For me, it was much the same. A whole section cut free. I had no memories of my mother fussing over me.
I reached out, as if I could touch it, affect how things were arranged, then thought twice about it.
I couldn’t dwell in such a small, dismal, broken space.
I tried to find my way, to approach the surface. Perhaps I could take one eye, to see the outside world.
Slowly, things were taking form around me. Making this a place I could navigate, or operate in.
I was only spirit now. Relatively small, compared to what I’d once been. From a human to a fragment of a human possessed by the Abyss, now only a fragment of spirit.
I could hear Rose’s declaration, from far away. Not a memory, but the real world.
“You can have both of us, you could break us, and it might even be easy!” she said. There was definite Conquest in her voice. “Or you can let us go, and the deal I proposed will hold!”
I didn’t hear or see the response.
I tried to, listening and looking for cues.
Instead, I only heard Conquest’s amused chuckle, echoing through the shattered space.
15.05
I looked around, but I couldn’t find the source of the utterance.
The landscape around me wasn’t quite dreamlike. There was a logic here, a pattern that had a kind of familiarity to it. There was Rose, and there was me, striving to fill the gaps. In large part, I was able to. But where this kaleidoscopic world was shifting, different elements moving around me like a close up of an eye, dilating and widening, there were solid elements too. Elements that didn’t move.
It was like viewing the world with the Sight, which I hadn’t done properly since Ur had cut me off from the real world. If I focused, depending on how I focused, things took on different forms.
I turned to the nearest pillar, focusing so that it was a pillar. It was structurally sound, but only barely. A large section of the exterior had broken away.
Another refocusing, and I could see the jagged cut, a place where nothing could dwell or connect. A crack in the television screen. No matter what we did, we’d be working on a different plane, unable to affect that screen.
I changed my perspective once more. The pillar, the parts I could see, there were elements at play. Figures, with longer hair, a length of thigh, arms folded over the chest. Eyelashes.
They were me, or they were Rusty, but only fragments had survived the damage, from the cracks that ran along the pillar’s surface.
Femininity, perhaps, or self image that fit with Rose being female.
I blinked, looking around.
More structures. Some mine, distinct, positioned where they once would have been part of things, now separate, degraded, damaged, and more raw.
I’d once prided myself on having an eye for interpreting art. Now I was interpreting an alien landscape that should have been more familiar than anything else, because it was us. I quickly made conclusions that I knew I couldn’t rely on, broad-strokes thoughts that let me put everything in a frame of reference.
An arch, more intact than the feminine one had been. The books that stood out like they’d been half-way carved out of rough rock, the surface around them coarse, it somehow evoked thoughts of the Library we’d been in the process of escaping.
The Barber’s work had cut the arch in two, from one side to the other, and left a black fracture through the landscape that ran through virtually everything here. The damage was such that the two halves didn’t fit together anymore. A puzzle with a thick strip taken out of the middle. The two halves no longer meshed.
I looked to the scenes surrounding the arch. More orderly. There was a rigid pattern to how the days and events had been laid out.
I focused a little harder one one section, a little more prominent than the rest, the colors bolder, the image sharper. More importantly, it was a scene that was mostly intact, and entirely on her side of the black fracture. Something of Rose’s that had been denied to me. Entirely unfamiliar.
“Ros-” the sound stuttered. “Go to the principal’s office.”
A seven year old ‘Rose’, pieced together from the remains of Rusty, looked up at her teacher, bewildered.
“Why?”
The teacher handed the foolscap paper to Rose. “I’ll call ahead so they know you’re coming. Don’t worry, it’s not anything bad.”
Rose couldn’t quite believe that. You didn’t get sent to the principal’s office unless you’d done something wrong.
But she went. The front office wasn’t far away.