Reconnecting Five

There was a table.

It had been there longer than anyone knew. Sometimes it shifted and changed, but it was always a table.

Right now, it had four seats. One chair was broken, tipped backwards and shattered on the invisible and immaterial ground. The table, the chairs, and even the shattered pieces – all of it just floated there in a colorless void, untethered from existence. That changed too, sometimes. Not for a very long time, now. Neutrality was best – it had no painful reminders for the visitors.

That, and they didn’t know what it would’ve looked like. Not anymore.

They were… they were broken, by and large. No longer bearing Names of their own. Two of the three that were left could function alone. One was even a being of vast renown, with a name that was spoken of the world over in hushed tones. It was still just a name, though – not more than a shred of what they had once been. The other stable entity was more obscure, called on only rarely by the last of a dying race, and resigned to wallowing in sadness and memory.

The third was little more than dust and ashes, scraps of a Self that had begun to unravel.

The meetings had been intended to slow that. They had worked, for a time. The third was more lucid when they came together, even solid for some time afterwards. What memories the others held reinforced their tattered Self and undid some of the damage, but that wasn’t to be anymore. They would have needed the fourth, for that.

That one was gone now.

They had no names when they were with each other. No titles, either; they would have been pointless, just as the ancient wars between their peoples had been. They only spoke of each other by numbers, assigned in an order long since forgotten. One sat on a throne of rusted metal and blades. Two sat on simple chair, the wood overgrown with meat that never rotted. Three’s was a simple cushion, floating on its own at the level of the others.

Four’s – cast down as it was – had been a twisted knot of roots. The tree and its leaves had sheared off long before they came to meet here and none were left, not even any blackened and soulless husks.

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The chairs were empty. Then, in a sudden shift, they were filled. Two arrived first, appearing in the flesh-lined throne as if they’d always been there. Their eyes were carefully turned from the chair they’d known would be empty before even arriving. That pain was too fresh and the brief glimpse they had of it set the void into a shivering chorus of screams and blurred violence.

The neutrality reasserted itself when One arrived, stepping through an immaterial doorway and settling into the throne. The swords protruding from their seat pierced One, but the being didn’t react. There was no blood, nor even a visible wound. Just smooth flesh that shifted as One moved, appearing as if the corroded weapons were natural growths, unanchored to any single point.

Two began to pour tea from the cracked pot in the center of the table as Three began to coalesce on their own cushion. The liquid was lukewarm, as always, but it was one of the few reminders they truly had left. The leaves didn’t grow anywhere they could reach, yet recreating them was one of the few things that was simple in a place such as this. Here memory had a weight of its own.

Three’s body was cracked. Thin streams of ashes dripped from the holes riddling their very being. Their very soul had been scoured clean, the wounds that broke them sanded away to save what little survived. No detail and meaning were left, merely the holes and the absence. It was a small mercy, granted by the allies they had embraced too late.

If Four had joined them, the ash would have ceased. Four had always been the most stable of them. As it was, every moment saw another fragment of Three fade away into the void. They still acted as if they were overjoyed to be there – even with half their jaw gone, they smiled. The tea, floating on a wind of its own into their mouth, dripped out of the hole and slid along several others to stain the cushion. Its true color wasn’t even memorable, anymore.

“Wonderful as always, friends! We need to wait for Four! Four’s never late!”

The other two weren’t looking forward to this. They had to break the news.

They did it as gently as they could, but it was too much for Three. First came the denials, then the bargaining. The muffled sobs followed. And then there were the screams as the tattered Self split itself apart even further until their companions realized that if they stayed – one of their last friends would fade away completely.

For a few moments, the plane was alive with usurped fires that had burned out eons ago, cold flames howling for vengeance against the inevitable and raging against the wars they had lost everything in.

Then Three slipped back into ashes and peaceful oblivion, waiting to be brought back again at the next meeting.

Until then, there was a table. And a fallen chair that, unseen, began to crack down the middle.