SWISHY TOOK SOLACE IN ONE THING: HIS WHOLENESS.
The scarecrow hadn’t broken down into a [Mist] or a [Pile] as he normally would as a defensive measure.
Swishy was scared too. The cruel cascade of fairy deaths drowned his psyche, so he clung to his wholeness, devising a full-bodied escape.
And so, the army of hands that Ruby commanded throughout The Last Straw now conjured around Swishy himself. They towered over him as a wall of midnight. Curses crawled through the surface, climbing upon each other, using others for purchase as they asserted their spirits to the outward prominence. They all wanted to be seen and recognized. Mostly, they yearned for the first bite of Swishy.
They were given samples as Ruby so loved to do.
Her dimensional pocket was open, from which she took crumbs from The High Chasm’s heart, sprinkling them onto the hands.
The fingers shot from the dark wall and picked the crumbs from themselves, snatching them out of others’ grips. They clamored, they maneuvered, they fought amongst themselves for a taste of heart.
The last thing Swishy wanted was to lose himself amid that chaos, to risk a [Pile] escape attempt.
“There’s more, there’s more, there’s always more,” Ruby reassured the curses.
“Is it gone?” Swishy said to himself.
Ruby had an answer, though. She mouthed it out so the curses wouldn’t hear. “Yes.” She stared into his gourd in giddy anticipation of his pain.
“I see…”
The boy did. He knew that though Ruby’s pocket was open, there was no sensation of that heart. Gone. That plate was clean, clean, clean.
“Do you hate me?”
“I think that’d be a waste of heart. I’m thinking about me. My heart. And how losing it to you will never happen again.”
“What unreasonable dreams.” Ruby went into a neutral expression, knowing Swishy wouldn’t give her the sorrow she sought.
Snap!
A crisp echo resounded from Ruby’s fingers, commanding the stiffened attention of the curses.
And then the hands turned their attention to Swishy and crashed downward, changing from a solid wall to a rubbery wave.
Swishy spread his arms in a T-pose and braced against the impact. His soul formed a cast that kept his straw and psyche intact, fortified against the tenacious handling of his enemies.
A vortex. Feathers, hands, and liquid shadows. These were the ingredients of Ruby’s black ocean that stole the boy from the world. And not just him, but the Swish-minis, too. Even though Znitchy did the best he could to maneuver the sprites away from danger, they were so, so small. If Swishy was a fish in that dark ocean, his sprites were mere krill.
Everything of Swishy—the main body and fairy sprites too—had been captured, stored in the shadows as a unit of food.
The feminine hands elongated and curved around the surroundings, finding the Swish-minis in their hiding places.
Wings—plucked. Limbs—plucked as well. Each of the fairies was pulled apart within the portals like gingerbread cookies. The malicious energy surged through Swishy’s mind as the memories of the suffering sprites returned to him upon their demise. His consciousness was fed with images of his minis dragged into the pitch of Ruby’s [Adieu] realm.
“So cute and so troublesome…” Ruby’s voice broadcasted. Then she did away with them like the sociopathic child she sometimes was.
Swishy overflowed with blackwheat but kept his wits about him. And he could only assign that composure to the completion of his body.
To be whole, to have a sense of self, was the only security he could afford himself for now.
Gourd, wings, heart, and everything in between. There were also his Timbs that he used to kick Ruby’s hands away. Even though Swishy was lost in darkness, an evil mass plotting to snatch and consume him at any given second, he wasn’t blind to the soulscape. Be it through a sudden heat or a flaring of aura, Swishy knew when to twist away from an encroaching hand. Ruby, while the most blessed human he’d ever come across, couldn’t control the intents that accompanied her presence and actions.
The hands went toward him and their intents were telegraphed as if spoken aloud.
CAGE, CAPTURE, CRUSH, CLAW.
These were hands that were meant to restrain and shackle the boy.
He strategically used [Pile] as a partial measure, dissolving the targeted hand or leg before growing it again. Still, the brush of fingers through his separated strands inflicted an iciness in his spirit.
And then came the intents that wanted to force a permanent [Pile] state onto Swishy and divorce him of his body. The curses acknowledged their emptiness, their kinship with the void, and were threatened by Swishy’s wholeness.
DOOM. DECAY. DEFORM. DAMNATION.
No more body, no more cohesion—these were the objectives.
As these hands narrowly missed Swishy’s body or grazed against the side of his gourd, a flash of their effects settled into him. A sizzling, a searing, a melting. The effects differed but produced one common result: Swishy grew more blackwheat with each encounter.
The intelligent curses waited, calming down. They silenced themselves, even folding their hands, interlocking them in patient gestures.
They’d try again later when Swishy was unsuspecting.
And it was that silence that set Swishy’s spirit abuzz with disquiet and anticipation. The feathers dragged him along the land while the hands were pliant and polite. They knew of Swishy’s unease and had intuited that he was most bothered by the lack of stimuli. With nothing to respond to, Swishy was tasked with preparing for anything. All options, all manners of dangers, were on the noiseless table. As Swishy waited for the inevitable assault, Ruby flew beyond the feathers and hands, chasing down Swish-minis. He couldn’t see her but his mind told him. Each drawn-out demise chipped at his composure. Ruby aimed to take his mind, heart, and reaction time.
The boy’s soul whimpered for the first time since the battle.
And the curses knew it. The pairs of clasped hands fidgeted from excitement, rubbing their fingertips over their knuckles or tapping rhythms against the back of their nails.
Let him squirm! The curses said. He’s dying inside. He’s cooking for us! See how his soul boils! This is prime grade, exactly what Ruby had promised! With the body gone, his heart will be there for the taking!
The hush returned as he passed through the feathers, the folded hands, the crushing aura of unkind darkness.
Hunger informed everything they did. It was a miracle for the curses to be so patient but they were guided by the restrained aura of their queen. Ruby’s soul darted through the skies, chasing the straw fairies, moving gradually to pin Swishy down. She knew that they’d come from his rake, that by torturing his mind she was also stealing gold from what was once his weapon. He’d find straw again but knew that gold still came at a premium.
By hurting his mind, she was restricting his gold. Ruby was a wise mistress, one who played the long game to perfection.
Swishy simply lay there, devising his reversal.
For now, though, he suffered.
And he was okay with that.
Acceptance, endurance, and resilience were traits of all scarecrows and guardians, at least the kind that he aimed to be.
Those things came with risks.
[Pile]. [Mist]. [Goldie]. Swishy used each of these techniques in tandem, releasing his body first, then his spirit, before collecting them into bite-sized scarecrows. One whole scarecrow became a hive of Swish-minis.
The only parts he couldn’t break down were his gourd and heart, but these were carried by the fairies.
Swishy didn’t know where to direct the fairies but knew that ascension was the only way. Surfacing was the goal and therefore he guided his fairies to fly upward through the crush of features.
The hands activated then, grasping for him, but the fairies slipped between Ruby’s countless fingers.
Swishy sickened of dying inside. He piloted the dolls as if he were the wind itself. Dying wasn’t a fate for him—that’s what he at least told himself as he soared through the shadows. There was a surface somewhere. His current smallness made his journey that much more vast. Patience, patience, patience. And the shreds of calmness his spirit cobbled together.
His fairies surfaced.
A flume of feathers and hands splashed through the miasma—but missed their marks.
He discovered that his Goldies had changed. The sprites were dark and frayed, a product of voodoo, something that Swishy lost the means to suppress. Each face was expressionless. Their eyes were protruding buttons, no light passing through the weaves. And their body language was slackened, lazy flies barely clinging to life.
But interspersed through the black fairies, there were some Goldie’s still, rare stars in his abyss.
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And together, the Swish hive shouldered the load of his pumpkin head and heart. While the gourd dragged upward by its stem and from the rind’s underside, brazenly paraded before everyone in The Last Straw, Swishy’s heart was concealed. His growing core was hidden within the doll cluster.
The Swish-minis strategically moved as a group, shielding that pulse from the world, guarding the core with utmost priority.
“Hide, you guys,” he instructed his teeny selves.
The Swish-minis did what their main consciousness told them to do, zipping within branch clusters and bird nests and bee hives. Some wedged themselves between cracks in the tree trunks. The darkest of them clung to the undersides of branches and leaves, melding into the shadows. Others stuck close to Swishy’s gourd, hiding in its jack-o-lantern holes, waiting at the edge of the lips and eyes for Ruby’s return.
Ruby flew above the swarm, studying it before deciding how best to pick them off.
“Sneaky, sneaky,” she said. “Even now, after giving me so many hearts. After seeing the good I’ve done with such blessings, you still are playing keep away with that which belongs to—not you—but us. Does your greed know any bounds? Must I teach you the spirit of sharing?”
A wind carried her up to the fairies. Aura blazed from her body, weighing on the sprites.
But they weren’t alone.
V-o-O-d-o-O-o-o-o snaked among them, that serpent wrapping around Ruby’s body and then becoming diffuse.
Ruby eyed the mist warily, then realized its nature.
“Dark boy, is that you?”
The [Mist] part of his technique had surfaced, fueled from his pain. His serpent had grown. The dying moments of his dolls were prominent contributions. The instances played continuously through his mind in a constant reel. No processing had been done. Only shock and anguish. And the humiliation of having been eaten.
His left hand, a phantom of its form, now solidified around Ruby’s neck. While his right hand formed with a charred rake.
Znitchy—in the form of golden rake sprites, half the amount as many as when he’d started—returned with the greatest of passion, merging into the new weapon.
Yes, it’s our time! Ruby will feel me! My spite, my hate!
“What a greeting,” Ruby said, staring at the incomplete Swishy, an ethereal choker.
Swishy squeezed hard, watching her go blue in the face even though she didn’t look panicked in the slightest. Her responses her physiological, not any sign that she was losing or damaged or even close to dying.
“What a way to treat your mother…”
A right-handed stab into Ruby’s stomach, one, twice, then many times.
But the impact of a body was only felt the first time. The subsequent stabbing was dulled by a spree of shadows hopping away from the teeth, splashing, rippling, casting sprayed droplets into the air and onto Swishy’s soul.
With each attack, Swishy became darker. His physical form had returning in chunk, an unintentional use of [Scarecrow]. Blackwheat packed around his ghostliness. His individual strikes offered one body part at a time. Leg. Arm. Leg. Wing. Arm. Stomach, chest, and…
No heart.
And that realization resulted in a stabbing fury.
Ruby’s shadows sprayed and sprayed. Swishy had turned her into black rain.
Then she disappeared.
Even the ocean of hands receded into the proper cast shadows of objects. The true laws of physics returned as the darkness retracted. Now the brightness of the garden, every species of tree, every enchanted trick of straw, gleamed with divinity and beauty. Wishwillows sighed in relief. Even the everytrees straightened their trunks, having cowered from conflict. But the nature had relaxed. Within the next few moments, the straw stalks swayed from the air, no longer stiffened in fright.
The land was gorgeous, a preview of a Ruby-less world.
Meanwhile Swishy’s swarm fluttered in the night, unsettled within the calm skies. They looked at Swishy and his knew growth of blackwheat, his malice and terror.
”Sorry, guys,” Swishy said. “I understand if you don’t want to come back.”
His minis floated around, helpless and small, listening to the rustling sounds of their wings. More of the hive gathered together, staring at each other. Most were afraid to stir. Only a few made significant movements—those carrying the heart nub.
They simply passed the core between the fairies, a constant rotation to make it difficult to find and steal in case Ruby warped back.
Beat, beat, beat.
The pulse was faster and faster, harder for the fairies to hold.
Don’t drop it, please don’t drop it, Swishy pleaded with himself.
Ruby, wherever she was, released a thunderous, echoing laughter.
(…)
Swishy watched the Swish-minis fly away with his heart. He did so for a while. He felt bad for them. As a whole, Swishy was used to bearing the burden of banes, being a shield, a protector. But the dark sprites worried him. He’d failed them. They were him. But he’d never gotten into the habit of thinking of his creations as being him, belonging to him.
The sprites were cursed because of him.
He waved as they fluttered off, hoping that he didn’t come off as too apologetic, as someone who’d wronged and abandoned them. “Come home,” he mouthed to them. “Just take your time, I’m sorry. We’ll fix this.”
But the dolls were the part of him that feared that there was no fix. Still, they carried the heart away, disappearing into the clouds.
The boy was familiar with spending and offering hearts, but relinquishing it…it was a lot for him.
But Swishy would do anything to protect it. And this was yet another method to keep Ruby’s hands away from it. A memory of Ruby’s crumb-feeding of the shadow hands seared his mind. There were many flecks that the black ocean continued to find and fight over, and he felt it each time another one was subsumed.
Like with the straw sprites, Swishy remained in sorrowful tune with all his displaced parts.
There was much that he’d done to protect it and letting it go was the latest tactic, and the scariest one.
For now, he felt the tingling of his inner chest, empty yet radiant with the remnants of Trey’s [Heart Armor] casing.
His phantom beats started to leave him. Each time a heartbeat happened, the heart armor inside him flared in light. But those lights dimmed gradually, their heat reducing from flame to simmer, and from simmer to room temperature—perhaps no temperature at all.
His straw fairies went higher and higher, frosting over from the cold. Their wings stuggled. Their limbs stiffened. And yet they ascended, working hard to survive. Everyone was brave. Everyone carried weight. And that redoubled Swishy’s DETERMINATION—because he wasn’t the only one that had it. There were many out there, in Straw Village and beyond, that’d traverse time and distance and ice for a chance to depose Ruby.
A numbed pulse interrupted his thoughts. His freezing heart slowed to arrest.
“My, my, you make things so easy for me. If Myst couldn’t play keep away with me, then what chance do you have?” Ruby’s voice but not her body.
But her darkness swirled over Swishy. Patches of it flared and vanished like a heart itself. Her rhythm was consistent and it took a moment for Swishy to understand that she was warping. [Adieu] over and over, much like what Trey had done, boosting herself into the skies after his vulnerable and frost-wracked sprites.
The woman warped so fast that she didn’t bother to reintegrate.
She was fog. She was cloud. She was mist…the new Myst. And now she vigorously flexed those powers.
Swishy flew after her, surprisingly fast, catching up enough to throw his rake.
Znitchy formed sprites at each side of the rake, scarecrows that drove the attack after Ruby’s weaving path. They homed in on her but were too slow. No raw speed would outdo a teleport, especially Ruby’s. With a frustrated grunt, Znitchy burst into sprites and returned to Swishy, regrouping.
I can’t get her! You do it!
Swishy stared in horror, seeking a solution, a miracle inside.
”It’s mine, Swishy. This heart and the next. And the next. And the NEXT after that. You are our future. Accept this honor. You’ve solved hunger. Congratulations, boy.”
She reached toward the Swish-minis with a hand that was half flesh and half shadow. Her ambitions had made her strong, changing her. Wind gathered around her palm, the start of a suction to vacuum the sprites in.
Checkmate. The boy couldn’t reach her. Not through normal means. But as the panic worked through his blackwheat, an idea came. As he was always hurting, always sprouting with sorrow and curses, Ruby carried her own hurt. There was a girl inside, hungry and wanting. One that Ruby never knew how to care for.
The weakness, he’d found it.
He telepathized a simple instruction to the sprites: “Split up. Split everything.”
And so the sprites fluttered in divergent paths, breaking the heart apart, strand by strand. As his seed unraveled and the darkness took hold of Swishy. A strange thing happened to him as the chasm inside roared onward. It settled into place with the authoritarian violence that so characterized them. But the curses said nothing. Easing into Swishy, they allowed him to lead. Dark gods knew best.
Ruby, with her semi-phantom hand outstretched, watched the heart vanish before her eyes. “No! Stop that! Why must you deprive me!”
The sprites, too, burst into crumb clusters, their black dust imperceptible in shadowed skies. Swishy’s dark fairies had done him one better. They broke themselves, risking nothing.
[Scarecrow].
Swishy chanted this over and over, calling his dark sprites back to him.
”You’re not dead, you’re not dead, you’ll never die on me, and you’ll never die in me. Now come back, come home, please!”
The boy flew toward the ground, sensing his dust with his desperate attention.
Ruby’s shadow hands made their return, blooming from trees and rocks and foliage, striking at Swishy’s wings.
But he weaved around all opposition, all obstruction. Nothing would keep him from his dolls. And in seconds, he found them. They were in a tree hollow, hiding, healing. Black grains slid on the trunk of a wishwillow, traveling little peppers.
Swishy stuck his whole head into the whole, panting, anxious, and smiling. The boy looked like a dust ball, the strands of himself gathered in a formless cloud. He offered a hugging gesture.
And the partial minis jumped into his body, using [Pile] to merge into him.
[Adieu].
Ruby stepped from a portal behind Swishy, clenching her broom.
Step, step, step.
Her footfalls crunched over the dead leaves.
“I imagine you’ll sound like this when I’m done with you—you and your ugly minions.”
Shadow hands elongated from the trees, making fists.
Ruby’s inner girl—she was in bad shape, laying on her side, crying.
HUNGER…its aura curdled in Ruby’s abdomen.
Swishy had lost heart. But had hurt Ruby too. He thought it’d hurt, to lose that heart, but the battle produced a special feeling: exhilaration. It’d worked, it’d worked—Ruby was hurting. Ruby had been subjected to loss. He firmed his grip on the rake and sensed that Znitchy felt the same. Satisfied purrs came from his soul weapon.
A breeze picked up as Ruby drew close.
Wrath, wraiths, and winds—their collective menace stirred in the atmosphere, an inventive destruction looming over the scarecrow.
"You're a sad lady, you know that."
"I do..."
The look she gave Swishy activated his guilt. He knew he wasn't responsible for her sorrow. That wasn't what Ruby was getting at. Woes and wraiths were intertwined from birth. Sometimes the world wasn't a good place, not by any means.
"But it can be better," Swishy gazed at the HEAVEN all around, the gorgeous islands. Yet Ruby's dark words snaked around the masses "Once the fog clears."
"These are things I carry with me, not just for myself, but the banes of others too. I know right and wrong. Good and bad. Death and death by a slightly lesser degree. Everything we gain, we die less and less. But you don't die. You have hearts to spare. Hearts for us all. And yet you refuse to save us. You hate us! We brought you here and now you're here, judging our suffering."
DEATH-TYRANNY-ENVY hummed amid the soaring islands, speeding and speeding, whipping the wraiths above into a frenzied storm.
"I don't hate you..."
Ruby guffawed.
"I just can't love you guys the way you want."
"It's not about love, it's about what we need." Ruby's broom gained bristles with every word. She quaked and her weapon absorbed the spite.
The girl inside clarified, an ectoplasmic aspect but her eyes were clear and sullen, almost human, almost.
"No, no, it's about love."
"I won't hear any more of this."
"Without love, what are you even making? Do you think I'm a savior without love? Do you think my feelings don't matter in my magic? You're a little delusional. And I give a wraith that grace. But you're stupid, too. All the ways that darkness can bend and you haven't picked up a thing."
Ruby raised her broom.
Swishy flourished in blackwheat.
His mother wasn’t done with him.
And that meant the V-o-O-d-o-O-o-o-o wasn’t either. As much as Swishy had lost, his profusion of artillery was infinite.
“[Stake Storm],” Swishy called, feeding his rake into the ground. As he pressed downward, his many totem-like stakes ruptured the ground, erupting beneath Ruby.
Ruby watched walls of darkness flow all around her. With a similar speed as her winds, Swishy’s blackness surged to towering heights.
The towers thinned and sharpened.
“Oh no, I’m being killed!” Ruby wryly laughed. “Fine, kill me then.” She lightened up, pirouetting around the spikes, her feet lifted over baby winds.
Ruby’s broom, too, beyond her grip, also danced around Swishy’s stakes, spinning like a top. And then it levitated into Ruby’s hand, its blackwheat spreading wider in its prodigious grandeur.
The spikes continued, missing Ruby.
She waltzed through stake hell with the ease of a woman who’d known no other home.
“If the Stormcellar couldn’t kill me, how could you?”
“Witches died at the stake. I’m sure I’ll figure it out.”
Ruby’s jaw had set with diamond hardness. Her dance ceased and a stake blasted through her—between the hips, the gut, the chest and head. But she dissolved into smoke and black sand.
Like a proper Cearthen emissary, she regenerated.
Darkness first, then the flesh, just as Ruby had always dreamed.