A GAME OF CHESS
(Naught But Lies)
"Do you believe in magic?"
Humans are supposed to say yes—or so they always tell him. Their fairytales, their dreams, their fantasies all revolve around that mystical phrase that the king can never fully fathom.
(He never quite understands why they find him so miraculous, so exotic, so inhuman. He probably knew once—but if he did, he's forgotten.)
The Goblin King lounges upon his throne, legs and arms lazily askew, staring at the yellow fog outside his window. It hangs clumped and poisonous on the air, swirling unnaturally—as if it is composed of thousands of writhing, tentacle-encrusted creatures. (They are grasping for their prey… struggling to drown some hapless beast beneath their toxic clouds, trying to strangle it in their gnarled jaws—in his mind, in the smog, something dies.) And it is just the beginning of another endless day in his dying kingdom.
The heart keeps a steady rhythm, locked inside a box. He can see the lid creak open with every breath it takes, breathing in its beloved fairy tale magic, suffocating on his world's aura—on his own aura. His scarlet eyes turn from his window to the beating, creaking, wooden box, and he is fascinated.
Do you believe in magic?
He asks them that question whenever they have the nerve to summon him (because it is sheer nerve that calls him from his own dealings into their world.) And they gape at him in horror, in disbelief, before sputtering out their answer. It doesn't matter what they say, because Kira knows why they summon him to solve the problems they are too lazy to handle themselves—somewhere deep in their bleeding, clogged hearts, they believe in magic.
Kira, however, does not.
He does not believe in their fairy tales, their golden princes, their white knights—and he will not bring himself to play out their pathetic fantasies just for their own entertainment. Kira amuses no one. He is no one's puppet; he is not their toy doll to be left in the gutter, used only at a moment's need.
He is not their Fairy Godmother. He will not make their dreams come true, or the ills of their world go away. Born a peasant, they will stay in their workhouse and starve (he remembers the way the orphan girls plead with him, and how they still aren't pretty covered in tears and grime).
The heart in the box begins to rush its tempo once again, attempting to fly from its wooden prison—flee back to the blonde girl he stole it from. He ignores it, his pale fingers tapping against the stone armrest that calls itself his throne. His eyes find the window outside once more, crimson beacons watching the ever-changing labyrinth from his palace.
(And beneath him, the pathways and dead-ends shift, growing bored of their current state and wandering away—only to make another road, another path that leads to his palace, and, of course, another trail that leads nowhere. Such is the Labyrinth: A mass of changing thought…. Magic—or so the humans would say.)
The Labyrinth whirls again to reveal the girl bleeding against a wall, her blonde hair matted with blood, her fake blue eyes dull and fogged beneath the mind-numbing pain. She staggers forward all the same—and Kira watches, a smile stretching across his face. (And it is charming yet savage and sharp, a clash of tooth and skin and cheekbone in a way that just shouldn't exist.) He does not work to save girls from poor houses; he does not give them gold and princes. He has not the heart to work such miracles.
His eyes stray to the box and he finds himself rethinking that last phrase, turning over a slightly less literal way to state what he truly means. The slash across his face grows in a twisted expression of glee. All the while, the heart beats desperately in its velvet-lined cage, bleeding against its prison walls.
"I've brought you a gift."
She feels the shadow stalking her, the demon laughing as she stumbles down her chosen path, which seems to stretch out for eternity. She knows it doesn't, she hopes it doesn't—she has her doubts that she can find its end. And all the while, the demon is laughing.
(It sounds rather like a hyena's laugh, she supposes. She remembers with a muted horror that hyenas are scavengers… like the crows that sit on the stone arches, and the walls that tower above her, he is waiting for her blood to run out.)
The stones beneath her remind her of a fairy-tale—cobble-stones, she thinks, an uneven pathway that makes her trip as she stumbles away, blood flowing from her chest. Get up, get up or you'll die; don't cry, Misa—just get up and keep walking.
Your parents have always been dead; they will never be avenged. You still have your legs, so use them. Magic, this place is magic. The Tin-Man has no heart. There are many characters who survive without a heart. She doesn't need one. She just needs to reach it in time….
(In the distance she can hear it sobbing, crying out for her….)
Misa Amane does not need a heart, so she moves painstakingly, one fractured step at a time as she ignores the laughter and ridicule, as she keeps walking, gritting her teeth the whole while.
You can survive without a heart. People even sell their eyes, their souls, their voices… and they live, don't they? Yes, they are worse off; yes, they rot away amidst the misery of their own mistakes and self-made vices…. But they survive.
Misa will survive to see his crimson eyes again, to watch him at the end of that thirteenth hour—to blind him so that he can't see the hole in her chest or the pain written in blood on her face. It will be his blood that paints her skin, his blood that soaks her clothing; it will be his own heart beating frantically in her hand.
She does not need a heart to dream of vengeance, and so she walks on, envisioning his blood, his veins, his demise, watching as the horizon extends before her, like a dying tree in winter… stripped of all its leaves. The autumn air is filled with dead leaves; winter is coming. The frost eats at her bare skin, but she feels nothing—only the pain of her caged heart thumping from far away, attempting to be free.
(The true irony, she finds, is that she did not understand the truth behind all those romances until she lost her own heart. He stole her heart—she locked her heart away in a box for safe-keeping—she gave her heart away—she has no heart….)
All her fairy-tales are lies.
"That's what you were looking for."
"You giving up yet?" asks the black demon between stifled giggles. He peers down at Misa with an interest she once would have called abnormal or frightening (now it is simply unremarkably horrifying—a carrion crow buried beneath ten thousand still-bleeding corpses).
She clutches her arms across her chest, leaning against a wall to block out the cold. She attempts to smile, but finds only a cruel sneer painting her face. It feels new, unnatural to her muscles; it is certainly no expression she has ever made befoe. She supposes it might have something to do with the gaping hole in her chest…. But that is simply a theory.
"You're a raven, aren't you? I read a poem, once, about a raven…. You talk more than he does…. Poe's raven…."
Nevermore—you shall live nevermore, you shall love nevermore, nevermore, nevermore, nevermore. The raven speaks with the glass of broken one-way mirrors; the demon speaks with the blood of her heart pouring from his yellowed teeth.
The raven convulses with laughter, falling over himself as he topples from his perch to the leaf-strewn ground before her. She says nothing, does not even blink as she watches him shake and tremble with an amusement that she cannot decode (she understands that she cannot understand, but she cannot understand—so does that mean that she understands, or does not understand? She doesn't know anymore). She is shaking; somewhere, her heart is pounding—blood is spewing from her chest and staining the ground beneath her feet. (Why, oh why, isn't she dead yet?)
"Light never tells anything to the ones he doesn't like."
She knows the words are not for her, are meant more for the stone walls and the orange sky than for her. And yet, his statement annoys her; beneath the pain of her bleeding heart and the haze of her vision, it annoys her. It grates more than the blood dripping down her legs, more than the walls surrounding her, more than anything she has ever experienced. And perhaps this is because she does not know if it is the truth or a lie—or a half-truth, half-lie, a twisted horror story stuck in between. (Because what sort of story is not black and white? Hers is red, so scarlet against the frosty ground, on the run-encrusted walls—she cannot imagine gray.)
"You know, Light doesn't like me either. That's why I'm stuck in the Labyrinth, day after day, year after year, waiting for someone to walk through the door. It gets very boring out here…. But enough about me; I'm just a lowly Shinigami. How about you?" Once again, the demon begins to laugh.
hyuk hyuk hyuk
(And the laughter reminds her of the mad laugh of the villain; the victory call that each tall, lean figure lets out with a great bellow; the cry that summons the hero from the dead and beyond.) No hero dares show his face.
God of death—yes. she supposes it does fit him rather well. Ravens, too, are some sort of god of death.
"Raven, which way should I go?" Misa asks out of a need to stop the laughter. She doesn't actually expect the demon to look at her with its wide-spread eyes and grin, maliciously, harmfully. There are no such things as friends in this world. She does not want him to point her the wrong way. She doesn't want this god to be cleaning her bones.
"One time, someone went that way." He points in the direction opposite Misa, the way she has come from, soaked in the bread-crubs of her missing heart. (And she wonders if the birds have eaten them away, yet—or is Raven the only bird in this nightmarish world? "But you shouldn't go that way. Light never likes it when people go… that way." He seems to find this funny; jagged, aged-yellow teeth split once more into that grease-paint smile.
Light, Kira, Goblin King…. She hardly needs to call him anything at all—she can feel his presence right over her shoulder, walking in her crimson shadow, whispering in her ear. He is a presence, not a name.
"He does not like it…. What happens if I go straight?" Misa asks once again, voice weak and, somehow, bloodless, but still pinning down the demon and challenging it for answers she is certain it will not give. She does not expect them, but she wants them all the same.
"Well, you'll go straight, I guess."
He mocks her behind his stupidity. Behind his blunt answers and even more blunt excuses for advice, Misa smells manipulation. At this point, she does not care. She would rather walk in her own bleeding footsteps than follow the unknown path that reeks of his presence—the presence who possesses her heart.
(Goblin King, Kira, Light.)
"It's full of openings."
She finds herself with the ability to pass through a wall—or not a wall, she thinks, but a hole in the wall. An optical illusion. The Labyrinth is full of illusions, the demon assures her between the laughter at her attempts of survival. This time, she believes him as she slips in her own foot steps and crashes to the earth below.
She wonders how she looks covered in blood and leaves with her hair tangled and chaotic, her knees scabbed and bleeding. She rests on the stone pathway, staring at the wall—and she sees it shifting for a moment. She sees another new path, another new road to take, another winding trail that leads inward to the Labyrinth. She blinks and it is gone. An image, a dream—the Labyrinth is toying with her and she knows it. It likes to torture her….
She stands and walks, listening to the god of death laugh (she refuses to ask him again—he knows, but she refuses to ask him again). Her body is leaning against the wall for support; her legs work but to a point, only to a certain point. It is in this way that she falls through the second wall.
She is bleeding, falling to the ground and cursing and wailing, covered in blood. She is screaming and the demon is laughing. The demon is always laughing…. (Why won't he stop?)
It is not obvious, the hole in the wall. She wouldn't have noticed it by looking directly at it. (There might be hundreds of holes in the Labyrinth, hundreds of gaps in its walls—she just can't see them.)
She stares blankly at the wall, then peeks behind her. (Her footsteps are gone; the blood is gone. She wonders if, perhaps, the Labyrinth has given it back.)
The demon is laughing (chortle, guffaw, snicker—the guttural hacks are more like the dying coughs of one Consumed than any of those words, any of those true laughs). She stands, supporting herself painfully, feeling the warm copper flow sink to her feet once again as her upper body starves for blood. She walks forward into the new path before her, saying nothing as she turns a corner into her new road.
And suddenly, the sun burns pale and the world grows dark.