Good evening / morning, you guys, this is Paradigm of Writing here with an idea that had just come to me literally at 11:01 PM sitting on my bed, doing absolutely nothing. I had an idea... what if I wanted to write a story or one-shot, but first wrote my ending line to the entire piece, and then started the story from there, to create an entire idea that culminated with the last line... and so this came to be. I am very proud of what I have created, truth be told, for two reasons. Firstly, it is written in past tense, that good ole -ed that I absolutely loathe and dislike since I have always found it super restricting... but alas, I think it's worked here. And secondly, I didn't write a single line of dialogue. I've done that for drabbles maybe, but nothing longer, and I'm really proud of myself for what I have done with it.
In conjunction, I am dedicating this to a long-term friend of mine on this site, who has his own entire story dedicated to me called The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, Mr. bladewielder05, who deserves all the joy in the world, and I thought why not write a piece about his favorite character, in which you'll understand everything you reach the end. Enjoy, Teal's Edge.
~ Teal's ~ Edge ~
Ripples.
He saw them first, as blurred lines on the surface, a porcelain basin breaking and shattering by the usage of force. Water pushed into motion, cascading, a tsunami in shallow depths, upturning leaves, sounding of ricochet heartbeats into the souls and minds nearest to them.
The man was lying on his back, head dipped halfway into the water where the fringes of his moonlit, abyss kissed hair was logged by humidity and dampness that erupted goosebumps over his skin. Shuddering underneath his form were two identical body parts, though not necessarily body parts, despite him not knowing – perhaps he never knew – what they truthfully were. There was no sunlight, where we was, where the vines grew above him in a thickness unparalleled to any situation he had ever met before.
Ripples rippled.
He spoke to himself in that manner, when he was alone, in solitude, because he could. No one forced him to. No one pressed a gun up against his temple and screamed insults at him. What happened when the ripples he created made ripples of their own? Would he be hailed as the creator of this new projection, this new abstraction… or did he give up his rights, was something else that couldn't have a physical identity lauded with that praise?
Ripples rippled ripples.
That was almost like a Fibonacci sequence, when a seashell turned in on itself, and in on itself, and in on itself even further, like a timetable, or an evenly divisible number going into the tenths place, the hundredths… where even infinity could not fathom how far it could go. He was terrified at that prospect, at what that meant… when even he himself could not totally picture or contemplate where his actions would lead him.
He moved a hand outwards, upwards more realistically, at the sky, though the sky was not above him, merely just a blanket of vines and ivy jumbled together to form this sort of cocoon. A sort of pain jabbed underneath his flesh, by his ribcage, next to this teal pool, riding the ripples of teal's edge.
Sleep seemed like the easiest possible action to take whilst waiting for some inevitability, waiting for nothing to happen, but clearly something must be going on, he can physically feel it in his shoulder blades, a sharp, shooting agony that pierced the bone and made him cry to the stars. He felt like he had two options: endure the pain, or play with the ripples at teal's edge.
With a groan, the man turned himself over onto his stomach, to stare at his reflection. The waterlogged tips of his hair leave moist spots on his back, droplets that splattered with the force of a gnat sizzling out into the grass of the cocoon. He wanted to spread his arms out, to reach behind his back, but his arms are not physically capable of such an action at this point and time, for whatever reason.
Staring back at him, almost as if it wasn't real, which very well may be the case, concerning what has happened in his life up until this point, are two, almost obsidian, black eyes. They are, in fact, not soulless, not emotionless, not just a burning sort of rage riding the pupils and the corneas. The gift of light is entrapped in his own eyes, the deviousness of a smirk imprisoned behind them as well… and the insatiable hunger of a curiosity that cannot be quenched was the kingpin of them all.
In stark contrast to his darkening eyes, was the whiteness of his flesh, almost translucence-like, the shimmering of a phantom in the optic lens of a camera taking a picture of paranormal activity. It is his skin, that is what he must tell himself, over and over again, he understood this, because – frankly, in a moment of opportunity, so tiny it could fit on the tip of a needle, that perhaps he isn't the man in the reflection – he still was uncertain of his purpose inside the emerald paradise that acted like a cinderblock cell, or for the water… how it all remained to him still a mystery.
He reached towards the water, dipping a finger in, this being the first moment of contact. Everything stopped, and he paused, looking up away from the water, staring off into nothingness. Back again, at the water, his fingers submerged themselves, and a ceasing of the activity started once more. He furrowed his eyebrows together.
Who were those people he had just seen?
One,.. one was ravishing, beautiful. He saw this person the first time his fingers graced the teal pool, in a figure of what he believed to be a woman. Tall, imperious, and glorious… a radiance emitted from her that spoke the word power, a power he would never be able to comprehend, a second Fibonacci sequence – oh no, his mind could not handle this, at all – that would unravel itself and unravel itself forevermore. He titled his head to the side. Did this woman have green hair? Like, the color of the grass above him? Apparently so.
The other, it struck him a bit more on the creepy side. All he remembered before arriving in this strange hub of floral beauty was going to sleep, like normal, under the covers of his bed, and a cold chill enveloping him before delving into R.E.M. Now, however, in a passage of time he cannot discern from, he was being shown visions, or snapshots… and the second one he saw, after touching the teal pool again… was him.
Not exactly himself, but close enough, and that sent chills down his spine. Someone with a lighter hair color, mahogany almost – quite a fine color he relates it to, he realized, with a snort, at his pretentiousness of using such a ridiculous adjective – and eyes so teal, so liquid blue… they came straight from the lake. The other man's skin complexion was exactly the same as his, and that is what brings on the trouble down deep. Did he just witness a demon unlike himself?
He didn't recoil away from the water's edge, like he expected. Rather, he wanted to be closer to it. He closed his eyes, taking a deep breath, one that shook alongside his ribcage with the reverb of crushed glass in his windpipe, a hollowness emitting itself from his throat. The man approached the water once more, and this time, stuck his entire left arm beneath the porcelain-esque – he used the word porcelain as easily breakable, not the physicality of it – glean.
A reaction, unlike one he didn't expect, pulled him out of the situation. Everything… stuck to him. It was as if the water collided with itself to become a stronger force and coagulated together, almost like blood droplets drying from a wound. When he pulled his arm out of the lake, a column of its contents followed, and this brought him alarm. Down deep in his throat, a croak broke free, and he lashed out in surprise. Nothing happened, except that his arm was wrenched free and whatever substance had been lingering onto him fled, it went away.
It had paint-like… where he could move it with his hands as one unyielding force, an epicenter of kinetic energy that would rebound off of each other. His perfect idea was to play with the water, which had the consistency of paint, but his first reaction was almost incendiary; shock, anger, rage, terror… they ruined what could've been an experiment.
Ripples rippled ripples ripping ripples.
That was the next step in the sequence, as he then placed his hands underneath his chin, curling them into fists. Using his right hand, and with this pointer finger on said hand, he tapped the water again. Once more, as if it had heard his thoughts, the vision of the brown-haired – he actually liked using the word mahogany better – stranger came back to him, reverting expectations, where he thought he'd find someone new to appear before him.
Who exactly were they? He knew he was no scholar or hypothesizer or anything of the sort… just a curiosity that often had answers. What did they want with him, if they wanted anything from him at all? Why would the water show him the faces of two complete strangers?
That brought another thought out of him. This copycat, this mirror image… it was no stranger, it simply can't be, if it was him in the reflection, just with different hair and a different eye color. You cannot be possibly a stranger to yourself, can you? He thought, in a way, you could, like if a simple nine-to-five man murdered his entire family and then looked at his blood-soaked skin in the mirror, he wouldn't recognize the abomination in front of him. But he – this being the man lying in front of the pool – was not an axe-wielding murder. He was a simple guy going to sleep, transported into a Pandora haven, where the water acts like teal paint, and there are resounding spurts of pain in your upper back by the shoulders.
The pain was starting to become more than just a tick, or an annoyance that would come up every so often as it had been so for the last hour, by the telling of time with the shadows above him. His honeymoon stasis period was over, as now the pain evolved into more of a hum, like the roar of a swarm of honey bees, this hum vibrating underneath the skin. However, this noise came with the sensation of shifting movement inside his body, like DNA change, a mutation he cannot stop. This sensation built like a pressure on his eyeball, as if there was an insane asylum doctor standing before him with an icepick about to perform a lobotomy, pulsating down to his shoulder blades, and with it, a fever pitch, as if someone flipped the icepick on the eye to slam it down between the shoulder blades.
Agony screamed in his throat, the water, teal's edge thickening. Whatever just hit him was not on familiar terms, and it was not designed to bring him any some sort of comfort whatsoever. He wanted to leap back, away from the water, terrified in his motions, but that the coagulating teal began to uproot itself, spiraling upwards into the air like helixes, DNA strands that curved, before latching onto the man's arms. He screamed again, this time purely out of fright. He trashed, he fought, he yelped, and he definitely cried, but the paint-like substances on his arms would not budge.
Slowly, he felt himself get lifted into the air, as if the attachments on his arms were giant pulleys that lifted him high above the surface of the water, where his back was laced with the smooth feel of a leaf from the ivy shelter above him. The pain began to get stronger and stronger, bile threatening to appear out of the man's throat.
Panic began to instill itself in his nerves, a fear that once it grabs hold of a man, it cannot let go. He wanted to thrash about some more, perhaps even scream and cry and curse whatever creator of this faulty dream – surely it cannot be a dream, despite having dream-like circumstances – when he's perfectly parallel, ninety degrees, with the water, and something stopped his fighting.
It was as if he had been a baby roused to sleep, at the sight of these two foreign objects protruding on the sides of his back. He furrowed his eyebrows together, frowning.
Were… were those feathers?
Not just a single feather on either side. Multiple. Many. A million, perhaps, if he turned them into a Fibonacci sequence like everything else in the emerald bubble. An array of feathers, splayed up against his back, which was the pain he had felt, the emergence of these gorgeous objects. A thought of elation hit him?
Did these combined objects suddenly somehow mean wings?
He almost looked like an angel.
Was he an angel?
He didn't have too much time to ponder that, as the teal ladders holding his arms up, the watery paint that coagulated at the rungs of the helixes, began to sprout more and more of the liquid substance. For some reason, he thought it would go over his mouth, or continue over the rest of his body, but this time these funnels of teal's edge were spiraling around him, going into each of the feathers.
The splash of color did not turn them teal like he expected.
They turned them black.
Black? Why black? He didn't understand that.
In his reflection, now, he saw it. Those white wings, which they had been white before, were now as dark as his hair, if not darker. Something pushed up at him, an unseen force, and the streamlines of teal's edge holding him securely by his arms receded back into the pool, leaving him unsupported.
The man cried out once more, for the next thought to enter his mind was that he was going to fall. That he was going to plummet down and get stuck in this sticky web of who knows what. However, that didn't happen. In fact…
Nothing happened.
He had shut his eyes out of the fear, but opened them, after a moment, releasing a sigh of confusion. His body had turned from parallel, one-hundred-and-eighty degrees, to perpendicular, at straight ninety… held up by his wings!
He was an angel. That hit him right there, that something, someone – perhaps it had been the iridescent woman he had seen, when touching the pool, perhaps he was meant to be the lookalike to the other man, who was him, he had seen, when touching the pool – that granted him the gift of flying, and being angelic in their appearance.
The ivy began to unwind itself, the cocoon disappearing, and in a moment of brilliance, he understood it perfectly.
This was his chrysalis. That stage was over.
A warm light enveloped him, coming from somewhere beyond, but he doesn't see anything past the light. Does he have a purpose? Could there be a purpose? Does someone have the ability in their own lives to create purposes for themselves? He wanted to have that power, yet not give himself too much of it, since power going to the head of one who doesn't deserve it creates terrible things.
All angels had names, he told himself. He had known that aspect of the religious culture. Gabriel... now that is a name in which someone can revere... a paragon; what could a simple man with dark wings do... or be? He frowned, doing a spin in midair. What could his name be?
Certainly nothing boring like Fred or Donald… right? That's too mundane… too Earthly.
Then, it clicked. He understood immediately. The teal's edge, the darkness of his hair and contrast to the man in the mirror that was his lookalike.
The color of his wings.
Black.
No one could have black for their name, that was entirely too foolish.
Another lightbulb of brilliance, and he understood, there. He's an angel, and his name shall be whispered onto the lips of common men doing brilliant, gorgeous things.
He shall be called...
Kuro.
So... in short, what came to me was the name of Kuro, which is Dark Pit. Of course, I could've used it as a name being whispered, but I thought about it being something like a proclamation, a declaration, a decision. And thus I thought about Kuro waking up, like he had plucked from a dream, put inside this cocoon of nature, with a pain budding at his back, next to this pool of water. When he decides to touch it, it shows him visions of Pit and Palutena, who I have given the role of his, Kuro's, creators, giving him the angelic wings, where the pool of water is actually teal-colored paint that gives him dark wings. Crazy and weird I freaking know.
I really hope you enjoyed this. It took me an hour and maybe ten minutes to write it, which I am very proud of, and this is most definitely a rough draft - everything on here unless indicated otherwise is rough draft work lol, that's why there's always typos - that I am happy to have finished in such a short time. Go give bladewielder05 some love, go and read The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, and please review this one-shot; it'd mean a lot to me. Have an amazing day or night you guys. I love you all so much! Bye!
~ Paradigm
