This/Lost ones song
She was in a tree. This became abundantly clear because of all the leaves and twigs poking her in the face, and the fact that she was sprawled across a large tree limb, bark digging into her chest and thighs. It was decidedly uncomfortable.
She tried to rearrange herself and promptly fell out.
The grass, at least, was softer. Now the tree was above, leaves and branches glistening in the early dawn, taunting her with their general up-there-ness. She glared at them.
She stopped. It was almost midday. She needed to quit doing this. Time passed so easily. She needed to move. So long as she moved too, it wouldn't matter that time was moving also.
Right. Logic. She got up and shook herself off.
Moving.
"Did you just fall out of this tree?" Someone asked behind her.
"Of course not," she said, turning. "Whyever would you think such a silly thing?" It was a child of some kind. Human? The distinctions were weird. She didn't understand why people would care. She didn't understand why she was arguing with the child, either.
"I dunno, why would I? You tell me!" it said.
"Er."
The child looked at her askance. "You really aren't much fun, now are you?"
"Fun?"
"Yes, fun!" It stopped. "You do know what fun is, right?"
"Not really," she said. "I mean, theoretically, certainly. I've seen enough of it fourth-hand to know it as it is, but... that doesn't mean I really know it. It's just sort of there. Like flowers. And cats. And black holes."
It looked at her uncertainly.
"Geese?" She said hopefully.
The child turned and fled, for whatever reason.
Okay, she thought to herself, that works. She headed in the same general direction, then broke into a run.
Had there been any poetry in her soul, she might have noticed the idyllic beauty of the land, with its rolling hills shimmering like a dappled sea of red, blue and purple flowers. Instead, as she bounded through the grass and shrubs, she ran collision avoidance in her head. Rock ahead. Current trajectory indicates best bet is to jump over it. Bushes now. Need to go around. Avoid that tree. More rocks. Go over again. Except that rock had been a bear. Okay.
She caught sight of the child a few times before losing it completely, but it didn't matter now. She knew where it was going: it passed this way often, and the path was well-written in the air. The space itself remembered.
Then, swinging around one last tree (a collision there would have proven impractical to the structural integrity of her skull), she stopped a few paces past. Here lay a road, sculpted out of the land and paved for permanency. It was important, somehow.
She looked up at the clop of hooves approaching. An armoured man on horsback. He tipped his helmet at her as he passed, and said, "Evening, ma'am."
She stared at him, and then at his back. Then she stared at the horse's butt for a bit. Then horse and rider rounded a turn and were gone.
Then, in a remarkable feat of self-awareness, she remembered what she was doing and turned - the child had gone the other way, so she headed that way as well, completely failing to notice as the sun's dusk set the clouds ablaze with colour to rival the hills.
The clouds had subdued to a dull golden glow when she passed through the first of the arches approaching the town itself. Its simple elegance was an offset to the landscape, at once contrasting and fitting in perfectly - white against the green and blue and brown, like the crest of a wave, glitter on the sea. White limestone shaped by magic and rain. Transported quickly, built to last. Good geometry.
Buildings, archways, terraces, and walkways gleamed in the twilight and magelights alike.
The child from before was sitting on a wall with two of its friends. It made a face and bounced a nut off her head. One of the friends looked slightly apologetic at that, but the other laughed.
"Nerrin, git!" a woman yelled at them from one of the doorways. "Dinner's on!"
The laughing child immediately jumped down and ran inside after his mum - and his dinner.
The wayfarer made a face right back at the remaining two, then continued on toward the centre of town. It was marked by a plaza with a statue in the middle, with a few older folks lounging around it, sharing the latest gossip.
This was Arah.
Vast, towering, a sea of golden light, a city of golden shadow. A city of doorways without keys, and wanderers without homes, a place where things came together across the realms and generally got lost as a result.
Danger was the only currency.
"This is wrong," Rahah said.
Aekrin looked around, but saw nothing apparently amiss. "Wrong how?"
"Who are you?"
"What?"
"Who are you?" she said. "Are you Aekrin Dri? Are you Fred? Or are you someone else?"
"Fred?"
She shook her head. "I don't know. Don't look at me like I know."
In the forest, in the glistening spires, the jagged edges, the empty hollows, in the darkness and the quivering cold, there was no hope. The trees were not trees. The air was not air. The ground was not ground, but simply rock and dust and no moss, no grass, only the dry bones of the earth.
The world was dead.
It was a world. It was not theirs. Theirs had gone long ago, and the sickness had simply spread, and spread, and spread. The doors had adapted. If they no longer went anywhere, they went somewhere else. The gods of the 'verse had adapted much the same, adjusting their views to see nothing at all.
And so there would be no hope left, simply the inevitable death that awaited all who lived too long.
It was her. Herself. Etched into marble taller than life, a beacon of something amidst something else. Bloody bizarre.
"Of course," she whispered. "Trust Eapherod to survive. Even dead she still survived."
He gave her one of his looks. "You say that like it's happened before."
"Hasn't it?" She sighed. "No, I suppose it hasn't. It's different every time."
"Dark Sister," Rahah said.
I know you, it whispered. The form flickered and danced, trailing ribbons of shadow behind it and gleaming with its own empty light.
"Of course. As I know you."
But how? How can you be here? Who are you?
"Would that I could say. But here I am. Here you are. Can you tell me how things are?"
What's to tell? Only silence. Only loss. The worlds fade, and move on.
"They're dying."
Yes. They have been dying as long as they have lived, though it was not always so. Before the beginning, there was a future.
"What happened? What was the beginning?"
How can you not know? You were there! It shrieked.
"Coraline?"
No. Before. She came here on the bones of its creation, but the thing itself was the size of the state of Nebraska. It looked like a little girl. It spoke like death. Its name was Rhi.
"We know the name."
Yes. It opens holes as it passes, in and out, and from there everything falls apart. Past and future.
"But the Rhi of Sarathi de..."
Moved on! When her worlds fell, she moved on! As Dreamers do.
"Some worlds live. Some worlds fall."
Yes.
"This is why we do what we do."
And for what? So our worlds too may fall at the first slip?
"Sure, that might happen. But it might not."
We have no King. Our King has fallen.
"No. He is here. He does not know, but he is here.
He is useless. He does not know.
"It doesn't matter. He will. You survive, Dark Sister, for the same reason we always have. What has happened?"
The form shifted in front of her, and suddenly it was everywhere, and there was only blackness. And the voice, now filling every corner of her consciousness. Come, then. We will show you who we are.
"The thoughts of cats," the man whispered. "The place in the world where the cats should be. Saucers of milk vanishing. Curtains ripping. Meowing. But no cats."
"Cats?" Aekrin asked. "But..."
"Aekrin," Rahah interrupted. "Have you seen any? Since we've come here, have you seen a single cat anywhere?"
"Why would I have? We've not exactly been... well, doing anything where we'd be likely to see them."
"I haven't. And I look."
"For cats?"
"Always. They're... let's just say they're important to me."
"Cats."
"Yes."
He sighed and shook his head. "That doesn't mean anything. Just because we haven't seen them doesn't mean they're not here."
"Even if they were here, that doesn't mean we could see them, either," she said, and skipped on ahead.
They sit in silence for a time, suspended in darkness. Then she smiles slightly. "There is a way. Rally the gods what remain. Bring them together for the end times, for the final fight. Call, and they will come." She pauses, then elaborates: "It is a pretence. With it, we can use their power to go back. Try this all again."
"There is no honour in that."
"To the hells with honour! What use is honour when you're dead? When the whole damn world is dead? We stand at the end of time, and it's already too late as is. It's been tried. With honour, all is lost. But we can still go back. We must go back."
He gives her a long look. "You want to make it so none of this ever happened?"
"No, no..." She shakes her head. "Once something happens, it cannot unhappen. We'll still remember. The worlds will remember. But it'll still buy us a chance at a proper outcome. I want to make it so that something else can happen."
"That's insane," he says flatly.
"Oh, love," she says, smiling. "You should have seen my day job. But here. I will show you." She stands as the darkness shifts and fades. Shapes grow and tumble, swirling through unspent time, and aspects of the plan drift from stage to stage. "This is how it will go..."
It didn't exactly go as planned. They had to improvise. Kyrule panicked. Eapherod took the fall.
The other gods caught them in the act, or so they thought. What the act was, or what the goal might have been, they did not know. What they did know was that Eapherod had gone too far, overstepped her bounds, trod upon the fabric of the law. So they stopped her. Kyrule bound her, and broke her, and said nothing about the truth, that there had been no grand plot and nothing to stop, that 'too far' was not far enough, that they had just killed their only hope of surviving the storm to come.
He was redeemed in their eyes. Not an accomplice at all, simply too brazen for a young god, who tried too hard and would have failed to stop her himself had the rest not stepped in...
"They will remain blind for so long as they choose not to see," she had told him. "You should know. You, too are blind." He did not know what this meant. As much as he thought he knew, that she was referring to the simple incident, that it was about what they had faced and fled, there seemed to be more, but he did not know what it was. He would watch and see many things as the eons passed, watch and not act as the blind gods acted out their blindness, not act and watch as the worlds died around, and not watch and not act as history played itself out.
