Lost Carnival Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ringleaders) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
lostcarnival2018-02-02 03:53 pm
ringleaders) wrote in lostcarnival2018-02-02 03:53 pm
Entry tags:
⇨ A SONG IN THE SILENCE
Who: The Harbingers
When: Just after midnight, Day 13
Where: ????
What: The new Harbingers have an out of body experience.
Warnings: Ego death. Some generally upsetting content, most likely.
When: Just after midnight, Day 13
Where: ????
What: The new Harbingers have an out of body experience.
Warnings: Ego death. Some generally upsetting content, most likely.
ONE WAY OUT↴ You don't fall unconscious so much as you find yourself completely slipping out of this reality, the meaning of everything you left behind becoming increasingly abstract and hard to hold on to. You're lost in a void, surrounded by whispers that fall just out of range of hearing, in the presence of something so vast that you feel crushed by its presence. On, in this case, lack of presence. Like they say: the abyss stares back. It isn't someone, it is an emptiness, and everything about you feels like it bleeds away in the face of it. A hole that has no bottom. Every attempt to pull yourself together makes this vertigo feel worse, until existence itself feels terrifying or reprehensible. How precisely this existential crisis manifests will depends on the individual, tailored to your own unfulfilled desires, disappointments, frustrations. You find yourself faced with all of the things about reality that fill you with despair and disgust, and while you can attempt to fight it with thoughts of the things you hold dear, it feels unrelenting. Eventually you will break under the weight of it. It's only then, when you find yourself desperate for any kind of escape, that you are finally given the opportunity. The void speaks to you without words, but instead with a simple understanding. It can give you what you need to take control of this despair, of this heartbreaking necessity. Of every lost soul in this world, you are the one that has been given the chance to be the one to end it, to take control in the universe's final days. You will be creation's judge and executioner - and having witnessed this evidence, you know what you must do. This can't go on. This can't be fixed. The only hope left is for the end, but it will be an end at your hand. For once, the power is yours. Only when you are willing to accept this gift will you awaken. You find yourself in your body again, your senses painfully acute, as if you've been reborn. Is this the first time you've truly lived? Every pain, every worry you had prior to this moment seems so small in comparison. The path ahead is clear and unburdened by complication. You are in a dark space, surrounding by the specters of creatures you can't quite make out, like things just barely forgotten. You find that you aren't alone, as others have awoken in the same space. In front of you, floating above your chest, you will find a black light, like a small inverted sun. You know it's a part of you, but that it wasn't like this before. Though fear and a distant sense of disquiet may linger, you can't bring yourself to distrust your new location, or the change in your Spark. You have reassurance, now. It will all be over soon. |
Steven Universe | OTA
That desire, that faith, is the first thing that comes before him - that need to keep trying, to keep hoping, to believe in things that others could only fear. Steven's natural inclinations are obvious. No matter his fear, no matter how much it hurts, in the darkest moments of his soul he would try to reach out. Compassion is the language of his spirit.
But what has it gotten him?
There is no feeling here, no suppressed passions, or repressed fears for him to coax out. There isn't even the wild and uncontrolled desires of the Blue Rose and his mother the Rose Queen. All there is to find is the icy cold of nothingness - the natural end to all things. What everything becomes, no matter how much it suffers, no matter how much it persevers.
Wouldn't it be so much easier to bypass the pain? Why does he choose to struggle?
And he does struggle - he clings to his memories as best he can. For every pain, there's something he loves and wants to return to, for every disappointment, there's a hope. Yet, destroying is easier than creating. Easier than protecting. Every time his defenses are torn down, it's harder to find them again. It wears on him, like the gradual erosion of earth beneath water.
He's drowning - he's buried alive beneath the weight of unrelenting responsibility and fear. All the things he can't accomplish and everything he'll go through, just to fail. Even now, he refuses to let go, trying to reach out for the heart of an entity that just doesn't have one. The void doesn't feel. It can't be begged for mercy. It can't be shown compassion. There's nothing.
When he finally breaks beneath the pressure, he weeps in mourning for everything that could have been. Everything that it's now too late for. All the pain that's being suffered for nothing.
He cries, but as he does, he realizes something important. If he takes this power, this new path forward... no one will ever have to cry again. There will be nothing left to fear.
Steven wakes up with tears on his face, only just beginning to dry. Yet, the sadness is gone from his heart. It's over. Isn't that what this means? After this, he won't have to fight anymore.
He crosses his hands over his heart, and he laughs, in frail, helpless relief.
no subject
Comes wandering up when Steven finally wakes, standing over him at a considerate distance but otherwise not really making a move to help him up or anything.
no subject
"I'm okay," he says, rubbing one of his eyes. "...Actually, I think I'm better, now. Did you feel that, too?"
no subject
Shima laughs a little. Everything's fine now, so there's not much reason to delve too deeply into what brought him here--he's not a fan of feelings or talking about them much to begin with. But he does hold up his Spark, rolling it between thumb and pointer like a marble for Steven to see, so he can make his own inferences.
no subject
Sometimes people really do act on the outside how they feel on the inside, he guesses.
"Everything feels really different," he explains, regardless. "Like... it's going to be easier, now."