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"What do you see when you look at us?" the Watcher spoke faux casually.
They cynically vivisected his entire being and curiously jabbed at his extra 'gifted' dimensions. Grian pulled his sprawling dimensional self closer, strode over, and craned his neck towards them: the essence of void and picturesque drooping shades of poisonous purple, the absence of light yet always present.
He stood defiant beneath their looming figure and straightened, trying to look more imposing and confident.
"I see," he started, all sets of his wings - painted with the reflection of the stars and plumes of browns, whites, and reds akin to a hawk’s, made painstakingly to be his not theirs - flaring out.
He ignored how much energy was spent focusing the colors not to shift into shadows of purple, building the habit into second nature to be different from the eldritch void beings that tore apart and shaped him into their image.
He clenched his fist in the pause of his words. "I see an abscess festering and seething."
(He sees death and grief in their wake and wonders what will become of him. He sees it trailing inside of him: corrosion and rot)
They watched one another and Grian shivered at the grin snaking its way across their shifting form. He pointedly ignored what lied unspoken in the cracks of familiar fear beyond his facade.
The Watcher stared him down, and a shiveringly sharp shadow draped over the already tense air. Grian felt chills.
"An abscess?" They tilted their neck with a sickening crack that sparked throughout event horizon. "How intriguing."
A star folded into itself and splintered into a supernova outside the giant glassless window. Neither of them moved. The End hummed and a nebula spiderwebbed and twisted about.
The Void and space outside was a tapestry weaved from gas and glittering stars, planets hung like ornaments embroidered with chintz. (It was a tapestry torn from destruction and impermanence. He wished that applied to the Watchers as much as it did for Evo.)
Grian pondered what the Watcher learnt from his words, wings twitching. The palace felt suffocating despite the expansive interior, huge open windows, and flight entrances in the roof.
He breathed without needing to and, not for the first time, wondered if this unreality was unimagined. His breath was tangible yet empty. He was still breathing, but he didn’t feel alive. He knew his heart hadn’t worked for a long time now. He imagined his body and being functionally dead, imagined it would be better than being one of them.
The monotony and torture strung him along like a puppet, and he felt like his joints were made up of wood, felt like his mind was a concoction of fuzzy and chronically defeated mixed with anger, felt like he was more dead than alive serving (even simply thinking, he spit it out like a curse) pompous deities.
Grian was a walking corpse among multidimensional creatures who feasted off madness and grief, plunged into a rotting body that was not his any longer and forced into being more (forced into being as cruel and monstrous as them).
The abscess spread, pus leaking out and maggots bathing in dead flesh, wriggling in and out of his pores. Invasive bugs crawled out of achingly perfect feathers, and Grian wished they were more in disarray at the bugs disturbance as if proof of his wrongness and defiance.
(As if proof he was not like their perfect stilted walls, perfect symmetric forms, and perfect striking stares. As if proof of his separation from them and their delighted consumption of pain off players).
Grian itched uselessly at a cold, empty arm, and his wings closed in on themselves. The Watcher stood apathetically. The maggots and bugs stayed.
"Permission to leave, One," Grian said, gritting teeth that bent in the wrong directions and entered several dimensions. "now that I have satisfied your questioning?"
The Watcher turned away smoothly and shadow smoked out of nothing beneath them, "Permission granted, Xelqua. Do be more... polite to your superiors or there will be consequences. Refrain from being late next time."
Grian stiffly turned on his heel and left swiftly, footsteps echoing throughout unnervingly silent and still halls.