This chapter was mind-mindbogglingly difficult to write. Not because I didn't have ideas, but because I had too many! Some had too much action; others too much sorrow. Some had too much cute (and sacrificed the story in exchange); others I wrote and then realized I'd sent the story someplace I didn't like and didn't know how to get it back from. Some revealed good surprises too early; others were inconsistent. Keeping Heather in character after stealing away Valtiel, Alex, Harry, and WAlter all in a short time span is tough. Keeping the PH in character, also tough, but at least I'm the one who decided what his character is. XD But onward the story must go, and so: Here is the next chapter! (Mind you, the horizontal dividers are still being naughty)

Thud. Thud. Shriek...

The sounds which had tormented James Sunderland and Alex Shepherd were now Heather Mason's greatest comfort. As she walked- slowly and patiently- the sounds were a reassurance that Samael hadn't disappeared on her. Now and then she looked back at him, at the way the red hell fire of night silhouetted him and gleamed off his helm. The sight made her smile more than once. The duo was making their way through the town, and Heather had managed to find a number of important supplies so far; not the least of which was a stash of ammo.

"I wonder if I'm psychologically unwell," she murmured softly back to the monster, pausing to let it catch up. "I don't think its normal to feel ecstatic that a giant demon is following me around." His sword slid painfully after him. The high pitched shriek of metal on metal was enough to make the hair on the back of Heather's neck stand on end; but the noise was enough to send other monsters scurrying in all directions. Nothing had come within a hundred meters of Heather Mason since the Red Pyramid had arrived on the scene. Despite the fact that he was clearly following her, he didn't look at her as she spoke. He remained staring blankly ahead. He may have been listening, or he may have been disinterested; he may have been protecting her, or he may simply have been ferrying her to her next soul-devouring pit stop.

"You don't talk much do you?" she joked. The Pyramid did not respond.

Ah, well. 'Ferrying' was pretty much what Valtiel had been doing and Heather had... Heather had ended up adoring Valtiel. She sighed suddenly, realizing how crazy her situation was getting: She was talking to a monster that either was extremely conflicted or else leading her from trial to trial in the hopes of destroying her. Bah, but if she thought like that, her thoughts would start to slip and her interpretation of events would starting to spin around in unhealthy loops. Even now Heather suddenly felt a depressive haze settling down on her, and it was only just shy of six o'clock in the evening.

"If I keep thinking like this I'm going to fall off into an endless pit of, "But what if?"" she muttered to herself, trying to keep her morale high. Then she took in a slow, deep breath and then started walking again. After a moment she kept talking aloud to herself, using the sound of her voice to help anchor her feelings:

"Alex said the way I feel, the way I act... the... the instincts I have..." she trailed off with a choked noise. Woops. So much for keeping morale high. The Pyramid Thing finally looked at her, but she didn't notice as she was no longer looking back at it.

Remembering Alex was going to be hard for a long time. But each time she said his name aloud, the ensuing pain seemed to numb her just a little further, making life just a bit more bearable. After a moment she tried to continue with her previous thought. "Alex..." she recalled sitting with him over the pit of monsters, "he wanted me to believe... that nothing was really wrong with me. That I wouldn't get to be normal or live a normal life, but that all the weird Alessa shit was just... was just part of me. An important part. A part I couldn't ignore because it was all I could use to save myself..."

The Pyramid Monster came up behind her and paused as well, completely absorbed in watching her. Heather was quiet and still a long moment. At long last she turned and looked up at the monster, surprised to see he was so focused on her.

"Can you take me straight to Valtiel?" she asked him. And as she said the words aloud, Heather realized she had wanted to ask it of him when he's first hugged her. The question hung in the air like a knife. A long silence passed between them, though the ambiance of the Silent Hill night provided plenty of background noise. Demon and survivor held eachother's gaze. Then at long last the monster began to move. With a heave of his sword he diverted around her right side, and began walking in a new direction. Heather jumped at the sound of metal on metal, and then hurried after him.

Heather knew that something in the grand Silent Hill plan was off track when she realized she couldn't recognize any landmarks. In her head she could plot the course that the Pyramid Monster had taken, but she was starting to realize that by now, traveling in a straight line, they ought to have walked straight through or at least beside several recognizable buildings. The darkness seemed to be closing in around her, dimming her flashlight. The hellish red glow dimmed to almost nothing, and then the ambient light began to grow brighter. She could see buildings now, but they were not town buildings. All around her sprawled bridges of rust and grime, a metropolis of rust and pain.

The hell? This is like I'm already deep in the belly of this place. But I haven't gone down a set of stairs.

This wasn't her imagination. Heather couldn't recognize anything. There were no trees, no buildings. The last tatters of asphalt that marked a road had disappeared. It appeared that the Pyramid Monster hadn't obeyed the laws of physics when he'd picked a direction to head in. This was neither north, south, east, or west from where she'd started; this had been completely non-euclidean.

That makes sense. It's not like half the spaces here conform to the laws of physics.

True. But this was the first time she'd had any input on how things distorted. As she looked around, trying to get her bearings, she saw unidentifiable shapes churning and writhing in the darkness. Heather paused for a moment, shining her flashlight on them, but it seemed as if they refused to be properly illuminated. The shapes were dark, tar-like, writhing. She frowned, thinking of Alessa and Walter's monstrous form. Unwillingly, she thought of her inability to save her father from Impotence.

Heather stepped forward, trying to get a better look. Somewhere behind her a low fog-horn-like noise sounded. It took Heather a moment of startled confusion to realize the sound came from her Pyramid Monster, and as she turned around she saw that he had gotten quite some distance away from her, and that writhing black tendrils were slithering over the ground between them. Her Red Pyramid had neither stopped walking nor turned around to retrieve her; no doubt he'd done her a courtesy just in alerting her to the situation.

Heather swore and bolted forward. The writhing black things grabbed at her legs and she tried to dodge their nips and snaps. It wasn't easy. Suddenly the Red Pyramid's ponderous gait was too fast. The ambient light in her surroundings was starting to fade; she could see less and less outside of the range of her flashlight. Her heart was racing. Something grabbed her ankle and she fell to her knees. It took her a moment to yank herself free, and then other globular things were reaching for her arms, her legs. Those she shook off. What she couldn't shake was the glob that suddenly grabbed at her head.

A flash of memory rippled through Heather's mind then, something she shouldn't have remembered right then and immediately regretted. Her knees went weak as she recalled walking into a room with a large mirror and staring baffled at its darkening surface. The mirror had given her nearly sixty seconds to abandon curiosity and turn away. But watching that mirrored world turn bloodier and bloodier while the real world had stayed clean seemed fascinating and relatively harmless. How wrong she'd been when, moments later, she'd traded places with the trapped girl on the other side of the glass.

She suspected Valtiel had 'fixed' that mistake, and that was why Heather hadn't remembered it until just now. Well, something similar had just happened again.

"Goddamn it!" Heather shouted as she came back to herself, tearing her head free from one of the globs and trying to drag herself forward. She could feel gobs all over her, grabbing at her, smothering her, trying to melt her. That damn memory had left her gaping stupidly at the black tar as it had wrapped itself around her. Now everything was pitch black. There was gunk on her face, over her flashlight, and her world was without light. Somewhere very far ahead of her, she heard a long, low groan again. A beacon, but not one that would be turning back for her. Pyramid Things were fueled by hatred, and this one wasn't going to save her from her own feelings of inadequacy. Fine. She didn't need it to.

"I am Heather fucking Mason!" she half bellowed into the darkness. "I'll rescue myself!" She smeared gunk off her flashlight and then staggered to her feet, fighting her way forward as oily gobs grabbed at her hair, her legs, her arms. She slapped grasping black ooze away from her. She was going to get out of this shit herself.

"That's a lie," she heard a soft voice say. Heather's eyes opened wide and she spun around. She came face to face with the disembodied head of Alessa Gillespie, suspended in a wall of writhing black slime.

"The fuck it is," she whispered, staggering backwards.

"You're deluding yourself," Alessa reemphasized in a smug tone. "You've always needed people. Harry, Kaufmann... Didn't Valtiel revived you multiple times? You've had to spend lives to stay alive yourself. Some of them live- through luck, mostly. But you've always needed help. You'd have hardly made it this far on your own. It's hopeless. Just take them all down with you."

"Fuck you," Heather snarled, pulling back from the apparition. "You're a memory! You don't even exist anymore!"

"That's like saying a nuclear warhead doesn't exist after it's detonated," Alessa noted, "but radiation's everywhere." A very cat-like smile played over her face. "So many things you don't want to remember... You're deluding yourself, forgetting what you really need to be doing. You have a line to it right here, you can end it all right now. You can implode this sick twisted nightmare.

Heather blinked, eyes narrowing. "The Pyramid Thing?" she asked, then scowled as she remembered Walter's words. "The hell is wrong with you!? I'm not dying here just to get vengeance on the cult!"

Alessa's face darkened. "You're a coward, and you're hiding from the truth," the girl told her. "You're the only thing that can end this place. Because you're one of them. You're like Claudia, like mother, you're me, and you can make him do it. That one will take any leash he must for his 'justice'. Let him end it! It can at least save those you care about outside."

"I didn't get stuck in here to fulfill your masochistic death wish," Heather hissed, not exactly sure what Alessa wanted her to do, but knowing that it meant inciting the Executioner God to destroy both Heather and Silent Hill.

"It's the only way," Alessa reminded her.

"Stop saying that!" Heather snarled, anchoring her mind in the knowledge that an avatar of that very Executioner Diety was abstaining from harming her. "You, Walter, Edwin, Claudia- stop claiming your beliefs are TRUTH. No one has the slightest clue how this all really works, and you're not even real!"

Alessa frowned. "You can't hide from reality."

The world went black

Alex had always tried to protect her.

It was after the fight with Impotence. Edwin had found them, but they weren't going down without a fight. They had nothing on hand but the surgical knives on the tables around them, but that wasn't going to keep them from trying. In fact, they were moving faster and more sychronized than they ever had in their lives. They were high on adrenaline and emotional fuel. The cultists couldn't kill them or use guns. They fought tooth and nail, plowing their way through their enemies, fighting towards one of the doorways.

Henry had always said that Heather was the strongest of them, hadn't he? Well. He was wrong. Dead wrong. On that day, in that place, her strength gave out. Heather tripped over the scattered remains of what once had been Dhalia Gillespie. She looked at the woman in horror and then, inevitably, her eyes were drawn to the slump where Harry Mason was woven in to Impotence's torn flesh. She sat there numb, a sitting duck. She did the same thing she'd one done in front of that mirror, and that she'd later do surrounded by black tendrils. She stared, mortified and in awe of Silent Hill's disgusting darkness.

In a second, scrolls were all around her, binding her arms and legs tight against her. Alex was at the exit. Alex could get out.

He came back for her. The last thing she remembered seeing before Xipe throttled her into unconsciousness was him turning back from the door.

Silent Hill was never going to let Heather leave. She carried too much guilt. She was going to die there. Silent Hill had broken her will when they'd killed him and... and Alessa was just rubbing it in. She just wanted to make sure Heather knew, that she was sure the situation was hopeless, that she was sure Samael's destructive nature was the only route to freedom.

Live.

"ALEX! ALEX! ALEEEXXX!"

Heather howled and dashed forward, slamming her fist straight into where she face had appeared. It laughed at her and she grabbed at it, tearing her fingers into its skin, pulling it and the black slime apart.

"FUCK YOU!" she screamed, tears pouring down her face, shoving through the forest of dense black tar. "I'm not dying here, not for this, not in this paltry stupid little tar trap! He believed in me, they believe in me, they all believe in me and I am real and you're not! If I'm going to die it's not going to be to myself!" She pushed through them, forced them apart. Something like rage, but more similar to passion coursed through her. It drove her forward with mental images of her friends, her family, her dad, her...

"I'm not broken! I'm not weak, I'm not going CRAZY!" she roared into them, pushing further and further and further. "I I'm NOT going to break for you, I'm not going to sit here and dissolve away at the feet of nothing more than my leftover nightmares!"

The tendrils shrunk back. They parted, made room, let light through. They opened up into a pathway of metal, some hellish place that at least had roof, walls, and ceiling. She heaved towards it, fighting her way through. Black tendrils sizzled, rippled away from her, writhed and withered. "I don't need to be saved! I'll do it for them! I'll do it for HIM, and for me, and Henry and- LET GO OF ME!"

The tendrils grabbed at her, smothering out the light and knocking her back to her knees.

"LET! GO! OF! ME!"

A High-pitched shriek of a child echoed out from her in a boom of heat, and then the tendrils were flying back from her, disappearing into metal, grime, rust, and gears. Heather staggered, but nothing renewed the assault. She heard the ambiance of the hellscape. Lights were bright again. Heather shuddered and took in a long, slow breath. She wanted to sit down and have a long, hard cry, but there wasn't time. She had to push that away till there was time to mourn. At least she could try and find comfort in one thing: Alex was right. Heather had what it took to win.

She heard heavy booming footsteps and the shriek of metal on metal. Rubbing tears from her face, she looked up to see her Pyramid Monster standing over her, helmet shifting slightly as he observed her condition. Heather half-chuckled, half-sobbed. "No big. Myself is just trying to kill me," she explained to him. Then her expression sobered when she realized she'd just referred to Alessa with the first person pronoun, 'myself.' She made a face and then slowly clambered to her feet. The Pyramid Thing surprised her by reaching forward to grab her arm, and he pulled her firmly to a standing position.

Heather winced and then rubbed her arm when he released her. "Um... Thank you. Thank you for... for waiting for me..." The monster said nothing, watching her as she dusted herself off. "I guess she's not really me," she decided at last. "But she's still connected to me, and she's one awfully screwed up bitch of a leftover."

The Pyramid Monster rumbled. Heather glanced back up at it couldn't help but smile, wiping her face of partially dried tears. "Don't worry. You're not like her. You're the nice type of leftovers; the sort that heats up well in the microwave and keeps for days without losing its flavor." If Alessa were a living thing, this conversation would have driven her batty. There Heather stood, directly beside an incarnation of the entity who could unleash Ragnarok on Silent Hill, and she was teasing him.

The monster continued to stare at her. Then, after a long moment, Heather was treated to the sorrow-banishing delight of watching the monster tilt his head curiously to the side. She beamed at him, at this acknowledgement that he understood her, that he was real, that he could feel confusion, that he wasn't just smoke and anger like the Memory of Alessa. At least that's what she believed.

"Yeah, well," she continued to tease, her voice falling into a cocksure tone. "Sorrow doesn't get you through the day, does it? That was par for the course for Silent Hill. Hey. You led me through that on purpose." It wasn't a question, and she gave him a reproachful look.

The monster continued to stare.

Heather rolled her eyes. "Whatever, asshole. I'm glad to see you waited anyways. Thank you."

An awkward silence followed for a moment. Then the Pyramid monster turned to begin walking again. As he did so, however, he paused midway and tilted his head to 'look' over his shoulder at her. There he waited for her to catch up. The Mason girl blinked but then hurried up to his side. He waited till she had reached him before starting to walk. Heather stayed well within arm reach of him. She glanced up at the red helmet once or twice. "Samael?" A slightly hostile growl and a sharp toss of the helmet tip answered her. Heather blinked. Was that name provoking him? But he recognized it, and he didn't recognize 'Red Pyramid.'

She decided not to ask him about what the Memory of Alessa had been talking about.

They walked for another fifteen minutes in silence, descending through several different hellscapes till at last they had come to a jungle of grated catacombs. At long last the Pyramid monster paused before a long fenced bridge that led to a single elevator shaft. He regarded the bridge for a moment, then lifted up his blade in both hands and jammed the tip vertically into the earth. There he waited, resting both hands on the thick leather handle.

Heather blinked at him, glanced down the narrow bridge, and then looked up at his helmet.

"You can't go any further?" she asked him. He didn't respond. "Will you be here when I get back?" Silence. Heather hesitated. "Red..." Silence. "Pyramid Thing?" No answer. "...Samael?"

His fingers clenched and a low rumble worked its way from beneath his helmet. Heather tilted her head to the side, observing him and wondering why his name always provoked a hostile response. It was his, she was sure of it; as sure as she'd known the spider monster who'd led to Alex Shepherd's downfall had been called 'Impotence.'

She sighed, not knowing what the problem was. "Please don't just disappear on me, Samael..."

Hearing it the second time in the same conversation didn't seem to provoke him as much as the first; he gave a slightly more neutral rumble, and then stared straight ahead at the elevator. Heather grimaced and stepped closer to him for a moment. She lifted a hand and traced gently over one of the larger scars left on his skin. then, with a deep breath, she turned and headed onward to find if the Pyramid Thing had indeed led her to Valtiel.