terminus

[cancrymods]

the final layer

Down, down into the darkness you go. It's not the first time you've made such a blind descent... though some instinct beyond any kind of conscious thought tells you that it will be the last. There's no movement down here. No motion. The air is so still that as you descent, it feels like stepping into a wall of ice as you leave behind the heat of the Wrath Layer and continue into the bitter cold of... Oh. This is the end, isn't it? The machine that sits at the bottom of Purgatory is incomprehensible. The sheer scale of its size make it impossible to imagine that it could ever have been built by anyone – and yet, the sheer complexity of its design simultaneously has you reeling from the idea that it could have come into being without some intent. Wherever you look, frozen gears interlock in a labyrinthine network that soars high into the space above your heads and down into the inky depths below. All at once you remember what you had been told so long ago. Not even a god could withstand this. It's still here. So still that it feels obscene to move or to make any noise. The air is at once thin and heavy - like stealing a breath from the hanging jaw of a skull. You've reached the Cogs of Renewal. Investigate . . . ?

Comments

[twibeast]

[ Achilles stayed quiet during the descent, but now that they're here he finds his breath taken away, freezing in place.

...You know, Gula reminded him a lot of his homeworld, the one he left behind. He's been haunted by memories of his abuser for a long time now. But there's one thing he was never expecting to ever be reminded of.

His parents.

The unending size of it reminds me of when he finally met Echidna, how she held his already significantly large form that could crush a man with one paw in the palm of her hand like he was merely a mouse to a Goddess like her. That something could be even bigger than her feels disgustingly wrong. "Not even a god could withstand this." Yeah, he's feeling that now.

And then there's the stillness of everything. Of something that should be moving and alive, and for some reason he's thinking of Echidna showing him Typhon's body, crystallized upon his death like the same material he would make for his children's hearts, frozen in time, and how eerie and not right seeing that felt--

He finally remembers how to move and has to turn to the side, looking away from it with one hand over his mouth. He'll be fine he just needs a moment. ]