Log:Borrowed: At Least It Gets Rid Of The Bodies

Borrowed: At Least It Gets Rid Of The Bodies
Open. Slay. Close. Eat. Sleep. Open. Slay. Close. Eat. Sleep.
Participants Cordy and Etsy as ST	6 January, 2018 Almost Out, but not quite. Part of Borrowed.
Location Arcadia
How long has it been? Time blurs and bleeds together in the Borrower's arena. Sometimes the girl who will be Cordy can perfectly tell time, sometimes she can't, but exhaustion and hunger drive her no matter the time, the day, the season. Seasons come and go erratically, and run from hot and dry to hot and wet to cold and wet. There's no real plant life or passing of seasons per se, it's all erratic. The Borrower takes from her, gives to her. When she wins, she gains something. She's never really lost, but she has fled. And when she flees, something is torn away. Time passes, or doesn't. Maybe days. Maybe years. She can't tell. Tired. Often wounded. Always hungry. Always, always hungry. Unless she learns to eat rocks, the only thing left to eat is what she kills. Tired, hungry, two fights gone today, she's found today crouching on a ledge near to the edge of the Arena. The tricks she's learned in the Arena give her the ability to stretch her senses out through the earth, to keep a watch around herself through air and water and earth. To alert herself if she needs to rest. And with blood on her hands? Now's her opportunity to rest. There's bits and pieces of the Girl left, but so much driven away, torn asunder, or put to sleep. She listens, to the words spoken by light and shadow. Everything passes through one or the other, and the two collaborate to keep her informed of what moves, what steals from the light and gives to the darkness as it moves. Her ears twitch, not on the side of her head but atop, as she hunkers down and drapes what passes for a cloak over herself. It's thick fur, filthy, allowed to crust with dust and dirt and mud, to minimize the differentiation between the girl who would be Cordy and the stony ledge upon which she perches. Her heart still pounds. Two fights, two kills, two meals. She can smell their life on her hands. She tries not to think about it. Mostly succeeds. But not entirely. Little bits of her scream inside. This is wrong. It's all wrong. It's not fair. They could have lived, if this wasn't happening. But it is happening, and someone had to die, and she desperately wanted it to be Not Her. There's a trembling on the edge of the elemental alarms, a feeling of rumbling that passes up through the ground, into her feet, shaking the fur, jangling her nerves. Something is moving -- something large, moving irregularly, on the edge of where she can sense it. A towering mass of a human, dragging what looks like a body, heads for the Arena's edge. When they get there, they slam the thing they've been dragging against the jagged rocks lining that edge of the Arena, splattering what was once a person across it -- And then they start throwing themselves against the rocks, too. Over. And over. And over. Against the blood and bone and brains. The girl cringes at the brutal destruction of what had once been a person. She knows it's not a person now, wasn't when it was slammed down, but it's HARD to not react to such a devastation. And when the towering mass throws itself forward, too? She's horrified. This is beyond her experiences here, and the pieces of her, put to bed to keep her sane, start waking up and screaming inside, even as she quivers and goes more and more still, staring at the display in mute, frozen terror. What is HAPPENING?! SLAM SLAM SLAM' There's no other way to describe what's happening other than brutal suicide. The once-human creature throws itself against the rocks over and over and over and over and ... over until... a slow, stony collapse ... leaves a dead body, and a hole in the wall A hole. A messy, terrible hole, left in the wake of not one corpse, but two. But a HOLE. To someplace where she might be able to eat without killing a person. To someplace where she might not have to EAT persons. She quivers only another half-second, then... bolts. She's quick. Very quick, and she's off the ledge, on the ground, and racing towards the hole as rapidly as she can possibly manage, legs pumping, muscles screaming, chest ripping air into itself to fuel everything else. There's a way out. No one stops her. It's almost too easy. Nothing, no one, though certainly The Borrower is watching her, right? He seems to always keep his eyes on the arena. But. No one stops her. Beyond the stone, beyond the wall, some of the harshest area in the Hedge lays out before her. Miles and aeons and light years stretch out before her, huge and empty and desolate. In a way, safety lies behind her, not before. So be it. Better to fail and die as a free being than to slaughter and gnaw the bones of her victims, a monster in every definition possible. She -bolts-. There is no hesitation. Desolation, eternal paths she has no idea how to navigate, and she throws herself at it, for the chance to be something but a fiend. But a ghoul. Back there? She's the thing children cry to hear stories of. Out here? Maybe she can just be someone people cry over the grave of. At first, she runs. And then time stretches out in front of her, the earth stretches, and the heat presses in on her. Sand scours her skin, gets in under her fur. Hunger gnaws her bones as thoroughly as she's cracked the bones of other humans for its marrow. This can't go on forever, can it? And yet... Her feet burn and blister, her hands ache, her bones feel like they're ready to crack with every impact of her feet on the broken, burning ground. Running slows to jogging, to trotting, to walking to dragging. She drags herself on every single step. The searing invasion of pain through her limbs is nothing in the face of her determination to do anything but turn back. She leaves herself behind, bloodied footprints- no, pawprints, though she tries so hard to think of them as anything but- as the heat sinks into her bones. She lets it. Fights on. Stumbles, falls, rises, drags. She can't stop. Stopping is the last thing she'll ever do. So she doesn't. She does anything but. Her body betrays her, in the end. The earth around her is too harsh, the air burns her lungs, dries her skin until it cracks and blood seeps forth. She drags herself across the broken ground, right until the moment when darkness takes her. There's a distant, echoing feeling of something on the edge of her senses. It's been so long since anyone showed her mercy, she might just think that this is the end of it all. The girl lies on the edge between waking and death and feels the wind brushing past, stealing more of the last dregs of moisture she retains. Her last thought, before darkness swallows her once more, is that at least she didn't die trying to slaughter her own meal- she died trying to be better than that. The last thing the girl sees before darkness? Stars. Improbably, perfectly, a starfield fills her vision. Then: blackness. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Impossibly-precise clockwork. The click-click-click of the mechanisms and the slow, hissing unwind of the spring. Subtle sounds open up behind her closed eyelids. And then exhaustion. And then pain. Her eyes open to a field of stars overhead, to the glittering expanse of cobalt-blue set with tiny scattered diamonds, both close enough to touch and a million light years away. Grass and damp earth underneath her aching body, and then, without a cloud in the sky, rain scatters down over her, cold droplets bursting on her split lips like the answer to a prayer. A hundred little constellations play out above her, but the moon in the sky hangs like a jewel in the bellybutton of the master constellation, both woman and wolf at once, stretched across the heavens. Trees ring the glade where she lays at the base of a tower in which clocks are set up the face. The writing on the clockfaces is unintelligible, no language she has ever seen, on the lowest and highest faces. In the middle, there's something written in a Roman alphabet. Maybe German? Maybe Polish? Maybe -- it's almost midnight. Or noon. It's impossible to tell. She has no response at first. There's so little left to her. She's so broken, so tired, so hurt. She just lays. Endures. Breathes, for all it costs her throat and lips. And then- rain. Rain falling onto her- no, unto her might be more accurate, to be so gifted without a cloud above. She drinks clumsily, sucking at the air and her lips with parched tongue, every drop both painful and soothing all at once. She takes in every drop she can, then starts sucking it off her fingers, out of her hair, scooping it off her body. She's shamless, heedless of the dirt and dust she swallows with it, ineffably grateful to taste sweet, clean water at all. It's all she has time for, for the longest stretch. When finally, she starts to relax, starts to look around, to peer up at the clocks, to study the trees, to note the constellation above, she starts to become curious. But only once her belly is full of grime and sweet, fresh rain. It rains, and rains, and rains. And as the clock comes closer to midnight, a glass panel underneath the topmost clock-face slides away: again, impossibly-close and yet impossibly-far, a small humanoid shape, possibly a man, possibly a woman, possibly a robot, clambers out very quickly and climbs up to the center of the clock-face. Removing a large key from inside his--her--their own torso, the clock is re-wound, exactly seven cranks of said key. In three and a half seconds, the creature is gone, back in the clock again. With a chiming that resonates through all of the stars, the clock begins to strike twelve. The rain stops. The forest moves. Somewhere in the near distance, something rumbles, low, distended, shaking the ground. It isn't until it resolves upwards into a snarl that the girl can place it as the vocalizations of a big cat -- and if that's truly a big cat, it's the size of the legendary leviathan, or worse. How can a cat be so large as to have its snarl shake the earth? The woman -- wolf -- woman -- reaches out to the stars above Cordy, and begins plucking constellations out of the sky; they fall, shooting stars, to the forest around her. An elephant trumpets. A wolf howls. The terrified bleat of a goat. A man's raucous, merciless laughter. The bellow of an enraged moose. The earth beneath her begins to shiver and shake, as the last of the rain closes the wounds on her skin, setting her to zero. Healing her. Blackness rises up alongside the woman in whose belly the moon is set like a jewel, and from within that velvet blackness, eyes like twin suns open in the face of a creature both panther and man. In the pit of her stomach, as she watches the wolf-woman the size of a universe lean into the darkness, she knows what this is, even if she can't understand how she got here. It's jus another arena. Just another place to kill or die. No. It can't be. Not all that way. All that pain, all the blood, the pain- the /pain/ of taking every eternal, unending step in the unceasing, desperate attempt to flee. Escape or die. That was her plan. Either freedom, or an end. But this is neither. This is denial of an end, this is just some- horrid replacement, some cruel swap of one deathly arena for another. This one is lush, this one is wet, this one is death surrounded by life, but it is at its heart the same game she crawled through brains and blood and bone to escape, the same game she bled and stumbled and fell and rose to escape. Only here, the skies watch them die. Outrage, fury, despair, well up inside and quail in the face of the overwhelming, literally cosmic terrors above her. The stars have teeth and the dark has eyes. Something in her breaks, and through the hole, she throws everything but her fear. That, she draws so tight as to choke herself on it as she drags it like a lead, forcing herself to move, to flee, to hide, to -learn.- There's rules. There's always rules. She learned the rules before and hid between them, emerging to kill and eat and vanish again. The light, the darkness, they still whisper to her. She can barely hear them over the screaming horror of having the skies themselves idly watching her in this place, but they whisper and she flees from the eyes in the dark, the teeth in the stars, the Things so large they wear the moon as decoration. She flees and she cowers, and she -listens.- Another cycle, and another, and another. Another way to kill or die, but now? She can see -- sometimes -- the audience. Is it worse when she knows that They're watching her, or worse when the Arena is open and they kill and die but the skies are empty, and They have gone wherever They go -- together, always together -- when they're not watching? The Arena opens, and the little glades join together, and they fight. None of the plants are edible unless it's raining, she learns to her chagrin, having once, twice, three times vomited them up when she tries to eat them rather than eating something that used to be human. She learns to drink the rain. She learns the chiming of the clock. She learns that the man -- it is a man -- inside the Arena Clock is terrified of all the competitors. Sometimes she can hear him talking to himself inside the clock, but he will never answer her. The trees patch her wounds in between rounds, and in between rounds, some of the competitors are returned to the skies, moving galaxies, constellations of man and beast. They never go easy: they always go screaming, begging, pleading. Not again, not again. Birds move in the trees between rounds. Raptors and vultures, hooked beaks and talons. No one, in the end, stays out of the fights. Over and over again, She flees from the eyes in the dark and the teeth in the stars, from the sounds which are sometimes lies but often true. She hears the whispers in the trees from the avians overhead: Their Graces, Their Graces. She explores the Arena, looking for its edges, and finds the dark, deep waters in a moat around this little world, sees the shapes moving within the waves. Sees the waves rise up and disgorge teeth and fins when a man who is also a tiger tries to swim for it. Not one, but six hungry mouths in the prettiest little faces tear him apart, leave the water dark, but they flee at the arrival of a massive leopard seal. These tiny dramas play out, hour over hour, day after day, and she knows the time perfectly in Arcadia, even if she forgets that incessant ticking and the exactness of the Arena Clock thereafter. She lives her life by the cycle: Arena Open. Kill or Die. Arena Close. Rain. Sleep. Arena Open. Hour over hour, day over day, year over year. Kill or die, fade or fight. Hide and strike and hide again. Arena Open. Kill or Die. Arena Close. She Bargains. So many deals. She barters, with Water itself, to try to call up drink when the rain isn't falling, only to find the water that springs from the earth or courses in from the moat is bitter and salted unless the skies say otherwise. She bargains with stone, trying to wall herself off when the Arena opens, only to find her opponents to have their own ways past her guards. She barters with metal, ice, with lightning- with sand and flame and light and shadow, and none of them, not -one-, ever finds a way to save her from the fights. Every plan she weaves, "chance" or providence or fate undoes, leaving her facing down someone else, some other life she's no choice but to snuff to spare her own. A life to slaughter to feed her own. She finds no escape from conflict. But she finds oh so many weapons to end it. She can't hide from the Arena or its rains, so instead she hides a fire from them, molds stone into a home for a blaze she never lets die. When her foes are sent to her, flames consume the battleground while she watches on, little more than a glimmering light herself in the heart of the flames consuming her foes. When they happen to turn away the inferno, she smothers them in stone, freezes them in ice, drowns them, electrocutes them, runs them through with weapons she's never wielded that fly at her command. Open. Slay. Close. Eat. Sleep. Open. Slay. Close. Eat. Sleep. The only change is what she kills with. The only change is what she's eating. Her only rebellion becomes the sleeping times, when she sings to herself. Off-key, badly, half the words forgotten, but she sings. In French. In Italian. In English and in her mother tongue. She sings the songs she can remember, and the ones she's afraid she's forgotten and she cries and she mourns. This isn't triumph. This is imprisonment. This is torture. Every time she survives, she cries herself to sleep, another little caern built and buried, to be forgotten by the forest. She casts what she doesn't eat into the waters while it's still fresh, that those pretty little faces might get to eat without having to kill. She doesn't know if they want to or not. But at least it gets rid of the bodies.