sinking down, down

[facultwist]

Death is a drop into a blackness that swallows you. You feel the movement of not air but shadow across your face as you plummet, and there is no bottom. No crash.

If there is another side, you do not reach it.

It is neither the light of heaven or the fires of hell that greets you when you wake. And wake you do, to the buzz and flicker of old fluorescent lights.

You are laid out beside a full-size competitive swimming pool, half-filled with stagnant water. The doors out are blocked off by locked doors covered in caution tape. The locker rooms are long since emptied, paint peeling from the humidity. The only signs of habitation are a few pieces of scattered graffiti.

Welcome to your new home. There's no sunlight, no indication of time passing. Just you and each other and your thoughts. the stagnant water bubbles a little occasionally, but there's nothing in it.

Before long you'll realize that you no longer need to eat or drink. You might notice your hand go through something if you don't focus. You're a ghost now. What's that they say about unfinished business?

Comments

[ergine]

I don't know. I guess it's not as jarring as it could be, like this.

[rosewitch]

That's fair. It's comparatively pretty warm, at least.

[And disgusting.]

[She weighs her words before continuing. There's something like How are you doing? but not the same that she wants to ask. Something less inane.]

Were you expecting that? The change when we didn't do what it wanted. [How helpless the Interim Headmistress was.]

[ergine]

[ Kohaku hums, toneless. ]

Well... It isn't as though we could have survived out there like that. We would have frozen before we had the chance to starve. [ Theoretically, there was a way across the ice—but every game before has felt rigged, so to Kohaku, that had been little more than a choice to die now or to die later. ] Still, I wonder what would have happened if there hadn't been any interference. Would everyone have been forced to sit and watch for hours? Days?

[ She's just kind of thinking out-loud here, though. So far as a more concrete answer goes, she does finally offer: ]

I guess what I actually expected was for the ice to just collapse. The stoning... It felt almost petulant, don't you think?

[rosewitch]

Yes. It felt angry. But childish. Like we'd ruined something by not doing it a certain way. It felt like a different creature entirely than the Interim Headmistress.

[It felt like something old and set in its ways. Something used to getting its way. Something that wanted the story to be told correctly.]

That we were punished wasn't good enough. The way it chose for us might be more important than we thought.

[ergine]

Yes—I thought there was a chance that if we resisted, Miss Interim Headmistress would be forced to appear and punish us herself. However, it seems there was another force at play we weren't aware of.

Well, either way... I hope that information is useful to the ones who are still alive, somehow.

[rosewitch]

I think it will be. Nobody's thought of that yet, I don't think. At least they haven't voiced it.

[. . .]

Thank you. For resisting.

[ergine]

You don't need to thank me for that, Anthy. Ah... But I am glad that you were with me, in the end.