7- Through the Red Sea
"The people remained at a distance, while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was." - Exodus 20:21
"I…I…"
Her wrists came forward in front of her, similar in the manner this person had obsessed with their arms the past few hours.
Free.
…Free?
The word addressed two perplexities at once. The first being…was she really free?! Wait, wait- what even just happened? She entered the studio only for it to come to life before her very eyes. It swallowed her, and soon she was found by…them. They battled to take her and succeeded, followed only by the memory of a flickering man opening the curtain to a play of vomit and relief. After all that, was she just…released from this?
The second seemed to disagree:
Until the day he sets us free.
"Who?" she asked.
The watery man appeared reluctant to answer.
"All in due time." Smooth and airy, more for his own thoughts than her own, a drawn-out mumble lost and resigned to forces beyond himself. It was in sharp contrast to a louder, demanding inquiry that echoed the room.
"Can you stand?"
With great reluctance, she moved her wary gape from him in order to center herself. A throaty groan signaled her start; unsteady arms tossed to the ground to lift her body from the floor. Most would have responded to the visual cues by offering aid, but not he. Eventually she stood before him, knees bent and ready to collapse, an arm leaning fully against the beam to which she has been tied. It appears restoring life does not mean to restore physical capacities, he noted.
"Come with me."
Without even a gesture or a look, he trudged towards the gaping hallway that had held the shadow man of her dying nightmare. Confoundment widened every opening of her face. Panic. Realization her turmoil wasn't over.
"I...! I need to leave! I need to-"
"If you don't come with me-" He interrupted her excuses as a schoolmaster scolds a child preparing to cup a brown recluse in their hands. "-you won't be permitted to exist as you are for another minute."
After that, the chamber was audience only to the dripping of pipes. She never noticed the pentagram that had encompassed her for the entirety of their stay.
Fatigue in every step, she followed him into the void, fingers and palms clinging to the wall for support. Keeping up with him, even as slow as he was, was an ordeal. There was doubt if the pulse she felt against her fingertips was just her own. But so far, this was the same as the first room of the studio, only filtered through extreme shadow-
A stench bit at her nose and she saw something move. Just up ahead, ink gushed from the pipes overhead and swamped the floor. A gigantic statue with the same face as the rest of the studio proudly oversaw the incubus in front of them as the mass grew and bubbled like a cancer eating the corridor inside out. The shepherd was unphased and walked closer and closer, about to enter this convulsing, living shade. The soft thump in her fingers became faster.
She felt herself begin to hyperventilate.
He looked over his shoulder once he noticed the harmony of footsteps was broken. The pivot came in time to see her dusky figure slide down the wall, literally letting herself go.
"I can't! I can't…!"
Hair clung to her sweaty skin and caught in the saliva of her mouth.
"Please don't make me go there…I don't…I…" Pleas to avoid the inevitable.
He was puzzled…and unbearably annoyed. "Why?"
She gaped for air like she was drowning, giving no comprehensible reply. His cycling between obligation and acrimony for her was proving to be so aggravatingly short. He sighed beneath the refuge of his mask. His lord must have blessed his kind with vigor beyond that of the untouched that roamed into this perdition by choice. So weak, so pathetic, even after Bendy bestowed upon her his own power and life.
Impatience overcame his virtues for struggle. Faint hiccups and sobs rang in his ears as she hung over his back, placed neither gently nor with intent to be thrown, torso once again aching from the pressure.
He was unaware it was less a fault in her strength of body than it was one of her mind as they waded into the ink. Her whispers turned to screams.
It took a long time for the sight of the throbbing flow of ink to leave her; eventually it was settled into a still pool that only passed waves where he had just stepped, the immediate fear of where they were sliding into a quiet trepidation of what was ahead. And yet, her breathing was still profoundly troubled.
She had been kidnapped when they found her before. Kidnapped. It was something that seemed out of the realm of possibility, as alien as the moving cardboard cutouts from the halls above. And now that same stranger was carrying her, a crow clasping an insect in its claws but not yet pecking, resigned to take flight with the worm in its grasp. They had not said to where or why, and she couldn't muster the might in her tongue to ask. Doubtlessly, the volatility of it all was her biggest enemy, her greatest distress.
She…did not trust the person to be rational. Considering they only stared at her in silence for hours up until these past moments, a sound mind seemed absent- or at least subjugated by this situation. Their actions may not be as meticulously intentional as surmised before, but driven by anxiety and horror…like her. That was her hunch. She hoped it to be the truth; otherwise, the resulting sureness left to them would leave her even more unsure of her own fate.
Her pupils lowered and saw the glossy, oily flesh they had. They seemed to be a blobby shell of someone- once human or eternally not- that wanted to leave as much as she. Leaving what was cast into the unknown.
She feared what made them this way and the likelihood that it surrounded her now.
Descending further into the enigma, she asked herself…what was he? -…Oh.
The question itself revealed the vagueness that clouded her judgements. Gender had never emerged in her reflections until now. The constant threat of death- conceivably worse- probably had a hand in that. And well, she conceded that gender was pretty pointless anyway. Wait no- it's very important! But well, just to the individual. But it also means a lot socially, even if it shouldn't necessarily…-
He noticed her breathing steady; her heart was beating so forcefully through him that its waning was obvious. It felt worthy of comment, and yet he had none. Her presence was awkward enough to suffocate any. Resuscitation, however, was unfortunately not avoidable.
"Hey…"
This was softer, perhaps even more serene than her voiced proved capable of before. Assisted by the blood flowing to her brain held upside down, she was now sedated by her own inquisitiveness, her own divulgence of thought and whimsy. It was remarkable, and likely a result of her own nervous system straining to keep her alive by avoiding yet another costly spike of adrenaline and panic where it would be utterly useless. Her own readiness to be swept into conversations with herself had always been a rival of anesthesia, but who had known it was enough to confidently probe the face of nightmares? The questions and asides came slow but without careful planning, merely wind from her lips. It was favorable that her brain made it too exhausting to care, as the mere idea this would have made her sober self fall over in flabbergast.
"Who are you? I mean…who should I think of you as?"
It probably made more sense in her head than it did to him as a question.
He began but never finished. "I am…"and they hung in the air like clothing to dry. Having never been asked to explain before rather than simply doing so opportunistically left him reasonably hesitant, and so he found he preferred to do so on his own volition. That was not his current intention. However, the still wet steps of his pantlegs dragging ink from the loch onto the upcoming bare, hardwood panels weren't satisfying enough to engage the silence.
"It's…okay if you don't have a name."
This tone- the utter, idiotic guilelessness-!
It stabbed through him like broken glass and left him arrested mid-step. He shortly recomposed and jerked his knees back in their cadence, unsure if the forcefulness in his next declarations were to prove certainty to her or himself.
"I am his prophet. I am he who is- " Too forceful, and he audibly choked on his words, just for a second. "-blessed to sing the hymns to our lord."
The concept of gender was indeed very stimulating, but this was much too ominous for her to pay attention to it any longer. The gratification normally attained by answering her own questions was completely engulfed by the dread freshly placed upon her shoulders.
"I…I think there's a lot we need to talk about," she stuttered wearily, naively.
"I suppose there must be," he curtly answered the sheep as he continued to carry them both gracelessly, cumbersomely away. Their figures obscured and fuzzed into one shortly before evaporating into the gloom ahead.