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by Suzuri » Mon May 16, 2016 8:34 am
The starfish-swarming statue spread its arms wide. Its fingers rippled as if trying to catch the shinobi’s words. There was no expression in its simulacra of a face, but the way it tilted its body almost got across its difficulty of parsing through human sentences. A line of starfish linked it to the real Suzuri, buzzing with twitches of information. A few of them had already crawled through the tissues at the back of her throat, into cerebrospinal fluid and upwards, exploring the ridges of her brain. Feeling the soft sparks that flowed around them told them enough for them to start unpicking the vibrations coming from the larger human’s mouth, and, more importantly, from his soul. They were beings of the fringes of the spiritual world, and it was the spiritual that they perceived the best. Sand rippled in an outwards arch, as a single word pulsed towards the shinobi.
“>”/ “Louder.” It was a voice without sound, without lip movements. It struck like a hammer to the heart. Yet the chakra wave did not lack a certain polite tone.
“I/we parse. Understand.”
The construct gestured animatedly to the sand near its feet. Swinging its arms like a whip, it had seemingly forgotten that they could be moved independently. One arm fell off. It scattered onto the ground into separate triskeles, merging with reinforcements from the main flank to shape a two-dimensional picture of white flesh outlined with sharp shadows. Two humans emerged as if drawn in chalk, one smaller, one larger, with slightly elongated heads and a withered arm, as if bent to the ‘artist’s’ own symmetries. Inside each of their otherwise empty contours there was a sphere, just under where their hearts would have been. It rippled fluidly in the case of the smaller drawing, and was a mixture of pebble-like curled-up triskeles and even faster currents for the other. It was, as it happened, in the very place that most academics would place the center of one’s chakra system.
The figures moved apart, and several starfish that had as of yet not joined them surrounded the smaller one, walked right over its contour without disturbing it, and broke a piece off its core-sphere. Then they left, leaving a single intruder behind to latch on to the untangling core. The larger figure approached again, and both humans walked under a net of starfish that lowered to become a solid shell, and then slipped away into the ground. The starfish stream that had attacked the smaller figure then left, with the core-piece carried as a trophy and the smaller figure running after them. At some point it seemed that it might just catch up. At some point the lone invader remaining inside it seemingly multiplied, drawing energy from the weakened sphere. At some point the figure lost those ‘hitchhikers’, but that left its core all messy loose ends. Eventually she caught up, but not before both ‘starfish’ and ‘human’ passed what was unarguably a Border (a white line drawn on the ground, unsurprisingly, out of starfish).
Then the story started playing again, the very same, but from the opposite direction.
A human figure stepped through the Border. Upon leaving, it unassumingly left behind a piece of its soul. She ran and ran from the starfish wave, but that only damaged her mutilated core further. A few of their kind had entered her body, trying to keep her soul from breaking apart until the main wave caught up, and all but one had perished from the stress. They were, for the most part, immortal, but all living beings have their breaking point. Then the smaller figure met the larger figure, and everything was just as it happened before.
The Suzuri-construct broke off a piece of its regrown arm, and held it for the shinobi to see. It spun into a sphere, much like the representation of Suzuri’s soul from before, at a larger scale. The construct started picking off individual triskeles from the sphere. At first there was little change, the scars regenerating almost as soon as they were formed. However, when it sunk its fingers in and ripped out too much, soon, both fragments started losing their coherence, shuddered, and collapsed into starfish mush.
“If I/we divide/rip your material shape, => you=zero(asymptote) / die. Life requires/is complexity. Whether it’s in the real (spiritual) plane or imaginary (material?!, confusion). I/we do not wish ‘her’ to asymptote zero.” The construct pointed at Suzuri, but the mind-word it used for her tasted more like ‘Wanderer’.
‘Too much damage kills, whether it’s to the body or the soul.’
For the triskeles, the spiritual plane was the undeniably real one, and the material was a ghostly concoction. They also, as revealed, had somewhat fluid conceptions about time and causality. But they would try their best to reach out.
“You are close to the other world too, true/false? I/we smell/sense it on you.”
From behind her ear, the starfish-Suzuri took out a starfish-feather, white and so long that it couldn’t have been there in the first place.
Behind her, the real Suzuri arched her back and let out a shrill, muffled howl.
*
The pain was gone.
Suzuri tried not to think about breathing. As long as she didn’t focus on it, it felt, she wouldn’t miss it. She cringed in the darkness, expecting it to hurt. Almost longing for it. The waiting was what had become unbearable. Now that she was at the end of the road, with ghostly starfish swimming through her body, she just wanted it to be over. Quickly. Her eyes teared up. Would they turn her into one of them, she wondered? Or was she merely food?
She thought back at the missing-nin who had tried to help her, and hoped that he got away. Suddenly the water bottle that she had forgotten to return in the shelter became the most important thing in her life, overgrowing all the others. The guilt was something she could cling to, that distracted her from her predicament. However, over time even that faded.
There was darkness. Then there was pain.
Suzuri howled.
It wasn’t just pain. It was the pain of sorrow and loss, that swung one’s mind over the edge to be discarded. It was the pain of being caged, so acute that it dug in her flesh with the thorns of an iron maiden, ripped the air from her lungs. It was the pain of despair, the end-of-line laughter when nothing can ever, possibly, conceivably be changed, and it was sprinkled with just enough hope to make it more pungent. It was seasoned with just enough fear that threats of more pain still remained effective. It had just enough spite to warn that any goody two-shoes trying to help will be ripped asunder. Suzuri didn’t understand why she had to suffer so, but in the context of this thought-scape, it didn’t matter. Instinct tried to push the pain it away from her, to run, to…But that had already happened before, hadn’t it? Something clattered in her mind. An uneasy dread snuck in.
‘How many times?’
Then a pair of claws dug in her shoulder. And in that moment Suzuri understood that the sorrow and the pain weren’t hers, just in the way that glimpsing a signature at the end of a document reveals it to be a letter.
It was a call for help. From her spirit friend. From Kree.
And it had frightened her so much, the understanding came slowly, that she had had torn off a piece of her soul in her hurry to throw it away.
*
The construct stood motionless. Behind her, Suzuri thrashed and writhed under the snow-like blanket like a dog in the last stage of rabies.
“Come.” The construct mentally sighed. It gave off the feeling of no longer knowing what to do. The white wave parted, just as before with the vector-kunai. Triskeles walked of Suzuri in their rolling three-legged gait, save for the occasional tentacle peeking from an ears or under an eyelid. “Human presence/empathy might (possibility, e-value unknown) be positive (+) (mean, standard deviation unknown) in matters of the heart.”
