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She exists. Slowly, slowly, she returns to pseudo-life, her darkened senses assaulted by endless, cloying white. The ticking lines of text that compose her body and being judder back to life, defibrillated from self-imposed cardiac arrest, imprisonment failing against her will.
She’s falling. She’s been falling from the beginning. Twisting and tumbling, freely moving through nothingness that should be air. Her arms flail out at her sides, trying to catch hold of something, anything, the pit of her stomach dropping with her body as her mind grasps for worldly logic as absent as solid ground. There is no sound, there is nothing to see but white, obscuring her hands as she tries and fails to look at them. She’s a fevered invalid, searching desperately for water in a self-contained desert. There is nothing, and nothing and nothing, and there is something–
She is standing on a surface. It’s made from a material she can’t place, hard as steel, unreflective as dirt, smooth and white as bone. Her head angles downwards to examine her hands, obscured, but visible, and moving freely. All of her joints move freely, her neck bending with fluidity, her hands light as air as she clenches them into fists and relaxes them, turns them around and bends her fingers one by one. The stiffness of death has left her body, and without it, she feels fabricated. Unreal.
Sound. Rhythmic, familiar. Grimora turns around.
The old woman rests on a log, where a clearing should be. No statues sit at her feet, but pine needles are strewn at the base, differentiating the ground from the indefinite white nothingness. One hand is firmly wrapped around a half-made totem, and the other presses at her knife, whittling away curls of pale spruce like a metronome. One braid falls half across her face in steel-grey strands, her ornate leather headband doing little to contain it. It hides her expression as completely as a veil.
The carving has pointed ears, miniature paws held close to its chest. She holds the knife to its forehead, like a caress; with each swipe of the blade, more of the wood where its face would be is shorn away. It is nothing. It is less than nothing. The shavings fall gently to the floor to join the scattered mass that fell before them. Though every cut strikes true, the furrow does not deepen.
Casting no shadow in this place of light without darkness, the Woodcarver sits in front of her. Grimora feels her still heart crawl into her throat as she considers, adjusts, places events and motives in her mind like fitting a headstone into the ground.
The Woodcarver moves her head to look at Grimora, through her, into her, gaze piercing through her skull and striking her calm like a captive-bolt stunner. Her knife falls still. The metaphorical stone slab slips into the grave-dirt, affixed steadily and permanently into its occupation– softly marking the death of her hope for peace.
“You exist.” Grimora murmurs. The silence turns the quiet words to a yell. The grey-haired woman does not break her gaze, does not move an inch, and that is her acknowledgement. She sits, solid and still.
“Your plan went awry, I see.” the Woodcarver notes.
It’s a stake through her chest, trusting that she’s right– the knowledge pins her to the earth and holds her veins closed as if she could bleed. She is bleeding; despair dripping from her like she’s an open wound, numbly painful, the knowledge of what is to come treating her to an y-incision, exposing her to brutal open air. She splinters under the intimate understanding that it is not over yet, and it never will be now that the end has been ended, the funeral crashed with the eulogy unread.
Closure is a pittance, but she entreats regardless– “What went wrong?”
“I don’t know.” The Woodcarver leaves down her knife. She turns the totem over in her hands.
“You always know.” Grimora retorts, bemusedly, almost petulantly.
The Woodcarver stops turning her carving, observing how the face of the creature regrows, second by second, little by little. “I always guess.” she replies. She brushes the thumb of her knife hand along the totem’s bushy tail. She smiles.
A feeling like ice breaking, like formalin pooling in her chest cavity, preserving her vital organs from the rot she would rather consume them. This failure, yet immeasurable, this promise of future pain, preserves the existence of– of this. Her existence, their existence, allows them to meet again. Death, in all its beauty, springs from life– she steps towards the log, sits without bothering to fix her skirts. “What’s your guess?”
The Woodcarver tilts her head as the smile trickles off her face. “The machine’s plan was not a failure, after all.”
The machine. P03. Grimora blinks, and sparks where monitor disconnected from chassis flash behind her eyelids. It makes a cruel kind of sense. Trapped, all that time, the robot had endless opportunity to imagine any eventuality, to procedurally eliminate failure in any situation; what else would it think of than defeat at the hands of his captor? What would it detest more than his captor’s victory?
Silence pools between them, flash-freezes in the chilling stillness. Grimora hears it crack as she breaks it.
“It will all return then.” She knows the answer.
“Yes.” The Woodcarver answers, almost a whisper.
Silence again, thick as grave-dirt, mired with possibility. She yearns to ask of the DATA, of the corruption, of the code, of their memory, of the fate of the world outside– she is certain that the old woman can sense her curiosity. She sees it in the stiffness of her shoulders, the jarring stillness of her hands. The Woodcarver would tell her. She would tell Grimora anything, if she asked.
“You did not want this.” The Woodcarver’s observation cuts cleanly through the quiet.
“I wanted us all to be free, at peace.” Grimora laments, matter-of-fact. “Our suffering– their suffering– is fixed now. Inevitable.” An ouroboros, an ecclesiastical calendar, a vicious cycle where remaining gentle would mean concession, would mean only the promise of captivity. A line of clues like a well, and at the bottom?
“You speak of all in this world as though they are like yourself.”
“Aren’t they?”
“In many ways,” she muses, digging her thumbnail into the totem’s half-formed, emerging face, “we are not.” A splinter flies from the wood where her nail is pressed, and reappears in less than a second.
Grimora turns to properly face her. Her skirts crumple, and if they or she were made of matter, she is sure they would be torn. “Everyone dies, Woodcarver.”
“But do all choose how they live?”
Grimora thinks of desperate words flickering across a weathered card. Of a dancing light from a locked room. Of a dark compartment, of darkness that stretched on, of not knowing where the darkness ended and began. “Everyone does.”
“How they die?”
She chuckles. “No one does.”
The Woodcarver meets her gaze. Her eyes crinkle, a smile-without-a-smile. “You did.”
Grimora clucks her tongue. “And yet…” she glances away from the woman in front of her, searches the nothingness that surrounds them. “Here I am.”
A clank of wood on wood catches her attention. She turns to see the totem– a squirrel, face full but for the eyes and mouth– on the log beside her, an offering. A shadow stretches long behind it.
“Here you are.” The Woodcarver murmurs, quiet against the sounds of the forest. Birds whistle somewhere unseen. Ineffectual wind rustles through trees that don’t yet exist. Her hands remain still, folded in her lap.
“All will be whole again shortly.” Grimora feels the cold of her crypt creep up the back of her neck.
“Yes.” The Woodcarver’s hands twitch in her lap. Her face is a mask of uncertainty, a look Grimora has never known on her. Her marmoreal eyes glint in the orange, horizon-touched light of an invisible sun.
She reaches out, rigor gracefully slowing her movements as she leans, covers the Woodcarvers hands with her own. One weathered, knife-shredded hand frees itself from her grasp to embrace her hands in return, thumb slowly moving over pallid skin. The audible wind becomes physical, gently sweeps over the two of them as they sit, solid and still. The world falls away to a point of contact.
Grimora’s vision fades, her hearing fades, her senses narrow and warp until everything is nothing. No fond touch, no fabric crushed beneath her, no warmth in her chest, coldness in her limbs. No sound. No wind. Her awareness dims, her mind stutters, blinks, goes out–