Swishy rested; Swishy recharged.
He stole a moment of calm amidst the burgeoning chaos, brief seconds to steady himself and recollect lost energies. The soul weariness weighed upon him. The closest experience to this sensation was his initial loss of heart, his naïve gift to the charming Ruby.
But he'd learned himself since then. He'd become used to having a heart again. He'd felt it inside, beating and beating, a precious engine that converted his emotions into palpable magic. When he used magic, his core shrunk, and during idleness the energy returned to him in a passive and consistent recovery of physical heart. He navigated the magic rules which others considered arcane. To him, though, his cardiac structure was basic arithmetic.
His heart came in fives—that's how he'd come to think of it. The boy pictured this as a stylized health gauge, one heart, five sections: top left, top right, middle left, middle right, and the tapered bottom-most core.
[https://imgur.com/1aoZ80H.jpeg]
Each significant use of magic drained roughly one of these pieces from himself, a fifth of his heart squeezed through his vein-like roots and pushed through his hands, manifesting as enchanted straw.
He was healing now, recovering his heart pieces. The straw fortress came from environmental foraging, no cardiac drain involved. But the fortification and shaping of the dome drained him with every reconstruction, every instance of supplying his own wheat to tighten the weaves.
His heart grew, nestling comfortably within his rebuilt body.
The thack-thacks of the snitchtalon barrage continued, holes successfully penetrating the walls. They faithfully set to tearing down the shield, aiming to harm Swishy in any way they could. Where their physical strength had currently proved insufficient, their barbed words always hit their mark, ghosting through all walls, all barriers, phantom toxins aimed at Swishy's consciousness.
Do you want to know a secret? We'll tell you because we're kind. Because we've always been truthful with you, as you well know. Trey is in the skies as we speak, a wingless tumble toward the cold cobbled ground. And he can't splat like you. He can only go crush-crush and crunch-crunch. I wish you could hear it. I wish you could see it. So you'll know that you'll never get your friend back. He'll die. And when his soul escapes that body, we'll find a way to capture it. Ruby is a talent. Ruby can use him in her employ forever.
Swishy blinded his mind with gold, combating the attack on his psyche. He thought about Clayhearth, about how he wanted to go there one day. The city would be full of gold jewelry, golden toys, golden buildings. He'd walk down the busy streets, bustling with people who looked like Trey. A Trey over here, a Trey over there, and several Trey's down the way. And there were female Trey's, too, with softer features and longer hair. The scarecrow's mind was a pure paradise, golden and lustrous and kind.
He's falling and falling. And the zeppelin is falling on top of him. Can you believe it? He'll die once. And then be properly eviscerated in the crash-landing. Nothing will remain. That little heart inside, you can keep it. We'll watch your devastation, watch you shrivel up. You got a full heart now, but it'll shave away into a dried, useless kernel. You'll become dead straw with a dead friend. A match made in abyss.
The scarecrow's golden vision eroded from the outside in, darkness collapsing his Clayhearth daydreams. Everything wondrous and lovely and hopeful and kind flaked apart like damaged drywall. Swishy could feel the peril in the sky. His soul frequency detected an incoming Trey, a screaming and careening soul quickly approaching a final moment of destructive impact.
And Swishy's innate radar also detected a dark presence plunging towards Trey, the vehement progress of snitchtalons who wanted nothing more than to ensure the Clayborne's end.
Amidst the thack-thack sounds were cacophonous laughter, a downpour of taunting caws at Swishy's impending loss. The birds were talented in the ways of harm, in knowing exactly how to ruin him bodily and spiritually. Swishy's fear swelled more than ever before. The flock knew how to crack him open like a pistachio and eat his heart out. They knew how to penetrate his charming hut defense by poisoning the soul inside, withering his fighting spirit with premature grief. Swishy wanted to cry. His soul erratically pulsed, rippling with despair.
An infiltration of blackwheat commenced. The dark straw pressed his insides, and cracked within his weaves. The gold cure Swishy worked for was dipped in a primordial tar, a soul-deep taint that drained his strength.
As the attack continued, small punctures in the straw wall grew into gaping windows of doom. Yet Swishy doubled down on his will to save Trey. The boy battled the despair with further hopes: the cardiac glossary, the Jesus piece, the golden heart he knew he had within his chest. He'd worked so hard to arrive at this point. This suffering was earned. This resistance meant that he was doing the right thing for him and Trey and the city.
Gold! Inside I will be gold!
The cards, the lessons, he'd already earned what he needed to see him through. He drew his favorite spells from the deep with his organic stitching, two words that were so dazzling and clean: DETERMINATION & HEART.
Was it an enchantment? Was it strength of will? Swishy briefly ruminated upon these questions as the malignant blackwheat faded within. His inner network felt light, a balm to the soul. He calmly took stock of the situation. Trey was falling—but he trusted him. The snitchtalons could break him—but he trusted himself.
I got this...I can do this...This is just a mini-boss. It's not a wrathraven. It's not Ruby. It's just a flock of fake birds.
A new word sizzled through his body, releasing the cracking sounds of straw gone to flame. But his soul felt strong. It was a good, empowering feeling, comforting in all ways. The intent bloomed inside him: FAITH.
The snitchtalons broke through the shield, their entire faces fitting through the holes, their beaks inching and snapping at Swishy's face. The birds cawed their victory.
This is the end, stupid boy! The delicious, delicious end!
Swishy calmly armed himself. He flexed his hands over the cobblestone and drew up a brand-new rake, gleaming gold-straw from handle to prongs.
His heart constricted, a fifth of it drawn from his body for the weapon cost.
And then he healed himself again, holding a hand over his organic wall and draining it. With the combined forces of the snitchtalon attacks and Swishy's self-cure, the straw shield withered and depleted and finally blasted away into atomized blacks and golds. But Swishy was poised. He gripped the rake loosely, comfortable in conflict. The boy was ready, a wizard with the prongs.
Five heart pieces and a gold-straw rake in possession, he ushered in the next round of battle by lowering his stance, compressing his center of gravity, and unleashing a dizzying 360 of a swing.
"GOLD HURRICANE", he yelled, an off-the-cuff freestyle. His inner gamer sparkled.
The attack transformed mid-swing, the rake prongs bulking in length and width, the gold-straw releasing a luminous aura blinded the birds, each snitchtalon squeezing their eyes such as the golden hurricane slammed into them. One sweeping motion and 16, 17, 18 snitchtalons down—while several others grounded themselves as they rubbed their blasted eyes with their wing tips.
"Hehe," Swishy gloated. "Spin to win!"
Back to the business at hand: Swishy ran up to the grounded birds. The snitchtalons writhed in blindness, distracted by their stinging eyes as Swishy scooped them up, one by one by one by one, eating them in a spree. More snitchtalons began to attack, their item rain continuing, but Swishy dodged every rock, his awareness refreshed and honed. Other items were thrown, acts of spiteful desperation as the scarecrow grew closer to The Curseworks—garbage mostly, apple cores and orange peels and trash can lids. The birds launched anything they could find, but nothing could stop Swishy.
And then an odd piece of trash descended, a thin drifting paper, heavily wrinkled but easily and annoyingly read: $18.74.
But that didn't inflict so much as a hitch in his step. Swishy couldn't be harmed. He couldn't let them price his worth. If the snitchtalons had their choice, the boy's parts would've cost a lot less.
"$18.74 is still something!" Swishy yelled into the dark. "But what about you? Aren't I eating you for free?" He tossed the contents of his soul whips into his mouth, feathers and birds and a random Straw Glizzy he'd grabbed off from a food kiosk.
The boy rushed on, grabbing the injured birds and stray feathers with his wriggling tendrils, drawing everything towards him. His mouth was a black hole, absorbing and breaking down the plumage, which added to his quickly augmenting wing. The wing was still winglet-sized, scaled perfectly to his petite body, but fully and fluffier and more angel-like—dark angel, that is. He could flex it, too, flapping it, releasing a wind of shadowed dust. Magic. Control. Hope.
It's real! I can do this! I only need another...
One wing for celebration but two for flight. Two.
What can I do? What's the move here...
But Swishy quickly returned to the reality of peril. He sensed Trey in the sky, swiftly plummeting in the direction of...himself.
The scarecrow peered at the Trey missile overhead, bathed in a golden aura as he flew in an arc, a soulful comet trail leaking rays of glitter across the night. But a darkness was with Trey, too, the inkiness of the altar riding on his shoulder. Swishy didn't know what was going on. The falling, the flying, the oddity of his best friend's aura. Swishy was scared. He wanted to scream out. But the FAITH stayed his quaking soul.
The magic, the witchery, the sight of his friend—all of these meant that Trey had it in him to survive. An ominous darkness had attached itself to him. The snitchtalons were chasing after him, having failed to catch him all this time. And the zeppelin, huge and overshadowing, slowly progressed over Swishy and towards The Curseworks like a cloud of stone. Despite all Swishy's fears, he beamed with pride.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
The blimp LEDs were upon him again, its too-bright letters consuming him like floodlights. Even so, Swishy was able to make out the illiterate nonsense: DFJGJERODFGJDF.
Trey knows words. Trey is in trouble!
He rooted for his friend and stood in place, somewhat in the crash zone but uncaring for his own self. He was waiting for this, a reunion with his friend-brother-father. The scarecrow eyes were alight, neglecting his tension.
"Come back, my friend!"
Swishy did what he did best. He opened his arms, awaiting a hug from his meteoric friend. The blue aura radiated from his heart and traveled outwards through his arms and to the tips of his fingers. The boy T'd in a holy and lovely way.
"Trey, come back!"
Trey noticed him then, his soul-stirring, his soul...noticing Swishy. The scarecrow was perplexed but excited by the new development. They could see each other now, soul to soul. They at least existed in the same realm. The brotherhood crested within the boy and crashed through him in a fulfilling wash of emotion. He never imagined that they'd both become one and the same. And as Swishy's soul spoke to Trey, wordlessly communicating to fall faster, to hurry up and return to his side, Trey's soul actually spoke back, Fall faster? Really, idiot? Save me, start with that.
Swishy melted inside, so glad to be scolded once more. His heart warmed but drained as well. His bid to save his friend was finally being enacted as he drew the environmental straw towards him once more, picking up the former bits of his straw shield. But instead of a fortress, he drew the wheat into his own torso, transforming into a round and humongous landing zone. There Swishy was, a magical T, soft and bulbous in the middle. He'd made himself a target, the softest hug that there ever was. He named this one, too: BOY BALLOON.
Trey screamed through the air as he targeted the scarecrow.
Swishy soul-shouted back, "Right here, right here! You can't miss, I'm fat!"
To which Trey replied: "Boy! The zeppelin is falling too! Don't you see it? It's going to crush us both!"
"Okay but let me catch you first. The zeppelin is a later problem."
"It's a soon problem!" Trey insisted.
"Okay, soon, whatever. Just fall already."
So Trey did.
ZIP. Trey swam on the air, panicking—but faster. His body wanted to descend with more speed, to die quicker, but Swishy after his dozens of air splats had by this point learned that fall speed maxes out. Physics was a wonderful and mystifying thing, so he'd learned it with his body.
ZOOM. A strange darkness coated Trey's feet, much like the blackwheat, an oily and slick licorice texture flowing from his soles. That too, did little to change his current state of fall. He adjusted his body angle slightly. Instead of landing on his head he'd crash shoulder first instead. Better, but not by much when considering the unforgiving mechanics of the human body. The organics were determined to be weak. People were programmed in very specific ways, the solid bone structure being one of those ways.
ZLIDE. Trey vanished like a dying star. The bright light in the dark suddenly came to be gone. No Trey, no stars, no hope—momentarily at least.
Swishy had a talent for this kind of soul math, and quickly applied an intuitive understanding to the novel sights of Trey's spellcraft. The young man slipped through a dimensional portal, swimming as opposed to falling, and then re-entered the physical world after a third of a second. It was an honest-to-goodness teleport, video game fast travel. Once you imagined your destination, then the mind and magic would put you there.
He knew that Trey had used the same spell in a three-stage progression. ZIP, ZOOM, ZLIDE: one spell, three stages. His older brother's soul appeared unsettled, rattling from the unfamiliar stress. It was a new spell, one which he charged up with successive uses.
Trey didn't die. He survived, having ZLID himself into a bale of hay—Swishy's ball pit of a chest.
Swishy remained a perfect T, a refined transcendence as he now found no reason to move. Trey's confirmed safety put the boy at peace, the most he's known in the past month.
"Trey! You're back!"
"Swishy! You're...big."
And then Swishy deconstructed his balloon self, spilling the straw—spilling Trey, who clumsily rolled through the wheat pile.
Swishy read his friend's soul, the GAME OVER image drifting through the scarecrow's mind. He needed something large to stop the zeppelin, its size and gravity and promised destruction. He stared at his bare hands, evaluated the reserves of his heart, and chose to pay the cost to save themselves.
The sky darkened above him, swallowing them as if a building were leaning over them. The zeppelin drew closer and closer, a sheet of life-squashing blackness primed to reap them.
Swishy bent down and placed his hands flush against the ground, flooding the cobblestone with his intent.
The heart reduced in a progressive drain, a faucet drawing from his heart. The ground itself populated with roots and energy, saplings emerging through the stone ground. The cloud-tappers came next, and then the sky piercers. The farther the trees were from Swishy, the higher they grew. He created a ramp of sorts, a gradation of organic tree trunks to halt the blimp's momentum.
The falling zeppelin caught on the first sky-piercers, bending their massively thick trunks, getting caught on the freshly conceived forest area that led to Swishy in an organic line. The sudden stoppage of the aircraft caught the snitchtalons off guard, who then began to circle and circle, dodging the branches in the trees and escaping the ignited Straw City.
After a couple moments of the airship's weight cracking the branches underneath...KABOOM.
The zeppelin exploded, setting the freshly conjured tree line ablaze. The flames crawled along the tree bark, interacting strangely with the Swishy-grown vegetation. Many of the trees were filled with the standard autumn faire of red-oranges and yellows, foliage which ignited and dissolved to ashes. But among the normal vegetation were the gold-straws and blackwheat that appeared in patches, both of which refused to break down: the golds became a flowing ochre blaze, a ghostly presence adorning the branch tips like glowing torches. And the blackwheat produced its own odd flame, flowing shadows that left physical tree unharmed—but remained on the surface as an overlay of curses.
The shadowclaws which escaped from the zeppelin had forgotten their mission to eliminate Trey. The destruction spooked them into a mass retreat. Some birds turned their heads to longingly behold the gold-straw blaze, yet feared the mystical fires.
Swishy was exhausted. The tree cost was immense, reducing his heart to an acorn at best. The abyss inside rolled through his cavernously empty chest, a tornado-ing ennui that awaited the regrowth of his heart. The boy's gourd blues presented as dizzied swirls, turning and turning like the decorative cocoas that were popular with morning coffee crowds.
Meanwhile, Trey was on all fours in the hay, struggling to his knees—so Swishy quickly gathered himself. The scarecrow was fine with displaying fatigue. He hoped to hide the emptiness, though, concealing his heart health from his newly soul sensitive friend. There was something about loss of heart that he didn't want anybody to see. Why this bothered him, he didn't know. But the exposure bugged him all the same.
Trey then pushed himself up, carrying Swishy's precious contraband. He raised a tattered book to his face and quizzically read the cover, "The Heart Arts: A Cardiothoracic Glossary for Inexperienced Caretakers and Distressed Patients...Swishy, you know your heart isn't anything like this, right?"
"But yours is, Trey. Isn't it crazy? All those wrinkles and holes you have."
"Well, you're not wrong."
Swishy studied his friend closely. Trey ran his fingers over the cover, slid his fingers down the spine, and flipped open the pages—absorbing the cardiac diagrams with his gaze. Trey wasn't reading how a human normally read, but instead deciphered the spiritual energies. The scarecrow's struggle was seared into the book, his memories branded in soul.
The text was not a mere text, not after its journey through the library, the night, the madness of beast and man alike. Swishy and Trey saw the book for its true form, its hard-won evolution: a tome.
"Now you can get words from the altar! Did I do good?"
Trey clutched the book to his chest. "Yeah, bro, you did amazingly."
Swishy shuddered in comfort but worried for his friend. The young man's soul appeared worn around the edges, having fought hard and grown fatigued.
"Straw-chew?" The boy asked.
Before Trey could answer Swishy floated a wad of gold-straw into Trey's mouth. Trey was caught off guard but chewed nonetheless, accepting the wheat's calming properties and soul replenishment. Swishy hugged his friend and buzzed from the feeling of Trey's long arms wrapping around him.
Trey reached into Swishy's shoulder and plucked out the cross. "You kept this, too!"
"It fell when they snatched you."
"Ah, that's unbecoming of me." He shook his head as he put the cross back on.
"Yeah, I know. You should be embarrassed."
Trey ruffled Swishy's straw hair, "Shut up, you swish too much."
The boys laughed, sinking into their shared moment of sanctuary.
And then Trey held the book up over his shoulder, handing it off to the mysterious shadows which clung to his person. The darkness grabbed the book and vanished it. The effects were immediate, the golden glitter merging into Trey's skin, traveling through his bloodstream, entering and fortifying his pounding heart. The mysterious magic had been delivered and consumed, the effects unknown.
But though Swishy should've been relieved, he was irked by the long, low laugh emitted from the shadows. "Whose the peeve that took the book?"
"She calls herself Myst."
"You mean, the altar," Swishy accused with all due wariness.
"Nice to meet you, too," Myst said.
"I don't like you."
"Brave talk for a boy so...spent." She stared into Swishy's face, knowing and obnoxiously wise. Myst materialized then, assuming a miniaturized human silhouette that walked across Trey's shoulder, gliding along his collarbone with a seductive stride. "Poor, poor boy. He heals, he drains. He heals again and then drains again. This is no kind of life."
"That's called humanity," Trey snapped.
Myst laughed. "I said what I said."
But Swishy's fatigue caught up with him again. He shook the cartoony dizzy stars from his head, wheat bits flying about from all the sustained damage. He clapped his cheeks, a comically hollow sound ringing from his gourd.
"Wow," Myst said. "We have ourselves a drummer."
Swishy sighed but smiled. It wasn't often—or ever—that a peeve possessed an actual sense of humor. The curses normally just made fun of themselves or complained.
"Hi, I'm Swishy. Are you Trey's new friend?"
Trey held out his hands in protest, "Hey, hey, hey, I wouldn't say all that—"
"We're friends, yes. He's promised to me."
"A promise? That's friendly." He eyed her suspiciously, his ocular blues condensing to angled slits.
"Yes, we made a deal." Myst casually stated this, but her darkness amplified in barely contained pulses, alternating between a seed of abyss to a blooming door-sized chaos. A slight vacuuming energy drew him towards her. Myst was a substantial being, an ominously endless one too.
"So you're not a friend." Swishy swished contemptuously, a shoulder-turning scoff.
"Told ya," Trey stupidly grinned, holding back his laughter so as not to offend Myst too badly.
"Hard to get, I see." Myst appeared behind Swishy, a clone of her miniature self, caressing the back of the scarecrow's neck with a shadowy finger.
The boy froze, wishing to retreat from Myst's touch. He stepped away from her, but the shadows remained right where she'd touched him, infiltrating him, joining the chest cavity chasm he housed within. He paused, knowing he'd feel it soon...and then he did. Myst' phantom presence took the tiny remnants of his spent heart within her fingertips, rubbing her digits over its textured surface, filling him with darkness.
His heart strongly pulsed, its thumping rhythm intensifying by the second. The shadows were regrowing his heart: one piece came in, then the second, and finally the last three swiftly propagating into place.
"There's time," Myst said. "It's not midnight yet...Now go get her." And then she shoved his back, and Swishy, fretful but restored, sprinted off to escape those deadly fingertips. As their contact ceased, a thin black smoke trail curled around upon the back of Swishy's wing. He felt a couple more feathers coming in, another unwanted gift from the accursed Myst.
"Thanks..." Swishy managed before bolting off—Trey sprinting after him.
THE CURSEWORKS was before them, a half block away. Their progress was unimpeded and quiet. The pair rushed onwards, Swishy's fast and short strides keeping pace with Trey's elongated gallops. Each moment of progress shaved the stress from Swishy. He cherished the reunion with his friend—even if this were a precursor to terror. He peered ahead at the scarred bark of the plaza sign. An ancient madness broiled within that plaza but for now, he had fun. Perhaps the last fun he'd ever, ever have.
Trey shut his eyes and brewed his magic. ZIP surfaced through the air, blooming, bursting, a golden glitter that doubled their speed. Near instantly, they'd arrived at the entrance—and the profound chill entered them, linking the boys in terror. Their steps felt heavier, the shadows clinging to their feet like mud. Even the cobblestone refused to emit its trademark clomp sounds. This world was new. This world, Swishy immediately sensed, was a pitiless altar.
Trey reached for Swishy's hand. "You good?"
Swishy grabbed it, his straw weaves pressing into the folds of Trey's palm. "With you, always!"
Myst cut irritated slits into her darkness—a moment which Swishy and Trey laughed at. So Myst joined in. Swishy figured that Myst had something to laugh at, too, because laughter was a good and soul-warming thing.
The boys crossed beyond The Curseworks borderline, hand in hand, as Myst's womanly upper body and gaseous lower half drifted after them. The darkness welcomed Swishy. The darkness welcomed Trey.
And the darkness welcomed Myst most of all.