songs for the fallen

new game +

?????

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They're human.

For a moment this thing, reawakened devil they are--it is--isn't certain what it's making this observation about.

The child is human. It is not. It rejects the way it first saw itself, as something tangible, as something real. It rejects the few memories that scratch at its mind like nails against concrete. It rejects that thing which it once was.

It loathes that it cannot reject the body it is now attached to.

The child sits up. Stands up. They poke around in the flowers and walk around stupidly and the realization that they're human strikes it (whatever it is--a ghost? a demon?) so fiercely that if it had a body of its own, it would stumble back, fall to the ground. It is disgusted. Revolted. It tastes a memory of bile on a memory of a tongue and the disgust only grows at the memory of its own body.

They're human. That makes them a threat.

The world is far too bright and loud and real, even in the relative silence and darkness of the caverns and tunnels. The echo wishes so badly it could go back to where it was before. What it was before.

Buried. Gone. Dead.

It should have stayed dead. Its plan failed. They killed him. (It killed him, it interrupts itself. It has no right seeing itself as something sentient. It is less than an object. It is less than dust floating through the air.)

Yet it's still here.

It sees faces in the flowers. It recognizes the voice of the white-furred woman in the royal violet robe. The people it loved, back when it was capable of such a thing, are still here. It was never any good at it before, but it will do all it can, here in this continued half-existence, to protect them.

It's the only thing left to do.

Golden flowers, it thinks as the child returns to where they first fell. They must have broken your fall. They--it!--knows these flowers didn't grow here long ago. So much has changed.

And nothing more will. This child will not spill a mote of dust in the world the echo once called home. It will do all it can to prevent that. That may not be much, but it's still something.

The child flinches at the echo's words, and it pauses in its introspection, realizing its thoughts are no longer only its own. It can't move, can't weasel its way into the nerves of the child's body, can't move their arms, can't hurt them directly.

But it has a voice.

At times like these, a voice is the best power to have.