Chương 98: Chapter 79 - Into the Depths

Someone's POV Hate. Hate is like… a crop. Hate is something you nurture. Hate is something you grow. Fear, pain, resentment, even love, these are the fertile soils in which hate can flourish. But like anything worth growing, simply planting your hate in the right place does not guarantee fruitful harvests come spring. Without careful attention, hate will whither on the vine, leaving you with only apathy, or disdain. It must be watered, and pruned, and protected from pests like joy, or curiosity, or understanding.

But if you give it the attention it needs, if you douse it with indignation and carefully curate its growth and keep it safe from that which weakens it, you may be left with something incredible. A true, real seed of change. A willingness, maybe even a desperation, to make different a thing you personally find fully intolerable. Isn't that incredible? One mind among the many had taken very meticulous care of their hate indeed, and the resulting seed had long since sprouted. And grown. And multiplied.

Fields of hatred. Groves of it. A teaming, infinite forest of malice and rage. That's what someone looked like, were I to try and fail to put it into words. I is a hard concept right now. I and me and us and we and they are them and you. Differentiating between the two was intensely challenging. Because it wasn't two. It was five, or ten, or fifteen. The number was impossible to lock down. Mercurial, shifting like an uncertain tide, washing over us. I. you. We then. We were lost, in a sea of babbling minds.

Yes, the sea! An excellent metaphor. If the forest of hatred were an overgrown bed of kelp, anchored to some unseen floor, twisting and wriggling in ochre malaise, then the substrate of our mental connection, the tissue fusing us all together, was a deep and vast ocean. We moved through it, indistinct, like a school of glittering fish, each indeterminate from the last. But though we could not tell one another apart, each little fish had its own destination in mind.

And where one lead, the others had to follow, lest the school risk being torn apart in detail. And really, the forest of hate was the only perceivable destination for us. I. We. Everything else was only the infinite blue, silent except for the crashing of waves, and the haunting, distant melody of keening whalesong. So, towards the kelp. Tall and wriggling and, in the space between moments, constructed of crackling, crystalline shards. It was a place of danger. Of Sickness, and malaise.

Various strands wound about one another, like great serpents, choking and strangling and consuming themselves, and being consumed in turn. A cloying, cannibalistic dance that threatened to subsume and absorb any unwary interlopers. To add their mass to the unbroken whole of consumptive glory. And yet. And yet some of us, you, them, were determined. Determined still, to brave those unholy waters, for all that the greater body of thought balked at the dizzying display.

Most were unwilling to brave the sea of such reckless hate. What could they do in the face of it? The small school was torn, for one moment, two, and debate raging back and forth in little flashes of light and sound. And then, from the crystalline forest, emerged yet another little fish. Somehow, tinier than all the rest. Almost, comically small. A miniscule, darting form, silvery and azure, barely visible except for two, distinct pinpricks of light emerging from their face.

Come with me, their faint voice called out to the school. I will guide you through this place, for these depths are in many ways familiar to me. Once upon a time, I grew up in a forest, much like this one, and I know how to navigate through these covetous strands. The school was torn, but where one goes, eventually all will follow. And so when one fish broke ahead, one strangely azure and covered in glimmering spikes, the rest had little choice but to pursue.

Think less, advised their guide, for here, thought is food. Prey for that which wishes to devour all within. Prey for what? one fish risked asking, its eyes glittering rainbows and its scales patterned with tailored ebony. Why for hate, of course, whispered the guide, their eyes alight with sad knowledge. When you are surrounded, with fear or pain or resentment, every thought is food. Fuel, to keep the forest growing. Expanding. Until it consumes your entire world.

And so the school traveled without thought, trusting instinct and their guide to see them through. They darted and dove, twisted and writhed, avoiding the grasping strands as they swam ever deeper, and deeper into this place. The journey took forever and an instant. Time held no meaning in the sea of thought. Too many competing perspectives, too much interference of the mind.

There were flickers and impressions, tortuous eternities where the school was almost caught by errant strands and brief instants where brilliant eyes cut a forward path. But continuity and proper chronoception were beyond any individual. So it should have come as no surprise that when they. We. I reached their. Our. My destination, it was abrupt. One moment, the surroundings were only wrought amber fronds, and the next, the school was at the bottom, skimming along the forest floor.

Mouldering bones lay rotting amongst the broken silt, intermixed with crystalline shards and clouds of malaise. Ivory mementos in the dozens, the festering remains of some grisly deed. And perched among them, like some fell hunter, sat a feral presence. A predator in truth, one gorged on their own worst impulses. The slavering beast had no place here in the depths, all stained fur and powerful legs and bellowing lungs.

In fact, the monster was floundering, smothered in the encompassing-sea, sustained only by the crystalline fronds onto which it clung obsessively.. North, someone's thought permeated the school, accompanied by a deep melancholy. To have fallen this far… He won't relinquish the power he's found, the tiny guide shook their head sadly. Perhaps I wouldn't either, were I in his position. But our empathy only goes so far. He must relent, because we won't. One of us will break, and it will not be us.

For a moment, the ocean rumbled, as if in agreement with the tiny fish's assessment, and the distant whalesong swelled, before fading once more. Their tiny guide flashed their eyes once, and then similarly vanished into the water, leaving the school alone with their quarry. Let us see why he holds fast to the dark, opined a pair of shellfish, armored in steel. If we understand, perhaps we can show him another way, the pair spoke with authority born from experience.

And so the school descended, to gorge themselves on the flesh of the hunter. For all their small size, the fish were many, and the drowning predator was alone. The abyssal pressure worked to restrain it while the pecking and biting and tearing took place, and when the grisly work was finished, the meat of memory had been firmly stripped from around blood-stained bones of iron. And the group understood.

"He was a victim, once," opined one mind, sharp and quick and tricky and darkly familiar with the same.

"Denegrated, punished, abused," she continued, each word briefly accompanied by flashes of memory. Instants of personal experience that she found the strength to share. A kick aimed at a darting feline, a shouted curse at a starving thief. A concerted beating by a disgruntled mob. All of the school had at least one memory of similar ilk, stripped from the steel-clad skeleton still drowning below. Recollections of a man in blue passing unfounded cruelty as 'discipline.' A litany of insults and bruises and curses.

Existence dictated by mood both mercurial and incomprehensible in nature.

"His suffering does not justify the horrors he inflicted," asserted another mind, or six. Young and righteous and horrified by their bounty.

"To stalk, and hunt, and murder. What right does his pain give him to perpetrate worse to strangers?"

"They deserved it," came a rasping whisper, creaking out of the tortured maw of the bound skeleton.

"Each and every one of them. I made sure of it. Just like she did." And that was the truth too, as the memories would tell it. Careful watching, days of observation, whispered interviews and determined research. In each and every instance of violence, the beholder was justified, so said the meat crowding every fish's stomach. But one mind said differently. The one that'd dragged them all to this place to begin with.

"No, North. Not all of your victims were abusers. Nor hers. We considered that as a line of investigation, a pattern to read in the slain, but ultimately discarded it because it didn't align with all those you two killed."

"Impossible," bit the skeleton, now struggling futilely to swim towards the school.

"You who have taken of me see what I saw? How can there be any truth but the one I laid out? It was Justice! Her Justice! It saw me take on my true form! How can it be anything but right?"

"What we perceive is not always what is real," replied another mind sadly, sparks and flickers of untruth and false reality exploding around them.

"The smallest shift in perspective can create different truths of the same vision. Allow me to show you." And even in this place of abstraction and unreality, this mind was skilled. To each of their fellows, and to the crumbling predator, they showed one truth, and then another. A man beating his partner with a stick, or a coach training his student in the art of defending oneself. A woman berating her hapless victim, or half a well-trodden argument between friends.

"The barest change can completely reframe a scene," the manipulator emphasized, "and what you take away is often what you went in expecting to see. If you believe that most relationships are predicated on abuse, manipulation, and extortion, then those are the interactions you'll see."

"Impossible," muttered the elongated skull.

"That's impossible. You– you're a manipulator. You're lying to me. To us all!"

"If you can't believe them, North, believe me," spoke that first mind.

"Lying is anathema to me, you know it. Even here, I refuse to believe you can't see it in my aura."

"Well maybe you're wrong!" asserted the skeleton.

"You couldn't see what was going on in front of your own self-righteous snout for so long Sigurn, how could I believe that you can see when someone else needs help!" The mind, Sigurn, ripped by name free from the school, recoiled in self-recrimination.

"I did fail you North. In so many ways. We all did, I can see that only now. But I talked with each and every one of the partners who were left alone after your murders North, and while many of them were relieved, some were distraught. Some loved those you took away deeply, and they mourn those losses even now."

"Well maybe they're wrong too!" the skeleton howled, as the steel bones began to rust.

"Maybe they read ownership as love! Abuse as justified punishment! We freed them! We did! Me! And her!"

"Maybe that's true for some of them, North, but even if your victims were abusers, monsters, criminals, that doesn't excuse your actions!" Sigurn's voice was growing stronger, his conviction suffusing the water around them. The volume drew the attention of the swaying, crystalline fronds, but they could come no closer to the congregation, repelled as if by a barrier centered around the shining presence.

"The law wouldn't deal with them! Hadn't dealt with them! Someone had to!" protested the crumbling skeleton, bones flaking away under the pressure.

"Forget the law! This is deeper than that! This is right and wrong! Truth so self-evident I shouldn't need to explain it! You killed those people North! Without exploring any other options. Without involving anyone else in your decisions!"

"Someone else might have stopped me, have been too weak," hissed the vacant skull, as orange crystals began encrusting its shattered bones.

"I was saving people Sigurn. Doing what had to be done. There's nothing wrong with that! I'm not wrong!"

"You're losing him," cautioned the two shellfish.

"He'll be absorbed completely."

"North, please!" Sigurn tried another tack, "what was done to you was wrong. What you did was wrong, but there's always a chance. Even now, you can turn back."

"But we weren't wrong," objected the skeleton, now completely suffused in ochre crystal.

"We were right. She was right, she had to be right" energy began surrounding the scrambling bones, an outpouring of shadows and hate.

"It's you who's wrong. The world that's wrong. Everything is wrong. Only she– no, only I'm right. So I'll make the world… me. The whole entire world," something was overlaying the skull's sibilant tones, something deeper, and darker. Something ancient, something starving.

"And then it will all be right. When it's all me. And not a moment befooooorrreeeee!" the last syllable elongated into a roar, first of rage, and then pain, as the crystals began creaking and groaning. Too much had been stripped away from the howling bones. There was no flesh left, no framework onto which the earth's energy could be layered. What was left of the scrabbling skeleton was too fragile, too suffused with rot. It could no longer support the strength that the crystallized malice deigned to provide.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. With one last creaking howl, the skeleton came to pieces, torn apart, subsumed by the towering, crystalline kelp. He's gone, muttered the shellfish sadly, as the kelp around them began winding around itself, banding together in a swirling, impossible lattice. And we must be as well, lest we be similarly consumed.

But before the school could move, before it could mourn or scoff or sigh or groan or wheel or spin, the ocean reacted. A deep rumbling came from below the school, and the seabed split, crumbling apart in a tectonic eruption. Babbling voices and tortured screams and delirious howls whipped past the school, gibbering currents of madness that swept the trailing kelp together, ripping it up and away in a swiftly-knotting core of crystallized malice.

And above them, so far towards the sky as to be almost indistinguishable against the like, reached down a massive, sun-tanned hand, plucking the enormous sphere of ochre hate free from the swirling depths, and tossing it somewhere far, far away. And again, the waters were still, except for the distant, keening cry of the ocean deep, and the steady rush of the tide.

The school meandered for an eternity and an instant, comforting their despondent former-leader, ruminating over what they'd seen, considering what awaited them next. And then they could only move on. Down. Further into the deep. - The rumblings had torn the sea-floor asunder, revealing a vast, dark expanse. An abyssopelagic hell, sheltering horrors imperceivable except for their very presence. For surely something awful had to be in these untrodden depths.

But none of the school could say for sure what lurked in this stygian nightmare, except what terrors they brought along with them. Ironically, the light of malice became their guide, the dull ochre glow the only method by which they could navigate the twisting caverns. A faint, dying ember, sputtering in the impossible pressure around them.

The whalesong had long since faded, as had the relentless waves, and now only the silent screams of their own minds accompanied the school, and the maddening whispers of the impenetrable shadows around them. And still onwards they dove, following one particularly determined fish swathed in scales of inky black and bloody crimson. Bursts of light and flashes of faltering luminescence kept the floundering school together, shepherding downwards, ever further, chasing the flickering glow of a dying flame.

Until at last, they beheld what remained of whom they sought. Sprawling fields of shattered wood and tattered sail revealed itself, scattered across the floor of a dimly-lit cavern. Overgrown crystals held chunks of the scattered detritus together, patching the tattered wreck as best they could. But the effort was for naught. The shattered decks and cracked corridors of the vessel were barren and empty, any sailors who'd once populated them long since drowned.

Slowly, the school descended upon the wreckage, looping in and amongst the sunken hull. For long eternities, it seemed there was nothing left to find at all. Until a mental signal from three particularly attentive and meticulous minnows brought the rest of the school to the shattered vessel's prow. Affixed to its length sat a wooden figurehead, warped and cracked and filled with orange crystal thought it was, some dull light emanated still from the effigy's cyan-blue eyes.

Delicately-carved fur and dainty teeth flashed beneath the school's attention, and the figurehead groaned as its arms raised up, as if in offerance. It felt almost… sacrilegious, to take, when there was so little to give, but nothing could truly be lost in this place except that which was never returned, and the school trusted itself to keep nothing but what needs made them. And so we. They. I feasted once again, bitter, rotting wood filling our. Their. My palate and distending our. Their. My. aching innards.

And what was once known only to one found an audience of many once again. The story was by now one tragically familiar. Shades of the same injustice perpetrated against a fresh victim. Years of companionship, turned years of hate and grief. Chains of expectations and conventions, crowned with threats and coercion. For the wreck's course had not been directed by its captain alone. Complicity was required, from the company who owned them, the investors who managed them, the family who was supposed to help them.

Courses were plotted on well-used charts, and retrofits dictated by familiar standards. The fish in ebony splendor wept for his own ignorance, guilt and recrimination entwining his writhing form, mirrored by the twitching distraught of his ink-scaled fellow.

"And now you see, I'm even less than he was," spoke the gnawed figurehead, nodding her head up at the now-departed.

"He at least made a choice, I simply lashed out." And the school knew that too. Saw the pawful of kills the wreck had made, with the captain her first victim. Striking not like a hunter, or a murderer, but like a beast that'd finally slipped the leash. The bitter taste of shame colored these recollections, moments that once felt like triumph made to feel like ash in retrospect.

"So you see, I have received my just desserts," spoke the figurehead.

"I acted the monster, and was chained as one." And this as well, the school experienced, perhaps the worst thing they'd seen thus far. Worse than the physical and verbal and emotional abuse, worse than the brutal killings, worse than the betrayal by trusted systems and family. The cruel, unfeeling callousness of the wreck's new captain, and the terrifying tools he employed to steer his ship. Abuse, surely, in equal and greater measure to what they'd seen before, but directed, purposeful in its horror.

Words to denigrate, punishments to coerce behavior, and further cruelties disguised as rewards. Opportunities to indulge in terrible impulses, cocktails of unknown contents that inspired impossible feelings, delectable treats and wondrous experiences rendered hazy in retrospect. A monster in truth. One whose mere echo had most of the school recoiling, and inspired slow, creeping growth in the orange crystals suffusing the ruined vessel. And that was the worst of his efforts.

A serum, derived from the malaise, untested and unproven yet, but effective nonetheless, in dulling all to the wreck but the commands of its captain, and the surety, the purity of hatred. His efforts had finished what others had started, hollowing the ship out until naught was left but wooden bones and this sad, sagging figure, pinned to the prow.

"And now that you know," whispered the broken carving, "please let me rest. There's nothing left for me."

"No," demanded the mind clothed in dapper trappings, his eyes flashing in the darkness like a prism.

"It's not too late for you. We're here to help. We can free you from this prison," he nodded towards the encroaching crystal overgrown across the shattered bulkheads and creaking decks. The vulpine sculpture shook its wooden head back and forth.

"You of all have eyes with which to see, though they've long been blind. Without the joinery, the support of that which you revile, I have nothing at all." And it was true. As the school had seen, the broken pieces of the wreck only held together with the assistance of the ochre stones. Without their efforts, of the shattered vessel, there would only be unrecognizable flotsam.

"Sister, please," implored a mind of shifting light and shadow.

"You don't deserve what happened to you."

"Who among us does?" replied the broken figurehead.

"In truth, he who was once my brother, I am tired. I no longer possess the will to fight. I am… shattered."

"So you'd let him win?" muttered a new mind, a fresh arrival, somehow brought to this place by whipping currents.

"Does that not bother you?" sparks dripped off the question like blood from a wound.

"To end your life as a prisoner when once you tasted freedom?" That question of all things pulled some reservoir of feeling from the broken sculpture.

"And what did I do with that freedom? Simply prove that I need be restrained. How could you claim this is anything but justice wrought?"

"I see no justice in this," spoke the paragon, emerging from their stupor.

"Righteousness is never found at the end of a blade, even one pointed towards oneself. If, truly you feel remorse, make something of it. Creation, not destruction, is the only real path to redemption."

"Look at what remains of me!" the figurehead growled, her wooden fur twitching in the stagnant water.

"What could I create anymore except death and pain?"

"Yourself," replied Ink, shadows and light swirling around him.

"Sister, we more than most are the authors of our own forms. Picture your Ideal and make it Truth, that is what lies at the heart of our illusions. That power lies within you, I know it."

"I heard Truth, and it burned away what falsities I clung to," protested the figurehead.

"My own complicity was laid bare, my own savagery. How could you claim that power is anything but antithetical to our nature?"

"Because I know that Truth is nothing with Ideals. All of reality is filtered through our perceptions. If the light of Truth burned away your reality, your Ideals simply weren't strong enough."

"What Ideals could I have, could I deserve?" the figurehead protested.

"Freedom," replied the sparking mind resolutely.

"Justice," said the paragon.

"Family," shouted the minnows.

"Redemption," ground the prismatic eyes.

"Mayal, your failures are mine. And all related to me. Come back, please, and help me set wrong to right."

"Grimsley," the name defined his form, "what right have you to demand this of me?"

"None," professed the empty tuxedo.

"I can only ask. And promise. No Gima will ever touch a Zoroak in anger again. Of that, I swear solemnly."

"How," whispered Mayal, dark hair matted and wet.

"How could you make that True?"

"By sundering your family from mine, Mayal. After what I've seen, who was complicit, our clans are quits, if I need spend the rest of my life making it happen. That's my Ideal. Your Truth could help make it reality."

"And what say you, brother? Would you shatter that which you hold most dear for your broken sister?"

"His Ideal is mine. Together or apart, it matters not," replied the trickster, laying bare himself.

"His rage is mine. His indignation we share. His guilt, I judge, and I hold. Please sister, come with us, that we might free our kin." For long moments and eternities, the drowning fox was still, unmoving in the abyssal depths. Until, finally, something unclenched, and the figurehead adorned the shattered vessel's prow once more. Fine, I will try to hold myself together, but what could a school of fish as small as you do to render this wreckage seaworthy once more? What fish?

thundered the deep, a thousand voices setting the deep caverns ashudder. I see no paltry school. I see leviathans. Titans of the deep, fit to match your hull. And it was true. Where once had been minnows, now lurked behemoths, nestling themselves beneath the ruined hulk and swimming up, up from the deep. A pair of steel-hulled submersibles pushed ever upwards alongside an impossibly-coordinated pod of huge porpoises.

A crackling longfish wound between the shattered decks, holding them together, while a shark covered in blades cut free the last clinging remnants of unneeded malice. A lurking, violet hunter scouted the path ahead, and an ink-scaled colossus made true the path she found. Darkness and water and stone parted like curtains, revealing a blanket of light above.

A solitary whale wrenched up the wreck, goodness alight across his form, and a trio of fish, smaller than all still, matched his power, dragging the ruined vessel into the light. And coordinating the effort, his eyes seeing all, swam a giant in true. Two legs and two arms and impeccable styling, he cut through the water with broad strokes, a steadying hand or gentle reminder always at-ready to ensure that together, all-at-once, the broken vessel reached the surface. Into the light.

And how bright it was, shining down on them. The feelings that'd been muted, dulled beneath the waves, weakened in the corrupted illumination of the crystalline usurpers. Understanding. Hope. Camaraderie. Fulfillment. Peace. Serenity. Love. It surged through the colossi, sun-warmed joy and relief permeating their beings, and through them, encapsulating the shattered wreck. Ah, it's so– warm. -" Okay, everybody out," the shouted voice roused him, high and urgent and familiar.

Grimsley took a gasping breath, feeling like water should have come pouring out of his lungs, but he could breath just fine, and when he opened his eyes, he found himself not surrounded by abyssal depths, nor by lapping, azure waves. Nor by a twisting globe of shadows, as it happened. No, instead he was surrounded on all sides by twitching, heaving bodies.

"Seriously, it feels like something lodged in my throat, and I'm getting a really strong urge to swallow," protested that familiar voice again. That got things moving. With a yowl, a little bit of the pressure above him was relieved, and then he heard odd rolling noises as something spherical tumbled down the hill of bodies. A couple of tiny bodies just beneath him pushed their way free, and at the same time, somebody sharp and cold carefully extricated an extended arm.

Two twirling hunks of steel floated away, and with a muffled curse, the person at the very top of the pile flopped to the hard concrete below. Grimsley feeling everything above him gone, stood up next, rubbing at a sore spot on his chest where he'd been laying on something sharp. Said something remained woefully still, except for where the reverberations of his weeping fellow shook his unmoving form.

And then left were a pair of indistinct shadows, twined around one another, one entirely swathed in black, the other similarly obscured, except for a twisting band of prismatic light, affixed across their chest. The two Zoroarks, held close to one another for another moment, two, and then Ink stood up, lifting his sister as if she were a princess, uncaring that his species' naturally hunched posture rendered the action nigh-impossible.

Mayal lay unmoving in his arms, except for the rise and fall of her chest, and the slow, twinkling glimmer of the stone implanted above her heart. With a creaking groan, the spires of bone and ichor around them began collapsing, and the shifting shadows separating them from the real world began to dissipate. Their ordeal was over. North was dead, the once-unfamiliar Lucario's name now indelibly burned in Grimsley's mind, as was Scythe. They'd found Mayal, which meant it was finally time to leave Ferrum.

Time to return home, to a family he'd just sworn to destroy.

"Hey," he felt a hand yank on his coat. He turned, and beheld the shivering mess that was one of his proteges. Fione's tanned skin was pale and drawn, and the girl was wet like she'd just been dipped in the ocean. Except it was sweat. He could smell the exertion on her. And the blood. It dripped from one of her eyes, the sclera red from a popped blood vessel, and dribbled from her nose in tiny beads.

She'd shed her black jacket, and then a jumper as well, leaving her only in a damp turtlenecked athletic shirt, the hydrophobic fabric impossibly damp. One sleeve was rolled up, revealing an arm swatched in bandages, and secured by a sling affixed to her neck.

"You owe me one," the shuddering girl nodded her head at Mayal's unmoving form, and in her hoarse voice Grimsley heard the crashing of waves, and the melody of distant whalesong.

"Before you go haring off to tear your family apart, I need your help rescuing mine, and obliterating hers," that last clause was punctuated with a gesture towards Alyssa, who was slowly finding the strength to stagger upright. The Unovan man took one shuddering breath, trying and failing to put on an easy smile for the monster in front of him.

"That sounds like a fair deal to me. What do you need?"

"I have a plan, and it's going to take all of us," the girl told him, before holding up a small note coated in a thin film of something ectoplasmic and green, "and a little more help besides." The girl paused, her blood-soaked eye trailing towards the unmoving pair of Lucario.

"Well, almost all of us."

"You fight your battles, Grimsley, Fione, and I'll fight mine," the defeated detective told them, knowing them as Grimsley knew him, in a way he'd have thought impossible minutes and a lifetime ago. The officer finally found the strength to stand, and he came up lifting North's body in the same way Ink held Mayal's, clutched close to his chest.

"As long as you can promise me," he continued after a moment, "that your cause is just."

"With my whole heart," Fione swore, the setting sun erupting behind her as the last dregs of shadow faded away, revealing cracked streets and shattered windows and terrified onlookers.

"Well enough then," acknowledged Sigurn, as he began staggering towards a nearby picket of officers, stopping only to collect from the ground a fish-sized sphere of compressed, citrine stone.

"Well enough."

"Ink," Grimsley nodded towards his partner.

"Sounds like we've got one last job before the big one. Let's make this one fun." And with a twist of shadows and a flickering of crimson lights, they were gone.