[[Title: Ebb & Flow. (a sort of tWWW for Zhaan) ~ ("how does the pious Zhaan coexist with all that rage?" "my decision to become a priest came at a snap [sic]") "We all visit the precipice. Each one of us must find our own way down."]]
The sound of waves was a delusion. Some part of her knew this; the sound of water, sometimes crashing like restive breakers against high and unforgiving rocks while at others the gentle lapping at a silt-soft lakeshore, could not really exist within these walls. It was ubiquitous, however, ever-present, altering only in pitch—and perhaps that difference lay in her perception alone. She welcomed its constant thrum, let it rise above all other noises: the steady pounding of surf dimmed the other sounds, the ones that danced in and around her cloudy head, throwing themselves against the wall like Skreeth shadows. Nightmarish hobgoblins lacking in shape or form, they prickled her skin like poisoned needles, rattled about inside her skull, jeering, coercing. In absolute, utter stillness she battled their temptations, rejected their dark impulsive taunts. Perhaps it was a fight without victory—or one long since forfeit—but she must struggle all the same. Even as she felt their tickling, thieving fingers working through her veins. Some nights were better than others.
Some days, she felt the ebb and flow of the large water resounding from within her own head. And, oddly enough, those were the days she felt most lucid...whether she really was or not. Sitting stalk-still—unbowed by any wind here in this cell—she could track the rise and fall of the tides, if that indeed were what they were. She followed the small changes with a vested interest, for somehow it was her battle pitched on the wet sand: though whether or not the tidelines marked ground she had gained or lost, she couldn't have said.
Ebb and flow. Far below, the waters raged; she stood looking down past her own feet and the pockmarked cliff face, while the demons cavorted around like pinwheels, screaming laughter in her brain, plucking at her clothes, enticing her to jump. Jump! Opening her lids to the dark of the bare and empty cell, she saw their eyes staring back, sick and malevolent yellow, orange, scarlet. They waited, lurking. Her own eyes stung, from tears or bile, but she was not brave enough to check for the stain of insanity. Not while she felt it writhing in her mind, a playful parasite. Her mind was a whirlwind of chaos—darkness, violence, anarchy. Jump! Their voices were laughing and plaintive, like children. She was not sure how long this resistance would hold—if the resistance itself were not simply an illusion. Perhaps the madness all ready held her fast and took a perverse pleasure in baiting a long line with which to reel her in. Perhaps her consignment had begun before ever these Sebacean pretenders had locked her away.
A guard came, bearing one of the sparse meals that were granted at irregular intervals: she heard his footsteps. Eyes snapping open at the creak of lifting flap, she threw herself at the wide bars in a sequence of motion too fast to follow or think through, slamming against the grille hard enough that fibers were pulped. Reaching through, she grappled with the soldier's unready hands, uttering a skin-rippling keen that came from everywhere but her throat, nails ripping until she found the unprotected windpipe and began to crush. She did not see the man's eyes as he began to die in front of her, only her own. The hands that made his death did not seem to belong to her; she felt only insanity's vice tightening mercilessly about her own throat.
The commotion brought others—although she could not hear it, only the jeering chorus and never-ending litany of jump! jump! jump! Jump! The angry slosh of water seemed very far away. There was a stabbing shock, seeming to originate at the crest of her skull and the soles of her feet, washing a double-circuit of her body, and she fell back, scream cut off. Nerveless fingers relinquished their victim, and they left her gasping, hungry and sore.
Ebb and flow. The surf was loud, pouring over her, through her. For once, the impulses were drowned out, as she lay on the floor breathing hard and fast through her teeth, her front damp with the spilled soup, she was suddenly very afraid.
Ebb and flow. Like a martyr out of myth, she wrestled the never-ceasing onslaught of demons, sometimes giving ground, sometimes surging forward. But always, as she threw one off her back, there were three more to grasp at her ankles. If she halted for but an instant, they would swarm over her, devour her. Through ingestion she would be spat out, re-made in their image: a red-eyed monster, feeding on violence and hate. On the labor colony, it had been easier. Her primary service was not often labor-intensive due to her unique manual abilities—a much prized asset horded in the modest cache of Delvians seized after the coup. But the punishments were. Under the beating sun, it had been possible to eke out a sort of compromise: hammer slamming on stone, the violent, forceful motion could act as her proxy, her sacrificial offering. She channeled her hate and her anger into each shattering blow, and so tricked the dark impulses that roared at her to break free and obliterate the entire asteroid in a single glorious chemical blaze of retribution. She nursed them on counterfeit milk—and perhaps in the feeding they only grew stronger, but the nourishment itself kept them sated, and thus at bay. In the sun, it was easier to lie to herself. In this cold, confining darkness, there was nowhere to hide, nothing with which to shield herself from her demons and their incessant prodding, their maddening laughter. Not once in eight hundred cycles had she ever felt so helplessly alone.
Ebb and flow. Pulling herself up from the jolt-induced sprawl, she huddled like an arachnid against the base curve of the far wall, limbs tucked against herself. Made aware of the rhythms of her body—a small harmony on the steady beat of the ceaseless waves—she began to regret the impulsiveness that had squandered the only sustenance she would see for days yet. Hunger pangs radiated out from the cavity in her middle, adding to the hopeless damper of her spirits. For a while, she half-seriously played with the idea of working herself into a state of starvation, if only for the simple pleasure of posing something of a threat to her captors, if only momentarily. They would intervene, doubtlessly, and what their idea of aid would be she did not like to think. Besides, the hunger brought fear trailing in its wake like a gossamer veil laced with poison, settling in to kill whoever fell below it. In the face of such, she would lay herself at the mercy of the dark impulses. In her despair, she began to think that perhaps that would be no bad thing.
Ebb and flow. The shadows became sharper around her, hard lines of blackness that could hide anything. All her motions became jerky, violently reactive as she recoiled from the luminous yellow eyes peering hungrily out at her from those shadows. She thought she could hear the click of teeth as they salivated, waiting for the inevitable falter that would bring her into their clutching talons. She stared fearfully down the long cliffs to the churning grey waters beneath, desperately trying to pick out a safe passage down its sharp, craggy face. Her demons tugged at her wrists, trying to pull her over their edge, or at the very least unbalance her. The transport had at some point taken on a Luxan, she'd heard. Poor beast. She did not know where the transport was bound, but it could be nowhere good. It hardly mattered, she reflected fatalistically, for nowhere could be worse than the torturous prison of her own head, beset by violent demons, and she brought that with her. Perhaps, she found herself hoping, the brute would succumb to a fit of hyper rage and lay waste to this miserable ship. Perhaps, in his passion, as a barbaric sort of mercy, she would be killed, too. What good would it do to survive this incarceration, only to come out of it violent and raving? Tentatively, almost, she prayed for just that. Death, at the hands of a creature ruled by primordial instincts of violence, would place her out of reach of those violent demons, constantly chiding and awaiting her plunge from the precipice—into their ranks. The irony of the thought caused her to laugh out loud. The gentle echo around the empty space startled her, and the bitter mirth gave way to smothered sobbing.
Ebb and flow. It was an endless tug-of-war. And she the tattered poppet clutched between two slavering mouths, the two halves of herself. Sane and insane; violent and pacific; penitent and not; wild and tamed. The struggle itself consumed the ends it strove for, and the high road was lost. All that remained was to descend. But the water raged without mercy an unfathomable length below. The cliff was sheer and unforgiving: she could discern no way down but for falling. The impulses embodied ringed her, pulling ghoulish faces, shrieking their eerie, morbid laughter.
Poised on the toe-edge at the very brink of the precipice, whipped by ghostly winds, snapped at by fiends of her own making, she threw back her head and screamed to the air, into space, to the ether. HELP ME! The scream scoured out her skull cavity like a melon rind, burned separately through each capillary filament in her body, shone out like a beacon through the stomata gilding her face. On the precipice, the cry boomed in the dark, storm ravaged air like a thunderclap; clasping their hearing orifices, her demons cowered. In the pitch stillness of the cell, there was a soft little mewling noise.
In the dark, she was answered by the voice of divinity, of madness, of her own desperate imagination.
My child, it welcomed her. Come.
With a weight like a massive, implacable hand bending her head, she looked down at the ocean, at the rocks, and suddenly the way was clear to her as though marked. Without thinking, she began to climb. Hand and footholds flowed smoothly, rapidly, each motion guided by the light of Kahalan herself. As she descended, the waves crashed loudly, nearer and nearer. The rock bottomed out beneath her feet, and she stood on a brink just above the lapping waves; their cold, stinging spray lashed her back from heel to crown in sporadic droplets. Before her, golden light spilled from an indentation in the cliff face, wide enough to engulf her.
My child, the light beckoned, come home.
The idea conveyed in that susurated noun was not physical or concrete. She could not go home to Delvia, to a broken thing she had sacrificed herself in trying to splint and trellis so that it might grow up whole. The notion offered her by the holy light below the precipice was much more profound, incomprehensible. Intangible, and all the more precious for it. What was offered was a spiritual niche, and togetherness: a sense of purpose, of contribution, a vindication for existing. The idea within the light washed over her like the purest ionic radiation. She closed her eyes and stepped into it—
—Zotoh Zhaan opened her eyes to the dark of her cell, found herself lying in her skin, cheek pressed to the soft-hard floor. There was no light, and little enough to be seen from her vantage point, but her eyes darted, searching for the demonic presences that had fled in the light of Kahalan. Her eyes were dry, and stung a little, but it was the burn of fatigue of weeping only, not the heralding sting of bile. She was free; she was saved. The Tacrah was all ready on her lips, a fervent whispering like shallow water over rocks, or wind in broad leaves. She could only pray she remembered it all, but fretted little over it. The Seek, so different to each who Sought, was guided more by faith, intuition, and collective memory than by traditions or teachings in its essence.
There was no sound in the darkness but the susurration of her chanting, the sacred words filling inhale as well as exhale. No sound but a gentle surging, pulling, on the fringe. Ebb. Flow. Ebb. Flow. Ebb.
A convulsive shudder gripped her body. Her eyes darted, fearful of the impulsive boggarts. Perhaps she had not escaped them at all, perhaps her darker impulses lingered yet, pulling her down to drown her. The sound of the surf by the precipice had chased her this far. But no—she felt them still, though caged, suppressed; if not mastered then subdued, a mercy granted by the voice of the idea within the light. They did not rule her, and would not. She had the Seek.
And with a burst of clarity impossible in the harried delusion she'd shucked, she remembered. Leviathan. This was a Peacekeeper prison transport ship. A Leviathan. A biomechanoid, a living ship. This heartbeat pulse of ebb and flow—so similar to her own, and different in unquantifiable ways to the regular thrum of a man-made ship—was a natural phenomenon. The ebb and flow of an ocean of life.
Her shaky breath wobbled hot back against its source as Zotoh Zhaan pressed her face into the floor and offered up a silent prayer of thanks to the great ship who had, knowingly or not, kept her sane.