Chapter 232: Dark Light
Truth was, in Mercury's opinion, the hardest of the broken thrones to face. Yearning had been full of murderous desire and power, sure, but it was mundane in its horror. A grafted tree of flesh and bones and all of that. He could deal with it.
Joy, in comparison, had been all bright colours. Its horror lay in the insidiousness of getting you hooked. Forcing violent cycles of Joy with no ebb or flow. The horror of Joy was perpetuity, and the way it was enforced.
And, of course, Loneliness. That one was quiet. The most quiet of the broken courts. So quiet, in fact, that Mercury could almost forget about it, if he didn't focus. Its terror was a small, personal one. The fear of being forgotten.
Compare that to Truth, and they paled. Because Truth was harsh, and unforgiving, and unbelievably present. It took up the whole sky, and loudly proclaimed its existence. The terrible whispers tore at Mercury's mind, each one reaching his ears, and stinging.
Each ray of light was like a needle driven through his eyeballs and straight to his brain. He blinked, trying to make the pain go away, and tears of blood trickled down his face again. But blinking was not enough to make the truth fade. It never was going to be.
Things were not that simple, after all. That waiting maw whispered things he knew, things he hadn't known, and things he never wanted to know in his ears.
Above him, the open sky filled with eldritch power. Purple tentacles twisted into eyes, their lids rimmed with teeth, and when they blinked, the sclera disappeared, and a writhing abyss waited. Then, a tongue snaked forth from the maw.
Over and over, without pause, Truth warped in on itself. A churning mass of darkness and twisted irreality, consuming, gnawing at the weakness in someone. Because that is what Truth couldn't stand. Weakness.
Mercury was a liar. That was the
Everyone. No exceptions. People say that they're fine, that there is nothing to worry about while the world was ending. People say they've moved on. People say they care. People say they hurt, or that they break, or that they want to give up.
People lie. And Truth hated each and every one of them.
In an instant, a thousand words wormed themselves into Mercury's brain. And he knew, instantly, that they were true. That Cherry was dead. That the vain hope he was holding onto was rotten and should die. That he was being cruel by never telling her grandfather, that he had taken an innocent young girl out into the world and gotten her killed.
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[Main quest: "The rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated." completed!
Reward:
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Was it worth it? Mercury cried, red tears growing a little translucent as bitter water mixed with them. Was it worth knowing? Was it? WAS IT?!
For a brief moment, Mercury wanted to shatter Truth. Break the court fully and turn it to ash, as Finva of Dust had done to the sin of Gluttony. He wanted to raze it to the ground. Then he took a deep breath.
[
[
The ocean of his soul swallowed the rage, swallowed the fire that was lit in his soul. Its surface stilled, turning the water into a clear, reflective surface. Mercury took a deep breath in, and another out.
Rain fell around him, and he barely noticed as the storm enveloped him like a warm embrace. The whispers never slowed, never abated. The Truth was not so easily stopped. It was not kind, or comforting, or anything like that.
Mercury now saw why his main quest had remained open. It was because he had hoped, held onto it so tightly, that just maybe she was still alive. But she was not. And that was the truth.
And it hurt. It was as though someone had dragged a carving knife over his heart. In fact… yes, his heart had been cut open, physically. The cruel knowledge hurt him, at his core.
More truths flowed in, more knowledge that he hated, that he didn't want. Knowing how much his parents had hated him. How he had meant nothing to some people he wanted to be loved by. Reminders of who he had abandoned, for lack of means or time or effort.
Life was painful.
And Mercury took a step forward nonetheless.
The sky, ravaged and convulsing with eternal motion, cyclical transformations from one horror to another. A million eyes watching him, piercing him, seeing through to his core and letting him know all the things he did not want to know… It was brutal, and it was a horrible experience, and he let it wash over him.
Within his mind, the movement stilled. He didn't bother maintaining multiple minds, or fortifying them, or anything like that. Mercury met the Truth the way he always did - as himself. As a person.
It didn't require him to be exemplary, that was not how it worked. He did not need to be incredibly powerful, he did not need to shoulder the weight of the world. All he needed to carry was the weight of his own choices, and the horror of his circumstances. All he needed to do was take another step.
So he did. He stepped forward. Once, twice, again and again. The storm of horrid knowledge raged against his mind, but it fell upon it like rain on a pond. The ripples appeared, and then faded. The skies were cloudy, and bolts of horrid thunder crashed down, but the singed grass would regrow.
Mercury breathed, and he smelled something different. Truth wasn't the ozone of lightning, or the rot of wetness. It didn't carry the smoke of fire, or the cold chill of loneliness. Truth was blinding radiance, illuminating the horrors that hid. It forced things out of hiding.
And Mercury was a liar. Everyone was. And there was nothing wrong with that.
He breathed. He stepped forward. He smelled sunshine. A horrid, purple, twisted one, that gave him a nosebleed. That made his bones crunch with each step, that made his body twist. He felt himself wanting to change, his nature trying to join the cycle, join the truth. It was infectious, making him wanna turn inside out.
But with a cast of
Mercury's parents hated him. He'd known that, but wanted it to be false. He still wanted it to be false, but it wasn't, and that was okay. Some people didn't love him. Some people he'd let down. Some of his friends died, and some died because of him.
He had killed.
People who didn't deserve to die. He'd murdered in cold blood, and it was painful to see that. To look back at his own choices, at his past self, and to show kindness even when he had fucked up.
And yet. His past self was just as much part of him as his current one and his future one. He just needed to do better. Just take another step forward, just be himself. And he did.
Mercury kept moving. One foot in front of the other, one unforgivable sin after the other - forgiven.
He looked at his own cruelty and acknowledged it, at his own harshness, at his own horrid failures, and at the cruelty of others. The horrors of Truth fell upon him like hail, and they were swallowed by the lake, and slowly dissolved into peaceful quiet.
It was hard to trust, to keep going despite the cruelty of oneself and the world. But that was okay. Mercury didn't need it to be easy. This knowledge didn't make him stronger. Every bit of it hurt, but that was okay. He would live on.
Because, the
To him, at least. And as he stepped into the sky, he felt
A single step, and Mercury was in the realm of Truth.
He breathed in the radiant light. He gazed upon the way the entire realm twisted and churned. It was full of creatures who knew everything, and who hated the cursed knowledge.
Mercury felt forbidden secrets lick his mind. Worms that dug into him like burrowing maggots, trying to create festering wounds, trying to shift him. His bones turned liquid underneath his skin, turning to rubbery light, before he forced them to consolidate again.
It was a realm of change, of knowledge, of hatred and suffering. Mercury saw it all at once - radiant, blinding purple. Radiation from all parts of his spectrum, gamma rays that pierced him and tried to make his cells mutate. And, at the same time, a library. Bookshelves made from flesh, twisting tendrils hoarding horrible secrets, and throwing them openly at Mercury, hoping he would carry the burden instead of them.
All at once, it was blinding and dark, a vault of knowledge that hoarded it, and yet tried to offload it as quickly as possible. A palace of collection, tearing his own secrets out and making him watch them, over and over and over, an infinite amount of experience all at once.
Mercury took a step forward. The floor under him was malleable light and rubbery flesh at once. It was like stepping on teeth, like walking alongside a great library floor, like wading through a swamp, and not at all like moving at all.
A whisper told him of using ice magic to freeze the blood in someone's veins. It was horribly painful, you see, the feeling of your heart trying to contract, only to have a block of solid, red ice within it.
A whisper told him of the shadows tearing someone limb from limb. The terror that darkness could cause, and how to use fear to physically maim.
A whisper told him of the way grass could feed on flesh. A whisper told him how to drown someone. A whisper told him how wind could take the air from someone's lungs, how their face would turn purple, and they would suffocate in agony. A whisper told him how to take dreams and weave them into nightmares, into terror, into unmaking.
A thousand whispers told him of cruelty and horror. Mercury's eyes bled, and he acknowledged them all. It was true, after all, that magic was cruel. And he was curious. Mercury wanted knowledge, even the horrible, cursed knowledge that Truth tried to offload to him.
[
That was the notification he received after restarting his heart for the fifth time.
A whisper told him how to make it stop again.
[
That was the notification he received after turning his skin from parchment back to flesh, his bones from light back to calcium, when he stopped growing eyes at the end of his fur.
A storm of knowledge and horrors battered into him. It hurt, horribly, and it was a twisted sort of pain. The kind that spawned from within. It wasn't inflicted on him, it came from his own desires.
Until, eventually, after a storm of hail, there was a change. Rather than a brutal impact, a snowflake landed upon the
It was the Truth that he was loved.
Mercury paused, and listened to that whisper again. He drew upon the path of that snowflake, and called it down once more.
It was the Truth that he was loved.
He drew harder.
He was loved by Zyl, romantically. Loved by Avery, as a friend. Loved by Yvette and Iris, loved by Arber and Orin and Alice. Loved by-
Mercury took a deep breath, as the world of blinding radiance around him shimmered. He stepped forward, and more of the horror failed to reach him. Truth was running out.
Slowly but surely, the pain ran out.
The clouds on his mind spilled hail and lightning, spilled pain and brutality and carnage. Spilled cruelty without end, spilled each horror ever committed, each murder ever done.
And it slowly ran dry. Another gentle snowflake drifted down, and it told him he had saved people.
A thousand horrors crashed into him, before another kind Truth came. Cherry had loved their adventure, however short it had been.
A hundred horrors crashed into him. And then, he knew that Kintra was waiting for him to come home.
A dozen horrors, until he heard that the Caretaker believed he might save her brother.
Only a single more horror followed, and then the Truth rippled. It had run dry. He'd made it past all of the cursed knowledge.
His own
So many of his Skills worked in tandem, letting him process, letting him take just another step - and at the core of it, they were simply a description of who he was. He walked forward, because he had full trust in himself. He walked forward, because he wanted to. Because it was right, because it was what he wanted to do.
Mercury walked forward, despite the hardship, until he came to the kindness.
The blinding radiance was a little less bright here. It was more of a vault, a shield around the core of Truth. To some degree, after all, the ruler itself had broken under the immense weight of it all, under the horror that came with knowledge. And so, it hoarded the kind truths for itself.
No longer were there writhing tendrils on the floor. The world was a garden. Light spilled forth endlessly from a cloudless sky, and flowers of golden radiance reached upwards. Everything was woven from the same purple, arranged with care, hoarded and hidden for fear of the cruelty of the world finding it. A shield of cruelty woven around the Truth.
Mercury almost laughed. How dishonest was that? That Truth itself would hide away, would build a labyrinth of horrific knowledge, a trap of blinding brightness and malleable flesh, a twisting menagerie of monstrous magnificence. All of that, just to keep a small coven of safety.
The garden of flowers opened up to a small gazebo by a lake. The grass was small and tidy, flowers arranged in neat rows, each one a Truth. He smelled them, and the knowledge spilled forth. The kindness and love a million billion people had experienced. Each memory of hope, each treasured, cherished, tender moment.
All of them were here, because they, too, were True.
In the gazebo there was a small table and upon it was a chessboard that was, at once, a tea set. Truth sat at one side of the table. It was a shadowy wisp, one made from intertwining purple smoke, woven of horrors and kindness, of radiant light and abyssal darkness. Truth turned inside out as Mercury watched, and waved him over without moving at all.
A silent invitation revealed without being spoken. Mercury moved forward, and hopped onto the small chair at the other end of the table. It grew a little, so that he could lay down and still be at an eye level with Truth.
"So," it said. "My garden."
"You are the second broken throne to speak," Mercury noted.
Truth smiled. "Yes."
"Is there any reason for that?"
The once-ruler shifted in a way that conveyed curiosity to Mercury. "I speak to you because I wish to, because we are similar. I am able to speak to you, because you have found me, found my garden."
Mercury nodded as if it made the most sense in the world. "Right, of course. What do you want?"
"It hurts," the ruler said. "The secrets, the hiding. It hurts."
"Makes sense," Mercury nodded.
"The Truth is too heavy," it said.
"Yeah," Mercury said. "It is." A tear rolled down his eye. "No one should bear its full weight."
"But… I still want to know it all," it said.
"So do I," Mercury agreed. "We are similar, you and I."
Truth chuckled, a horrible, gargling noise, not unlike the roar of a dying star. "We are. You don't cower before the horrors."
"They hurt," Mercury said, shrugging. "But I persist."
"Why?"
"Ah, that's a complex question," the mopaaw said with a chuckle. One of the chess pieces floated to his mouth, and he drank some of the radiant light masquerading as tea in a teacup. "There's a lot of reasons. Don't you know them all?"
"I wish to hear them. From you," the ruler said. Mercury noted that their chair, a humble one, was cracked.
Slowly, he nodded. "Okay," Mercury said, drawing a deep breath. "I can do that. It's… complex. A part of it is hope, that things will improve."
"Hope," Truth muttered. "So easily shattered, so fragile. The greatest cause of despair."
"And its only enemy," Mercury smiled. "Another part is desire. I want to find myself, to see the world. It doesn't have to be a kind world. I think life is worthwhile experiencing, even when it is miserable or boring."
"People will hate you."
He shrugged. "They will. They're entitled to doing so, even. But, so what? I don't need their approval to be worthwhile. Another part of it is spite, to live because some people would want to see me dead."
"How… mortal," Truth noted.
"Oh, I disagree. I think this matters far more for immortals," Mercury smiled. "Do you not hold century old grudges? Do you really wanna give 'em the satisfaction of laying down and dying? Just cuz it's a little hard to go on?"
The ruler hummed. "I suppose not," they said eventually.
"Neither do I," Mercury smiled. He took a deep breath. "At the end of the day, though, it comes down to freedom. It always does, for me." He paused, and Truth waited patiently for him to speak.
"I want to choose," Mercury said, finally. "I want to choose to live or die, on my own terms. I want to see it all. To cherish every good memory, to change, to find myself. I want freedom. The freedom to know, to feel, to breathe. Giving up, to me, is a choice. And it is a valid one - but once I choose it, there is little going back.
"So I refuse it," he said. "I refuse to give up. At every turn. Not because it is a worse choice, but because it isn't mine. It'll always be available, always there as an option. If I want to die, at any point, then it'll be there. But wanting to live… that's hard. It's a choice I make each and every passing second. Despite the horrors, despite the pain," he said, smiling.
Truth looked at him for a long, moment, then picked up a chess piece, drank from it, and moved it on the board. "That makes absolutely no sense."
Mercury laughed. "Hahahahaha! It doesn't, does it?" He shook his head a little. "I like choosing and freedom. I like cherishing good memories, and surviving bad ones. Life, itself, has no purpose. If it did have one, that was ordained by a higher power, I'd refuse it, even."
At that, Truth tilted their head. "Why is that?"
"Because I bow to no one," Mercury said, his smile growing wider. "My choices are my own, and I want to make as many as I can, as confidently as I can. I'll bash my head into walls, I'll pick fights I have no right picking, I'll help people who I wanna help. I'll see the whole world and then some. Because that's who I am, and that's the fucking
The realm rippled at that, a wave passing through the light and the darkness, through the shelves of horror and the garden of hope. The ruler of truth shivered, their cloak of lies blown aside for a moment, revealing… nothing. Truth was a lie, in and of itself, and that was okay, too. It didn't make them any less real.
"It doesn't make sense," they said. But then, the shape shifted. "And… you say it doesn't have to."
"Everyone finds their own reason to live. Yours can be different from mine. Mine doesn't needa make sense to you, that's right," Mercury said. "So, what's yours?"
"I- I do not know."
"Hahahahahaha," Mercury laughed. "Hahaha. Isn't that silly? The Truth itself doesn't know something. Every bit of horror in your garden doesn't prepare you to know who you are, does it?" He smiled. "Don't worry. It's okay. Just a little ironic."
They smiled. "Yeah. Ironic."
"If I remake you, it might not be your Truth anymore, you know that, yeah?"
"Yes. I am aware," it said. "But… there is no shame in accepting help, and that's the Truth."
Mercury smiled. "It is." And then, he
[
And he already knew everything he'd seen. After the labyrinth of horrid cruelty, after the garden of light, the duality of it all, the terror and fear at its core, Mercury knew what was necessary. The Truth was too hard for anyone to bear, the Truth was scary and it was vulnerable, and it was horrifying. The garden of kind things was too bright, and the darkness or horror too dark. What was needed was equilibrium.
A measure at which a person might handle the Truth. A bit of kindness. Friendship. Thoughtfulness.
Was something that was unkind helpful? Or was it simply hateful? Was something kind a lie?
He smiled, and shifted a few things around. Truth itself was sharp, spiky, and dual in its nature. But there was a foundation there that was… useful. With a little bit of good intentions, he started bringing his mind to bear… and forging something Honest.