Chapter Text
Incandescence grazed along the border of the Master’s territory.
Her ears turned back to listen to the distant racket of her flock, the friendly chatter and the shouting of play fights with the dreams. The grass she plucked from the ground tasted sweet on her tongue. She hummed a few stanzas of a melody the Master played for them a few days since, and she smiled without thought.
Oh, how she loved them. How happy was she to be here with them, to have these borders to graze along.
Love, love, love.
She was made of love, she was sure. She was mostly terror, like any other nightmare, but she was also love. It made her different.
She glanced across the border, into the wild void beyond. Out there, love had made her lesser. It made her soft where other nightmares were armoured, blunt where others were sharp. Love made her weak, and dreamlike. It was what made her vulnerable. She knew she had lived for as long as she did only because she was lucky. She was lucky, and good at hiding, and she survived, but now she was home.
Here, love was what made her different. Not quite nightmare, but not a dream either. Love made her bright, made her a mess of colours and smiles. Love made her more. Love made her Incandescence.
She loved and was loved, and she loved so much. It had only been a few weeks since she came here, and already she loved them all. She loved the dreams dearly. She loved the nightmares just as much. She loved the ones like herself, which were not quite either-or. She loved her name, and she loved her Master, who had given it to her.
He loved her back, as well. Maybe not with the same strength of being that she loved him, but he did, and sometimes that was almost too much for her to take.
Sometimes she wondered how he would react if she kissed him.
She smiled at the thought as she looked out at the void. Would he be angry? She thought not. Not really. Maybe annoyed? Would he think she was being silly? Would he think it strange that a nightmare fell in love with a demon? Even if it was her, who was a little in love with everyone, and him, who was so, so kind.
Would he be okay with it? Would he brush it off, or would he maybe even kiss back?
She giggled, and bounced once or twice in glee. Ah, maybe she would even work up the courage to try some day.
She tripped a few steps closer to the border and felt almost nostalgic for her life before coming to the pastures. Things had changed so fast, from having to close off her own emotions and hide, and prey on those weaker than her just to survive, to being allowed the freedom to be, without restrictions. It was hard to believe she was the same creature now as she had been, then.
She did not miss it. Not even a little. She went from having nothing to having everything, and turning back was an impossibility. Still, there was beauty in the void, and from this side of the border she could watch without worry.
A point of thought-light floating by drew her attention.
It was a small ball of energy, pulsing with unfamiliar and seemingly partial thoughts, and it moved in an aimless, spiralling pattern, drawing ever closer to the border she stood beside.
Incandescence could not remember ever seeing anything like it, and she walker further along the border to get closer to it, to see if she could find out what it was. Floating, partial thoughts were plentiful in the Mindscape, but they were never this… gathered, and she was curious.
The thoughts it was made of seemed searching, beacon-like, as if it wanted to home in on something specific.
It drew even closer. Incandescence touched her nose to the barrier dividing this place from the not-place of the void, trying to look closer, and the thought-light instantly froze.
Alarmed, she pulled back, but it was too late. The thought-light changed direction and shot across the border, slamming into her with enough force to lift her from the grass. She did not land again.
She fell.
The next thing she remembered was darkness and then choking, and something ripping her apart.
Her perception of time stopped functioning, leaving her confused as to how long the process lasted, and what happened in which order, but she could still feel it, the painful and careless rending of her self.
Her senses were dampened to the point of nothingness; all she got was a faint impression of movement around her and a hint of some sort of emotion, either focus or elation, but certainly not her own. At some point, her form was squeezed into something much smaller than itself, twisting and tearing to fit.
She might have screamed. She could not hear.
There were other sensations. Something heavy and constricting all around her, crushing her. A rhythmic thudding sound. The concept of something wet and moving.
She was choking.
She was a nightmare, or a dream of some kind. She was an independent, living collection of thoughts, she did not need to breathe, but she was choking.
Her sense of time restored itself all at once, as did her hearing. Sound filtered through to her, but it was wrong and twisted. It sounded like a bad recording, lacking certain tones and frequencies, and letting others blend into each other, and it was far too loud. Loud to the point of pain.
She was cold, too. A numb kind of coldness that penetrated deep into parts of herself she did not know she had. Parts of herself she had not had, before, that felt stitched onto her real self, and her real self was still tied down.
She could taste, and she tasted blood, except bad. It was blood, but not like blood was supposed to taste. It was utterly vile, made her want to purge every part of not-her-but-her that could taste it, and she was still choking, still scared still choking choking choking breathe.
Gasp.
She pushed on something burning in the not-her and her tasting parts turned cold as air rushed past them and into the burning part. At the same time, other parts opened and she could see, and the loud and wrong reality became louder and wronger.
She could see, but what she saw made no sense. Like the sound, it was filtered in a way that made it blurry and with too few colours, and the view she got was looking up at the ceiling of a room similar to something a mortal would build, with several mortal faces looking down at her. They smiled, but she could see no reason to smile.
She wanted to move, so she pushed, and something loose and jellylike not-her at her side responded, pushing against something that felt cold, in the same filtered feeling way as her other senses, and she moved slightly away from the smiling faces.
Still, they smiled. One of them opened a mouth.
“Good morning, Eve,” it said. “I hope you’re enjoying your first moments of living.”
The voice was just as loud and wrong as the other incomprehensible sounds. Incandescence pushed at the air-pushing part and drew another breath, if only to keep from choking again. She still tasted disgusting blood. Then she turned her seeing-parts down, to look at the not-her-but-her, and she pulled the loose part at her side closer.
A human hand showed up in front of her, over a human chest attached to human legs. The thudding in the not-her sped up. Like a heartbeat.
She pushed, and the fingers of the hand curled. Sinew slid over bones and skin stretched and folded.
Fingers, but her fingers. Not-her but not. She drew another breath and this one was wet. Not-not-her and her and it was made of skin and blood and flesh and she was stuck in it and she was nothing now. She was made of dirty, mortal things, and not herself.
Incandescence screamed.
---
“We actually did it,” Doctor Garth Enns said with an incredulous smile for possibly the tenth time since Eve’s awakening.
Ida had to say she could not blame him.
“I know,” she said. “It’s incredible.”
“I mean, we created a human being. From scratch.”
“Yes, Enns. I know.” She grinned back over her late lunch and his coffee. They sat on each side of the table in the lounge, with the rest of their team milling around with their own conversations and food-items. “That’s what we’ve been hoping to do since the beginning.”
“She even understands human language!”
She laughed. They were both beside themselves with happiness, exhaustion from a sleepless night the only thing keeping them from still skipping, as they had after Eve opened her eyes.
“To be fair,” Ida said, “mostly she was screaming ‘no’.”
Doctor Enns waved her off. “It’s understandable,” he said. “After all, the shock of suddenly being brought into existence shouldn’t be underestimated. I’m sure she’ll be up for conversation once she’s calmed down a little, gotten used to it.”
Ida nodded, and said, “Of course. And if she’s not, we’ll just have to figure out what we did wrong and try again.”
He nodded in assent and they fell back into companionable silence.
Doctor Enns was a scholar of the metaphysical mind, and the energy associated with it. He studied, as far as mortals were able, the impact of the mortal mind on the Mindscape, and vice versa, the effect of the Mindscape on the physical world. His specialty lay in the connection between these, present in each thinking being, and how it affected psychological development.
Places like this complex of labs, located far underground and with enough wards and shielding to be cut off nearly completely from any outside magical influence, from the Mindscape itself and from the Earth’s magical fields and leylines, was ideal for certain of his experiments, showing how a mind compensated for being cut off from the greater Mindscape.
Ida focused more on the biological side of things. She specialized in cloning, particularly of large animals, and through her working relationship with doctor Enns had been the one to discover that a being that was gestated without access to the Mindscape would be born without a soul, a condition otherwise exceedingly rare.
The reasons behind them wanting to create a living, breathing, thinking person were many and diverse. Mostly it was the money. There were quite a few people around who would be willing to pay big money for mass-produced, untraceable people with questionable legal rights. In fact, there were even people who were willing to sponsor most of their research only for a chance of such an opportunity existing.
Eve was the prototype.
Ida and her team had created the body easily enough, cloned with DNA from a database and grown in the underground facility, under exactly the right conditions to turn out soulless, but alive.
Doctor Enns and a few of his co-workers had taken over from there, prepping the body for the insertion of a mind and soul-substitute. They could not use a human soul, of course. That was traceable these days, not to mention very difficult and extremely illegal. Souls were fickle things. They needed something else. Something simpler.
In the proto-prototypes, the animal tests, it had been reasonably easy to extract a large enough cluster of inert thoughts from the Mindscape and insert it into the right slot. Of course, the dog had eventually swallowed a pair of scissors and bled to death, but it had lived for almost a week. After that success, their benefactors had pushed them to escalate the testing to humans.
Once this turned out a success, they would branch out into other sapient beings, but for now, humans were easier to work with and in much higher demand, because of the relative population numbers.
It had turned out to be much harder than expected to find a thought cluster large enough for a sapient being, but they had, in the end. After almost twelve hours of non-stop searching, they had. Then came the delicate procedure of splitting a metaphysical object into two still-connected parts, as a mind and a soul-substitute, and make sure everything was properly inserted into Eve, but they did it. It took several more hours of hard work, but they did it.
She had woken up. Breathed on her own. Looked around and they had seen recognition on her face at the sight of theirs.
Yes, she had screamed, tried to claw her skin off, and fought them hard enough that they had to sedate her, but she was alive, their Eve, and it was the greatest success of their lives.
---
“Just… gone?”
The Master looked lost, Lolonja thought. Lost and small. Worse than she had seen him in a long, long time. Not quite as bad as he had been when his sister died, but worse than anything since.
He had been distressed several times since then, of course. He despaired many times, more often than was good for him. He was angry, or confused, or lost to himself and his fight against apathy, but not like this, never like this.
He stood with his arms hanging by his sides, wings small and still behind him, looking out at where their Incandescence was supposed to be. His eyes were open and uncomprehending, scanning the empty field again and again as if the bright rainbow ball of light would somehow be easy to miss. As if she would somehow be there if only he looked hard enough.
Suddenly, he turned towards her again, coattails twirling behind him. “How can she be gone? She was right there. You kept an eye on her. I kept an eye on her. She couldn’t have gone anywhere, so how…?”
“I don’t know!” Lolonja snapped back, and she belatedly realized that she was angry. At herself, for not taking better care. At her flock, for not staying closer to their brightest, newest sister. At him, for not being the great, all-powerful Master and easily fixing everything immediately.
She clenched her teeth. Sharp, sharp teeth. Sharper than usual.
“I don’t know,” she said again. “She said she wanted to walk along the border, to look at the view, and things have been so quiet lately we didn’t think to worry, and we barely took our eyes off her for a second, but after we did, she was gone. We can’t even find a trace of her. It’s like she’s just stopped existing and we can’t tell what’s happened to her at all. For all we know she just r- ran away without- she’s so n- new after all.”
He sunk down to his knees and pulled her close, and she shook against him, buried her muzzle in the hollow of his throat and cried. He might have been shaking as well, but it was hard for her to tell.
“I don’t think she ran away,” he said. “She was happy here- is happy here. She fit right in the moment she showed up, and even if she did, I’d be able to find her easily. She wouldn’t have gotten far. Right?”
She nodded, once, and then she pushed up against him, looked him in the eyes. “But you will find her, right?”
“I…” He closed his eyes with a pained expression, and her heart sank. “…I will. I promise, if it is at all possible to find her, I will.”
Lolonja hated that “if”. She hated that it had to be there. She hated that he was afraid to promise outright, but she understood.
“Okay,” she said then. “What do we do now?”
He squeezed her tighter for a second, blew a long breath into her wool, and stood up, letting her go.
“We search,” he said. “If we don’t know where to start, we just search everywhere. Get together as much of the Flock as you can spare and head out. Look wherever you can think to look, ask whomever you can think to ask, and do what you can to gather information. Okay?”
She stood to attention and nodded. “Yes, Master. And you?”
He gestured in the direction of the physical world. “I’ll be going downstairs, see how deep I can look. If there is a single trace of her in those channels, I will find her. Tell me the instant you hear anything, okay?”
She nodded again, and he nodded back and left.
For just a moment, she hesitated, staring out at the lightless chaos of the void and thinking of exactly how large a not-space they were tasked to search, and then she turned and bounded back towards the Flock, calling for their attention. They had a lot of work to do.
---
The second time Incandescence opened the seeing-parts, the eyes of the body that was not-her-but-her, there was darkness. Enough light filtered through that she could make out shapes in the room she was in, but it was still dark, and the darkness was as fuzzy and wrong as everything from the sound of the breathing to the sense of fabric against the skin was.
The darkness was made out of grey static, not the blank, smooth shadows she had seen the few times she had seen true darkness before. The shapes she could see beneath the static was a different room than before, empty aside from a rectangular shape on the wall and the structure she was on.
The shape on the wall had light seeping through the edges, and was probably a door, though she could see no handle. The structure she was on seemed like a bed. They were what humans slept on, she remembered.
She tried to push with the arms to move up, maybe move around and find some more light, but they would not move properly. Looking down with the eyes she could make out that the arms were tied to the bed, leather straps over fabric wrapped around the arms. The fabric was stained, and she smelled blood, and that was probably from the first time she opened the eyes and tried to scratch her way out of this thing, this not-her she was drowning in.
She made a sound with the throat in frustration, and it was wet and vibrated in a disgusting way. The eyes were leaking, leaving cold trails down the edges of the face, and she could not make them stop.
She made another disgusting noise.
She tried to move her legs. Her own legs, made of light and love and terror, not the meat-sticks attached to this not-her, but all she got in response was a sting of burning, ripping pain and a twitch in the not-her.
Another sound came out of the throat, and she shaped it into words this time. “I don’t want this.”
It was less disgusting like that. Still nothing but a sound made of a meat-flap forcibly attached to her, but they were her own words. The only thing left that was still hers, it seemed.
She had been right about the shape on the wall. It was a door, and now it opened to fill the room with light.
Instead of feeling good, like she had thought it would, it was blinding and sharp, causing pain to shoot through the eyes and more liquid to leak from them.
Once the pain faded, and she carefully opened the eyes again, she could see the strange and fuzzy shape of a human walking towards her. It wore a wide smile on its face, and it quickly walked close to her and sat down on the bed besides the not-her.
“Good morning, Eve,” it said. “I’m glad to see you’re awake. How’re you feeling?”
“Hurts,” Incandescence said.
The human’s smile changed shape, into something that looked kinder. Maybe it understood what was going on, and would help her?
“I’m not surprised,” it said. “You hurt yourself pretty badly last time you woke up. You’re probably not quite used to existence either. It will get better. Don’t worry. Your wounds will heal and your body will feel more familiar once you walk it around a bit.” It lifted its own hand and patted the hand that was not-her.
It did not seem like this human understood what had happened. Maybe it would help if she explained?
“I’m stuck in this,” she tried to say.
“Yes, I’m sorry,” the human said.
Sorry? Had it done this to her?
“We had to tie you down, because we were worried you’d hurt yourself again when you woke up, but you seem to have calmed down, so I think I can take them off. Will you stay calm if I do?”
The human moved its hand to the straps around the not-her arm.
Oh. It had just misunderstood.
“Not what I meant,” Incandescence said. “Stuck in this.” She curled the fingers one the hand and cringed at the feeling of sinew over bone. “It hurts. I can’t get out. Can you help?”
The human blinked once, and then changed its face into surprise and sadness.
“Oh,” it said. “Oh you shouldn’t worry about that. It’s supposed to be like that. Now, can I untie you without you hurting yourself?”
The human wanted her to be like this? It thought this was how it was supposed to be? It must not understand how disgusting this filthy body was.
“I want out,” she said.
The human nodded and started undoing the straps, another misunderstanding.
“No,” Incandescence said. “I want out. I want to go home.”
The human kept removing the straps, but its eyebrows rose in surprise. “Home?” it asked.
“Home. Home to my Master. To the Flock and the pastures, and my- my brothers and sisters. Home.” Not for very long yet, true, but the only home she had ever known, the only family she could remember. She longed for it so hard it hurt, and the pain mixed with the aches of her mind and not-her.
“Fascinating.” The human finished with the straps and leaned in to stare into the eyes. “Must be residual memories from something. This is far more coherent than we anticipated. Can you tell me what you remember?”
The human did not make any sense. Incandescence understood most of its words, but not what it meant by them. “Everything?” she said. “They took me to the pastures a few weeks ago. The Master accepted me. It is wonderful there. I want to go back. Please send me back.”
The human smiled sadly and ran its fingers through the not-her hair on the head, and it felt wrong.
The Master ran his fingers through her wool sometimes. She thought he liked the way the colours played in it as he did, illuminated from within by the light he named her for. She would lean into his touch and he would smile and scratch her ears.
This twisted mockery of that feeling was not good. It sent a shiver of revulsion through the not-her body, and through herself as well, which hurt.
The human seemed to realize she did not like the touch, and stopped, but still it smiled. “Oh, Eve,” it said. “The pastures aren’t real, I’m afraid.”
What? What had it misunderstood now?
It continued. “Sometimes memories break free from people’s minds and float around in the Mindscape, and sometimes they clump together into big lumps of energy, and that’s what we harvested to give you life. Maybe there is a pasture somewhere, but the memories of that are borrowed, and it’s better if you don’t think about it much. You are Eve, not the person who was there. This is your home.”
Incandescence stared with no words forming in her mind.
The human was speaking nonsense. She was not some discarded memory, she was a nightmare! Or at least something like it. She was a sheep in her Master’s flock. She was Incandescence, not…
“Why do you call me that?” she asked. The movement of the speaking parts was more disgusting again, as they had dried out slightly. She attempted to swallow, and that feeling was… worse.
“What? Eve?” the human asked.
Nodding would have sufficed, but the words were hers, and the neck was not. “Yes,” she said.
“Because it’s your name,” the human said. “It’s what we named you. It’s the name of the first, well, the first woman. Kind of. In Christian mythology. It’s a symbol, see? Because you are the first true artificial human. We were calling you that long before you woke up.”
“That’s not my name,” Incandescence said.
“No?” the human asked. It wore a kind smile. Incandescence hated it. “Then what is it?”
“I-” The throat closed up on her words, and she gagged. More water leaked out of the eyes and down the face, and a convulsion ran through the body. The human’s hand on the side of the head did nothing to help.
She spat out an absolutely vile glob of something and pulled in another bite of air. “It’s-” Incandescence. Was it, though? She looked back down at the not-her lying on the bed. Could she be Incandescence when she was lying in ugly, grey darkness, trapped in a filthy meat sack and missing the glow her Master called beautiful? When she lacked the shine of love that had made her now-siblings stop in their tracks, call the off hunt and decide to make her their sister instead?
She bit down with the not-her teeth and could not speak another word. More water leaked from the eyes.
“Shh,” the human shushed her. It stroked the shoulder closest to it, which was also bad, but not as bad as the hair had been. “It’s alright,” it said. “A little confusion is to be expected. Just know that everything is as it should be, and you will probably feel better and less confused as time goes on. Now,” it patted the shoulder and got up, “I think you should try to get some more sleep, and I will come back soon with something for you to eat. You must be starving.”
It stood there for a few seconds, waiting for her to answer.
She did not even acknowledge its presence. Only barely had she even registered what it said. By now, it was clear that it would not help her, that it had no interest in helping her, and that it was in fact keeping her captive here.
It shrugged and left.
The closing of the door once again filled the room with murky darkness.
Incandescence cried. The body she was stuck in cried. Water soaked into the pillow and cooled the face, and it was just another thing among many horrible things.
She wished she had never walked so close to the border. She wished she had never stepped away from her flock. She wished so hard that she was back with them, lying on the grass between their warm bodies and laughing at something or other.
Had they noticed she was gone yet? What would they do?
The Master promised her he would take care of her, that he would protect her. She trusted that, wholeheartedly.
He would find her, and come for her.
She closed the eyes to shut out the darkness, and tried to ignore the patterns that lit up on the inside of the eyelids when she did. She grabbed that one thought and held onto it as a lifeline.
The Master would find her.
The Master would come for her.
The Master would come.
The Master would come.
The Master would come.
---
Dipper opened his eyes to a bloodstained ceiling.
It was white and tiled, with the blood seeping out from the cracks between the tiles, dripping lazily down to the floor.
He bared his teeth and growled, a deep, visceral sound that sent every living being within earshot running for their lives.
With a single violent movement of his hand, the ceiling tore away, ripped to pieces and fell. Another growl and another movement took the walls down, quickly and messily destroyed the house he was lying in and crushed the pieces to dust. It was fine. No one had lived there for decades.
It was ages since the last time he had delved deep enough in his omniscience for the walls to bleed. So many years since the last challenge that had required it, yet this one still eluded him.
All the power he possessed, and he could not even find this single, missing sheep that already belonged to him.
Her trail went cold so quickly it could not be called a trail. There was no trace of whatever happened to her, aside from a slowly dissipating imprint of ambiguous, untraceable energy, and searching the world for her signature yielded nothing.
It was as if she had simply vanished into nothingness.
He put his dusty sleeves over his eyes and tried not to cry. Crying was unproductive. He needed to do something, anything, to find her. His beautiful, innocent little sheep, who was his so fully and wholly so quickly even the demon in him was willing to go far to get her back.
The forest around the now-levelled building was mostly quiet, aside from a single set of footsteps. Likely some random hiker, who unlike the animals did not have the sense to move away from loud, inexplicable noises in the woods. A hiker who would most likely make a fuzz about a child crying in the ruins of an old house, after which there might be a lot of screaming.
Dipper did not have time for that. He did not have the time to lay crying on the floor either, so he got up and faded back into the Mindscape. The hiker was unlikely to know where Incandescence was.
Most mortals would be unlikely to know that, but who knew? One or two of them might have noticed something weird. All he needed to do was find those hypothetical people and figure out what they knew.
Deciding on a course of action, he determinedly wiped a few traitorous tears away and got moving.
The blip into the current Mizar’s bedroom was as quiet as he could make it. She was asleep on her bed, muttering vaguely into her pillow, and he had no intention of changing that.
Not only did he not want to bring her into this, he also did not actually need her for the next step. He just needed her computer.
He muted it magically before he turned it on, just to make sure that it would not wake her, and then he settled back and got started. He hoped she would forgive him for what he was about to unleash from her bedroom.
The screen turned black the instant the page he was looking for loaded. A second or so later, the Alcor Virus’s little avatar popped up with an animated yawn, accompanied by a little yellow text box.
[Hi Dad.] it read, then, [What’s wrong?]
“What makes you think something’s wrong?” Dipper said, because he was honestly curious.
Al-V rolled his eyes, which made Dipper twitch a smile despite himself.
[One: You look like someone just kicked your puppy.]
[Two: This is kind of early.]
[It hasn’t been that long since the last time you woke me up.]
[You usually give them more of a rest between each time they have to deal with me, don’t you?]
Dipper closed his eyes for a moment and nodded. “Yeah, I’m not really after a big mess this time. I just need to find something.”
Al-V put his arms behind his back and stood at attention.
Dipper allowed himself another smile before he continued. “One of my sheep’s gone missing. Her name’s Incandescence. She shines like a neon light in every colour you can render. You couldn’t miss her if you tried, but she’s gone missing. I need you to go through anything and everything you can get access to and look for anything that could be a trace of her. Can you do that?”
[Sure.] Al-V nodded. [Can I make a little chaos too?]
“Not enough that they notice you and flush you out before you’re done,” Dipper said, “but beyond that, I won’t hold you back.”
[Thanks!]
The little virus grinned, probably already sorting out which databases he could devastate without drawing too much attention.
[I’m off, then.]
[Good luck!]
The screen went blank, and then the computer shut down. Dipper carefully placed it back where he had found it, spared a glance at Mizar’s sleeping form and blipped away. There still had to be places he could search.
There had to be.
---
Incandescence had not counted days in the beginning. She had no idea how long she had been there, beyond ‘too long’.
The mortals in the place, most of them human, did not tell her the time, and she did not think to ask. They did not care to answer her questions, only to have her do as they wanted.
In the beginning, they smiled, all the time. They brought her out of the room she woke up in, into a larger mortal building with no windows, no colours, no life of any kind. They asked her to walk for them, to show off how well she could control the body they had trapped her in, and they seemed content with the result. When she asked them to put her back, this was wrong, please give her back her true form, they only laughed and said she would get used to it.
She was hungry, and they made her eat.
The feeling of food going down the throat was the most disgusting thing she had felt yet, and it took days of trying before they fed her something that did not come back up. The food dampened a pain among many of the borrowed, mortal form, but it did not still her hunger.
The mortals spoke over her. They marvelled at the body they had put her in. They dismissed her talking about her home as an intricate fantasy, and she eventually stopped talking about it where they could hear.
She hated them.
They smiled and they praised her and they touched her and she hated them.
Hate was a lot like love, she discovered. It filled her until it tainted everything else, making her feel so strongly and passionately there was room for nothing else, but love was warm and bright and beautiful, and hate was dark, cold and painful. It filled her with black tar, and it made her feel cold and ugly.
During her breaks, when they finally left her alone again, she curled up in the murky darkness and hoped.
Hoped that the flesh constricting her would rot away, so she could break free. Hoped that everything would stop being so painfully wrong. Hoped that she would stop hating.
The Master would come for her.
She hoped, and hated, and tried to ignore the water leaking out of the eyes until she eventually fell asleep.
And dreamed.
Nightmares could sleep, normally, in a way. If they felt safe, if they were not hungry or bored, or if they were tired, they could rest. They could settle down and not think so hard, but they did not dream.
This body, this thing she was forced into, it needed sleep, and when it slept, it dreamt.
Her thoughts fell apart with it, turning into twisted visions of the pastures, of the lonely void of the Mindscape, with all its dogged predators. It was a dream that first told her she had been abandoned.
The Master would come for her.
She hated dreaming almost as much as she hated her captors. She felt like she fell apart a little more every time she did. Every time the breaks ended without a single dream happening, she counted it as a victory.
They scolded her for not sleeping enough.
She did not care.
They scolded her for not eating, or for not washing the body when they asked her to.
She did not care.
They stopped smiling as much. They stopped asking her to do as many things. They stopped asking her what she could remember, and trying to find what she knew and how. They started acting more professional with her and less friendly.
She did not care.
One of them implied they were trying again, hoping for better results this time.
Suddenly, she cared.
Her outburst took them by surprise, which was good, because it gave her more time before they restrained her.
The body they had made her use was weakened, and she hurt all the way in to her self, but she ignored it. She screamed at them, raging at them for daring to do this thing even once, let alone more.
They tried to hold her back and she wrenched free, struck them in all their vulnerable places, all the places she knew now were weak points, because they had given her a human body, let her become intimately familiar with how it could be hurt.
She fought, and screamed, with more strength than the body wanted to use, and it hurt, but she relished it.
They caught her arms and she bit down on someone’s shoulder, only regretting that she missed the throat.
The blood tasted vile on the tongue, and the body hated it, but she hated the body, so she forced it to swallow.
It came right back up, of course. She had hoped that this would stay down, where nothing else had. That it would poison the body and leave it to rot away in its own hate, but she had no such luck.
The mortals shouted and hustled, rushed around like headless chickens before they struck her down and tied her up properly in her fuzzy, dark room.
“Why?” one of them asked. “Why would you do that? You’ve never done anything like it before.”
She did not explain. She had tried and tried and given up on explaining anything to them. They never listened. So she laughed. There was no humour in it. There was nothing funny about anything, but she was choking in a bag of flesh that was tied to a bed in a dark, underground room, gagging on the taste of dirty blood, and she had nothing else.
She laughed.
The mortal closed the door and left her alone.
Soon, the dreams would take her.
What would it be this time? Her brothers and sisters falling to pieces before her eyes? Waking up back in the void and realizing nothing good had ever been real?
The Master would come for her.
…Wouldn’t he?