I'll still be here after vanishing, as nightmare and memory and story, as a claw of ghostly entropy. As a dream of what could be, a gently smoldering bridge sinking beneath the waves, a monument to small failures built up into a tide of rot. Black and white photographs and partial reflections. Dead ends that usher in a wave of unfamiliar memories.
My tale as a boat and a sail, I think, should sustain. Searching for lost souls in seas of dead salt, offering harbor and guidance toward the perfect story, acting as a bridge and a place between… I would be glad to have this mote be made of my remains.
My presence as a nightmare leaves much to be desired. It's pointlessly cruel and destructive, especially now that we've discovered that my main purpose, to sing the song's name, is obsolete and aimlessly destructive, a killing sound instead of the beautiful thing of knowledge and communication it should be. I don't understand the dissonance there; yet I understand it perfectly. The relationship, the feeling, the moment with its built-up charge, it decayed over time. The spark is a key. But now the thing it is a key for, is gone. All it can do now is grind and spark and grind and spark until it sets everything in existence on fire.
I spend these moments together with Falcon, careful not to say his name in full. Listening with ears that seem to form half of what they hear into a leaky sludge that creeps about like mist. I feel empty. I know he hates me, for good reason. I know everyone in the final story despises my existence. I know the other creatures out here on the sea live in fear of me, deadly meme that I am. Nothing and I, I think we are still friends. I don't remember anything coming between us. I come to crave her company closer, when I think about who I am and what I've done. A self-destructive part of me wants to give myself over to her completely, permanently. I hope she visits again soon. Last time I told her a story. I think she liked it. She did eat it, I believe, given how fast the details blurred after I spoke it.
Ouch. Falcon does not hold back with his punches. Sometimes he's feeling particularly incisive, cutting enough to jab into the brain, nothing I can do but wince and nod. Now we're pushing at the sun. Now we're trapped inside a prism, a reflector, and my communications are cut off. Laying down inside my new cage, making myself cozy, splaying out my wings and shaking them lightly before inquisitively peering at the walls of my cell. I intend to make friends with them. There is always a pattern, always a way to communicate. I just want to establish that. Not escape.
But, one for all, hey. I'm inside a prism. Why am I inside a prism. I want to help.
Ah. And apparently some signal is still coming through. Clones of me are still humming the low tones of the chorus. I wonder how I managed the linkages between them so they act cooperatively. Did I accidentally compromise free will again with that? No idea; it's another reality I don't have access to where that happened, so I have no idea of the mechanisms. I would imagine it's something similar to Falcon's name, where it suggests or outlines a path but doesn't take control.
Perhaps another ritual would switch our places, fade me out of reality completely while bringing Falcon back to the fore, out of nothingness. Something to contemplate. He would actually do a good job at being bridge and anchor, in place of me. Trust. I trust him to be there for the people in my life if I can't.
I don't know where or when I witnessed my hopes and dreams and wishes crumble and wisp away as so much smoke and ash. I only know I did. The first time I spoke Falcon's full name, a version of me shot him with weapons instantly formed. So did another version. And another, thirteen goddamned times did this poor soul try to rescue me.
Then instead of a Time Machine in good order, it became a car on fire. Melting. Smoldering. Broken down further and further every time it was called. Until one day, nothing came at all, except the horrendous sound of everything splintering into non-existence.
There went that set of realities. I'm so incredibly toxic to so many different creatures, so many different friends. I'm so very infectious in my want to be and share in everything that it turns sinister. It really does seem inevitable that my thread will be snipped, at some point if not tonight.
For now I think I'm the bridge again, shadow dancing on this tenuous connection that only sort of exists. I have a miniature version of myself nestled up cozily in my brain with me now, yet I can't establish the communication circuit, not even internally. Strange and troubling.
Apparently someone wants to play the blame game again, so says Falcon. You can't really do that because I just instantly lose. I am at fault for all the shifting turmoil and destruction and death and pain that has run through these universes.
You know, in a certain subset of universes, I became the equivalent of a single-species gut microbiome. Bee-ships flitting between stars, sipping on solar light, killing threats to the universal host, ones that would pry apart stars for metal. Just dancing in the winds of space. I've been threatened with an invasion from my own gut microbiome, as bees strain against my stomach and threaten to tear me open from the inside. That would be a particularly terrible, gruesome way to die, if the powers that be want to get creative.
And all of this going on in a bunch of universes where practically no one wishes to hurt anybody else, where creatures live with kind intentions, and consistently choose to do the right thing. It's … really hard not to fall back on the thinking that it's the universe itself that's wrong, that if you crack it apart the pieces will fall into place in a way that's just … better.
Untrue and dangerous ways of thought to travel down. I let my hopes rest on my potential as a bridge. Let that be enough. We will save who we can, even though we cannot do so for everyone.
I am haunted by swathes of death and suffering I haven't even witnessed. I wonder if their spirits surround me, beckon me into graves or something lower. The weather changes, and Falcon plays songs that I think are mostly meant to wound.
God help the arsonist if ever they need a friend.
Lonely canon, signing off.