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You reach out for the Avid Horizon and something in your eyes, in your head, in your body feels
heavy. It feels
your vision flickers out before your hand ever makes contact, and you only have enough time to think how strange it is, because—you aren't alive, it shouldn't matter, none of it should, you're so close, just give you seven more damned seconds—let you—
Your hand touches the gate, fingers splayed so you can catch yourself as your balance goes out and you gracelessly stagger forward, and for a second you experience some sensation you don't have a single word or name for in any language, and you feel a tug on your stomach and some taste you can no longer recognize in your mouth, and then you aren't anything at all.
You're sort of expecting that to be it, to be honest. You've never expected anything to come after. Just make it to the Horizon, and let go, and whatever message you should have carried will fall away with you. It's not as if you'll be the only person who reaches here—who has reached here—who will ever reach here. You're just—you. Brittle, hollow, you.
So when you open your eyes and you're lying on your back on some uncomfortable surface, one leg hanging off the side of the bed, you—panic is maybe not the word for it. You don't feel panic anymore. You carved that out of yourself many, many years ago, when you took a spirifer's fork to the crevices where your soul had once sat, and even if it still had some grasp on you it was gone by the time you had your whole damned head cut off and that blade slipped through your neck like a guillotine. You barely even remember what panic feels like.
But maybe you do panic, actually, because what are you where is this what's happening, and your breath is coming in shallow little hisses that don't do a thing to inflate your lungs (which you don't even need and barely even work, why does this hurt, it shouldn't be able to hurt at all)—you grapple around and manage to swing your other leg to the side of the bed and sit up, and you put your face in your hands (fingers so tense your dull nails mark furrows into the skin) and try to breathe.
It's harder than it ought to be. You haven't actually needed to breathe in... years. (Not that it kept you from drowning. Lacre cannot bury the law, as it goes, and you're not a Drownie and never have been, as far as you've ever known. There are laws to the universe—and even you, terrible impossible you with your head hollowed out for something less than a ghost to nest there, can't claim immunity to all of them. You can only make yourself so different before you fall between the seams and can't get back up, twisting and changing into something new forever and evermore.
You never quite went so far at once, but you knew someone who did; you were friends, once, for a long time.
But you changed wrong.)
Somehow eventually you wrangle your breathing back into some semblance of normalcy, enough that your chest doesn't feel like it's going to burst and shatter.
You sit up.
You look at your hands. It's—
Something very, very strange is going on.
These hands are a little darker than they should be, still some passing semblance of sun-tanned, and almost all your scars are missing. These fingers haven't been broken more than once, maybe, and even that would've been some time ago; they sit too straight at rest, no uneasy angles. The scar that sits right in the middle of your left hand, mirrored on both sides, a blade that pierced right through it—that's gone. The skintone is too warm by far; your blood hasn't flowed this way since—since he took all your organs out and you staggered deliriously home and had them sewn back into your empty torso, useless, useful, just obedient of natural law enough to let you do things like a "normal" "human".
You're not even wearing gloves. You can't remember the last time you left both your hands bare. And most importantly, that thin line on your left wrist, where a Deviless took your useless soul from you over a decade ago—
It's not there.
Why isn't it there. Why isn't it there. You dig your nails on one hand into your fingertips on the other and are further surprised when it actually hurts, because the nerves in your fingertips haven't worked right in years and years; you compensate, you're excellent at compensating so nobody ever notices, but—these aren't damaged. These sensations are firing bright and loud and correctly, as if there's never been—
They shouldn't be like this. You continue your self-examination before you can let yourself get altogether too worked up about it, but packaging this neatly away isn't nearly as easy as it should be, what with all your years of practice. Still. If you've ever been very good at anything in your entire life, it's been compartmentalizing. The Neath taught you how to excel there.
Your legs, your feet, they're the same. Barely-scarred, warm and alive; there's not that knot in your right hip you compensate for when you twist, and there's not that dull, aching pain from when a harpoon went through your leg and splintered your shin to bits, where it was never quite like it'd been ever again. You've got feeling on the bottom of your left foot and that ankle doesn't click if you put weight on it the wrong way.
By the time you get around to investigating your torso, you don't even particularly bother with taking your shirt off, just unbuttoning it a few buttons and laying your hand against your chest to feel your heartbeat (traitorous, ephemeral, too fast by far, and oh so very foreign to know). You already know your weeping scars are gone. They're always most painful after a revival, and there's no blood on your shirt, no pain in your chest, no unconscious shake in your arms: they're gone.
Your teeth—your teeth are dull all around and painfully human. There is no deep scar carved into your neck all around, the circle of where the blade went through in its guillotine way. There are no little scars at the curve of your lips, no deep gouges in your left eyelid; your hair, which has been your truest point of vanity for so long, is a knotted mess that barely reaches your shoulders and in possession of frayed ends like it's been hacked at with a knife. There's no knife at your hip, no needles slotted into your sleeve, no blade nestled in your boot, no nothing. You're weaponless. Laid bare.
If you were someone else you might assume this was a dream. But you gave your dreams to the well long, long ago, and that space in your mind has sat empty since; you don't dream anything that's uniquely your own, if you dream at all. You only dream of the same things everyone in the city does, and sometimes fragments of some other world that are not yours at all.
You aren't dreaming. You can't be. (You can't dream.) So that's right on out. Even a dream would never do something so great as disconnecting him from you and giving you back that part of your head, and it's empty-quiet up there, no whispers, no nudges, no hunger; he's gone. But he might've been gone before you came back. (You almost felt him slipping away, right at the end, right as you stopped being. There's no pall cast over your thoughts. They're only yours, which truly doesn't seem right, but, anyway,)
It could be the is-not, but you feel too clear-headed for this to be Parabola; and even Parabola would never play a trick on you such as giving your soul back, not that it's been in a state to have that done to it since you tore that pathetic thing to shreds. And. And. The newspaper on the rickety table near your bedside says
How old
were
you, back then?
Count back if you have to.
That whole year is still very clear in your mind, even as faded as it's become with time, even with the fact you're not sure you've told a single person besides your—family—how old you actually are in longer than you can remember, so. So that means. That means:
You're in truth sixteen years old but claiming nineteen, is what this tells you. Meaning: you have not sold your soul. You have not made your name. You—you check the month and it's before he ever—there's no call in your head for the search, for the Name, for any of it, it's just—gone. Your body is rickety and human and malnourished and has never died a single time.
Reflect. Recenter. Breathe. You can't seem to draw any air into your lungs. The room flickers and wavers in your sight; you draw knuckles down your sternum and choke on the pain and desperately try to center yourself. You can't fall apart. You can't afford to fall apart. You can't. You need to regroup and resettle; remind yourself step by step of who you are separate from him, in your ways, with your names.
You had an epithet, before—this happened. But you abandoned that, too; became the Hollow Captain and then threw even that away with the captain-that-you-were to rot in irrigo. You are—were—a Monster-Hunter, a Hierarch of the Hunt. A Seeker of the Name. Mad, bad, dangerous to know, unmistakably and irrefutably an Abomination. The epithet you used to have, before you were the Hollow Captain, was
It was
It's gone. The one you had before is. It's gone. It's happened to you before, so it doesn't take you as much by surprise as it could, as it should; you threw away your first one, too, sloughed it off like a snakeskin in a carnival that you didn't ever go to and forced your way into. You could only remember the shape of it, the syllable-count; back then even your loved ones almost forgot your real name, too. But it came back. Your epithet never did, but you grew a new one, you made it separate from yourself.
It's—it's fine. You think epithets are—pretentious. You'll live. There's horrifying creeping panic in your chest so severe your vision's blurring and there's nausea making knots in your throat and your head is starting to hurt but you're
fine. It's not like it was back then, but they remembered your name eventually, didn't they? Since your name, your real name, bereft of any epithets, is
You know your name it's right there on the tip of your tongue why can't you say it why can't you say it where is it where is it. If he's gone.
If he's gone from your head, and he is, there's not even a hole there, why is yours gone. Why does trying to remember your name, to shape your mouth around two goddamned words, make
It's not even that it makes you hurt. You would understand if it hurt. You understand pain better than anything else because it makes sense it makes sense it makes sense. It—your name starts with an—it's an A, right? Shouldn't you be certain about this much? But it's
It's not there. It's just not there at all. It's gone. It's gone it's gone it's gone and trying to pull it back is making your nose drip blood all down your face and your chest, an empty hollow feeling of nothing nothing nothing, not even gant. Gant remains. There's nothing remaining of your name at all. You blink repeatedly to try and dissuade the pressure building up behind your eyes, to no avail.
Think back. Think back. You're clever. Even when you've thrown every part of yourself to the well and torn yourself to shreds you've still been a fast thinker, you've always been good at finding a way, it was one of the last pieces of you that started to fade. It's irrigo-hazy but you
You know. You can't know and it feels like a dream but you don't dream anymore so it can't be but you know. You talked to her in the Nadir. You gave something up. What did you give? What did she give you? Think back. Remember. Remember. Just for one bloody moment, remember. What did you give. What did you promise, and what did she promise you.
You remember, clear and bright, and press your fingertips to your temples as if it'll stop the fact your skull is beginning to feel like it'll shatter:
(No marks.) Your skin is scarless; your body is flesh and blood, not skin over a frame of clay and bone.
(No nature.) At this age you didn't even have a job; you were just making it through day-to-day via petty theft and odd jobs, via people willing to overlook how young you looked if you postured enough and worked for low enough pay. It's gone. You're just some nobody. You're not even hungry, and you've been so hungry it didn't even hurt anymore for so long—it's gone in a way you can't recognize and can't remember ever having. No pit in your chest, in your stomach, some endless gaping void you could never ever ever fill.
(No purpose.) He's gone.
(No future.) You're sixteen again and just another nobody in a sea of bodies.
And and and. And. And
(No name.)
It's gone. The rest of it you think is just consequence, maybe, whatever's sent you back taking those as natural consequence of removing who you were and who you are, but your name is
it's just gone.
But didn't she say—there was one more, wasn't there? Her final promise. Your final sacrifice. (You would never be alone again.) So what is—
There is someone sitting incongruously straightly on a chair near the closed door to this room. You can't tell how old they are, you can't really tell much about them at all given how little skin they've got showing, but they're—pale, healthy-pale, so less sallow than any Neath-dweller becomes. They're dressed well, and the heels on their boots must give then an inch or two of height. They're wearing dark spectacles, and no matter what way you angle yourself you can't see a single hint of their eyes. And they've got salt-white bone-white hair, long bangs cascading down out of the hood on their coat and the rest? of their hair? tucked up in there somewhere, maybe, if it has any symmetry to it. Something about their choice of fashion reads 'outsider', something a little Khanate, a little Hellish, but it does so in a way where they've clearly enough money to make it intentional. The fabrics—from this distance you don't know you can't tell it doesn't matter you've never cared enough to know. They're still there, glancing in your general direction, the same way they were ten seconds ago.
They've been there the whole time, the odds are, but you've been so caught up in your pathetic little tantrum that you didn't even look to see. Unacceptable.
They look a little like you, you think, in some funhouse mirror sort of way; the nose, the lips, the faint wave of the hair. But you were always hollow towards the end, weren't you? Empty. Drawn so thin over nothingness that even mirrors didn't quite catch you anymore, forgetting where you were in the world. No matter how much you ate (and, god, you ate) it never changed a single thing about you, no matter how hot and red and wet and raw it was. It never made you any better. You've always been all angles, corners so sharp they could cut, but it was—worse. At the end. You couldn't put it off anymore and the search, the search, it ate you up. You put it off for so long, and for what?
You think there's hysteria bubbling up in you and you don't know what to do about it. All that makes its way out of your mouth is a cut-off choked little laugh.
They tip their head to the side and smile, clasping their bare hands (what in hell's name is wrong with their hands, those lines aren't scars, you know so very well what so many types of scars look like; someone's fit their skin and flesh together as if pottery shards), and cross one leg over the other at the ankle.
"You can call me the Haruspex, love," the Sidereal Haruspex says, with an accent so perfectly practiced it's doubtlessly fake, and to some degree you hate them a little on sight.