Something about the name struck him with an intense fear so strong, he could feel a twisting inside his gut at the wrongness of it all. He had a strong urge to just take off and run and never come back, but he knew he needed to go through this God forsaken place to get to Lacie. For her, he would brave anything.
Jack peered through the iron bars to try and see what exactly he was getting himself into, but the whole place was surrounded in a thick purple haze. He couldn't see more than a few feet ahead, but at least he could see that there was a path and they wouldn't be wandering blindly through the fog.
Jack swallowed nervously as Ariella pushed open the doors of the gate.
"Why is it called that?" Jack asked as he warily stepped through the iron gate.
Ariella had already looked unnerved when they arrived, but his question only intensified her discomfort. Jack had seen something dreadful in her eyes, but she looked especially haunted when he asked. She looked out into the fog like she saw something terrible approaching, then she abruptly shifted her gaze to the broken cobblestone path beneath her feet.
"It just is," she said definitively and looked at Jack, "and whatever you do, do not step off the path."
Jack knew that by her tone, Ariella was done talking. He had so many questions he wanted to ask her, like why a graveyard was in the Abyss in the first place and why they had to go through it to get to Lacie, but he decided to give her some peace. They walked down the path in silence.
Jack looked around at the dreary landscape, it was as if they were inside some giant purple cloud. The purple haze blurred everything around them so Jack could only see a few feet away, and the fog was so thick he could barely breathe. Glittering green shimmered in the air like mist. It should have been beautiful, but Jack could only find it foreboding.
There was only one thing missing from the graveyard's ominous atmosphere; the graves. Jack hadn't seen a single grave since they entered, and they had been walking for a while. It was all just pure purple nothingness they were surrounded with.
"Um…Ariella?" Jack asked, still trying to see through the thick miasma.
"Hm?"
"If this is supposed to be a graveyard, where are the graves?"
Ariella bit the inside of her cheek and didn't look at Jack, keeping her gaze forward on the path. They continued walking and just as Ariella opened her mouth to speak, Jack felt something squish under his boot. He stopped, and Ariella pressed her lips together in a thin, fine line and scrunched up her nose in disgust. Judging by her reaction, Jack thought he had stepped in the waste of a chain but he looked down and saw a severed human finger. His eyes widened with revulsion.
"What the—?!"
Ariella swallowed and turned away from Jack. She looked down the path nervously and said, ''come on, we have a long way to go."
Jack ran to catch up with her. He grabbed her shoulder and she looked back at him with sorrowful eyes.
"What's going on?" he asked.
Ariella said nothing and turned away from him, mechanically walking down the path in front of them.
"Ariella!" Jack shouted. She only stared blankly at him with those uneasy eyes.
He yelled at her to tell him where they were headed and what was going on, but Ariella remained silent as they continued on. After a few minutes Jack saw a whole severed arm off to the side, crudely cut off at the base of the shoulder. It had belonged to a female; the fingers were thin and the nails painted red, and it was clothed in a bloodstained white silk sleeve. Jack stared at it for a few seconds, wondering who it could've belonged to, and why it was there, but he had to keep moving to keep up with Ariella, who refused to stop. He figured she wasn't going to tell him anything, so he decided not to ask.
They kept walking in awkward silence, but it was more frightening than it was awkward. Maybe Ariella didn't know what was going on either, Jack thought, and that would explain why she wasn't talking. He was deeply disturbed by what they had seen, and the thought of what was yet to come. It must've affected Ariella to the point of not wanting to talk about it. She was just a young girl. This place must've scared her a lot more than it scared him. He could understand why she wanted to keep moving and get out of this place as soon as possible, but he couldn't get rid of the feeling that she knew something. She kept avoiding looking him in the eyes, but Jack could see the haunted look she had in hers.
Jack inhaled sharply. A decapitated head lie on the side of the path, its mouth opened in a terrified scream. Jack couldn't be sure, since the eight years he had been involved in the noble's court were nothing more than a blur of masks and misery, but he swore that the head looked exactly like a woman he had known. Although, Jack wasn't even sure what was real anymore.
"What is this place?" Jack breathed out in a shaky whisper. He received no answer.
He and Ariella walked further down the winding path way in silence. The next few severed body parts scattered along the sides of the path were enough to set them on edge, so when the fog started to clear up, Jack wasn't sure what to expect. The fog didn't go away completely, just enough so that they could see further off the path on both sides. At first he had wished for it to clear so that he could at least see where they were, but now he didn't want to.
That's when they saw the first body.
It was whole, thankfully; a man with a deep slash across his chest. Jack thought the face looked awfully familiar and he shuddered. He often did…errands for the court men in exchange for them boosting his social status, and even though he couldn't remember every individual face, he had a terrible feeling that he knew this man. He tore his gaze from the man's face, and focused his attention on the cobblestone pathway. It took a moment for him to realize he was wringing his hands and he suddenly missed the purple fog.
They continued walking and saw more bodies along both sides of the path. At first it was only a few at a time but then they started increasing at an exponential rate. Soon the corpses were almost covering all the visible ground around the path they walked on. Some were missing arms or legs or heads, and many had a giant slash across the chest, like they had been haphazardly cut down with a sword that had no concern for elegance. Jack wondered what kind of gruesome battle had taken place here, since the people all wore civilian clothes. What kind of monster would murder this many innocent people?
Oh right, him.
The thought struck Jack with such an unnerving distress that he stumbled on a broken stone and fell to his knees. He braced himself with his palms outstretched and they scraped against the damaged stones. The staggering pain barely registered to him as he looked upon the face of a dead woman who lie in front of him. He had been trying to avoid looking too closely at any of the bodies, especially their faces, but now he was forced to look at one up close and he could see perfectly clearly. Jack knew this woman. Her name was Melanie Tarabat. She ran a restaurant in his hometown where he spent a lot of time to avoid the wrath of his unstable mother. Jack would come into the restaurant with a new bruise on his jaw and Melanie would give him a big hug and a bowl of her special chicken noodle soup; her famous "cure-all." She always made sure he was getting enough to eat.
In exchange for the food, Jack would help Melanie in the kitchen. He would peel vegetables, wash dishes, and sometimes he would sweep the restaurant and bus tables. Melanie kept insisting that the food was free for him, but Jack felt guilty taking it since the restaurant was already struggling as it was. And he liked working there, it gave him purpose. Jack didn't know what else there was to do to while he was avoiding his mother, besides joining a street gang of local urchins. (That hadn't really panned out for him when he tried to join, back when he was too young and stupid to know that scrawny boys like him were easy targets and too vulnerable to manipulation). Besides, the restaurant had a nice atmosphere. It was warm and cozy, despite the door being perpetually broken and never shutting all the way. But he was happy there. It was little more than a small, run down shack on the corner of one of the many lower west side streets, but for a while, it was the closest thing to what Jack could call home.
Jack grew up in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Sablier so a lot of the buildings were decrepit with increasing neglect, but he didn't mind much it being that way. Jack would chat with Melanie and the restaurant patrons, and at the end of the day Melanie would send him off with a hug and kiss on his forehead and tell him to come back again to try her new recipes. Melanie had always had that paternal instinct in her and Jack had wondered if she had kids of her own; he had never seen them. She was more of a parent to Jack than his own mother was, for a short while at least.
The restaurant eventually went bankrupt and Melanie moved away to work in the factories in the northern quarter of Sablier, and Jack never saw her again. He still remembered how she had personally sought him out, just to say goodbye.
After his mother had died he had wished the restaurant was still there, as there were many nights when he went hungry out on the streets. No one wanted to be responsible for one more worthless bastard, so they all ignored him. Too absorbed in their own lives to even acknowledge him, except to shoo him away from their storefronts. And to smack him with a broomstick when he got caught stealing a loaf of bread—that had been an interesting day.
Everyone turned away when they saw him sitting on street corners begging for food, refused to see how thin he had gotten. Ignored the gauntness of his skin, or his trembling blue fingers reaching for warmth on a cold winter day. Melanie was one of the few that had actually cared what happened to him, and did what she could to see that he had been healthy and fed.
Jack had wished to see her again many times when he was a boy, but never did he want it to be like this. Here she was in right front of him, with her glassy eyes looking right through him. Jack remembered how she used to smile at him with so much carefree happiness that he could never understand it. Now her mouth was gaping open in a frightened scream. A tooth was missing. There was a cut on her lip that stained them bright red and blood trickled down the side of her face from a gash on her forehead. Then there was that horrible, crude slash across her chest that Jack had seen on many of the other bodies. Melanie's purple dress was in bloodied tatters, and her hands were glistening a sickly crimson. Jack suddenly felt a terrible pain in his head just looking at her.
Before he knew it, he was bent over the side of the path, retching. His ears were ringing and his head felt like it was going to explode. His vision blurred and distorted; all he could see were Melanie's wide eyes staring emptily through him.
Jack felt someone put a hand softly on his back and he remembered Ariella was still with him. Oh god, Ariella. Jack was so concerned with himself and his stupid, meaningless problems that he hadn't even thought about how this might be affecting her. Ariella was only a child, and if Jack was having this much trouble dealing with their surroundings, he couldn't imagine what she might be going through. Oh, he really was a selfish bastard.
He sat on the path and wiped his mouth with his sleeve—which he would never have done in the real world—but Jack couldn't care less about appearances now. He just wanted to know what was going on with this place, but at the same time he didn't want to find out.
He sat there for what felt like a long time, breathing heavily, and his head pounded like a drum. He ran his hands down his face and wrapped them tightly around himself, trying to stop the rapid beating of his heart. Ariella had been sitting next to him the whole time.
She leaned her head on his shoulder and said softly, "it's alright, Jack. You're alright."
Jack looked down at her. "What happened here?" he whispered shakily. He bit his bottom lip to keep it from trembling.
Ariella unwrapped her arms from around him and studied him. The look in her eyes was strange and discomforting; it made her look far older than she really was. She gazed at him with a look of fire and destruction, of horror and desolation. Condemnation. It was so sorrowful and disappointed that, for a second, Jack wondered what she had seen that had put that look in her eyes.
"Something that should never happen again," was all she said.
Ariella got up, extended a hand to Jack, brushed herself off, and continued walking down the path without another word. Jack noticed there was a stiffness in her steps and she was walking at a much faster pace than before. Odd, Jack thought, since she had so far always walked side by side with him.
"Ariella?" Jack said tentatively.
Ariella looked over her shoulder to face him with tears in her eyes. Her eyes were softer now, but Jack felt the nauseatingly pitying look she was giving him right now was worse than the haunted look from before. Jack hoped her pity was for the poor dead souls that lined their path, and not for him. Hatred he could deal with, but pity, no, that wasn't something he needed.
They continued down the path in silence.
They walked down the path and encountered body after body, lining the outskirts of the path and the surrounding area. There were so many of them, all so brutally slaughtered, it made Jack sick. Most had that same hastily-done slash across the chest, with some missing limbs and sometimes heads, and some had slit throats. Some bodies had gashes on their faces like they had tried to fight, but had ultimately failed and ended up here. The one thing they all had in common, though, was the undeniable sense of familiarity Jack felt about them. Of course he didn't know who they all were, but every once in a while he would see a face and it would take him back to his childhood, or days at the noble's court. The woman with a slash on her palm could have been someone he once spent the night with, or a man with blood trickling from his mouth could have been a guard at his father's estate. Jack felt a terrible sinking feeling with each new face he saw.
He shook his head. It was too impossible; these people just looked similar to those he had known in Sablier. He was confused, tired, the faces were probably just blending together and recreating images of people he only vaguely remembered. That must have been it; Jack hadn't cared to memorize the faces of people he met, only Lacie's. Only ever Lacie. She was the only one that mattered.
Jack wrapped his arms around his midsection and looked down at his boots. He laughed at the bitter irony of it all; he could remember every single detail of Lacie's face, every pore on her porcelain cheeks, every shimmer of life in her crimson ruby eyes, every smile on her perfect rosy lips. He could remember all of this even when he hadn't seen her for so long, yet he couldn't even remember what his own face looked like. Was is painted in hatred, anger, sadness, guilt, or was he simply a mask of bright smiles and shiny disposition? Was that all he was, fake smiles and empty eyes?
Empty.
That's right. He wasn't any of those things. He was nothing.
Water. That's what they always compared him to. You could never see its true intentions. It showed you a reflection of the sunlight glinting off the water in dancing flaming sparks. It tricked you with something so deceptively simple that you were a fool for not realizing it at the start but it was so clever because it didn't even look like a trick at all. It was just whatever floated beneath the water, the rocks and the weeds and the fish and the deceptive cunning. You couldn't see it of course, too caught up in the beautiful and sunlit reflection that you didn't realize it was pulling you closer to the water before you were in too deep and you couldn't get to the surface and you were drowning in all that pitch black murky water. Then, only then, would you be able to see what lurked beneath the waves. And it was not beautiful. It's what made up the tattered shreds of his soul; something so clear, it was almost as if it was never there at all.
Jack felt laughter bubble up in his throat and he threw his head back to look towards a heaven he would never reach.
Lacie.
Now Everyone in Sablier was dead because of him.
Jack cast a glance over to the expanse of corpses and his stomach lurched. He thought he was going to be sick again. He started blinking rapidly, feeling his damp eyelashes' on his cheeks and his breathing came out in short, shallow gasps. It felt like he was drowning.
Impossible.
Impossible.
Jack knew what had happened to these people, although he hoped it wasn't true.
He looked to the side and noticed that Ariella had moved closer to him. He had forgotten she was even there. Jack didn't know how long she had been standing there, regarding him with concern. Whether it was for him or her own safety, he didn't know.
"Did I…do this?" Jack asked, his eyes wide. He silently pleaded she would say no.
Ariella was quiet for a beat, like she was contemplating whether or not she should answer him. Then she nodded.
"This is your graveyard of corpses, Jack. Look at what you've done."