Kernoel77
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Chapter 230: Healing
🕑 Added 2025-01-06 02:35:26 +0000 UTCChapter 230: Healing
For the first time, Alice properly got to see the world unravel.
She had been there with Mercury multiple times now. With Sibori, with Ciraski, with Heath. Each time, he had simply stood there as things reassembled themselves, but this time was different.
With each moment, the world quivered. It was frozen, still, cast in ember solitude. Silence hung heavy in the air. And even then, in that still world, it changed, and came undone.
Joy, a ruler of a court, made of glass and coloured and intoxicating shifts. It was so bright it almost hurt to look at, yet when Mercury stared at it, when his fur shifted and each lilac line became a gateway to a galaxy, it fell apart.
Each blink turned into a faint crack, each second passing another break. Except there was no sound of shattering. Joy winked out of existence with a symphony of silence. Not a noise left the amber hue, and not a shard of glass disappeared. They hovered there, broken apart and fragmented, falling like slow motion rain.
And then it stopped.
From one breath to another, it all halted. Within the smears of colour, scattered a million ways, stood a single mopaaw. His eyes were wide open, his face turned into a wide, euphoric grin, and Alice could almost see it all click into place.
The way his eyes darted around, locking onto tiny bits of glass, and then they shifted. Moved by an invisible force, by a combination of power and understanding and beckoning. The threads of the world that came undone turned inside out. They unravelled into thinner and thinner threads, then reassembled into a new reality altogether.
Seconds passed, then minutes, and in the frozen world, tiny shifts happened. A single thread placed back, a single shard of glass fusing to another with a light touch. They snapped together like magnets, like they belonged with each other. Somehow, each edge aligned perfectly, even those that seemed jagged and sharp snapped together beautifully.
A whisper thrummed in the air. “Reform,” Alice heard Mercury say, and something in the world quivered, wanting to obey. She looked at herself, at her clothes, at the minor wear and tear, as it all mended.
“Reform,” the sound came again. A command enforced by amber reality, helped along as with each passing moment, Mercury went through the steps required for mending. He pulled and pushed and wove in patterns she could never have come up with.
Alice was loved by the world. Truly loved. She was called a friend by the wind and by the earth. She could ask anything of it and it would oblige. But could you ask a friend to heal? Would their wounds mend faster at a request?
That was where Mercury was different from her. Both of them understood the world. Its needs and wants, and what it meant to be like that. Alice knew what it was like to be free as the wind, to flow like water, to be as steady and giving as the earth, but she did not know how to mend them.
Mercury did.
Somehow, what he saw went beyond just what it took to be like something. He went above and beyond, and noticed deeper patterns, manipulating them masterfully. Alice had never seen another person do quite the same thing, never seen anyone interact with dreams like he did, with the world like he did.
She had granted a thousand requests, gone to a hundred places, and yet, here was yet another person who could do something she couldn’t.
Alice smiled. The world was so vast. She rubbed her eyes, and her fingers came away wet. It was so big and strange and scary and lovely. Alice really did love the world, every bit of it. The dark corners, the crevices filled with scum and dirt and rats just as much as the highest, untouched mountain peaks.
And now, she saw it being restored. A bit of that world she loved so much that was going thin and hostile and slowly dying, it was being put back into place. As if effortless. It should have clicked and clattered, should have gasped and groaned, the world barely held together at all, but the amber was like anesthesia.
There was no pain.
It was what really surprised her. The world was unravelled and held in place, like a human body turned inside out, and it didn’t give a single complaint. The grass there was perfectly content, even as it dissolved back into the basic buildings blocks of reality, ground down to something less than atoms, to strings of potential that might at some point be something at all.
The grass stopped being grass - and not once did it seem to mind that, as if trusting Mercury to put it back into place properly.
“It’s kind of special, isn’t it?” Orin asked her.
Alice looked over at the fae, their furry body covered with leather and bits of rust red metal. “Hm?” she hummed curiously.
Their cheeks turned a little red. “Ah, I didn’t mean to speak out of turn, it’s just… seeing it, what he does. It’s special.”
Teasing a little, Alice tilted her head. “What do you mean?” She knew, of course, but she wanted to hear their perspective, untainted.
“All of it,” Orin said after a moment. They gestured at Mercury, at the way the grey world reassembled into one of pastel colours, slowly saturating. The monochrome bled away, the tears were mended, each one smoothed out. Inch by inch, the world healed. “It’s… weird, you know?”
They paused, took a deep breath of the air that still smelled faintly of rain. “I can feel a part of the world resonate with me. It’s part of my main Skill, ah, <Superposition>. It lets me superimpose myself, but also tells me a bit about probability. And it… warps, around Mercury, you know? Whenever I look at that slice of the world, all my senses tell me it’ll die. It’ll stop existing. Yet, as the seconds tick by, even though it seems inevitable, it doesn’t happen.”
“Instead, it heals,” Alice said.
Orin nodded. “Yes. It heals. The seconds tick by, and the chance of breaking, or fully coming apart… becomes less, and less. It’s only eighty percent, now. Around seventy-nine. Like a clock, ticking down until someone is in good health.” They chuckled a little.
Then, it was Alice’s turn to nod. She looked at that strange part of reality, where threads interwove with glass, where colours acted like a liquid, and light seemed to move like smoke. Luminescence wrapped around ribbons of blue and red and green, and then turned into little specks of crystal.
“I know what you mean,” she said, wiping her face again, giving a small sniffle. “This one, particularly…”
“Joy was so close to falling apart that we can see it all, for once,” Orin provided.
“Hehe. Yeah, that,” Alice said. “It makes me glad to travel with him. That each time he does this, it goes a little smoother.”
Orin laughed slightly, shaking their head. “Baririri. A little, you say. No, he has improved by leagues each time. Not just a little bit.”
“And still he complains,” Alice said with a shrug and a dramatic sigh.
“Baririri,” Orin laughed. “Yeah. Still he complains.”
Then, the two quieted down, and watched again. As the world flowed like water, as glass shifted and magnetized together, and as it all mended.
- - - - - -
Mercury grit his teeth, his eyes wide open, aching from the strain.
A whole damn world pressing down on his Amber domain. “Reform,” he commanded it, and the world quivered and obeyed. In this realm of silence, his word was law. “Reform,” he begged, and another shake ran through it.
Again and again Mercury whispered that world, like a mantra. Each of his zeyjn ran at full power, grabbing and weaving, shifting and moving, keeping what needed to be still held in place. None of this was doing itself, and Mercury felt even his <Oceanic Consciousness> run dry.
Against the mental strain, he adapted. Pushed forth his willpower. Tangled the threads with his nexus to hold them in place just a fraction of a second longer before he got to them.
Flaw after flaw, inconsistency after inconsistency he cleaned the remnants of Joy. He removed the addictive properties, because that went beyond simple fun. He removed the manipulation of biological function, the way it directly released dopamine in humans, for example.
So many insidious, exploitative things that had crept their way in. Joy was like a poisoned well - entrancing, and intoxicating, but ever harmful. It was why it had broken, because it had veered too far.
And it wasn’t even anyone’s fault. Joy got lost in itself. The ruler enjoyed it so much, and wanted to spread it, and absorbed ideas that were parallel, but not the same. Just a little stilted. And with each one, Joy gre, and with each one, it twisted a little. Until the well overflowed, the toxic waste spread, and it started crumbling apart.
Mercury was split a hundred thousand ways. He built barricades against the void, reservoirs to catch the water, filters with distillation and charcoal in them and mud and bacteria that cleansed the concepts. His ystirs, the minor processors of his mind, buzzed around like bees, cleaning and removing and remaking.
“Reform,” he whispered, a candleflame in a dark monastery. “Reform.” He tapped walls and tested the ground, relaying it when needed. He filled in voids, and cleaned away all the unnecessary parts, until a pristine foundation was left.
Then he slotted it back in with the rest.
The ideas of cleanliness distilled into crystals of colourful glass, made of threads that were so close to being real, and then he had to seamlessly graft them onto a construct whose full shape he did not yet know. It would not be an eye anymore, he knew that much.
Rainbow colours crept into his word in dull pastel, and he ignored it all, refocusing on the task. Even as his minds began to buckle from the strain, he held on. He convinced himself he could do it, that it was easy, for <Perceived Ease>.
He held on, because <Tencious Genius> helped more with each passing second. He leaned on <Multitasking> and <Relentless Will> and <Worldweaver> and <Perseverance> and <Clarity>.
Each of his mental Skills worked with him. Each of them resonated and threaded into one another, helping him see, helping him weave. <Thread> activated on the building blocks of reality, on the grass and the dirt as it dissolved and reshaped. <Fast Learner> made him take it all in that much more, and he held on.
Nothing broke him.
The world warred against his <Truth>. The Void burned against it from the outside, but it all splashed against the amber of the Stifled Silence.
Motion only happened when Mercury allowed it, when he had another fragment ready to be assembled according to his best ideas, and how <Medicine> guided him. He <Severed> the bad bits, and wove in some more to fill the gaps.
Small joys and big ones to fix what was broken.
His goal wasn’t perfection - joy was never perfect. It was temporary and ephemeral, and altogether unsustainable. It wasn’t something you needed to be feeling every moment in time, and it wasn’t supposed to be chased after, either.
Joy was fleeting. It came and went in moments of tenderness and of wonder. But at the same time, he wasn’t remaking Joy, he was reforming the court. But then again, all he did was remove the bits that seemed like poison, and add in things he felt resonated. It wasn’t an exact science, and he did not have a goal, all he had to do was… endure.
And so, the hours drifted by. After a day, his first zeyjn ran empty. A few hours after that, his second one went to rest.
The operation had slowed down by then. Much of the amber had crystallized, and Mercury was taking a long time to reassemble each piece. But there were enough for it to be stable.
Reality still shook, occasionally. The <Nothingness> outside scraped against Mercury’s amber barrier, but it was meaningless. In that sphere of silence, things only moved when he asked them to.
And after a little more, one of the most miserable hours of Mercury’s life began.
He had three zeyjn. They recovered incredibly fast when resting, and two were asleep now. So he needed to hold out just a little longer. But his final one was on its last legs.
So he <Persevered>. Minute by minute, second by second, moment by moment.
The world twisted, the amber silence crackled and popped… but it held. Despite it all, Mercury <Witnessed> Joy, unblinking. He lasted, his mind stretched and worn thin from the sheer exertion. Hours had passed and he was assembling a puzzle in three dimensions while handcrafting each piece.
And he was left with a suspiciously human feeling of sleep deprivation and headache, one that he was familiar with from long hours of overtime and getting yelled at on the phone by customers on his boss. The scratching of the Void itself started sounding like the clicking of keyboard keys at midnight. Still in the office, in the uncomfortable chair.
Moments stretched into eternity as Mercury had to hold on rather than work on reforming Joy, as he had to simply keep the crumbling world in place - until the last second ticked over, and another part of him awoke.
Instantly, that strained part went to sleep, and Mercury worked again.
He paced himself, this time, stretching himself thin but not impossibly so. By the end, he felt sleep deprived and the headache, but never quite reached that state of agony when his other zeyjn awoke. Fresher, now.
Some of his Skills had levelled up, but he ignored all the notifications. All he needed to do was… well, reshape reality from its fundamental blocks in a stable and sustainable shape.
What else would he be doing on a nice sunday evening?
He did not, in fact, know which day of the week it was.
- - - - - -
Alice ate another meal, unpackaging a nicely wrapped sandwich. When she folded the wrapper, she knew another one would be inside it by tomorrow. She had a few of those trinkets - the kind that made meals readily available, and each was delicious. She felt lucky, too, because eating the same thing over and over would get boring.
“Do you even need to eat?” Orin asked.
Alice shook her head with a smile. “Not in the fae realm, really,” she said. “I could live off the essence of the courts. But… that’s not very tasty, is it?”
Her faerie companion nodded. “Right,” Orin agreed. They threw another nut into their mouth from a little bag. One that Alice had lent them, in fact. One that would slowly refill with nuts. “How long have we been here, now?”
“Six days,” Alice said. “Well, something around that, at least.” She leaned back in her grassen hammock and stared at the sky above, slowly rebuilding with specks of colour. It was almost whole now.
“And he hasn’t slept, or stopped for a moment,” Orin noted.
“That’s right,” Alice said with a nod. “For a whole week.”
“Scary,” Orin said. “Could you do that?”
Alice shrugged. “Technically, I suppose. It depends on the task. Something like this? Full focus, all the time?” She laughed, like a chime of bells. “No, I doubt it. I cannot do what he can at all, cannot understand things the same way. And I tried.”
She had. Both of them had kept busy. Alice had spent the days trying to understand the grass better, figure out what let Mercury work with it like so and kept her from doing it. She wanted her <Kindness> to be received by the world, too, but it had not yet clicked. Someday, maybe. So she kept watching Mercury.
Piece by piece, he assembled the puzzle, and strand by strand, the world wove back into place.
Outside, the Void had grown angrier, scratching and clawing at the amber crystal, but it had only grown. The silence had slowly, slightly, grown out of reality. Not just filled the gaps, but grown tiny protrusions that felt beyond it.
They were bitten and torn at by the Void’s indescribable appendages, but they regrew. The silence hung, and the world mended, unbothered by the gaping hole filled only with an amber glow.
Alice shook her head slightly. Mercury’s work had begun quickly, then slowed for a little while, then sped right back up. She could visibly see his Skills levelling, his mind stretching as it processed things faster. It was incredible, the way he used even this as practice.
How he stretched and adapted without ever breaking or compromising his self. She smiled, once more feeling that happiness at getting to see all this.
“You think he’ll be done soon?” Orin asked.
There were two of them now, Alice noted. One copy was already plodding off into the distance, though. The other one sat with her, at the clearing, around the smoldering embers of a campfire, radiating bits of speckled warmth.
“Shouldn’t be too long,” Alice said. She’d been watching the sky carefully, and it was almost whole. The gaps almost mended, the colours returned. The jungle had shifted in totality. It seemed a little cooler, more comfortable. Easier on the eyes.
Somehow, Mercury had made the jungle gentle. Not perfectly so, there were places for roughness and intoxication, but overall, it was a little more mellow. No longer did Alice feel an assault on all her senses. She could simply smell the grass, the faintest lingering hint of rain dispersing, and look at a rainbow sun in the sky.
It was pretty.
Not in the excessive way it was before, just in a regular, aesthetic way. Still untamed, sill nature, but a little less exploitative.
Alice breathed, and waited.
Another day passed. Another copy of Orin shimmered into existence next to the fae and walked off. And then, eventually, as night slowly fell, the amber bubble popped, and Mercury stumbled out.
He looked like shit. Really, Alice could not find better words for it. He stumbled, fur matted with sweat. He’d bled from his eyes again, bits of it crusted over. Amber still stuck to him in clumps of orange, making his fur cling to itself even more.
There was sleep in his eyes, and he smelled rather bad. Even though there was little actual dirt on him, Mercury looked rather determined to fix that now, as he promptly stumbled to the campfire, then let himself fall onto the ground.
“Fuck. That,” he said.
Looking at the sky, Alice couldn’t say she agreed. The world was better for his deed. Clearly better. She stood in a vibrant jungle chirping with life. Rather than grasping at straws, the forest was thriving.
“Good job, Mercury,” she said.
“Yeah, yeah… ugh, my fucking head. Ow. I’m taking a nap,” he said. With that, he curled up into a ball, draping his tail over the top of his head, closed his eyes, and was out like a light.
For a moment, Alice considered reaching down and picking him up. He looked so small, and vulnerable. Like he needed shelter, someone to care for him. What a precious creature, she thought. He deserved protection.
The thing that once was Joy sank to watch over him, too, concerned. Alice looked at it, and it looked back, having been restructured entirely. Rather than a prismatic eye, it was now a more indecipherable shape. Geometric and unachievable. Always a little out of reach but so near.
Like a neighbour’s house with no doors. A window that was a mirror, maybe.
And it spun for a moment, and the reaches she had done were suddenly pointless. It was companionship and it was nature, and then it was a friend. The glass seemed to paint itself in broad strokes, creating impressionist visions of…
“Happiness. Tivo of Happiness,” Mercury supplied.
The creature, now back to being a dog, bobbed its head. And barked. The sound was like the opposite of shattering glass, it was the noise of something becoming whole, condensed down into a snap moment. She looked at Tivo, and saw the name slot into place.
With a smile, the two of them reached out to care for Mercury.
“Touch me and I tear your head off.”
And promptly abandoned those efforts again.
A heartbeat later, Mercury was asleep, and Alice let out a laugh. She sat back down in her hammock, Tivo coming to join her, curling up on her lap. The creature of prismatic glass was somewhat heavy, yet light. Reshaped and new, but still complete in its own right.
She slowly dragged her fingers through two dimensional fur made of glass shards, and it was soft. Alice smiled. Yeah.
There was happiness to be found in that.
Comments
Soulfure
I feel like Mercury will eventually start feeding the void with the bits that he weeds out, which also makes me wonder how he disposed the pieces before, I wonder if they will form a collective
Kernoel77
:P
Nadine Kurz
"Lick a clock" is prolly not what you wanted to say there xD
