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Save Point: The Default

In Aftertime

<system initialization>

There is a moment of disorientation.

(It is happening again, all over again, it is happening again all over again again again....)

Sethkill circles, casually, arms upraised in a defense he didn't know the first time, weaving about his enemy like an enthusiastic serpent, like the Dragon on crack, a phantasmal swirling of mist and shadow. He wishes he could bring himself to ask, just to ask the question, but his silence is more demoralizing to his brother than any number of words.

Kilseth looks at him strangely, a slight head tilt, a glimpse out of the corner of his eye, and Sethkill realizes that for the first time ever his brother is actually listening to someone else, trying to hear his thoughts with the slight baseline let-us-not-call-it-telepathy of shared intent that was bred into their race a long time ago in the hope of a final peace. Of course Kilseth would use something like that as a weapon. Of course he would try listening only when he had no other options left.

"Where are we? You wonder, what is this place?" he asks, half a question, almost mockingly, answering himself. "I'll give you a hint, brother - you never learn."

He launches into a flurry of strikes and counters, a veritable slew, seemingly stored in muscle memory and knocked off from some ancient martial art. He's hoping that the leading words of conversation and actions that are faster than thought will give him the advantage, only to find himself decisively schooled as Sethkill carefully and thoughtfully counters each motion. Then the pain kicks in, like being stabbed all over again as all the torn and ripped tendons in his side contract with all the force necessary to drive the required motions. Sethkill casually grabs one side of his muzzle and shoves him sideways down onto his knees.

"Bored are you? Bored? How dare you?" Kilseth snarls, gleaming insanely from his eyes at wild angles like a sick animal. He lunges again and Sethkill pushes him away.

"Let me tell you a story," Kilseth hisses maliciously. "Let us call it a story. It's a lie of course, like all good stories. But this one happens to be true."

Kilseth attacks again, and this time Sethkill doesn't even bother to defend. He simply sways through the wider space of all these possible moments, the way he has seen the Dragon do it, the way Cleo seems to have learned now as well, and it is easy. He gets backhanded across the muzzle just slightly for his trouble, but it doesn't even hurt much and is well worth it for the learning experience. The impact sends him spinning out in a direction that may be sideways.

Kilseth is laughing or maybe giggling like a hyena. He doesn't seem to be able to adequately handle the concept of losing as applied to himself.

"Before there was something there was nothing," he snickers, seemingly on the edge of some sort of final hysteria. "But the nothing was without form and void, which really wasn't terribly convenient for working conditions. All those fucked-up sideways angles! So they installed a sort of screen saver, a decorative background, if you will. This is the default, Sethkill, and you'd better pray to the fucking Wolfmother that someone backed up the universe, because you're not gonna get the chance!"

Over each others shoulders, the two of them take in the surrounding place, which Kilseth has named as the default. It seems as though it has written itself from the stray fragments of their memories and thoughts, like a shared dream, because except in the little things, it is the dusk of the long-ago day of the exhibition duel, when Kilseth first tried to take his brothers life and then Keselt gave it back to him. Similar thoughts now drive them both to examine it intensely, looking for the key that drives its interaction.

The landscape is beautiful, in the way of a dream. The endless expanse spreads to forever in all directions, without the complication of a true horizon. What passes for the sky seems to be the deep and shadowy azure blue of the sky visible after sunset, but the shades are perfectly distributed all the way down the azimuth, without any stars. Some sort of global illumination applies, revealing everything with peculiar clarity despite the overall tenebrosity of the scene, all the way down to Kilseths strangely shaded eyes.

Sethkill find himself trying to remember the exact appearance of that day, before the fight that started all of this. It was late, yes, later than they'd intended to go or than anyone thought, but it wasn't this late. And the grass is all wrong, not at all as he remembers it, almost the same colour and texture as some sort of reaped wheat or cereal, but not quite. The repetitive texture of the randomly leveled patches of stalks is quite lost in the sheer vastness of the distances involved, a mapping substituted for the real thing. He suspects that there is no ground beneath this surface, just as there is no temperature to be felt, no air motion.

Could it be, he wonders, that this is in fact how it could have been, how it might have been? He faintly remembers Keselt making some sort of proposal, rapidly shot down, for a very different location for the exhibition matches, on an old farm where they still held to ancient agricultural practices, a living museum. They'd just finished harvesting their single field of some sort of ancient cereal crop, the old-fashioned way, with bladed scythes and sharpened sickles.

It was further out and fewer people would have come. But the audience would have been of better quality, more informed and deeply interested, and maybe some of them would have had the nerve and the skills to intervene, to drag an enraged young sethura off his brother. And the greater travel distance would have caused it to run later, perhaps with better precautions and care being taken in the face of the fading lights for the last few performances.

As he remembers all these things, though they never happened, the surroundings begin to gain detail and depth. Stars flicker on, one at a time, the way you never notice the first light of evening and then suddenly there are hundreds. Clouds take shape, starting as faint volumetric shadings and taking on patterns of light and shadow. The last flocks of swift-flyers are winging home against the slight remains of the sunset. Soil firms underfoot between the stalks of the grain that has been cut down to rough stubble.

He breathes in air, and feels the warmth of the land. The circle of decorative torches, a purely dramatic gesture arranged only for the sheer drama of it, burn cleanly in the sconces that hold them and create the unique and moving light that lent such excitement to the combat in all its ancient tradition, before it became a pointless attempt at murder.

"We're not really here either!" insists Kilseth in a futile attempt to undo his decreasing control over what is and what was. "None of this is real! This isn't happening! This place is not suitable for the living!"

In fact, it occurs to Sethkill, it could be anywhere he wants. They could be anywhere he wants. He closes his eyes in the face of another of Kilseths pointless attacks and he blinks.

<system reset>

The new place is different.

Where before the land and its grasses were extrapolated into infinity, here there is a distinct edge and it is not far away. The surface underfoot has a unique texture, slightly curved and covered in ripples, like the patterns left by wind and wave in the sand dunes on a beach, but is artificial in its creamy smooth consistency. Fine fractures spread throughout the wider pattern of the material, and there is a little faintly grey dust on the surfaces.

It reminds Sethkill of the Glass Desert, in fact, in a way, but the Glass Desert was never on a coastline and that is all he can interpret this as. The space they are in is so vast that the blue of the sky merges completely with the blue of what looks like the sea in the infinite distance, so far away that anything which might be out there is out of focus. Once when he was on holiday with Keselt, they visited a place where a high cliff overlooked the sea with visibility so wide and unlimited that you could see the curvature of the earth, and it looked a lot like this.

"You can't kill me here! We can't die here! We're not even alive here!"

Sethkill ignores Kilseths last descent into crazy and looks around. Off into the distance, away to the left and right, they are surrounded by a row of enigmatic forms, like vast monoliths or sculptures, made of various different materials and in assorted geometric shapes. There is an obelisk made of black stone with greenish ripples in it, a small pyramid cut from a single block of pale crystal full of subtle breakage, and numerous others, each of which seems to represent some sort of general principle in abstraction.

The whole environment is wide and airy, filled with light and potential. The breeze overhead is fresh, carrying all sorts of scents he can't even begin to place.

He wants to be in a place where he can change things, where he can somehow fix all of it and everything, where he can get the attention of god itself and make it do something, finally at great long last, whether it gives a damn or not. He realizes that it is in some way the attitude of a small child, hoping that someone will come along and fix the terrible disaster, and make it all better, but making over the entire universe is beyond him and he knows it.

So here he is.

Somewhere here is the lever, the thing to pull or the action to take that will change things. He looks around and then he realizes that it is already right on top of him, an enormous glass sphere balanced precariously on its base with no visible means of support. The curvature of the globe is so great that it completely overhangs him, and the cloudy pattern inside the glass marks the shape of the living world, of his home, of Sethuramandraki.

It is huge, so huge, but on a perfectly level surface, there is no reason why he cannot move it. It's not just the planet, of course, but representative of the particular universe he comes from, and everything that is in it. A smile starts to creep across his muzzle again, in a way it hasn't, ever since what happened. Just a slight baring of fangs at god.

Sethkill braces his splayed feet against the mysterious surface underfoot, whatever it is, and places his shoulder and both of his palms against the cool curvature of the globe.

His brother batters at him wildly as he does so, not even making coherent punches and kicks but flailing at him with the base of his fists like an enraged child. He shrugs the impacts off as though they were nothing, barely feeling them at all, and keeps pushing with all of his will and breath and soul. Kilseth really doesn't matter much compared to this.

At first it seems as though the globe is solidly immobile, not yielding even a fraction, but then as it slowly begins to move, just the tiniest bit at first, he shrugs his weight up against it as it begins to waver from its accustomed course. Soon, after what might have been forever or just a moment, it starts to roll, at first very, very slowly, and then with increasing speed.

Kilseth redoubles his efforts to distract his brother, but Sethkill just keeps on pushing. Where nothing is real and everything is a metaphor, all of this is just his will stood against the way the world works. Finally, he straightens up with a surge, and the globe rolls ponderously toward the nearby edge of all things, hangs for an instant, and then drops over.

Driven back by several steps into a final moment of mad panic, Kilseth lowers his head and then charges screaming incoherently at his brother, perhaps with some poorly formed idea of pushing him over the edge as well.

Sethkill stands absolutely still in his way, and catches him bodily, hugging his bloodied muzzle safely up against his chest. It is only then that he finally speaks.

"Ssshh, don't worry brother. It will be alright."

He closes his eyes again, and somewhere far, so far below there is a terrible shattering sound that consumes the world.

<system crash>