Abyssal Reverie

Chapter 12: Sugar

"You must be crazy if you think that I will give up the game."

My body was fighting me as I struggled to clean myself. The dirt, grime, and blood refused to relinquish their hold on my skin. I scraped and scrubbed the memories of the last few days from the surface of my skin. I watched as I rubbed myself raw with seawater to regain some semblance of control.
"If you scrub any harder, you will be permanently red." I heard III chime in from the doorway. "Would you like some help?" My face flushed to match the color of my skin, the prickle of embarrassment goose-bumping everything exposed to air, the top of my scalp tingling under each hair.

"No, Thank you." I scrubbed again at the tips of my fingers, under the skin of my nails. They were bruising that lay flush with the pale undertones of my skin, circles of where fingers grabbed me, curved bruising under my arms, and around my chest from where Sleep had grabbed me. The thick red circles around my face ached as they finally started to scab and heal.

"You look like Hel, Selah." He had a sweet smile on his face that reached his eyes. The little crinkles around the edges of his mask tugging the extra fabric on his neck upwards. I flipped him off and moved my hands from scrubbing my skin to de-knotting my hair. "How are you feeling?"

"I think Hel very well sums it up." My fingers racked through the layers of grime, the dried debris flaking off and falling to the ground around me like a halo of death. I tugged and yanked at the knots, pleading with them to come loose. "Whatever happened to me while I slept caused my hair to abandon all morals and fold in on itself." III let out a chuckle that tugged at my heartstrings.

"I suppose that is a benefit of the mask; I can tame the hair and stuff it away unseen." The lilt in his voice echoed in the space around us.

"Why do you wear masks anyway?" My hands stayed busy with my hair, but my eyes met him, the beautiful blue captivating my attention.

"Vessel says it allows us to lead with our hearts, that when they cannot love our looks, they fall in love with our leadership, the words we use to lead them into a new era. It allows us to be deities in our rights, even when the people follow Sleep."

"And is that what he promised you when you met him? A chance to be a deity?"
I continued clawing through my hair, tugging and pulling the knots free.
"No, when I met Vessel, he promised nothing but a way out... A way away from the pain and suffering that littered my life. And he promised me that together we would create a new world that would live in a place of love and mutual understanding for pain."

"He saved you. Like he saved me?" I remember them saying this was an experience they all went through, that mine is different even now, but they all struggled to return to where they are now. Complete devotion to the one called Sleep.

"As you well know, our initiation into this group differed from what you are experiencing. But Vessel leads it with the same compassion and fierceness he leads you with."

I rolled my eyes, the frustration derived from my lack of knowledge regarding my place here among the leaders.
"Why does he let them see my face? Am I not destined to be a disciple as well?"
My hair was finally free of the tangles; I began scrubbing it clean in a bucket of seawater, the murkiness left behind reminding me that this fight was far from over.
"I don't believe he intended our need for you to be so Urgent, Selah." III moved across the room and settled against his bunk. "Usually, he does the initiation in private, as we told you, leaving room for him to take on other disciples that can remain, in their own right, anonymous."

I continued to lose the fight against my hair. The weight of what I had just experienced was heavy on my mind. The dream that was so much more than that interweaved its way through each of my thoughts like a plague. I watched as III met my eyes with his own, a question lingering on his lips. I wondered what could be so hard for him to ask, almost as though what we had endured didn't automatically give him the right to ask me anything he saw fit.