Progeny - Book IV

Eat the Light

This second awakening is not like the first.

The first was a slow, sluggish thing: a dull light filtering through murky ocean; a muffle, sharpening into tone. It was like piercing through a haze; like swimming up and breaking the surface of water, not knowing what lies on the other side. Everything was nothing, and nothing was everything, and then the pieces had seemed to settle over the image of the gray, grizzled Ruben, and across his blue, wide eyes. And then the pain set in, the pain of memory.

This is different.

Allayria lets her eyes open in the cold moonlight. She is aware of all her surroundings, from the man breathing heavily to her right, to the thing perching on her chest like a dead weight. She knows where she is, she knows who she is, she knows when she is. And all these aches and pains, they never left her.

"Oh gods," he whispers near her, out of her frame, but still very much there in her senses. "Oh gods, Allayria–"

The thing has its hands lying around her throat, thumbs on that small, vulnerable divot between her clavicles, at the base of her neck. It looks at her, and she, at it.

"I need a robe, Lei," she says, and her voice is a scratch along glass. "Water too."

She senses his hesitation, or she thinks she does. This, this is not clear. Not like before. The creature sits back, hands hanging limply at its sides.

"Lei, water," she repeats, and she lifts a hand up, to try to shoo him, only to find it so very heavy.

"I should get the doctor too," he says, but his voice is hesitant.

"After," she rasps. "Water."

He does leave her then, quick, quiet, a hidden maelstrom of anxiety. She senses in his undercurrents, however opaque, a kind of gist of what came before her awakening: the fear, the uncertainty, the revulsion.

It's only when the door shuts with a definite click that the thing above her speaks: You are running out of chances.

Allayria sits up. It is as if the world tilts with her, shifting and swimming, and as her orientation changes, as breath whistles in through her mouth and her dead hair drifts in front of her face, she feels it more keenly, the thing she thought she had escaped this time.

"What is wrong with me?" she asks it.

That is the wrong question, it answers. The correct one is: How much of you is left?

Memory is a beautiful, fickle thing. It is, Allayria considers, the one thing that defines us. Memory, and the long, deep, latent consequence of it, is the one thing that shapes what and who we are. Without it, we are just bags of meat.

She's sitting in a dark room, alone, a mug of water on the table beside her, thinking these things. Thinking about memory. Hers are folding. She can feel it, a kind of retrograde, somewhere in the corners of her mind, an ouroboros of sense, time, and meaning. The linchpins, the keystones, they are still there, but all the little ones, all the meaningless ones, they are fading away, faster still, this time.

There are always consequences.

Consequences. In her dreams of late, fire lies intermixed in all the dark and gray. A fire of letting, a fire of blood, a fire of the deep, deep dark and all the hidden things beneath flesh and bone.

Now, you will have to make up for what you have lost.

The stag now walks in between these embers and flames, a molting foul wretch, fur and meat sloughing off of bones, its eyes burning as it seeks her in all the mist and blackness. It's dead on its feet, a corrupted carcass that still, somehow thinks it's alive. But she knows better.

He is dying, some wretched, gleeful part of her intuits, all piercing pain and delight, for something in her, underneath this shroud of memory, is black and rotting too. He is dying as he stands, all broken pieces and shattered parts.

Good. There are always consequences. Let her not be the only one who feels them.

The shape at her feet twitches now, not quite dead yet, but she doesn't mind. She may still have use of it yet. If another memory fades. It's hard to tell how soon that will be. It's hard to tell time.

There is some part of her, in the quiet, in the dark, that feels fear. It is the part that feels close to Lei. She is afraid of something in all this, something she can't quite put her finger on. But it doesn't matter, really.

What matters is she is alive. She is still here. Feuilles did not send her into that black hole, that endless, vacant void. He tried–just as Ben did before him. He failed–just as Ben did before him. They cannot send her there. She won't let them.

But there is a cost. The thing that had sat perched on her chest, they who lived within it, explained it quite naturally. There's always a cost. Always consequences to our choices. An end result of our memories. A core feature engraved on our brains. Once, they had told her, a body can bear it on its own. Twice? Twice requires... outside assistance.

The shape, a different shape, at her feet whimpers. Before it (him) she had tried to use one of her creatures. She really did. But what made them so perfect in all other things was, it seems, exactly what made them so useless in this. There was nothing in there. Nothing to destroy, but also nothing to absorb. And Allayria...

Allayria needs to eat.

She sits in a dark room, a mug of water on the table beside her, thinking of things. This time was very different. This time, the first breath back into life had felt like swallowing sunlight, consuming day into a black pit of night. She had breathed it, she sucked it into the chasm of her rib cage and through her strangely beating heart.

She ate it.

A/N: *in a high-pitched, squeaky voice* Everything is fine!

Chapter Notes: Allayria's first reawakening occurs in Partisan's "The Tangle of Vines" and her reanimation is recounted in "The Thing in the Water." The stag as a symbol of the Cabal first appears in Paragon's "Riddles in the Dark."