Coruscating triplets of light converging in slow-motion, vacated on suspended hopes. But moments passed, and the Abyss remained entrenched. Slowly, I realized the battle must be over. Exhaustion poureDown, eerie silence suffocating.

Hooked.

Slipped.

EnvelopeDragged.

Sunken.

I dropped to my knees, plowing them against now-invisible grates. “Why were there so many choiiiceZzz..?!” I broke into sobs. “Dammn. IITTT!” I screeched into unrelenting Void: my rage merely swallowed by the Tarpit of darkness, defeat crushing down over me.

“Maybe we just weren’t quick enough,” my companion’s voice arose through the thick veil. “Or maybe our karma is poor. No telling what went wrong.”

My mouth opened once more to contend, desperately entreating the light back, a muffled roar frozen below a Gravestone while the surface was twinkling on somewhere else*. Yet only wordless bubbles rose... as endless Oil shoveled it’s way down my throat by the gallon. My thoughts spiraled. The people entrusted with the hope of our return were separated. I was even now cut off from Gutterson with no safe way down from the Heights. Hell, I felt out of touch with myself. Numb. And I just wanted another chance to stay home today and graduate at Week’s end. “We let them dowwnnn..” I moaned, unable to shout any more, utterly unraveled.

The noise of machine had died; you could hear the whistling of a hair if it were to flutter toward the ground. “It was our only job. To come back and aid them. Why were we greedy for the Flamezzz??”

His voice returned slow with disbelief. “We did our best. We... we, we were gonna make it. In fact, I just had this theatrical feeling. We were.”

I dug into my eye sockets to drive the tears away, but they squirted out only more to replace the flow. “No. No. No. We didn’t know what we were doing. Somebody lost the instructions, or maybe they didn’t like them and tried to hide ’em so nobody would know what to Aim for. Had we searched hard enough to really discover something; Or did we settle to write our own rules, since everybody wanted to push a different style?

Maybe it was basically a daydream all along anyway, while the wealthy paid to insert rules to tip pursuits in their advantage. Hell, we barely know the characters we’re playing alongside our whole lives...

“It’s alright, Pyramis.” Gutt quavered. “We’ll figure something else out. Don’t quit now.”

I tore at my face. “Oh, it’s no use. We screwed up. We lost.” My head turned, I could feel it, but the direction it faced was ambiguous. All I knew was that every direction might as well have been the same direction. “And I won’t sit here and rot away. There’s nothing left to gain here. I’m not sure what I was playing for to begin with -- some sort of Crowdfund charity club?”

I dragged myself,eeeeling along for the railing with blinDisorient+hanDeals.

Malibu heard my body scraping. “Take it easy, son. What are you doing up there?”

I couldn’t answer him. My face was leaking all over the place: He shouldn’t have to be in this mess; This is because I didn’t listen closely about spinning Heschita.

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“Wait a minute, do you hear that?” In my beleaguered state I barely heard his voice, and sure as heck didn’t hear anything the crazy man thought he was hearing. In a fog of isolation, I became dead-set on the one thing that could end the, thee torment of it all.

I was about to leap off the catwalk and float to my inevitable death.

Shuffling along, I jammed my finger into something sturdy that gave a little ground & budged. Then my nail caught in a crack and I winced as it bent the wrong way. But i merely brushed the pain away with a depleted thought - Oh, must be the Gaslighter. Supposed to lift us to victory, but our attempt to retrieve it ironically proved too tantalizing & its flame consumed us instead. I howled maniacally.

I couldn’t find the strength to keep on being a Robin; I went rogue, replanted my roots as Throbbin - The same reaction as any other joker with nothing contaminated cooking-ware would have: rob every trace of joy near your clutch: because you aren’t living if all you feel is bitterness or fear. You’re taking in the scant essentials; Where’s the charging conductivity of fascination?

My hand kept wandering, until it slipped off and dangled into empty space. The edge.

Reaching the precipice, I grappled onto the cold bars and erected myself. The bones, the flesh; they came easy. It was the flagging mind I wrestled to lift. But I beat him down; I shoved my conscience away, swapped it against the cost of perseverance, and planted my rocking legs on the middle rung -- thighs inclined against the firm bars, suspended over the beckoning pit, drooped like a flower long-tramPlucked.

“I believe," Mali remarked. "There's a low-pitched stirring in one of these aisles."

I scoffed in adverse shrillness! “Drone? It’s MEeEEeE…!” tore free from my lungs with barbs attached to it, startling myself with its thirst for blood. “It’s. ONLY. me.”

“Pull yourself togeth–” but the air froze on its climb across his vocal chords. “Odd.” His attention had been diverted. “Feel that pressure in here?”

“If ‘in here’ is my head, then abbbB-solutely!” I cracked. “It says I can fly.”

He was finally catching onto the bigger signals. “Son,” he said diligently. I could picture him holding a hat over his heart. “I need ya.”

A fresh pang of remorse rolled over me, but I swallowed it hot and hard. It severed the chords of my heart, but over the sore lump in my throat, I managed to continue: “And you know what? I buy what it says. I’m gonna punch a ticket and fly into forever.”

I stabilized myself. Two, Deep, breaths. Except no clarity overrode the panic. I was torn between my immediate desire for relief and crawling around to give my buddy some sort of false solace unto starvation of body and soul.

So I dredged up a collection of all the instances that marked me a dopey loser, staring down the circumstances of my worst memories, in order to quash any further reluctance to give up all of my eighteen years in a solitary minute. My breath backed up behind my lips, threatening to blow out my eyeballs, and all my muscles contracted -- until I thought I had been compacted into an air-tight can.

“Please.” I wished it imaginary, Malibu’s despairing voice wriggling into my ear, “You’re ALL I’ve got for help around here.”

I supposed I was killing the both of us. But weren’t we already dead meat? Surely the power-Grid disturbance would be summoning some Security force to investigate very soon.

One of my feeTrickled its way upon the middle bar, between me and the easy way out, the act of total release proving none too easy. Lifting my heel, I shunned the pieces of my Path. My calves tensed in anticipation.

And I leaned forward off the rail, with heavy tears roaring down.

***

My eyes flexed open by some external force. I was... in some decorative nursery. A small rocking zebra sat in the corner, the lone object in the room. I no longer owned the little horsie, so I figured I had joined the places of the Bygone, or else was in some TwilighTransit phase. It was a distinct object, an amusement between myself and a cousin, Georgi. Suddenly, a wave of tthundE=RupToweRode like a Bull and the room crunched down into pitch black. Not again… is Demise going to discard any reliefs also?

Then a hiss more gasping than cat, blistered through the formless space, followed by the rustling slink of what I imaged to be serpents. My useless eyes darted around within utter void. I had no protection if something was going to strike at me. “Paper-thin memoreeeazzz, need a seat to stack; brute meet only sssoap...” pulsed around the atmosphere, right before warm purple light flooded around -- revealing I had unexpected company. My striped pal was absent; a swirling sort of cloud had taken up residence there. Cloven hooves clattered down like a hippo, and an engorged sort of flank panda bear flank tilted at me. I heard something like an underwater bellow, then a muted snort. There wasn’t much else to do except approach for inspection.

As I tried to tiptoe around scruffy, stubby haunches, its face lifted & I recoileDead in my tracks.