HIS HEAD WAS ON FIRE—shadow fire, a Myst-controlled fire.
The boy avoided blowback from Myst’s [Nightmare] release, but he rued the waste of her energy. His head was simply aflame as Myst hadn't quite deactivated the technique. The pumpkin was wet with melted ice. Corrosive energy surrounded Swishy, jumping from his eyes and mouth, but without damaging his rind. Myst was a master of her craft, a shadow mistress in careful control over her elements.
Swishy was relieved to be okay but skipped to major panic when taking a look around. There was darkness everywhere. Eyes, mouths, laughter. The sugar wraiths had once more been pleased by their leader. Everyone liked being fed. But for Straw City, that always happened to come at Swishy’s expense.
The flames bothered him again. He second-guessed if they were hurting him, after all.
“They’re not, stop being dramatic,” Myst said.
Are you reading my mind again? He wanted to say—but couldn’t. He lacked swishable straw. He rephrased and switched languages, choosing telepathy. "What are you doing to me?"
"I'm defrosting you, obviously."
"Is that what you did to Ruby last time? Defrost her?"
"Oh no, I just showed her her worst fears."
"That didn't seem to do anything."
"Who can know? She aims to be impenetrable. Nobody can know her. Nobody can bring her soul to the light. I'm sure my nightmare worked. Only time will tell if she can withstand her ever-growing abyss. But the clock is ticking. It ticks for us all."
That last part made Swishy woeful again. He was all pumpkin and no straw. His mind produced a ticking all of a sudden, a sound effect to accompany his doomed mood. His body was in Ruby's arms, an iced platter that she'd chip open and extract his heart from. It was over for a second time. She'd won again.
He'd failed another heart.
Swishy felt like one of the peeves, no agency, no movement, no vehicle through which he could feel.
The warp ended.
A brief glimpse of the moon flashed in his face.
And then Ruby magicked him away.
Swishy moved along the evil conveyor, one Ruby teleport at a time. As soon as he saw the world again, Ruby said “Begone,” and he was off again.
It happened over and over, several times within several more seconds, a loop, a cage that Ruby had to consciously maintain.
Whenever he glimpsed her face during his surface world cycles, Ruby looked bored. But she was committed to her banishment work. She held Swishy’s frozen torso the crook of one arm while holding her palm out in the other, summoning the warp gates.
“Begone,” was a powerful word—but Swishy could tell that it annoyed Ruby that he didn’t go away forever.
Ruby flew after him on her broom, following him, meeting him at gate after gate.
The world opened, then the darkness, in that order on a moment-by-moment basis. Swishy had never been less stable. He'd gone through the chaos of blackwheat corruption, of a whorling and violently-minded chasm, of being dropped from the skies and splaying into a hay pile, but this moment of being a pumpkin and only a pumpkin was the most disarray that he'd ever felt.
Outside again—moon, stars, and birds in a V formation.
And then a click of Ruby’s tongue, a speedy command for them to leave.
Swishy and Myst were vacuumed into another warp. This pattern continued in a series of warps, a series of split-second fresh air before plunged once more into Ruby's darkness. Each time the moon appeared closer, bigger, and he knew that Ruby was ferrying him further into the throes of The High Chasm.
“She can’t keep this up for long, this is good.” Myst said.
“If she has to keep juggling us, she can’t take the heart yet.”
“That’s the hope but I’m sure her minions are coming to help her out with that.”
“We have no time, then.”
“Oh, time, I used to never think of it. Now it’s always waterfalling from my grasp. What a horrible world this woman’s made.”
“Seriously.”
The boy stayed focused. It was a different type of concentration now that he couldn't conveniently reach for the intents in his straw. RESOLVE and DETERMINATION and FAITH, his trinity, were nowhere in his head. He found it strange to not be directly emboldened by his positivity. He wished he had some kind of structure, an anchoring that didn't rely on a body. He knew now why Ruby aspired to be Myst. It made sense to him now.
What he did focus on was noticing everything he could when he'd exited a Ruby warp.
There was only so much time before Ruby extracted the heart from his body.
Once he was back in the world, he had to sense Ruby and his straw, go toward her, and then somehow return to himself. But every time he gathered his bearings again, a Ruby portal opened behind him and dragged him out of life.
The darkness, the laughing shadows, the embarrassment of being straw-less and—to an extent—heartless.
Instead, Swishy and Myst ignored the next several warps. They only needed to confirm that their glimpses of Ruby included the ice torso, the frozen-over heart. And as long as they noted it, there was nothing to worry about. Calmly, they gameplanned. Or rather, Myst was calm while Swishy endured the anxiety of heart and body separation.
"My dear, why are you straining yourself when you have a shadow sister to lean on?" Myst knocked inside his head. She was a much bigger spider now, having fed on the gloom. She’d grown to a mommy long legs a few warps ago. Now she favored a tarantula.
"I don't know."
"Because you forgot about me, how sad."
"I didn't mean to, I'm just stressed."
"I know but please, my altar, why must you reject me?”
"I’m not. I won’t. I need help.”
“I know you do.”
“Be my eyes, please?"
Myst swam around his eyeholes, empowering his vision.
Moonlight—it was so big, so round, a silvered world enveloping him.
[Spiral]—Swishy spun like a top, searching for Ruby.
The boy twisted his gourd around and around, a rapid spin that'd disorient biological beings, but Swishy and Myst were immune to dizziness. There was no blurred vision, no brain fogginess that accompanied his rotations. Step one was to find her. Next, he’d attack. A simple plan. He just had to move fast. He had to find her before—
Smack! Ruby, irritated by now, chose to bat Swishy away with her tremendous broom.
He flew toward the moon so quickly he briefly fantasized about landing on it. Then he’d have no problems. He’d live there and maybe grow a new straw body. But as he twisted his gourd around and around, Swishy’s gaze landed on his priorities again.
In the distance, the Sling-ravens—one carrying Trey.
Was he alive? Was he okay? Was he conscious? Swishy aimed his concentration at Trey’s soul but his frequency was intercepted by sheer darkness. Ruby’s DEATH and TYRANNY drifted between them, not aiming for him, just happening across Swishy’s path, casually dampening his sense for anything in the distance.
“Ah, too slow. Let’s go!”
Swishy, a flying head, zoomed toward the dark intents.
Myst, for her contribution, pushed smoke from his head. Stacks and stacks of factory clouds were sent into the air, creating a signal, an indication of where he was.
“Smart!”
“It’d be folly to expect anything less out of me.”
Myst’s giggles were music to his ears.
Ruby’s cackles, though—that was another story. He glimpsed her broom-riding towards him, her wide-open eyes staring through the smoke. Darkness was no obstruction to her. She disappeared inside it, seeming to become one with the clouds.
“I won’t let you free. None of us are free, young one. We all must earn our keep.”
“I’m just a bird. I don’t have to own anything.”
“Ah, the cop-out. A boy, a bird, a scarecrow. You’re anything but accountable. We all must learn responsibility and that’s why I must teach you. There is no greater crime than to shame the village.”
“I think you’re underselling all your other crimes.”
Ruby emerged from the cloud cover, cradling Swishy’s frozen torso. Then she slowed her flight, showing off for the boy. Ruby smiled, gliding her finger across his iced straw, figure-skating. She even did a double-axel. Even meaningless movements were aided by her shadows, cursed threads tugging at her joints.
A curtain of snitchtalons burst through the sky as well, zipping all over. The swarm stole the sky. Swishy couldn’t even pivot with grazing a feather.
Together, the flock casted a spell of their own.
[Dark Veil]—there were feathers everywhere, some real, others ethereal, which obscured Swishy’s ocular and soulful vision. The snitchtalon spirits were amplified, jamming his tracking of the soulscape.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
[Grain Mill]—Swishy used the darkness inside, putting his curses to work. They, of course, were glad to do his vengeful bidding.
The bird souls were fear-stricken and sank from the sky, their cast-off feathers with him.
By the time the skies cleared, Ruby was gone. The boy sensed her behind him. Her aura was unmistakable—and she made sure that his soul could feel the chill. There was one more signature that Swishy noted: the cadence of his beating heart. Even through the ice cage, his pulse was depressed by the frost but present. He was relieved to feel that bond with himself again.
That was, of course, until Ruby said a new magic word: “Banishment.”
Back into the portal. A cluster of hands snatched him in. But before the gate closed he turned around to see catch a final glimpse of Ruby. She was already behaving as if he were gone, as if there were no birds or souls or enemies glued to her every move.
A true embrace with the torso-Swishy, pressing herself into the ice.
Swishy strained to fly out of the arms. But more of them kept coming from the gate to drag him in. Hands covered his eyes, his mouth. They grabbed at his stem. They wrapped around him in rubbery lassos, adhering to his rind like leather straps. He lost ground, naturally, but remained stubborn.
Myst just watched on, leaning against the inside of his gourd, absorbing the shadows that leaked into him.
Everyone was occupied. There was no recourse but brute force, which Swishy knew was fertile.
Ruby, however, wasn’t concerned with the prolonged struggle. She devoted her full attention to the iced torso, hugging it—and sending one mocking glance to Swishy as she did it. But the closer she pressed herself against Swishy's torso, the darker the TERROR intent became, a word that hurricane’d through every part of her body. Within the horizon, both DEATH and TYRANNY buzzed in excitement.
There were many words, emotions, and memories in her, but Swishy strained to find a sliver of empathy. After all, that was what made all the feelings matter. He had it inside. Every time something happened to another, it triggered his heart. What, then, was moving Ruby's heart?
Instead, there was hunger. It was like a replacement heart, a prosthetic brain.
Her insufferable void was her engine.
Then the ice began to melt.
And then the gate closed, locking Swishy from the world—while Ruby claimed his heart.
(…)
Ruby had it all—all of Swishy.
The troubles filled Swishy’s mind like a swamp as Ruby sent him away with a [BANISHMENT], another renamed version of Trey's [Zlide], but a longer version too. Swishy expected the warp to end within a split second but that wasn't the case. Ruby had practiced throughout their battle and had evolved to turning her warp into a dungeon.
Throughout the tunneling dark, the bodiless boy traveled and traveled and traveled. Swishy stared ahead, searching for a door, a minuscule pinhole of the outer world. None appeared, though. The world was locked from him. Even when he was within the wrathraven nest, he hadn't felt this disconnected from the Cearth before.
"I'm so dark, the blackness is overflowing. Is this what happens when I don't have any straw to turn into blackwheat."
"I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but as you can see, you're certainly bearing more than enough darkness for me to not have to answer that."
"How did this happen? I only wanted to play. I only wanted to fly."
"Me, too, my dear. Me too. Now please, express gratitude. You know you want to.”
“Thanks, Mysty.”
“That’ll do for now. But next time, please, enthusiasm. It makes me feel good.”
“Yes, Mysty. I’ll scream with all my soul.”
They shared chuckles but Swishy didn’t feel any better. No sooner had the silence come, did the worries trail behind.
His village, his friends—who would protect them now? Deep in the Ruby’s darkness, Swishy could do nothing but cycle these worries through his detached head.
Swishy fretted over his frozen body. His wings and heart were in Ruby’s arms, waiting for her to claim them. But what he wished for most of all was some ration of straw to work with. But in the Ruby realm, there was none. He was at a complete loss. Even when Swishy had no options, his spirit drifted to some act of desperation. There was nothing for him to take action, though, not that he could see.
His friends, his wings, his straw his heart—Ruby had stolen them all.
This realization was when the realm’s loudness returned to focus, sugar wraiths rejoicing, an undercurrent of wind howls flowing beneath their voices.
Wind, frost, hollowness—these all checked out as Ruby features, as Stormcellar family traits.
As Swishy slid along the realm, the clamorous souls cheered. The warp realm was a shade-tinged domain that suddenly went alight with slanted eyes and sharp-cornered mouths. Like the rest of Ruby's magic, some entities lived in her darkness, sanding and refining the edges of her techniques. The realm shined. Swishy was in a perfectly shaped tunnel. The gleaming eyes and mouths slid in arcs, molding the boundaries with micro-adjustments.
The woman's rule was as close to divine as a human had gotten.
Through the realm, Swishy saw Ruby's face—or what looked like her face—sometimes show itself within wraith walls. Maybe it was a cousin. Maybe it was her. But that was the deal: they were all her.
The feminine gazes were uncaring. Ruby had provided food for her people and fuel for her ego.
"Efficient, aren't I?" Ruby’s voice echoed, knowing what was on Swishy's mind. He sensed her staring into the realm from the outside, admiring him like a pet fish.
Swishy was full of panic and dread, the gloomy pressure forcing cracks in his rind. Black pulp squeezed from the fractures, a thick, bloody substance, whose heat released curling vapors.
"I can't let her have everything," Swishy said.
"I know."
"But how do we stop her?”
"I'm thinking. Even I'm in a bind, you know. I, too, was sent away from the body I was drawing so much from."
"Sorry that you can't eat me anymore."
"It's more like drinking, I believe."
"I'm sorry for that too."
"For now, I'm good. There's so much damage control to do with these thoughts. You’re such a riot inside this gourd, a storm in my lovely little living room."
Myst transformed from an arachnid into her humanoid form, her lower regions cohering into her trademark genie smoke. With her slender fingers, she gathered shadowy orbs atop their tips. She even crackled them, releasing sparks.
"It's like Trey, is it not?"
"Yeah, just the edgy version."
"I know you wanted to say evil. It's okay, you can say it."
"Evil, it's evil and black. Now do evil to Ruby, please, we need our hearts."
"She's not here but I know a good way to start."
Notes of DOOM blew from Swishy's head, an energy that Myst reached for and drew into herself. The shadow mistress billowed from Swishy's head. She turned herself into a thin stream that exited the boy's left eye and then spread outward into her full-bodied glory, her long arms and slender neck and symmetrical face.
The tunnel shades were used to Ruby's darkness but stretched their eyes open at Myst, who, a potent goddess, now turned her strength against them. Her hands dipped into the walls of the realm. Her forearms dragged through the shadows as if she plunged into a body of water.
The curses splashed and rippled as Myst dragged her hands through them, fishing for their empowering intents.
Myst’s shadows grew and grew. The inventory of words she’d reaped from the curses scrolled across Swishy’s eyes faster than he could read and more robustly than he could feel.
She'd acquired so many of them that her body started to become unwieldy and amorphous again. Myst went through cycles of sharpening into a physical form and then blurring into a massive cloud. All the while, her face was visible. Rather than the joy that she normally experienced when victimizing curses, she heaved deep breaths within her chest.
A non-dark word flowed through her, something that Swishy wished to have for himself: RELIEF.
Myst breathing her relief like air was another novel change, something else that signaled that their plight had gotten deep.
The boy shook his head. He wanted to know if his heart was okay. If his heart was still his. When, he wondered, would this ride be over…?
"Please, though, pick your head up—that's all you are—but lift it. It's not over. You're a trove of riches."
"I think that’s the problem but I don’t see any riches. Ruby has it all."
She towered over him, still half inside his eyehole while stretching the rest of her high as she could go. Myst stared down at the boy, a stern expression set into her face.
"Do you believe that, truly, that you lack riches? How silly of you to not only fear the shadows but also underestimate them. These shadows are the capital of the world. By casting your imagination onto them, you can create anything you desire. Please don't neglect your materials. Such a thing would be wasteful. Everything has a worth. Everything has weight and malleability. Don't be so inflexible. Open your mind as you've opened your heart."
"I'm afraid to go dark. It talks. It wants things. I don't want it to take over."
"Air is breathable. Water is buoyant. Curses have a certain…magnetism. Accept the costs. Cearth requires your sacrifice and investment."
That last part hit different, especially knowing what Myst had endured. All things considered, Myst handled her demotion with grace.
"I got you. I'll freak out less. I'll use this dark…maybe not too much of it."
"All of it."
"What?"
"You're going dark anyway. I'm simply using what's already in you. Now's not the time for compartmentalization. Only for you to go mental."
"I don't know about this mental part but…I'll choose violence."
"Lovely. An altar that doesn't kill is no altar at all."
"Is that true?"
"No. I had to try, though. Be the change you want to see."
Myst smirked; Swishy smiled—then nervously laughed.
At least he was in a better state to handle his capture. Swishy, whose soul was tense as could be, relaxed. Trust, trust—that was what he needed to hold onto.
Easier said than done, of course.
He took a seething breath with his soul but nothing flared but darkness. The plentiful darkness began to circulate through Swishy's head. He winced at the encyclopedia of horrid intents flooding him. Claiming the gloom and curse-fuel was off to a rough start.
"Slowly now, you can do it." Myst rubbed the inside of the gourd, a tenderness that Swishy clung to like an heirloom.
A trial, truly. Swishy could only rely on his pumpkin to contain the totality of his emotions. When times were good, his magic overflowed with beneficial gains. But now he was on the reverse side of the fated coin, vessel-less, and therefore his gloom had no boundary to contend against, to fit itself within.
His skull drowned with darkness. The smokiness ebbed outward in an orb, spreading everywhere. With nothing for him to package these emotions away, no blessing of straw for him to store his banes as blackwheat, his emotions instantly transformed into a variety of woeful words.
DEFEAT, DOWNFALL, SUBJUGATION, SERVILITY.
There were also simpler ones that came from the curses, suggestions that also populated Swishy's head.
CAGE, CHAINS, COLLAPSE.
The most ruinous part of the whole ordeal to Swishy was that the phantom sensation to his body parts had waned. For some reason, he was cut away from everything he knew to be himself. He was in an arena of sugar wraiths, a levitating dinner plate for them to leer at. Eyes glimmered and great carpets of tongue unrolled from the mouths. He closed his eyes but could still see the outlines of white ghostliness pressing into his soulful eyelids.
There was no sense of wishwillows, of straw, of the prayers that the straw-bound fed into their charms. There wasn't even sound or wind or anything that he was so accustomed to touching his body.
His body…Swishy lamented that even as Ruby pried into it, there was no sense of it. The boy was being opened, possibly chipped away at in its iciness. The frost that was infused into him…he now wished to feel that too. Not knowing was driving him insane.
P…S…Y…—but he shook and twisted his head around, a bodiless writhing that resembled a spinning urn. He wouldn't give in to psychosis. His soul jerked at the notion. While new to the concept, he knew it’d be his worst nightmare.
"My little friend. You're stressing over nothing."
"This is nothing?”
“When you have so much at your disposal, nothing is exactly what I’d call your troubles.” Myst raised her arms in the waterfall of curses. The frenzy of their runny faces washed between her fingers.
“I…I think I see where you're going with this."
"You do see it. It's all around you. And it's inside you in spades."
Swishy looked around, looked within, and saw nothing but abyss.
"Mhm," Myst said with a self-satisfied grin.
"Well, here goes…"
"Embrace the dark like they said to. But serve yourself. You've suffered—now use that suffering to suffer less."
Smoke ebbed from Swishy’s gourd, this time not from Myst, but from himself.
Swishy decided now to take ownership of his darkness. He'd done it before. He knew the shape of it even, and how it breathed within the world.
Where Myst's [Nightmare] left off, Swishy's voodoo took over. It snaked from his eyes. V-o-O-d-o-O-o-o flew from his head and flowed into the spaces where his soul normally stayed, tracing the shape of his missing body. He knew not to fear this. He had control. He had confidence in himself. Swishy knew that whatever lived inside him was something he could handle, even if it was noxious, even if in excess it'd harm him irreparably. But Myst was fine, wasn't she? She was a shadow body, a shadow mistress?
And so Swishy pushed out several layers of mist, creating arms and legs, a rake with the constitution of flame. There were Timbs, of course, curse-black stompers that fed his soul. As a finishing touch, the boy even grew two wings. This part made him feel good. Not that the wings would do anything—since he could fly as a ghost body anyway—but his soul was comforted by mimicking the shape. Anything he created, hard or soft or gaseous, counted as a structure, a suitable anchor for his spirit.
There was no resisting it this time. And there was no reason to other than useless self-righteousness.
Besides, he liked the way that Ruby's darkness measured his serpentine energy. The eyes and mouths were pinched at their corners. Being feared—who knew it'd felt so good?
Myst smiled. She was waiting for this moment.
Swishy plunged into the shadow tunnel as he'd seen Myst do herself. The faces gasped in terror. They recoiled from the tiny hands of black ether. And that made him feel good, to turn their laughter into terror, and their mockery into submission.
The dark little god clapped his hands, then spread them apart, throwing the boundary open like a curtain.
Cearth—its moonlight, its forests, its Swish-brightened nature—had welcomed him again.