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In Sampo's experience, children and cats are the most aware of the Aeonian of all conscious, mortal beings.
In terms of children, they're pretty sure it has to do with their brains being moldable, still developing, able to withstand the pressures and influences of divinity without snapping. Adults are more… fixed. They're so sure with what they think reality is that beings and powers beyond sense and rationality break their minds into millions of pieces.
In terms of cats, they have no fucking clue, they just knows that every feline they've come across have been able to look Aha in the eyes and decide they hate them. The fact cats can take the full brunt of their power and still hiss and swipe at them both drives them crazy and makes them laugh hard enough to shake galaxies.
Initially they considered reincarnating themself as a cat. But apparently they had short lifespans, probably only a century or something sad like that, and although Aha could easily get up to all kinds of fun as a cat, humans can get away with a lot more. Their small stint on Akivili’s weird space train had opened them up to the possibilities of being human, the things they could get up to and the simple way humans saw the world. Aha’s form then wasn’t real, wasn’t anything but a puppet they manipulated and spoke through. But it had been enough to plant the idea in their head.
First, they tried to occupy a human’s body, pushing their soul out of the way and letting it dissipate into the cosmos. As soon as they slid themself into every cell the thing burst apart into confetti and glitter, bells and whistles and their own laughter so loud and all-consuming a new star formed in its place. They tried to take a dead human body after that, only for the flesh to inflate into crystal and create a celestial body made up of glass and gems and stardust flowing like water, light coalescing into something solid and sprouting up like trees.
(Aha is pretty sure some of Idrila’s little zealots found it and are trying to claim it as proof of the Beauty’s continued existence, some sign they’re still out there. Aha cursed them out a bit for that one but never felt a response. Aha visited it again some eons later to find the IPC made it into a tourist destination that serves shitty cocktails.)
Aha stole the bodies of a few Masked Fools, thinking maybe their devotion to Elation would make them more… durable. But they started replicating, cells reforming into paper mache bodies over and over and over until Aha eventually blamed it on Yaoshi and convinced The Hunt to destroy them all. They abandoned their attempts to take over a human body when Lan tried to shoot them too.
Making a human body from scratch was harder, more time consuming; they danced around the cosmos for a few eons, picking up bits and pieces of the universe that they would mold together into… something.
They visited taverns overflowing with laughter and cursing and music, catching the notes out of the air and shoving them into jars, scraping sticky spilt liquor off the floor. They sent their puppet to attend some showstopping, never-before-seen plays and movies that would’ve been groundbreaking if Aha didn’t spool through the consciousness of the audience and actors and directors and writers, eliminating them from mortals’ reality and keeping them for themself. They picked through the debris of wars, battles and galactic skirmishes, taking the rancid fear and pain left in the air and waving their hands through it all until it gathered around their fingers like cobwebs. When they were feeling particularly brave or bored, they picked away at some of the shiny, pretty asteroids making up Qlipoth’s Celestial Comet Wall, barely dodging Qlipoth’s rage or talking them out of trying to wipe Aha out of existence.
They took their bits and pieces to the edge of the universe, the brink of non-existence where things that don’t exist yet and will never exist gather and writhe. Putting it all together into a mortal body was the hardest part.They stole some anatomy and medicine textbooks from some of the Intelligentsia Guild but they got bored with it and shifted the pages into four-headed birds, sending them careening into the Nothingness. Aha asked Nous about it at some point, what exactly made a mortal soul and how they could bend themself into one. But the Machine started asking mind numbing philosophical questions and showing far too much interest in Aha’s actions.
Aha isn’t sure how long it took, how many forms they made; sometimes the organs didn’t connect properly, sometimes the skin was too thick or too thin, or the form slipped into the fourth dimension and would’ve been incomprehensible to mortals. Most of the bodies couldn’t handle their Aeonic powers, folding in on itself or bursting at the seams or shifting atoms into something else. Aha threw body after body into the incomprehensible Nothing until they finally got it right.
(Or… close enough, anyways. They couldn’t quite get that… look in the eyes right, leaving them devoid and blank.)
Aha built the body around themself, curling ribbons and frills and fabric and all the fanfare of their very being smaller and smaller and smaller. They shifted themself down to one uniform consciousness, deprived of the very sensations of the universe and the feeling of the fabric of reality. They squeezed and squished themself into the body until they could feel limbs, feel skin, feel the cold-hot of the airless space.
Aha created themself into a child, becoming Sampo Koski at the edges of the world outside of reality’s view. The left the debris of Aha in their wake, floating endlessly until Sampo returned to themself again, then they dumped himself onto some random human planet at some random human orphanage like he’d been there all along.
It didn’t take long for the Masked Fools to find him; Sampo expected that, planned for it actually. But it did take long by mortal standards, a couple decades passing before Sampo realized he messed up this body.
Turns out, time is different for mortals. Where he could once see before and right then and now and the future and alternate futures all tangling together into one rushing stream, now he was stuck on a single one direction path. And he had horribly miscalculated the human aging process.
His attempt to recreate a childs’ mind worked against him, now; the weight of everything Sampo had experienced and known and seen as Aha was confusing to his young, underbaked brain. When the adults started questioning how years passed and he didn’t seem to grow past the age of six, he couldn’t comprehend how to excuse it or make them look the other way. Being a child was frustrating, the way they bent at the waist to talk to him, how he couldn’t quite figure out the words and phrases he needed to say what he wanted. It was harder to keep himself contained, too, his divinity showing a little too much and brushing against humans’ minds too harshly.
It was probably a few years of being barely seven years old before the Masked Fools showed up at the small, defunct orphanage on the poor planet and started whisking up children for the auditions.
Sampo knew how the Masked Fools worked; they often found small, young kids forgotten by the rest of the world and took them away to one of the many circuses and fairs across the universe. Usually they just took random orphan children they thought could survive it, or sometimes stole away kids from families if they thought they had real promise. Regardless, it was a given they took Sampo. He didn’t expect to feel fear, though, being grabbed out of nowhere by laughing, grinning porcelain faces and theatre masks.
The Masked Fools’ auditioning process is grueling, painful, horrifying, exciting, all things Sampo has never experienced in this simplified, precise way. He takes to it easily, even as other kids he was stolen away with fall away, either to madness or their bodies breaking in the trials. It tugs at something in his chest, makes him choke up with something in his throat. Sampo assumes it's because he’s a child, subtly accelerating his cells to grow at a seemingly normal pace, until the Masked Fools decide he’s ready.
(His first role was a young, bright-eyed aristocrat in a developing planet with a strict class system. It was easy if fairly boring to upend it all, leaving the planet only a few months later as he watched the shining towers of the Monarchs burn and crumble to nothing.)
Sampo takes to the Masked Fools easily. It’s kind of funny, how they don’t ever seem to suspect a thing; no one questions how he barely ages beyond early adulthood, how he sometimes laughs too hard and feels his skin shudder under the weight of his essence, or how he can bend people’s desires so easily. There’s something hysterical in it, the idea of the very Aeon they all worship and revere and shout messy prayers to as they drink and carve smiles into their own skins, is sipping liquor they shifted into ethanol in the corner of the room.
Sampo stays in the lower rungs of the Fools’ messy, unintelligible hierarchy. He keeps to quick roles, not ducking from the most dangerous ones as he downs poisons and gets stabbed and enacts tragedies with a smile. (The pain is a strange, horrible thrill he never knew before.) No one questions the weirder things about Sampo, either because they don’t care or because the pressure of Sampo’s prolonged presence has bent their minds too much.
He feels Akivili’s Express repaired in the distance one day, like a cheap imitation of the Trailblazer’s presence. In between getting forever banned from Herta’s Space Station for stealing a number of curios and re-enacting a movie that only exists in his mind as he enacts a revolt on one of the IPC’s manufacturing galactic plants, a long-term position opens up on a frozen planet.
Sampo feels it, the inevitability of the Express’s arrival, and he finds himself intrigued.
He lands on the planet years before the inevitable, the script suggesting he lay low before he can get the chance to orchestrate everything, saying he should get cozy with the Architects and gain their trust.
Instead, Sampo dives into the Underworld. It’s rough, made up of scraps and crumbling buildings, people barely holding on. It reminds him of his… well, childhood, technically, if it could be called that. Time is strange to him now, and the years he spent on that sad rock of a planet make up a large chunk of his existence now. It pulls at that weird tugging in his chest that he couldn’t get rid of by growing older, watching the people.
It’s ridiculously easy to inject himself into the more questionable business of the Underworld. The barricade between the Underworld and the Overworld provides a niche for him to fit into easily, flitting up to the surface for things, medicines and relics that hold laughably small amounts of divine power. It doesn’t take long, only two years before he’s built up an image, a sort of presence among Wildfire and the general people.
He meets Natasha first, his deliveries of medicine turning into exchanging information. He likes her a lot more than he thought he would, that no-nonsense, tired seriousness to her making him laugh. He obviously knows more than she lets on from the start, clocking her as the leader of Wildfire right away, the risks she’s taken and responsibility she’s shouldered a visible weight only Sampo sees. But Natasha seems to know more than she lets on too, or at least suspects something of Sampo. It feels like they could rip each other’s images apart at a moment’s notice, and Sampo delights in it.
Seele is instrumental to the planet’s future, he knows this, creating a scythe out of scraps and bits of relics and incomprehensible things and selling it to her under the guise of scavenging it. She’s strong, she’s fierce, she’s unwavering in her resolve, the kind of rough-heroic figure that emerges from peril. Sampo finds her intriguing, a bit predictable, but he enjoys pushing her buttons. Seele puts up with him but he can see it, how the longer she’s near him the more she tenses, grits her teeth, clenches her fists. It’s interesting, how she dismisses her sensitivity to the Aeonic as Sampo just being annoying.
The children of the Underworld, though, are the most fun.
Pitch-Dark Hook the Great and the Moles take to him instantly. He plays hide-and-seek with them, chasing them around and playing pretend. Hook shows him to their hideouts, hidden in back alleys and made up of cardboard boxes and metal scraps. Sampo tells them fantastical stories as they hide out from Natasha and Seele in Rivet Town, manifesting images in the air. Hook and the kids just squeal with delight and wonder as he creates roses growing from his palms, twists broken machinery into chirping birds, creates dancing lights and music in the air around them.
Sampo used to do this with the other kids at the orphanage, he realizes at some point. Before the Masked Fools whisked them all away to different corners of the universe and beaten them down into performers, Sampo would play hide-and-seek and tell stories forgotten to time. It makes his chest hurt.
(Sampo goes out into the Snow Plains and takes his face off, peels back his skin and bends his ribs on their hinges. Making his heart out of stolen songs, crumbled love letters never sent, and the scraps of unfinished dreams must have been a mistake. That must be what’s causing this tight, uncomfortable feeling in his chest.)
The first time Sampo meets Gepard Landau is in the Snow Plains, only a few months after Sampo landed on the frozen planet. His image is shaky at this point, his business practices and services not well known yet. But he’s done enough smuggling, enough trading of secrets and relics and controlled goods that he has a little attention on him.
Sampo has made a sort of home out in the Cold Plains. He’d neglected to build his body enough sensory neurons responsible for sensing temperature, the freezing cold more like a soft breeze to him. It’s a small blessing, allows him to head out into the snow where no one else will go. He finds himself enjoying the unassuming livelihood of the frozen wastelands, finding life in gargantuan snowbears that recognize him as an equal threat, the small snow slugs that thaw out during brief periods, the rabbits that burrow and hide as he walks through.
He created a sort of house, halfway buried under a glacier and completely unassuming to anyone who’d dare to walk by. Not that everyone ever does, with the constant raging winds and horrific cold.
Sampo goes there when his skin doesn’t feel right, feels too papery. When the people around him start to act strange and look at him with wide, vacant eyes. When he feels cackles bubble up dangerously through his throat and rattles his teeth like bells.
It’s when he is readjusting the body’s hold over Aha’s power that Gepard makes his first appearance.
“Halt!”
Sampo literally jumps out of his skin, frantic to pull himself back into the seams of his flesh. It’s something like panic, he assumes he feels, knowing that the mortals who’d caught him here are no doubt forever changed; he’s too raw, vulnerable, exposed. His divinity is subdued even now, but even a small taste of it, the slightest brush of it, would render them all insane.
“A-Ah,” Sampo laughs, coughs into his fist to try and bring his voice back into one uniform tone. He spins on his heels, grin straining across his face as he crosses his arms.
Gepard Landau. He’d heard of him at this point, seen him vaguely at a distance sometimes. Meeting him was inevitable, a part of the script, but he didn’t think he’d be caught en-route to his ice house, readjusting the Aeonic under his flesh. It’s a shame, that this contact has probably killed Gepard, or worse. Adjusting the script to account for his fumble will be a pain in the ass.
He expects to see Gepard’s eyes melting in his head, or wide with fanatic reverence, or maybe diminished to primal rage. He’s shocked when Gepard is none of those things.
He holds his guitar-case thing beside him, broad shoulders and stern expression. His eyes pierce Sampo in a strange way he hasn’t seen from a mortal yet; it reminds him of the many times he’d annoyed Lan a little too much and ended up dodging arrows across galaxies. It makes Sampo pause, gawk at Gepard for a moment. His lack of response makes Gepard tense. “You, what are you doing out here? Normal civilians are not permitted to…”
There’s two other Silvermane Guards accompanying Gepard are fairing much, much worse than their Captain; under a helmet Sampo hears gurgling, groaning, the Guard’s shaking hold on their halberd falling as they collapse to the ground in a twitching, whimpering lump. The other guard suddenly screams, making Gepard flinch and spin just as the Guard bolts, wailing profanities as she trips and scrambles out of the valley.
“What…” Gepard gasps, looking down at his fallen comrade with wide eyes. The surprise and confusion on his face is… confusing. Sampo watches him intently, a hand on his chin. He looks down to the Guard who’d finally fallen unconscious. “...aw, man! The guys who run or just collapse are always the most boring.”
The Captain’s head snaps up at his words, his grip on his guitar tightening. “What did you do?” Gepard growls, gaze unwavering as he stares at Sampo and clenches his fist, ice swirling around his gauntlet. “Tell me! What did you do to them?”
Sampo chuckles, waving his hands. “Nothing, nothing! I… well, it wasn’t on purpose, okay?” He snorts as Gepard’s expression darkens, holding up his guitar case like he’s going to… hit him with it? Strange weapon choice, but Sampo can’t judge.
“In Qlipoth’s name--” (ugh, of course he was one of Qlipoth’s.) “--you will come with me, criminal. We’ve had multiple reports of a scammer with blue hair who leaves the walls of Belobog. You are under arrest, and you will come with me and you will explain what you just did to my--”
“Why aren’t you affected?” Sampo interrupts, more talking to himself. Gepard balks and stammers, stepping back as Sampo approaches. “Hey! Not a step closer, criminal! I will use force if necessary--”
“You’re pretty resilient!” Sampo chuckles, reaching out. His fingers nearly reach Gepard’s face before he stops, gauntlet harsh around his wrist. Ice creeps up Sampo’s arm and his hand, so cold even Sampo feels the bite of it. The freezing pain startles a loud, echoing laugh out of him. “Woah, woah! Don’t be so hasty now, Captain! I just want to know why you aren’t crying on your knees or something, capiche?”
Gepard goes to say something, probably to yell at him or declare him under arrest again. Sampo takes the opportunity to steal the breath from his lungs, any sound he’d tried to make instantly muted. Gepard’s eyes widen, his hand letting go of Sampo and going to his throat. He watches him desperately suck air into his lungs. Sampo holds his stolen breath in his other hand, a ball of wind. He squeezes it down into a rubber bouncy ball and chucks it over the horizon.
Sampo meets his eyes, Gepard no doubt seeing the lifeless, lack of humanity behind his own blue irises. The expression on Gepard’s face, of confusion and fear, like an animal that only now realizes it’s cornered, is exactly what Sampo expected the first time. “Okay, so you’re not immune. Thank Aha for that!” Sampo giggles, Gepard narrowing into a glare. He tries to say something but not a sound comes out of his mouth. “I was almost worried for a second. I mean, you reek of Preservation. I thought that Qlipoth sent one of his lil’ emanators to ruin my fun. But I guess not? You’re weird.”
Gepard steps back, looking like he’s going to run. But his expression hardens, his fist tightening, ice swirling around it fiercely. The display shocks another laugh out of Sampo; the fact this little human just was rendered literally speechless by him, and he was going to punch him?
Sampo ducks down under his fist easily, surging up with a sudden speed that leaves Gepard completely defenseless. He places his hand over Gepard’s face, watching his eyes widen impossibly under his palm, the pads of his fingers pressing into his forehead. Sampo hums a little tune, watching the Captain’s eyes rise into the back of his head before drifting shut. Sampo grabs the front of the Captain’s uniform as he starts falling backwards, pulling him up and throwing Gepard over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
“Interesting!” Sampo hums, patting a hand on Gepard’s back. “Maybe you weren’t looking, like your Guards? I mean, you acted like nothing happened. I’m sure this is Qlipoth’s doing, that asshole.”
Sampo drags the other unconscious Guard behind him, finding the other that had ran collapsed and murmuring to herself a few minutes away. He takes them to the wall, propping them against it. Sampo grasps their heads in his hands one at a time, siphoning their memories of Sampo out, twisting it into a much simpler memory of losing track of Sampo in the snow, before shoving it back into their neural pathways.
The other two Guards are… scrambled, the circuits of their brains all twisted and messed up now. Sampo can’t do much about that without making it worse, so he just shrugs and leaves them be. Gepard, though, is completely fine. It’s like he hadn’t even just crossed paths with the incomprehensible, completely unaware that he should have been rendered mad.
Sampo spends a moment standing over Gepard, just staring at him. There’s nothing notable to him, besides his obvious devotion to the Preservation. Sampo doesn’t feel anything else, nothing abnormal or strange or concerning. He’s just… human. So painfully human.
Later, Sampo places a message in the fabric of space, more like a jumbled mess of curses and accusations to Qlipoth. The Amber Lord never responds nearly as verbally as Aha did before, and the response he gets is nothing but a sense of confusion, annoyance, and indifference.
Sampo spends years on Jarilo-IV, technically following the script, mostly doing what he wants. His presence has an obvious effect on the people around him.
When creating Sampo Koski, it wasn’t just that Aha shoved themself into a mortal body, no. It’s almost like… reincarnation, taking the entirety of Aha and whittling themself down, cutting off bits and pieces until Sampo came to be. He’s as mortal and as human as he can be, entirely and utterly Sampo, the butchered remains of Aha left at the edge of Nothing for whenever he returns to it.
His divinity is much weaker, much more subdued than when he is Aha. Before, Aha could see everything and nothing, feel the world and space and time, interact with reality like it’s a tapestry made of fraying wool. Before, Aha was Elation itself; the full spectrum of jubilation, excitement, revelry, chaos and the extremes of emotion, pushed to the edge. Aha was nothing compared to Qlipoth or Fuli, who could rearrange the entirety of existence with a passing thought, but the distance between Aha and a typical mortal was insurmountable.
Now, Sampo Koski is more like a fragment of Aha, a piece of the full picture of the Elation. He can no longer see everywhere at once, or glimpse himself across the universe. His messages to Qlipoth take months to send, his pull on space no longer as grand and significant. But it’s still insurmountable, still uncontainable, unimaginable.
His body isn’t a perfect, air-tight container of the Aeonic. He tries a lot harder to contain himself than he did with the Fools, now conscious of how much his very being impacts the minds of others.
He sees it, as his grand finale on Jarilo-IV approaches.
Some humans are naturally more sensitive, more aware of it; Sampo knows Natasha has an idea of what he might be, or at least as much that she’s capable of imagining. Sometimes she gets a sort of listless, nostalgic look to her when Sampo spends time in her clinic, listening to something before bringing herself back and bidding Sampo goodbye. Seele is sensitive, too, but she seems to always convince herself Sampo is normal; she is weighed down by how Sampo’s presence inspires a sort of bloodlust in her, makes her feel insurmountable rage and a desire to strike Sampo down when he’s around her for extended periods of time. He knows she either assumes he is just pushing her to the edge, or she feels like something is wrong with her. He lets her assume either way.
Oleg takes a while, but even he acts strangely after a few years of working with Sampo. He treats Sampo like a predator, like he’s going to lash out and attack at any moment. It’s not quite fear, more like apprehension, a kind of tense caution when Sampo is around. Oleg never turns his back to him, never lets Sampo have the last word. Sometimes Sampo bares his teeth when he speaks just to watch Oleg stare and tense up.
(Sampo only met Luka a few times, but his sense of the divine is extremely dull; the fact Luka thinks Sampo is sketchy and untrustworthy is entirely because he is, honestly. He still complains about weird sounds when Sampo is near him, though.)
Gepard is different.
They run into each other a lot more, especially as Sampo prepares the stage for the Trailblazers’ arrival. It’s entirely Gepard catching sight of Sampo, yelling at him and rushing after him. Sampo delights in it, the feeling of being hunted something both foreign and familiar. Sometimes they come down to blows, Sampo either slipping away after letting Gepard land a few hits, or releasing a smoke bomb and propping Gepard up against a wall like he did the first time.
Other Guards try to keep up but rarely can. Even then, Sampo watches how the Silvermane’s are affected by Divinity.
(“I swear I can hear that Koski guy before he shows up!” Sampo hears the Guards whisper to each other, complaining about the weird conman the Silvermane Captain is so fixated on apprehending. “Like… bells. You hear bells when chasin’ him too, right?”
“I don’t know,” another Guard hums, hands shaking slightly. “I just think he’s… he’s… I don’t know. I’ll be honest… I hate chasing him. I usually lag behind, because… Wh-what if he does something? Attacks or… something.”
“You’re crazy!” A third guard laughs, voice sounding reverent. “Koski is impressive! I mean, he’s--he’s everywhere, right? And-and we’ve not caught him! He must be doing something right! And he’s got crazy good looks. I mean, if the Captain wasn’t around, I’d proposition that guy to--”
The Captain always, always cuts them off, appearing as if from nowhere and reprimanding his guards. “Sampo Koski is just another criminal,” he barks out, as if affronted by the idea that Sampo could be anything else. “So don’t you dare forget that.”)
Gepard, though, never falters. He never winces, or frowns, or looks over his shoulder as if feeling something that isn’t there. He never looks at Sampo with inhuman rage or pure reverence or crazed, blank eyes. He never runs from Sampo, never gets down on his knees and prays to him, never does anything more or less than try to apprehend him.
Sampo doesn’t really know why some people are more sensitive to the Aeonic. He wonders if it’s to do with belief, or maybe the capability to see reality as something more, or them being ever so slightly closer to Aeons than the regular mortal. Sampo just knows that it is what it is, that some people always seem to know.
It takes Sampo too long to realize Gepard is the absolute, complete opposite of such mortals; he’s completely blind to the divine. The glimpses of Aha, the sheer weight of their presence underneath Sampo’s skin, he doesn’t see it, doesn’t feel it. Sampo thought he was ignoring it at first, maybe Qlipoth whispered in his dreams in order to spite Aha for stealing bits and pieces of his Wall. Sampo learns, after years of chases and fights and Gepard’s shouting following Sampo’s teasing laughter, that Gepard just feels nothing.
He’s so, so painfully human. The epitome of the mundane. It intrigues Sampo more than anything has in eons.
(Sometimes, he wonders. He wonders. What would happen if Sampo took off his face? What would Gepard see? Would he no longer be able to be so oblivious? Or would he see Aha, simplified to who he is now? If Sampo took him away, to the edges of the universe and the waves of Nothingness, to the fragments of Aha. What would he see? It fills Sampo with some sort of all encompassing, giddy excitement that makes him nearly break apart. But he can’t, he can’t he can’t. Sampo knows, he’d just go mad like every human.)
Akivili’s resurrected Express shows up, and Sampo plays his role beautifully. The Masked Fools applaud his play, waxing poetics about his adherence to the script, the fun he had while manipulating and scheming and putting all the characters where they should be.
(They don’t know, of course, that the original script wanted Sampo to be a boring Silvermane Guard. Sampo had changed the script, bending it and leaving them all unaware. He finds himself wondering, though, if the original script would have let him get closer to Gepard.)
The Stellaron is gone, that girl, Stelle, leaving with the power of Qlipoth despite entering the scene with Nanook simmering under her skin. Sampo doesn’t question it, although sometimes she stares at him a little too long with dead eyes that match his own. March 7th has an interesting reaction to the divine, absorbing it and storing it inside herself. Sampo doesn’t know if it’s his presence that makes her hate him so much or just her personality. The Vidyadhara hiding as a human, Dan Heng, was impossible to crack. Maybe it’s his relations to Long, but he acted like Sampo was nothing but a normal human, barely frowning when he felt the divine brush against him.
Sampo’s role is finished. He’s promised drinks by some of the ladies and gentlemen in the taverns, Fools he doesn’t recognize but who act like they’ve been friends for years. He takes the attention with a bow and a flourish before severing the connection through the Elation, suddenly feeling more alone than ever in Rivet Town.
He’s meant to leave, recoup at a tavern, maybe watch some other Masked Fools’ performances before either causing his own fun somewhere or taking up a new role. Jarilo-IV has been cracked open, the walls between the Overworld and Underworld torn apart, the longstanding oppression of Cocolia’s madness no longer weighing over Belobog. But at the same time, nothing has changed; the planet is still cold, the children in the Underworld are still playing hide-and-seek and getting in trouble in Rivet Town, the fragmentum still score across frozen land.
(Sampo had watched when Hook and Clara and the other kids saw the surface, saw the sky for the first time. He didn’t realize he was crying until tears crystallized into assortments of dice across the ground. He still doesn’t understand when his chest hurts.)
Sampo should leave.
The Masked Fools keep reaching out, contacting him, inviting him to mess around on Xianzhou or to plays in Penacony. They keep asking when he’s returning. Sampo doesn’t respond to any of them, let’s the Fools eventually grow bored of him too.
He’s having much, much more fun on this stuffy, rigid planet than he ever had with them, anyways.
(He thinks of Gepard, when he’d stolen his breath that first time. He thinks of the fear he’d seen as his chest pangs with something that might be guilt. Sampo wants to see how else he would look at him, what he would do if Sampo pulled music out of the air or took them both across the galaxy or turned the ice and snow into cotton candy fog. For him. For him.)