy, even with the physical distance between them.
—
The bishops put Clancy on a stage. They treat him like a doll, in that they dress him how they want and dye his hair into a shade of bubblegum pink. They move him around from set to set as they so desire, and make him sing to promote their religion. His fragile frame and wide, glossy, empty eyes do nothing but add to the doll imagery that Clancy sees reflected back at him the first time he comes back to himself long enough to see one of the recordings.
There is an odd disconnect that he experiences, watching his body perform and project his Voice, when he does not remember doing such a thing. This performance could be considered perfect, by all standards presented to him by the bishops. He promotes Vialism with his words and melodies. He brings color to an otherwise grey and dim city. He is the perfect puppet, performing for the ones pulling his strings.
The more he performs for the puppeteers pulling his strings, the more he can feel himself fade into the background of his own mind. The moments he spends conscious of his bodily autonomy become fewer and fewer as time passes. He spends longer and longer amounts of time unaware of himself and the things he does.
He finds himself forgetting things now. Things from his childhood that he thought he never would: the shape of his mother’s face, the sound of her laugh. He has trouble recalling the home he once had, the streets he once walked, the people he once knew. It is a slow progression, an unnoticeable change, until he tries to recall something and finds it lost from his memories.
He passes this off, until he tries to remember the feeling of the sun on his skin in the early mornings when he was in Trench. The memory of the feeling does not come to him.
He tries to remember the faces of the banditos that took him in, that came to rescue him from his room. All he can picture is a vague mass of people, blending together and indistinct, a mix of green and yellow and the faint impression of what could be sunshine.
He tries to remember the face of his Torchbearer. His mind gives him nothing but the impression of yellow. He thinks that this might be the moment he fully breaks.
He feels like his existence is slowly dissolving into sand, at that moment. He starts to break down, in a slow crawl of granules falling out of a small crack in the glass of an hourglass. If he has forgotten the face of the one person that he was holding on to the most, then what does he have left?
The conflict he holds within his mind, while it frays apart at the seams, is only internal. His body continues to move without him.
—
The other ghost that is visible only to him can make contact with him now. This works well in this other ghost’s favor, when the submarine glass is shattered with the force the creature with glowing eyes slams into it. This ghost grabs Clancy by the wrist to pull him out of the remains of the window and into the open sea, to drag him towards the surface. It scares him that Clancy feels so limp and puts so little effort in swimming upwards. But they make it to the surface, and Torchbearer somehow manages to pull them both up and onto the shoreline.
When Torchbearer finally catches his breath from the effort he has exerted, he turns to look at Clancy beside him. He is greeted with closed eyes and a slack expression, like any tension that might have been lining his body is gone, washed away with the water lapping at their shoes. Torchbearer has the sudden thought that Clancy looks so at peace, one would think he was dead.
This thought turns to panic, and a desperate reach over to check if Clancy still has a pulse, is still breathing. Thank whatever deity exists in whatever religion except for Vialism that he can know process touch sensations with this projection. Torchbearer relaxes when he can feel the faint pulse, and the gentle drift of Clancy’s breath across his knuckles.
But they can’t stay forever on this stretch of beach. The wind is cold, made even colder by their wet clothes, and while Torch aches as much as he is able through this projection, he knows that he needs to get them moved off of this beach and into some kind of shelter. Fire is a must, to get them both dried off and warmed up. So he shuffles to his feet, pulls Clancy further up the beach and hopefully out of the reach of the waves, and staggers off to find an alcove and hopefully some dry wood to work as a fire.
When he has something together, and is making his way back across the sand with a lit torch in hand, Clancy is blinking his eyes open. So Torch quickens his pace, and reaches out to help Clancy up when he gets close enough. But Clancy does not acknowledge his outstretched hand, so Torch grabs a fistful of his shirt to drag him upright, to get him moving in some way. He staggers upright, and stumbles a little, but he remains standing.
Torch grabs his wrist as gently as he can, and guides him out of the open air and in the direction of the shelter that he found for the both of them. They can worry about everything else later, the important part for now is getting Clancy warmed up. Then they can rest, and then they can plan. Trench should not be far from here, and if they are where Torch thinks they are, they can get home.
He helps Clancy settle with his back propped against the wall of his chosen alcove, and places his torch within the dry wood he gathered along the way to create a fire for them both. It catches, protected from the wind with how deep this alcove runs, and brings warmth to the area. Clancy shivers.
They will survive.
—
Clancy comes back to himself slowly. His body is warm, and it aches, which is different from the numb comfortability he existed in for so long. When he blinks his eyes open and they adjust to the dim lighting, he starts a bit, because he does not recognize his surroundings. He finds his eyes drifting from the burning embers in front of him, to the figure sitting beside him, tensing a little when he does not recognize him. There is no red, no bishop cloak, or hood depicting him as a Glorious Gone. The colors the stage hands wore to depict which department they worked with are not present.
The man beside him wears what could be all black, thick looking clothing with a cloak of the same material draped across his lap. This stranger must not realize Clancy is awake, because he moves to drape the cloak across him to make up for the dying fire. He withdraws his hands, and happens to look at Clancy, sighing softly when he is met with open eyes watching him.
They watch each other for a moment, one like he is tracing the other’s facial features with the same warmth as the fire, the other in slowly growing confusion.
The stranger takes a slightly deeper breath, before murmuring, “Hi, Clancy.”
Clancy does not manage to catch himself before he rushes out a breathy, “Who are you?”
The stranger’s face freezes before it is consumed by hurt and grief, and a slowly dawning horror and understanding.