24. Chapter 24:
Chapter 24:
The stairs had slowly gotten more and more derelict as we had arrived at the second floor. As we stepped onto the little platform that marked the floor, I questioned myself as to whether they had been this derelict when I had ascended them before, but the answer came back a resounding no. The tree was decaying, and so therefore so were the stairs that were made out of it. The same holographic insects made their way through the stairs, and I paid no attention to them, knowing that my steps would do them no harm, and that they likely did not even truly exist. They seemed too monotonous, too devoid of any life-giving properties to actually exist, somewhat like the Witches. I wondered to myself if the Witches had created them in the the only way they knew how - through thinking them up, creating them out of pure thought and reason and logic, no ambiguities, perfectly efficient at their singular duty. I wondered how they managed to break through and degrade the otherwise very physical tree were standing in, though the only answers I was able to come up with made me feel uncertain and lost, and I reserved them for a time when I could sit and think. This was not the time.
I had told the others that I had expected the Children to be here. Nettle could barely bear to climb closer to the top of the tree, especially as I had told him what I had seen when I had come to the second floor, but he managed to push himself through with us, and now stood at the entrance to the second floor, his eyes tightly closed. "This is where they must have brought him." he said, I think he was talking about his son. I squeezed past him, and looked into the room.
The room's floor was a grid. it was not quite regular, and not quite even, but the grid itself was made up of what seemed to be loosely woven intestines or entrails of some sort, tied together with all manner of sinew and gristle. Suspended just above the grid, in the centre again, lay a crib. I was immediately transported back to the moment I had shuddered across a very similar net in the harvestmen mound.
I began to feel rage bubbling up inside of me once again. The witches were playing with us. No. They were playing with me. They were the only other entities that knew about what had happened in that mound, and now they were using it against me. I looked up to check that no foreboding shape lay there, but saw none. There Should be witches here, but where were they? What were they planning?
I looked over to the crib, and I assumed that that was where the two children were. They seemed to be suspended seemingly in mid-air. I wanted to make sure that it was not another one of the witch's illusions. I asked for Nettle to give me a rock from my sling, and flung it carefully at the side of the crib, careful not to take it anywhere near the children. Luckily, it bounced off, and I told the others of my plan. "Hawthorn, Hejj and I will go over to get the children from the crib. as you can't go with us, Nettle, you look over Foxglove." I said. He nodded, and descended the stairs to where we had carefully placed Foxglove, propped up against the stairs.
I let Hawthorn start, as she was the lightest and nimblest of us all. She stepped onto the entrail closest to her, and immediately stepped back. "Those gaps are too big for me." She said.
I let Hejj go second. He hopped a bit further, this time, and the entire floor experienced a series of waves that made him jiggle. He was too large to fall through the gaps if he fell over, so motioned for me to come towards him. I took off my pack, and gave it over to Hawthorn, remaining calm, and trying to picture myself back in the mound, where I had been more confident. I stepped onto the intestine, its wet flesh depressing slightly as I got onto it. I looked down. Even though we had climbed up the stairs from the first floor for seemingly only a quarter of an hour or so, the expanse beneath my feet was an empty darkness that replied to my eyes looking into it with a resounding melancholic absence.
I shuffled slowly over to Hejj, and we began making out way towards the crib, making sure to spread out weight out evenly and as widely as possible, to make sure that we would not sink. As I got to the centre, I slipped. The skin-like outer covering of the strand I had had my foot on dislodged, and put my weight too far to one side, causing my foot to come off. I began to fall. I could barely think as my feet slipped past where I had expected them to be, and I tumbled. I tried to grab out for one of the intestine-esque strands, but missed. Somehow I did not fall. "Might want to be a little bit more careful." I looked up to see Hejj straining against the grid, holding onto one of my arms. He he puled me up, and I hauled myself onto the grid, looking into the abyss beneath me. I could not help wondering what would have happened If I had come here alone, and fallen deep into that inky-blackness. I wondered if I would even die, or just keep falling forever. Maybe I would cease to exist. I felt the fragment inside of me try and push its own ideas onto me, and swiftly forced it into my control. I stood up again, my nerves slightly shaken but otherwise all right.
"Get onto my shoulders, you should be able to reach them then." I called out to Hejj. He clambered cautiously up my body, and onto my shoulders, the net beneath us shaking constantly. He leaned over to try and get the children in his arms.
"Stuvlok! Hejj!" we heard a piercing scream from Hawthorn. Hejj Looked back and quickly clambered down my back and stood next to me. I heard a distinctly familiar snarling noise. I turned around.
Behind me stood a large dog-like creature. It had long, stilt-like legs and glowing red eyes, and towered over me. Its body was covered in cracks and fissures that made it look distinctly ancient. It was almost as if it was degrading just as the tree around us was. it has sharp ears, and whenever it snarled, i saw small bubbles of a blood-like substance fizz on its lips. Its teeth were as black as the night, rotting too. I felt as if I had seen it before somewhere. I felt as if I had a connection to it. I thought back to the memory the Witches had given me, and realised that this was the Ghennen that had taken me from those bakers so many years ago.
I realised that I did not have any weapons on me (though I doubted that I would be able to do anything with it) , and looked to Hawthorn in vain. She rooted through my pack, and found my short sword. She began carefully inching her way across the grid to try and give it to me. The Ghennen turned to look at her, its reflexes unnatural and laboured, yet lightning fast. It moved almost mechanically, and I was struck with a distinct flavour of terror in my heart that I could not try and ignore. I ran towards it, trying my best to make sure my feet were firmly placed where I wanted them to.
It began to run towards her, gracefully stepping exactly where it needed to, its great bulk perfectly placed to avoid dropping down through the gaps or getting stuck. What made me even more angry was that it purposely shook the entire net every time it walked, with its sinuous tail, the end of which had been snapped off. Hawthorn hung on for dear life, wrapping herself round one of the intestines, and gripping it with everything she had, She kept the Shortsword too. The Ghennen was rampaging towards her, and I felt just as powerless as I had when I had seen that the children and Foxglove had gone.
Suddenly, a small metal ingot flew over my head, and landed on the Ghennen, right in between the eyes. I looked back to see that Hejj had my sling and its bullets in his hands. He threw another one at the Ghennen, and it turned to face him. It growled at him, shaking the air in between us as it did so. Its breath was dry and cold - the opposite of what I would have expected for any living thing. It began prowling ever closer towards Hejj, who hopped around, throwing projectiles with remarkable accuracy. He nodded to me, and I snuck past the thing's legs, and over to Hawthorn, who had inched her way closer to me, but was very clearly just as terrified as I was. I lifted her up, and popped the short-sword in my pocket I placed her back on solid ground, where she began to look in my pack for anything else I may be able to use. I turned to watch what Hejj was doing - an almost coordinated dance for the Ghennen, enticing it this way and that. I anticipated that I did not have that much time. When I looked back, Hawthorn had filled her own backpack from items from inside of the pack, stuffed it with whatever she could find, and now stood handing it to me. I put it on my back. I thanked her quietly, and rushed over to Hejj.
"Ghennen!" I shouted, trying to make it look straight at me. I motioned with my free hand for Hejj to collect the children, as I had seen him use the net as some sort of jump-amplifier, launching himself high enough to get the children by using the net's bounciness to his advantage. He nodded back at me, and began to prepare for a large jump. Meanwhile, the Ghennen had begun to look straight at me. A strange sensation filled the air.
The Ghennen began to vibrate. "YOU." A stream of pure ideation and thought emanated from the body of the creature. I took this to be the witch who was controlling it. "WE ARE INSIDE OF YOU." "LEAVE US." At this, my anger grew once more. "No. I will not leave. I refuse to listen to you anymore." I retorted. It took me everything to not turn around and leave. The force inside of me felt as if I was being split in half with a chisel, my heart being the focus of the force. I screamed out. I faintly saw Hawthorn behind me struck in a mixture of shock and fear. The Ghennen began to shake even more violently. "WHAT DO YOU WANT." "DO YOU WANT IMMORTALITY." "DO YOU WANT YOUR PAST." Somehow, the Witches' questions seemed more like statements. I think they sensed that I had felt something to the second suggestion they had given me. "WE ARE TIME." "DO YOU WANT THE LIFE YOU COULD HAVE HAD." "WE COULD NEVER HAVE TAKEN YOU." "GO." "TELL US."
I thought about what the Witches were trying to make me do. They wanted to make it so I was never taken from my baker parents. They could undo everything. They could make it so that nothing that led from that moment ever happened. I thought of Sew finding me on that dark, dark night in the forest. I thought of all of the friends I had made, all of the people I had ever met, everything I had ever done. I thought about every pain I had sustained, every trick, every lie, every hope, every dream. I remembered my time in the village, my time in the town, I remembered the things I had cared about, the thoughts I had thought, every memory I had made. I felt viscerally the grief I had sustained, the losses I had never quite managed ot mend, the nights I had sat unfulfilled, alone, lost, drifting as if through an endless black void, each night I had thought that nothing had gone wrong and had wanted for nothing, each and every thing I had seen and touched and smelt and heard. I thought about how what had happened to me shaped me as a person, my mind moulded by my experiences, my environment, the people I had talked to - my wants, my dreams, my desires guided and folding out as if a series of chain-reactions, my past being my future, every decision I had taken and will ever take led and predetermined in a beautiful field of possibility...
I thought of the other suggestion the Witches had made. Immortality, just like them. I thought about everybody I loved and cared for - Sew, Derr, Kleh, Foxglove, Nettle, Bloodroot - I did not want them to disappear into obscurity as I went on living and they all slowly died, my mind muddled and grey, ambiguous and uncaring.
A life without death, I found, would be aimless and meaningless.
I would have thousands of lovers, all of whom I will eventually forget, I would see thousands of beings die, I would not remember a single one. Soon loss could not take any more of me away, as I would go from being the whole to being an empty being with no life in me, and I would not - no, could not care about these deaths. I would lose what it means to be alive, set apart from every other living being by my sheer absence. I would see more sunsets and sunrises than the mountains - which I would see rise and then slowly get eroded away, yet I would not be able to appreciate them. Death gives things meaning in a way immortality never can. An absence of death is nothing more than an absence of life. I realised that, in their obsessive search of endless life, The Witches had not seen this, and continued searching for life while ignoring death, thinking them opposites, while really they are but one. They have no life, spending the finite time they have searching for an infinity they can never quite grasp. Each second they gain makes every other one more meaningless. No memories, no emotion, no existence.
Realising this, suspended in the nothingness around me, freed me.
"No." I said quietly.
The Ghennen began to vibrate uncontrollably. "STUPID." "WEAK." "NOTHING."
I began to smile. Such powerful things submitting to such base insults. The laughter quickly ended, however, as the Ghennen began to make its way closer to me. It walked in strange jerky movements now, as if something inside of it was broken. The pain in my heart started up again, and I collapsed onto the net, holding on tightly to make sure I did not fall through.
Suddenly, I felt something slimy crawling up my neck. I put my hand back to check what is was. Once I brought the object to my face, I noticed that it was a snail. I almost threw it away out of fear, but I calmed myself, established control over my instincts, and pulled off Hawthorn's backpack to see where it was coming from. The backpack had been left open, and the snail was crawling out of Foxglove's pouch. The one she had somehow managed ot give to me before I ascended the ladder what seemed to me to be years ago. I began to cry - what had I let happen to her? If I was going to die, I wanted a sign of someone I cared about next to me. The Ghennen was close now, and I could feel its breath. I looked at the pouch of snails in my hand, and I got an idea. Witches did not like snails.
I threw the nail at the Ghennen, trying to hit it anywhere. The snail sailed through the air, and hit the Ghennen on the head. The thing shrieked out with a high-pitched, grating cry and stumbled back, trying crazily to try and get the snail off of it. I began to smile, Foxglove had protected me here, too. I threw most of the rest of the snails at it too.
Its screams rang out across the tree, and shook the air violently. I saw that Hejj had successfully retrieved both children, and was carefully trying to take them back to the solid platform, trying not to fall over as the grid shook randomly from the Ghennen's convulsions.
Suddenly, as I threw my last snail at it, it froze for a split-second. Then, its eyes swelled to an enormous size, and burst, spilling blood everywhere. It went as limp as a marionette, and collapsed. Its entire body developed tiny cracks that migrated around it until every part of it was covered in them. With one last shriek, it broke int dust, and fell through the gaps into the abyss.
I began to make my way towards Hejj and Hawthorn, before I saw a large, dark amorphous wispy shape materialise above me, its hue shifting constantly, each more of an emotion than colour. My chest began to vibrate again, and I collapsed onto the net. I was so close. Why would these wretched things just not let me leave?
"YOU." "NOTHING." I only laughed. "KILL US. TRY."
I began to cry and laugh at the same time, completely free of any control they may have previously had on me. I tried to fight back with my mind, pushing with all of my might, with every ounce of life that I had inside of me against whatever the Witch wanted me to do. At some point, I stopped vibrating, but I kept going, further this time, more power, leaving nothing to chance. Slowly, I felt the Witch weakening, losing some of its existence. I did not stop. The large amorphous shape, that had once morphed the world around it began to feel the constricting panic that rapidly losing power brings. I had felt it once. The pain in my chest began to grow, I felt as if I was being split apart, and I almost stopped pushing with my mind. Almost. I kept going. The Witch slowly simplified, I unravelled its logic, caused its very existence to disintegrate, until it stopped being altogether.
At that exact moment, I felt my heart exploding; my chest splitting open; my eyes seeing everything and nothing at once; my blood boiling into vapour; my mind collapsing in on itself many times over and the only sound I heard was of a thousand ideas leaving my flesh and turning into an absence that surrounded me completely.