Coming To Grips With Death And The End

Sol sat on his legs, pulling his torn and burned feet beneath his hips as he tried to make sense of his circumstances. Metus had done enough to his mind to make him uncertain about immediately finding comfort in this new situation. Remnants of his former glory and idolatry lay strewn around him, mocking him in their quiescent loneliness.

Once, this place had been a sanctuary. Pilgrims would travel from across the sacred rings to sit with him and share their joy. Stories of weddings, safe births, good harvests, and new talents filled his ears and spirit, giving him light and making him strong. By the time Metus’s insurrection of fear was unleashed, Sol was taller than the trees, wider than boulders, and as warm as the sun on calm days.

Now, his skin drooped over his hollowed frame, and there was no light left within him.

He did his best to control the seizures and tremors that shook his palm as he wrestled with trauma’s lingering abrasions. They stayed slumbering within his palm, small and soft.

They offered no gentleness. No light. Those discolored soul stones told him that they were made of hurt and little else. Even when he focused on sensing even the slightest drops of warmth within them, he couldn’t find anything cloistered away in their guarded souls. Such a thing was unheard of. To not know joy or hope was to be incomplete. Yet there they were, shivering against his wrist as they held each other close.

His eyes betrayed him first. It started with a cutting sensation that he’d assumed was simply from the ash that had begun to gather along the edges of his forcibly pried lids. Then his vision smeared at his edges and he realized he was weeping. The experience had become so familiar in his ages of torture that he’d almost forgotten it wasn’t his default state.

However, this weeping was different in the way it pulled upwards from his stomach first, seizing his throat with warnings of cold, lonely heaves that lingered between breaths. The larger one shifted in his hand and he bit onto the back of his lip where he could so that his body would calm.

This weeping wasn’t just from sadness or pain or any other antithetical state he’d wished to have never able to know.

These scorching lines of ethereal fluid were the tears of shame.

It was all his fault. Everything before him was because he’d failed. Metus, in his ultimate cruelty, had kept him alive to see this. Even if this escape wasn’t some trick from his tormentor, Sol knew that Metus would relish in knowing he was now drowning in grief.

Sobs came slow and draining, pulling more and more light from Sol’s chest as he silently mourned in the haunted stillness. Not even the rocks or petrified wood sang to him anymore. Instead the world sat undone. Shadowless and indefinite in its unrefined shape beneath the starless sky.

The little ones slept. Cadence shifts in their breathing and occasional involuntary flinches told him their rest was fitful and full of unpleasant specters. His hand briefly glowed out of habit and innate desire to soothe them, but he remembered the smaller one’s strange pleas and refrained. Their nightmares continued, as did his grieving.

Deep in the expanse of paled life, he wept and cursed himself. All the while, waste gathered along the edges of his glowing eyes as they pierced through the nothingness. He was a whisper of light standing alone in the company of the dead trees and blanketing fog.

At one point, his tears calmed and he sat and breathed and softly shifted his legs as he tried to not focus on his agonizing wounds that were still burning. Something large and slow moved in the far distance, and he sensed neither joy nor hate or desperation from it as it dragged its silhouette through the void. Once, there had been a serene pond near that point, and he pondered if the solemn shadow was making its way to that spot. If so, it would likely not find relief, if it was anything like the rest of this place.

Seconds later it was gone, and his tears returned.

They had entrusted him and his companions with their futures, and now they were gone. He looked down at the tiny furry ones in his hand and wondered if they knew the truth of his failings. If they did, he had no understanding of why they would have freed him.

Then she spoke from the dark and his thoughts tapered.

“I didn’t know you could cry,” she whispered in a tone that was curiously soft and also spiteful.

“I did not know either, until I did,” he admitted.

She didn’t move, aside from turning her head away from her sister’s ears.

“I… I hate you.”

Sol exhaled as dust spooled in currents before them.

“I do t-too,” he answered.

Her shard scraped then softly pressed into his index finger as she carefully slid herself away from her sister, who let out a weak grunt of protest but did not wake.

Without speaking, he offered his other hand to her and she understood, slipping from one palm to another to let her sister continue to rest.

With her now in his left hand and the small one in his right, he decided to sit to his hips and cross his legs. Movements were slow, painful, and stiff. His prison had kept him suspended, and now his limbs were atrophied. The joyless world was only weakening him further. Still, he managed to settle himself without waking her.

Wretch watched his eyes stay on her sister as he thoughtfully bent himself as gently as possible. He was hideous in his scarring and wildness, but she could not deny the calm stillness of his demeanor. It frightened her.

They sat in silence for a bit, both looking at nothing.

Eventually he dared to ask more questions.

“W-why did-did-did you wake me? Release me?” he started.

Her paw scratched her lip as her long ears flicked ever so slightly. Words gathered but didn’t release, and instead she shifted her small jaw side to side, causing her bent whiskers to angle up and down briefly before returning to their place. She inhaled, and he sensed her soul stone darken.

“I need your help. We need your help,” she whispered as she looked to her sister with darkened eyes.

“You and this one?” he asked.

“Burden. My sister. Not just us two, but our tribe. And others.”

Once again, his throat seized in rebellion and he feared she was going to ask him to save the world and fix this. Surely there was someone or something else, better, wiser, and stronger. His mind began to fracture at the thought. No one deserved to help others any less than him, but also no one deserved to help others more than him.

But her soul stone only darkened more, and he felt jagged, bitter energy drip from her spirit as she prepared to speak again.

“I… we… we want to kill ourselves.”

Sol’s brow lowered in confused concern.

Wretch tried to clear her throat as she sniffed and took her time to fully articulate her proposal.

“Most of the gods are dead now. And the world is ending. It’s too late. It’s too late for things to get better. But dying in this world leaves you as a husk. Worse, if a wanderer kills you, you become an eternal.”

“Eternal?” Sol asked.

“The ones with crystal in their bodies. They never truly die. The regular wanderers, they eventually starve or, as you just did, can still be killed for good. But not eternals. And I don’t want that. I don’t want that for her, or my people. I… I…”

She stopped and wiped her eyes. The light in her chest had all but turned to ink.

“So, I need you to take us to the soul portals. I’ve heard that touching those will kill you in a way that won’t turn you into one of them.”

Her words were steady and assured, but her vacant tone and unblinking eyes told him that a deep seeded trauma was guiding her. It was impossible to know just how cruel life had been to her, but as she spoke, he sensed only true conviction. In the most horrific of ways, he did not sense a defeated, broken mind, just a somber, accepting one.

It was a worse request than what he’d feared. Every aspect of his divine design yearned for joyous rapture and positive life. But now this broken creature was asking him to lead them to a place only his kin knew the location of, so that they could all end their lives. She was asking him to be their suicide usher at the end of all things.

Each ligament locked in fits of objection, and he struggled to speak. He accidentally shook his head.

Her gaze turned to him and he saw her eyes were hateful. Seething despair dripped from her like muck to his eyes, covering her fur with heavy, slopping streams that almost seemed to pull her corporal shoulders down in exhaustion. Even if she could not feel the spiritual representation of her grief, her slouched chest and malicious eyes told the world it was there.

“You owe us this,” she challenged.

“It’s the least you could do.”

Sol felt her insult seep into his chest, further drowning his light in her impermeable demand.

“There-there has to be a way. A way for me to fix this.”

It was as much a plea to the heavens as it was to her. One fatal pause could not have caused such horrific loss. He should have killed him. HeShouldHaveKilledHimHeShouldHaveKilledHimHeShouldHaveKilledHim.

Wretch sneered and a slight growl formed at the end of her exhale.

“There isn’t! Do not be so arrogant to think none have searched. Thousands, tens of thousands, have died trying to find a way to undo your error. And the other gods either abandoned us or evaporated. This is it! And it’s all your fault! So take us to the place where we can die uncursed deaths, and maybe I’ll forgive you.”

“Wretch?” her sister asked nervously from the edge of the darkness.

Sol hadn’t realized it but he’d slowly moved his hand that was holding her away from them as they spoke, as though trying to shield her from the nightmarish discussion. Wretch’s rage briefly calmed and the edges of her fur lowered as she looked for her sister. Sol moved his hands back together so that they could touch.

“I’m here,” Wretch said as she touched the littler one’s back.

For the briefest moment, her voice softened and lowered to a nurturing, safe tone. It flickered like a candle in a breeze and extinguished just as swiftly. Her ears lifted at their ends and her cold voice returned.

“You’re always so afraid. Just because I’m not right beside you doesn’t mean I’m gone.”

Her paw lifted and Sol felt her soul stone pulse gentle red before devolving back to abyssal black. In the mortal realm, if anyone could see her, they would have seen the subtlest hesitant lingering of her paw at her sister’s shoulder, and the simplest muscle shift of her lips pulling into a broken frown just before she breathed in through parted lips.

Her eyes flashed once again and she quietly looked to Sol, who could not yet speak.

“Do it. At least do this for us, you failure.”

With that, she looked away. Wind pushed another bit of ash and dust into his eyes, and the tears returned. Agreeing felt like it would rip away the last bits of self he had left. Joy was rarely a companion to death. He was meant for life. But the lifeless emptiness around them stood silent in testimony to the little one’s plea. All he could do was lower his head and offer a partial agreement.

“You said there are others?” he asked.

Wretch nodded.

“A few days from here. At least, for us a few days.”

“Guide me. I will take us to them,” Sol conceded.

Her shoulders dropped further and he couldn’t tell if it was relief or acceptance. Regardless, a bony arm pointed out to her left, past an outcropping of jagged obelisks and bridges that no longer stood over water. Sol forced himself up with a grunt, and his wounds stung in protest, but his arms remained bent and level to hold them, and his knee pushed forward to begin the slow walk.

Chains clinked against one another, and the chunk of tethered stone pulled along the ground behind his ankle.

Far away, barely visible, a large bit of Star Stream gathered and fell from the sky, careening towards the mortal realm just beyond the direction they were headed. Some manner of a soul had died and fallen away, and Sol assumed it was his as he quietly observed the sad streak fall through the fog.

Beside them, no longer visible, the great beast from earlier let out a groan of defeat upon reaching the dried bed of the pond. There was a soft thud as it collapsed in defeat to the unwelcoming ground. As they slowly left the former temple of joy, its broken and dying bleats serenaded them goodbye.