ONCE AGAIN, IT HAPPENED—
Trey watched his friend become a dark god.
From afar, Swishy overshadowed the buildings and trees as the blackness flowed through him. The scarecrow became a sky piercer, wearing a sash of clouds around his torso. Trey found these developments to be quite insane, reminiscent of the E-squad towering over them. Shadows that laid flush against the ground or slashed across the surfaces had stretched toward Swishy’s engorging stature. The smallest of the curses flew away as specks of dust, dark little wind-blown pebbles. Even the snitchtalons in the sky struggled to resist Swishy’s dark gravity, straining to fly against the current—but the birds, too, were slowly, slowly drawn into the Swishy’s gravitational force.
Everything living became everything that was Swishy.
Trey fretted over his friend’s metamorphosis, nervously clawing the Sling-raven talons that held him up. A possessed guardian…what a wild thing for Swishy to become. Please control your dark this time. Keep it together for us…
His mind was full of prayers like these. There was nothing he could do to stop Swishy from embracing the darkness that so plagued him. Trey had tried with all his might to keep the boy guarded from the world. But Straw City was the type of place that knew what its blessings were, and everything gained would be everything used. And there was no greater gain—or harvest—than Swishy. The scarecrow had proven that he was the seed of a new civilization. Food, riches, evolved forms—he’d facilitate it all.
Swishy lived everyone’s dreams with his body, a burden that he’d clearly learned. The rising shroud was unambiguous proof.
Trey found it disgusting that such a thing could happen, that others could feel so entitled over the state of a boy’s soul. He hated living in a place where souls were meaningless. Everyone was only valuable for what they were set to provide, and Trey judged them for this. These sentiments weren’t lost on the lurking shadows. Trey felt the weight of his thought crimes as each critical notion seemed to trigger more and more hidden gazes.
Trey, in mind and body, was never alone. The fact of his surveillance was as true to him than God.
Now that he was finally alone (enough) to feel his feelings—not having to worry Swishy or protect the scarecrow’s emotions—he couldn’t do that. The land sought to feed upon his negativity or report it to Ruby. His innermost thoughts would be used as knives against himself.
His emotions manifested as airborne particles, a dew that traveled toward the [Sieve].
The lion’s share of the darkness went to the double-headed Duo outside.
Congratulations, Duo said together, a double-voiced bellow and screech.
“I don’t see any successes, any prizes.”
You’ve made it to the second layer.
“I guess I can take your congrats, then…”
Duo laughed.
Meanwhile Swishy kept rising, the city’s newest spiritual monument.
I will consume you and your birds. And then I’ll help Ruby claim our nest’s darkness.
Before the Duo had continued their spiel, Trey disappeared with a [Zlide]. There were problems, though. The sieve was around him still, tracing around the warp path. He found that he was easily followed. Even before he’d arrived at the exit, Trey noticed the presence of snitchtalons and the massive force of Duo gliding along the invisible path.
When he came back into the world, he stared into the clear skies—but his peripheral swirled with blackness.
A pincer—both of Duo’s heads were split to both sides of Trey, their necks slithering around to surround him.
[Zip]—another boost to his wrathravens. He handed out spell orbs like popcorn, and in return they quickly pulled up before the beaks snapped at him.
Duo continued to snap after Trey, too, as their necks stretched and coiled around each other’s like a helix. Trey and the Sling-ravens were forced higher and higher still. All the while, Trey settled back into his wrathraven taxi, abandoning his [Zoom] ride.
“Down!” Trey called to his beast trio.
And so his carriers plunged downward along Duo’s extended necks, assuming relative safety. They waited for the necks to retract and bring the necks after them. However, everything above Duo’s collarbone vanished into smoke. Their upper portions became a thin haze, grayish, devoid of energy.
But the truth was that their genuine selves were masked.
The heads reintegrated again with their originally-sized necks, retracted. And now those mouths opened once more to meet Trey’s rapid descent.
“Oh fuck!”
The dual-head laughed and laughed, each utterance accompanied by collected energy in their mouths.
[Black Blast], the duo shouted. And the balls shot forth, twisting around each other, another kind of helix. Their tricky movement made it hard to judge where to dodge.
The snitchtalons gathered from far away, too, staying at the edges of the blast radius.
Trey, again, was caged.
While the Sling-raven carrying Trey halted its flight, the other two converged in front as a wing shield, blocking the blasts. But once those two blasts disappeared, the Sling-ravens undamaged but visibly fatigued, Duo sent another helix after them.
Blast after blast came, a tandem rhythm, one-two, one-two, one-two.
As the crew was secured in place, trapped by the impact of boulder-like blasts, the [Sieve] shrunk once again. The spell’s damaged boundaries fed from Duo’s darkness, from Trey and the Sling-raven’s panic, and from the curses whipped up by Swishy’s eclipsing rise.
The sieve shrank and shrank. It wasn’t a one-bedroom apartment anymore. It wasn’t a room. It wasn’t a closet either. It reduced and reduced and reduced until now that grid was a proper cage, a kennel.
Trey reached out and grabbed the bars with a handful of [Zzt], breaking these shadows down to the best of his ability. But the sieve self-healed, absorbing the panic of the Sling-ravens.
A bead of sweat trickled from Trey’s temple down his cheek. The sweat pooled down his neck.
The sieve was inches from his face. Stray flickering of the spell’s aura sparked against the tip of Trey’s nose. The curses inside laughed their menacing laughs. They rejoiced in the terror that they now harvested from Trey and the Sling-ravens.
More, more! The curses said. Suffer more!
“I won’t!”
But you are!
The sieve fed from the Duo’s residual black blast aftermath, recycling the energy, fueling more of their evil laughter. The curses were in the prime time of their existence now, flowing joyously, finding new forms and experimenting with them. From wrathraven body, to black blast, to smoke, to sieve, to whatever it was that’d come next for them. Doing Ruby’s bidding was close enough to autonomy for them, to freedom.
Calamity was their favorite mode of existence yet, no matter its shape.
The Sling-ravens trembled.
Trey, struggling to combat the sieve with his voltage, used his free hand to multitask. He sent [Heart Strings] to his beastly allies. He knew that he couldn’t manipulate them into calmness, not with the combative darkness overwhelming them the way that it did.
The string looped in speedy grade-school cursive into COURAGE. It glittered within the Sling-raven bodies, a lone light sparking within their oceans of gloom. Wrathravens at their base possessed bodies structured from curses and word banes. GLOOM were feathers and bone. HOLLOWNESS and FROST were a heart. Other sorrows, other agonies, were akin the rest of what creatures regarded as organs. Even through the [Heart Strings] spell, Trey’s soul felt the chilliness, the emptiness. His exploration within the wrathraven bodies was like stepping into a blizzard, a frost so deep that Trey’s soul burned from the iciness.
Three birds, three uncertain hearts, a triple shock of spiritual pain.
The Sling-ravens were panicked still, but the thread-bound encouragement gave them composure. They were manic but not lost. They were receptive to Trey and slowly turned to him for something of an answer. And he had one—even though he wasn’t sure it’d work.
“Let’s work slow! You don’t get anywhere without starting small.” Trey pointedly glared at the flaring curses, the taunting mess-talkers.
A hint of recognition flashed across the glossed emptiness of the wrathraven eyes.
[Ultimatum], the Sling-ravens breathed onto the [Sieve], a black fog misting against the wires.
While the majority of the curses, retreated into the sieve, packing tightly, strengthening each other by becoming one—some of the taunters were caught in the fog as weak, unfortified individuals. SERVE, that was the word, the command. They were so weak that the Sling-ravens weren’t required to give them an out. And so they were drawn from their comfortable wiring, absorbed into the wrathraven’s mouths.
The ultimatum breaths continued onward, eroding the sieve bars, keeping it at bay.
Duo was quick on the uptake, though, continuing its black blast barrage. Meanwhile, it grew a new appendage. From its tail feathers, a body part stretched outward with an intermingling of feathers and scales. And then it moved swiftly and whip-like after its blasts, a third attacker, the massive strike of a tail.
CHIMERA, Duo boomed.
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Other appendages began to grow from different parts of its torso.
The fog spread into a phantom shroud, taking shape gradually. A fearsome and indecipherable silhouette developed from Duo’s body. One limb resembled a floating claw. Another formed into an additional tail. Feathers blew around the mass, the wrathraven rearranging, making a chaotic mess of itself.
Overall, the wrathraven became less itself and more a mass of black doom. It took the shape of whatever it knew would hurt most.
A pause in the attacks, the core darkening as a nucleus, its physicality fading into a cloud.
“Down!” Trey called. “We can’t stay stuck up here. I don’t think we can fight…atmosphere.”
A low thrum began. The air vibrated. The world buzzed against Trey, every minor fidget prickling against his skin.
As Trey and the Sling-ravens plunged toward the Cearth, a surging rush of wind was sensed. The dark cloud of Duo swirled and swirled, the dual-head merging with the sky itself.
“Run, run, run!” The Clayborne said, his [Heart String] drawing COURAGE repeatedly in his crew.
And then the first of Duo’s head came shooting from the nebula, triple its original size, and without its neck. The bellowing head, unburdened by an immense body, chased them with unimaginable speed.
Trey wouldn’t look back. He knew that gaping mouth was right there upon him. He traced the shape of the danger with his imagination and knew that his vision was the reality. Duo’s head hadn’t teleported—it might as well have, but it didn’t. Because Trey was full of good ideas, Ruby and the rest of Straw City had a habit of using many of them.
[Zip] included.
“Such bullshit,” Trey groaned.
The Sling-ravens shook their heads too.
Everyone ran. Everyone also took the liberty of a silent—but very expressive—commiseration.
(…)
The giant head hunted while Trey and the birds fled for their souls.
It was another day in Straw City, the sun stolen by shadows and the humans harvested in a thousand creative ways.
Trey groaned at the negative atoms stripped from his body in beads. He thought about the science of the animal ability to smell fear—and of the city’s one-ups-manship in eating it instead. He wasn’t sure if he found it funny or sick or both, but decided to share a novel thought the Sling-ravens.
“If you guys were full grown, you could’ve just fought this thing and we could call it a day.”
The Sling-ravens took turns grabbing Trey by the collar and shaking him.
“I’m kidding, I’m kidding! (Well I’m not but I know you can’t help it).”
They shook once, twice, then a third-fourth-fifth time because it was fun—because Trey was an amazing fidget toy for their stress. Smoke from their bodies flew toward Duo in greater measure. The Sling-ravens fed from the weaker, anonymous curses in the environment, while the larger wrathraven collected the lion’s share of those dividends. Their absorption and drainage were stable in their present state, equal in both measures, but their outlines were amorphous. The birds never knew when Duo would take more, further warbling their uncertain forms.
All the while, the distraction helped them fly faster. Their bolstered speed wasn’t lost on Trey. Even during the punishment game, he had the wherewithal to feed them modest orbs or zap.
“So guys, if we get to Swishy, maybe we won’t die. Sound like a plan.”
The birds squawked.
“Okay, it’s not a plan-plan. We don’t know what’ll happen but we’re going to do this anyway, right?”
They hummed, they wing-shrugged, they steadily returned to their Trey-protecting formation.
“Good, let’s get cracking. Give me a little height, yeah?”
The Sling-ravens tossed him high and Trey formed a [Zoom] beneath his feet.
A bellow—then a shriek. One Duo head was visible while its other consciousness remained in the fog, a black weather that gradually lowered onto The High Chasm.
Trey rode on his [Zoom]-rider, eyeing everything with suspicion—while the rest of the settlement eyed him with curiosity and confusion. He understood why, kind of. Being that he was rushing through their neighborhoods, their bazaars, their kiosks and everyfruit crates and treehouses.
A grouping of scarecrows were standing around, T-posing, slightly bowing on their buoyant stakes.
Others were wiping down their homes or collecting everyfruits from the trees or building collecting snitchtalons upon their arms. Everyone was minding their business, finding a purpose in the mundanity of their sudden bark-borne lives—
While, of course, Trey and the Sling-talons were running for theirs.
Meanwhile, the shadow of Swishy rose upward while Ruby’s silhouette cut through the darkness. She looked like a cookie-cutter version of a witch, the way Trey could only see the vague shape of her in the sky.
The closer they made it to their scarecrow, scare-buddy goal, the worse the weather became.
Winds howled among them. The everytrees blew and bounced and even made springy noises. Beneath the force of the gales, the shadow world had debuted its melty textures in full. Nothing about this world was solid. Everything was flexible, malleable, moveable. Trey noted the stability and lack thereof in the essence of each building, each life form. There was some universal lesson he thought he could glean from it. He knew that one day he’d look back and hit the young Claybornes with one philosophy or another about the contradictory shadowdeep.
But he needed to live first.
Duo belted out multiple [Black Blast] attacks, one-two-three-four-five. And none of these curse balls were fast. They were slow-slow-slow, an envoy, an escort party of spheres.
Initially, Trey thought this was easy to avoid, something that they could zip from.
But as the spheres positioned themselves slightly above and off to the sides, he soon saw that these attacks were boxing him in just like the sieve. Less room to maneuver now that the Duo had used one [Zip] after another. Not even Trey used multiples on the same person. But Duo’s darkness and talents were greater. So the [Zip] stacks were in full effect, exponentially raising its speed.
The head appeared directly above a Sling-raven, baring its abyssal maw.
[Zlide]—Trey sucked the would-be victim into a portal.
But Duo disappeared as well—zipping to another defenseless Sling-raven. Duo chomped down but the Sling-raven read the tactic in advance and had poof vanished, leaving only mist and feathers behind. Elsewhere, it reconstructed—eyes first, warily scoping out their pursuer’s movements.
It didn’t take long into the chase for Duo’s vision of labor to clarify. The anatomy was controlled by one head while the other head gathered the curses. As the body parts warped from place to place, leading the assault, the nebula gathered the ambient energies and released a plethora of spells.
The Clayborne thought of Duo with fresh labels: Brain and Nebula.
While Brain, the head, went after prey that passed before its blood-cracked eyes, a creature of action and reflex, Nebula served as the core, the strategist, the whatever-it-was that passed for a wrathraven’s heart. He didn’t want to go so far as to call them heartless, not with the Sling-ravens being his primary allies. Things were complex in the shadowdeep. Trey remained mindful of his place.
But all the respect didn’t help him one bit when it came to Duo’s strategy. Brain played the lead while Nebula cast problematic support buffs: [Zip] and [Zlide] being the first upon them. An occasional attack came, too, because it was a [Chimera] of a sort, conjuring random claws and tails and beaks.
Trey and company dodged them all, but their mental fatigue made them clumsy, the close calls and near misses adding to the pressure. It was all within Nebula’s calculations, to drain their unseen reserves, to burden them with any activity at all to deprive them of rest. Busy work—but the evil version.
The Clayborne felt the manipulation, the way Nebula worked his mind, claiming it move by move.
Every time Trey cast a warp, Brain reflexively used its own [Zlide], following him. And when Trey boosted his speed with [Zip], Nebula did the same to Brain, multiple stacks at once.
Trey, being human, couldn’t outdo the shadowdeep denizen.
He did, however, get very very lucky.
The first time his [Zlide] exit was intercepted, a flash of Swishy’s darkness rolled across the area, a cresting wave that eclipsed everyone and threatened to crash down with an indiscriminate and destructive intensity.
Duo phased away, dispersing as fog, taking shelter in the ground-level shadows or below tree roots and building foundations.
Trey and the Sling-ravens escaped into a [Zlide].
Once the warped finished, the danger remained—in fact, it was closer than ever. Trey had brought them toward Swishy’s black wave, much to the Sling-raven’s squawking surprise.
“Sorry guys! That’s where we’re going. You didn’t think I’d take us backward? Nope!”
The birds beat him with their wings to hurry it up.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.”
The black wave descended, releasing a spray of waterfall residuals.
[Zlide]—forward again.
Trey closed his eyes and mumbled a brief prayer. Please be far enough. See us through.
The crew burst through the exit again—alive. There was relief. Sweet, sweet relief.
From behind, the wave crashed down. But a tremendous shade overtook them again. A larger, second wave roared beyond the clouds, beyond space from Trey’s estimation. It kept rising and rising. It could’ve gone on forever. Such was the depth and measure of Swishy’s blackness.
“I know you’ve been hurt, but dang…”
The Sling-ravens were sad, too, as they mourned the steady growth of wave number two, the beginnings of an endless gloom.
Yet Trey’s [Heart String] thread pointed forward, an unraveled knot that straightened with the rigidity of an arrow. Through the bleakness, there was heart. Briefly, Trey wondered how that could be. How would a heart survive an abyss like this?
[Zlide]—forward.
They knew another wave was coming. Trey could only hope to land between the next one. Fortunately, he did. Perhaps two out of two wave dodges wasn’t luck but something of a pattern.
The Sling-ravens regarded his magic string with admiration, pecking at it, finding confidence in each subsequent warp.
Trey opened his portals again and again, feeling like he was going to the casino with his and his bird friends’ lives. And he came out intact each time. But after the first several warps through black waves, Trey noticed a hanger-on: Duo.
That mysterious head-and-cloud just followed Trey’s warp, safely traversing the Swishy sludge. This also meant that Trey’s life was secured for now, seeing as he was their ticket to life. And not just security, either, but Swishy’s and Myst’s hearts. He knew that this would come to a head. Trey focused on his [Zlide] warps, spacing those consistent distances apart, while he schemed against his tenacious enemy.
The waves continued. The [Zlide] spells followed. And the black haze thickened with the intermingling presence of Swishy and the amorphous Duo.
It’s over, you know. Brain advised. You’re only leading us to the hearts of your friends. There’s nothing you can do to stop their reaping.
“I can’t wait to see the look on your beheaded ass when you lose.”
Speak no more, for I can taste your fear. Brain slurped through the darkness and the particles lifted from Trey’s body, his sweat.
“I said what I said, and I meant every word. My fear is because I care how this world should be, and how a person should be in this world. Make no mistake, I don’t believe I’ve lost.
I see…a soul with improper vision. The delusions of a lower being are…sad would be the word.
“This philosophical bitch thinks he’s on to something,” Trey said to the Sling-ravens. “Ready to ride for your family?” Trey spoke the family word without reservation or embarrassment. He had a human family, a blood one, but he knew he’d long expanded the scope of those bonds. In this world, personhood was such a limiting, limiting factor.
The Sling-ravens crooned, spreading their six wings wide, their special flavor of T-posing. Triple the limbs, triple the scarecrow-ing glory.
The [Heart String] glimmered with celestial beauty. Trey hadn’t done that. His spell responded to an outside source, a heart most dear.
“You like that?” Trey called to the abyss.
The heart string shined on.
Yes was the answer. Swishy’s heart liked what it saw. Through the howling pitch, the connection was made. Yet the darkness was powerful. It warred against the ways that hearts touched hearts. As the heart string glimmered, Swishy’s next black wave grew far higher than the ones that came beforehand.
The Sling-ravens stared at Trey, seeking direction, waiting for him to summon his next [Zlide].
Duo waited for their cue to follow after their trailblazer tour guide.
But Trey made no move to avoid the blackness. “Well? Ya’ll go first.”
Now Trey…
“Don’t now-Trey me. Swishy likes me. He’ll let me through.”
I see…fine. We’ll wait too.
Brain receded into Nebula’s gas, returning to oneness.
The black wave soared upward as an ascending waterway. Cursed faces flew through its roaring tapestry, each one representing a unique facet of anguish. DOOM rising, ABYSS converging, and SUFFERING inevitable.
“I’ll even double down on this gamble.”
[Heart Strings]—The spells proliferated from each of his fingers, going straight into his heart. His soul felt the warmth of his touch. His magic weaves wrapped around his heart, mapping themselves against the most prominent parts of Trey’s cardiac veins. As the strings found their place around Trey’s heart, he then activated another spell.
[Soul]—the astral projection occurred.
So you choose evisceration.
“Shut up,” Blue Trey said—while Trey-less Trey nodded.
I’ll quite enjoy watching you die.
“Whatever,” both Treys said.
Trey-less Trey [Zoom]’d into the cresting wave, escorted by the Sling-ravens.
“Let’s go diving,” Blue Trey instructed. “If we want those hearts, we better have our own on deck!”
Blue Trey then took the plunge.
(…)
Ruby watched, admiring her ex-employee, challenged by his bravery.
The darkness was dangerous, this she knew, but what was life without risk?
She broom-rode into the [Possessed Guardian], chasing her coveted hearts.
“I can’t let some boy outdo me. What would that say about me?”
She soared in spiraled patterns through the pitch, laughing her head away, riveted by her element.