@worldsave sent: " no one should have to feel responsible for the entire world. "
it must be strange, to see someone you probably thought lost. i told valkyrie cain and skulduggery pleasant once that eskew was unescapable for those it wanted to stay. that they were a rare, rare thing -- travelers who would likely be permitted to leave. they could show me an exit and i doubted i would even be able to see it. yet here i am, escaped, gone, elsewhere, and yet not truly escaped because i am, once again, the bearer of bad news. it would be nice to show up with good news for once, but it has been so many years since i have been anything but a collection of ill omens that i doubt i'd know what to do with it. i don't know what to do with most good things that come my way.
it was a surprise, after flitting through enough worlds not touched by eskew, relieved to know that maybe, just maybe, it was sated with whatever space it had crawled into.
as if i don't know which world it destroyed. as if i don't know which world i gave it access to, the one i sent my transmissions into like signal flares and watched them die again and again. it was my fault this time. but now, i think, it will eventually try to reach everywhere. then there is no more not-eskew, and only eskew, and maybe that's the eventual end. that, in itself, is a kind of punishment for eskew. nothing to witness it but itself, and i know that feeling, and how hollow that is.
in that way, even if i lose, perhaps i earned some kind of victory by persistence. it's the only thing i've ever been good at. but for now, i am still in the midst of a long-running war. no direct battle. just a long and desperate skirmish, trying to make sure eskew gets only what it has. it's constructive, i think, for everyone to learn to use what they have and not overstep once again.
so it's for that reason alone that i find myself, as if by fate but maybe more by will, somewhere unlike the places i am used to. london was london. eskew sometimes seemed to take notes from old eastern european architecture, rain-soaked and dismal, though the latter was nothing new to me. this doesn't look like that, and i know exactly where to go because i know which places have been touched by eskew. people are sometimes just places, too, with interiors and exteriors and many selves moving through them. this is something i have learned about myself, including in the places where my reflection momentarily peeks through. in panes of glass and puddles.
when valkyrie invites me in, we sit at her table drinking coffee, and i try to explain what happened. maybe she knows. how i am barely solid. how, for a moment, when i brushed past her, maybe she felt nothing at all, or only the whisper of presence. i died and then i did not. i found myself between. then i stayed.
❝ yes, ❞ i agree mildly. ❝ well, as it is, i think i find myself responsible for one world, and stopping it, and therefore responsible for every world. not that i asked for it. but here i am regardless. ❞ i'm trying to smile. it's not really working. instead the expression flickers awkwardly at the corners of my mouth, flat and not really going anywhere. ❝ funny, i suppose, how things work out. ❞