imeeji_frontstage | Flowers of Heaven II: Star of Bethlehem

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Flowers of Heaven II: Star of Bethlehem

Who: lost(?) idols
Where: ???? a mysterious courtyard
When: day 490

[ You awaken to the feeling of cool stone at your back, and a night sky overhead.

All around is a courtyard—a wide circle of marble tile, alternating black and white, interspersed with stone benches and flowerbeds and ornamental trees, all lit by the lambent gleam of strangely vivid starlight.

It is beautiful. And it is decaying. The stone is cracked; the flowers wild and overflowing between the cracked stone; the trees bent and twisted with age, the ground around them littered with fallen fruit. There is a fountain in the center of this space, but it too is broken-down: the water sits stagnant, and nothing remains of the design except a basin and the shattered base of a once-golden sculpture.

—And surrounding it all are not walls, but dense mounds of kudzu, climbing over itself until it towers as high as any watchtower.

How did you get here?
The last thing you vaguely recall is a sudden fit of drowsiness. There’s no sign of any guide or host around, and your powers don’t currently work either. In fact, if you have any corruptions, whether mental or physical, they too are … gone? No, perhaps that's not quite it; you can still feel them—faint, like a phantom limb. Invisible, and unable to affect you.
But there is one notable exception to the rule: all wings, corruption-induced or not, remain in place, as natural as the starlight.

There are other idols around you, all waking up the same way. Is this meant to be some kind of game…? ]

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[ it turns on—though the light doesn't travel very far. like it's being covered by a blanket. perhaps it's just a property of this place. ]

[Perhaps it is]

[Either way, he presses on]

[ he presses on, on, on, as the light fades to just a dim glow. he can still see, kind of, but it's like walking at night, even with his leg flashlight on, and his footsteps echo strangely, in a dull way. he begins to feel sluggish, like even his limbs are becoming heavy. ]

[Surely there's something here, though; plainly with the spattered blood, someone has been here before him]

[He sets his jaw and presses on, tryinging to shrug off the lethargy]

[ and the light goes out.

there is a thickening sense of despair, of loss, of pointlessness and emptiness. it's almost enough to bring one into their knees—and might, if he doesn't keep pushing on with all his might, if he falters for a moment. what was in the water, before, when his fingers brushed it—here it is in the too-heavy air.

emptiness ought to be light, shouldn't it? but no, it is heavy—heavier than all the world. emptiness asks: here, in the dark, who is he? who is he, alone? ]

[He tucks one arm in around himself, as though to hold himself together. In the other, he grasps the dagger, so much heavier than his own blades -- holds to it tightly as he takes another step, and then another, and then another]

[Of course the emptiness is heavy]

[He knows that better than anyone, doesn't he?]

[Here in the dark, in the endless nothing, he knows who he is all too well -- knows what he's capable of, and what he isn't. He's had a long, long time alone, after all, to come to terms with it]

[And still he presses on]

[ he steels his resolve; here, in the dark, here, in the depths of the tower beneath, where the last of the light has faded and all is silent, where he is alone. where emptiness will not break him.

and then there is a sound like a drop of water—drip, drop, falling into a pool, and sending ripples tinged with light out from a center point somewhere ahead of him, roughly illuminating the shape of a circular body of water. ]

[He blinks against the darkness -- steps forward, toward the pool of water]

[ standing, moving—suddenly feels strangely light, and almost too light, like he's in a space with no gravity, the space between worlds, except there are no stars.

great gashes like scars are carved into the walls—if they can even be called "walls," still, in this strange void. they no longer bleed gold, but are inlaid with ice that stays frozen. only the path to the pool (again, if it can even be called that) is unmarred. and on the surface of the water—

every time a drop falls, there's a fleeting glimpse of a face, partially obscured by bars of darkness. across the pool is an empty chair—a throne, really—of polished dark horn. ]

[He had meant to touch the gashes along the walls, but as soon as that face appears in the pool he starts forward, closing the distance to its edge as fast as his legs will carry him]

-- Mehniel?!

[ the water is clean, and pure—even though it looks ink-black, like a mirror surface in the dark. and just for a moment, the face mirrored in the surface seems to turn toward him, looking surprised— ]

Hurricane? Is it truly—?

[ and then tendrils of water wrap around Hurricane's arm, and pull him beheath the surface. ]

[ darkness.

—and then, when he finds himself surfacing again, he's at the top of the stairs once more, the courtyard just at his back. ]

Mehniel?!

[He turns, disoriented and dripping -- looks first one way and then the other, half expecting to see him here]

[ No answer; just the distant sounds of the other idols in the courtyard.

...Also, he's totally dry? Which maybe begs the question of what all that at the base of the tower even was, if it wasn't exactly water. Or maybe not. This place clearly operates on some kind of dream logic as it is. ]

[Who knows what it was]

[Either way, he's turning to charge right back down that staircase]

[ Actually, possibly the weirdness of it all is kind of telling? Even "actual" Heaven doesn't really operate like this, for all its strange power and unwritten rules. Once again, the similarity to heartgames asserts itself—in the way everything in this place seems to operate on symbolism and metaphor.

—Regardless, it only takes a few steps down the stairs before it hits him again: that too-heavy emptiness. If anything, it is more oppressive than before.

This time the swords are missing from the rack on the wall. One seems to have fallen a ways down the stairs, blade snapped in half, leaving a jagged edge and a spray of gold across the wall nearby. ]

[He goes right on past it, feet pounding as he races down the stairs, as fast as they'll carry him]

[ As he goes down, down, down, that aching melancholy and emptiness starts to return—heavier this time, seeping into his bones, eating at his convictions. It gnaws away at the will to continue—and at the will to care about anything at all. After all...

It will never ̦͇̩͚̞m̪̯̙̯̼a̗̟͎̬̘̪t̲͓t̪e͈͚̹͕͇̯̮r, in the e҉̯̰̕͞ṋ̢̦̮͖d̬̟̪̥̞̖̥͢ͅ.

Maybe it's just a trick of the dim light, but it almost seems like black liquid is weeping from the stone walls. ]

Edited 2022-08-13 00:03 (UTC)

[It will never matter in the end]

[After all, he's searched and searched and searched, every day now, for months on end]

[He's tried everything he knows how to try. And of course -- of course -- the very best way to ruin something important is for Hurricane to touch it]

[But he can't not try, and he pushes doggedly down the stairs, heart still slamming in his throat]

[ it will never matter. can the small forces of love and kindness and good ever hold against the strength of cruelty and evil. against sheer numbers?

somehow, in this long hallway, he finds himself feeling smaller and smaller, as he descends into the dark. not that the stairway grows any bigger—just, it seems so long, like the vastness of space or the depths of Hell.

can he still keep going, faced with that? as the light fades, and black sludge creeps down the wall from nowhere—will his heart hold fast? ]

[Joke's on this black sludge]

[He's already faced down eternity and come out the other side, whether he wanted to or not]

[Putting one foot in front of the other, step after step -- making the attempt, in the face of an endless dark -- lives in his dreams, still. It's taken up root in the space behind his eyes. It lives with him, daily, something he hasn't quite managed to be rid of]

[He digs his nails into his palms]

[He is small, here, but he has only ever been something small. He is powerless, but he's only ever been powerless]

[He presses on]

[ he presses on. streaked in the black sludge are trails of gold like heavenly blood; the gold pools at his feet as the feeling of heaviness in the stairway forces down upon his legs, in a way that brings him to his knees.

he's already been through so much pain and hurt for what he thinks is right. if there's no guarantee it'll mean anything, and it probably won't—

why? can he remember? here, in the night-black closing in around him? here, where just the act of moving is so hard to be nigh-impossible? ]

[Even breathing is a struggle]

[Better, isn't it, to give up and lie down for a little while. To give up and lie down and never move again.]

[But those streaks of golden blood are bright, in the dimness. And somewhere -- somewhere, for a long time, now -- there's somebody who's been waiting for him. Somebody who's been waiting for a long time, now]

[And if he can't walk, well -- he can always crawl]

[ his hands are sticky with blood, bringing to mind—what will he need to sacrifice, if he continues down this road? what is worth the cost of righteousness?

but he can crawl. because there is no turning back for him, is there? no real home to return to.

it's so quiet. there's only the slick sound of his hands and knees shuffling across ground that feels insubstantial. he could almost be floating in the starless space between worlds.

and then

there's a sound of a drop of water falling. ]

Flowers of Heaven II: Star of Bethlehem

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/5 jk

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done.

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