I have a lot to catch you up on and so little time.
I think this happens every time. The veil comes up and we get all this info thrown at our fragile little minds at once and we just get overwhelmed.
There's a lot to go over and I don't really have the heart to give you the dramatic play by plays of Gwen's dismemberment. Suffice it to say I've alluded in tweets and stuff that she died. She is gone from The Outer Layer. As far as I can tell her death was a very permanent thing and it had a bit of an effect on the realm.
I left off just as Kendra cut Gwen in half. It was supposed to be a big epic scene that I poured all my talent into to communicate the visceral nature of the scene or the way the ripples of inverted color echoed across the sky like when Broly transforms for the first time in the original movie. But I'm fucking done putting effort into this so you get the cliff notes version.
The fire from the flaming sword cauterized her bisection so it wasn't extremely messy, but it still looked nasty to see half a girl laying against the tree, her legs twitching uselessly nearby and her entrails congregating beneath her, her only admirers. I watched in fascination as she and Kendra began talking.
"You bitch." She spat at Kendra. She sounded like she was in shock the way her eyes darted everywhere at once. "You tried to kill me."
"And you tried to kill them." Kendra motioned towards me and Anna. For her part Anna was staring mostly into space. Her gaze took the scene in but no life sparked in her eyes. Seeing it made me think of a body with the life slowly leaving it. I briefly registered how strange it was that Anna's eyes looked dead and hollow while Gwen, the half a body lying nearby, stared at Kendra with fierce liveliness.
"If you think that this shell means anything to me, to that," her eyes darted to the dark cloud overhead, "then you're a fool."
"As long as she has the will to live," Anna said beside me, "her immortal soul will not leave her body. The energy lingers stubbornly in that way."
Kendra slowly sauntered over to Gwen lying on the ground in clear anguish. Each step her hips swayed and she seemed as comfortable as one would in their bedroom. She knelt over the severed body, her long flame frosted hairs inches from Gwen's pale face.
"Yes, it is true that you will not die because I've wounded you, sweet thing, but you're still connected to that cursed cloud up there. And it's connected to Chameleon." The flames of her sword flared up as Kendra lifted her head pridefully to look down upon the fallen foe. The blade's tip tickled Gwen's throat. "So I want you to deliver a message for me."
The whole thing happened all at once. The blade sunk in and flashed a golden orange that blinded all of us watching. Gwen screamed a horrifying bloodcurdling yelp that I won't be surprised to hear again in my darkest nightmares. She clawed at her throat but lasted only a few seconds before her convulsions became involuntary. Blood poured from every hole on her face and her wings turned from an eggshell white to a shriveled grey.
It was more than that though. A devilish energy poured off of her as she did this. The blade shimmered and swayed becoming less of a metal instrument and more of a conductor for the demons inside them to dance. A sick black silhouette of an abominable humanoid overlaid itself upon Kendra. Wave after wave of unimaginable evils flew across the environment. Envy, lust, shame, desperation, wrath, narcissism, apathy, cruelty, chaos, disorder and darkness intertwined holding hands with a deep unsettling eldritch madness, an elder one's eye just taking notice and as it's impossible gaze settled upon me the whole world went red and everything fell away and
"Mat? Mat!"
(I didn't mean to write this part like this. It was supposed to be a quick synopsis. I remember I started writing the paragraph and then...hearing Anna's voice breaking me out of my weird fugue state. I feel as if she is somewhere in there, behind this all, motivating me to write.)
I looked up to see Kendra dismissing her weapon to some extradimensional plane. The environment seemed stable enough. No technicolor acid trips or overwhelming madness riding the wind. Gwen's body lay motionless. The eyes were glossed over, no soul behind them at all. It was like looking through a window into an empty house.
"She was never the one I wanted to kill. She was just a means to an end." Kendra spat on the ground. "I used her connection to Chameleon to make her realize quickly that staying alive meant writhing agony." She smiled sweetly like she had not just violently and brutally slaughtered someone's soul.
Suddenly a violent wind swirled through the clearing, centering around Gwen's corpse. The dark cloud formed into a funnel and touched down on the ground, a vicious tornado of storm clouds flashing lightning wildly. As soon as the gust connected with the ground we all fell back on our behinds and watched in surprise as the cloud lowered itself into the cone, colliding with the ground, like liquid escaping a funnel, until the last of it vanished and Gwen's body, both halves, were gone with it.
What I managed to learn from talking with Kendra and Anna before awakening was that Gwen was a conduit for Chameleon inside my mind. Kendra explained in her usual just-cryptic-enough manner how Chameleon and the dark cloud were like two parts of a Venn diagram. Where Gwen existed is the intersection between them. The dark cloud was supposed to be the depression that had plagued me all my life. Gwen was Chameleon's way to use it to try and thwart the greatest boon to my survival.
Alice.
Now there's a whole can of worms I'm not ready to open. We did talk about her a bit. I'll keep that information private though. I have a lot more to get to.
Entry #72 is Darek cursing out my viewers and blaming them for Kendra's death. Sorry about him, by the way. I obviously don't think it's your fault. In fact, until this, I thought you were Figments too and Darek was giving me social media access to demonstrate how even my audience is fake. So this entry was a big game changer for me. Darek is not just angry; he is panicked. Whatever happened to Ali, to Kendra, it wasn't supposed to occur. This gives me flashback vibes to what happened to Casey that last lifetime. The only difference is I got to watch on the sidelines while it happened. So I guess you exist and you were the key to saving her somehow that I didn't know about.
Another thing about that entry, there are pictures uploaded to my imgur that I had not put there. They're related to view counters and analytics in order to show readers that he knew he was getting attention. Explains why the statistics page for this blog was open on the computer that morning. There are, intermingled with them, several images of what appears to be a wiki site viewed on a mobile phone containing the mad ravings of Rob Airheart.
That's another thing I didn't really want to mention but knew I would have to. The cops came on Friday to inform us that Rob Airheart was found dead in his efficiency, hanging from a noose. One of the cops mentioned a knife in his back and the other one shushed him like I wasn't supposed to know. I didn't question. I'm so numb from everything. All I can think is how fake they are. They're all simulated. They're all hallucinated. It's so clear now. I understand. I have a couple leads I'm looking into. Let me just get my alabi straight so I can continue to access a keyboard.
No comments:
Post a Comment