Chapter Text
-ˋˏ ༻𖤓༺ ˎˊ-
Shedletsky set down his backpack and sat down at the desk. History, ugh; his least favorite subject, as there wasn’t anything in it that could apply to coding, which actually interested him, nor could he really gain any artistic knowledge from it, which could be useful for future game development.
The subject felt outright useless, the only reason he tolerated going everyday being the presence of Christina, who made the whole thing just a little less unbearable. They’d been in their ‘World Religions and Mythology’ unit; if you asked him, the whole thing should have just been an elective. Would’ve been great, but alas.
“Today,” Their teacher, who the students called Spectre, though his last name was Chapman, and made fun of endlessly, “We will be discussing Bloxianity, specifically the denomination that primarily worshiped Telamon.”
Boring.
“Bloxianity, as you already know,” he droned on, “Was a popular polytheistic religion in ancient times that believed in a delayed reincarnation. Telamon…”
Shedletsky looked at the notes sheet he’d passed out, probably ripped straight from the school-issue curriculum, and ignored the spaces to fill in blanks. He wasn’t a particularly good artist, but he doodled on the sheet instead of taking notes. His only actual character, 1x1x1x1, showed up time and time again. He’d made them to vent out his frustrations; he had been ten at the time. He was sixteen now, sure, but he still liked the character. They were an incarnation of hatred with a bunch of random powers that made no sense to combine, and he loved them for it.
“1x1x1x1, or 1x4 as we will be referring to it as…”
His head snapped up, and he stared at Spectre. What did they have to do with this?
“Was a being born of Telamon’s hatred. It is said in the myths that they were responsible for his death, and that in his second coming he would slay them and end all wars.”
It was eerie, how similar it was to what he’d come up with himself; or rather, what he thought he’d come up with himself. He took a breath, not realizing he’d been holding it, not noticing the way his heart pounded in his chest like it wanted out. What was wrong with him? This didn’t mean anything.
At least, it didn’t mean anything until Spectre clicked to the next slide.
He felt he might puke.
“These are the classic depictions of 1x4; it was commonly portrayed as a skeleton, with a glowing acidic endobody and holding two swords that dripped poison. Said swords were referred to as the Daemonshanks…”
The pictures were identical to them. Down to the crown on their head, although it lacked the domino details Shedletsky used when he drew. It couldn’t possibly be a coincidence, Shedletsky wasn’t stupid enough to think it was a coincidence, but why? Why did he, completely out of the blue and without knowing anything, happen to re-create something from mythology?
He was so lost in his thoughts, he hadn’t registered the clunking sound of Spectre's boots on the floor getting louder as the teacher approached his desk.
“Do you have anything you’d like to show the class?”
He looked up from his paper straight into Spectre's sneering face. It would look better as a streamer that solely played asymmetrical horror games, but unfortunately he was situated in their classroom at the moment.
“No.”
Shedletsky answered.
“Then will you care to explain why your paper is covered, not in notes, but in scribbles?”
“If you actually looked, I…” He came up with the first explanation he could, an absurdly simple one at that, “I already know the source material.”
Somehow, it was a masterfully crafted bit of deception; he’d not been thinking, really, but the doodles would make it seem true. And he sort of did know, even if it was just details about 1x1x1x1 that hadn’t changed since he’d made them in the fourth grade. Specter brought the paper to his face; a bloodhound sniffing for crime scene evidence. Upon looking closer to the drawings, he let out a sigh of acceptance. Shedletsky wasn’t, at least so Specter thought, lying.
“Not an excuse this time. I’m impressed.”
He walked back to the front of the classroom, but this time Shedletsky was actually paying attention. Something was different about this, different from the other boring lessons they were taught; this was so familiar it was like being given cliffnotes from his own log entries; it was like reading his own essay to scan for flaws.
“Telamon’s followers were known to be some of the most devout in Bloxianity. Like those that followed the Spawn, they performed ritual sacrifices. However, these were sacrifices of an animal, often a young deer or some other large animal.”
Unlike 1x1x1x1, he hadn’t come up with anything like this; like 1x1x1x1, he felt like he knew this already; like 1x1x1x1, he remembered this. He could picture it, so vivid in his mind that it felt real, the temples in Telamon’s name. White marble with golden filigree in columns that reached out to touch the sky, four walls without a roof that were meant to, somehow, contain Telamon’s statue; so lifelike it was carved it felt real, like he was to spring from it and crack the stone that contained those little details. Laid at the statue’s feet, pathetic in comparison to his grandeur, was a table; this was where the offerings were given.
He held it like an old polaroid photograph, that scene. It was tranquil; clergymen moved through the space, maintaining it, reciting necessary prayers, giving holy water to the few pilgrims who made it to this sanctuary in the mountains.
Shedletsky shook his head, forcing himself out of stupor. He’d never pictured something so vividly before, his mind’s eye not nearly that developed. Not enough to render the scene with every blade of grass, let alone allow him to see clearly the priests of the place, in their pale grey robes.
The bell, he noticed distantly, rang in the halls. It was an ugly noise, grating against his ears and setting that little remembrance of tranquility askew in flames. He stood up from his desk, legs weak and shaky, even as he packed his bag; the routine, so ordinary, broken in an instant. The walk to the cafeteria was filled with nothing but the mindless chatter that surrounded him.
“Tough day, huh?” Christina said, though he barely heard it. “Hopefully tomorrow's better.” She then walked off.
He sat down at the table he normally shared with his classmates; his friends: Christina, Matt, and David. Two of the three, Matt and David, were there when he arrived; Christina had tutorials that day, and couldn’t come.
“Ya okay?” David asked, looking him up and down in concern. “Ya look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
He didn’t say anything, looking down at the table. The marbled surface, designed and cut of plastic, was in his mind, juxtaposed with a smooth white altar.
Matt arrived, and he set down his food. In Shedletsky’s mind, a vision he couldn’t run from, couldn’t blink away no matter how tightly he shut his eyes and begged, a deer was pierced through the heart.
Against his will, even at the gruesome bloody mess in the vision, his mouth watered. The knife was removed, cleaned.
Matt bit into his square pizza. Neither he nor David seemed to realize anything was amis, they spoke of mundane things.
“Football tournament tomorrow, right?” David mentioned.
“It would appear to be so; let us hope the match they do not throw.”
David sighed.
“I get yer AP English is in its Edgar Allan Poe unit, but ye don’t have to keep rhyming.”
“It is the challenge of the week; to betray it would be quite meek.”
Shedletsky’s stomach roiled, nerves coiled up; hummingbirds flew into the sides and crashed miserably before beginning their futile ascent once more. He needed to eat something, he was hungry, but he couldn’t even begin to force himself to stand.
“John?” Matt asked, looking at him with creased skin in between his eyebrows. “Normally your mouth runs on, but today? Your ramble, gone.”
Shedletsky’s breath started normally, started as a calm regularity, but it accelerated like a falcon on prey.
“JOHN!” David shouted. It wasn’t angry, it was fearful: He was empathetic, though he often struggled to act on it. He placed a hand on Shedletsky’s shoulder, though his fear poked through in the way it shook. “John. Everything’s gonna be fine, ya hear me? Breathe with me, got it?”
This had never happened before, at least not with Shedletsky, but he’d read articles. He’d done research. David convinced himself he could handle it, and he could.
Shedletsky followed, forcing himself back to regularity.
“What’s wrong?” David asked, eventually.
“It’s…”
“An’ don’t go sayin’ its ‘nothin’. Ya don’t have a panic attack because of ‘nothin’.”
Shedletsky gathered his thoughts like a sheppard finding wayward sheep.
“The lesson in History today,” he began, holding up a finger to stop David from interrupting with some sort of assumption, “felt familiar. Like I’d heard the information before, even though I haven’t. And then Spectre brought up 1x1x1x1, and all the information was the same as my character. The exact same, I know, it’s insane.”
“That all?” David asked, unconvinced.
Shedletsky admitted, “... I might have started having visions. It was like a memory, almost, except way too detailed.”
“So that's why.” David muttered. “Think you need to go to the nurse's?”
“NO.” It came out rushed, frantic, almost like it wasn't him saying it. “I don't.”
David squinted, lowering his glasses. But he didn't say anything; he let Shedletsky make the decision for himself. It was the right thing to do, even if it didn't exactly feel like it; no, David felt as if he was actively hurting Shedletsky, somehow.
“I am pretty hungry, though. Brought chicken?”
There was the Shedletsky he knew. He couldn't help the little sigh of relief he made at the question. Chicken, of course it was chicken.
“Nah. The lunch line's got it though.”
“Of course it does.”
Shedletsky stood up, and David would've had to be a fool not to see the way his legs threatened to give out under him, the way he stumbled like a baby taking their first steps. He didn't say anything, even though he wanted to.
Shedletsky got into the line. Grey robes, intricate sword patterns; if he so much as squinted, they adorned the students in front of him. What was wrong with him, he had to wonder, for this to happen so suddenly? He'd never had a hallucination before; he didn't think they could just happen like they were.
He pointed at the chicken, like he was going to ruin something if he spoke; he felt like an imposter in his own clothes.
He was served it, and his legs thanked him at the sheer bliss of sitting down. Relief, again, coursed through his bones.
He took the first tentative bite. Dry. Overcooked. Hell, he'd prefer it raw at this point. The barbeque sauce did little to help, and it was dry and oddly crusty. It was, altogether, somewhat disgusting, but he still ate it. He had to.
It tasted like nothing, the spices applied so faint you might as well call it unseasoned. He couldn't even say it tasted like cardboard, or water, or anything other than dry chicken.
Everything tastes like chicken anyways.
The food, if you could give it such a prestigious title, was almost inedible. But he tore into it with such a fervor you'd think he worshipped it, ripping the meat from bone as if he was on death row. He wished it was actually fresh, he wished it was juicy to where his face and hands would be a mess and the paper towel would feel grating against the oils on his skin.
It wasn't.
He finished off the wings and didn't even contemplate touching the vegetables that mandatorily sat on the plate. They, similarly to many students in the school, looked like they didn't even want to be on his tray in the first place. They smelled, like his peers, faintly of rot and sadness.
“You were hungry, huh?” David mentioned, tentatively.
“Yeah.”
He didn't say anything else. The rest of the day, he moved through classes slowly, lumbering along at a steady pace. Arriving home was a great relief; he didn't greet his parents, opting instead to head to his room.
He opened Discord on his home computer, which he'd assembled himself off of the good parts he could find from discarded laptops. Sure, he could buy one new, but it was more fun to take what he could and make something better. If you asked any of his friends, they'd tell you he had the ‘processing power of NASA and the patience of a god'. It didn't have the processing power of NASA, of course, but it had a pretty decent graphics card from an old gaming PC.
Doombringer: Hey, Sevenless, mind coding this character's walk and sprint? Here are the sprites
7spritesheet.png ← there
Shedletsky chuckled. There were hundreds of PNG images just for this single character. See, he'd managed to get hired on an indie game development team; they were making a metroidvania survival horror game set after a nuclear war, and one of the main components was building a team with different skills and abilities.
Coding walking was pretty easy, if a bit time consuming. He simply copied the code shared by every character and started manually changing every part of the script to work with the sprites he was given instead of the main character, Guest 1337’s, sprites. This particular character was named 007n7 and served one purpose: Distract and Survive. He was going to have the ability to make a clone of himself using some sort of futuristic hologram technology. Mostly, he seemed to exist solely for co-op games, where drawing the enemy away provided a larger advantage.
Shedletsky didn’t particularly care about the nitty-gritty of it; his job was, very essentially, to code. He was good at it, especially for someone who was only sixteen. It had always come naturally to him, from the first day he signed up for a coding class.
It was a comforting sort of repetitive process, and it distracted him from whatever had happened that day. He didn’t want to think about it.
It terrified him.
It was late by the time he finished, sending a quick message in the Discord chat that he was done, along with a smiling emoji he truly didn’t feel. His back hurt from hunching over his computer, and the screen was practically burned into his retinas; he kept mentally going over each line even though he had it memorized by now.
His mom had cooked up food, and left his portion in the refrigerator alongside a note that looked worried just by the way it stuck on the tupperware container.
‘You keep staying in that room, clacking away at the keys. Take more breaks.’
Breaks.
Shedletsky felt like he was about to break, and he’d barely done anything all day. Sure, he’d been productive at school, but no more than he was on a regular basis. It wasn’t… he wasn’t doing enough, if anything. She probably wanted him to study more, to pay more attention in his classes, to wake up from his dream of developing his own game and go work at McDonald’s.
They were all just more feelings he’d vent into 1x1x1x1, he thought. He always threw the worst of it- the anger, the hate, the despair- he used 1x4 as an outlet, as a superficial way to deal with it all.
He felt like he experienced it all strongly, he’d always felt like that. While other kids had pouted over their silly squabbles, he’d clenched tiny fists and punched the lights out of another. It was something stupid, too, they were arguing about the right way to pronounce ‘potato’. But that rage he’d always had, it came to the surface as if it had just been looking for an excuse to rear its head.
He microwaved the ribs, as if that would heat them up in any satisfactory manner.
That anger wasn’t normal, he’d learned that when they sent him to an alternate school. It wasn’t normal for the wrath of a thousand suns to trickle into his bloodstream as poison, it wasn’t normal for a child not to cry when they scraped their knee, but try and wound the ground back, it wasn’t normal to find catharsis in the pain of others. He’d forced himself not to, taught himself that laughter wasn’t the right reaction when somebody is suffering. He’d taught himself proper empathy, but he’d had to be taught.
He ate the ribs. They were good, and should have been delicious and mouth watering; but they weren’t, and he was left feeling hollow. His back still hurt, even as he cracked it, and he was still hungry, even though he was finished.
“Weird.”
He commented, because that should have been enough food to stay full. But it wasn’t.
He took some more ribs out of the refrigerator and warmed those up. They were just as good as the other ones; somehow, they’d yet to lose the seasoning of hunger. He ate far too much, and it should have felt worse than it did. He should hurt with how much he was eating.
It didn’t hurt, not one bit; he was left only with a vague feeling of satisfaction.
He headed back upstairs, brushed his teeth, and prepared for bed. His bed was, though soft, somehow uncomfortable, like a luxurious hotel bed you’re just not used to. It was a struggle getting to sleep, despite how exhausted he was.
The dreams were just as vivid as the hallucinations, but this time he truly stood in that temple. Not as an acolyte, but as the statue they were offering their praises to. It wasn’t his body in the dream, the statue. He recognized that he was just using it to peer upon them, and that his body was somewhere else.
The knife once again slid into the deer’s throat, crimson coating it as the poor young thing whimpered its pain before expiring. It was dead, dead as a doornail. He should have felt horror, he recognized distantly. He should have been outright terrified, but instead a little sliver of glee, the catharsis he had long since kept at bay, snuck through the cracks. Such a tiny droplet, but it was what gave way to a waterfall.
And then he was there, truly, actually there. It was his body, but in a sense it wasn’t. Large wings mounted his back; he knew the color though he had never seen them; they had dark brown coverts, almost black, and the primary and secondary coverts were lighter. The flight feathers, on the other hand, were bright golden. This body was taller, giant in comparison to his regular stature, but it felt normal to him. Instead of human feet, he had monstrously large talons that curled into the grass.
It was a sacrifice meant for him, and so he ate. The blood, raw and fresh, dribbled down his chin. It tasted divine, and if it had been up to Shedletsky, he would have given his thanks. But his body moved of its own accord, and he said no such thing, only continuing his feast.
The second he flew off, Shedletsky awoke in a cold sweat. He felt like a candle: on fire and slowly melting. His mouth was dry, unbearably so in contrast to the warm, wet blood coating it in the dream, and the room was dark.
There was no sunlight in the room, nothing peeking through the blackout curtains. He checked the time. Three in the morning.
“What. The. Hell. Was. That.”
Unfortunately, there was no response. He got out of his bed, mustered up the strength despite feeling sick and feverish, cold and hot at the same time. He shivered, but he knew the feeling of that sort of shiver. He’d come down with something, probably, then.
It was almost comforting to think of that as just a fever dream. It was probably just a fever dream, not some sort of flashback to a bogus life he’d never led. He wasn’t going insane, he was just under the weather. He’d probably been ill all day and just didn’t notice it.
He filled a glass with water and jumped at his own reflection. Nothing was different about it, not upon a second glance, but he could have sworn his eyes shone gold instead of blue. But there wasn’t anything, there wasn’t any conclusive evidence.
“I’m just sick.”
He reassured himself, drinking the water.
“It’ll pass.”
He reassured himself, washing the cup.
“I’ll be fine.”
He convinced himself, heading back to sleep.
And again, he was interrupted so rudely by a dream.
The skies were a crimson orange, and perhaps for the first time, he felt no rage or hatred, not even the subtlest notion of it. Though flames burned on below, the scene was overwhelmingly tranquil. The charred flesh of those fallen in war smelt vaguely like pork, though not in any appetizing way. He felt no terror, nor did he feel fear; this was his fault, and yet he reveled in it.
Standing, amidst the chaos and the destruction that went on below, was a man, if you could call them that. They waved their fist up, brandished their sword, however foolishly, at him. He laughed, but stooped down and landed elegantly to greet them.
He knew them already.
“Ah, One-by-Four. You arrive.” He spoke, and it may well have been his own words this time. “Come to challenge your creator. A fruitless endeavor.” The words were fact, not spite; it was simple; 1x4 would lose this fight; they had no chance in the matter. He was experienced, he was the god of warfare; even his own hatred stood no chance against his might.
“You may think that.” They snarled at him. “But I am stronger than you believe, creator.” Spite indeed coated their tongue, venom on their breath as it was on their swords. “I challenge you to a sword fight on the heights!”
He chuckled and drew his sword, the Ilumina. The blade glowed with a faint golden light, contrasting with the neon green of 1x4’s ‘flesh’ and casting a lime tint on the scene. He leaped into the air and spread his wings, flying high and fast before diving down on 1x4; they anticipated, dodged, and swung their own swords. It was second nature when he dodged, it was instinct when he threw the ice dagger and it dug into their ‘flesh’. They pulled it out, remaining unharmed, but he didn’t feel the slightest hint of worry, not one bit.
He lunged at 1x4, slashed with the firebrand, and yet they parried; he remembered, then, that he had been the one to train them. What a stupid thing that was, wasn’t it? They understood his fighting style like the back of their hand, like the very swords they fought with. It continued like this, until the first hit was landed. 1x4’s sword slashed through him, and that was the end of it.
Shedletsky woke up, heart beating erratically, the pain still in his stomach. He raised a hand to it, to check, to see if it would come back stained ruby, but it was dry. He was fine, alive. Nothing had happened, but he still felt the poison in his veins.
“Just a nightmare.”
He lied to himself, shivering. His back was sore, though it felt less like the pain he got from leaning over a desk and more like the pain you get when you’re a child, growing so quickly it hurts.
That wasn’t good. There was merit to be had in the dream, he knew that. Even if he lied to himself again and again, he knew that. Things clicked into place too readily, too easily to be coincidence. But this wasn’t something he could work with- he was sixteen and a coder who’d probably drop out of high school the second he got the chance. He wasn’t a god, wasn’t prepared for the responsibility that came with being a god.
“I’m not Telamon.”
He whispered, but it was gossip you read in a tabloid.
“I’m John Shedletsky.”
He spoke, but it was the cunning tricks of a politician.
-ˋˏ ༻𖤓༺ ˎˊ-
