HIS MATERIALS WERE GONE.
The straw, the gourd, the wings, the heart—Swishy, while larger than ever, was left lacking in startling and terrifying ways.
Where had his items gone? In him was the answer, this he knew. But where exactly? Somewhere…in all that abyss. He grew more diffuse, more lost in himself by the second. Growth had been advertised to him as a great thing. Someone should’ve told him that they meant that in the abstract. Because his literal gigantism was cumbersome and counterproductive. Swishy gained mass and sacrificed shape. He rightly couldn’t call himself a scarecrow anymore and that scared him. He’d just gotten used to being who he was. A small boy. A straw boy. A joyous shell of wheat.
When he was a scarecrow, none of the gloom rippled or made unnatural progress through his body. The straw soaked up his curses—the blackwheat was a form of defense all along. But now his agony roamed free, unfurling from the nuggets he’d painstakingly packed away.
The [Possessed Guardian] was summoned in all its potency.
It was supposed to be a good idea, releasing his pain while inviting the pain of others. Consolidating it into a core, a place to dump hurt, seemed like the greatest community service one could perform. Perhaps it was. Perhaps he was on the right track.
But right now Swishy struggled to grapple with the harrowing and inconvenient transition.
Swishy was himself—but black—and that was an improvement. He’d achieved a good, good thing. Just at a cost.
The boy proceeded with the next step of his pain-mongering: rejecting panic. The sheer proliferation of blackness pouring from his soul made him want to scream. The prospect of a breakdown struck him as both defeatist and cathartic. Folks talked about the sweet release of death—but there was also the release of giving up, ceasing effort to circumvent stress. But no, that wasn’t the answer either, not for him anyhow.
But with Swishy allowing his shadows to reign free, he felt more abandoned than ever. He wasn’t alone, of course, and knew that because he underwent this transformation with Myst by his side, within his smokiness. Swishy searched for her but within his diffused state, he couldn’t find her.
Myst, where are you? He thought as loudly as he could. But there were no echoes or reverberations through his dark ocean. He couldn’t find an origin point for his sentiment, a control center to intentionally use magic.
Myst?
Myst?
Myst?
Swishy’s words hit like droplets after a long, long fall.
There was no feedback, no response, but he knew she was in there somewhere.
Is she?
She was. She had to be.
But what Swishy sensed instead was a response from another being. “Now Swishy,” Ruby said. “You’ve grown large. I knew there was much in you. Thank you for opening your trove of riches to me. It’s all I’ve asked. We didn’t need to go through all this for you to get here.”
“I want you to go away,” Swishy echoed.
“And I’ve heard that a thousand times from you but you’re not a person, you’re not even a doll anymore. Actually, you’re more like me on the inside now, an endlessly spendable abyss. I’ve never seen a farm more perfect. You should be proud of yourself.”
Screams, groans, any outlet for frustration but cries. He won’t give her tears, whining, or any of their emotional cousins.
Still, Ruby taunted. “Let it out, yes, let it all out. It makes no difference to me. But if you want to scream, then scream. Every step you take leads to acceptance, such is what I’ve heard. I’ve read that in a magazine or three, hehe.”
Then she was gone.
Swishy was relieved, knowing that for all her talk, Ruby was lost too. Swishy, for once, was overjoyed to be complicated, murky, and hard to know.
Still, he now began the process of re-learning and reconstructing himself.
He activated [Scarecrow].
The boy wasn’t sure how it’d work in this form, devoid of straw, but Swishy noticed the currents of himself flow more evenly. The edges of his territory had smoothed out, as if his shadows were pruned and trimmed.
There was a form coming along, just slow going, more of a process than Swishy wanted.
But he’d already begun to calm. There was no feeling like a sense of self, he’d learned. And a settled feeling came over him. He was less like a flame and more like a polished drawing. The wild flaring of his dark boundaries simmered into steady flickers.
His was a new reality now, a blacker one, but not bleaker.
Blacker but NOT bleaker. Everything will be fine. This is my technique, I can handle it. I can, I can, I can…
Swishy was one with miasma; one with pain.
His shape would work itself out in its own time. Or he hoped that such a thing would happen.
The [Possessed Guardian] maneuver was doing something for him.
Swishy had to start over as an existence again, rebuilding a sense of control, autonomy, and grounding. There were no movements, no sensations, that were natural.
He focused on ‘finding’ where his body even was. Darkness poured from his core, so much of it beyond his control. His soul started the process of becoming the [Possessed Guardian] by venting out his pain. His contained agony began to breathe, to assert its presence in the world, its right to life. But to live, one needed a form, and Swishy was still in the throes of making his darkness be born.
DOUBT welled through him, a word far easier to find than any of his lost physicality. His blackness was the element of agony, fertile ground for his hurt to blossom into word banes.
The HOLLOWNESS and HOPELESSNESS, the SOLITUDE AND SORROW, and DEATH that Ruby strung along to her aura.
The negativity found purchase within his slick shadowy textures.
And the light simply disappeared. Abyss hid things well, and that included the inner strength he’d earned.
[Midnight]…it streamed into him from the surface up, Swishy managing to earn the loyalty from Ruby’s summoned shadows. They didn’t know Ruby, only her power, and had arrived to the city in search of a place to settle. Swishy, however, had given them a place. There were so many entities that found themselves in his oceanic agony. Each personality present was awed by the capacity of the dark god to suffer.
The boy focused on the overlapping commentary of his newcomers.
Yes, this is good. These folds, this silkiness. This will do. Oooh, a patch of FROST, there’s nothing like a chilliness of soul. Is that…VIOLENCE? My favorite. This darkness gets active. We knew we came for a reason!
These weren’t his morals but these were his gains. He patted himself on the proverbial back and concentrated on his [Possessed Guardian]. There was more to develop and worthy harvests to achieve.
“Grow, grow, grow,” he told himself.
And so he did.
Among the buildings and trees, Swishy as the [Possessed Guardian] felt like the tallest kid in the classroom. He stared down at the treetops and roofs, impressed with himself. He was colossal. Even the sky-piercers came up to his hip. One thing that Swishy hadn’t surpassed—hadn’t come close to outdoing—was The High Chasm itself, which still appeared mountainous to him.
Because his scale had surpassed the environment, said environment was what he’d become. The living entities started to treat him as such. Birds, insects, shadows had all begun to call him home.
And if he concentrated hard enough, he could feel a flower bloom.
From afar, Swishy spotted his other fellow in height: the Straw Guardian. Bright limbs, dark body, that giant wearing the shadows like cloth and armor. On its own, it negotiated the needs of the land, radiating a light that affected other trees, slowly transitioning the everytrees to wishwillows. Meanwhile, much of the ambient shadows had flowed toward it, a phenomenon that Swishy experienced with himself now.
Swishy admired his creation and blueprint, understanding better how the gigantism was supposed to function. And there was pride, too, because he’d done well without even knowing what he was doing in the first place.
The guardian was in better shape than how Swishy had left it. Within its weaves, the snitchtalon escapees of the wrathraven nest were preening and homemaking. A few of the Straw-bound were hanging from the giant’s chest and arms, hanging from their stakes, T-posing in prayer.
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“Creepy…” Swishy mused. “But thoughtful, very thoughtful.”
The Straw-bounds’ thoughts crackled within Swishy’s darkness. Evidence of their love shimmered through him as tiny sprite-like stars. The village’s prayer lights sparked in rhythm with Swishy’s beating heart.
Oneness was a conscious, communal act.
The straw-bound maintained their trance states as their stakes anchored into the ground and the trees and the guardian, blue auras pouring from their T-posing bodies and drifting toward Swishy.
Their contributions, however, were drops in the bucket compared to his oceanic blackness, which wasn’t to call them weak—because Swishy’s soul was no more influential. He realized that his soul was the same size as it’d always been, a modest core meant for a scarecrow. His expansive formlessness made it a Herculean task to navigate and control himself. There was more ground for his orb of essence to cover. Swishy needed an efficient means for accessing himself, for delving into his bottomlessness.
In fact, he had a quick answer to this.
[Swish-mini], he said.
(…)
[Swish-mini]—a side effect to his [Scarecrow] activation. Swishy couldn’t turn himself into a giant scarecrow, which he blamed on a shortage of straw, but there had to be enough gold-straw in him to make this happen. There had to be.
Swishy tapped into the prayer nodes of the Straw-bound and mined them for threads to borrow. So many others had given him offerings and now was his time to cash in. He tried to make as many Goldies as he could, those lively straw boys with hummingbird wings. He spread his soul throughout the vast realm, beads of himself that he set out to inhabit his crafted Goldies. It was a risk to spread himself thin, not knowing if he’d successfully create a vessel for them. Even if it was his own spirit, Swishy was unfamiliar with it like everyone else. His split soul resulted in dozens of instances of being lost, of his consciousness beads traversing far and wide.
There was no sign of a Swish-mini yet constructed, and no sign of his heart either.
But he sent his soul farther and farther away, a type of [Pile] technique, except instead of distributing straw he used his soul. The splitting off came with a side effect: heightened vulnerability. His soul parts were sensitive and chilly. The sharpness of cold was disorientating but he pressed onward with his exploration, choosing FAITH. He knew that the word was within him, that each experience of his life trained him to remain calm and believe in himself.
In him, was everything that he needed.
But as Swishy searched himself for straw to use, for material to complete [Scarecrow] or at least [Swish-Mini], there was trouble.
The boy released his frustrations in waves, though, a natural effect, pulsing the curses outward. During these moments of heightened anguish, a shock of clarity shot through him. And that’s when he saw everything—and everyone—that was within him.
In these flashes of relief, Swishy saw Trey staring into the waves. There were [Zlide] warps. There was a celebratory fist pump as he survived. And then, after a time, Trey’s body and soul separated, Trey-less Trey and Blue Trey going their separate ways.
Trey-less Trey, the [Heart String] influenced dummy, was trained only to use one spell at a time. Swishy traced the familiar magic of the [Zoom]-rider with the three distinct signatures of the Sling-ravens. The buddy system seemed to work for Trey and the beasts, and it worked for Swishy, too, who could easily track them as one collective. Their combined communal spirit was a rare warmth in his expansive aura.
Where’s your soul, Trey? It’s dangerous to be here all alone.
Swishy was saddened that Trey was a human soul devoid of mind-reading talents like Myst.
He wanted to find Blue Trey but had no control, no flexion of his enormous, sky-piercer of a spirit.
Oh no!
And then there was the trademark Trey side-eye as he glared at the wrathraven head and foggy presence that warped after him.
The boy focused on the wrathraven and tried to harden the darkness around him—it was his territory, his domain—but no such luck was found.
Swishy, as of yet, couldn’t maneuver the blackness like he’d done his straw, so there would be no jailing of those who entered him.
However, the mysterious wrathraven cackled. It was sensitive as well and knew something was up. Valiant effort! The beast said. A shame you won’t get the chance to try again.
Another black wave involuntarily burst from Swishy, radiating over Straw City.
A brief sensation of Myst occurred—and then was gone. He trusted that she was collected from his shadows.
“I upgraded your apartment!” Swishy called out.
But there was no response from her still. Swishy, this time, kept calm. There was no need to freak out. They’d survived much worse.
Trey warped—and so too did the smug wrathraven.
Ruby returned to prominence as well. Her aura was defined and crisp. If there was one thing that she was going to do as a person on the planet, it was to assert her existence in no uncertain terms. She sat sideways on her broom, drifting by the particles of Swishy’s soul, and caught one on the tip of her finger. She let out a giggle as she examined his gem of soul.
“A beautiful soul, you have there,” Ruby complimented, speaking into the void, knowing that Swishy was everywhere and nowhere.
Ruby took that finger and guided that soul spark down toward her broom—right where she still kept the inert torso of Swishy’s body. As the soul gem lingered a hair’s breadth from the scarecrow remains, its strands rose upward and curled around energy. First the wheat became a ball, and then reserves from the torso continued to fly into the mass. Upon the tip of Ruby’s finger, a scarecrow doll was made, that piece of Swishy’s soul completely its Swish-mini mission. There was no gold-straw. But there was life and that was enough.
The Swish-mini grew two wings, its figure-eight rotations lifting it into the air.
Swishy became one with the Swish-mini, seeing through its point-of-view once its birth was finished. Suddenly, he was eye-to-eye with the illustrious Ruby.
“I’m here for your heart. You know that, don’t you?”
Ruby’s smile was apple pie warm.
“I, of noble intentions, can only tell the truth.”
There was much for Swishy to say—but the Swish-mini, that tiny mass, couldn’t speak just as the ones that’d come before.
Blackness—Ruby crunched it within her fist. Within her palm, the curses and their sharpened HUNGER gnashed away Swishy’s miniature body. The shadows ate through the wings first, then the arms and legs, eating inward as they saved the head for last. She wanted Swishy to watch, to experience the full harshness of being killed by her.
When the Swish-mini was obliterated, Swishy returned to a split experience of all his diffused soul gems. But around each one, there was a sudden repopulation of RAGE and HUMILIATION that trailed each one. Nothing new here—just raw emotion without the filter of blackwheat. But that reaction presented a new problem.
The boy sensed Ruby speeding within him, covering tremendous swathes of darkness. The changes, the discharge of gloom that cohered around the soul gems, revealed their exact locations.
Black and purple magic welled into Ruby’s hands as she set off to spiritually cripple Swishy. It was a new spell now, a flaming orb affixed with a gnashing mouth.
As she flew over a grouping of several soul beads, she unleashed her latest doom.
[PICA]—her handheld orbs left the nest of Ruby’s touch, floating through with their blind biting, eating through anything with even a hint of fortitude. Solids, gases, souls—the pica pets were starved at their core.
The lights of Swishy’s soul were extinguished, several by the second, as Ruby unleashed her raiding malice.
Swishy felt vulnerable, unwieldy. He began as too big. Now he was too small. But there was so much of himself to work with. There were shadows. There were allies. There were hearts…somewhere—but they were his. Swishy’s stubbornness, annoyance, and resolve converged upon the same motivation all at once: that if Ruby can make destruction, then he can at least make himself.
IMAGINATION—he forced that intent everywhere within him. It wasn’t black like Ruby’s. It was his and therefore luminous. He knew that justice was on his side and in his heart. Building a body was too small of an ambition when it came to this situation. Here, Swishy would make a world of himself.
Ruby came after another cluster of Swish beads, charging Pica pets in her hands.
The soul particles were subsumed into the Swish-borne void. They were already inside him, after all, so he claimed them with more ease than he expected. Absorbing the things of himself turned out to be more effortless than walking or speaking or eating or even blinking. He focused on the darkness’s breath, and the act of respiration happened by itself.
And through these conscious triggers, a world started to take shape, the inner workings of a scarecrow made large, made labyrinthine.
Ruby twisted around on her broom, watching the swirling atmosphere take on color and light.
Everything brightened first, then solidified. Straw, of course, was the basis for everything. There were sudden spires of straw, bridges, hinges, coiling connectors. Great spikes rose from the depths and lodged themselves upward. Ruby dodged all the new growths, doing her acrobatic best to not get clipped by a beam of birthing infrastructure.
Swishy wasn’t focused on her, though. He only cared about becoming a massive, massive scarecrow. His full concentration went into converting all his shadows into straw. Even if it became blackwheat, even if the curses were the main aspect of his population, of who he was meant to walk the world as.
At least he was taking them all into himself.
He’d be responsible, suffering alone, and everyone else would be safe from the scourges of Cearth’s imperfections.
Gradually, he began to resemble the innards that he used to have in his boy-sized version: tightly packed straw, intricate and repeated weaves, layers of blackwheat packaged barely beneath the surface of gold and brown hay. He brought the respectable portions upward while pushing the shameful, unsavory parts of his character downward. He’d radiate hope while processing the foulness within.
There was one final touch that made him…him.
A tremendous hollow space that was cleared of curses, of straw, of any presence at all.
The space was just…space.
And from that emptiness came a beating.
Thud, thud, thud.
A calm and thunderous drumbeat.
Energy subtly pushed outward in waves, a rhythm that matched the successive black waves that his shadows released from the outside. Everything he was had been processed in this void space, then released for usage.
His chest chamber.
A heart floated up there somewhere—and everyone knew it. Swishy sensed the sudden attention of each entity in attendance. The weakest curses gazed in its direction, slowly crawling toward it. And the strong…they paused. They waited. They knew that other contenders were here to claim the prize. Swishy saw them so clearly in his head, the timing of their gazes, the shape of their smiles, the contractions of their muscles and mayhem as they rushed toward that constant thudding.
“Thank you,” Ruby said from somewhere inside him.
He could feel the warp coming on, an [Adieu] conjuring against a sensitive batch of straw.
Swishy now, having created straw, could speak again.
“Somebody stop her! I can’t do this myself!”
There were no answers yet, no clapbacks.
Only the bellowing of the wrathraven head paired with the laughter of its nebula.
Swishy only sensed the bad but none of the good.
Ruby and her Duo wrathraven teleported into the chest chamber. The woman now rode atop of the head, drawing her broom backward, a [Clean Sweep] gathering upon her wide-bristled weapon.
“Fine…” Swishy lamented.
He tapped into the straw from his chest walls, infusing his weaves with pieces of his consciousness.
He made the wings first, hundreds of hummingbird wings that grew from the walls—then pushed outward, conjuring little scarecrows around those appendages.
Fairies, hundreds of them, all converging before the beating heart.
They faced down Ruby’s cursed wind.
[Clean Sweep]—and the wind had evolved this time, using the wrathraven nebula as its fuel.
There was no build-up.
It was an instant giant, a maniacal laughter accompanying its scythes of wind.
Blue Trey joined the Swish-minis, escorted by Trey-less Trey and the Sling-ravens.
The Swish-minis buzzed around their friend, circling his head in a crown.
“No, no, don’t look at me.”
The fairies stopped, disappointed.
“Sorry guys, but that thing is beyond me. This is still a you problem.”
Blue Trey laughed once—but after that, he was just huffing out stress through a forced smile.
Blackness was upon them, a phantom face etched into it.
Then it became faceless.
Because it was close.
And because the first wave of Swish-minis was blown to nothing.