Re: QUIETUS [S!5] [Round 1: Godsworn Valley]
10-20-2012, 04:55 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by XX.
It slipped into the tunnels of the cavern between the molding rocks and the fire-bitten earth, singing a whistling song as it went. Little echoes- ech, onora! fuse, ster whispered back in answer, always teasing it, always hiding. It moved in secret rivers down to the sun-beneath-the-ground, berating itself. “Oh Sonora, heavenly blood and earth in excess,” it sighed, “Take us into you! Make us a part of your chthonic ecstasy!”
She was there.
“John, is that you? John, is that you? Is that you- Is that you- Is- Is- Is-“
“Leave me alone, monster,” she said. All fire and fear and sweet womanly flesh, ah... Delectable. Disgusting. Dirt-ridden filthmongering anthill of a human being. Her flavors were bitter and sweet and so, so sharp.
“Please,” it whispered. “Please, I’m so scared….”
A silence from her that was no silence but a symphony because it heard her heart and her throat, pulsing with that sweet slow river of luscious lovely blood like the curve of an artist’s brush tracing her aortas. It opened its mouths and tasted the air to smell her fear. Her anger. She was a bouquet.
“J-John? Is that you? Please, John, it’s coming… Please come back…”
“Enough,” she said. Indignant and disgusted. Her solar heart burned with all her anger and self-pity, worrying at her like a starving dog. The corpses on her scent were in her mind, it could see so far into her that she was transparent, a girl-shaped ghost with a nova at her heart. It had never seen such a creature in all its lives. It came closer, flowing across the floor rippling so she turned her head away from the ceiling’s sudden mouth.
“It’s here, it’s here, it’s here,” a frightened female whimpered from above the sun-girl’s head, black teeth dripping on her hair, “Oh John, John, John John John, where are you? WHERE ARE YOU, JOHN WHERE-”
A burning in its flesh that scarred its lovely teeth. Sharp and pretty as a bee-sting. It laughed a little girl’s laugh (when the family cat gave birth to kittens) and withdrew, pooling into itself and spreading into a sky over her head. Her eyes were like lanterns even in the darkness.
“Don’t touch me,” she screamed/said. “I’ll burn you to ashes, Sonora. I’ll burn- I- I will…”
She looked at her hands. She wore their blood as war paint.
“Some cultures believe that there is only one Sonoran, that all individuals of the species are simply fragments of this gestalt being. This is of course ridiculous, as separate Sonorans produce different reactions to stimuli.”
She was such a pretty weeper.
“The Murre people have a legend in which the first Sonoran-“
“Shut up!” she screamed to it. “Shut up! Go away. Leave- leave me alone. I just want to be alone.” Her posture was weak and limp and her voice was a tremor on the sunscape of her nonexistent breath. Such radiance should never be tarnished by the petty flaws of nerves and it flowed from the skylight above her head to form an ocean at her feet. She bared her teeth and it bared its own back, spiny black mouths arcing from the molding stone all awash with the pretty pretty blood of the madmen wolves.
“Look at me. Can’t you look at me? What happened to you?”
She grew colder then, seeing its words as its own instead of a part of its endless soulful song, as if it were a woman asking the question all those years ago in that lovely house on the edge of the river. What happened? What happened? She saw the water take her children. She warned them not to go.
“Nothing happened,” she said. She sat down with the blackness pooling all around her, phantom waves making fists and mouths and lovely long teeth, a birdsong warbling in its twenty-thousand throats. “I killed them all. Nothing happened.” She was so precious. Her bones were a goddess’s. “They were going to use me. Again, just like the others. So I burned them all. I burned them and they screamed and I kept burning them anyway. I… I’m just as bad as you.”
The venom in her voice when she spoke of it was poetry. It wheezed in the voice of a murderer, “Ah, you’re like me, aren’t you? They hate us because we’re stronger. We’re killers, we are, and it makes ‘em nervous. Makes ‘em shake in their beds like children! Ha ha! Ha ha ha!”
She wasn’t impressed by its story, it could tell. Her pretty muscles underneath her face were taut with tension and weak from exhaustion, her lovely radiation-light eyes trying to watch its infinite self but finding nothing but the darkness around her. She did not see how trapped she was, a single spark in its river’s waves, rolling and rolling around her in a languid soutenu. It wanted to be patient, to savor her, to make her last before it swallowed her and carried her voice across the centuries. If it could take her lights! And her anger and her hate, and all the other burning suns inside her…
“A marvel of modern science! She’s a natural-born-“
It heard another
“…Sonora?”
and it sank
Rachel’s eyes, assisted though they were by the faint light of her internal sun, were playing tricks on her in the darkness. She knew that she’d dug herself into some – kind of cave or something- but the floor was too warm and smooth, like skin or paper, and it gave slightly under her feet when she moved. It stank of mildew and smoke and something else, something sweet and dark that she was trying not to think about. The smell filled her mouth. Reverberations of some strange, distant breathing rumbled through her. All around was the patient panting of the writhing in the darkness, all around her, whispering and whispering…
She ignited a tiny flare and immediately felt the kickback in a sudden heaviness of her eyelids. She was more tired than she’d realized. All that fusion slowed her down, made her weak and… she-
A pale face, terrified, red mouth wide and screaming. Young.
She didn’t-
“I surrender! I surrender! NO-“
She wasn’t-
“Frightened, are we, child…?
“Sonora,” she hissed, her fists clenched, “I don’t fear you, monster. Come out and face me.”
“What did you say to me, human?”
Belatedly, the water at her feet giggled.
The air in the cave rippled; a distant singing wound its way to her from somewhere far off in the cavern’s depths. The shadows on the walls slithered together and began to coalesce, forming narrow arms and a sunken chest from the fragile shade and solidifying with a hiss into a tangible form. An enormous shape like a woman formed from black gauze and smoke materialized before her, taller than the ceiling yet unbent and gleaming in leather and polished iron studs. Two familiar black glass eyes bored into Rachel from the smooth planes of the woman’s face, reflecting the single insignificant mote of light that was the glow of her sun against the cavern walls. The thing’s face was drawn and tight, more stitched than grown, and it was painfully beautiful even through the snarl of its pretty mouth. It opened its black lips and spoke and in a throaty whisper.
“You again,” Obscura said. It was impossible to tell where her body ended and the surface of the hidden stone began. The blackness now seemed thicker, almost tactile, a living shroud that draped her sharp shoulders and folded itself gracefully into nonexistence. A narrow-fingered hand drifted forth from the darkness and laid a razor nail in the center of Rachel’s forehead, pricking her skin and drawing forth a tiny bead of blood. “You again. Where are the fools I gave you to? Where did they go….? Ah. Yes. I see.”
There was no particularly hurry in the way she plucked the girl by the throat from the floor and held her dangling there like a freshly-born kitten. Pain exploded in Rachel’s neck as the goddess’ nails pierced her skin, but her mouth wouldn’t open and she couldn’t seem to scream or call for anyone- anything-
“And who would answer you?” Obscura whispered, inky lips and dagger teeth inches from the girl’s face. The deathly chill of damp stone pressed through Rachel’s straitjacket into her skin and she gasped, making the goddess smirk. “Another god, perhaps? Or that little bitch of Kedemonas? A jumped-up magpie is your best hope, how sad. You wretched thing. Do you know who it is you gaze upon? Or am I too far back in your pitiful memory, after all?”
“Obscura,” Rachel choked, eyes brimming with tears. Her legs kicked futilely for a grip on the smooth wall. She clawed at her neck, meeting only the nail-studded gloves of the goddess who hissed like a snake and shook her violently, smashing her head into the stone with a sickening crack. Agonizing lights exploded behind the girl’s eyes and she felt her grip slacken and surrender, a nauseous darkness rising up from the base of her spine to meet her…
“Darling! Da-aaarling!”
Obscura’s head stayed perfectly still. Rachel sensed her gaze flicking over the floor, the faintest edge of a growl emanating from her hidden throat. “Magpie,” she said, “I will attend to you in a moment. Be patient.”
“Girl, it’s just yoooouuu I’m thiiiinking of!”
“Obscura,” Rachel mumbled. Her head was swimming and she felt her sun guttering with pain. “I killed… your mmmen… I burned…”
“Idiot girl. Did you think I didn’t already know? That the goddess of subterfuge wouldn’t know when her own pawns were being disposed of? They breed you mortals more dull with every rutting cycle.” Obscura’s hand might as well have been steel cables for all Rachel could resist it. The goddess sneered at her efforts. “Even now you wriggle like a worm on a hook. You disgusting thing.”
Without warning the goddess’ grip loosened and Rachel fell to the floor, the stone hitting her like a titan’s angry fist. Black fingers spiked at the edges of her vision and she heard someone whimpering wordlessly. “I can find more,” Obscura said, staring down at her, “I have hundreds of men. Thousands. But you’ve done something far worse, yes. You’ve returned to my Labyrinth with a guest.”
““You know you’re gonna hurt somebody tonight…”
The goddess’s outlines were blurry and faded, curiously washed out, and dimly Rachel saw her black eyes flash silver in the gloom. “Even if for some asinine reason I was seized with the desire to show your pitiful self mercy, I couldn’t. Could I? No. Who knows who you might go to with my secrets? Desolo? That ancient wreck could care less, but to lose…” Her voice trailed off. The cavern fell into silence. Slowly Rachel’s vision climbed back into focus: the goddess’ head was turned, glaring at some point on the floor. Rachel couldn’t move. Her limbs felt as though they were filled with stone and tied down with leaden chains. Through the haze of Obscura’s cloak she could just barely make out a ripple of light on the far wall, one that rang with a tiny bell-like note.
“Come on, show your faaaaace!”
“Magpie,” said the goddess slowly, “I told you to wait.”
“Come on, give us one more spaaaaark! Set us all afire!”
“Why is it that Kedemonas’ lot can never stay silent?” Obscura growled. “Do you expect your prey to leap into your mouths?” Something shiny and dark glittered in her hand; the muscles in her pale arms writhed underneath her armor, she turned to strike-
A freezing wave of blackness slammed into Rachel and smashed her into the ground. She felt the floor buckle and vanish and then she was floating and falling all at once, plummeting through nothingness into a wall of sound and crushing strength that bound her arms with needle claws, jamming her wrists into angles that made her scream. “You’re looking for a way out, I can feel it!” a voice roared in her ears, hysterical wolves’ howling echoing all around her, “COME ON, SHOW ME WHERE IT HURTS, MAYBE I CAN HEAL IT!”
She tried to yell, to bite the choking darkness but all she met was a bitter numbing rushing of waves and fire and thunder rolling and rolling in her head, a swallowing madness that echoed her missing heartbeat with deafening bells and drums in agonizing strikes hammering into her head with every breath the darkness took. Her sun hummed, flared; she clenched her fists through the rushing currents and focused on the fire exploding into life and with every ounce of her strength sent it out-
The blackness parted and there in her path was the startled face of Obscura, staring up at her in fury. The bolt erupted; she heard a nightmarish scream, and then everything slid quietly to a stop.
She blacked out.
-------------------------------------------------------
“All that I wanted was a little touch, a little tenderness and truth, I didn’t ask for much…”
A drop of rain splashed her face. Her eyes didn’t seem to want to open.
“Talk about being at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Shhhssss….”
“I only wanna smile at your eyes. You should have seen your little face. Burning for love!”
Something cold crept along the inside of her calf and coiled around her ankle. Rachel groaned and rolled onto her side, weakly brushing at the sensation; splinters of ice shot into her fingers and melted into a soft numbness that crept into her bones and stayed there. It was nice. It was like falling into a gentle and long-awaited sleep. “You are cold, and darkness, and death,” a girl somewhere far off was saying, “I am heat, and light, and life. You fear me- You fear me- You fear me…”
“Sonora,” she mumbled, “S-sss… So…”
“I. I never caught your name.”
The dead soldier’s words triggered something in her mind- a brief flash of a pale young face -and she curled herself into an upright ball, wincing from the sudden rush of coolant to her system. For a moment she thought she was still where Obscura had dropped her, trapped beneath the ground, but as the distant sounds of cannonfire and screaming reached her she realized that the darkness surrounding her was different.
It was breathing…
“PEOPLE? PEOPLE? IS ANYONE OUT THERE? IS ANYONE THERE? I never caught your name. Rachel. Rachel. Hames gave me fuckin’ last week’s map. You stand accused of murder. I did what you said, I did what you said,” it sobbed. Sheer walls of glistening black liquid arced over her head, continually forming and collapsing into strange lacy patterns. Pockets of dim light dappled the ground where gaps bubbled and burst, endlessly knitting itself back together. From all throughout it came a gentle whispering, echoes of its voices and, faintly, a wheezing man laughing and laughing in a way that made her skin crawl.
“Stop it,” Rachel said. Her mouth felt as though someone had stuffed it full of bile and cotton and her head seemed to have been bashed in with a hammer at some point. The rest of her…
She looked down. Dark water clung to her hands and legs and she realized with a horrible twist in her gut that she couldn’t feel them at all. All sensation came to a stop where the blackness covered her. She shrieked and slapped at herself, only succeeding in spraying the fluid across her chassis where it hissed and bubbled fitfully. “Get off me,” she spat, wobbling precariously to her feet. “Get the fuck off me, you- you- !”
“Sometimes the dream, it don’t come true,” a voice sighed. Warmth spread across her flesh; the water slipped off her to join the pools at her feet. “It’s a pity it’s a feeling I can’t control.”
“Control it.” Slowly, concentrating on maintaining her balance, Rachel turned in a cautious circle. Walls of water surrounded her on every side, occasionally pocketed by windows into something she couldn’t make out. “Where is this? What… what happened? Where did Obscura…”
“I saw my girl with the golden touch- does it get you, ohhh-ohhhh, does it get you ooooooff to know that sometimes we aaaaall blaaaaack ooouuut? Are you looking for a sign? Or are you caught up in the liiiiiiight?”
Rachel groaned. “Obscura… What did you…?” Memory flooded her mind; a crushing darkness and a horrific screaming, battering her from every direction. Suddenly she felt much colder. “What did you do to me?”
“You got a fooooolish heart. I feel the heat, I see the light of miss atomic bomb, spoken up, fiery heart, your sil- ver- bones- and a sun to maybe dissipate the shadows of the mess you made. For a second there we’d won, we were innocent and yoooung! My lioness! MY PIÈCE DE RÉSISTANCE!”
The voices burst into a hundred types of howling laughter, a discordant clamoring that made her headache throb resentfully. Though her sun was still recovering from the attack on Obscura Rachel bore down within herself and forced its glow to flare. The darkness flinched: a little girl screamed pitifully and the liquid around her rippled and fell to the ground in a curtain of rain, flowing away into the shadows. “Thanks,” Rachel said drily, and stepped between two outstretched hands, black and bubbling.
“Oh, oooh, o-oooh, please don’t tell me I can’t make it,” something crooned into her ear, just behind her head. “It ain’t my fault. Let em hate, it ain’t my fault. Letting go, all I know, I’m giving you my song, you could have it all if you want it…”
“I get it. You talk in song.” Sometime between when she’d blacked out she’d- well, Sonora, anyway- had moved to some other part of the Labryinth, one she didn’t recognize from her earlier visit. Strange glyphs covered the ceiling and walls, almost seeming to form intricate pictograms but dissolving into meaningless shapes the longer she stared. It seemed lighter than where they’d been before. As her eyes adjusted she noticed that one end of the tunnel seemed less dark than the other, although faintly muted and somewhat distorted where the shadows had begun to dissipate. Water lapped at her heels as she walked. “So you just carry on mimicking people and trying to scare them, is that it? That’s your whole story? You’re just a coward who fucks around in the shadows. Go bother someone with more time on their hands.”
An icy needle exploded into Rachel’s leg, spreading through her flesh with terrifying swiftness as numbness quickly overtook her. “What- !?” Almost reflexively she sent a blast of energy at the floor but the stinging continued, biting deeper and deeper with every move she made as the cave around her suddenly echoed with the agonized howling of wolves and men.
“Please don’t lie, don’t lie to me that you’re not afraid, my love,” the water around her wailed. A hand seized a hold of her waist and shoved her to the wall in a clash of metal, pairs and pairs of glistening black hands erupting up from the ground and digging their fingers into her jacket and pulling at her hair, clawing madly at her ribs and neck. One seized her wrist and pinned it above her, another punched into her stomach with enough force to make her chassis creak and Rachel snarled wordlessly, blasting the hands with fire that destroyed some but only seemed to make the rest sharper and more intent, pulling at her with greater and greater fury. She had just enough time to see a newcomer, talons long and glittering, lunge for her eyes before a freezing blackness overtook her and gripped her jaw with icy talons.
“Love, you don’t know what you’re running away from,” something lilted next to her ear, tenderness thick in its voice, “I am better than you think! You are one of them, I won’t be fooled again! I followed you through the darkness, I followed you through the cold, I remember myself as a looooonely child and so it was and I don’t understand what I lost, I don’t understand it, you took it from me. I’ll show no mercy for you- you had no mercy for me- I promise toniiight I won’t do no harm, I only want what’s best for you, I only want so bad I can’t think straight, so baaad all my bones shake, I want you, I want you, I’ll never leave you alone, don’t cry! it’s over! I never got your name, I was wrong and you got me wrong, yes, you got me wroooong… All men are pigs! All men, but meeee…”
The grip on her relaxed. Rachel threw herself forward, clawing free of the remains of the ichor clinging to her and sputtering wordlessly as smoke-like billows of darkness parted before her, drifting aimlessly across the floor. She stared at it, speechless.
“I’m frozen to the bones, I am. You bring your elegance and me my dumb strength, you were so kind to me, please please it’s coming please please where did you go!!!! My god. Can’t you see that Iiiiiiii know which way to run?”
“What the hell are you talking about,” Rachel hissed, but then the shadows shifted and a pale arch of light appeared on the far end of the tunnel, the faint outlines of trees and distant battlegrounds burning into her eyes as the cavern filled with daylight. She threw up an arm in defense, stumbling into something wet and writhing that pushed back languidly.
“My logic will prevail! So shut up, nightingale,” someone said smugly. Cold hands batted at her feet. “I’m the boy that that will heeeaaalll you. Rolling river of truth, can you spare me a sip?”
“Some time in the near future, Sonora,” Rachel said, edging her way into the light, “I’m going to find your face and punch it.”
“All men but me.”
It slipped into the tunnels of the cavern between the molding rocks and the fire-bitten earth, singing a whistling song as it went. Little echoes- ech, onora! fuse, ster whispered back in answer, always teasing it, always hiding. It moved in secret rivers down to the sun-beneath-the-ground, berating itself. “Oh Sonora, heavenly blood and earth in excess,” it sighed, “Take us into you! Make us a part of your chthonic ecstasy!”
She was there.
“John, is that you? John, is that you? Is that you- Is that you- Is- Is- Is-“
“Leave me alone, monster,” she said. All fire and fear and sweet womanly flesh, ah... Delectable. Disgusting. Dirt-ridden filthmongering anthill of a human being. Her flavors were bitter and sweet and so, so sharp.
“Please,” it whispered. “Please, I’m so scared….”
A silence from her that was no silence but a symphony because it heard her heart and her throat, pulsing with that sweet slow river of luscious lovely blood like the curve of an artist’s brush tracing her aortas. It opened its mouths and tasted the air to smell her fear. Her anger. She was a bouquet.
“J-John? Is that you? Please, John, it’s coming… Please come back…”
“Enough,” she said. Indignant and disgusted. Her solar heart burned with all her anger and self-pity, worrying at her like a starving dog. The corpses on her scent were in her mind, it could see so far into her that she was transparent, a girl-shaped ghost with a nova at her heart. It had never seen such a creature in all its lives. It came closer, flowing across the floor rippling so she turned her head away from the ceiling’s sudden mouth.
“It’s here, it’s here, it’s here,” a frightened female whimpered from above the sun-girl’s head, black teeth dripping on her hair, “Oh John, John, John John John, where are you? WHERE ARE YOU, JOHN WHERE-”
A burning in its flesh that scarred its lovely teeth. Sharp and pretty as a bee-sting. It laughed a little girl’s laugh (when the family cat gave birth to kittens) and withdrew, pooling into itself and spreading into a sky over her head. Her eyes were like lanterns even in the darkness.
“Don’t touch me,” she screamed/said. “I’ll burn you to ashes, Sonora. I’ll burn- I- I will…”
She looked at her hands. She wore their blood as war paint.
“Some cultures believe that there is only one Sonoran, that all individuals of the species are simply fragments of this gestalt being. This is of course ridiculous, as separate Sonorans produce different reactions to stimuli.”
She was such a pretty weeper.
“The Murre people have a legend in which the first Sonoran-“
“Shut up!” she screamed to it. “Shut up! Go away. Leave- leave me alone. I just want to be alone.” Her posture was weak and limp and her voice was a tremor on the sunscape of her nonexistent breath. Such radiance should never be tarnished by the petty flaws of nerves and it flowed from the skylight above her head to form an ocean at her feet. She bared her teeth and it bared its own back, spiny black mouths arcing from the molding stone all awash with the pretty pretty blood of the madmen wolves.
“Look at me. Can’t you look at me? What happened to you?”
She grew colder then, seeing its words as its own instead of a part of its endless soulful song, as if it were a woman asking the question all those years ago in that lovely house on the edge of the river. What happened? What happened? She saw the water take her children. She warned them not to go.
“Nothing happened,” she said. She sat down with the blackness pooling all around her, phantom waves making fists and mouths and lovely long teeth, a birdsong warbling in its twenty-thousand throats. “I killed them all. Nothing happened.” She was so precious. Her bones were a goddess’s. “They were going to use me. Again, just like the others. So I burned them all. I burned them and they screamed and I kept burning them anyway. I… I’m just as bad as you.”
The venom in her voice when she spoke of it was poetry. It wheezed in the voice of a murderer, “Ah, you’re like me, aren’t you? They hate us because we’re stronger. We’re killers, we are, and it makes ‘em nervous. Makes ‘em shake in their beds like children! Ha ha! Ha ha ha!”
She wasn’t impressed by its story, it could tell. Her pretty muscles underneath her face were taut with tension and weak from exhaustion, her lovely radiation-light eyes trying to watch its infinite self but finding nothing but the darkness around her. She did not see how trapped she was, a single spark in its river’s waves, rolling and rolling around her in a languid soutenu. It wanted to be patient, to savor her, to make her last before it swallowed her and carried her voice across the centuries. If it could take her lights! And her anger and her hate, and all the other burning suns inside her…
“A marvel of modern science! She’s a natural-born-“
It heard another
“…Sonora?”
and it sank
Rachel’s eyes, assisted though they were by the faint light of her internal sun, were playing tricks on her in the darkness. She knew that she’d dug herself into some – kind of cave or something- but the floor was too warm and smooth, like skin or paper, and it gave slightly under her feet when she moved. It stank of mildew and smoke and something else, something sweet and dark that she was trying not to think about. The smell filled her mouth. Reverberations of some strange, distant breathing rumbled through her. All around was the patient panting of the writhing in the darkness, all around her, whispering and whispering…
She ignited a tiny flare and immediately felt the kickback in a sudden heaviness of her eyelids. She was more tired than she’d realized. All that fusion slowed her down, made her weak and… she-
A pale face, terrified, red mouth wide and screaming. Young.
She didn’t-
“I surrender! I surrender! NO-“
She wasn’t-
“Frightened, are we, child…?
“Sonora,” she hissed, her fists clenched, “I don’t fear you, monster. Come out and face me.”
“What did you say to me, human?”
Belatedly, the water at her feet giggled.
The air in the cave rippled; a distant singing wound its way to her from somewhere far off in the cavern’s depths. The shadows on the walls slithered together and began to coalesce, forming narrow arms and a sunken chest from the fragile shade and solidifying with a hiss into a tangible form. An enormous shape like a woman formed from black gauze and smoke materialized before her, taller than the ceiling yet unbent and gleaming in leather and polished iron studs. Two familiar black glass eyes bored into Rachel from the smooth planes of the woman’s face, reflecting the single insignificant mote of light that was the glow of her sun against the cavern walls. The thing’s face was drawn and tight, more stitched than grown, and it was painfully beautiful even through the snarl of its pretty mouth. It opened its black lips and spoke and in a throaty whisper.
“You again,” Obscura said. It was impossible to tell where her body ended and the surface of the hidden stone began. The blackness now seemed thicker, almost tactile, a living shroud that draped her sharp shoulders and folded itself gracefully into nonexistence. A narrow-fingered hand drifted forth from the darkness and laid a razor nail in the center of Rachel’s forehead, pricking her skin and drawing forth a tiny bead of blood. “You again. Where are the fools I gave you to? Where did they go….? Ah. Yes. I see.”
There was no particularly hurry in the way she plucked the girl by the throat from the floor and held her dangling there like a freshly-born kitten. Pain exploded in Rachel’s neck as the goddess’ nails pierced her skin, but her mouth wouldn’t open and she couldn’t seem to scream or call for anyone- anything-
“And who would answer you?” Obscura whispered, inky lips and dagger teeth inches from the girl’s face. The deathly chill of damp stone pressed through Rachel’s straitjacket into her skin and she gasped, making the goddess smirk. “Another god, perhaps? Or that little bitch of Kedemonas? A jumped-up magpie is your best hope, how sad. You wretched thing. Do you know who it is you gaze upon? Or am I too far back in your pitiful memory, after all?”
“Obscura,” Rachel choked, eyes brimming with tears. Her legs kicked futilely for a grip on the smooth wall. She clawed at her neck, meeting only the nail-studded gloves of the goddess who hissed like a snake and shook her violently, smashing her head into the stone with a sickening crack. Agonizing lights exploded behind the girl’s eyes and she felt her grip slacken and surrender, a nauseous darkness rising up from the base of her spine to meet her…
“Darling! Da-aaarling!”
Obscura’s head stayed perfectly still. Rachel sensed her gaze flicking over the floor, the faintest edge of a growl emanating from her hidden throat. “Magpie,” she said, “I will attend to you in a moment. Be patient.”
“Girl, it’s just yoooouuu I’m thiiiinking of!”
“Obscura,” Rachel mumbled. Her head was swimming and she felt her sun guttering with pain. “I killed… your mmmen… I burned…”
“Idiot girl. Did you think I didn’t already know? That the goddess of subterfuge wouldn’t know when her own pawns were being disposed of? They breed you mortals more dull with every rutting cycle.” Obscura’s hand might as well have been steel cables for all Rachel could resist it. The goddess sneered at her efforts. “Even now you wriggle like a worm on a hook. You disgusting thing.”
Without warning the goddess’ grip loosened and Rachel fell to the floor, the stone hitting her like a titan’s angry fist. Black fingers spiked at the edges of her vision and she heard someone whimpering wordlessly. “I can find more,” Obscura said, staring down at her, “I have hundreds of men. Thousands. But you’ve done something far worse, yes. You’ve returned to my Labyrinth with a guest.”
““You know you’re gonna hurt somebody tonight…”
The goddess’s outlines were blurry and faded, curiously washed out, and dimly Rachel saw her black eyes flash silver in the gloom. “Even if for some asinine reason I was seized with the desire to show your pitiful self mercy, I couldn’t. Could I? No. Who knows who you might go to with my secrets? Desolo? That ancient wreck could care less, but to lose…” Her voice trailed off. The cavern fell into silence. Slowly Rachel’s vision climbed back into focus: the goddess’ head was turned, glaring at some point on the floor. Rachel couldn’t move. Her limbs felt as though they were filled with stone and tied down with leaden chains. Through the haze of Obscura’s cloak she could just barely make out a ripple of light on the far wall, one that rang with a tiny bell-like note.
“Come on, show your faaaaace!”
“Magpie,” said the goddess slowly, “I told you to wait.”
“Come on, give us one more spaaaaark! Set us all afire!”
“Why is it that Kedemonas’ lot can never stay silent?” Obscura growled. “Do you expect your prey to leap into your mouths?” Something shiny and dark glittered in her hand; the muscles in her pale arms writhed underneath her armor, she turned to strike-
A freezing wave of blackness slammed into Rachel and smashed her into the ground. She felt the floor buckle and vanish and then she was floating and falling all at once, plummeting through nothingness into a wall of sound and crushing strength that bound her arms with needle claws, jamming her wrists into angles that made her scream. “You’re looking for a way out, I can feel it!” a voice roared in her ears, hysterical wolves’ howling echoing all around her, “COME ON, SHOW ME WHERE IT HURTS, MAYBE I CAN HEAL IT!”
She tried to yell, to bite the choking darkness but all she met was a bitter numbing rushing of waves and fire and thunder rolling and rolling in her head, a swallowing madness that echoed her missing heartbeat with deafening bells and drums in agonizing strikes hammering into her head with every breath the darkness took. Her sun hummed, flared; she clenched her fists through the rushing currents and focused on the fire exploding into life and with every ounce of her strength sent it out-
The blackness parted and there in her path was the startled face of Obscura, staring up at her in fury. The bolt erupted; she heard a nightmarish scream, and then everything slid quietly to a stop.
She blacked out.
-------------------------------------------------------
“All that I wanted was a little touch, a little tenderness and truth, I didn’t ask for much…”
A drop of rain splashed her face. Her eyes didn’t seem to want to open.
“Talk about being at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Shhhssss….”
“I only wanna smile at your eyes. You should have seen your little face. Burning for love!”
Something cold crept along the inside of her calf and coiled around her ankle. Rachel groaned and rolled onto her side, weakly brushing at the sensation; splinters of ice shot into her fingers and melted into a soft numbness that crept into her bones and stayed there. It was nice. It was like falling into a gentle and long-awaited sleep. “You are cold, and darkness, and death,” a girl somewhere far off was saying, “I am heat, and light, and life. You fear me- You fear me- You fear me…”
“Sonora,” she mumbled, “S-sss… So…”
“I. I never caught your name.”
The dead soldier’s words triggered something in her mind- a brief flash of a pale young face -and she curled herself into an upright ball, wincing from the sudden rush of coolant to her system. For a moment she thought she was still where Obscura had dropped her, trapped beneath the ground, but as the distant sounds of cannonfire and screaming reached her she realized that the darkness surrounding her was different.
It was breathing…
“PEOPLE? PEOPLE? IS ANYONE OUT THERE? IS ANYONE THERE? I never caught your name. Rachel. Rachel. Hames gave me fuckin’ last week’s map. You stand accused of murder. I did what you said, I did what you said,” it sobbed. Sheer walls of glistening black liquid arced over her head, continually forming and collapsing into strange lacy patterns. Pockets of dim light dappled the ground where gaps bubbled and burst, endlessly knitting itself back together. From all throughout it came a gentle whispering, echoes of its voices and, faintly, a wheezing man laughing and laughing in a way that made her skin crawl.
“Stop it,” Rachel said. Her mouth felt as though someone had stuffed it full of bile and cotton and her head seemed to have been bashed in with a hammer at some point. The rest of her…
She looked down. Dark water clung to her hands and legs and she realized with a horrible twist in her gut that she couldn’t feel them at all. All sensation came to a stop where the blackness covered her. She shrieked and slapped at herself, only succeeding in spraying the fluid across her chassis where it hissed and bubbled fitfully. “Get off me,” she spat, wobbling precariously to her feet. “Get the fuck off me, you- you- !”
“Sometimes the dream, it don’t come true,” a voice sighed. Warmth spread across her flesh; the water slipped off her to join the pools at her feet. “It’s a pity it’s a feeling I can’t control.”
“Control it.” Slowly, concentrating on maintaining her balance, Rachel turned in a cautious circle. Walls of water surrounded her on every side, occasionally pocketed by windows into something she couldn’t make out. “Where is this? What… what happened? Where did Obscura…”
“I saw my girl with the golden touch- does it get you, ohhh-ohhhh, does it get you ooooooff to know that sometimes we aaaaall blaaaaack ooouuut? Are you looking for a sign? Or are you caught up in the liiiiiiight?”
Rachel groaned. “Obscura… What did you…?” Memory flooded her mind; a crushing darkness and a horrific screaming, battering her from every direction. Suddenly she felt much colder. “What did you do to me?”
“You got a fooooolish heart. I feel the heat, I see the light of miss atomic bomb, spoken up, fiery heart, your sil- ver- bones- and a sun to maybe dissipate the shadows of the mess you made. For a second there we’d won, we were innocent and yoooung! My lioness! MY PIÈCE DE RÉSISTANCE!”
The voices burst into a hundred types of howling laughter, a discordant clamoring that made her headache throb resentfully. Though her sun was still recovering from the attack on Obscura Rachel bore down within herself and forced its glow to flare. The darkness flinched: a little girl screamed pitifully and the liquid around her rippled and fell to the ground in a curtain of rain, flowing away into the shadows. “Thanks,” Rachel said drily, and stepped between two outstretched hands, black and bubbling.
“Oh, oooh, o-oooh, please don’t tell me I can’t make it,” something crooned into her ear, just behind her head. “It ain’t my fault. Let em hate, it ain’t my fault. Letting go, all I know, I’m giving you my song, you could have it all if you want it…”
“I get it. You talk in song.” Sometime between when she’d blacked out she’d- well, Sonora, anyway- had moved to some other part of the Labryinth, one she didn’t recognize from her earlier visit. Strange glyphs covered the ceiling and walls, almost seeming to form intricate pictograms but dissolving into meaningless shapes the longer she stared. It seemed lighter than where they’d been before. As her eyes adjusted she noticed that one end of the tunnel seemed less dark than the other, although faintly muted and somewhat distorted where the shadows had begun to dissipate. Water lapped at her heels as she walked. “So you just carry on mimicking people and trying to scare them, is that it? That’s your whole story? You’re just a coward who fucks around in the shadows. Go bother someone with more time on their hands.”
An icy needle exploded into Rachel’s leg, spreading through her flesh with terrifying swiftness as numbness quickly overtook her. “What- !?” Almost reflexively she sent a blast of energy at the floor but the stinging continued, biting deeper and deeper with every move she made as the cave around her suddenly echoed with the agonized howling of wolves and men.
“Please don’t lie, don’t lie to me that you’re not afraid, my love,” the water around her wailed. A hand seized a hold of her waist and shoved her to the wall in a clash of metal, pairs and pairs of glistening black hands erupting up from the ground and digging their fingers into her jacket and pulling at her hair, clawing madly at her ribs and neck. One seized her wrist and pinned it above her, another punched into her stomach with enough force to make her chassis creak and Rachel snarled wordlessly, blasting the hands with fire that destroyed some but only seemed to make the rest sharper and more intent, pulling at her with greater and greater fury. She had just enough time to see a newcomer, talons long and glittering, lunge for her eyes before a freezing blackness overtook her and gripped her jaw with icy talons.
“Love, you don’t know what you’re running away from,” something lilted next to her ear, tenderness thick in its voice, “I am better than you think! You are one of them, I won’t be fooled again! I followed you through the darkness, I followed you through the cold, I remember myself as a looooonely child and so it was and I don’t understand what I lost, I don’t understand it, you took it from me. I’ll show no mercy for you- you had no mercy for me- I promise toniiight I won’t do no harm, I only want what’s best for you, I only want so bad I can’t think straight, so baaad all my bones shake, I want you, I want you, I’ll never leave you alone, don’t cry! it’s over! I never got your name, I was wrong and you got me wrong, yes, you got me wroooong… All men are pigs! All men, but meeee…”
The grip on her relaxed. Rachel threw herself forward, clawing free of the remains of the ichor clinging to her and sputtering wordlessly as smoke-like billows of darkness parted before her, drifting aimlessly across the floor. She stared at it, speechless.
“I’m frozen to the bones, I am. You bring your elegance and me my dumb strength, you were so kind to me, please please it’s coming please please where did you go!!!! My god. Can’t you see that Iiiiiiii know which way to run?”
“What the hell are you talking about,” Rachel hissed, but then the shadows shifted and a pale arch of light appeared on the far end of the tunnel, the faint outlines of trees and distant battlegrounds burning into her eyes as the cavern filled with daylight. She threw up an arm in defense, stumbling into something wet and writhing that pushed back languidly.
“My logic will prevail! So shut up, nightingale,” someone said smugly. Cold hands batted at her feet. “I’m the boy that that will heeeaaalll you. Rolling river of truth, can you spare me a sip?”
“Some time in the near future, Sonora,” Rachel said, edging her way into the light, “I’m going to find your face and punch it.”
“All men but me.”