SWISHY KNEW THAT MYST WAS IN TROUBLE.
The scarecrow had learned that sooner or later captivity came for all creatures of the shadowdeep.
Human. Animal. Curse. The classifications for the beings of Cearth were straightforward at its surface—but highly complex when it came to him who counted as all three. His initial opinion on the matter was that the only meaningful differences were biological. When it came to the surface-level stuff such as the features of a body, Swishy believed he was right to assume that the visual and shallow components carried the most weight. The body parts. The abilities wielded. Even the stage of matter that the entity was comprised of. But the constant soul play within Straw City brought him to another truth, one that he intrinsically—perhaps out of self-protection—chose to ignore.
Autonomy. The right that one asserted over oneself defined a creature the most. And of all the beings that existed on Cearth, humans possessed the most autonomy.
Humanity was not the master race in respect of innate strength or shadow-crafting ability, but the Cearth had chosen to leave them alone. It may not have felt that way to them when The Curse first punished them—but when Swishy put his mind to it, that was a slap on the wrist. And after decades passed, the planet had enabled the rise of its next criminally possessive human: Ruby—and perhaps others. The thought of other settlements with similarly ambitious rulers was almost too much for Swishy to bear.
Humans are something else, jeez.
But people shouldn’t have stood out, not in theory anyway.
Everyone had a means of communication, of language and culture, and of magic power too. The shadows—and even some of the animals—were just as intelligent and knowing as human beings. But the humans were the only ones that weren’t so straightforwardly harvested. Animals often became food and pets. Shadows were used in spells. And the mega-shadows, the world-bending power freaks like Swishy and Myst, were still less autonomous than humans.
While everyone actively hunted and schemed for Swishy’s body, Myst was used as a one-button call service to fix people’s lives. And in this moment, she couldn’t refuse—in all moments in actuality. Even at her own expense. If her own was even a concept that the planet applied to Myst at all.
Myst said No. Over and over and over again. But to the planet it was like she’d said nothing at all. Cearth maneuvered her like a limb when the time came for them to render an altar reward. The bane of a genie was always its lack of freedom.
And so the teeming curses began to turn on Straw City’s resident shadow ruler. She no longer bossed the shadows—the Cearth took over with its manual override.
The Cearthquake was significant. The debris shifted; the wheat stalks vibrated; the everytree trunks swayed from side to side with their bendy and extraordinarily rubbery textures. The rumbles started and stopped in set intervals of about 10 seconds. It occurred like the gears of a clock. Swishy knew he was small, but the profundity of the smallness concept left a stronger impression on his mind. He was smaller than the gears—and possibly as disposable as his harvest-hungry opponents said that he was.
The attack on Myst added to the effect of his shrunken self-importance. She floated in the sky with the darkness thinning around her chest wall, exposing the quad-colored heart. It was her turn to be taken from. Once the Cearth decided, there was nothing one could do to stop it.
No, Swishy thought. There’s got to be something. It isn’t fair. It isn’t right!
Swishy surprised himself with the clearheadedness of his want to help her since Myst had always been…Myst.
Myst had been a complicated figure in his life, toying with him, breaching his boundaries, spinning webs of her shadow within the darkness that Swishy so wished to minimize, but he sensed that for some reason she was worth helping. It wasn’t just an enemy of my enemy is my friend type of deal, but Swishy believed her claims that they were siblings. While Trey was a gracious and caring brother, Myst was a terroristic older sister, and he for some reason accepted this.
Swishy decided it was worth his time to aide Myst, his less-than-satisfactory sibling—but kinfolk that he also tolerated and in the right moment kind of sort of liked. Kinda-sorta, of course.
When the E-squad came after Myst he felt for her as if they’d come after him. The type of horror she now experienced was something that he recognized.
Shadows thickened in the sky around Myst’s general vicinity. As she moved through the air, the clouds darkened. When she passed through everytrees, their foliage fluffed as if attempting to entrap her. It was different than when she enacted atmospheric changes to gradually match her mood. The darkness changed in reaction to her movements, walling her progress, boxing her in.
E-squad laughed. They just wouldn’t die. Swishy didn’t have light enough in him to erase them for good. As with all the curses he’d encountered, he consumed and integrated them into himself. He trusted his body to process his extremely cunning food. His E-squad fight was done, and he’d therefore devote attention to present concerns such as the last-resort wishes of those doomed paper dolls.
Their wishes had caused this ground-shaking production. But what had they wished for? How’d they turn the tables like this? The wish couldn’t have been to take her heart. Something told Swishy that the Cearth wouldn’t grant such a request. It wouldn’t be right, though Swishy didn’t prepare to know the planet’s morals. He worked to figure out the Cearth’s thought process as a starting point for getting Myst out of this situation.
He remembered the moment in which the city riots had led to large swathes of the population wishing to become Swishy, indirectly staking a claim to his heart—a claim that Cearth denied. The folks had become clumps of straw, his future villagers, his followers. Perhaps that was one solid boundary of the wishes: you couldn’t steal. Or phrased in a less judgmental, accusatory way, you couldn’t take possession over anything that belonged to someone else. Cearth wouldn’t transfer ownership rights—those were already established.
Swishy broadened his theft and ownership ideas, the optimism in him wanting to believe that the real rule was this: no wishing harm upon others. Harm, in this case, was something he hoped would have a flexible and discerning interpretation—such as to include the infliction of direct harm or roundabout loss. His belief in justice yearned for this basic level of fairness. Swishy had given up on the idea that Cearth granted everyone a level playing field, but he needed this exact amount of idealism to keep him going.
The FAITH and DETERMINATION in him required a constant anchor, a level of equity and justice that he could drive Straw City’s population toward.
Eyes on the prize. Eyes on freedom for all. And eyes on Myst whose autonomy now hung in the balance.
A dark cloud chased her with a deliberate slowness. The real threat was in its constant collection of cursed energy. Airborne curses and shadows within the trees all clung to the rolling darkness that now began to suffocate Myst’s possible pathways. She stared upward but the sky already appeared to blacken. And that blackness lowered in sluggish confidence, forcing her into the woods. The forest, too, was filled with chasing shadows that blocked the choicest pathways and herded her into an underground hollow.
The girl flew alongside the tree roots as the curses filled the paths, stoppering them.
But she was good at this. She found smaller and smaller pinholes with which to phase through. The curses wished they possessed that same talent but for all their I’m-an-abyss-I’m-a-void insistence, they managed to consume some semblance of physical space. They were always together yet managed to feel alone, and with tenacity and gusto they remained on Myst’s trail, seeking to add her to their lonely legion.
And when she shot out of the ground, the every-ten-second-on-the-dot Cearthquake launched curses in sputters and geysers and belched-out bubbles. She dodged by slivers and kept going as the hexes collected and enlarged and laid a gradual, sprawling claim to everything.
Swishy wondered what the E-squad had wished for. What could be so great that the Cearth shook in its core? And was it that the wish was a monumental ask or if the target itself was the colossus in this equation?
The shadow girl fled. She never fled. Such an action wasn’t in her until now. The present circumstances were a bizarre reversal of fate. Magic and shadow were within Myst’s dominion yet now the land treated her as prey.
They hadn’t caught her, though, not yet.
Swishy found Myst’s avoidance of the darkness peculiar for her until he remembered how it worked: darkness could touch darkness. Darkness could harm its element. Hadn’t he done this to the wrathravens? Hadn’t he just now crushed the E-squad under this same principle? Overwriting one darkness with a greater degree of another.
Bigger animals win. Swishy released the I-got-the-math-problem-right kind of aaah…as he watched the land itself pursue his shadow sister.
The boy was deeply troubled by these events. He didn’t realize until now that he was comforted by Myst being the top power in Straw City. Swishy assumed that if worst came to worst, Myst would have a technique to wrest the land and its fickle curses from out of Ruby’s control. He thought that Myst was being kind—her version of kind anyway—when she’d enlisted Trey and Swishy as her so-called champions. Why would she need weaker beings to do what she, the strongest being, could do for herself?
Yet now the basest and weakest of curses raised in tendrils against the great and forever confident Myst. They hadn’t come under the influence of a spell or other such E-squad-related coercion. The curses had chosen to pursue Myst with the same enthusiasm that the ones Swishy housed were chasing the E-squad. Didn’t they know that she was stronger than them? This makes no sense. You can’t hunt Myst… Perhaps they were just that ignorant. But they were never that dumb. Or careless. Or…
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Swishy shook his head from the next scenario but the thought bulldozed into his psyche: or perhaps she could lose for real. His mind was plagued by the implication of her defeat.
Each time he thought he’d gotten a handle on the darkness he was thrown another curveball. Rumble-rumble-rumble, went the Cearth. Curses spewed upward, hissing for Myst’s heart. The girl dodged, everything flexible about her except for that bright beating organ. Swishy beheld the curveball of the moment: cataclysm.
The ragged state of Swishy’s body and soul demanded help. His heart was strong—but dark. He needed a break from the curses. A brief buffer, any that life would spare.
Help came in the form of the mummified Sling.
Sling, the resident curse-sealing expert, could tell what was going on with Swishy. She gazed knowingly at the boy and then hoisted his cross-positioned body upon her shoulder and ran off.
“For half of a hay bale, you sure are heavy. Do you know that, dearest Swishy?”
“I’m heavy?”
“Yes, but I understand why.”
“I don’t even understand the first part. I’m not heavy—I don’t think I am at least.”
“You are. Everything inside is squeezing together, packing tighter and tighter. Your curses are dense. Your curses weigh.”
“Oh,” Swishy said—and that was all he said. She was right. And he was bummed about it. Curses brought your mood down but his problem was not knowing if he had them managed. He questioned if his current functionality signaled his control over the dark or numbness to it as they led him astray.
“It’s okay, you’re still in the throes.”
“And so is Myst from the looks of it. The rumbling is crazy. I wonder what they’re trying to do to her…”
“She’s a scary one. Whatever has befallen her, don’t you perhaps think that it’s for the better?”
“I wondered that, too. But if they take from her what will that mean for us?”
“One less enemy if the world is perfect.”
“But it’s not perfect. She has one of my hearts.”
“Oh Swishy, you really could stand to share less.”
“I know, I can’t help it.”
Sling patted his head. “There, there. Let’s go help the shadow demon.”
“Okay, thank you.”
Sling focused on her stride, a multi-task of sorts. Helping Myst was the priority but Sling kept her route toward Trey and the villagers—one could do that sort of thing when your damsel was everywhere and nowhere.
And Myst wasn’t just everywhere as she tended to be. For the most part she remained within Swishy’s and Sling’s vicinity. Her shadow self darted through the nearest treetops and slithered through newly formed Cearth fissures. She took the form of a shadowclaw and flew through the woods. Myst skimmed the ever-lowering sky, that dark slate that now produced distorted mouths, fanged teeth that she angled herself away from.
Swishy had the strange notion that perhaps she’d ask for their help, or if sticking close to them was her method of already asking for it. Or maybe she was too prideful for any help, and that this was all a coincidence. But her recent hiding from the E-squad and her fears of the present barrage of wishes told a different story, one that suggested that she’d cast her vanity aside. He decided that yes, she would appreciate assistance—though the method through which he could provide help hadn’t been picked out yet.
“Mysty, we’re here!” The boy called.
But she focused on gliding, whispering that same litany of “No, no, no…” to herself.
Swishy needed a starting point for handling the situation. The enemy wasn’t the E-squad. They were an enemy but had already been defeated. Within his dark heart, he was confident that the Emi-Emilio-Eren-Emily had lost their influence. There would be no carousing power—and definitely no escape. Brainstorm was the final spell of their shadowy autonomy before their integration into Swishy’s body and soulscape was completed.
But what conclusion did their spell bring them to? What was the wish? He used his spiritual sense to read the land. Without that information, he wouldn’t be able to save Myst from the real enemy—if he dared think of it as an enemy at all: the Cearth itself.
Even the thought was overwhelming. He wondered if the planet read him and would target him for revenge. Cearth had allowed him to suffer imaginative cruelties before—so why not now for these thought crimes?
He braced against the fear and focused. Read the wavelength. Listen close. Wishes, wishes, wishes…What are the wishes?
But the answers didn’t come. He’d only managed to better hear the ambient sounds of nature as opposed to the most selfish desires of four desperate souls. Such a thing should’ve been easy for him to hear. Was it that the E-squad was small now? Or was it that Swishy was no longer sensitive to the dark the better he’d learned to live with it? Troubleshooting himself became a harder and harder task.
A mysterious notion floated through his mind: Listen to your heart.
Even to him that sounded corny. He wondered where he got it from. Maybe the city was full of that advice, a thing he’d heard parents tell their children, mentors to their students, Trey to him in one form or another. He applied the adage to Myst encouraging him to embrace the darkness. Go with heart. Use heart. Spend-spend-spend that heart.
Listen.
So he did—and he remembered then the type of heart he currently had. This heart was unlike the ones of his past that encouraged him to Timb-stomp, to scarecrow pose, to fly. His heart was a pitiless, violent thing. The straw cracked in spirals as they chased the ever-diminishing E-squad around and around and around and around…His current heart and the swirling [Chasm] that he’d extracted from himself were one and the same.
Get the paper dolls! Shred them! Hurt them! Silence the fools!
But for as much as they were speaking, they’d also heard their enemies making the wishes—they were in the same place, after all. Earshot was a thing, even in the soulscape—especially in the soulscape.
And the chasm curses had begun to ape the E-squad’s wishes, intending to mock and deride them earnestly.
Closeness to the land? A vision of a perfect straw seed? You guys are so dumb. Wish all you want but you’re going to be absorbed by us. There’s so little of you that your personalities will be gone. You won’t be a family anymore. Food is what you’ve prided yourselves on making the world. But food is what you now are—less than that actually. Air! You’re air! Air in a vessel that doesn't need to breathe. Waste, you’re waste. I love how that math turned out. Speak no more, and let us waste you. Yes, yes, that feels right.
Swishy’s mind lunged at the first couple of clues, the restatement of the wishes: closeness to the land and a vision of the perfect straw seed. He saw Myst all around the area, darting to the moonlit clearings that soon were collapsed by darkness. She dodged and dodged, all while that exposed heart was pumping away. Closeness to the land was code to see the heart. And a vision of seed hardly qualified as a clue at all—that was as blatant as one could hope to put it.
The boy imagined his straw crinkling open upon the command of the Cearth. But Swishy was targeted by similar wishes when he was the only straw heart in all the land. Why hadn’t he been opened? Why had the Cearth refrained from exposing him?
An answer crept into his mind, simple and horrible. His sorrow for Myst increased tenfold, twentyfold, and more. Swishy the scarecrow was a bird, an animal. Myst was Myst, an appendage of Cearth. The girl only existed through the altar and for the altar.
She wasn’t a bird, a person, or even a traditional curse. She was a contrived consciousness without a natural clan, species name, or ingrained habits.
Myst was one of a kind. She was a nothing and allowed to know it.
Another Cearthquake. To Swishy it sounded like a belly laugh.
Swishy heard the E-squad, their voices clarifying as his senses sharpened. The paper doll villains were mute in most practical senses except for the thin soul current from their spirits to the Myst, a line that Swishy gawked at. No matter where Myst moved or how she changed shape or what gaseous form she chose, the wish thread as Swishy now thought of it continued to orbit the area around her heart. The thread’s presence cleared away all obstructions from the path of the “closeness” to the land and the “vision” of ideal seed.
The E-squad wishes echoed from within Swishy’s heart and carried vibrations along the thread, the words themselves petitioning Myst, the only physical manifestation of the altar remaining in the city.
Bring us closer to the land’s heart.
Show us what the perfect seed looks like.
And then a third wish revealed itself: Present the way forward.
The way forward was something Swishy had known all along: to proceed with heart. To have a heart. To treasure your heart. And the Cearth presented that progression through exposing Myst to a further degree, un-fogging her torso of its potent darkness. The shadows of Myst’s chest were practically non-existent, displaying her core beneath what was little more than a case of dirt-streaked glass.
The E-squad’s wishes didn’t cost much. They required no actual material from Cearth. The planet was perfectly fine with handing out a freebie of showing their most available heart. They wouldn’t open Swishy up in respect for his autonomy as a bird, a scarecrow, or whatever people wanted to call him. But Myst was a shadow. Myst was a construction of Cearth. She was their property—and the planet decided to show off the goods through her. Opening Myst was no different than showing off a sleeve-concealed tattoo or a childhood scar.
It costed nothing. It meant nothing.
The wishes ripped Myst open. She closed the shadows as best she could with her magic. But the E-squad repeated their wishes and encouraged others to do the same. The original curses that’d chased after them, doing Swishy’s bidding, soon got curious about the sudden power they sensed from Myst along with the clear and tempting view of her heart.
It’s not like they betrayed Swishy—but they decided that Myst, herself, was a usurper of Swishy’s property. They made their own wishes, not knowing that they were asking this of Cearth.
More prayers continued to Return Swishy’s heart, Show us the shadow who stole from him, Give back what was taken, along with hundreds of requests to Put it back or Show us what Swishy is missing.
The boy hoped that these requests edged close enough to ‘harm’ to be rejected. But he knew things would worsen. His dark heart now petitioned on his behalf, and the spirit of their wishes were less about hurting Myst and more about acquiring justice for Swishy.
Make our boy whole! They said.
Cearth didn’t answer all of these prayers—the individual curses were asking for a lot. They were asking for a literal material heart and they had nothing of their own for an equivalent exchange. But enough of them were asking to simply expose Myst, mostly the show-us-what-Swishy-is-missing wishes. Dark hands sprouted from the ground, from the blackwheat, and from the air itself.
“Myst, can I help you?” Swishy yelled. “Is it even possible to fight the planet?”
“I don’t know, I wish I had all the answers but apparently such a blessing hasn’t availed itself to me.”
“If we can’t fight, then why are you running? Isn’t Cearth your boss?”
“Why does my body need a boss? Aren’t I a sufficient enough boss for everything I am?”
“You are…” Swishy shook his head and fixed his vision to Myst’s smokiness, content to see her glide on and on.
Within the sky, an invasion of hands conjured and spread outward, casting a grasping net over the entire forest. Myst floated at the center of it all. Her heart hammered with fear. There was strength there, too, but how much of it was hard to say.
Eyes opened within the palm of every dark hand. The pupils roved across Myst chest.
Myst crossed her arms but the wish threads worked their continuous magic, diluting her shadowed limbs. Her heart was revealed for all to see.
Thump-thump, thump-thump!
“Can we cut the threads?” Swishy asked.
“You mean negate a wish? I’ve never seen it done. But what a wonderful idea. I wish I’d thought of it myself.” She tightened the hug on herself but the shadows provided no coherence or covering. Her contours were drawn with air.
Myst was a beautiful piece of glass.
So beautiful, and so afraid.