Chapter Text
The interior of the church is brightly lit enough that Karkat has to keep his shades on to shield his eyes from the sallow glow. It isn’t from an obscene amount of biolum lamps, as he’d first thought; as Karkat looks around, he sees instead that the walls and floors are festooned with glowing fungi, caps lining the main corridor through the pews and stretching up to the low-hanging wooden beams of the ceiling. There’s species he’s never fucking seen before, long, finger-like tendrils dripping down in eager fronds that gleam wetly; broad, flat-capped mushrooms that look big enough to be seats themselves, with frilled, frothing gills beneath them; cup-shaped fungi holding little balls of light as spores drift down from beneath them. The air is thick with damp, clinging to his skin.
"Hello?" Karkat calls out as he steps inside properly, lingering near the still-open door. He can't fucking see anyone in the main room, not even tending to what he has to assume is the fucking altar right at the front, lichen and mold almost carefully curated to make a mural spanning the entire fucking wall.
No answer.
He takes another step, the floor groaning quietly under his feet. The pews are covered in moss and faint swirls of lichen, beaded with moisture because it's absurdly fucking humid in here, threatening to fog up his stupid glasses. The silence is thick and eerie, and every step brings with it the same feeling of transgression he'd had in the tunnel – which is also fucking horrifying to consider, except Karkat firmly tells himself to get a goddamn grip already, since this time the cause is more fucking mundane and obvious.
"Is anyone here? I just have a couple fu – uh, questions. About –," he cuts himself before he can say something fucking stupid, like Mod. "About the gloaming, and the black."
The air flinches, like the whole room has sucked in a sharp breath. Karkat tenses and looks around all over again, his skin crawling.
"Well! Come in, come in," a voice echoes out from the front of the church, and Karkat nearly jumps out of his fucking skin when he can't see who's talking. It seems to ring around the space, all excitement, and for a single, horrifying second, he thinks that it's the building itself answering him – or worse, the mycelium. But he's not a symbiont, it can't do that, and even if he was, it wouldn't fucking talk, probably. No one's ever described it as a literal fucking voice booming out.
"Sorry to startle you," the voice continues, fucking thankfully resolving into a figure that emerges from somewhere to the left of the main altar, a hunched over priest in tattered, spore-dusted robes whose eyes fucking light up alarmingly when he lays them on Karkat. "Oh! My, my. A new convert, are we? Haven't had one of those in a while, our congregation is a little out of its way, but the mycelium proves and provides and so I am sure it led you to our doorstep where you needed to be."
Karkat doesn't fucking know about any of that, but he pastes on a smile. His pusher's calmed down some, and it's pretty fucking difficult to keep believing there's any real threat here, faced with a benign, wrinkled face smiling at him.
Not that wizened old human men can't be threats, but it's not the enormous, chucklevoodoo'ed subjuggulator he'd been subconsciously expecting.
"Yeah," he says. "That. Listen, I don't know much about any of this shit – I mean. Stuff. I don't know about this stuff, but someone I know comes here, so I figured I might ask around."
It's the lamest fucking excuse he's ever concocted in his entire life, but the old man just nods sagely.
"You were in the tunnels that day, weren't you, son?" The priest gestures him in further, and Karkat follows, minding his steps as he weaves closer to sit on a pew in the very front row. "One of our own was there, Ascendant, if you can believe it at all." He sighs in deep, fervent glee. "Our daughter has not been in since but she was able to send us a message to let us know all was well -- apparently the mundanities of her employment preclude spreading the bliss of true revelation."
"Or that she needs a full medical workup after what happened," Karkat mutters, irritation rising. He's not entirely fucking successful at tamping it down, but at least he manages not to swear at the priest. That's something. "Just to, you know. Make sure she's fine. I'm on enforced medical leave right now because of it, I can't go back until next week."
"I'm sure the Agency has her best interests at heart," the priest agrees quickly, displaying more sense than Karkat might've fucking expected from someone who spends most of their time in this place. "But it's a shame that she's been unable to come preach, don't you think? Our congregation is burning with curiosity to know what she saw, to experience it even through the eyes and words of another. If we must scrape by with mere dregs of the divine, at least we will have tasted it, don't you think?"
Karkat does not fucking think, but he knows better than to say it.
"Yeah," he says. "Sure. Whatever. That might be too advanced for me."
The priest does not look at him with so much as an ounce of disapproval, which Karkat's grudgingly impressed by.
"Ah," he answers. "You are earlier on in your journey, my child."
"I guess you could say that," Karkat admits. He's putting in some real effort not to lie through his teeth; he doesn't want to outright say 'this is for a case,' he's learned that sometimes that just fucking makes people clam up. A little faith, a little belief, can go a long way. "It's a fu – a lot to handle. It was a lot to take in, down there. And Vancet was talking like she knew what was happening, like it was a good thing."
"She embraced it willingly," the priest sighs out, reverent. "As I wish I could once more. But my place is here, and here I will remain until I'm taken into the arms of the mycelium once more. But you – you don't think that's a good thing, do you, child?"
Karkat grimaces. Honesty, or as much of it as he could manage, is what he'd decided, and now he's fucking sticking to it.
"How can you think it's a good thing?" he asks instead. "I don't even fucking – sorry, I'm trying here –,"
"You can speak freely. It's not words that matter, but the meaning behind them, and after all, what use has the gloaming for language?" The priest doesn't even pause for Karkat to conveniently ask what the fuck that is to begin with, just says, "And I think it's inaccurate to ascribe our ideals of good and bad to the Black."
Karkat can practically hear the capitalization, the emphasis placed on it.
"Why?" he presses. "Not everyone was fucking enlightened. Not everyone came back."
"We get that a lot," the priest tells him. "Skeptics who ask why, who come here looking for meaning but find themselves unwilling to accept it. So I ask them this instead: Shouldn't we revere something that is so much bigger than us? Something that reaches its hands out to shape the world that we live in, something inextricably entwined with our lives? It can change us on a whim; it must only will it and we are transformed, our very flesh and souls altered. We live here, child, but this place is not ours. It was here before us, it will be here after us. You ask if the Black is good, and I say, would you ask the same of the very planet on which we stand?"
Karkat fucking hates this mystical bullshit. He does. But he has to fucking pay attention because he was right about Jade Harley's book sounding like the fucking sermons from this place.
"When you put it like that," Karkat says slowly. "I wouldn't say anything about Laeto. It's a planet, I like having an atmosphere over my head. But I wouldn't worship it just because of that. It's just nature, co-existing with us. You said I could speak freely, I'm not trying to spout blasphemy on purpose."
"You have the spirit if not the words," the priest agrees, which rubs Karkat fifty fucking ways wrong. But he's here for a reason, and the reason is not to lose his shit on a fucking know-it-all religious nutcase. He knows how to deal with know-it-alls; if nothing else, his time working with Strider and Crocker both fucking trained him for this. "And if not the finer understanding. You said you wouldn't worship the planet, but you'd agree that it deserves respect, yes? That you're grateful for its existence, for it being a haven and providing itself as a home for you."
Karkat takes a second to think about it. There's no fucking denying that his life is better here than it would've been on Alternia, in that he has a fucking life at all and can show his face in public. But would he say he's grateful to the planet when all it does is exist? Karkat is the one who got himself here, who worked fucking hard and found a way to live here, the same as all the humans who came from their dead home to make a new one, the same as all the other trolls who came here fleeing the Empire's reach. He's not sure Laeto has fuck all to do with that other than be a conveniently placed rock with liquid water and a survivable atmosphere.
"I'm grateful it's here, not to it for being here," he finally says. "But obviously it fucking deserves respect. I know what terraforming looks like, I know what the fuck happens to planets that get used up and run dry. We weren't the first living things here and if that's what you mean, you should just fucking say it already."
"I see just how much you were holding back on the language," the priest says, amused. "But very well. I suppose you're one of the rare few who favor a direct approach. Most skeptics who are shown the way here, they're not ready to hear the truth that we know nor to lay eyes on it. I have to talk them around to it, let them challenge their own views. But you – ah, well. It was my mistake. If you were in the tunnels, if you know the city as well as I think you might, you need no coddling. You're tired of wandering blind in the light, aren't you, my child?"
Karkat hasn't ever been coddled, except for when Kanaya decides that he fucking needs to shut up and let her take care of him for five minutes.
"I'm fucking sick and tired of not knowing what the fuck is going on," Karkat admits quietly, the rubbed-raw ache of his fight with Red earlier coming back to haunt him. "I want to know and that's not a fucking bad thing."
"It's an admirable thing," the priest agrees. "You would push through your own prejudices in a single swoop to learn the truth, and that's unusual. Even more so because you do it for good reason, out of nothing but the desire to help. Isn't that right, Karkat Vantas?"
Karkat stiffens, eyes narrowing and his hackles rising at the mention of his name – which he is one fucking hundred percent sure he hasn't told to this priest.
"Now, now," the priest continues, smiling all the while. "None of that. I am merely blessed with knowledge – you wished to know of the gloaming, but I know it just as it knows me, and it knows all in this city, down to the smallest, frailest of its children that are even now being crushed beneath unseeing boots. Is it such a surprise to know that you are seen too?"
"I don't like being fucking spied on," Karkat says through gritted teeth. The priest is like Red – except no, not like him; there's nothing to suggest that he's a fucking symbiont at all, his voice hasn't changed in the way that Red's does, the hyphae and the mushrooms don't seem to react to him at all.
"Nature does not spy," the priest chides him. "You have no secrets from your own home, Detective Vantas, and the city is your home, make no mistake about that."
"The city needs to mind its own fucking business sometimes," Karkat mutters. He feels like he's been pinned and peeled open, metal probing at all the exposed flesh underneath. Red was right, he shouldn't have fucking come.
The priest just hums like he's fucking patronizing Karkat by not saying shit about that. "If I may, let me tell you a story, child. And then you can decide whether you want to see the truth for yourself or not."
"A story," Karkat repeats, dubious. "Not a sermon."
"A sermon is for a congregation; consider this a more individual service. We offer no absolution here, but stories passed from mouth to mouth, life to life, are the blood of belief," the priest tells him solemnly. Karkat wants to say that sounds like it's bullshit. He wants to walk the fuck out of here as the air thickens with tension and the priest gives him an all-too-knowing look, but he doesn't. "From our Alternian brothers and sisters, especially those that hail from the planet itself, I understand that you might have an idea of what that means."
Karkat swallows, his mouth suddenly dry. He does. How could he not? He'd spent nearly a sweep planning, chasing nothing but rumors and whispers across lowblood forums on his Husktop, risking a fucking meetup now and again when he dared to, dodging all the fucking scammers and officullers posing as helpful, concerned trolls, to get here. Laeto was a fucking wriggler's tale, but here he is.
"I guess," Karkat allows. "But I have a feeling that you're going to be telling me a different fucking story."
A thin smile touches the priest's lips. "Perhaps, but you'll still listen. It's a good one, I promise. My grandchildren love it, always beg me to tell this one to them when it's their bedtime."
"I'm listening. And I fucking guess that's a vote of confidence. No wriggler sits through stories they don't like, let alone asks for more of them," Karkat says grudgingly. "How many do you have?"
"Experience with children, hm?" The priest's eyes twinkle, and his expression softens to something real, something more human. "They're precious things. The hopes of all who came before them in a single body, often with an impressive set of lungs. I wouldn't trade any of my five grandkids for the world, but, well. I'm very, very grateful for the existence of schools. This wouldn't be a place of quiet contemplation with them around, I promise you that. Ah – but you'll have to forgive an old man his rambling, you're not here to hear me talk about them. I promised a story, and then after that, if you want to see. A demonstration. Are you ready, Detective?"
Karkat thinks this is a bit fucking melodramatic, but he nods.
"Excellent." The priest claps his hands together, just the once. "Laeto is vast, as you know, its oceans bountiful and bottomless, its deserts sprawling and its forest wild. And Ishtar is the jewel at its heart, even before the city was here, even before we were here. It's easy to say it was always so, but that isn't the truth. Ishtar is special. The very ground on which we stand sacrosanct, blessed from the stars. One day there was green, stagnant and unyielding, and then in an instant, it changed. With the coming of the gloam, the earth was blessed, and from it spread a new kind of life that thrived here and made itself ready for us. Ruins swallowed whole, the small dwellings of the long-dead subsumed and remade into something greater. The Old City, they call it today, whose fragments may still be found deep beneath us by those who care to look. Primitive homes replaced by wondrous mansions; straw and grass roofs by living matter to keep their inhabitants safe. Yet it was not to be, for we are the latecomers, and those that were here before could not see the beauty of the gloaming. They did not love it, as it asked to be loved; they did not pay it the obeisance that was due, and so the home it crafted laid empty and abandoned to the sands of time, buried beneath us but not forgotten. And then we came, and we built new lives upon it and we bled and cried and laughed as we did, overflowing with nothing but gratitude for what it gave us: Our home. And so the slumbering thing began to wake and greet those that loved it so. And so it called to us, and the brave few answered, venturing into the deep as Messiahs waiting to be made."
Karkat's face must be doing something fucking disdainful, because the priest is quick to laugh and add, "No, not the mirthful ones that populate Alternia's worship, though I understand that our word messiah is the closest translation to what you'd call them. I can say messengers, or heralds, and it would be a more accurate description. Honestly, the whole thing has been a little bit of a sticking point with some of the newer Alternian converts, especially those from Alternia, unsurprisingly. Some would rather the accuracy, others the – let's say, spirit, of the word." He gives Karkat a look that very plainly says which he thinks Karkat is.
Karkat grimaces; he feels like a pedantic asshole, but it's easier to keep these thing separate. It feels better to keep them separate.
"Heralds, then," he says, the word a little strange on his tongue. "I appreciate the consideration."
"Hardly any trouble, my child. These stories are for everyone, and it matters little what language frames it when the message at its core is the same – or that's the way I think it should be. It's difficult when you become used to a purer, more distilled form of communication." The priest's gaze goes distant for a moment, eyes trained on the small doorway through which he'd come in. "But I understand the importance of choosing the right words, still. In teaching, in explaining, in reframing things in the best way to get someone to listen. And, of course, mentioning Alternia in any form can sometimes be a fraught topic. Our congregation is quite evenly mixed, actually, between trolls from Alternia and those hatched here on Laeto, and humans too, but not all churches can boast such a diversity nor experience with overcoming the misunderstandings that sometimes follow it."
"Believe me, I know," Karkat mutters, thinking back to his futile fucking trips to Serket's bar, the strange mix of reverence and resentment he garners every time he steps into the place. "I'm guessing you don't get a lot of old highbloods, they're a fucking enormous pain in the nook if I ever knew one."
"One or two," the priest says, shrugging. "They are welcome, as are all children of this world, but we all have things to unlearn before we can accept the truth of the world and live unfettered, and the older you get, the more difficult it is to do so. The world changes, and we have to change for it. Now – where was I?"
"The heralds answering the call," Karkat reminds him. He's committing every bit of this story to memory, in case it ends up vaguely fucking relevant somehow, but even outside of that – it's fucking interesting. Karkat knows as much as the average citizen about the history of Ishtar, but for the most part, it stops and starts with the Shift. Whatever came before it barely matters, because it's not fucking here anymore and whatever that world used to be, the rules of it no longer apply.
That, and there's very, very few people to ask who remember what happened at all.
"Yes, yes. Good. I won't go through their names, but suffice to say they were all of them sainted and enshrined. Eventually," the priest says, with a wry twist to his mouth. "It's often the way of these things. Some were decried as insane, others as dangerous, and quite a few as liars who would disrupt the peaceful life that we'd found for ourselves here. All this as the city grew and grew, and began to take some of the shape that we know it as today. But that was not enough for the Black – how could it be, with so much ignorant life teeming and thriving on it, because of it? And new life too, for what it gleaned from the Listeners who became Heralds was that they too had come from the stars. And so it yearned and so it grew, pushing up once more into the world that awaited it. But the world had changed while it slept; no longer did it belong so wholly to it.
“ I could tell you of betrayals wrought in its name, of blood watering the mycelium, of great debates over what it meant and what it was. The heralds who existed at the same time were often a fractious bunch.” The priest smiles, quicksilver. “Not dissimilar to all the stories you hear going around today. There’s many churches, and you’ll forgive me if I blaspheme and say that some are better than others. Worship is worship, of course, and is its due, but if you ask me there’s a right way to do it and a wrong way, and the right way is when it’s genuine, done in full knowledge and awe. You can’t give yourself to something fully if you don’t love it, and to love it is to know it. But I can see from your face that’s a little much. I don’t always ramble like this for newcomers, you know, I have a good spiel for them. Very practiced.”
“ It’s fine,” Karkat reassures him quickly, because he’s fucking invested in the story but aware that while he doesn’t need to censor himself too much, he also doesn’t want to fucking offend this priest. He might be completely fucking demented with zealotry, but he’s a nice old man and he’s giving Karkat some kind of information. “You were saying about the heralds?”
“ Ah. Yes. The heralds, all of them given bits and pieces of the puzzle to be put together, for the gloaming did not know language, and it did not know the minds of those it chose to be its servants at first. Too much, and they would be – unsuited to the work. But too little, and it would never get done. For it was no absentee creator, no benevolent but distant parent; it wanted to be here. And so herald after herald came and went, each spelling out the letters of its name, none of them able to do anything real about it. The city grew and grew, and for a time it seemed like our ungrateful predecessors had forgotten that which allowed them to thrive here in the first place. Hands outstretched were shot down, caps destroyed with extreme prejudice, not unlike the Chrysogenum and Diamond Districts of today – heretics live there, who do not let themselves think of why they’re allowed to do this. But I’m getting ahead of myself now. There was one herald, not so many years ago that I could call myself young, and he listened as no one had before. He was by all accounts a remarkable man if not a successful one, and in his chest his heart beat the same as Ishtar’s. They say he lived in Chytrid – and by they, I mean I say that, it generates interest, but who knows how true that is? It doesn’t matter, either way. He walked the tunnels, walked the old city that was buried by the festering sore we’d built on top of it. He dove into the darkness and let it swallow him whole, and when he came out it was with a new resolve.”
The priest sighs here, wistful. “This is where the story becomes murky, since any gospels he might have left are vanished, and so is he. I tell my congregation that he returned with the truth of the gloaming upon his lips, with the charisma to make people listen and right their wrongs. I tell my grandchildren that he found something wonderful in those tunnels, that it blessed him as it will surely bless them, and that he brought it with him to the surface. That he was kind, and he nurtured it as all living things must be cared for, and it repaid him in spades. Moralizing is sometimes good for little ones who don’t want to share their toys, or who think they’re ready for a dog and swear up and down they’ll take care of it themselves. Sometimes in moments of weakness, I even say to myself that whatever he saw there drove him insane, for what came after – well, it would take a madman to do it, and do it willingly. If he cared about the world as he knew it at all before he made that last trip into the Under, he came out to burn it all down. A madman and a martyr, and may my marrow be wasted for saying that.” The priest makes a curious sign, a twist of his wrist rising upwards and then out.
Karkat is fucking hanging on every word, committing it to memory, because he is almost fucking sure this old man is talking about the Shift. And talking about it like it was caused by one person – one madman, since Karkat doesn’t give a single flying fuck about blasphemy right now in the privacy of his own thinkpan. It’s not like anything he’s ever heard before; he’d always assumed it was a natural disaster, a fucking catastrophe, from the way people talked about it. Or, if he was feeling particularly fucking jaded, biological warfare gone wrong, an experiment in stumbling human and Alternian biotech that turned the city into a different kind of warzone.
“ But for you, Detective Vantas? I’ll give you the truth, because you won’t come back if I give you anything else. I don’t know who he was, as I never met him and am not privy to that knowledge secondhand. What he saw there, what he heard – I can only imagine. But I know this: It would take someone singular to listen, and someone even more so to act . He brought the gloaming to the surface, and he was its hand that shaped the city into a world in which its existence could not be denied. Perhaps touching the divine like that drove him mad, perhaps it has driven us all a little mad, but what is that compared to the unheard cries of a god?”
Karkat has nothing to say to that, save that he’d probably fucking prefer if the god in question kept its servants from routinely transforming or fucking kidnapping people out of the blue. If his skepticism shows, the priest doesn’t comment on it, only continues on rapturously: “Now, it is here , with us, and this world remade in its image with Ishtar as the beating heart and us as the lips that chant its name.” The priest finally falls silent, his face open with nothing short of ecstasy, eyes staring off into the distance – into the door he’d come from.
Karkat, meanwhile, feels like ice has been shot straight through his pusher.
It’s just a story, he tries to tell himself, except it’s fucking not. Whatever it is, this old man believes he’s telling the truth. Whatever it is, it made Vancet run straight into the arms of the Lurker, and it made her come right the fuck back out believing she was a herald of the fucking doom of the city.
And whatever it is, Karkat can’t deny that there’s some part of him that believes it.
Fucking thankfully, the priest doesn’t seem to need an actual response. Karkat’s stunned silence is being mistaken for – well, still fucking stunned silence, he hopes, but not the kind that shows how fucking troubled he is about this.
“ It’s a lot, I know,” the priest tells him, almost apologetic. “And you’ll forgive an old man for getting carried away with his stories. But you come here seeking the greater truth, and this is the piece of it I can most easily give you.”
“ Thanks,” Karkat says. He means it; the priest’s words are echoing in his mind, ricocheting away with the sermon from Harley’s book. “You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t know what the fuck to make of any of that. I’ve never heard anything like it, even with the insane horseshit I’m told on a nightly basis.”
“ This city is a strange and wondrous place,” the priest agrees placidly. “It beggars belief, sometimes. And our minds can only comprehend so much of it; we weren’t built for a world this vast, I sometimes think, but that’s maudlin all over again.”
Karkat shrugs; he’s not going to fucking disagree with that. He certainly doesn’t feel fucking loved by any kind of mycelium, no matter what Red jokingly says about the city knowing him, no matter what ludicrous claims the priest is making about this gloaming thing wanting to love and be loved in turn. That’s not how fucking nature works. It’s eat or be eaten, grow or die, and maybe you get fucking lucky every so often like Karkat did, but mostly you don’t.
“ You get used to anything,” he says instead. “Given enough time dealing with it. I see shit these days that would’ve had me running to vomit out the contents of my entire foodbag when I first started.”
“ I suppose that’s one way to look at it,” the priest says with a shrug. “I would rather embrace the inevitable change than try to deny it, personally, and it’s a wondrous thing after all to be alive for this kind of history. Saints in the past died barely able to dream of the world we live in now.”
Karkat had better not say something fucking stupid right here. He just shrugs, and lets a little of his discomfort show. “I don’t know if I’m there yet,” he tells the priest, completely honest. He still doesn’t want to outright lie to the old man – and now not just because Karkat’s fucking terrible at it, but because it feels like a transgression, like the priest will somehow know . “But you make it sound like you didn’t believe any of this from the start.”
“ Oh, well now that’s a different sort of story,” the priest says warmly. “But you would be right. I was very much like you, Detective, in that I was a skeptic. I didn’t know then what I do now, but looking back on it, I’m not surprised that I did not find solace in my faith. The city after the Shift was a pit of madness. Those who could leave did, pouring forth to the plains, to the river, even to the Raze, if they were truly desperate and had nowhere else to go, hoping to stumble upon the underground cities. But enough people had no choice but to stay, and enough people refused to relinquish their home to chaos. I was the former, not the latter; I remember very little of the time before the Shift, but the aftermath is seared into my memory. I wasn’t a young man, even then, and was set in my ways.” Here, he casts an amused look at Karkat’s way, like they’re co-conspirators. “But my story is one that’s been told many, many times before and one that you should be familiar with. A man, lost and looking to lose himself, takes a wrong turn in the labyrinth his city has turned into. He emerges nearly a month later at this very spot, changed by what he found within and without himself, and establishes a church here. Well, perhaps not that last part. Half these institutions barely merit the name, given the quacks who run them.”
“ Definitely not the fucking last part,” Karkat says, not unamused. “But I’ve heard that plenty people decide the best way to deal with their tunnel trauma is to go into the first church they stumble into after they get back out and then start worshipping the thing that fucked with them so bad they can’t so much as look at an alley without wanting to scream, all because some asshole in a black dress told them they could make it better. No offense.”
The priest scoffs, which summarizes how Karkat feels about the whole fucking thing too.
“ Only charlatans take advantage of the newly awakened like that.” He shakes his head, disapproving. “It takes time to believe, and true faith can’t be bought. But what they do isn’t my purview, and all I can do is ensure that the members of my congregation do the best they can to warn people off those false prophets. Predators, I should call them, grown fat with their own lies.”
“ You’ve never done that?” Karkat can’t keep the skepticism out of his voice, which isn’t fucking ideal.
“ No,” the priest says vehemently. “I do not treat everyone as I do you, to be sure, but it’s a variation of the same treatment. I ask what has brought them here. I ask them what they think, I ask if they wish to hear the truth. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t, and sometimes they come back. They’re always free to leave, Detective, and I am always careful to tell them only what they are ready for. It’s rarer than you think to have someone stumble in here, remade with the bruise of the divine still upon them, and leave irrevocably converted. Such things take time. And I have learned patience if nothing else. No, my purview is, oddly enough, those who have not experienced such things yet seek to peel back the veil of their own preconceptions. Ones such as you, and your Vancet, who came to me two years ago.”
Karkat doesn’t know what the fuck he’s supposed to say to that. He doesn’t want to believe it; nobody’s going to fucking admit outright to that level of manipulation, but the priest’s outrage was real. His horror and revulsion were real.
“ Okay,” Karkat says, as soothing as he can manage. “I had to make sure.”
The priest lets out a slow breath. “I understand that. A few members came to us equally wary, though perhaps with more immediate concerns. Relatives, or friends, who were pushed to donate or who met ill fates in a pilgrimage.”
“ Sorry, did you say a fucking pilgrimage?”
The priest nods, mouth twisting downwards viciously. That, Karkat thinks, is real anger. “Yes. Some of those so-called churches take people Under, far before they are ready, with no preparation at all, and call it a baptism. That , Detective, is no baptism. That is cruelty. That is – a lie, at best, and a danger, at worst, and they have these people pay for the privilege. You understand that they are secretive about it, so as to avoid encountering any such as yourself.”
“ Fuck.” Karkat scrubs at his face. “I get the fucking sense that you don’t mean something like the tourist trap bullshit trips to tunnels barely under the surface, maybe poking around the outskirts where there’s some ruins of the old city left. I also get the fucking sense that you don’t mean the stupid goddamn parties we have to break up. God. I’m going to add this to the heinous pile of idiotic shit people get up to when it comes to the Under and immediately fucking bump it to high priority. Anything else you might have to add would be useful, just – come by the station sometime.”
A fucking mess, that’s what this is. Every time he thinks it can’t get worse, it somehow does; he should stop being so surprised by yet another scoop of shit onto the mountainous pile that’s Ishtar.
And then the rest of the priest’s words sink in.
“ Wait,” Karkat says slowly. “You said without preparation. You just said that’s no baptism, which fucking implies that there’s something that is one. Have you been doing this shit too?”
His voice comes out sharp with anger, but Karkat’s not fucking trying to hold that back anymore. He’s standing before he knows it, looming over the priest with his hands curled tight into fists.
“ No.” Delivered steadily, but Karkat’s done buying into any kind of honesty that doesn’t have real, tangible proof to back it up.
“ I don’t believe you. What fucking insane ritual do you have that you call a baptism?” Karkat’s nearly vibrating out of his skin now, all goodwill very fucking quickly evaporating into the ether.
“ There is no ritual,” the priest tells him, fucking infuriatingly calm but for the tinge of regret in his voice. “I misspoke, earlier, I did not think you’d react so – poorly. I’d intended to wait to show you, to mention it at all.”
“ What about me made you think that I’d take fucking kindly to the barest implication that you’re illegally fucking dragging people into probably the most dangerous situation that they’ll ever face and pretending it’s for their own good so they can find faith ?” Karkat asks, dangerously low. “What kind of preparation is it that you’re doing that makes you think that it’s all fucking fine?”
“ The baptism itself is a preparation,” the priest answers, uncowed despite the fact that Karkat’s fucking bristling with rage. “ Knowing is preparation enough – of the highest degree, in fact, and I do not think even you can find fault in it, Detective. I do not encourage these trips; they are not to be taken lightly, but sometimes they are taken without my knowledge and very much without my guidance. I’m sure you know plenty about that.”
The barb lands. Karkat clenches his jaw so tight he’s worried for a second about splitting a molar.
“ So your exalted, priestly presence makes all the fucking difference?” Karkat doesn’t outright snarl out an inquiry as to what the fuck the priest would know about any of this shit, about what happens to people down there, with or without equipment, but it hangs in the air anyway.
“ My being there makes some difference,” the priest corrects him. “The rest, well. That depends on how much they know, if I have deemed them ready to see the truth of the city. It is what I was considering showing you, when you said you wanted to cut to the heart of the matter. Metaphorically speaking, at least. Now – perhaps I will not have a choice in whether I show you or not, for the truth comes to us all eventually, though certainly some demand it more than others.” The priest smiles once, wry. “It’s strange to find myself being judged, stranger still to flinch from it. Who are you, Karkat Vantas, that your opinions sway me so?”
“ Don’t blame me for the echoes of your conscience rearing their head now that you don’t have worshippers fawning over your every word,” Karkat mutters, unwilling to fully subside. He was right not to fucking trust the priest, he knows that now, but there’s still a strange thread of sincerity to him.
“ I don’t lay blame at the feet of the undeserving,” the priest answers easily. “But – you are upset, and I recognize that. It comes from a place of concern and care, because you don’t yet understand what this place is. And so I ask, as I always would have: Would you like to see the truth through unvarnished eyes, and do you think yourself ready?”
There’s a challenge hidden in those words and Karkat bares his teeth in an approximation of a smile.
“ I want to see your preparation before you fling hapless assholes into the devil’s den,” Karkat says, sharp. “And why I came here to begin with hasn’t changed. I want to know the fuck is going on, why the city’s changing – all of it. There has to be an answer.”
He knows he’s on the edge of something big. Cracking the case, finally learning something real about what the fuck has been going on in Ishtar since the Shift, finally learning something that maybe, just maybe, he can use to make things better. Even if it’s just for the spectre of Jade Harley, of John Egbert, of the Lalonde twins. Except there’s something else there, this sense of creeping dread that tells him he won’t be able to turn back after this. That it’s going to be too late.
But it’s already too fucking late, Karkat thinks. He does what he does to get closure for people, he doesn’t fucking stop until he has answers. Red won’t give him the answers, and Karkat understands why a little better now, but that doesn’t mean he can’t fucking get them himself.
“ There isn’t always,” the priest murmurs, joints creaking audibly as he rises. “And you may not like it when there is.”
“ It doesn’t matter if I like it or not,” Karkat counters. He crosses his arms over his chest, unsettled by how the phosphorescence of the fungal murals spiraling across the walls and ceiling washes him out, changes his skin into something other.
The priest regards him for a long moment, and Karkat half-thinks he’ll change his mind and kick him right the fuck out of here. Karkat doesn’t know that he’d go – if he did, he’d be back in two fucking hours with reinforcements to drag every last detail out of this old man.
“ As long as you’re certain,” the priest says, but there’s a touch of a smile on his face that makes Karkat feel like he’s passed some kind of test.
He almost wonders if that’s what gets people to agree to whatever the fuck is going on here, in the end. If this priest doesn’t have to coerce or lift a single fucking finger to manipulate anyone not in their right mind, because when they are, all they want to do is prove they’re worthy of the secret he’s been talking up. It’s the kind of insidious cajoling that sticks disgustingly sweet to the inside of Karkat’s mouth, even if he fucking knows he could walk out of here. The old man won’t stop him, Karkat knows that instinctively.
“ I’m sure,” Karkat tells him, flat.
“ Yes,” the priest answers, smiling so wide that Karkat can see all the valleys carved in his face by time, the gaps where teeth should be in his mouth. “You are so marvellously sure, Karkat Vantas, almost as much as some of our church’s most devoted members.”
“ If I were you, I wouldn’t have any hopes about me showing up to Sunday fucking service,” Karkat mutters. “No offense, but I fall into my respiteblock right after my Saturday night shift and don’t get up unless the city is actively on fucking fire.”
“ I can certainly hope that you’ll come.” The priest shuffles past Karkat with increasing ease as he heads directly for the door he’d emerged from. “And I might be disappointed if you did not, but I understand that your reason for being here is slightly more...unique.” There’s a pause before the last word that Karkat doesn’t fucking like very much, but he doesn’t protest it.
“ That’s one way to put it,” Karkat agrees. He trails after the priest at a slower pace, taking the measure of the rest of the church as he goes. It’s pure habit – nothing has really changed, beyond some hyphal growth, but that’s expected in the heart of Chytrid. Probably encouraged, in a place like this. The altar itself is surprisingly old, made of solid stone that looks like it’s seen plenty good and bad days under the sun. Karkat doesn’t know why someone would drag that shit inside and build a church around it, but to each their own he supposes.
“ If you’ll forgive an old man his joints when the going is slow, we need to go downstairs,” the priest says as Karkat steps through the doorway behind him. The room here is all stone too, cool and a little damp, containing little but a cupboard of sagging wood that smells a little of smoke and incense, and the yawning, dark mouth of a stone staircase, the two steps that Karkat can see worn smooth right in the middle, with a little dip from how many people have descended – and fucking hopefully ascended – over the years.
“ How old is this place?” Karkat asks before he can think better of it. The Shift was only decades ago, but this place looks like it’s been here for centuries.
The priest looks pleased as he opens the cupboard, the door groaning in protest. From its depths he fetches a biolum lamp, the inside still bright with green fungus. Unsurprising, since the walls of the church are practically fucking swimming in it.
“ Astute observation, Detective,” he says, turning to the stairs. The lamp’s green glow casts the next few steps in a sallow hue. “Much of this part of Chytrid is built directly on the ruins – though some are lucky to have found whole buildings relatively intact – of the old city. One can only surmise as to why these structures were buried by neither time nor Shift, of course, but this church has foundations in good, strong stone, and that’s not something to sniff at these days.”
He seems more animated here, more alive somehow. There’s a glow in his eyes, a spring in his fucking step like just being in this little vestibule hallowed by mycelial light has reversed his aging by fifty sweeps. Colored in strange green, the priest looks far from human, far from a symbiont, and for the first time, Karkat feels a shiver down his spine. The priest glances back at him, an eyebrow raised. “Come, now. It’s a long way down, if you’re prepared for that.”
It isn’t meant to be a challenge, but Karkat decides that he’d better fucking take it as one before he runs out of here with none of the answers that he’d sworn to get.
“ I can manage,” Karkat answers.
“ You’ll come to no harm with me,” the priest reassures him anyway, and Karkat politely doesn’t scoff at the fucking concept. Whatever’s under the city – and probably whatever is crawling around under the church, too – doesn’t give a single flying, fantabulous fuck about the presence of one old man. Sure, the city sometimes plays favorites, inasmuch as it actually fucking can, but Karkat’s not the kind of idiot to think of it as anything other than a force of nature. In a catastrophe, you don’t get chosen to survive, you get fucking lucky. And eventually, your luck runs out.
Maybe he’s not completely successful at keeping his thoughts off his face, because the priest just gives him a smile and begins to descend, leaving Karkat to scramble after him with a pumpbiscuit that’s already starting to thud unpleasantly.
He’s immediately aware of the scent of cold, damp stone, something in the air that envelopes him instantly and clings to his skin like a second layer. It already feels like a different place, two steps in, then three; what little light was in the small room is swallowed by blasphemous lime, the kind of color that makes his throat threaten to close up because it screams nothing but danger and extinction and a strange sorrow that he can’t name, for the fate he managed to get out of but others couldn’t. He focuses instead on the fungus, the patterns of green that whorl across the walls, little caps bursting from gaps in the mortar and bricks, glowing carpets of filaments writhing in holes in the blocks and growing larger the further down they go. The steps themselves start to become carpeted in them, and Karkat doesn’t dare say a fucking word as he works to keep himself grounded. The color, the continuous downwards spiral of the stairs, at least make it easier for him to remember that he’s not in that fucking tunnel with the giant caps and the thing Red calls the Lurker waiting at the bottom.
Except for the fact that his idiot thinksponge is now very fucking concerned that the priest is leading him down here to feed him to some fungal abomination and throw the bones out in the graveyard nex door. He’s – reasonably fucking sure that’s not the case, but once the thought is lodged in his pan it’s like a fucking thorn, he can’t get it out. He finds himself seriously fucking contemplating how he’d overpower the priest, just to give his restless mind something to do as it gets darker and darker, and the caps on the walls grow in new, lurid colors – not just green now, but gently pulsing blue, and gold, and a searing orange that reminds him of Strider, warmer tones peeking in amongst the others.
And all the while, out of the corner of his eye, he swears he can see Alternian words mixed in with the undulating filaments, smeared out in phosphorescent liquid.
He almost wants to stop and read it, find out what the fuck they could possibly say – the entire concept of the mushrooms talking to him doesn’t feel particularly fucking like the outlandish ravings of some lunatic down here; it feels like a real possibility, with the entire earth teeming with life around him and the scent of rot in his sniffnodes. It’s only sheer professional memory that keeps him from lingering to long to read them – and common fucking sense that keeps him from asking the priest about it.
Karkat doesn’t want to be down here any longer than he has to, with the walls closing in as they go ever deeper.
The priest is fucking sprightly for his age, walking down the rough stairs without so much as trampling a single hypha, not even remotely fucking out of breath; in contrast, Karkat feels like a clumsy fucking trunkbeast leaving a swathe of destruction in his path. He doesn’t take any satisfaction from it, like he might if he were at work, suited up and half-scared shitless. This isn’t a fucking reclamation, it feels more like barely tolerated trespassing. Even where there’s signs of a city – not Ishtar, but maybe what was here before – in a dizzying drop-off to his left as they hug one wall of a grand cavern coated in gold caps and shifting waves of golden hyphae, swirling spirals transforming what were once buildings into an utterly alien landscape, it’s obvious that it doesn’t belong to anything but the mycelium anymore.
They turn away from the cavern that glows like a muted, subterranean sun, and the stairs are swallowed in a tunnel again, one Karkat has to stoop to enter, with its rough-hewn walls coated with jagged, lichen-like things.
The air grows colder and heavier, stabbing into his lungs with every breath he heaves in, and Karkat is excruciatingly, horrifyingly aware of every ton of dirt above them. The priest doesn’t say a single fucking word, and Karkat isn’t sure if that’s supposed to be a cue he’s meant to follow – some rule of this fucked up pilgrimmage he’s agreed to go on – or just a preference, but he decides not to push it.
It’s been a shockingly fucking smooth journey so far, and if keeping his mouth shut is part of that, then Karkat’s not about to risk it all just to ask if they’re there yet. It’s nothing like being in the tunnels, and in Karkat’s opinion, it’s more akin to being behind enemy lines than anything else – out in the tunnels, it’s a fucking warzone. Them against the mycelium, against the very fucking soil beneath their feet. Here, there’s no battle at all; that shit’s been buried and decomposed and left to rot – or been transformed completely and irrevocably.
Karkat shudders to think of that golden thing that was once a city, once a home. He fucking hopes that Ishtar doesn’t ever end up like it.
The thought sits in his stomach like a fucking rock, and he’s so bothered by it that he nearly slams right into the priest’s back and sends them both face first into another cave, columned in stone teeth that look like they could be cocooning columns for wrigglers, if it weren’t for the complete absence of any life that’s not hyphal. And not Karkat and the priest, that is.
“ We’re here,” the priest murmurs, voice hushed as he steps inside. He ushers Karkat in with a grand sweep of one hand – fucking melodramatic, in Karkat’s opinion, but he shuffles into the cave, relieved when he can fucking stand straight without worrying about chipping a horn on the ceiling.
“ And where’s here, exactly?” Karkat asks. He means to sound sarcastic and totally fucking unbothered, like maybe Red or Strider would, but he fails abysmally the second he opens his talkhole because he’s already looking around, his thinkpan stuttering as it processes what the fuck is going on here.
The walls are all coated in hyphae, but there’s no glow to them; they look shriveled and dead to his eyes, like nothing he’s ever seen before, the black of dead, rotten things left to molder. The cave itself is lit entirely by the dusky sphere sitting in the middle, shot through with red to a fucking disturbing effect; the pulse of it makes it look like it’s a diseased pumpbiscuit, torn right out of a human’s chest – or Karkat’s.
It’s fucking horrifying.
It’s completely mesmerizing. In that moment, Karkat understands how so many people have walked this path, have lost themselves to find this. It’s not the same kind of siren song for him, but it’s worse – it’s curiosity, the knowledge that he fucking asked to come down here and see, and instead of something completely fucking alien, he knows exactly what he’s looking at. He’s walked on it, around it; it’s part of every second of his life, and he knows it.
And then the sphere begins to unfurl, bit by bit, threads winding away to halo it in darkness as brilliant light spills out from within.
And Karkat – Karkat can’t move, he can only watch .
He doesn’t scream, if only because his jaw feels like it’s fused shut, his pusher beating out of his chest, the world narrowed to nothing but the impossibility of what’s in front of him. It moves like something alive, and while Karkat wasn’t the kind of pan-addled fuckwad to claim that the mycelium was anything but, this is different. This is – consciousness, or fucking sentience, or maybe he’s just finally gone off the fucking deep end and his poor thinksponge has collapsed under the weight of all the bullshit he’s had to deal with on a daily fucking basis, because he swears that he feels the echo of something saying Welcome .
He looks at it and he knows that it’s looking back at him.
Maybe a human wouldn’t be able to tell, maybe anything that hadn’t grown up with a nonverbal lusus wouldn’t be able to; hell, maybe any fucking troll that wasn’t constantly, excruciatingly aware of when they were being watched and for how long wouldn’t be able to tell, but Karkat can, and it scares the shit out of him.
But that’s not the worst part of it, not really. Karkat’s used to being watched one way or another, sized the fuck up and either dismissed or noted as a threat – or a fucking abomination, but that’s few and far between these days. No, the worst part is that he knows exactly what he’s looking at, too. Hyphae, the mycelium, stripped away from all its trappings and fucking tunnel denizens that he never wants to run into if he can help it: Underneath the deadened black filaments, the writhing mass of living color flashes as it weaves around and amongst itself in a dizzying complex pattern that forms nothing but a map of Ishtar. He looks at it and he sees the streets he’s walked, flinches with every stalk he’s unknowingly (and knowingly) broken, breathes in the faint scent of rot and damp that permeates every corner of Chytrid. He nearly relaxes, the safety fucking reflex of thinking that he’s in his hive at the table with Red again, dark berries on an impossible vine –
And something clicks in his head.
He’s not in his hive, that’s not what this thing fucking is. Itt’s Ishtar, it’s his home, and it’s reaching out for him and all he can feel is nausea burning the back of his throat as his entire being tries to flinch away, instinct telling him nothing but don’t let it touch you, don’t let that fucking thing touch you.
But he’s fucking frozen, the startling solidity of the priest at his back, wizened hands like cuffs around his wrist, iron-gripped. He tries to move his feet but he can’t – he hadn’t even noticed thick ropes of hyphae winding around his ankles, up his legs, heavy and wet as they curl around his chest and squeeze tight like that’s all it’d take to fucking absorb Karkat.
The thought alone makes his stomach heave, his hair bristling as he starts to kick against the filaments binding him.
Whatever the fuck this is, whatever the fuck he was trying to understand, all of that is subsumed by every fiber of his being screaming that he has to get away. He can’t look at it anymore, he refuses to; his eyes squeeze shut tight because that’s all he can do, but he still sees the hypnotic pulses of lights searing into his eyelids, a pattern there just out of reach, words in his peripheral vision that he refuses to turn his head to see because he fucking knows better than to do that.
This was a mistake, it was a fucking mistake – he shouldn’t have come here, and if this is what Red was trying to protect him from, he’s as grateful as he can be while being scared shitless.
For a second, he thinks that this is it. That this is how he ends, in a cave with a fucking insane priest holding him down – and that, at least, is fucking consistent, even if it was supposed to be a fate he avoided once he got the fuck off Alternia.
And then he finds his own voice, and blind fucking trust that the priest won’t actually leave him to get eaten by whatever the fuck this thing is.
“ No,” he manages to croak out, the word dredged up from somewhere deep inside him.
Almost immediately, the hands holding him in place become his fucking rescuers. The hyphae slide off and he’s yanked backwards with a strength that Karkat didn’t think the old man possessed, and he keeps his eyes fucking shut until he feels his back hit a wall and slide down it. Until he can fold in on himself and rest his head on his knees, and look at nothing but dark fabric and the glowing, sticky trails smeared across it.
He doesn’t dare look up. The room is still lit, that thing is still unfurled, it has to be.
“ You did well, you know,” the priest says conversationally. Karkat suspects that he’s looking at it just fucking fine – and anger surges in him anew at the thought that people are brought here, believing and trusting and –
Taken back up, if they change their minds.
He’s not really sure what to think of that.
“ Did I?” Karkat manages to say, his voice rough. He needs water, he needs fresh fucking air – he needs to not be here, except he thinks that his walkstubs are no longer load-bearing and he’ll collapse like a fucking wet stack of cardboard if he tries to stand. “What the fuck was that.”
“ There is a reason I allow new members some time before bringing them here,” the priest tells him. “It takes a certain amount of mental preparation. And I often have to have a bucket on hand in case of vomiting, but I have gotten rather good at guessing who will need it and who won’t.”
“ Well, I’m fucking happy to have not broken your streak,” Karkat mutters darkly. The priest’s good cheer is fucking grating as shit, but he can appreciate it for the distraction that it clearly is. “And you didn’t answer my question, either.”
“ No need to,” the priest says. His voice slides back into solemnity. “You already know, Detective. And words do not do its glory justice. Come, stand. It’s best not to linger, but we can take the stairs as slowly as you need to.”
The glow has died down to near nothing, now; the mass of tendrils sealed up and slumbering once more, and Karkat’s heart no longer feels like it’s about to make a fucking run for it straight out his chest. Even if his breathing is irregular, he stands slowly, focusing on the rasp of lichen under his fingers. His legs tremble, but they hold him, and he lets out a sigh of relief. He couldn’t fucking handle the priest having to carry him out of here.
His steps are slow and faltering, and the priest still hovers around solicitously as Karkat shuffles out of that fucking cave, eyes firmly on the ground in front of him, but he got out of his own accord and he’ll fucking take what he can.
It’s a more subdued journey back up, but the exertion is good. It’s good, to walk, to be reminded that he’s still himself. Karkat Vantas, unaltered but potentially fucking traumatized, with more questions than answers as of fucking yet.
More dangerous questions, he suspects.
“ There is a reason, Detective, that I chose this place for my church,” the priest begins as they ascend – through the close, dark passage that’s approximately a million fucking times more horrible for how Karkat keeps expecting a sudden glow, something to come from the walls and drag him right back to that cave.
He’s trying very fucking hard not to think about it.
“ Literal fucking holy ground?” Karkat asks.
“ I wouldn’t put it like that myself, but yes. I think now you’ll believe me when I say that it called me here,” the priest tells him earnestly. And Karkat can certainly fucking believe that, alright. “But it was here long before I was, and I’m not arrogant enough to think that it was waiting for me all that while. No, it merely happened to dream – and it dreamt me.”
To Karkat, that sounds like a fucking nightmare, but he has the good sense not to say it.
“ So you take people down there, and – what. They’re suddenly fucking blessed so as not to be dragged back down an alleyway and hunted for sport by the fucking mycelium?” Karkat continues.
“ Nothing so straightforward as that, but blessings rarely are.” Golden light begins to filter through, and Karkat nearly flinches from it before he remembers that nothing’s moving, that this is the way they came, with the old, overgrown city. “Sometimes it is as simple as answering the question someone may have been asking since their original experience. Sometimes it is erasing doubt. Resolving a balance, let us say, between what they once were and who they have become. In more extreme cases it might help someone achieve their full potential; it certainly helped me find my calling.”
“ And the protection?” Karkat presses, because while all that is fucking fascinating and shit he’ll have to file away to think about later, he still needs to know the rest.
“ Comes with the resolution,” the priest answers easily. “And the recognition, that you are part of the gloaming. We all are, in our own way, but many walk through their lives in denial of it, and many do not see it for what it is. It is not enough for it to recognize you, but for you to see yourself in it.”
Karkat’s skin prickles all over, hit by an icy wave. That hits too fucking close to what he’d felt in there.
“ Projecting onto that thing can’t fucking solve everything,” he says instead, but they both know he doesn’t mean it.
The priest only laughs, a silvery thing, and says, “I am glad you’re recovering so quickly, Detective Vantas, even if I wish your skepticism hasn’t lingered. But there’s time yet. A little time, but perhaps enough.”
His voice trails off, and Karkat doesn’t bother trying to revive the conversation. Instead he focuses on the burn in his lungs, in his thighs, as they climb. Slowly at first, but faster and faster, as the air loses its dampness and starts to warm by degrees, when the weight of the earth lifts little by little until he emerges into the same little vestibule in the church – and then into the outside world again.
And there’s no comparing the sunlight to what the fuck was down there; it’s warm against his skin, almost fucking welcoming in its impartiality.
It even feels good – and it’s still out, which means that he’s either been gone for less than a couple of hours, or more than an entire solar cycle, but Karkat is seriously fucking hoping it’s the former. He tips his head up to the sun, the outside air, and waits for his pumpbiscuit to calm further. He got out, he’s relatively fucking unchanged, and now he knows more than he did before. For better or worse.
“ Detective Vantas,” the priest calls out, lurking in the shadow of the threshold. Karkat doesn’t turn back, but he still continues: “Remember. You’re welcome anytime, should you wish to speak more. Or should you wish to truly partake in the divine, not just bask in it.”
“ I’ll keep that in mind,” is all Karkat can manage. He has no fucking plans to come back, but he also suspects he might not have a fucking choice in the matter later down the line. The only good part of it, his rational brain says, is that whatever the fuck is down there, the priest clearly has some kind of handle on it. There’s no danger to anyone unsuspecting, and as much as Karkat might fucking like to, he can’t stop people from deciding that they want to partake in the divine or what the fuck ever.
Karkat knows, roughly, what a god should be. And he knows that whatever’s down there isn’t it.
He doesn’t fucking flee back through the overgrown yard, which shows no sign that he’s been through there recently at all, the caps all an even height, the stalks precisely as dirt-stained as they were before. He also doesn’t sag in relief once he sees Red’s silhouette waiting for him, but that’s a near fucking thing.
“ Hey,” he calls out as he passes through the gate, and leaves that entire horrific experience behind him. “I wasn’t gone for too fucking long, was I?”
“ It’s been eighty seven years,” Red tells him, completely deadpan, and Karkat startles before he realizes that Red’s just being a fucking jackass. “Kidding. It’s been like, an hour and a half.”
The inane bullshit Karkat’s expecting doesn’t come, nor does Red make any motion to leave immediately. He looks oddly comfortable here, for how fucking viciously opposed he was to the trip to begin with.
“ Thank fuck,” Karkat says. “It felt like a small fucking eternity, I don’t even know how much I’ve fucking walked, with all those stairs.”
“ Don’t say you weren’t warned about the stairs, bro. You were warned, dog.” Karkat has no fucking clue what that is, except that Strider sometimes says it, deeply fond. It’s extremely disconcerting to hear his words in Red’s mouth, delivered in a disturbingly similar intonation. But where he might expect Strider to launch into a speech of completely and wildly fucking inaccurate media analysis, Red only adds: “Find what you were looking for in there?”
It all comes crashing back, the retreat from earlier clearly fucking tentative at best, aimed to lull him into a false sense of security.
Karkat, hands still shaking, only says, “I fucking found something, but I don’t – I don’t know.”
Red straightens up and looks at him, through him, his face going slack and the telltale red glow of the hyphae pulsing from his skin in slow, hypnotic bursts. His coat bulges out at the back, billowing around his legs.
“ You found me ,” it says, and it smiles.