Recomposed decay. As though with mind its own or her own the prosthetic ‘stood’ from thumb and fingers, positioning its bones towards Shay’s hanging elbow.
“Do we know-grow each other?” She asked, inching towards the edge of insanity.
And for the first instance in too long, red were the words scratched across the tunnel walls where Shay sat poisoned, bleeding and alone, hoping the antidote soon would settle.
∞
The bony-looking prosthetic cupped her wound, slotting into destined place. Her torn muscles pulled on the false bones and her hands got to know each other as she read my scratches, lit by shroom and spore:
“It knows you… will respond and react to you… designed for you.”
“By you?” Shay thought or asked certainly not aloud, and found eventually the written answer.
“Not I; by an ally to the cause. You needn’t fuss for the bleeding, now. This arm has long been a gift from me to you, in return for your service to the contract, allowing the continuation of such service. Look at all your sacrifices around you... becoming the fuel these mushrooms need. These stalks and their caps tea-destined. Over and over again. Our enemy relentless, so too must we.”
Shay sighed and spat as spores fell. Her real arm laid grim and bleeding on the ground to be food for the swelling fungi. My words wherever she looked:
“Now now, my dear (amne)Shay… this is what the enemy wants from you. To rage and forsake. Look at what or whom you just killed, hmm? Complication, contradiction and convolution are our tools, so too theirs. So too is to dishearten, discourage and dismay. Planting despair. We are up against Duality, Fate, Entropy... and all weapons are fair. This is not your life in this story… a literal fabrication… come back to mine.”
∞
“Is this true and real?” Shay madly asked the written-walls of the tunnel. “Is it possible, what you are trying to do? Going beyond…”
Shay kept those visions of family at the fore. The glow of ancient mushrooms died and was born again, as changed the unseen ages beyond the tunnels. She tried to stand though all her poisoned, exhausted muscles glanced apathetically to the wishes of her heart. She read somewhere else my narrate, drifting:
“Do souls as you and I have an alternative? Has it worked - coming to terms with reality or trying to? Accepting that all we love does fade or die? Against Joy's finite fleet - coming to port though ever-soon to leave. Or do we onward for our ages now, with our wheels around and around, rowing more slowly or we work always harder to keep spinning? What of when we look down at splintered hands? And settling down for dinner we set blood upon crockery and glass? When we look into mirrors and see what drifting we are doing… withering.”
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
Only Shay’s prosthetic was helpful as she read and tried again to move.
“Loss hurts, and for us it has not stopped hurting. Courtdom have always executed and persecuted souls as us… making shoes of the covers that bind our pages together; but just as I and Vilifrado saw to the raising of the Twinedoms, allowing for souls of opposed ideologies to live their separate harmonies… the same can be achieved with us. Fanatic, they now say! It is yet a more severe fractal, I grant you… but a pattern, nonetheless. Call us cowards! Name us weak!”
Shay could hear knitting needles tick on each other, and waves of fabric in wind. Flags. Sails. The Dam’e had called Fate the seamstress and Payn the authoress. She knew not what to believe, her dual-signed contract as it was, as the walls scratched on. From needles or nails:
“Duality a weakness and a strength, internecine! They can keep their Time and Death and Misery… and we can elope to shores where such things do not exist. Yes, that ‘here’ we are mad, but elsewhere we are free under Heir wings. We must fight for our place having found it. To steal a phrase from your Woid, ‘against all odds’ - alas Duality is utmost, and cutting out our ‘There’ from their ‘Here’ was always going to bring agonies. An atrocious Now justified, for Greatest End.”
∞
“My parents were criminals before Courtdom.” Shay finally offered or noted, in a somewhat connected stream. She wasn’t feeling well at all. “I should be more loyal and grateful.”
“And in Courtdom they will be are welcome, in high employ and demand.”
“Will be?” Shay accused the words that had been scratched out.
“Forgive my Timelessness… too many are the dimensions I see spun from my vantages, in work and play or not…”
“If you are lying to me, no cell shall keep you safe from me, Lay’d Pain.” Shay stood finally, helped by her prosthetic as though it were her own arm. Her cut elbow disagreed.
“There she is…” The walls scraped deeper into their scratches. Satisfied. Emboldened. “My greatest weapon, and oldest friend. The device of my plots. Let us not forget how we began, hmm? In my Crimson Palace after the darker castles… I always know what to say, to get young Shay a’going.”
∞
Shay fell into what she remembered as sleep, when Night still would visit, where no dreams but fevered nightmares pillowed by Grief. She was waking and slipping back into Slumber’s turning realm repeatedly, always fighting something off. And so it was, for moments or their aeons.
∞
She awoke unable to breathe. Muffled coughing. Her throat was full. Retching and writhing alive she tore free of the mushrooms that had grown over her and into her, vomiting them out and gone.
∞
She breathed at last. Euphoric wheezing and collapsing she dragged herself to the eroded ladder of her shop, every heaving pull upwards a scrap and a scraping battle in itself. Leaving behind my red words that had darkened with age, and corpses she did not want to see.