@r3v3n4nt-000 : iām the only one alive in this town. what does that make you?
has she not noticed it yet? the sea of people seething and heaving towards us, with their black umbrellas and their long coats? clara, apparently i didn't warn you enough, or i warned you too well. i have spent long hours describing eskew-in-ruins, or my memories of it alone. i did not mention the fact that eskew once designed a scenario in the cabin of a plane to give me my escape, or trapped riyo in some place that i dared not ask about. the problem with this city is that it is malleable, that given enough time and material and rotten imagination, it can make anything.
because you are right, clara, in that i am dead and the people coming down the street are not quite people. you are closer to being alive than all of us, frozen as you are. and about those people -- have you looked behind you yet? because i can perceive the gauzelike film of their faces. i can see the slits where their mouths should be, and the dripping black holes of their sunken eyes, black liquid spreading out from the holes to stain the gauze. they are wearing masks, you see. if we are lucky they will merely push past us, unseeing. if we are unlucky, then, well --
oh, clara. i think i've made a terrible mistake.
i was trying to help rather than stand by. riyo would want me to help. but there lies the rub, don't you see? my help brings harm. i knew all this and i did it anyway.
eskew split open the world, and now i've brought you and your wonderful machine here. at least there is no sign of your friend, a woman who calls herself me as a matter of self-definition. she cannot be killed. do you know how much fun this city might have finding ways to take her apart? but you are just as much of a problem too. not the valeyard. i mean you, clara, because try as you might, and you were quite successful, there is a part of you that is curious about a place like this. all those tapes. my voice like a breadcrumb trail, me as hansel and you as gretel in the tangle of eskew. have i accidentally led you towards the warped puzzle-amalgamation of flesh called why and how, blue eye and brown blinking slowly above a set of two gums and teeth melded together, layered like the teeth of a shark? if i glance back, will i see that railway bridge too close suddenly, and the splash of bodies hurling themselves into it, drawn to drown?
i learned your story. through it, i've fallen into the trap again. i have, again and again, warned you, and by warning you, i have introduced you and eskew to each other as if handing you off like a lover in a ballroom dance only to watch you whirl away into a sea of people. much like the mob still making its way down the road towards us. slowly. steadily. as if they are in no hurry, and have nowhere to be. which is quite possible here, all things considered.
"maybe you're right," i say. "maybe i've just been wasting my time with all this, because i died months ago or years ago. i'm not even sure any more. i don't know how long it's been. but the fact that you want to stay here? i can't believe that. that i can't tear you away from this. because i know you think that maybe eskew can force change, like i told you. maybe eskew could even take you out of whatever state you're in. but it wouldn't, clara, because the one thing about this city that is universally true is that it likes to watch someone suffer. and i can tell you that once it understands how miserable you are, as you are? it will want to see you like this every day for the rest of time, even as the universe starts to crack apart under the strain."
i can imagine it. the way it would strip everything from you, clara, down to nothing at all. how it would hollow you out and then offer you what you wanted at the very end. a release of some kind. an escape.
change comes, but not because you want it to. it comes when you are most comfortable, finally. i loved allegra. i did. and i grew comfortable in that, ever so briefly, and that alone might be why eskew saw fit to warp her as it warped everything else, while leaving me much the same. it thinks it is giving you what you want. didn't it tell me it had finally given me purpose?
that's the dangerous thing. places were so often depicted as relatively mindless when they were living, a warped understanding of what its purpose as a location was. eskew is anything but. it knows exactly what you want, and that alone is what makes it more dangerous than any place any of us have ever seen. it acutely understands yearning.
it wanted me, once, and i said no.
so now this is a dead town. i almost thought about taking you to see the ruins of eskew instead, the tank with entrails pouring out of it, the ruined landscape, the sky turned grey as if about to rain but never relinquishing a drop. you've seen the end of the universe, or so you tell me, and i should've asked if you wanted to see another as proof of what i know. of what i know might happen. of what i know has happened, already, and is probably still happening across other spaces and other times. if i had showed you that, would you be more resistant now?
or would you have looked even more? maybe there was never a good way out for me.
"so come with me," i say. "before the mob reaches us. just -- just take my hand and we will start running until i find a way out."
there has to be a way out. eskew is extending always, and as it stretches itself out further, there must be more cracks in its world. and i have always been good at seeing those, even when i was younger.