just_muse_me 15.1.2 {RP with bulletcarnage}
"If you're going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
Kanda awoke to stillness, the near-silent whisper of falling snow. It coated his bare shoulders and his hair, which fell loose and limp and already wet over his cheeks and back.
There should have been a rumble, the shake of the room disintegrating around his ears, the sound of him falling into oblivion along with the cracked stone. Instead there were only the chill smooth banks of snow not even marred by the footprints and furrows of the battle Kanda knew he'd fought just meters away before he lost consciousness.
He remembered everything: the fight with Skinn, standing off against the Noah's penultimate blast, Mugen shattering in his hand, the final winning blow he'd dealt, and the room crumbling down around him before everything went black. He hadn't expected to wake up again. And now that he had-
Pushing himself to his knees, Kanda took stock of his surroundings: his fist was closed around Mugen's hilt, the blade was inexplicably whole, and his body, though naked to the waist, was uninjured.
Because there was no other choice to make, he staggered to cold-numbed feet and started walking. The door to which he'd been heading when the room's download got too far along was again whole and solid before him, and beyond that hallways, rooms, doors and corridors that turned unexpected angles and deposited him back into the outside of the city that was the Ark.
The whole way there was no one. No sign left by his comrades' passing nor by his enemies. No sign that any feet but his had crossed over the thresholds and paving stones in eons, though they must have done because Kanda sensed that he had not been unconscious more than a minute or two before he awoke in the snow.
Because their objective before had been to attain the city's highest tower, he went on still towards it. It wasn't the urgency of the disintegrating Ark that quickened his steps now, since the stone around him was as solid as any city he'd ever walked through and there wasn't so much as a tremor beneath his feet. It wasn't just the closing press of isolation, for Kanda didn't sense merely that he was alone-he would not have minded being alone; he preferred to work alone. And he would not have minded the knowledge that the city around him was dying and that he must to race to escape it. That would have been a discrete and comprehensible exigency.
Instead, it was the absence of any such surety that made him hurry onward through the doors: it was the unsettlingly paranoid sense that there was no one here and, more importantly, that there had never been, so there would be no way out, so that he would find only emptiness in room after room. It was the sense that this place he was in now was only the afterimage of an Ark that had already downloaded and that he was only here by a chance glitch in code, an inescapable malfunction that would trap him in the dead city forever.
There was no one in the room atop the highest tower. No sign that any living thing had been through before him. A long empty table, bare and unadorned, a few doors that led only to more bare and lifeless rooms, a piano, a couch. No exit.
He told himself, If this place exists at all, there must be a way out of it. There must be someone alive in the city. He tried to force himself to calm by repeating the words in his mind, tried to dispel the yammer in his chest that whispered again and again There is someone alive in the city: it's YOU. He passed through door after door, lost himself in labyrinthine corridors that only eventually deposited him back outside onto the bleached white of the cobbles. There was light, but there was no sun only a uniform, unchanging illumination that gave no warmth. In some of the rooms it poured rain or blew wind in gales. In some there was no floor but only an empty expanse of water too deep for vision to plumb. A few held desert sand and heat that rolled in waves with the force of solid rock making it hard to draw breath.
It was in one of these, atop a mesa which stood in solitary silhouette against the otherwise rolling horizon, that he found the fissure, jagged like a wound cut into the rock but wide enough that he could, by crouching, pass inside. It was dark within, the stone raw and uncut and smelling of earth. The passage went on a long way. So long, in fact, that though its diameter decreased gradually along its length, by the time it had become small enough for Kanda to have to kneel, it didn't occur to him to turn back. And by the time he had to make his way along at a crawl, pressed low on hands and knees with the ceiling still brushing his back, he could have no doubt that this was indeed a passage that led to something and no natural cave in the rock (not that there could be any such thing as natural when he was not on earth at all but in some infernal Noah-devised parody of it).
There was no sound but his breath and the rustle of his body as he crawled. And there was no light at all. He couldn't have drawn his sword if he'd had to fight. Yet somehow the only fear to gnaw at him was that the culvert might become too narrow for him to squeeze through before he reached its terminus. It must have been that which drove him, at last, to inch along on his belly, arms outstretched above his head, even when the aperture became so small that it threatened to trap him.
He had no way to mark the passing of time, but he could, at last, feel the crevasse begin to open gradually around him, a mirror of its slow constriction. Now he could crawl, now kneel, and at last regain his feet. His hands and knees were bruised and raw, and he could feel that his chest and forearms and the front of his trousers had been torn against the rock, but he didn't allow himself to stop, convinced that whatever he would finally come out to, it would be at least somewhere unlike the hopeless emptiness of the ark he'd left behind.
But none of that prepared him for what met his eyes when he did at last emerge, blinking against a brightness that seemed to burn his cornea even with the long slow adjustment they'd had as the tiny sliver of light on the very limits of his vision grew bigger and bigger with every step he took towards it. When he emerged again into the outside world, the first thing that he saw was rock and sand, and he dropped to his knees in helpless defeat: it wasn't different than what he'd left behind at all.
It was only belatedly, as a tiny brown lizard the size of his finger skittered haltingly over the ground and through the periphery of his vision that his breath caught and his eyes shot up.
He was kneeling near the base of a great terraced slope, like a broad steep staircase of stone, though not stone of the sort he was used to seeing. This was ruddy and smooth, like baked clay, only a shade apart from the sandy ground around him. At his back was a nearly-sheer cliff that towered some fifty or sixty feet above and whose surface was pockmarked with dark recesses so that it looked almost spongy and so, were he not still knelt immediately at its threshold, would have made the cleft from which he'd emerged nearly impossible to distinguish or to ever find again. The rock face didn't end at the top of its vertical ascent, however, but instead curved forward overhead, stretching above him like a great roof of stratified clay so that only a thin swath of blue sky was visible between it and the rim of the stone structures before him. He was, in effect, in a giant concavity of rock, and so, he began to see as he look around him, was the entire expanse of what appeared to be a city molded and carved from the earth all around.
For long moments he knelt panting, the heat even in the shade of the rock making the dry air coarse and heavy. And then, at length, having no other option before him, he began to climb the terraced clay into the mysterious city before him.
Kanda awoke to stillness, the near-silent whisper of falling snow. It coated his bare shoulders and his hair, which fell loose and limp and already wet over his cheeks and back.
There should have been a rumble, the shake of the room disintegrating around his ears, the sound of him falling into oblivion along with the cracked stone. Instead there were only the chill smooth banks of snow not even marred by the footprints and furrows of the battle Kanda knew he'd fought just meters away before he lost consciousness.
He remembered everything: the fight with Skinn, standing off against the Noah's penultimate blast, Mugen shattering in his hand, the final winning blow he'd dealt, and the room crumbling down around him before everything went black. He hadn't expected to wake up again. And now that he had-
Pushing himself to his knees, Kanda took stock of his surroundings: his fist was closed around Mugen's hilt, the blade was inexplicably whole, and his body, though naked to the waist, was uninjured.
Because there was no other choice to make, he staggered to cold-numbed feet and started walking. The door to which he'd been heading when the room's download got too far along was again whole and solid before him, and beyond that hallways, rooms, doors and corridors that turned unexpected angles and deposited him back into the outside of the city that was the Ark.
The whole way there was no one. No sign left by his comrades' passing nor by his enemies. No sign that any feet but his had crossed over the thresholds and paving stones in eons, though they must have done because Kanda sensed that he had not been unconscious more than a minute or two before he awoke in the snow.
Because their objective before had been to attain the city's highest tower, he went on still towards it. It wasn't the urgency of the disintegrating Ark that quickened his steps now, since the stone around him was as solid as any city he'd ever walked through and there wasn't so much as a tremor beneath his feet. It wasn't just the closing press of isolation, for Kanda didn't sense merely that he was alone-he would not have minded being alone; he preferred to work alone. And he would not have minded the knowledge that the city around him was dying and that he must to race to escape it. That would have been a discrete and comprehensible exigency.
Instead, it was the absence of any such surety that made him hurry onward through the doors: it was the unsettlingly paranoid sense that there was no one here and, more importantly, that there had never been, so there would be no way out, so that he would find only emptiness in room after room. It was the sense that this place he was in now was only the afterimage of an Ark that had already downloaded and that he was only here by a chance glitch in code, an inescapable malfunction that would trap him in the dead city forever.
There was no one in the room atop the highest tower. No sign that any living thing had been through before him. A long empty table, bare and unadorned, a few doors that led only to more bare and lifeless rooms, a piano, a couch. No exit.
He told himself, If this place exists at all, there must be a way out of it. There must be someone alive in the city. He tried to force himself to calm by repeating the words in his mind, tried to dispel the yammer in his chest that whispered again and again There is someone alive in the city: it's YOU. He passed through door after door, lost himself in labyrinthine corridors that only eventually deposited him back outside onto the bleached white of the cobbles. There was light, but there was no sun only a uniform, unchanging illumination that gave no warmth. In some of the rooms it poured rain or blew wind in gales. In some there was no floor but only an empty expanse of water too deep for vision to plumb. A few held desert sand and heat that rolled in waves with the force of solid rock making it hard to draw breath.
It was in one of these, atop a mesa which stood in solitary silhouette against the otherwise rolling horizon, that he found the fissure, jagged like a wound cut into the rock but wide enough that he could, by crouching, pass inside. It was dark within, the stone raw and uncut and smelling of earth. The passage went on a long way. So long, in fact, that though its diameter decreased gradually along its length, by the time it had become small enough for Kanda to have to kneel, it didn't occur to him to turn back. And by the time he had to make his way along at a crawl, pressed low on hands and knees with the ceiling still brushing his back, he could have no doubt that this was indeed a passage that led to something and no natural cave in the rock (not that there could be any such thing as natural when he was not on earth at all but in some infernal Noah-devised parody of it).
There was no sound but his breath and the rustle of his body as he crawled. And there was no light at all. He couldn't have drawn his sword if he'd had to fight. Yet somehow the only fear to gnaw at him was that the culvert might become too narrow for him to squeeze through before he reached its terminus. It must have been that which drove him, at last, to inch along on his belly, arms outstretched above his head, even when the aperture became so small that it threatened to trap him.
He had no way to mark the passing of time, but he could, at last, feel the crevasse begin to open gradually around him, a mirror of its slow constriction. Now he could crawl, now kneel, and at last regain his feet. His hands and knees were bruised and raw, and he could feel that his chest and forearms and the front of his trousers had been torn against the rock, but he didn't allow himself to stop, convinced that whatever he would finally come out to, it would be at least somewhere unlike the hopeless emptiness of the ark he'd left behind.
But none of that prepared him for what met his eyes when he did at last emerge, blinking against a brightness that seemed to burn his cornea even with the long slow adjustment they'd had as the tiny sliver of light on the very limits of his vision grew bigger and bigger with every step he took towards it. When he emerged again into the outside world, the first thing that he saw was rock and sand, and he dropped to his knees in helpless defeat: it wasn't different than what he'd left behind at all.
It was only belatedly, as a tiny brown lizard the size of his finger skittered haltingly over the ground and through the periphery of his vision that his breath caught and his eyes shot up.
He was kneeling near the base of a great terraced slope, like a broad steep staircase of stone, though not stone of the sort he was used to seeing. This was ruddy and smooth, like baked clay, only a shade apart from the sandy ground around him. At his back was a nearly-sheer cliff that towered some fifty or sixty feet above and whose surface was pockmarked with dark recesses so that it looked almost spongy and so, were he not still knelt immediately at its threshold, would have made the cleft from which he'd emerged nearly impossible to distinguish or to ever find again. The rock face didn't end at the top of its vertical ascent, however, but instead curved forward overhead, stretching above him like a great roof of stratified clay so that only a thin swath of blue sky was visible between it and the rim of the stone structures before him. He was, in effect, in a giant concavity of rock, and so, he began to see as he look around him, was the entire expanse of what appeared to be a city molded and carved from the earth all around.
For long moments he knelt panting, the heat even in the shade of the rock making the dry air coarse and heavy. And then, at length, having no other option before him, he began to climb the terraced clay into the mysterious city before him.