Chapter Text
Tenna doesn’t remember dying.
An alarm is shrieking. It's thundering inside his ribcage, blaring like a storm siren. The spaces between his joints are belching smoke and static, and Tenna -
Tenna can’t feel his arms.
His heartbeat is screeching metal beating laboriously - a thronging crowd of steel, the scratch of iron plates grinding against each other. Bursts of electricity shock the copper casing of his brain-wires; shocks him brain-dead, as his screen begins to fizzle out.
The snow is building a casket around his torso. Tines of ice shear into his skin, a building cold nestling in his circuits. A shiver runs up his spine, Tenna’s body trembling with the effort. His rubber muscles - pulled tight as stretched rubber bands - shift to compress his nerves. A wail leaves his voice box as his body crushes itself.
The static is building; stray electricity filling his head, travelling down his nerves. In the distance - yelling, twinkling peals of stars. Tenna thinks of his show, of the acrid scent of glue and cheap air freshener, of the green room -
and flickers out.
? days.
Tenna’s suit is heavy and wet. His screen lags - visual snow melting into a gentle white glow. He lifts his aching head up and thumps it back against the wall behind him, staring upwards. Pain soaks through his clothes.
Flying buttresses arc across the ceiling in nautiloid spirals. Opaline moonlight ripples over the indigo friezes overhead, the carpeted floor dripping in the swelling cyan candlelight. The ashen scent of burnt candlewax puffs up in the room, clobbering down Tenna’s constricted throat. The static stench of electricity buzzes ambiently about him, distressed - frantic. The nylon rug beneath his disjointed knees rippled with dust-soaked wires.
Tenna rocks his too-heavy head to the right, to droop against one aching shoulder. A tired furrow builds between his brows, screen crinkled - pained. How long has he sat here, slumped against this wall, feeling its icy edges? enough minutes to blow the hour to a close? Days?
The candles flicker out, burnt and run dry.
Darkness washes the room in a navy fog. The last vestiges of jasmine moonlight weep from the arced cathedral windows above, fractals of rose and gold splattered onto the floor.
Through the lashes of his dissolving death-dream, Tenna makes out a figure. His voice first - scratchy, abrasive, and flickering between glitching and bleating puffs of air. Sweat-soaked exhaustion pleated through frantic murmuring. Rubber soles scraping against the cobbled floors, forks of leathery-creaking bouncing through the air; footfalls echoing ghostly through the palatial cathedral hall.
Wires dress Tenna’s lap, ruby scraps of fabric swept around his folded legs like a dust pile. An oil-stained amputee of his former glory, the slick sheen of petroleum clinging to his laminated suit. It makes him smell of rotting eggs and tar. Pink and gold reflect on the stone by his scratched soles. Sounds sculpt into words. The CRT looks up -
and his breathing grows stiff.
There’s a stranger at the mouth of the room - his shadow engulfs Tenna’s carapace in its entirety. The stranger moves into the candlelight as he approaches, his teeth clicking together. His hair is ink-stained-bone; black paint dressed over the calcified shape of hair - and interrupted, occasionally, by thin silver strands. His temple is white as snake eggs, ends split and stuck up in unseemly spirals. And as he shuffles he forces purpose into his steps, like he’s perched perpetually over broken glass.
He’s prickly to the touch; thorny ribs and forearm bones pushing at the porcelain dressing of his skin. The moonstone slope of his pallid shoulders are uneven beneath his tattered blazer, and his bones click loudly as he shifts. Tenna’s gaze catches on the hunch of his shoulders, and thinks of pinocchio.
“YOU’r; E AWAKE.”
The wind softly keens in Tenna’s ears, a thin sound like distant wind chimes tinkling. The air is thick with dust and smoke - dry and syrupy; a cloying sweetness like rotting flesh. Tenna swallows past the static beading inside his throat, the static scratching at his frayed vocal cords. Fear stuffs his airways full of acetone; a bitter taste, like lemon and grass and shots of plastic-cap vodka between cigars.
“...Yeah,” Tenna says, then hesitates, “sorry, do I know you?”
The puppet’s face contorts. His polished plastic skin creaks as it moves sparsely; the gap between joined patches of plastic revealing a dark, hollow interior. Grey-gilded droplets of sticky sweat slide down his sunken casing. Shell? - Tenna has never seen a darkner that looks even remotely like him.
The puppet recovers quickly, pushing a fall of dark hair (calcified - hard as bone) from his face. “EAHAHAHAHA OF COURSE NOT. I’M JUST [[Your Friendly Neighborhood spiderman]] GUY HERE TO HELP.” His plated hands grasp at the paper-thin bandages he’s cradling. His pinkie twitches, and curls around one end of the roll protectively. “I NOTICED YOU WERE [[down on your luck?]] AND DECIDED TO [press F1 for Help].”
Tenna rocks his head to his other shoulder, an ache building in his neck and settling at the base of his spine. “I’m not … dead?”
“OF COURSE [Not]! MY [[Medical malpractice lawsuit]] SKILLS ARE [Refine your search]!” The puppet clutches the gauze tighter, approaching Tenna cautiously, like approaching a feral cat - his movements stiff and disjointed. Although the puppet is shorter than Tenna by several heads, his large shadow arcs up to the ceiling to bisect the room.
Tenna thinks briefly of puppets, and strings. “Well, I … “ he grinds his teeth together as pain bursts his chest open, like a cyst rupturing. Tenna winces, agony splitting his vision in two.
The puppet flaps his hands through the air dismissively, though he’s trembling. “DON’T STRESS IT, [[Boob tube]]. IT’S [Free], [[On the house]]!” He sets the bandages down beside Tenna, and stands appropriately away.
“I — sure, okay.” Tenna frowns, adjusting his back to be better situated. While Tenna isn’t actively observing him, the puppet slides over to the wall and sits slowly down. The space between them is held only by the bandages. “Where are we?”
The moonlight returns in increments - as it does, the lanterns on the wall flicker back to life. “A CATHEDRAL,” the puppet says after a moment. “LIKE THE ONE IN THE [City], ON THE CORNER OF [[Marketable plushies]] AND [Castle].” He turns his head towards Tenna to scrutinise him. Tenna shifts, uncomfortably, and imagines that cobbwebbed cathedral. “IT WAS A [[On sale for $4.99]] EXCUSE OF A [$@#!]BOX. AND THOUgh it didn’t —… “
.
.
.
(Tenna recognised his voice first, as he came-to from his mind-travels - rich and sanguine, dripping in violet moire and silk scarlets. The low timbre of his sell-pitch had dimmed to a drawl, exhaustion pleated through his wrinkles. A tired grimace arced across his lips, skin crinkled at the corner of his eyes. He clasped his bright hands together in front of him, paused mid-gesture as he briefly caught Tenna’s gaze in his peripheral.
Spamton’s eyelashes fluttered against the crest of his cheekbones, casting long, blurry shadows down to the bow of his lips. The copper dusklight rippled over the gloamy stone floor, silk banners dangling overhead dripping in the waning amber sunlight. Chairs scraped against the cobbled floors, echoing down the church hall.
It was Saturday, and Spamton had promised that lunch was on him.
Slowly, with the artificial streetlight buzzing as it dimmed, darkners clattered out of their seats in the cathedral as the darkness filled the room. The red-brick fireplace behind Tenna murmured knowingly, burning mournfully in place of a real sun. It was a great mouth of fire, cyclopean, and dressed in candles and paper trails. It belched dusty, cinereal smoke, blanketing the air with charcoal; which glided down the tongue, and settled in the CRT’s steel lungs. He turned his head over his shoulder, and watched the edge of the dais glow.
Spamton’s hands gestured animatedly to the Ambyu-Lance he was pitching tyres to. The Ambyu-Lance nodded slowly - attempting enthusiasm, but failing badly at it. Tenna could see it in their hands - jammed under their armpits, fingers twitching anxiously. Tenna took one sparing glance at the altar, then turned back towards his partner, approaching him unhurriedly.
As the Ambyu-Lance scurried out, Tenna finally met Spamton’s eyes properly. They were cinder and gold, ringing wine-dark pupils. Spamton was kempt and arranged purposefully. The crown of his head, ringed in dark hair, was slicked back except for one stray curl falling intentionally in his face. His suit was pressed - meticulously ironed - and his smile was practiced to be as wide as it could be without being unsettling. And - for a moment, as he ended his pitch - Tenna watched the addison deflate minutely. Exhausted.
Spamton’s sharp gaze softened as Tenna approached the slumped figure, hands jammed in his back pockets. It made Tenna sick; with greed, with need - to have living flesh undulating underneath his fingertips, and fantasies bloodied and burnt into the sloping planes of his mind.
He could not escape those eyes. Sickness grew in him like a curling sapling, bringing with it the rapture, and the end of all things.
In the tone one uses to talk to a friend (after humour has seeped out of one's pores and into the nylon rug below their chilled feet), Spamton quips: “done pretending to pray?”
“Maybe I really was praying,” Tenna deflected.
Spamton raised his eyebrows. A grin split his face - it was an ugly grin, but also painfully real. “Please, don’t tell me you believe in all that.” He coughed once, and batted away the candle smoke. “C’mon, let’s get outta here ‘fore I choke on this shit.”
Tenna - )
“... [[TRASH HEAP]]?”
“Huh?” Tenna says dumbly - jolted forcefully out of the memory. The puppet gives him an odd look, cocking his head to the side and furrowing his eyebrows. “Oh — sorry, yeah.” Tenna swallows. “I was just … thinking.”
The puppet rolls his fingers against themselves, and winces when he cracks his segmented knuckles. “ABOUT WHAT?”
Tenna sighs slowly, feeling anxiety well up in him like a flooding house. Vocal chords stuffed full of cotton; his lungs full - of dust and wax and smoke. “Churches,” he answers curtly, then falls into a taciturn silence. The moonlight streams into the room fragmented; spilling in from the stained glass windows ringing them - which stretches tall to an invisible ceiling. The silver light dusts across the puppet’s face like golden glitter. Tenna turns his head to follow the gilded lines to where they lead, on the floor, to him. “Puppet?” he asks tiredly, “Where are my arms?”
“I — “ the puppet hesitates, his shoulders jumping up to his ears, “[[Searched Far and Long have you?]] BUT COULDN’T FIND MORE THAN [Ruby Scraps].” He clamps his teeth tightly together. “CHEER UP [[hear that whine? that’s your CRT asking for a walk!]], THEY’VE GOTTA BE [[something Somewhere in this Hell-Hole]]! A LITTLE [[Hyperlinked Blocked]] AND A LITTLE [Work] AND YOU’LL BE [[Good as New]]!”
Tenna opens his mouth to respond, then pauses. His breath mists out in front of him in the cold midnight air as thin white smoke. “What did you say?”
“WHAT?”
“That bit about the whining.”
The stranger frowns - or, as much as he reasonably can, plastic casing creaking. “WHAT WHINING?”
Tenna frowns, thinning his lips. “Nevermind.” He looks away, and feels the buzzing settling under his skin dim to a melodic hum. The waning moonlight bounces and bursts off the stainless steel of his forearms, digging into the gaps between his plates. His head is iron. “I’m … tired.”
The puppet snaps up, his voice abruptly frantic, an ugly scratching sound like a fork dragging down a chalkboard: “HE-HEY HE y, WOAH D ON’T [[Turn off your Screen and go outside!]] NOW — “
Tenna grimaces, then cuts him off quickly: “— Boy, you’re mighty concerned about my health for a stranger aren’t you?”
Silence engulfs the room.
Tenna watches the darkner look away guiltily, rows of plastic panels reflecting light where a face should be. Singed, matted hair glued to his collar; bone melting into muscle overtop his manilla-coloured face. The yawning silence fills the room slowly, until minutes have passed between Tenna’s screen buzzing and the darkner’s joints clicking together. “Spamton?”
Spamton perks up - there is real fear in his eyes as he scrolls over Tenna’s wasting form, the likes of which he’s only seen once prior. An empty dial tone rings in his ears. “I’m just going to take a nap.”
Spamton deflates, the monochrome snow in his glasses waning into pink and gold. “...OKAY,” he agrees after a long moment. “I’LL WAKE YOU UP.”
4 hours.
Spamton’s hands twitch over Tenna’s shoulder. The drowsing darkner had shrunk minutely in his sleep, his chest undulating slowly with his labored breaths. Tenna’s screen played nothing at all as he slept - not dreams, not ads, not even a flicker of peace. His crimson suit was torn and bloody - not just at the sleeves, but at the back, too. Spamton’s forceful yanking of the darkner from the snowy hills into the azure-tinged-darkness had stretched the suit at the back collar, where the material hung limp over itself. And Spamton -
Spamton’s hands quiver over Tenna’s arm sockets. He had peeled the floorboards for hours, earlier, out of an endless library - like he was peeling open a ribcage, hoping the darkner’s arms had landed next to the heart. Amidst the rubble, somewhere in this maze where the snow once was. His fingertips bled - red, real blood.
(Madness was energetic - it was a horde of hecklers chasing a man with a limp, it was a rage burning in the back of his throat. Sometimes, when Spamton was angry enough, he flickered. Just slightly, just enough to be hidden under his porcelain facsimile, just enough to feel warm again.)
Silver moonlight beads on his face in the silence. Spamton stands suddenly, his body stiff and rusting from disuse. The cathedral’s corridors yawn with dread; the cold abyss yearning to swallow him whole. His footsteps reverberate as he paces, as he prepares himself to run - the only thing he’s really good at anymore; flailing around on drunken limbs, slipping around tight corners.
'what a fucking joke,' Spamton thinks - of himself. Here he is, a man hollow and sere - desecrated by circumstance and bad luck. His carapace - a thin white shell masking his shadowed face - is contorted into an uncanny, permanent smile. His hands clutch at the masks' strings and draws them tighter around the back of his head. Perched in front of this row of lustrous windows - sunlight-stripped of his dignity - he’s reduced to a glass jar of his suspended organs, with his wishes written out across his agitated skin for all the world to see. Spamton tugs at his gloves, for protection.
Kris had been the only other person to consciously register Spamton as a person since he’d dug his claws into that receiver enough to garble the piercing wail. He has yet to get used to it - worse, to being scrutinised naked, too. To being hated in such a visceral way; shifting feet, curled crows feet, rubber lips pulling into a watery smile - scared eyes.
Tenna’s screen flickers briefly.
There was a prophecy on the wall - the image is painted on his eyeballs as the memory fires across his mind - past where Spamton dragged Tenna’s dying carcass to safety. It was hidden behind a cyclopean fuschia rug of a curtain - but Spamton didn’t need to unfold the rest to know what it said.
The Lord of Screens cleaved red by blade.
Tenna’s voice came out in a murmur. Spamton swivels on his heels quick enough for dust to fly as he does. Tenna groans as he comes to, his head wobbling around on his neck like his skull’s too heavy for his body.
Spamton draws forward, then backward to re-inspect his earlier handiwork. Bandages are wrapped poorly around both jagged cuts. The knight's sword is sharp, but pointed with a dozen serrated edges. To dig into a victim; to hurt.
Spamton kneels down to try to fix his mistakes.
38 minutes.
Tenna’s shoulders are rotting. His fingers had trembled as he'd helped Spamton wrap the frayed metal plates and exposed wires in bone-white bandages. Gradually, the makeshift cast had turned a deep black, like a thousand bloodied hands had dragged their fingertips lovingly over the linen gauze until the blood had rotted, too. Oil spills out of him in concerning chunks, bathing him in his own entrails. Condensation makes the room sticky.
Tenna sat stiffly. Wire-ends too frayed to be repaired had to be shorn off and scorched closed before they unfurled further, and Spamton’s hands are shaky. The pain had eventually subsided from screeching wails into shallow keens; sharp yelps, to weak whimpering. An angrier, less frazzled Spamton would’ve admonished him for it - for moving - but he had no energy left in his hollow bones to say much of anything to the effect.
Both had the same memory on their mind - a better situation, the two stars lounging on the breakroom couch. The lights dimmed, the music slow and brass-y; spiced wine, acrid beer, cloves of roses, and tulips wilting. A slow waltz hums in the background, and the memory is gone when Spamton forgets the words.
Spamton stands, two minutes into a panic attack after the operation’s sort-of-done, to go throw up in a flower pot. Yanking his lower jaw down and out of his face - plastic casing cracking like snapped bone - enough to hurl a lunch he didn’t eat into stiffened soil. When he’s done, he watches Tenna delaminate himself from the wall and struggle to stand using it as a brace.
Tenna - now awake, now tethered and conscious - grows a little as he finds his balance on his legs. He’s a hulking figure - screen webbed with cracks and armless, leaking condensation and oil - straight out of a horror movie. Spamton grabs a coattail and clings to it - as Tenna idles - his knuckles clicking with effort.
Tenna takes a step forward. Spamton - unwarned - flies forwards with the effort, the ground shuddering slightly under Tenna’s weight. He glances down at Spamton, who broke his fall with his face. “Sorry,” he muttered, voice raw from overuse, "I didn't know — “
“WHERe ARE YOU [[Going on vacation soon?]]” Spamton says, getting up from his date-with-the-floor on two wobbly hands - wiping the dirt from his mouth as he stood.
“I don’t know where we are,” Tenna says, “I need to — “
“N[[eed a place to call home?]] TO GO BACK TO THE [[cheap Studio apartment]] ALREADY? [[Find a dog-sitter]] YOUR ARMS WHILE STILL [[Oil Leak in the pacific]]?”
Tenna hunches forward, his shoulders slumping. “Yeah,” he admits, "I want to go home.”
Spamton clamps his teeth together, grinding his jaw tremulously. He rubs a spot on his gloves where it blisters with dirt and dust. “EAHAHAHA SURE [[Trash heap]]. ON ONE CONDITION: I [[Follow your passions]] YOU. I’VE BEEN AWAKE [[Long-time deals]] AND CAN NAVIGATE BETTER THAN [[Your loved-one is Brain Dead]].”
Tenna looks forward, his screen crinkling with concentrated effort. “Fine,” he eventually relents, “but please keep it down. I have a headache."
“SURE [[Boob Tube]]. I CAN KEEP QUIET.”
3.5 hours.
The cathedral’s a labyrinth. Anyone with an IQ over 2 could’ve seen that coming - but that didn’t mean the two were any less lost. Spamton tried to be helpful, he really did, but all the corners looked the same, and after they rounded the same piano three times in a row, he began to lose his mind a little.
Tenna’s on edge. Not that Spamton isn’t - his knuckles have begun to cramp from how hard he’d clung to his former partner - but Tenna hasn’t spoken. Hasn’t utter a word - Spamton has never been so unappreciative of the silence. After all, he made a promise to keep quiet. He couldn’t break it if the CRT didn’t give him proper incentive to.
The library walls shot to the sky in crushing columns of decrepit books, closing them into narrower and narrower spaces. There’s no way to climb the shelves to the top - only shoot forwards, and hope that the scent of rat poison and the barriers of hoary cobwebs relent, even for a moment.
Tenna takes long moments to recognise he’s leading the charge at forks in the road - his screen greyed over as he dissociates. Longer still to relax his stiffened spine into a wobbly hunch; his vertebrae protruding like daggers through his suit and clicking back into place like a crane's metal arm. His breath hisses out between clenched teeth, like pained whistling.
Spamton thinks of spices and beer and lyrics he can't remember. - Then collides into Tenna’s back leg.
“Wait.” Tenna turns his whole body to peer down a skinny hallway. The endway is dark and voidward as the sky - save for the smallest glimmer of light. Distantly, blue glass twinkles in the flaxen candlelight. “I see something.”
Spamton hesitates as if to speak, but Tenna’s already squeezing through the alleyway before he can protest. Tenna’s eager silhouette distorts and wobbles in the light, uneven and grey in the distance. A cold draft whistles in at the mouth of alleyway, where Spamton finally catches up to Tenna standing statue-still.
The blue-glass morphs into a stained-glass painting of words, unaffected by angle or distortion.
A world basked in purest light. Beneath it, grew eternal night.
A droplet of sweat slides down Spamton’s temple. “WHAT A LOAD OF [[need somewhere to dispose of your Garbage?]], WHO BELIEVES IN [Tis] STUFF ANYWAY?" His smile’s wan and unconvincing.
Tenna frowns. His face is washed in the azure light, bathing him in a gentle glow that glimmers like starlight on his screen. His face - lit up with a thousand stars, a glut of jewels and twirling clouds of gas sewn into an inky night sky - stuck intently on the prophecy’s words. Spamton swallows as the silence grows, and grows, and grows arms and legs -
The light and dark, both burning dire. A countdown to the earth’s expire.
“I don’t remember this part.”
“NEITHER DO I, SO WHAT?”
The silence grows a heartbeat. Tenna turns to Spamton, his lips furled harshly downwards, his brows pinned together - pained. “You used to pray.”
“WHAT GOOD WOULD I BE AS A [[Number1RatedSalesman1997]] IF I WASN’T [God-fearing]?” Spamton chuckles, but it’s awkward and stilted, and leaves his throat as unpolished as it formed a decade ago.
Tenna scrutinises him - digs into his skin and tries looking, really looking, for the lie that he can hear. Spamton’s penance sits on Tenna’s shoulders- a devil, whispering liquid lies into his ears. “You —”
Footsteps snap shrill behind them, like wailing. It pops Spamton’s hallucination into blurry wisps of regrets, and rings like a gunshot through his sternum. Now, he’s properly tethered.
Belatedly, he realises the gentle sweat caused by the ambient humidity has melted into thick, cold rivers of fear cascading down his face. He’s drenched in the fluid, and his sweater has turned damp-dark at the hollow of his neck. Gut hollow, his breathing uneven and rough.
Tenna snaps his head over his shoulder to the sound of the footsteps and sees no figure - but snow.
A draft whistles in, howling in an icy chill.
In the distance, behind the rolling white hills, an inferno of ice roars. It approaches slowly, ever-presently. Tenna walks dazedly over to the snow -
and is arrested by nothing. He yelps and steps warily backwards, observing something greedily. Spamton approaches where Tenna has stopped and smoothes his hands over the object.
An invisible wall. Spamton crawls his fingers down the brick illusion and feels the beginnings of a windowsill and frail glass. If he could snap his fist through the fake window -
but he looked. Of course he looked, to Tenna. His screen is pressed into a crack in the wall - a brick’s divot - looking mournfully out at the snow. Out in the snow-mounds, Tenna’s body’s imprint is left dug in, with oil staining the lip of his coffin. No footsteps crowd around the imprint, no footsteps are to be found anywhere at all; nobody has even tried to look for him. Nobody has even tried to find him.
Spamton reels his fist back, and clenches it at his side.
The blizzard keens like a howling inferno. A great twister, it unfurls icy rage from the horizon to the edge of the atmosphere in a column of debris. White snow mixes with silver sand, melting into each other as a spiraling crucible.
They’re safe.
Or, rather, as safe as they can be as bystanders. Spamton watches the storm spiral towards him in a milky-white whirlpool between those invisible paned windows, arced and tall. The sky casts dark shadows over the pair of them; and the moonlight sits, fulgent, as a thin white cast over his tattered blazer.
The darkness tumbles over itself to ensconce them in shadow, but the candlelight behind them smokes, and fights - blood and bone - in ravages of amber to keep Spamton enveloped in the light. Away from his madness. - His selfishness, that chained his fist to his thigh.
“It’s over … there.”
“CAN’T DO ANYTHING FROM HERE, [[Trash heap]]. IT’S BRICK.”
Tenna rests the side of his head on the wall, angling himself to watch both Spamton and the snowstorm in the distance. His screen glimmers a faint orange colour, like a fireplace - yearning to break through. Famished of love, of amber ichor spilling from cheap vending machines.
“IMPENETRABLE.” Spamton clarifies.
Tenna thinks for a moment, shifting his bodyweight to lean back on the invisible barrier. “Why is the studio there?” He thinks aloud. “It doesn’t make sense. This was never here … before. Was it?”
“NO.” Spamton says. “I THINK I WOULD HAVE [Noticid] A BIG UGLY [[Cathedral tours on sale]] IN THE MIDDLE OF THE [[Studio apartm]] —.” he clamps his hand over his mouth.
Tenna sighs, exhaustion weighing on his shoulders like anchors made of iron. “I don’t understand.”
“ME NEITHER, BUT WE’RE NOT GOING TO — “
Glass bursts beside him, arresting him mid-sentence. Spamton whips his head around to the source of the sound, watching a slim shadow dart guiltily into the fragment of a forest sitting in the darkness. His heart rattles in his ribcage with dread.
“Was that… there before?” Tenna stands up straight, abruptly 2 feet taller.
Spamton snaps his head around in jerky, fearful movements - but finds he’s the only thing moving. Sweat gathers on his forehead like melting snow.
Behind a votive stand - billowing flaxen smoke erupting out of dozens of lanky amber candles - in the darkness, a forest stands tall and unmoving. The hairline of ruby red grass is quilted into the darkness like patchwork, and stretches as far as Spamton can see. The congested treeline wavers only slightly to an invisible breeze.
Dewdrops, moss; the sweet, rotting scent of flesh curls around him, and sits - thick and viscous like honey - atop his skin.
A seething exhaustion grips him, stretching his rubbery muscles taut. For the last few years of his life, Spamton had never stopped dreaming of cold coverlets and a pillow. He clears his throat of mucus, spitting clear acid to the ground to unclog his throat of glacial fear. Tenna grimaces in the corner of his eyes.
“NO.” Spamton answers finally.
Tenna takes a tentative step forward. The ground quivers beneath him, the shivering of stones waning as he shrinks back to a manageable height. He approaches and nudges the votive stand aside with his hips, then walks - confident as a brave fool - out into the darkness.
Spamton, though, is as confident as a coward. He rushes up to the votive stand and stands right where the nylon rug melts into the abyssal darkness. “HE-HEY HEY T[[rash heap]] SLOW [[Down south]], THAT’S NOT — “
“This wasn’t here before,” Tenna parrots, not bothering to look over his shoulder. Then: “I know this place.”
Spamton frowns. “YOU … DO?”
“A Virovirkun told me about a white, ghostly forest once.” Tenna swallows, turning his head over his shoulder. In the line of his brows - doubt. “In another dark world, that they’d glimpsed.”
Spamton feels the gears in his head - rusted from disuse - begin to churn again, blowing dust into his skull. “YOU DON’T THINK … ?” he trails off, feeling an AD well up in his throat, and watching Tenna stalk back towards the treeline. “[[Boob Tube]], IS THIS A GOOD IDEA?”
Tenna stops where the thicket begins to scratch at his plastic casing. A white branch reaches out to him devoutly, its white fingers outstretched in a grasp. “I want to go home,” he repeats, and steps into the forest.
Spamton swears under his breath and takes off towards him.
The cyclopean treeline stretches on to the dark horizon. Congested - like a mosaic of pallid bruises over pink flesh - the white forest is cut through only by large fields of graves.
Pale-barked trees - tall and slender as mountains, thin as parchment - stretch their limbs outwards into perfect crosses. Weeping charcoal leaves spring from their branches, carpeting the ground like a blanket. The forest roof is made of twilight - so black it reflects the sky like polished sheet metal - thick with stars, or glittering fruit.
Tenna has height over Spamton, taking large strides to cover fields of grass in few footsteps. Spamton runs with what energy he has, but lacks any recent sleep to cover the cost of his endeavours. At best, he’s in debt to a three-day-old nap in Kris's pocket. Spanton wobbles on his drunken limbs, whipping around branches and through thick stalks of blood-grass.
In the looming fog, black gnarls of haunted wood warp into unseemly spirals and gnarled fingers. A rotting sweetness fills the air. It’s of carrion - of meat. Scintillating doubt glances Spamton’s heart; though Tenna walks forth into the darkness unquestioningly.
A blood-starved cry quivers through the trees.
A roil of fear twists Spamton’s stomach, a rattle of dread shirking down his spine. Sweat springs over his forehead anew, dripping down his knifed ribs.
The graves grow into blood-grass as he limps forward; as he feels striding atop broken glass, feet painted in callouses that’ve memorised the jagged edges. Fronds of wheat burst from the ground in a cacophony of sound - throwing Spamton back - then grow and ripen as he approaches, stopping suddenly as his gaze pauses on the ferns. The stalks are full of kernels; all unformed, all dehydrated of sunlight.
Finally, Tenna stops long enough for Spamton to reach him and yank at his coattails. Hard. Tenna looks back - mildly annoyed if anything.
In the silence, it was clearer: Tenna’s vermillion arm-sockets belching and groaning in pain, longing for oil, and dribbling half-congealed chunks of greasy liqueur and condensation onto the pus slicked-sheen of his boots. Now unlacquered by fear or rage, exhaustion grips Spamton’s twitching fingers. “ARE YOU [[Trying To find a new job in this economy?]] GET US [[Unalive]]D?” He hisses between his teeth.
Tenna scrunches his nose, and bats at Spamton like he’s an insect trying to chew on him. “What’s wrong with you?” He spits. “You're twitchy and helpful and glitchy. I barely recognise your voice.”
Spamton grinds his teeth together. “IT’S NOT MY FAULT THAT I [[Hyperlink blocked]] AND LOST AND GOT [[Scammers melting your computer?]] BY A GOOD-FOR-NOTHING-[Robber] THAT COULDN’T HANDLE MY [[NumberOneRatedSalesman1997]] AND [[ Google.com ]] [To Much] FOR A [[Person-sized marketable plushies]] HIS SIZE.”
“The man on the phone?”
Spamton seethes , stomping his foot into the ground and grinding his heel into the rooted soil. “YES THE [&#@!]ING MAN ON THE [[End of the Receiver]] WHO LEFT ME FOR [&#@!] ALL!”
Tenna’s brows furl in anger. “Left you for nothing?!” His figure grows to the treeline - hulking down over Spamton, ensconcing him in his shadow. “Last I remember you skipped out on ME for “ FUCK ALL ”!” He barks. Tenna bends his head down to drag in the dirt, leaving skid marks as he reels - unbalanced - towards Spamton, who’s the size of a fly in comparison. “Where have you been for the last decade, anyway?! I’m sitting in some rafters, dying and you— you look like you’ve bathed in acid!”
Spamton’s throat closes up. “I — “
“Did you go take a swim with Queen in her giant pool?! Did you have fun skipping out of that door?! Letting it swing shut behind you and into MY face !” Tenna’s voice breaks, momentarily, as he shrinks an inch, then 4. His booming voice echoes through the trees, bouncing away until only the faint mention of his anger still lingers between them. Tenna shrinks - back to his normal size - and slumps against a pale-barked tree, nestling his head under a twisted branch.
Spamton clenches his hands together in front of him. He rolls his fingers over themselves, cracking the knuckles as he goes. As he does, he approaches Tenna slowly - eye-level, now, with the darkner. “...T[[rash Hea—]]ENNA.”
Tenna sobs quietly. “Where have you been , Spamton?”
Spamton feels his throat dry up. “I’VE — “
And then, water - ebony and ice-cold - bings to spread around their ankles. The water collcts over Spamton’s naked, electric skin like a blanket and fills up slowly. He scrambles where he stands, watching as the water level rises to split the forest in two from where they stood, and curl around its end to form an island of lavender. Its argent shore glimmering opal and pearl where the treeline abruptly melts into the beach.
(Tenna gargles where he is - flailing, and unable to keep himself afloat. He kicks his legs (somewhat pathetically) until the turbulence of the waves crashing against themselves begins to provide enough chaos to keep Tenna somewhat afloat. Spamton spits water out through his mask, the stream doubling back and hitting him square in the eye.)
Leathery and womblike, the rising flood spreads its watery fingers over Spamton’s cold, electric flesh. The chill-wet threat of a storm clings to the back of his neck. He beings, then, to sink - deeply, until his body is coated in thick, cloying silver blood. His wounds begin to caulk over. Spamton tries to call Tenna’s name, but finds his throat has already filled up. He closes his eyes as his head ducks beneath the waves -
Then, just as quick as it comes, it begins to recede. The silver forest melts back into black, ghostly silhouettes. Spamton opens his eyes and looks down, finding himself at the argent river’s edge. The water in his throat spills out of his mouth unprompted, leaving a puddle where he stands. Tenna creaks beside him - upright, somehow - shaking his shoes out. “What was that?” he asks - twitchy, thorny with anxiety.
Once his throat is suitably raw and dry, Spamton looks up. Amber fireflies quiver around them in a primal terror beneath the forest roof, as dusk shines through the thin lavender-tinged leaves. Spamton turns his head over his shoulder.
“Spamton?”
His shadow holds two people.