The Wyrms of &alon

167.1 - Alles auf dem Kopfe stehend


After much effort, I finally managed to squeak out a sound:

"What…?"

Andalon's eyes lit up in excitement as I came back to life.

Me, her favorite toy.

She smiled a little, and nodded once, almost solemnly. "I am the fungus. &alon is the fungus." She spread out her arms again and then pointed at me. "With you and all the other transfees, I took what you were and made you part-a me. Part-a &alon." She nodded again, kind of bobbing her head, like a kid nodding at their first ever school project. "I'm here to help, Mr. Genneth. I'm here to save you. I'm gonna save everybody."

I stuttered. "S-Save…?"

No. No no no no no no.

"This can't be happening. This can't be happening." To my own surprise, I looked her in the eyes. "How can you be the fungus, Andalon? You're supposed to be one of the Angels! You're the Moonlight Queen! You're one of the good guys. We're the good… we…"

Andalon gave me a quizzical look. "Ain-gel?" She tilted her head to the side. "Oh," she straightened her posture, "you mean the Shiny Guys?" She shook her head. "Nuh-uh. I'm not a Shiny Guy." Her quicksilver temperament lowered her smile into melancholic regard. "I dunno what I am," she said. "&alon is just… &alon." She repeated the word like a mantra. "&alon, &alon, &alon…"

"But… what about the war? The War in Paradise? What about Kléothag and Azon and Ooüm, and the Tachyonim, and—"

"—I don't know them." She shook her head and her fists, getting more upset with me. "I don't know!" She stared at me longingly. "I don't know, I don't know, I don't know! Why do you have to ask me stuff I don't know!" Tears welled in her eyes.

"What?"

Everything had shattered. The world had turned on its head.

"Until I met you," she said, "I was always so alone." She struggled to smile through her tears. "I've tried being nice to the wyrms. I try and try. I tried for so long!" she said, "so, so long! I do this, I do that, I give them all sorts of things, but they don't like me. They're mad at me, Mr. Genneth! They say I hunted them and killed them and turned them into monsters. But I didn't! I help them! Why are they mad at me? I don't get it! I'm just helping! They say they don't like being wyrms, but they'd all die if they weren't, and I don't want them to die! I don't want anybody to die! It's like you said: I'm one of the good guys! The good guys!"

She wept profusely, hiccuping and snotting.

Her lips quivered into a smile. "But… you understand, Mr. Genneth! You know! You always knew! Can—can you talk to them? Please? Can you talk to the wyrms? You made Miss Leen understand. You made Yuta and Geoffy understand. You helped so many people understand, Mr. Genneth! You're so good at it! Please, make the wyrms understand that I'm helping them. I'm helping everyone! It could be so much worse." She shook her head. "It could be so, so much worse. They don't understand. It's so scary. So so scary!"

Understanding poured onto me like cold molasses, slowly percolating into the recesses of my mind. I marinated in her words.

Sword stab me…

It would have been so much easier to just write her off as evil incarnate—a demented monster. Darkest hate made for the perfect refuge. But I couldn't.

I knew her too well.

I yanked my tail across the fractured pavement and lurched away from her, and then took a deep, trembling breath.

"You really don't get it, do you, Andalon?"

No.

I was drawing a line. She was Andalon no more. Heck, she never had been. This was &alon, the Princess of Broken Memories—and nothing else. She'd more than earned that impossible ampersand. She didn't belong here. She was an alien thing, blue and orange in her morals. The little girl I'd thought I'd known was just a misrepresentation, the handiwork of an evil too stupid to remember what it really was.

I spat at her. "Get away from me!"

My spores hissed where they hit the pavement.

Now it was her turn to recoil. "What? M-Mr. Genneth?" She staggered back in horrified disbelief. Her eyes quivered with tears; her mouth was a crooked cave. She tried to pull her lips into a smile. "But I… I did like you said. I remembered something, so I told you, just like you said. Just like you said!"

Hope twinkled in her eyes.

"Please! Maybe… if we go really fast, we can save lots more people," she said. "We just gotta put me in them, and then I can give them to you and all the other wyrms. The Darkness won't take them if we get them first and then run away real fast!"

Beast and Queen, it was like looking at myself in the mirror. My words broke her just like hers had broken me. She had that same despondent hope; that same, egregious faith that there was some way to salvage our dissolving paradigms.

But there wasn't. The foundations were melting, and there was no way to stop it.

Pride came before the fall, and after that, there was only darkness.

I hissed in breath. "It's all because of you, isn't it?" I said. "All…" My voice broke. I gagged. "…all this time… you…"

If &alon was the fungus, then everything I knew was suspect. My struggles? My hopes? They were all adrift.

I'd thought the light of faith had been snuffed out. My heart had been iced. But then &alon came into my life, and it turned out that light in my heart was still there, waiting to shine. It wanted truth, yearned for it.

Who wants to live in a meaningless world, doomed to suffer pain and disaster without justification or recompense?

Not I.

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Even now, in desperation beyond desperation, I was reaching for anything—anything—I could think of to absolve her of her crimes, or at least frame them in a better light. But, no, there was nothing, absolutely nothing.

Angel, I hated myself for having even tried!

"Don't you understand, &alon," I said. "You say you want to save us, but… just look at what you've done, and what you're still doing! You're killing people! You've murdered billions, and turned the rest of us into monsters!" I spread my arms at the devastation around us. "Look around! Look at this! Look at what you've done! You've destroyed us! Was my world perfect? No! But it didn't deserve this! No one does!"

"No! No no no no no no!" &alon clasped at the sides of her head as she shook her head side to side. It was a spastic motion, like a lawn sprinkler. "I don't kill people," she said. "Killing is when you go away forever. FOR-EV-ER!" She stopped her feet. "I don't kill people. I don't! I don't! I don't! I save them, Mr. Genneth." She patted her chest. "I! Save! Them! I make some people into wyrms, and I put the rest into the wyrms." She nodded vigorously. "It's like a cookie jar. It's like a cookie jar!"

She was the cruelest murderer any world would ever know.

My lips puckered. My whole body tingled with emotion. I scoffed, shaking my head as I softly laughed in the loudest kind of sorrow.

"You're no savior, &alon…"

Destroyers of worlds always have the prettiest eyes, don't they?

"…you're a monster."

God… I wanted to rip those sea-blue eyes of hers out of her noggin and pop them with my claws.

"No!" She swung an arm. Light plumed off her eyes. Her wings flared behind her, stretching tall and wide. "You're not listening! Why aren't you listening! You're supposed to understand! You understood before!" She shook her head and arms, in full temper-tantrum. "It's not fair! It's not fair! I try so hard, but everyone is so mean to me! You were different! Why'd you change? Why? Why?"

"You kill people Andalon! You destroy lives!"

"No! I don't! I don't kill! I save! I save I save I save! It's the Darkness that kills! It kills and kills! It takes everything away forever! Please, Mr. Genneth, you have to believe me, please! We have to help them! We have to save them!" She fell to one knee, sobbing profusely. Her wings of blue flame flopped onto the ground behind her. "Don't… don't…—"

"Don't you get it?" I said. "You are the darkness, &alon! You're the evil you're trying to stop! So do yourself a favor: just stop! We didn't ask to be saved, &alon."

"But then you'll die! You'll be lost forever! And that's a really long time!"

"You offer immortality, but at what cost?" I shook my head. "You charged us a price we never agreed to pay! We never asked for your help. I certainly didn't! We didn't want it! We didn't need it! We never needed you, &alon. We needed to be saved from you. Angel's breath," I lashed my arms out at our surroundings, "if this is what your salvation looks like, I'd rather be in Hell!"

She was down on both knees, now, teetering from side to side like a tchotchke in the wind.

Her voice dropped to a heartbroken whisper. "But I need it, Mr. Genneth. Nobody talks to me." She croaked. "Nobody wants to help me. I… I don't know a lot, Mr. Genneth. I'm not smart like you. That's why I need people. I need to know what they know. I need their help, to figure stuff out. I wanna find what's missing. I wanna find my family!"

She cried, and it hurt.

By the Angel, this was torture. This child… this abomination…

After all this, knowing what she was, I still felt sympathy for her, and that was unbearable. I hated myself for it!

Looking up at the rising dawn, I laughed.

"God, just shoot me now! End it! I want out of this farce!"

But, of course, nothing happened.

Had I really fallen so far that I could no longer look evil in the face and call it by name? Or was I so lost—so doom-fated and forlorn—that I still wanted to have some sliver of hope to cling to—some final sunbeam—to give myself something worth living for?

(Obviously, it was the latter.)

"If everyone was telling you that what you were doing was wrong, did you ever stop to think that they might have been right?"

She glowered at me. "Wrong wrong wrong! That's all everybody says!" Her wings flopped in protest. "Wrong, &alon! Bad, &alon! That's all they say!"

I scoffed. "I wonder why…"

"But they don't know how lonely it is!" she said. "How cold! You were the first one who understood! You were the first one who knew I was good! You were the first one who wanted to help! Nobody else ever wanted to help! You can't leave me now! It's not fair! It's not fair!"

She cried, and I cried along with her.

"Then stop, &alon! Just stop! Stop what you're doing! Undo it! Undo it all!" I flung my arms out again. "You said you liked me. Well, if you meant it, then stop, right now. Stop! It's what I want you to do! It's what Mr. Genneth wants you to do!"

Her head shivered. Pale blue fire ripple through her aura. "But then…" she cried. "I'll be sad forever!"

"What?"

"I need to understand, Mr. Genneth. I have to!"

"Understand what!?" I screamed.

"Why am I here?" she said. "Why am I so alone? Why do I have to be alone? Why can't I have a family? I want to know! I have to! And that's why I look and look. I save people from the Dark, and keep them with me to help me find my family. I help them, and they help me! I don't want to be cold and sad and scared anymore!" She shook her head in rage. "It's too much! It's too much!!"

"By the Godhead…" I muttered, inhaling sharply. "That's what this is about?!" I was so angry, I felt cold; cold enough that I shivered. "You destroy words because you're lonely?!" My words echoed through the ruined basilica. "All that talk about saving people was just self-gratifying nonsense! Excuses! Excuses! Angel's breath, if this is what you do, why would anyone ever want to help you?!"

&alon got up to her feet, bristling with vigor. "It's not an excuse!" Lifting her gaze, she pointed at the towering wyrm-tree Verune had become. His snorting, indignant heads pointed still higher up, to the last vestiges of the starless sky at the crown of the world. "The Darkness! There it is! The starless sky, it's…"

The vigor drained out of her like spilled blood. She stepped back, pale with fear.

"It's alive. It's the Night. Oh no." She brought her fingers to her lips and shook her head and trembled. "Oh no. No no no no no. It's been here, and I didn't see it. I didn't see it! It's what hurt Klay-oh and Dr. Sushi."

Tears pooled in her eyes.

"We need to leave here, Mr. Genneth. Now. Now!" She looked off into the distance, staring at the haunted, burning city with quivering eyes. "It's waking up!"

Leave?

My God…

To think, I'd been waiting for her to come take us away to "safety".

Well fudge that!

I screamed. "You're insane! You're the starless sky, &alon! You're a killer of gods and a destroyer of worlds!"

She shook her head again. "I'm sorry I couldn't save everybody! It's not my fault! There just… there isn't time! The darkness is waking. It's waking—I can feel it!"

She stepped toward me. "I'm super close. I'll be here soon. Then we'll all leave, and everybody will be safe! Please, Mr. Genneth, please!"

&alon wasn't a person, she was a sentient disease from some nightmare beyond the Night that sowed sporey death that remade worlds in her own image.

I swung my arms. "Safe!?" If anger was power, my claws would have cut through space itself. "Angel's breath, you don't even understand your own evil, do you? You don't want to be safe, &alon, you want to spread, because that's what plagues do! They spread and spread until there's nothing left! You want to infect other worlds and start these horrors all over again! That's why you tried to kill Kléothag: you want His power for yourself, so that you can spread farther than ever before!"

I had to get away from her. If I didn't, I might keep sympathizing with her, and that… I could not do that in good conscience. And, really, good conscience was all that I had left of everything I used to be—that, and my lucky yellow bow-tie.

&alon reached out to put her hand on my scaly hide.

I slithered away from her.

"Get away from me, &alon."

She wept. "Mr. Genneth… please. Please, no…"

"Get away from me, &alon," I repeated, stronger and more insistently.

She trembled. "Mr. Genneth…"

"GET AWAY FROM ME, YOU FUCKING MONSTER!!"

I let her have it.

She gasped, blue eyes going wide, and then turned away and disappeared.

Then I reared back my head and roared, howling at the cruelty of the dawn.

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