Chapter 55 - Too Many Promises
I came back the next day, feeling horrible for promising a child that I could do something that was probably beyond my power. Part of this that I reread recently lit up in my head with Lila remarking that nothing was impossible in your mind, but this was a little bit beyond my mind now. I was only connected to somewhere I was not supposed to be. I wondered what the Rahin decided, or if that already occurred. It was hard to keep track of the events that happened since that first knock on the wooden box below the library.
I stepped into the very box this time, instead of the library. It was just as I left it, minus the laptop with Rebecca’s record. Parts of her story didn’t even make it out to her story, and I was fine with that. A lot of that story already was not fit for standard human consumption. It would get edited to all hell, reduced to the gist of an idea, but that was likely to happen to this last installment of the mind, coming apart.
I sat on the green couch for a moment and relaxed into it. This was the couch Lila used to rub up against in the past. We hung out in this space before I recreated the library. It was arbitrary how a building could imprint on a young mind. I pulled the design into the first story I buckled down into, something I had not been able to share with the world, and the sense of calm it imparted followed through to Rebecca’s story.
I looked up at the ceiling to scan the structures above me for inhabitants. Tarne was in the garden, making something out of long green leaves. I watched for a moment. As she wove the leaves skillfully into a basket, only to hang it up on a branch of another tree. They would dry out and remain. I had to wonder why she was doing this, until I saw a bird fly by in the garden. She created life to care for, and the baskets were nests. I smiled. I needed to help her. She was the precious one in this story, descendant of me and Lila, belonging nowhere, yet everywhere.
I scanned over to the housing side of the library to find Kara alone in the ballroom attic. The placement of it made no sense, but it did not need to make sense. The actual attic was smaller, but it was amazing to see a dance floor above a library. The sound of dancing and music would make the quiet enclosure pointless. She was holding something in her hands, and it waved in the open space with a giant mass. It had to be her Keir, the device that opened the way between worlds.
I found Lila in her bed, resting, but not asleep. I watched her for a moment, visibly arguing with herself about something. It had to be about Tarne. It took a few minutes of her pointing upwards and talking about something before she sighed and placed a hand over her face in defeat. I almost looked away, but the hand moved down her body, squeezing parts on the way to her lower back. I watched for a moment as she rubbed the triangular opening and writhed around in pleasure derived from it. When beast woke up to the excitement, I looked away, but he tilted my head back and held me in place for a few more seconds.
“You want to take a tar nap?” I asked. The pressure let go of my head, and I left Lila to her masturbation. I stood up from the green sofa and floated up to the dance floor passing by Lila’s soft moans. Kara had the keir laid out on the ballroom floor, and it just nearly fit. The various machines were constantly moving, shifting with pistons, and cutting shots of steam as if some sort of locomotive.
“Hey,” I said. “Keir broken?”
“It’s sluggish,” Kara answered without hesitation. “I do love the old style, but the new one had such better technology housed within a collapsed matrix. Instead of using advanced tech, the order decided to use the old school mech with a ‘spell’. It’s their word for it. I just call it technology. It’s like when you collapse a collapsed matrix. It’s not magic. The reason it can sink into skin like a tattoo is because of this doublelapse.”
“Doublelapse?” I asked. “It would sound better as ‘Twinlapse.’”
“Sure, whatever,” she said, and pulled a large tool from one of the boxes attached to the Keir. “It’s also a storage medium.” The object looked like a metal bar, but when she clicked the button on the end, the other end changed to a strange shape that fit exactly over a knob she was beside. The shape was something of a hexagon, with a heptagon cut out of the inside, resulting in a hexagonal sort of moon with a heptagonal missing part. With another click, the head turned to a very sharp-looking awl.
“You wanted something?” Kara asked. “I’m kinda busy right now.”
“I— Never-mind,” I said. “It can wait.”
“So, now you’re going to say, ‘I have to go’, right?”
“You’re not being fair,” I said.
“FAIR?!” Kara burst out, throwing the tool across the ballroom. The rod shifted back into rod form and flew back into the holster on the keir it originated from. “I’m not being fair? You made me care for Tarne, to love her even. I truly considered her my daughter, even if she came from you. AND THEN YOU TELL ME SHE THE BASTARD WHO TERRORIZED MY WHOLE LIFE?! AND I’M NOT BEING FAIR?!”
“She’s not Akier,” I said. “She’s a remnant of him, one that doesn’t understand who he is or what he’s done. You know what that means, right? Someone got him. Someone finally gave the bastard what he deserved. He got eaten by the Rahin, and digested as chaos. The thing that was left was a void leech, and it did what it was supposed to. It leeched onto something in the untethered space that it could. That just HAPPENED to be Tarne, but it’s NOT HIM!” I met her eyes.
“How can I believe that?”
“You have to,” I said. “It’s the truth. And you know what? There was another ver—.” I bit my tongue to stop the thought from exiting my mouth. I could not believe I was about to tell her about the alternate version that Fyntn sacrificed his time-wind for.
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said, then grit my teeth. “I have to go.”
“Yeah, figured,” Kara said. I wanted to argue more. I wanted to defend Tarne, but maybe the best option for this was having Kara and Lila just forget I ever told them about it. I let the idea mingle inside my head for a bit, as I punched myself out of the ballroom, and out of untethered space.
break
I came back after a few days of stress. My reality was running me down. I had to escape to the library, even though it was just as stressful there. I hoped Kara and Lila accepted Tarne back in, but when I appeared in the library, I knew that was not so. Kara sat on the desk, by herself, knocking the heels of her feet against it nervously.
“Finally!” She exclaimed when she saw me. “You haven’t been by in a few days!”
“I… Had some things to deal with,” I said. “I still do. They’re on my mind a lot. It’s a lot of pressure.”
“What did you promise Tarne?” Kara asked.
“That I’d help her.”
“No. What exact words did you use? What did you say you would do?”
“Fix her.”
“You can’t fix this, Jack. It’s beyond you. It’s beyond life, before life. To think that you could alter stuff and not deal with consequences—”
“ENOUGH! I GET IT!” I burst out. “I TOLD HER I’D FIX HER, AND THAT’S WHAT I INTEND TO DO!”
“THIS IS BEYOND YOUR CONTROL! YOU’ RE MESSING WITH THINGS OUTSIDE OF YOUR REALITY!” Kara’s face got all red from the anger. I felt my face contort in a rage, then I felt like I was choking. Hair burst out from inside my mouth, spilling out until beast was outside, much to my disgust. He stood up, an animalistic version of me, coated head to toe in long brown hair, like some sort of weird bear. His fangs bared into a snarl at Kara before he roared out wildly, and leapt at her.
“No,” she said, and drew out her Keir to produce a box big enough to capture him inside and closed the expanded machines back up. “That will not work.”
“Actually, you did me a favor,” I said. “Now we don’t have to shout. I am going to fix Tarne, because I’m the one who broke her. I’m the one who made her. I am her, or was. Just be glad it’s not by making your memories disappear.”
“You can’t do that,” she said.
“You know why that sounds like the dumbest thing?” I asked, with every intention to answer the question right after. “Because it’s my seed of thought here connecting me to this place, a gift given to me by Rebecca. I’ve been doing this shit for a long time, and there is nothing else that they can take away. Take my life? Sure. I’m depressed already to the point of not wanting to be alive. Never record me into the ivy? Of course. Couldn't have other idiots finding my story and putting holes in your strange sense of order in the chaos.
“Spoiler alert. That shit already happens, and that’s what gives the Rahin the chaos they feed on. That’s the stuff that gives the Order of the Keir jobs. It’s the very reason you exist. Everyone is doing this shit already, Kara. If you don’t get that, you’re not the sharpest tool in the shed. You exist because the old man pulled you into this life, but he didn’t explain anything. Akier had some nerve to try and poke holes in this stupid system. In a way, he was like me, but did things for bad reasons. I am just trying to heal my mind.
“I just want to feel normal for whatever little time I have left. I want to experience love, and belong somewhere. I want to find my corner of the world, and die there, even if I have no children. It all started with one piece of shit idea, that I want to feel better. So I opened my door to Finn, then pulled Rebecca in. Now I’m here, in what Rebecca left behind for me when she set out to do the very same thing. Fyntn spent himself on my account, too. You already knew about Akier, but Tarne was grown up at that point. We fucking altered time to try and make you happy again, but you found a way to know again.
“So fucking what that Tarne is Akier past the chaos digestion process? Doesn’t that make him a normal human? Doesn’t that mean that he was defeated, and that he suffered for the things he did? Just because you weren’t witness to them, does it make it any less? The parts of him that remained were nothing that you knew of him. He killed his daughter by accident. That’s why he latched onto this shell of a girl I left behind when I wanted to be reborn correctly. I arrived at my core, and he was rescued, and you dare hate him for this?” I let the question hang there after a torrent of talking. Kara’s eyes did not look convinced. Anger still swirled there.
“I WILL be fixing Tarne,” I said. “And there is nothing you can do about it. Even if it takes erasing your whole mind, or making a clone of you just to love Tarne wholeheartedly. I don’t ever want to see her cry ever again, do you understand?”
“You said ‘Tarne was grown up at that point’,” Kara said. “Why was she grown up? I refuse to believe that much time passed to have her grow up.”
“It was a mistake in the garden,” I said. “Garr made her grow up into a woman.”
“Uh-huh,” Kara said, unconvinced. “Right.”
“Lila’s the one who made the garden safe to play around in,” I defended. “She may have changed something about Garr. All of a sudden, you two had a full grown woman on your hands, masturbating out in the open, and walking around naked everywhere. It was kinda hilarious.”
“I don’t remember that,” Kara said.
“Time reset,” I said.
“We’re outside of time, Jack.”
“Not in my seed of thought,” I followed up. “Fyntn was only able to turn back time, using his only time-wind, because you spent some time here with me. And now, guess what I’m going to say. You know it all too well.”
“You have to go,” Kara said.
“You got it.”
“I—.” Kara started, but I was already on my way out and did not hear anything beyond that. I felt beast snap back into me outside.
break
I mulled over the smugness in recent paragraphs the next time I sat at the device. A week or so had passed, and I was still stressfully looking for a place to stay in the city on short notice. The brief moment of time I had before work could just as likely be spent writing of archives of stories for younger audiences. Yet, here I was, hoping to eventually finish this journaling story of a broken mind trying to heal itself in a country that did not worry about treating mental disorders.
I stepped into the library, finding Lila floating in the air entirely naked. Nothing else floated with her, and her eyes were closed. I felt beast push at the inside of my chest, to place her triangle vagina on a finger and spin her like a basketball on it, but I grimaced as I stuffed him back down. With the image still in my head, I decided to clothe her in the air by wrapping swaths of cloth gently into a sort of toga.
“Jack!” She burst out, when she felt the cloth surrounding her. Her physique slipped the swaths of colorful cloth and dashed at me into a hug. When she touched down, my clothes disappeared as well. She had to be the culprit, because I was more interested in seeing her dressed. I motioned to clothe the both of us again, but Lila parted the hug for a moment to meet my eyes. With a wink, the clothes vanished again into a puff of smoke. “Don’t be embarrassed. Be naked with me for a bit. It’s liberating, and exciting.”
“It just feels weird since you and Kara are a thing,” I explained.
“We’re not having sex, Jack,” she said. “Skin contact is important, too, not just the rubbing of certain parts. It’s about warmth and vulnerability.”
“And often unavoidably ends up sexual,” I added. “Or progresses beast thoughts to want it that way.” Lila hugged up against me again, slapping skin against skin into a hold.
“Well, then fight it,” she said. “Because I like being naked, and I know you do as well.” I sighed, and relaxed against her. It was imagined skin contact, but the entangled reality core made me feel part of the sensation. The warmth was comforting, but beast rocked his cage and rattled at the chains all the way. I would have to find time to write some adult story for him later to relax him. Something that blended gore and sexuality would get him calm without actually having to run or feed him. It was something of a drug, to satisfy standard cravings otherwise sated.
“I know I just got here,” I said, “But I have to go.”
“You haven’t been around a lot lately,” she said. “Is everything ok?”
I considered explaining my troubles to her, but then realized I would have to explain how people lived as well, and how jobs worked, and the basic living dynamics in a large city. It would take too long to say all of that.
“Don’t worry,” I said instead. “I’ll be around more often soon. I promise.” As I said that, JJ reached out a hand from my heart with a pinky outstretched to her. Lila smiled, then extended her own pinky to connect in a promise. I grimaced at the gesture, but it was ok as long as— All of a sudden, beast reached out a hand, too. This one took hold of her exposed breast and flicked the nipple with his index claw a few times before I reeled them both in.
“Sorry,” I said. Lila smiled, and floated away and down onto the brown couch back-first.
“That was a little exciting,” she said. “I’m going to need to take care of that. You’re welcome to watch.” I looked while she set down and ran her back up against the brown cushions for a moment. Her smile soon vanished to visible enjoyment, but I left the air of the library before she started really getting into it. When I arrived outside, I still felt naked, but more alone than ever without the imagined skin contact. I sighed before closing up the device.
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