Chapter Text
Quirrel had not expected to leave the lakeshore.
When his little friend had left him, scampered away into the dark with all but a glance of mutual finality, he had thought himself at the end of a long journey. Of course there were things he was never going to be too fond of, but he’d spent his lives well, and he was content with the notion of never seeing another bug again in this haunted corpse of a kingdom.
He had not wanted to leave. It had been a gentle place, there—a melancholy air, drowsy with moisture and bestrewn with the quiet melodies of droplets as they fell, the lap of water upon old shells all stacked up through the years. And the blue! So, so blue. Rippled like glass, deep and huge and all-consuming. A world he could get lost in, wanted so dearly to get lost in, just lying there with his wounded side to the sand and his eyes glazed over. It was there that he knew it was time.
But then, he found that if he rested his gaze he might find himself in a different place entirely, one visited not so long ago—a humming, whispering forest of verdant glow and corroded bronze filigree, bubbling with tiny gelatinous bodies and leaking pipes and acidic humidity. He might recall, too, the recent sting of his … completion, an ordeal unexpectedly dealt with alone.
Because that was right, wasn’t it? He had done it alone. He wasn’t so sure why that felt so wrong. Although, ever since that little wanderer with inkwell eyes and too-big horns had first scurried away from him at the temple, he had carried this … feeling. A tiny needle-and-thread of recognition that nagged at his insides, deja-vu that felt far too important to shoo off. They may have been small and odd themself, that wanderer, but their presence certainly wasn’t—not with the way they had stared into the spiralling face of the egg. Not with their hurry in the way they would gather their nail and slip off of the bench into the rain. Not with that cold murmur sitting about them that spoke of something far deeper than a tiny body and dark stare. And yet it would seem that despite everything planned, that old place of fog and knowledge-left-to-rot was not part of the little wanderer’s journey.
It was, however, part of Quirrel’s, and his journey was over.
Or, so he’d thought. Because more and more, upon the lakeshore, he would find himself slipping from reminiscence and into true dream. There, a dissonant sort of voice would whisper to him, all swallowing glow and feathered heat, a saturation of an old life in amber warmth. All sorts of syrupy what-ifs and if-onlys wormed their ways into his mouth to trickle saccharine down his throat, and he found himself much too exhausted to spit them back out.
Oh, of course that old archive he so dearly missed—but nonetheless it was an old archive no longer his. He no longer belonged there. The bug that was then curled up on the shore of the Blue Lake was not the same little teacher’s apprentice who had left so long ago—no, that bug had been gnawed away by the wind and grit of the Wastes and left another bug, stripped of memory yet living for the same purpose. Surely it was only natural that it was time for that old bug to rest too. That’s what he had told that new light in his head. She had not listened.
He had not expected to leave the lakeshore. He had not wanted to. It was not his place to.
So why was it, then, that he stood up? Joints clicking, haemolymph oozing down his side where his shell had been bitten at by acid and electricity, mask light from a burden shed, he had gotten to his feet. Before staggering off along the shore, through tangles of petrified root and coquina, he’d driven and left the point of his nail between the striated curves of two shells, where it stood still and rigid like a monument, a grave-marker. One last attempt to let himself go, because he had still rather liked things to end, even if the light would not let them end there. And even yet as he left, a pitiful noise had caught in his throat, born of something halfway between distress and frustration. He had wanted to rest and had not understood why he couldn’t.
He had, with time. Without the Madam’s protection an old afterglow had taken interest in him. He only hoped he’d give himself to the mournful quiet of the lake before the light got ahold of him.
But he’d failed, and now he finds himself not resting but wandering the Crossroads again, like some bizarre retelling of his journey’s beginning. This time though he stumbles, limps, old claws on brittle ground, carrying a head far too light yet full of detritus at once. The sweet-talking light in his mind guides him, and although to where he does not know, he follows. He might have chuckled if his throat weren’t so claggy—he’s gotten awfully good at following odd voices, hm?
Along these tunnels, through the murk, over piled fossil and under crumbling arches, past fever-glinting eyes and slumped carcasses—such a morbid beauty in this decay, but one now tainted with memory. The Crossroads have changed since his last visit. Choked with a sort of effervescent miasma, the thick air he recalls now curdled into an orange-tarnished fog that worms and spirals, gathers upon his eyes to haze his sight. A branching, blistering sprawl of glow crawls its way over the ruin, too, bubbling to clog pathways, thrumming and pulsing with hot lifeforce. The husks are even further diseased, weeping and bleeding light, oozing with it.
Sweetness drowns out any other scent and sends Quirrel’s antennae twitching restlessly under his kerchief. Unable to smell anything besides that very sweetness, blinded by fog and light, touch muddied by fever, wit blunted by age, the formerly watchful bug finds his capacity for navigation entirely slurried.
As he maunders his way across a bridge stretching half-collapsed across an opening, fossil and pebble scattering from his own dragging steps, the husks only continue their pacing. They pay him no mind, a jittering, distracted air to them. A pity, almost, that not even they are willing to give him the end he wishes for. A very small part of Quirrel, the explorer, wonders just what brought that about—he has little energy to give to such thought, his mind long since dissolved to a monotonous one-foot-in front-of-the-other, a reluctant continuation of his travels. Even when he’d intended to go further than this kingdom, when he still thought himself a mere explorer, he had not wanted to continue like this—sickened and confused, blind to the world. And yet he does, for whatever reason.
Distantly he notes that his insides have begun to hurt, his stomach roiling in feverish sweetness he’d swallowed—such an odd feeling, illness, something grown unused to after so long under the Madam’s protection. Now this sickness burns hot in his chest, gurgles in his throat as he breathes, scintillates in the corners of his vision, all around him, all through him, laced into every fracture of this world.
And so it goes on. The light whispers and in tandem he wanders, fever blossoming in his thorax and light in his eyes, meandering long-forgotten paths now riled up, coiling back and around and away. He waits and waits, for some feral or plague-maddened bug to snatch him up, end this welcome now long overstayed. The time will come, surely, especially now that his nail now lies in a place far below him and far out of his delirious reach.
He waits for a long time.
Within the close embrace of a temple not so far from where this simple bug wanders, a vessel dreams.
These are unfamiliar dreams. They do not burn with furious light or divine fever, and nor do they ring with mawkish whispers and invasive tendrils of light. And nor are they dreams of Father, either, his glittering, his spiralling wells of eyes, his appraising.
No, this time they are flooded with a writhing dark and an abyssal tide and something else like togetherness. It is a distant sort of togetherness, far from the murk of the birthplace they’d crawled their way up from. Tiny scrambling bodies and reaching claws have grown to become something huge and deep and ancient, liquid shadow dripping, eyes upon eyes upon eyes full of scorn. Despite its unfamiliarity, this was still a darkness they knew, one they might have even been part of if they hadn’t left it all that time ago.
She’s still there, She who haunted them, who they’d tried so hard to keep bound up inside of them—but She is not Herself. Despite the power of Her light, Her ferocity, Her will, She is screaming. Desperate, wailing cries of something frantic not to die, loud in the vessel’s mind, ringing and scraping.
She fights with abandon, and yet the dream sees Her torn asunder by this together-dark, snatched by it and dragged down. Just thrashing and burning and screaming screaming screaming like a feral thing. And then She is swallowed, and those cries are drowned in a sea of lashing black. She is gone.
The vessel has no voice to lament with, to howl their protest, and thus the together-dark pays them no mind. She is taken from their shell-festered-within and they cannot do anything about it.
And it’s here, as She is pulled from them, into somewhere deeper, that it truly hits them—they have failed. They couldn’t hold Her tight enough, and this burning-leaking inside of them has finally broken out.
The dream is swiftly fading, slipping from them like a veil unfastened. She is no longer, but in the end that was not their doing. They did not do well. Father will not be proud. They cannot fight to stay in this dream, and so they wake.
They are not supposed to wake. Because the chains had been hoisted and the spellworking had been woven tight. Because tarnishment was something they would have to endure, even while the sealing had bound every little one of their impurities along with them. Because it was there in their scratched-out shell the Old Light had to stay, and it was there in the temple they had to hold Her. Because they were not supposed to ever experience anything outside of that. Because their sealing was supposed to be all there was.
But against all that, their seals have broken. Chains have simply given up, spellworkings unravelled with their purpose lost. The Old Light has been dragged from their body and into far more capable claws. This old vessel is discarded and with them their very reason for existence. They don’t understand. They don’t understand because they aren’t supposed to—just like the spells, they should wither without a purpose to hold them up, decay with the rest of it. A hollow thing would do just that.
And yet, they wake.
And at once, it ends.
Quirrel had, ultimately, come to the conclusion that this was it. This restless, miasmic-headed maundering had become his new being. The things the light found within him to manipulate were things he could not defend—not when he could barely get ahold of them himself, not when they appeared to belong to almost another bug entirely, not when he was so tired. He grew weary from separating that wistful fever-dreaming from himself, and it seemed that in the wake of the explorer’s death he had become the husk. He considered letting the light take him, drown him in hot and syrupy delirium, soothe these odd feelings and this aching shell. A tempting thought, really, one that was becoming increasingly hard to resist.
Because he was not wandering the Crossroads anymore. He was seated amongst ardent tubes, lost in watery whispers and glimmering words all blurred and wriggling under his claws. He was making his way home through the city from the station, where the lamps sparkled rosy amidst the rain, lumaflies’ dances reflected off of wet cobbles. He was surrounded by an embrace of soft cloak and tendrils of softer glow, a mellifluous voice there to tell him just how proud she was of him, and then it was not the light speaking but her and he could almost—
But it was then, just as he truly thought he might let himself slip, that it ended.
He feels a panic before he quite knows what’s happening. It is not his panic, initially, but a distant sort, vibrations through silken web. Warmth seethes, boils, thrashes at his insides, and then these tight-wound threads of whispers are lacerated and dragged from him like gossamer, a great silent-dark in their wake.
He falls from the dream unwieldy and still clung to by strings of essence, finds himself abruptly yet dazedly back amongst those ancient archways and fossil-stone walls. Is the world dimming? Or is that his eyes? He wipes his face, still limping forward, and his vision returns darker than before.
A few more steps and he finds himself terribly, terribly nauseous. At once this hurt lances his chest, wrenches from him like a confused sob. He hiccoughs, sharply, and then he chokes, tastes sweet rot all up his throat. The haze from the light is so rapidly usurped by another feeling entirely, tepid and dense and visceral.
His claws scrabble for purchase upon the shells of the tunnel wall, then just as frantically catch the scuffed material of his mask as he realises with a bolt of dread that he’s going to be sick. He frees his mouth just in time to seize over and cough up a stream of viscid dark onto the floor. A scant few sips of air laced with the charnel reek of it and he’s vomiting again. Despite how violently his body rejects it, it leaks from his mouth in languid strings as if reluctant to leave him, an aftertaste lingering caustic and sugary-bitter at once.
Inside of him feels raw, wrong, as if things have been yanked loose inside of his shell, gnawed out. Is he dying? Despite himself, he cannot help but rue the fact this is how he might die. He doesn’t want this to be the end. If only he’d—
His thoughts are snatched to a halt with another heave.
Well there’s nothing he can do now, is there? He has to wait it out. If he dies, so be it—an unpleasant conclusion to his story but a conclusion nonetheless. If he lives longer still to seek out a more restful end, he’ll be ever grateful. It’s leaving him and maybe that’s enough. Maybe the earlier wish of everlasting tranquillity can be momentarily replaced with the simple notion of plain rest. So he lets the waves pass over him, until he’s just retching and retching and retching and nothing is coming up anymore and he wonders if he truly has just purged his own organs from his body.
But with time it eases. He sways against the wall, still half curled-over in anticipation, waiting for the knotted hurt in his core to release. He cannot see, the bottom half of his mask swept up over his eyes and still reeking mawkish from his breath. When his muscles relax, he reaches with a stiff and shaky hand to pull it back down. The Crossroads come back into view, as oddly dark and decrepit as he remembers.
Still floundering in confusion, he casts a tentative glance to the puddle of fluid now spread upon the floor, this scarcely-cooled something from inside of him. His head reels; this cruor-like substance does not glow as he feared so, and nor does it writhe with life-movement. That delirious shimmer he felt inside has left, perhaps, and all that remains is basic matter—rotted, decomposing as anything once-living might. That, or he’s coughed up his own diseased tissue. It rather feels like it, he thinks, but he is still alive. His heart still patters in his thorax, light and unsteady like weak rain, but there nonetheless.
Eventually, with legs growing too weak to stand, he sits.
Ahh, and what an alleviation that is! To cease moving again, just rest his back against the fossil-stone with a groan of confused and weary relief, still shaking and panting but surrounded with silence. He works a hand under his mask to wipe the fluid and acid from his mouth, tips it to spit some more up instead of swallowing. Soon he will move again, but not now.
Now, if only for a short while, he will let himself rest here and enjoy the respite.
The vessel wakes to a blackness heavy with rot and dust and settled wrongness. The black is terribly odd compared to the hot glow they felt for so long, humid and weighted like a second cloak piled upon their body. Something tells them it feels like home. But what is home if it isn’t that pale world with Father?
They wake on the floor, the chains that once bound them—bound Her—drape in a heap across their mass, still clinging but barely, cold and rough metal so unlike what they remember.
They wake to something trickling in a rivulet down their mask, from a place that squirms in their head and presses out of their eye. Another something pours down their side, too, dripping in a ribbon to the damp of the floor. It makes no sound, even as it gushes and flows and drains from them, something only to be felt.
But they are not supposed to feel. They are not supposed to hurt either, and yet this roiling and prickling of the viscera within their shell feels so very much like hurt that they know they have already failed.
They wake and are greeted by quiet.
…
It is so, so quiet.
Something is very wrong. Has it always been wrong? When was it they failed? So, so long ago.
This wrongness becomes too much. And so at some point, against everything, they make an attempt to rise. Their legs have all but forgotten, and one arm simply will not not move. Instead of standing like the noble creature they are expected to be, they thrash into an inelegant mass of bony shape and cloak, shaking badly. What seems like their entire weight is borne by a thin arm, their other still not responding to them. Blindly their hand crawls forward in the dark for their nail, for something to lean on.
They should not have to lean on anything. But it hurts. They are drowning in this oily substance that flows out of them, floods the temple and floods their mind, shell wrenching and crackling and oozing with every flail of their arm. They don’t understand what is going on and they just need it to stop.
Their hand slips upon the satiny wet of the floor, sending them thudding onto their opposite shoulder with a stab of hurt, face scraping the polished stone. The insides of their shell seethe in serrated tendrils against their mask, and more liquid bubbles up and out of the well of their eye, bleeding from the fracture She cut.
Through the fizzing of their head, they distantly sense their claws landing with a crack, seizing the floor. They try again. It’s here—has to be here—but they thresh under their chains and the sodden weight of their own cloak and viscid fluid for what feels like an eternity, seeking, scratching, writhing like the dark in their dream.
In a way it wedges its way into the god-shaped hole so inexplicably formed inside of them, a new thing to focus on. Reaching out. Coming down on nothing. Gouging the floor, dragging forward, trying again. Again, and again, and—
With a weak clink shell strikes metal, still cooling from the fever-heat of infection. At last. At last.
In the dark they find the hilt of their nail, feel along the smooth flow of its etchings that ache with familiarity but are not supposed to. And then, slow and ragged, they pull themself up.
It’s in this unwieldy and blind manner they begin to move, one arm bracing their weight. Silent-wet gushes down from where their other arm should be, seeming to drain from their shell and leave it a husk, hollow. Upon this weakened shell their mask begins to feel so oddly heavy in comparison, the downwards pull of their horns sending them careening to the side. Righting themself in one way only causes them to swing wildly the other.
Where has it all gone? Their coordination? Their statue-like composure? Their purity? They have awoken such a heavy, dissonant creature, one that is not supposed to be and yet is, stumbling out of the only place they were ever meant to exist, driven by something they thought long whittled out of them by teeth of dark. Marred by their own sick little existence, repulsive, damaged, no longer fit for purpose. They should not feel and yet their very self disgusts them, liquid roiling cold and revolting in their thorax.
They travel for some time, through this murk. They fall, stumble over to crack onto the joints of their legs, scrape their horns against stone, drag their claws as they try to move.
Eventually and oh-so faintly upon their shell, the air begins to stir. It starts subtle, but as they stumble through the dark this ragged breath grows stronger, pushing against their cloak, singing to them. Reluctantly the black emerges into a wan blue, the stench of rot mingling with that of dank fossil-stone.
They see it long before they reach it, standing out amid the inner black of the Egg. The wall of the temple is wounded where they know it shouldn’t be, more cold-wet-blue bleeding through, prisms of glow caught by the dust in the air. Slowly they approach it. They wait to be stopped, or to wake up from this and find it to be a cruel dream. But they are not dreaming, and they are absolutely alone.
Upon finally reaching the fractured gap in the wall, they try to peer out. Empty murk awaits them, and they can’t see much further than that.
Tentatively and with the direst knowledge that they shouldn’t, the vessel begins to clamber into the world.