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cancry2023-01-15 05:24 pm
cancrymods) wrote in cancry2023-01-15 05:24 pm
descent
Like flakes of snow, the days spent in the Sloth Layer slowly but surely begin piling up. Life here is quiet and easy, even with the anxiety that comes with needing to move onto the next layer. But as the days drag out, so do the mysteries at play here – with the gradual uncovering of the odd doppelgangers and the seeming lack of any way to proceed to the next layer, it leaves the Executors at a loss for what to do. Until one day, everything changes. It comes entirely without warning – the ground lurches under everyone's feet in a sickeningly familiar way as a brief but violent earthquake rattles through the town. Then all of you feel it; a snapping sensation deep from the very foundations of Purgatory followed by the most cataclysmic impact any of you have experienced in your lives – or unlives. Snow explodes up from the ground, houses creak and lurch and the whole layer seems as though it might shatter apart under your feet. It seems like it's going to last forever. Then, finally, it stops. The silence that follows is even more pronounced in comparison to the hell-rattling noise from before, but as some semblance of calm starts to return, you realize several things. First is how eerily quiet the town is. Surely after all that, you'd hear a Specter or two... but there's nothing. Secondly – a splash of something wet strikes your cheek. Then again. Until it becomes clear that the weather has taken a sudden drastic turn and in place of the gentle snowfall from before, the heavens have opened with a torrential rainfall. Why? Possibly because of the steadily growing heat you suddenly feel burning up through the foundation of the layer and radiating out through the town. Will you investigate? | |
no subject
But if we don't go down there and face them, how are we ever going to find out?
[Maybe she never did quite overcome her sin- that greed for knowledge, that need to know the answer no matter the costs.]
[But if purgatory wants to take it from her, it's going to need to fix its' shit first.]
no subject
Personally, I'm sick of looking back on what I do remember and thinking about how wrong it all feels now that I'm away from it.
[He and Medic were the only ones who heard it, after all. But... well, it's not like anyone else's dirty laundry is going unsaid.]
And how are we to know your slow and steady change over the past year and a bit wasn't the same thing that happened to me, whatever it is? Something you can't even see, pushing you to hate until it's all that will satisfy you? I certainly wouldn't trust that.
no subject
[The smarm and drama drop. Ardyn he may be, and yet inside, the memories of Chiron also play. For a moment: conflict. For a moment: he seems like Chiron again.]
There was a plague upon my world that drove men to monsters, daemons, full of agony and rage. Two thousand years ago, a sage was blessed with the power to cure them. [He pulls his hand from Phoenix's, and his appearance changes again--back to the familiar white robes and longer hair that his Executor form used to have.] And he thought he was put on that star to cure all the ills that befell his people. He took on that plague, from every infected he touched, transferring that hateful corruption into himself.
Little did he know that the gods intended to curse him instead. To become the plague personified so that a beloved chosen king would sacrifice all to be rid of it, and him, once and for all.
I rotted with this plague inside of me, entombed in a prison where I could not die, could not live, by those who I thought loved me. My fate, my name, my existence were erased by a brother I had come to understand was meant to be king. Betrayed by family, hated by friends, abandoned by gods, I hung there in the darkness with naught but a fearful curse to my being. And when by happenstance I was rescued, by a wretched little man with plans and ambitions greater than he could ever achieve? Do you know what I did then? Do you know what I felt?
Nothing.
Two thousand years of this hateful plague manifesting in me, keeping me alive for ever single agonizing moment, and I did not hate the country that formed in my wake, the family that abandoned me, even the memory of my brother. It was bitter, but I was willing to simply exist. Until I learned the truth. The gods and their petty little schemes. Choosing me as a rightful king and then rejecting me for the very gift that had been given to me. My pitiful brother's jealousy and hatred of the monster more than man that he saw. A nation founded on lies, lies, lies.
It became very easy to hate after that.
And at first. Oh, at first it was simply that I wanted to tear down all that my brother had created. That would have been enough. And I nearly did. Until the great got Bahamut himself stayed my hand, because that was not my fate, and he would not allow it. He gave me a fiction of a choice. To accept that I was to be naught but a sacrificial lamb to ultimately save mankind and eliminate the scourge of our star, or to keep struggling on, fighting the entire way, with the end being the same.
I had no love for kings, and then I had no love for gods, and what use did I have for love for man?
Do you think this unseen force alone drove me to hatred? Do you think I have no right to hate?
[His skin is deathly pale, the scourge, pneuma-like in its ichor, oozing from him.]
Do you think a world like that did not deserve my wrath?
...And do you think, now, in a place like this...I do not deserve to be remembered? Do you think, now, in a place like this, I do not deserve to rest?
I promised Noctis that I would meet him in the beyond. He promised me to rest forevermore. And here I am.
Here I still am.
[The scourge and robes vanish, leaving Ardyn with a hand upon his breast.]
To fix the Cogs and dust our hands to be done with it...everything that I was in my too-long life, and everything that I was here--a friend, a family member, a lover? All of it, erased, forgotten, unremembered. As though it had never happened. As though it never mattered. And then I, whatever is left of me beyond the Cogs, will be set forth anew into another world of fate and gods, a plaything of the whims of those on high.
Why would I want that?
no subject
[There's no trace of horror in her face, of accusation or fear. Medic just looks sincerely, quietly sad.]
[She speaks more slowly and carefully than normal, like she's trying very hard to think about what she's saying and put it together piece by piece, instead of her normal high-volume enthusiasm where half of what she says tries to come out all at once in her sheer excitement to say it. This is important, she knows it's important.]
[She's trying to do it right.]
I don't... understand gods, not yet. I've never caught one and studied it. But I understand diseases, and what you said happened is wrong- you were sick, they shouldn't have done that to you. They shouldn't have done that to anyone.
You don't fix a pandemic by making a carrier- that's just creating a reservoir population, really. You aren't solving anything at all. Until everyone is well again, it isn't over.
[Calmly, plainly:] If the gods do that to you, then the gods are wrong.
I think... we should get the chance to do it right. [She looks over at Wolfsbane, her expression softening for a moment. She's trying so much, even someone as socially dense as Medic can see her grow, and it makes her so happy to see her getting better.] All of us, because it won't be right otherwise.
Whether what we need is to move on or to stay here... I want us to have the choice. A real choice, not just "because we have to" or "because they won't let us have anything else".
No one should be trapped and fester. No one should be made to go back until they're ready, either.
[She lifts her chin, finally seeming to resolve what she wants to say, what she means, when so often it's so, so hard for her to make the words come out right at all.]
If gods didn't make it the right way, then I want to take the world apart and put it back together better, so everyone can be happy.
I want to make the gears into a door. It will never be locked, and you can always walk through it- but no one can make you, until you want to go.
no subject
They always said it's no use if you aren't born under the right star. That if you're not loved by the gods and chosen for what you want, you shouldn't try. I thought the same, all this time.
[Does she still? Hard to say. But what she's felt, how she thinks looking back on it, everything falling apart when her dream was a lie and then (Wolfsbane) throwing herself at it anyway... The world was unfair even to her. Maybe, she wonders, even especially.
"A tragedy. Isn't that all death is...?"
She still feels the same revulsion at Mona's words, her rejection of the fate Wolfsbane thought they were born and died for. But it brings her to everyone turning on her in the meeting, not the first time by far, because all they had wanted to do was live.
Had she ever wanted to just live? When was the last time she'd wanted anything but to make Ernesta suffer? And if they'd all let her dream of being a mage, not claimed it was misfortune because she must not be talented... where would any of this have gone?]
Now what I want matters, does it? ...Though I suppose I can't say that to either of you, at least.
[She can't say why, but she rests a hand on Medic's shoulder.]
A system where Purgatory does what it's supposed to, rather than warp people into worse versions of themselves and then into Revenants, then. And you don't even have to work through your sin -- just like you said before. Isn't that right?
no subject
And to think there are those who might want to throw that away.
The emotions are tumultuous. But wrath he still is, deep inside, boiling, always, always. She says until everyone is well again and feel the horrible bitterness rising in an instant, and were she not a distance away, he could think of raising a hand and smacking the pigtails right off of her--
But Medic is not Lunafreya. She doesn't want to erase him, a thing that made him him. She wants to take it apart. Put it back better.
He turns sharply, ascends a few more stairs. This he could turn into a kingdom rightfully his. But would it not be a stolen wreckage again? His shoulders heave.]
I did not have the power to remake a world anew. All that I could do was rip it apart. To shroud it in darkness, blot out the light, outlast the miserable insects that still clung to hope.
And in the end. The fated king slew me. Made a sacrifice of us both to bring about a world of light, where no godly scourge remained.
Long ago. Long, long ago, there was a man who only ever wanted to help. Look where it got him.
[He looks at the girls over his shoulder.] It would be nice, wouldn't it? To make it so we do not have to appease something on high, a god or fate or a higher purpose. Wolfsbane, you have suggested on several occasions, that perhaps this is fate. That we were brought here, specifically, so that we could--how did you phrase it? Repair the reincarnation cycle to what it's supposed to be. [He turns to them.] What if changing it is what it's supposed to be?
Or, further still, what if you didn't have to be so hung up on what is supposed to be at all? Who says what Purgatory is supposed to do? Who made this decree, and by whose will must it continue?
Yes. Now what you want matters. What all of us want matters. It has always mattered. Let us all, together, make it better. A place where we can stay, or go, or grow or stagnate or be whatever we wish. Ignore fate. Ignore the gods and every star in the sky. We choose. We choose change.
[And, to them all:] Can we not all choose change together? If you are bound by some inscrutable will to simply fix without questioning why things must be as they are, then would that make you any better than the gods that have never cared for a single one of our wretched souls?
no subject
[The world meant nothing to him, after all. In another world, another time, perhaps he would have spoken that sentiment aloud and refused to accept the outcome laid before them. Refused to let the greater good necessitate sacrifice. Selfish? Probably. But he didn't care much about that, either.]
Whatever comes of this, I have long since chosen my own path--to stand at your side, wherever that leads. No matter what either of us become in the process. I chose to do what Ignis would not, so that neither of us need be left alone again. However...I think that Medic's idea is a worthwhile pursuit to examine. Whether it is possible to accomplish or not, I would know that we tried to strike upon our own path rather than take a road laid out before us.
[He held out a hand towards Ardyn, smiling with something bright and dangerous.]
Ardyn...let's all break down this world and rebuild it from the ashes into something greater. Together. Whether we should succeed or fail...better that than never to have bothered dreaming of something better.
no subject
She's thoroughly sick of Purgatory, but it's true -- the whole thing needs fixing. Not just the Cogs.]
Rejecting fate because it wasn't fair... tch, I really would be a heretic. Then again, by this point perhaps I already was. So we're compromising, then? Change the system, but nobody has to stay?
no subject
[He looks around at those remaining, eyes narrowed, a look of suspicion, uncertainty.]
If that...is truly what you agree to.
[#doubt, but apparently that seems to be where people are leaning.]
We break this wide, wide open. We reach into the center of this mess, and we rearrange it to our wills. We do away with these ridiculous concepts of sin, we tear apart the Cogs that would see everyone possible chewed up and spat out, and we rewrite this wretched reality into one that does not erase what is already there if it isn't desired. One that involves stepping forward only when one makes the choice to. We don't lose ourselves unless we truly desire that kind of oblivion.
We don't simply leave the system the way that it is. As this nonsensical hell.
[He reaches out a hand--and familiar stairs form at the base of the Citadel. Each one appearing in a sparkle of pink crystal that Chiron- Ardyn- is known for, one at a time, up and up, up past the darkness that lingers overhead and disappearing to, in theory, connect to the sheer cliff above.
He reaches out his other hand, and instead crystal, a smoky substance, like pneuma made gaseous, on the other side of the Citadel. It swirls for several moments before through the purple-black haze, a path downward.]
Don't disappoint us.
no subject
[That smile, dangerous and defiant and full of mad possibility, hadn't left Phoenix's face.]
Let's find out what kind of end we can bring this to. Whatever may come of it, I'll be at your side.