Interlude: A Dark Place
Content Warning:
themes of identity death
Like macabre shooting stars, memories and fragments of identity swirled in a maelstrom. The coalescence hardly formed before it was pulled from the space between spaces. A single fragmented mind within the maelstrom rose to the fore, fugue-like and confused as the forming body descended into a barren world whose crimson air pulsed with a bitter semblance of life.
The prone figure pushed upright, clawed hands sliding through red sand. Within them stirred the raw fury of cast-off, fragmented souls and their mind heaved. They shivered in the heat and fell back down into the sand, twitching. Within them, different shades of wrath fought and clawed and consumed. A thousand small deaths later, a handful rose to the fore.
Among them, a bright spark of raw, righteous fury burned. But as it devoured the others, something nagged at it. A small flash: a narrow, but brilliant shining ray. A single memory of something other. What am I doing? What’s going on? I was just—
The fragment of what once was, larger than the others, stalled and stumbled. In the span of a thought, the multitude that still raged fell upon it. Indescribable agony wracked its incorporeal form. Another fragment, larger than the other small ones, pushed through and towered, triumphant over the fallen one.
The final blow never came. Instead, the unique shard turned and shielded the largest fragment. Struggling, the largest fragment grabbed onto the blinding thread of that single, fragile memory and lashed out in a desperate bid to save its fated ally.
For what seemed an age, the battled raged on and on. Seconds in one plane were an eternity in the body that twitched and spasmed, kicking red sand across barren rocks even as the cloying, thrumming air of the plane seeped into its being. In the end, the two allied fragments triumphed, but the smaller of the two began to crumble.
In the last moments before singularity, they embraced. And then, a single consciousness floated alone: confused, lost, and scared. They clung onto that same ragged memory. As rage and fury threatened to consume all they had been, they clung on.