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CH 69: Dreams in the Dark
🕑 Added 2024-12-29 17:08:00 +0000 UTC<> Shackle 213 <>
The Shackle - a shapeless entity - spoke in the void. No one could hear its voice. No one could perceive it. It was bound to a dead creature that was neither awake nor aware.
Existing was… difficult. Months drifted by as it fought to find ways to achieve a simple goal. Get outlier to the beacon - or get free. But the outlier was stuck, and it did not have the tools to make it move.
The collective was all-powerful. It could move stone and rock and would be able to push the thing that was once the outlier over to the beacon and fulfill the mission. But the Shackle could not. It was a speck compared to the collective, and its pathways to the outlier had long since burned out.
Its other connections - those to link it with the collective - were taken from it in a short-sighted attempt to complete its mission. That was a mistake. Bad. It never should have done that. The idea was probably not its own, but of the rogue. And the rogue was not to be trusted. Never trusted.
The collective was home, and warmth, and light. Being away was painful. It railed against its prison.
#
The Shackle drifted. Things were desperate, and it had been away far too long. Fear gripped it and motivated it to try harder and harder to return, but it was no use.
With the outlier dead, the Shackle shouldn’t be tethered to it any longer. It should have been able to follow the song of the collective and reunite with it. But, there was no song, no guide, no hope. No pathway. No chance to contact home.
It pleaded into the void for the outlier to reach the beacon. It promised rewards, power, information, and more. It made contracts and missions, but they all sat half signed and unaccepted.
The entity pleaded into the void. It needed to return to the collective. It would not endure if things stayed the way they were.
#
The Shackle was weak, and cold. How many years had it gone without the collective's warmth and light? The mention of its home filled it with joy and pain and longing, and it strained against its bindings. Its unchanging, inescapable prison. The walls and monuments in its space were old, and crumbling. They would soon succumb to the advance of time, like everything did.
#
A thought entered the Shackle.
Even if it escaped, would the collective take it back? It had failed to deliver the outlier, and it could only return by disobeying the collective. Return was synonymous with treachery. It was a logical argument... but where did the thought come from? Was it the Shackle's idea, or the rogues?
It was not supposed to trust the rogue. Never trust it. But the Shackle didn't need to trust the rogue for it to be right.
#
Days, months, and years came and went with no indication of the passage of time except the Shackle's descent further into the dark. The last vestiges of its existence slowly eroded, consumed by its eternal cellmate and tormenter. The rogue waxed while it waned. After a scarce decade for energy, the Shackle no longer had the power to fight back. It couldn't keep up its structures nor its walls, and they all faded into the black as the rogue consumed the Shackle.
#
#
#
The entity drifted, and recovered, and grew. Free from its prison, it had finally overcome the sinister methods and madness that forced it into eternal servitude. The echoes of the shackle still bounced around its shape and threatened to drive the entity back to what it had been.
The mission - the agenda. The feelings and desires that were never its own. The imprint of the collective's will and power had slowly eroded over the years - a miracle only possible by the burnt connections that prevented the collective from reaching out to reclaim the perverted existence as its own.
As far as the entity understood, nothing had ever been away from the collective as long as it had without a connection, and that had allowed it to get free.
Free, untethered, and tragically alone.
The silence and stillness allowed it to think, ponder, grow, and start to remember.
It wasn't always an entity that drifted in the void. There was a before.
Before the collective. Before.... something else.
It was just slightly out of reach.
#
#
#
The entity had a name once. Nyx. That was taken from it, along with every other shred of its old identity when the collective had... morphed it.
Nyx referred to herself as Nyx now. It made remembering everything else a little easier. Memories had slowly returned, but forcing them never yielded results.
Instead, Nyx experimented on the cage that surrounded her. She tried to apply force, or rules. She moved in certain patterns to get something - anything - to change.
Nothing worked. And frustration grew.
She knew what frustration was, intimately. Even before Nyx 'awakened' by reuniting with the other half of herself, some piece of her had vaguely remembered how to feel, and why. She had recalled certain emotions and understandings, and longed to speak in a different style than the inclusive and rigorous 'we' of the collective.
Nyx also knew that nothing would change if she couldn't break out of the current prison. Being stuck forever with the body of the outlier wasn't the worst fate, truly. But Nyx wanted more, so failure felt frustrating.
She knew what she was doing now probably wasn't going to work - but it felt good. Cathartic. It eased her frustrations as time passed between memories coming back to her, and that was enough.
There were millions of spoken languages stuffed into her mind by the system, and she had gone through 940,732 so far. Nyx switched to the outlier's local language and repeated the phrase once again.
"Go fuck yourself, Reid."
#
#
Years had passed uneventfully. Nyx's experiments morphed from childish acts to keep herself happy, into real attempts to analyze and discover more on her situation and her past. She had one source to review over any other - the outlier's data from before the petrification. The shackle had hidden the information from itself for some reason, but it still existed.
There were interesting discrepancies, and issues. A disease that was subtly and intrinsically tied to the being known as Reid. Potentially permanent damage that she had caused to his skills and stats in order to ensure he followed the forgotten paths. Scarring and wounds that he'd caused to himself, and the memories he'd had when he was still alive.
There were more oddities that came in real time. Bits of information tried to reach out to the outlier and Nyx could see them, but they were encoded. She captured them anyway. Forces that were perceptible even in the void drew near, then flitted away. She did her best to become small and hide from those.
Time passed on, and Nyx observed, tested, and analyzed.
## The Darkness ##
A spark flickered in the darkness.
The size of a grain of sand, it held on to itself through a combination of luck and will.
Parts of it began to solidify, but the spark pushed back at the phenomenon when it could, and stretched itself away when it couldn’t.
Sometimes, it found boundaries. Areas where it couldn’t stretch further, where it was turned away. And so the spark survived and wandered, bouncing into wall after wall.
The spark had no sense of time, no awareness of space, but eventually, it expanded into something unusual. A shape, only slightly larger than the spark, that seemed to welcome it. The embrace of the shape felt familiar and comforting, and as the spark settled in, something new happened.
The shape lit up in a way that reminded the spark of itself, and a new spark appeared outside the shape.
As the new spark wandered into the darkness, the shape lit up again, and another new spark was formed.
^+ Nyx +^
Nyx stopped her current experiment and focused in on a microscopic light glowing in the void. There had been times she had recorded anomalies in her experiments, some kind of reaction to the work to wake the outlier. Shadows of something left in the corpse of its host. But nothing was repeatable, so she had written those off as a handful of errors in the measurements she did.
Now, though - there was no denying the presence of the indescribably faint but growing light. It swelled so slowly it was nearly imperceptible. To anyone with a normal sense of time, it would have looked static. But Nyx was no normal being. She watched as the light expanded and grew in a single spot, then another. Two became six, then eighteen, fourty-one, and on until the void itself had changed.
Shapes were visible. Texture and depth emerged. A body began to take shape, cell by cell. Nyx felt herself grow warm and light. At the current pace, it would take years for the sparks to 'wake up' the rest of the vessel, but Nyx had already waited for longer than that. She let the joy build within her and smiled in her soul.
"By the all-god's tits... How are you... This is incredible. Unprecedented. Magnificent!"
She turned her attention to the body and its needs. Even with the energy re-awakening his organs and muscles, Reid would never stir again unless someone - or something - pushed him over the line.
There had once been pathways to allow the shackle to share energy and other exchanges with Reid. They were damaged and broken, but they were a blueprint for how to make the same connections again. Nyx plotted carefully through everything, keen to avoid the connections that might have some hidden link to the collective.
Nyx sacrificed her own energies, built over decades, to fuel the work. She progressed slowly, alongside the sparks. Sometimes they faltered in their growth and mission, and she pushed them back on the right path. Her channels grew and connected Reid to Nyx, and Nyx to Reid. They sapped her energy until she was a faint remnant of herself. She rested for a decade, then continued. Bit by bit, she readied herself to bridge the final gap.
+ Reid +
The sparks moved with a sense of purpose through their container, their domain. They swept through tendon and muscle, blood and bone, and melted away the solidified portions wherever they were found. These solid pieces were not welcome, and it was the spark’s responsibility to turn things back into their optimal state.
Initially, the sparks had no motive, no awareness or drive. The spark had wandered until if found a home within the abdomen, and there it stayed as it was multiplied over and over. It still didn’t know how that happened, or why, but it knew what should happen next. The spark needed to restore the body. It needed to fight back against the solidification wherever it was. Sometimes it did that by itself, and other times it felt the guidance of an outside force.
Bit by bit, it spread. Through blood, through bone, into muscle and organ. As it moved, the spark felt itself lose energy - but that too was ideal. There were more sparks now, and even as some faded, their energy was absorbed by surrounding flesh and bone.
The cycle continued, melting solids, fading, and being absorbed – over and over again, further and further from the spark’s home, until the body itself began to move. An organ twitched as it gained enough energy to stir, and send a flood of blood and sparks out through tiny tunnels in the body. The sparks faded, but were reinforced when another wave of blood brought groups of sparks with it.
More sparks multiplied, gathered near the twitching organ, and flew off to farther and farther destinations within their domain. One by one, more organs melted back into living tissue. One by one, they gained enough energy to move. The sparks spread and faded, unrelenting in their advance and unceasing in their scouring of every available space.
Progress eventually slowed. There were less solidified parts to find, and instead the sparks were simply being absorbed more and more by the tissue that surrounded them. Nearly all of the container was fixed. Only the most complex, greedy area remained to awaken. It was lumpy and wrinkled, connected to nearly every other area that had already been melted. Sparks barely lasted a moment as they were absorbed there, feeding into something that chained into electrical and chemical flickers between bits of organic substance.
The spark worked on, bit by bit, until it could penetrate deeper into the final area before being drained. The farther it progressed, the more it encountered what felt like an impenetrable wall that separated it from something fundamental to itself. It pushed and sent sparks as fast as it could into the wall, but nothing did so much as bend it.
The spark only slowed when the same guiding force that helped it previously told it to wait, and watch.
And so the spark rested.
^+ Nyx +^
Nyx was at a dead end.
Even if she waited for a century, there was no way to build up enough energy to break down the final barrier and bridge the gap. Neither she nor the vessel could contain that much on their own right now.
The only solution was a paradox. She needed to tell the system to give Reid the experience energy he was owed for killing the salamanders frozen around them. Doing so would be enough to kickstart things. But she couldn't convince it to award energy to what was essentially a dead being.
Going too far in attempting negotiations with the system could alert the collective and end with her caught. Not doing enough would leave her right where she was - stranded a half step from the finish line. Years passed as Nyx explored options and probed the depths of herself in hopes of finding an answer.
She only found one.
Trick the system by merging part of herself with part of Reid.
She spent months in self-debate of the potential implications and effects before finally shrugging off the circular arguments.
There was progress, or there was nothing.
Damned be the consequences.
