BLOWN TO NOTHINGNESS?
Not exactly.
Swishy had never been so glad to be wrong.
The straw sprites were alive, all of them.
Swishy thought that oblivion was upon him when Ruby’s attack first barreled through his fleet of miniatures, but he instantly discovered that his Goldies were intact.
There were no signs of predatory curses crawling over him or corrosive words seeping through his delicate golden weaves. He’d managed, through no small miracle, to be fine in practically every way. Each Swish-doll heaved out little sighs. No sliver of his consciousness wanted to die at Ruby’s hands again.
After the relief, there was mild pleasure.
For a moment, the proliferation of Swishy dolls beamed at their lack of soul-shaving, soul-shaking pain. The giddiness thrummed through them, passing the feeling along one another through osmosis. It was a thousand instances of feeling powerful. It was a thousand-fold resilience that they hadn’t dreamed of. Swishy saw himself using his dolls like this during peacetime. Multiplying the cadence of good feeling was a party trick he hadn’t had the pleasure to use outside of battle. But he was going to do it—something fun to add to his bucket list.
And so the [Clean Sweep] impact came and went and left no damage behind. Ruby’s technique targeted darkness and darkness alone. Her enchanted wind only touched the Swish-minis’ straw but not their internal essence, their stores of brilliance.
But the resistance to banes didn’t make Swishy’s dolls windproof by any means. His edges frayed. His tiny wings shed a preponderance of feathers. The group of fairies had separated, their lights spraying outward in an array as they disappeared from each others’ vision. The boy began as a glimmering hive and then witnessed his gradual disappearance, the fairies becoming dispersed several specks at a time.
Everything Swishy suffered was standard physics, which was problematic in and of itself.
The sprites kept flying and flying, rocketing with ceaseless speed, unable to regain control over themselves.
The more they lost the light of their buddies, the more they panicked. When the solitude set in, their gloom hardened in them as teeny cores. Emotionally, spiritually, the distance from his heart ran through the Swish-minis, as represented by DREAD, FEAR, and DOUBT. The words appeared as bubbles within the auras of each Swish-mini, conjuring around their faces, blinding them with these worries.
It took some steps to kill their shine, but the aloneness ultimately did it.
No deaths here, only lone suffering. Each fairy light felt like an anonymous traveler in an overwhelming pitch. Their hurt unfurled, softening, merging with the fabric of the permanent night.
But Swishy’s will passionately stoked. There was much to live for. Much that he was responsible for.
Trey! Myst! My heart!
However, the gale force showed no signs of dissipating. The dolls’ speed persisted, and there were no trees or buildings or other obstructions to stop his backtracking.
The catapulting banishment went on—while Trey and his heart were left alone with Ruby and her dual-headed wrathraven.
But the tumbling wouldn’t stop.
His gold sprites were the sole speckled light among his tapestry of curses and words of power.
As each fairy careened in amid their newest bubbling words—SADNESS and SOMBERNESS and BLUES—they flapped their wings to regain control of themselves. The momentum remained strong. With his split consciousness, Swishy despaired over his entrapment hundreds and thousands of times.
His darkness was deep. The further away from the heart he got, the more each gold sprite felt like they were clasped within cones of velvet. Emptiness thickened, an odd contradiction. But it did. Each cluster of DOOM, GLOOM, and FROST was luxurious. The heightened gravity relaxed the fairies, slackening their otherwise urgent movements. But the sight of each other renewed their firmness.
And that loss of his other selves gave him a clue, a course-correct for his outward flow.
[Pile]—the smallness of his dolls became nothing once more, his straw stardust going out.
Now that Swishy reverted his dolls, his hair-like strands floated in place, diminishing its heft. Without mass, the attack momentum was killed. The remaining winds passed over and around his straw, leaving him for good.
It was what the winds left behind worried him.
Scars—white ones, everywhere. The shadows he’d built his guardian from were being stripped and reaped by Ruby’s technique. [Clean Sweep] did as advertised.
It cleaned.
And, as Swishy noticed portions of his darkness distort and stretch toward the heart chamber, he noticed a secondary feature to Ruby’s broom action: collection.
The Swish-minis hung their heads, shaking and shaking. Some shrugged. Others just drooped in altitude, hiding beneath their buddies.
What doesn’t kill me makes you stronger? Is that the expression?
“Bingo,” said Ruby’s voice from afar, reading him, her infiltration so thorough, so damning.
The [Clean Sweep] had done its work on Swishy’s shadows, stripping him of the darkness that he’d embraced as his element. Each millimeter of blackness was a unit of his existence. He was comprised of minute spirits that contributed to his [Possessed Guardian] wholeness.
And Ruby blew them all away.
His curses murmured in whimpering cadence throughout his vast but scarred remains.
In the wake of Ruby’s swirling attack, there were streaks of white that followed that represented the spell’s wind currents, the streaks of cleared darkness revealing a white void. Swishy was shocked at what was becoming of his insides, how the damage inflicted on him eroded [Possessed Guardian] into the paper-white chasm that the E-squad once contained. So much of his baggage was contained within the shadows, a plethora of cursed words that he rejected and disliked, but now instantly missed when Ruby came to remove them for her convenience.
The whole of him trembled and teetered. He stayed focused on piloting his inner world, knowing that looking through the [Possessed Guardian]’s eyes would do something vicious to his psyche. Still, he couldn’t help imagining the shadow his immense yet crumpling form cast over Straw City.
The boy activated his scarecrow-derived technique, [Swish-mini], and the gold straw magnetized along the white streaks, following the path they’d come from. They sped faster and faster, then smashing into each other, soon reforming into the army of un-summoned gold sprites.
“I’m coming!” He said—or tried to. The Swish-minis were too small for Swish-speak on their own, but together the sounds created a louder rustling, one that the boy believed would be recognized as language.
Through the expanse, a response: “Then hurry that ass up!”
“Yes, Trey!”
“I hear promises but what I really need is speed!”
Now that his [Possessed Guardian] had taken a tactile shape, turning its limbs into straw and its wings into feathers, Swishy now had an overall sense of his anatomy. His roadmap to his dark insides clarified and he was no longer lost. That aside, he also had a compass to where he needed to be. All thousands of his golden fairies reorientated toward the potent shine of his now-revealed heart.
The golden flock swarmed toward the battle zone, sharing a mission, a war cry, a passion. He saw himself as a bird but was more like bees, a hive.
Hives were meant for togetherness.
As they drew closer to one another, they even adopted a formation to spell out the word.
UNITY.
There seemed no purpose in it. It just felt right to fly in a pattern the same as any shadowclaw. Swishy accepted his genetic wiring as his sprites set into place.
The flock of Goldie’s then arrived at a new scene.
His heart chamber. The whiteness outnumbered the shadows as Ruby had never stopped sweeping. A pale havoc spread through the lair with every flick of her wrist. Toward the end of the path, the white emptiness within himself became wider. There were more of them, too, closer to the source. Ruby’s winds cut through his curses like human veins.
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The UNITY-bound Swishy flock gazed all around, studying the curious void, mourning its evicted shadows.
“No,” Ruby said.
[Clean Sweep]—it blasted the Swish sprites away again.
No more grouping, only separation and lights swallowed by the overwhelming dark.
Swishy had to recover once again, using [Pile] and then [Scarecrow] to kill the momentum and rush back to the heart chamber.
Once reconstructed, the Swish sprites were shocked by the stalk whiteness that he saw before him. He was afraid to tap his consciousness into the [Possessed Guardian] and check on the status of the giant. But the more paleness he saw in his body, the more the domain wobbled. Creaking sounds came from the colossus’s boundaries, his degradation progressing fast.
There was much for him to do. There were options. There were friends.
He saw one now—Swishy only had to make out who.
(…)
As the Swish-mini hive grouped together again, they detected four presences.
Swishy noticed a familiar presence floating near the edge of his body. Three were flapping, and one was a no-soul silhouette, a mysterious shade without a spiritual signature.
Swishy concentrated and read their souls with clarity. The [Heart Strings] radiated its warm signature around Trey’s heart, leaving instructions for use—whatever they were—while the Sling-ravens acted as his rides and security form.
“Trey?” Swishy asked, Swish-speaking with the combined straw of his recollected swarm.
A grunt in the dark.
“Trey-less Trey!”
An approving laugh.
“Can you speak?”
“Hi,” it said, in Trey’s voice, before awkwardly shuffling within the Sling-raven’s grasp.
Swishy wasn’t being ignored or dismissed. He caught on to the interaction. Trey-less Trey was staring at Swishy in the dark. He couldn’t see. He only followed its basic orders and answering to Swishy wasn’t one of them. The boy, though, tried to figure out what Trey had assigned his body to do for him.
Trey-less Trey held out both hands and cupped them.
Swishy’s fairies clustered within Trey’s palms. Magic energy vibrated beneath the skin, phasing upward, manifesting as something special for Swishy.
“What’s that?” The miniatures excited bristles tickled against Trey’s palm.
Black and gold energy gathered in Trey’s hands then flared into an amorphous, swirling pattern, the familiar entrance of the [Zlide] portal.
The gate, in its imposing size, vacuumed the Swish-mini hive inside.
Swishy accepted the ride, feeling the clutch of Trey’s magic, its gentle yet firm hold on his miniature body.
After a split second, they were expelled from the exit, as if lightly shoving the Swish-minis by the wings. A white area, the damaged heart chamber. His soul quivered from the go-on-buddy energy.
Then came the confrontation of Ruby’s go-away-go-die vibes.
[Clean Sweep]—it was heading right toward him.
Blue Trey intercepted black waves with [Zap] beams, cleaving through them with light. Brightness, as it turned out, was a simple counter to her curse-collecting spell.
Unfortunately, Trey wasn’t an endless reservoir of soul. He was a human, a good human, the best one that Swishy knew, but with the limits of a human amount of soul. After deflecting Ruby’s winds, Trey’s spirit shrank and had de-aged into a preteen.
“Trey…”
“I know.”
“Don’t get any younger, please.”
“I don’t think that’s something I can help, my guy.” He laughed but he looked tired, a little stressed.
He prepared more volts, losing an inch of height—while earning a zit on his nose and one his forehead.
Ruby, however, used no magic at all. She was a living engine. She was skilled at making her spells cost nothing to herself. In this case, she used Nebula as the cost. And Nebula, being a wrathraven, absorbed blackness—of which there was an endless supply in Swishy. Currently, it swelled from the darkness it’d stripped from the [Possessed Guardian], absorbing that which it’d ‘cleansed’ in one fell swoop.
The boy hated that his suffering was used against him.
“Be sad,” Ruby laughed. “Express your sorrow so that I can be strong.”
She swept continuously. And while Blue Trey reduced from the [Zap] usage, Swishy’s minions sometimes relieved him by body-blocking the winds. They were on full defense with no gaps for them to attack Ruby.
“Thanks, Trey,” The Swish-minis said as one, buzzing around Blue Trey’s soul, tasting his warmth.
“No problem, just go to your heart!”
And that’s what Swishy did, flying toward his heart. In the dark, that heart shined like a sun. Within the pure white of his Ruby-damaged chest, that contrast was just as powerful. No matter what, Swishy’s golden core stood out. The blackness leaked over its outsides but between the bars and layers was sheer luminosity. He believed in himself and knew that he’d produced the best heart ever.
The Swish-minis flew around the heart, pressing against it, wedging themselves into its weaves.
And then the other dolls placed themselves as a secondary layer, then tertiaries layers. The stacking kept going and going, the atomic scarecrows fortifying as a heart armor while Trey kept Ruby’s winds at bay. Trey zapped through the anti-dark winds, dulling their shadow-cleaving blades before they brushed through Swishy’s cursed architecture.
Swishy could’ve used the cleansing long ago. And he felt a type of way about Ruby, she who’d caused his blackness in the first place.
“A little self-serving, yeah?” Swishy taunted.
“Yes, I have things that I want. Less shadows, a little more light.”
But there wasn’t less darkness. The swept curses were condensed into orbs. Ruby’s cleaning placed everything into nearby packages, easy to discard at will. Instead, Ruby kept these orbs swirling around her. There were dozens by now. And the stockpile of these curses were growing. That which was Swishy’s now belonged to her.
Swishy became nervous. He hadn’t yet figured out how to make the [Possessed Guardian] work for him. He’d just now noticed that the overall structure was firmly of straw. Through the whiteness, Swishy saw the boundaries of his summoned energy more clearly. They were encased in a body of blackwheat, rich and slick and usable.
He was proud of himself then. Instead of guilt over the sourness that’d produced his dark stalks, Swishy only saw weapons, a potential way out.
Unfortunately, Ruby’s wrathraven was making its rounds toward the ceiling and walls of Swishy’s chest, aiming to absorb the blackwheat’s potency. This time instead of a brain and a nebula, they were now just two floating heads, soaring toward the blackwheat with opened mouths and wagging, ropey tongues.
“Shoot, I have to go,” Blue Trey said, charging volts in his fingers.
“I’ll be okay,” the Swish hive said.
“Please be.”
“I will.”
Blue Trey offered a fist and the Swish-minis shaped themselves into a fist of their own. Trey’s soul knuckles were coated in straw glitter and voltage.
And then he flew away.
Meanwhile, the Swish-minis stayed glued to the heart while a cloud of stray ones flew around it loosely, glaring at the slow approach of Ruby.
There was nothing of Swishy’s that he could keep to himself and it angered him greatly.
Ruby’s hands filled with orbs, faces, and mouths.
“Go,” she said.
[Pica Pets] now went up to the heart, licking at the barrier of Swish-minis. They nibbled at the wings. They chomped off some of the heads. None of the miniatures were swallowed whole and done away with speed. Their mouths were full of Ruby lessons. HUNGER was at their core. But MENACE, THREATEN, TROUBLE, and TORMENT were its ways of being.
Some of the Swish-minis trembled. Their glow and color fled from them, deadening their straw into an ashy, lifeless color. It was then, in their moment of utmost weakness, that they loosened their grips from the heart. The dolls fell off like cracked strips of paint. And when they let go, they just drifted down-down-down, unable—and perhaps unwilling—to fly.
It was only then that the pica pets swooped downward to eat them.
The psychic shock was tremendous. [Possessed Guardian] lost more of its composure, its stolid scarecrow structuring. Death was a violent, violent thing, and the giant’s jittery behavior reflected that. Its scale didn’t make it any more immune to trauma than any other advanced-minded being.
Death was the world’s weakness.
“Did you learn something,” Ruby smirked. “Making your enemies die is how you get things done. Simple, right?”
She flew up to the heart, speeding into the ashen sprites, gently blowing the gray dust off their crinkled wings. As the wings flaked away, her ENVY dispersed, curling inside her body. Now, though, it was DEATH that ebbed from her heart and swam around her hips and chest and shoulders like an eel.
One part was sated while another came for its meal, a cycling that Swishy also attributed to her hunger.
He was learning a lot—because Ruby was telling more about herself than she knew.
[Feather Duster]—she conjured a shadowed one in her hand, then brushed the petrified minis away. Each fairy fell from the heart with no resistance, relinquishing it to Ruby.
And then, her signature move.
[Clean Sweep]—it carried Swishy and his shadows away.
More winds, more white scars.
And more quaking environment as the [Possessed Guardian] wobbled and swayed and doubled over.
Yet Ruby swept and swept and swept, standing upon her wrathraven’s head awhile she swirled the Nebula around her brush tips. She danced, she swept, she lost herself in a spinning trance. She looked like a woman atop a music box, dancing with the darkness, focusing on her motions. Her movements were relaxed and joyous.
But the truth was clear in the result: there was no joy or jubilation, Only the witch’s methodical takeover.
HUNGER flared in her stomach, a black aura radiating from the center, a spidering presence whose gradual progression overwrote the shadows cleared by her attack. Through her starvation, she began to make the [Possessed Guardian] hers.
That which belonged to Swishy was blown aside.
The [Clean Sweep] gales landed flush against the army of Swish-minis that guarded Swishy’s heart, sending them into the throes of his abyss. They were sent so far away that their twinkling fairy light disappeared.
“Swishy!” Blue Trey cried.
“He’s gone,” Ruby sang under her breath, sweeping with steady flicks of her delicate and flexible wrists. “He’s gone, gone, gone.”
He was, too, flung far off, away from the whiteness and into his shadowed anatomy.
The scarecrow—and scarecrow minis—felt emptier than ever.
It was now that Swishy started to panic. The hopelessness set in as this meant Ruby was coming for the heart.
[Pile] to stop his launch. Then [Scarecrow]. And then he waited a few anxious moments before Trey-less Trey glided upon him with a Sling-raven. Trey’s hands were outstretched, a [Zlide] at the ready. The gate widened, spreading over the Swish hive as a living cave.
The heart chamber once more, its stark whiteness—only for a [Clean Sweep] to smack the gold sprites point blank.
He was sent straight into the [Zlide], knocked through the exit and blasted through the entrance.
Swishy tumbled through the blackness again as Trey-less Trey watched, scratching his head. The Sling-ravens caught the sprites this time, preventing the need for a [Pile] to [Scarecrow] combo.
Still, the sprites were shaken.
A hand, soft and moisturized. The grip he sensed around his heart wasn’t a silky texture like Myst. He hated that he knew the feel, the distinct sliminess, of Ruby’s lotion.
The guardian quaked with more tumult than ever before.
“Hurry, Trey, another portal!”
The Clayborne’s vessel was already on it, opening a gate.
Squeeze—Swishy felt Ruby’s clenching hand. Her nails dug through his cardiac ridges.
The possessed guardian sank, all the darkness rushing downward in a waterfall. The giant, before it’d even made a meaningful contribution to the battle, had fallen to its knees.
“What am I going to do…” The miniatures drooped their shoulders. They fluttered sadly, slow up-downs as if they were carried by the ocean waves.
A black hand laid atop Trey-less Trey’s, canceling his spell.
And a second hand then swooped the Swish-minis all at once, the silky and familiar feeling of his shadow sibling.
“I’m ready,” Myst laughed.
“For what?”
“To manage this altar, of course.”
With that, the waterfalling darkness then reversed its course, pouring upward.
The [Possessed Guardian] stood up again.
Judging from the flow of the blackwheat and the curling obsidian current, Swishy recognized that the black giant had taken its first step.
“Wow,” the Swish-minis said.
“Wow, yourself,” Myst encouraged. “This is all you, my dear.”
A warp gate opened, her own.
And then everyone—Myst, the minis, Trey and the Sling-ravens—were drawn into its fabric-y folds.