[CRUMPLE]—an attack that Swishy’s [Chasm] curses blocked by soaring around his gourd like a helmet.
The boy came face to face with the intents, galled but not surprised by the horrors he’d grown inside him: PANIC, REVULSION, NIGHTMARE, LOATHING. He hated how so much ugliness became integral to his being. The chasm allowed him to see inside himself, the horrible parts at least, which, once unrecognizable to him, now seemed more like a more natural, consistent form of him.
More [Crumple] spells occurred, slamming against his spirit helmet. The dimensional collapse failed to reach Swishy but elicited a blaring commotion from his protective curses. You won’t end him! You won’t end us! We might be nothing but you won’t make us less!
The scarecrow could hardly take the simultaneous screams of his sorrows, and the E-squad stacked their own shouts atop the pile.
You can’t have the heart! You can’t have our souls! Who are you to colonize our stomachs? Everybody eats! We’ve eaten this already—get your own!
“You’ve eaten me too!” Swishy called out, near tears.
Then you, too, are OURS!
Unintelligible wails followed—both the E-squad and the oncoming waves of newly swallowed souls. A blue-black avalanche chased after Swishy, gaining on him fast.
Meanwhile, the [Crumple] spells floated through the air with undetectable hair-triggers. As soon as Swishy brushed past a patch of air, the spells buckled the realm, unleashing a crushing trap.
Stop! In four voices, four cadences of fright.
Swishy had caught up to the heart pieces, flying in their center. But every time he reached out, a [Crumple] activated and he had to snap his hand back.
The closer they got to the core, the more desperate the E-squad became. Their attacks on the outside world were elegant, of artistic quality to say the least, but their current skills were crude and dangerous. In their panic, they only shaped things for violence.
Squared auras were conjured in a net around the whirling white core, all [Crumple] spells. Some of these invisible papers were already wrinkled, the skills hastily constructed.
Swishy opened his palm and the curses took his cue—they’d deconstructed from helmet form and gathered into the boy’s hand again. He closed his hand and kneaded his finger over the winding darkness, nervous for the clash to come.
“Forward!” Swishy and his handful of allies said.
They burst through a shimmering blue pocket—and a dozen [Crumple] spells activated. The deafening crush rang out like smashed aluminum.
The scarecrow soared through a collapsing, paper-white tunnel. Air wrinkled upon his body, manifesting as crushed looseleaf.
Swishy dodged with his brittle body, slipping between the collapsing walls—but the space became smaller.
And smaller.
And smaller.
[Crumple] to both sides, [Crumple] above and below, and [Crumple] activating in his direct path. But the heart pieces were in front of him, within arm’s reach. Swishy couldn’t stop now. He wouldn’t. He refused.
The boy stretched out his rake, forking for his heart.
He grazed the [Heart Armor], sparking upon contact.
CRUMPLE, YOU TRASH!
A wall of [Looseleaf] populated, then crashed upon Swishy. He was caught in the papers, flailing his rake toward the falling heart.
[Crumple] activated, and the papers all locked around his body and hardened. Stray papers flew around his face and solidified into a helmet.
Everything darkened. Everything closed.
[PAPER BALL], the E-squad said.
There was nowhere to go. The toothpick-framed boy was stuck. His [Voodoo] rider had no physical space anymore and flowed back into his gourd, filling him with dark thoughts. Swishy expected the [Chasm] to return inside him, too, and he braced himself for the full brunt of MISERY and FROST to ravage the scarce remains of his body and psyche.
It was over. All over.
Rather than his life, he saw his failure flash before his eyes:
A piece of paper folded, then scissored around its edges, and when it was unfolded a chain of human silhouette dolls revealed themselves. They were suspiciously shaped like those he knew, a boy with Trey’s hairstyle, a row of scarecrows—and smaller ones for the kids, and a mummy with slits cut across. There was even a ghost cutout—with breasts.
(“These are nice, right?” Myst teased as she read his mind, cupping herself—but the joke couldn’t pull Swishy from his grief).
The white chasm pulled them in its massive force, tearing his paper loves to shreds.
[Chasm] returned to Swishy’s gourd; it spread through his stick-thin straw; it set his soul ablaze…
Then expanded outward, returning to a swirling orb, pushing the [Paper Ball] away. The folds unwound and reversed, parachuting upward.
Swishy was released from the [Paper Ball]—and encapsulated by the [Chasm].
We will protect you, our Lord. You have saved us and WE will save you!
The dark shield vigorously spun the cursed words into a hurricane. Swishy peered between the gaps in the shadows and watched the [Chasm] grow from within. This darkness was birthed from his suffering but now found other hurt to feed upon. He wondered where the chasm fuel came from in this howling void of a realm.
And that’s when he noticed hundreds of [Looseleaf] orbiting him, pressed firmly against his sphere—but different sheets, terrifying ones.
The papers contained rudimentary drawings of the Straw City. There were scenes of the forestry. There were everytree clearings and the entities that nestled within their hollows. Fields of straw were also depicted. There were several drawings of scarecrow parts—torn-off limbs and misshapen heads.
The [Looseleaf] drawings contained people, too, the original forms of the captured souls.
“No wonder they’re so hungry…” Swishy was awed by the portraiture. Everything the E-squad had siphoned and consumed was captured in their paper storm. The [Looseleaf] absorbed time, nutrients, and souls. The pictures screamed within the papers. Now that the [Chasm] was upon them, they saw their opportunity for release.
The souls streamed from the images, removing themselves from their 2D cage. The accursed refugees clamored for the dark hurricane. Thin tendrils that the spirits attempted to shape into arms stretched in disquieting gumminess. The amorphous entities found their desired home.
Let me in! I’m empty, always empty. I’m one of you!
Swishy’s whirlwind HOLLOW called back to them, too. The chasm happily absorbed the spirits and roared on.
And all while the realm itself crunched inward. Swishy and his dark orb stole what little the E-squad claimed as their own. While the souls were freed from their paper confines, the stomach area of the body shrank and shrank.
The vague shapes of the E-squad were apparent then, their ab region crumpling, the folds of their paper-white insides jutting and spiking and folding. They were conjoined at the rib area, which also began to pull inward, and the 4 siblings were dragged toward each other from their hunger. They’d become less on the inside and collapsed on the outside.
NO! Stop it! Our food! You’re starving us! Us and those souls are one. We’re a family!
Swishy disregarded the cries. He knew the right thing to do. He plunged toward the paper-white chasm where all the souls were drawn into. The [Looseleaf] storm was also pulled into the pasty nebula. So invisible. And so dense.
A starvation core, a powerful, powerful hunger that the E-squad all shared. One stomach, one chasm of their own.
The four quarters of his heart were drawing into the core, too, its waning light speeding away and away and away…
One by one, the white hole ate his heart.
One.
Two.
Three.
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Four.
No emphatic sound or visual effect occurred. Only light going in, light leaving.
Then the steady, feelingless whorling.
Sling gasped, her spirit quivering through Swishy’s borrowed body.
Myst was silent, too, but she extended from over the scarecrow’s shoulder, curious, perhaps concerned—or Swishy wanted her to be anyway. He’d take any support he could get.
Swishy’s eyes condensed into blue-black beads.
The [Chasm] did the same, gathering passersby spirits, [Looseleaf] refugees. More spirits—but less mass. The dark sphere condensed upon Swishy’s command, compressing into tighter and tighter springs. The boy was no longer covered by the aura. The sphere was collected into the size of a pumpkin. Then grapefruit-sized. Then down to the average mango.
And then heart-sized at last.
Swishy squeezed his fist around it, disappearing the hurt.
Sling was unintelligible by now, hissing like a zombie from the fresh infusion of anxiety. The cursed straw scorched her soul—Swishy knew because he felt the same sensation from the straw. A constant blackwheat burn sizzled and popped, yet Sling managed to overcome the possession and cry out, “Save us from The End! Save us from this nothingness!”
“She’s right, you know.” Myst reverted to a spider and crawled climbed up Swishy’s pumpkin stem. “Unless you want to be nothingness itself, then you ought to do something.”
“I’m going to make mine fight theirs.”
“Is there a logic to that? Seems rather…base.”
“I’m a bird. What else do you expect?”
“So we’re using bird excuses? You really think of everything now. Dark lords are cheeky these days…”
But Swishy stopped listening and leaned headlong into the abyss.
They’d arrived. The paper-white void callously spun.
It’s killing time! The orb curses screamed, the thousands of Swish-suffered slights flaming to life.
And then Swishy dropped his [Chasm] in.
(…)
[Chasm] against [Paper-White Void].
The scarecrow’s darkness mixed into the translucent core, creating stripes along its exterior and bleeding inward. The competing forces melded in a turbulent yin and yang. Swishy’s curses surfed along the white nebula and reached inside, searching for the spirits to drag into its flow, its community. Friends, friends! Free our friends!
Swishy, too, was dragged through the rush. He rode through the whirlpool, his remaining straw splitting apart from the force. His pumpkin head cracked and fissured and leaked its orange juices.
His grip loosened on his rake as his hand began to disintegrate, so he brought it up to his face and slowly munched.
The pumpkin pulp receded into his gourd cracks, and those damages began to close—but new nicks were lashed into his rind.
So he switched tactics—oral healing wouldn’t work. But maybe reconstruction would.
He activated [Scarecrow] and the remains of the rake handle unwound and merged into his body. The boy went from stick-thin to branch-thin, fragile, but better off. As the weapon’s golds were integrated into himself, the new straw changed to blackwheat within seconds.
The curses took over, outside and in.
Meanwhile, the spiraling path grew tighter and faster as well, drawing the boy deeper into the eye of the core.
The closer he got to the center, the more bottomless the nebula became.
Endless, endless, endless.
Calmer, though.
And quieter, too.
And, strangely, more colorful. There was a world here in the bottomless well. He drifted down into a tunnel of life, similar to the sea of souls that Trey had recently shown him. The blue-black marbles had made a return, a rush of them from below, and a waterfall from above.
Every few seconds, clusters of souls transformed into [Looseleaf] portraits. The consumed forestry now towered over Swishy, pages of woods stacked atop each other, a taped-together wallpaper flapping in the nebula wind. Shadowclaw drawings filled their ‘sky’ and rolled-up stalks of paper-mâché wheat stretched up to Swishy’s knees. Crafted scarecrows were positioned around the clearing as well, inanimate mannequins—except for the souls in their eyes, in their pleading mouths.
The boy landed.
His [Voodoo] rider had even reached a ‘floor’, a firm surface. The bottomlessness had a limit it seemed. But everything was metamorphosed into [Looseleaf]. Everything.
Swishy’s quartered heart floated around his body. He’d reached it at last. The [Heart Armor] sparked, its light fading and weakening. He was glad it didn’t break altogether. Swishy was proud of himself for that fact.
The [Chasm] outright rejoiced. Yes, yes! He must have it back. I want to live in it! I want to taste its surface!
After the brief quietude, the friction of Swishy’s [Chasm] and the E-squad’s void created a rumbling. On all sides, Swishy was once again encased, the [Looseleaf] dome collapsing…
The shadowclaw-filled sky dipped low; the crinkling woods dragged inward; and the ground buckled and elevated.
Your selfishness sickens us! You’re reinforcing our hunger! You don’t want us to eat. You don’t want Straw City to thrive. We thought we had a savior in you but what we received was the second coming of The Stormcellar. Everything Ruby has given you now aim to take.
The boy didn’t have anything to say because he agreed. He didn’t want them to eat. He didn’t want Straw City—in its current state—to thrive. He meant to hold his tongue. But the curses inside Swish-spoke with his straw, reading his spirit.
“Starve, sugar wraiths.”
RECYCLING BIN!
The entire realm at once suffused with [Paper Ball] spells. A collective crush was coming to smear Swishy’s remains into the pages, absorbing his soul into the magic-infused [Looseleaf], capturing him.
“Is this the end of our young scarecrow hero?” Myst joked.
“Are you laughing at me? Or trembling?”
“If anything, I’m trembling from excitement.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, find another straw to do your bidding when I’m gone.”
The realm collapsed.
But the [Chasm] tore through the paper-white void, stripping the magic from the [Looseleaf]—and the souls too. Everything the [Chasm] touched was absorbed, strengthening the spell, the yin outnumbering the yang.
Dark, dark, everything became so dark, sapping the bleach from the domain.
And then the gale tore through the E-squad’s realm in tremendous hoops, revealing the outside world. Fresh air sifted through Swishy’s straw as he fell from the ripped-open silhouette.
Finally, it was time to end this.
(…)
The stomach abyss ejected its contents in stages.
True to the city’s moniker, straw spewed out first—everything that was taken from the surrounding acreage. Flying amid the fields of wheat, the boy noticed enough resources to reconstruct Sling.
“Are you ready?” Swishy called.
“Yes, yes, yes!” Sling said, her presence spiking through the shared scarecrow body.
Swishy disintegrated then, relinquishing the borrowed Sling straw. His pumpkin, wing, heart, and Timbs fell through the air, tenuously bound in place by the strong presence of his soul. As the boy reconstructed with his [Scarecrow] spell, harvesting the wheat cloud for a new normal-hay body.
He was thankful for Sling’s straw but relieved to shed himself of her unruly blackwheat—strands that she gathered back with [Scarecrow], constructing a hand through which she focused her magic.
“You’re saved!” Swishy said.
“I am, I am,” Sling collected her proximate wheat, restoring her torso and limbs. She then aimed to re-wrap herself, levitating scrolls of the E-squad’s sliced abdomens toward her body. Sling grinned from the irony of the situation—harvesting those that’d harvested her. She mummified herself in their silhouette’s papers—but inside out—shadow on the inside with outward-facing whites.
As the E-squad remnants re-spooled over Sling’s body, she used a clawed fingernail to draw new charms onto the co-opted bandages: HONEY CRISP, YOGURT CLUSTER, CHEESECAKE, LOLLIPOP.
“Are you going to need real spells to go with that?”
“Oh, Swishy, there’s nothing realer than cheesecake.”
But she did get around to using [Nest], [Nurture], [Sanctuary], and [Timeout] on the shadow side of the wraps.
Next stage of the descent: the four heart pieces—naked without their [Heart Armor], raw black hay.
The dark state saddened him but he recovered fast. Swishy was strong. He’d rehabilitate it in no time.
“[Hell Weave],” Swishy said, four black vines spreading from his fingers to catch his sliced core. He hesitated about returning it to his chest. But he made it—he did this. He placed the dark heart back inside. His scarce wheat closed over the four quarters, squeezed it, weaved it, and drew them back together. The core fused, sealing with magic.
Relief…A couple of straw sprouts sprang from the reintegrated heart. He hoped for gold-wheat—he knew that it was.
The terrified chorus continued. E-squad screams issued in crinkling trills. Pain? Not a thing. But their shared starvation core imploding in a great release of all the sustenance they’d consumed? A gut-wrenching panic.
What have you done? Why would you do that? You’ve undone the harvest, you’ve undone our meals…
Bursts of torn pages sprayed across the sky from the disemboweled E-squad, the [Looseleaf] returning everything it’d captured and converted. The paper debris returned the blue marbles, free of charcoal-colored corruption, and shot them back to their original locations. Shadows flowed from the sliced silhouettes and returned to their rightful nests. Everything that was drained now returned to its original form. The grounds swelled with roots, and those roots pushed up sprouts, which grew into saplings, cloud-tappers, and the occasional sky-piercers. Branches stretched from the tree trunks. Canopies regrew. Fruits returned and weighed down the branch ends.
The shadows spread through the ground, matching the shapes of the restored objects. The entities inside, now freed, were pleased to return home. Praise Swishy! The curses said. Hail him! Raise him! Serve him!
Swishy bristled from the comments, from the promise of dark allegiance, and from the implication that they preferred him to Ruby. It was dangerous thinking. And breathtaking in its promise—though it wasn’t as pressing as his opponents’ demise.
As the environment returned, the E-squad drained and drained and drained…the SILHOUETTE spell losing its bold form in black vapor streams, dissipating into air. The sky-piercer-sized beings now condensed into the paper dolls they once were, cut from 8.5 by 11 sheets, swaying in the air in pendulous arcs, a slow-drifting defeat.
Swishy held out his hands and stared at his enemies, their wedged hands affixed to each other. Emi-Emilio-Eren-Emily had landed into his palms. Their top hats were flattened into a pancake stack, and their hoop skirts were bent out of shape. Scarecrow and E-squad exchanged looks, the vast soul blues bearing into the four pairs of glue dots their eyes had reduced to.
“I win, yeah?” Swishy said, more a statement than a question.
Eat us, the paper dolls managed. We need a use, some use, anything at all…everybody ea—
Swishy crunched them in both fists, grinding them good.
Would they die? The boy didn’t think so. But embarrassing them felt good. Their little whines tickled his soul.
Cruel…the E-squad said.
“Cool. You mean cool.” All bravado, though. He was on to the next problem. What to do with these entities? Shadows were hard to snuff out. He needed light for that exorcism. Tapping a finger to his gourd, he tried to think—but couldn’t. His insides felt scraped out. The time away from his heart was heartlessness. [Voodoo] had had his way with him for too long. Soul-tired—and heart-tired too—the boy was set to power down on the spot.
“Poor child, perhaps I can seal them?” Sling offered. But she was as soul-bedraggled as Swishy. Worse in fact. A thin blue candle of soul powered the tree-sized mummy.
Swishy shook his head. “Myst? Ideas?”
But she disappeared. He looked inward for any spider webs, any dainty footholds in his weaves. Nothing. Is she running again? Swishy couldn’t figure her out. E-squad and Myst—he couldn’t make the connection.
Did you say Myst? Why do we sense power in that name? We’re missing something…Their quad-voiced curiosity now worked together, forgetting their defeat.
Let us have them…a voice—voices—from Swishy’s heart. We’ll show them to siphon us. His chasm blackwheat was as vocal as ever.
“Sure,” Swishy said, staring down at his paper captives.
His chest opened and the boy pressed the E-squad to his heart, allowing the clamoring curses to take their revenge.
Think, think, think…he gave us a clue…
Black rubber whips stretched from Swishy’s chest and coiled around the wrinkled dolls and dragged them in.
Swishy’s chest closed over the enemies and before the final weaves fastened, he sensed a spell activation.
[Brainstorm], the E-squad whispered.
Swishy had consumed his enemy, but not before he heard a frantic search—the shifting of papers, and the hurried shuffling of pages upon pages of possible solutions.