Chapter 287: Chapter 287

Give him back.

 

There’s something in the air, something that lingers with me as I fall, as I stare in disbelief at the gray mass which presses, which worms its way out of an impossibly small crack in the rock, just beneath where the hero was a second ago. There’s a screeching, a screaming as my fist arcs back and I crash down like a falling star towards the maggot that forces itself straight up out of the ground, straight up towards me, as it reaches for my eyes with hungry, lashing tendrils. With wet, gray, slippery tentacles that slap out all around it, lashing through the smoke and the fire and the terrible screams in their excited jubilation, their long awaited moment having finally arrived as I fall towards it.

 

The thing that ruins, reaches.

 

Give her back.

 

The disturbance of the air caused by the sharp whipping of its leathery tentacles comes towards me in that final second, cutting through my body like a knife, like a keen gust of wind, like the whispering of a voice that is so quiet, so so far away, so… susurrant.

 

And in that final, hallow second, in that final moment before my fist strikes down towards its open maw, as I fully intend to punch my way through its intestines or die trying, simply out of principle at this point, in what perhaps might be the final instance of my existence on this plane of being, I hear…

 

- A murmur. A whisper. A humming. A buzzing of a distant electricity, of a pulse, of a calling heartbeat that beckons me. It wants me to go to it. It wants me to get out. It calls for me, it whispers. Though, is it calling me? Or is it calling you, guy? I’m starting to think it’s you that’s being called for, it might have been you this entire time. I don’t recognize this voice. This…

 

Something skitters.

 

Crystal light fills the air. My fist crashes down together with my wordless, animal shout, together with everything I have left in me. With everything I can muster.

 

I throw my punch as the gaping maw of the maggot opens itself up just before me, ready to swallow me whole.

 

In a second, my momentum stops. My fist shatters. My arm shatters, as the energy of my failed final strike runs back up my joints, running into my body and tearing it apart as there is nowhere else for it to go. My fist strikes against the prismatic, horizontal wall of white-magic that now separates me from the thing that reaches. A crack runs through it, arching out in all directions like a bolt of lightning. But it doesn’t shatter.

 

They’re ruining it again. They’re always ruining everything! I crush my skull down, pressing it against the glass, gnawing, trying to bite my way through. The front of my forehead shatters along with my teeth.

 

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The encroacher crashes against the bottom surface of the white-magic window, inches away from me, a needle’s head’s distance away from me, from my eyes that stare at it so hungrily and it in turn does the same from below as I do from above. Just below me, just beneath me, its gray meat compresses, pressing and squishing against the transparent magic wall as it crashes against it. Its tendrils, all feeling and touching and sloshing, press against the glass, trying to reach me, trying to take me back with it, so that it doesn’t have to go back alone. Or at least my eyes so that it doesn’t have to go empty-handed.

 

None of us want to go back. To the void. To the black-water. None of us want to go back alone, empty-handed, to the darkness from which there is no true escape.

 

But it’s understandable. If nothing you do matters because the dungeon always resets, everything you feel might as well have never been, as it all reverts and becomes undone once the time-line shifts with my death. As it is all made meaningless every time I die, that means you can never really touch anything. You can never really reach anything. But even if you can never touch, there is still so much left to see.

 

But you need eyes for that. I have eyes. It doesn’t have any.

 

The blind encroacher screams with a loud, furious, desperate, wordless cry as its tendrils smash against the glass, as it loses its momentum, bashing its thin feelers bloody, as it whips against the body of magic like leather against once scar-less flesh.

 

As it has come so close to finally having eyes, so that it can finally see, as it has once again fallen short of its goal only seconds away from reaching me, it falls back down to the stones below, screaming, writhing, angry. Desperate.

 

That is why the encroacher encroaches. I don’t know what purpose it originally served. I don’t know who made it or for what reason, if any. I don’t know if it is something evil, or something good that has been corrupted or if it is simply a wild thing that has been made rabid by time and that it now continues to eat and to take and to gorge its way forward to fill the empty.

 

It is trapped here, much like I am. Yet I have eyes to see, I have had things to experience. It simply lives alone in the darkness, in the empty, in the cold, loveless ice and so it longs for that which it can not ever have.

 

It longs for warmth, for experiences, for the feelings of being touched and held. For the feelings of red light on its body and soft words in its ears. It longs for that sensation of the hairs standing up on the back of your neck, when you hear a soft, melodiousness tune singing to you with gentle care on a sunny morning, as a kind hand holds yours. It longs to be told that it’s good and to have its head gently stroked. It longs to know that there is something else, someone else, somewhere else. That there is a purpose. That there is a reason. That there is something to believe in.

 

It has nothing but that empty darkness, that cold void which permeates its essence. Those distant, happy dreams and feelings which it is unable to know are what it reaches for. Its feral, animal mind, warped by eons of darkness and loneliness, knows no other desire.

 

It can reach, but it can never quite manage to touch.

 

 

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