There is no light in the deep sea. Everyone knows that. Once you pass the mesopelagic zone, the only light is from glowing worms and such. They appear only in small clusters, unlike the millions of stars up above. The night sky will look like this when the world-serpent starts to eat the stars, little colonies of luminescence trying with all their might to cross the cosmic sea before they're swallowed whole. The stars will want to find somewhere large and bright, too large and too bright for the world-serpent to eat. They will decide to flee for the sun. The experience of the glowing worms is much the same, except they don't have to worry about the world-serpent but rather a quick and hungry fish. They want to camouflage themselves, and so they head for something bright, navigating only barely with their vestigial photoreceptors. The brightest object around is stirring from his sleep, resting on a ledge under a natural overhang. His scales are flashing—slowly, at first, but they speed up quite quickly. They dart under his wings, and the fish follows only to be batted accidentally out of the way as the deep-sea constellation stretches, his wings extending as if in flight. Royal patterns are etched onto them, a legacy he cannot escape. The glowing worms stick close to their patron god as he puts his wings back down, Awake, the SeaWing puts his lights to rest, plunging the worms into total darkness.
He relights a small spiral on the inner edge of his wing and grabs a chisel and a large stone. These are his singular possessions. The stone has thousands of little nicks in it—he's running out of room—and the spiral is being kept as dim as possible so as not to hurt his extremely sensitive eyes. Uncaring about the dangerously low amount of space, he adds one more notch to the menagerie. These used to symbolise days, but now he marks one every time he goes to sleep. He hopes he sleeps regularly enough that these are synonymous, but he knows that his haphazard calendar has long been out of date. He keeps the total in his head anyway: 5,552 days. 553, actually, counting today's mark. Today is, more or less, his twentieth hatching day.
He looks out into the darkness. It's not as bad for him as it is for us. He is on the ocean floor, he knows, and he sees not abyss but an endless landscape, a stretch of stone with organisms all around. Like hills, it rolls. He is looking for a valley, but he can't quite find it. He's in a valley already, technically. Beyond the edges of even his vision are two tall mountains, ridged and lonely. He lies in between them, in the depression, where the strangest animals in the world subsist on one another. There are no plants here—the sunlight cannot give them sustenance. This land is barren and otherworldly, a leech on his soul just as much as his magic is. He doesn't want to be here. He wants to be somewhere like here, but where there is nothing; where he can just slowly sink into nonbeing. That is the valley. The deepest point of the ocean, as calculated by oceanographers five hundred years ago. They thought it was somewhere around here, but nobody has ever had the gall to find it.
Turtle of the SeaWings knows he is a coward. This heroic epic is his paltry way of making up for it. The world doesn't want him anymore, and he doesn't want it. It's for the best if their marriage is annuled. Even he hardly feels that he exists anymore, but glowing worms still flock to the scales he can't keep from lighting up when he sleeps, and he can't stay afloat forever without eventually feeling the ground beneath him. If he's going to disappear, he needs to do it right. As such, he takes his rock and chisel with him and continues into the ink. Turtle has acquired some kind of intuition these past fifteen years, and he feels that the ground will eventually decline if he keeps heading in this direction. That is the only phrase Turtle uses to refer to where he's going; the cardinal directions mean nothing down here. Absolutes do not exist. Everything has lost its point of reference, and Turtle himself is the only constant.
He rises up from the ocean floor, and a giant squid drifts past him. Its tentacles briefly tickle Turtle's face, the first living touch he has felt in quite a while. He stops abruptly and turns his head around, dimly flashing don't go... It's embarrassing, and he quickly flees the spot where he made his pitiful plea. Like a sad elder, he judges his performance. A sad elder, going up to spend time with the crabs. Giving them names... Moons, I'm so alone.
A voice suddenly echoes in his head, aged and paternal. You're never alone, Turtle. You have yourself!
Seventeen years and seventy-two days ago, Turtle sat on his own in a dark room. That is a generous descriptor; only the front wall was actually made from bricks. The rest was all granite and such, jagged and unwelcoming, though not cramped. The floor was no different, and a hole in it let Turtle peer into the sea. It was a delicate viewport—the creatures below were skittish in the face of the massive water displacement known as swimming. Turtle, every day for a few weeks, had come here after he was done with doing an alright job on his schoolwork. The least known part of the Summer Palace, it had been visited before him only three times in the past decade: twice were dragons getting lost and once was a builder taking measurements for a conversion of this cave into an actual room. That never came.
Even the largest minnows were difficult to see, especially from above the water rather than in it. Turtle tried to put his head in there once, but a comfortable position left his nose submerged and his gills not, and he couldn't get his gills under the water without straining his neck quite badly. Luckily, minnows were not the only animals down there. If the sun was right, Turtle could see down to the sandy floor, where crustaceans were abundant. Crabs, mostly, but it wasn't uncommon to see a crayfish or the like.
Turtle, for the past month, had been isolated from his peers, treated as a non-entity. All of his effects lost their cause—his brothers suddenly believed in divine intervention. The need for closeness is deadly, and so, in lieu of the death penalty, this was only a fair punishment for two counts of negligent infanticide. Prior to this, most of Turtle's free time was taken up by social intercourse. There were two categories of that: games and just talking to each other. Turtle didn't do great at the games, but he was an alright conversational partner. He was a bit too excitable—some would even call it self-centred—but there was a delicate balance. Conversations among the SeaWing princes had, on average, about five participants, and so if Turtle was getting carried away one of his brothers could just cut him off and change the topic, and Turtle would recognise that his time to speak would come again someday.
Twenty-eight days ago, Turtle was cut off for the last time. His time to speak would never come. He tried to talk to himself, but about what? Others spoke about worldly things, but he was a bit more conceptual. He had intricate knowledge of each and every one of his ideas, and to destroy them such that he might build them back stronger, the purpose of his interlocutor, was terrifying to him. One particularly sad night, he came down here and considered talking to the crabs down below, but he decided that such would be too pathetic even for him.
He dipped his claw into the water, stirring it around. The lack of reactivity from the world around him had degraded his sense of dignity to nothing; who was he performing for? As such, a certain thought was not kept cooped up in his head as it should have been—more than that, it should have been kept to a corner of his head, but such things can be forgiven in these dire circumstances—and instead slipped out of his mouth in a mumble. "It wasn't my fault," he said with a contradictorily guilty voice. "It wasn't..." He sighed. "I just want them to forgive me."
"You want, do you?" came a friendly growl from behind him. Turtle did not turn his head to face it. "Have you forgotten what you are?"
"I wish I could," said Turtle, unexcited by the voice's more lively demeanor. "If they find out... I don't want to have to do anything important ever again." Turtle's juvenile tongue pronounced important as imporpmt. "I'm useless. I'll just mess up whatever they want me to do."
"Useless?" The voice scoffed. "You're one of the most talented dragons in the world. Listen to me. If you want them to forgive you, I can help you with the wording—"
"I'm not doing it!" Turtle snapped, finally turning around to meet the visage of his disputant. Towering over him on the other end of the room was an impossibly pale dragon, scales so blue they were nearly white—he could have been mistaken for an IceWing. Above his demonic musculature, strange patches of white fur scattered throughout, sat his head, long and unsettling, his teeth caught in a permanent hateful grin. Nothing seemed to be on the other end of his deeply black eyes. Turtle was not at all startled by this horrifying apparition—he had the courage to argue with it, after all. "No matter how much you try to push me, I'm not going to become like you. It won't even help, anyway. I'll just be thinking about it."
The demon ambled towards him, snapping his jaw with every step. His tongue was long, drooping out his mouth like an eel. "You already are like me," he said. "What are you trying to do, protecting yourself like this? It's only making you miserable. This spell will make you sane, Turtle."
"If I..." Turtle searched for the words. "If I just kept casting spells whenever I felt like it, I'd be dead before I turn ten."
The monster sighed, a rattling sound. "I agree, you must be careful, but there is nothing wrong with magic. It's a tool."
"A tool to kill your whole family with?" Turtle, despite being two years old, was well-read on this particular topic, though he understood about one word in three in the scrolls he read about it.
The monster didn't deign to respond to that. "Besides, what else can you do? Will you stay here for the rest of your life, arguing with me about whether you could have lived instead of wasting away in here?"
Turtle had a biting remark at the ready until he actually thought about what his interlocutor had said. He'd been figuring that at some point his brothers would forgive him on their own, that he would get to feel alive again, but... did they really need him? They looked like they were doing fine without him—even better, if his most self-deprecating thoughts were to be trusted. If he didn't get back in their graces, then it would only get worse between him and the thing to his left. It had only been some weeks of isolation that had caused him to appear—what would years look like? At the end of it all, there would be another massacre.
Turtle looked his evil reflection in the eye. "Fine, I'll think about it."
Seventeen years and fifty-two days later, Turtle has long realised that his conception of Albatross was incorrect. Albatross wasn't an IceWing hybrid—or if he was, that fact has been kept very secret. As such, he probably wasn't white all over, and neither were his eyes pure black. In fact, written records of his appearance dispel both of those ideas.
Nevertheless, the demon is still here, looking exactly the same as he did when he first appeared in the corner of Turtle's vision. He's resting alongside Turtle on the sandy sea floor. There is nothing to gather around; there are no landmarks. Turtle gnaws on an isopod as an elderly voice somehow speaks inside him.
Happy hatching day, the demon says. His mouth moves, but the words cannot travel through water.
Twenty, is Turtle's simple reply, flashing at him in Aquatic.
What happened? asks Albatross. Didn't you say you wouldn't get any older than ten?
Well, that was the plan. Not originally, of course, but when I first came here. I thought I could find it in a year. Now...
Fifteen years.
Fifteen years, yes, and I'm still here.
Where else would you be?
Nowhere. Like it or not, I haven't given up disappearing.
Albatross soundlessly thumps his tail on the bedrock behind him. I've had enough of this disappearance nonsense.
Oh, what do you want me to do? Get mind controlled?
Just kill yourself! It's so much simpler than all this. The sea won't give up its dead anytime soon; you don't have to worry about anyone finding your body.
Kill myself, and then what? Go to Hell? I want to go to sleep.
Turtle expects Albatross to echo his own thoughts that he's too much of a coward both to live and to die, but he doesn't. The imagined creature before him just glares at him with those pinprick pools. Turtle's wings droop a little.
And... I still have some hope.
There it is.
Oh, give me some slack. I just think that...
Albatross' glare isn't ending. With his tail, he motions for Turtle to continue.
You're right, it's useless.
Useless? repeats the demon. I don't mean that. I think there's more to come from you, you know, even if it takes another fifteen years.
More to come how? What am I supposed to do? The world's over, and I'm not in a position to lay the next world-egg. Or any eggs.
You're an animus! Go on and give yourself a womb.
Can we move off of this metaphor?
If you like. But know that you never lost your chance. Not when you abandoned your friends, not all those times you clung to your safety. Not even when you begun diving down here. If you're going to disappear, so be it. Keep looking. The way I see it, though, is that the only ways out of here are to come back up or suicide.
Yes, well... neither of those appeal to me.
Really? I thought you were just skirting around having to admit you have hope. Do you really believe in Hell?
No, there's nothing after death, of course.
Aren't I an exception to that rule?
You're special; you're not real. I mean, look at you. Do you think you had fur? I have no idea why I imagined you with that.
I can't complain. It gets chilly down here. You were saying?
I don't want to die. I don't really want to sleep forever, like how I've been describing the valley. I want to... be falling asleep forever. I want to be caught in that little moment where it feels like everything is going to be okay, where tomorrow is another day.
But everything won't be okay.
Of course it won't; the world is doomed because of my cowardice. That's why believing that it will is so intoxicating. They say alcohol drowns your sorrows, but I've tried, and it only makes you sadder. The valley, on the other talon...
You don't have to do all this, though, in order to reach that feeling. Fifteen years, it's taken, only to get this far. Just enchant—
No! Turtle's getting more frustrated; unnecessary stripes are starting to light up. On his left shin, a cluster indicating that the sentence is interrogative becomes lit despite the fact that he intends his next sentence to be declarative. This nascent miscommunication is killed before it is born by the fact that Albatross, by virtue of being fictional, can just sort of read his mind. I can't lose my soul. If I want to somehow come out of this winning—come out of this at all—I have to stay intact. You've already done too much damage to me! Don't you remember when I was three, and I was racing, and—
You need not narrate. Albatross' voice, while not warm, remains calm despite Turtle's excitement. I remember it just as well as you do.
Turtle takes a moment to calm down, lights dimming into silence. The point is: I won't use my magic. No matter what it takes, I'm saving it like the IceWings did. Once in a lifetime, for something grandiose. Something foolproof, like whatever Fathom did. Well, that wasn't foolproof, but...
Why are you talking to me, then, if you plan on conserving your magic in such a way? What use am I to you? I am the very rust eating at your soul, if you believe such things. When can I expect for you to go on alone?
I've thought about it, Albatross. I've thought about it. Turtle feels a headache coming on. He is not meant to spend any amount of time at these depths, and arguing with his distant grandfather isn't helping. You cropped up because I wanted guidance on my magic. I don't need you anymore; I've long made my decision. You've only ever hindered me. Still, I keep you around. Turtle smiles. After all, you're a monster, and who doesn't love the company of monsters?
Albatross scowls. I'm not a monster.
What else can you call what you did? You massacred your family; more than them, almost everyone in the Island Palace. The dried blood is still there.
I didn't want to! Albatross pleads; a thousand times he and Turtle have had this argument, and he has never elaborated on this. And I don't feel good about it, now, either. I can't right my sins—
I know what you're trying to do. The amount of dashes is increasing; soon, this conversation will consist of nothing but words hastily cut off. You did it all because you lost your soul. You envy me; you think my soul is nice and clean, don't you—
Case in point, Albatross doesn't let Turtle finish. I didn't lose my soul. You didn't lose your soul, either.
If you didn't lose your soul, why did you do it? Turtle's scales are lighting up as brightly as they can, annoyed by Albatross' reciprocation of their own rudeness. This makes him incoherent, but the pale demon next to him understands perfectly. What made you do it, if you didn't want to? Answer me!
I don't know! Albatross shouts, suddenly desperate. Turtle is silenced, and he continues quietly: I don't know anything you don't.
Sixteen years and five days ago, Turtle was awaiting his hatching day. It was two weeks away, his future makeshift calendar destined to slowly drift away from the actual date by about nine days. Honestly, it's surprising that it isn't further away than that. Anyway, he was not sitting on his own in a dark room. Rather, he was celebrating the hatching day of a few of his brothers—the names had drifted away over time, but they were older than Turtle. These celebrations included, three hours after noon, a race from one end of a small archipelago to another. Turtle, as part of his lack of prowess in games, was not good at racing, but he still participated anyway. To do otherwise would be unusual.
He was swimming in the clouded water two minutes before the race began. Two minutes lay in between him and failure, and being on the outer edges of failure or success were never good for him; not to mention the bullying that came when he failed. Sometimes even when he succeeded.
He had a good plan as to how to deal with this impending failure: tie a piece of kelp to his arm and enchant to make him a little faster. Not the fastest; that would be brazen. Ideally, his speed would be caught dead in the median, a perfect average, but he couldn't predict exactly how fast his brothers would be. Few worries overtook him about his soul as he finished wrapping the kelp around his arm; he didn't like Albatross, and almost always disagreed with him when it came to magic, but his influence had nevertheless creeped into Turtle's psyche. It was small, insignificant. Building a palace from nothing might cause you to murder your family, through the insane logic that is the popular conception of animus magic, but to simply make yourself faster? No harm had ever resulted from that.
But Albatross—moons-blasted Albatross—wasn't content with that. "What's the point?" he said, speaking from above the water as Turtle dragged a piece of kelp out from the mud. The water was opaque that day, silty. "Mediocrity, hurray. I understand why you might settle for third place, but right in the middle? Really?"
What are the consequences, though? Turtle flashed. It was almost impossible to see from above the water, and certainly impossible to glean any meaning from, but, as mentioned before, nothing in this world could possibly stop Turtle and Albatross from communicating. If they think I'm too fast...
"It's a game, you little..." Albatross left Turtle to fill in the insult himself. "What are the consequences of your winning? You get to be lauded, that's what, to upstage your brothers on their own hatching day. What's better than that?"
"Is that why you massacred them all?" Turtle asked as he resurfaced, both literally and figuratively out of the blue. "Was it a play for power?"
"What..." Albatross spread his wings in disbelief.
"Besides, they'll catch on if I'm suddenly the fastest," Turtle said, as though he had not used the Royal SeaWing Massacre as a cheap way to argue with his ancestor.
"True," replied Albatross, equally as willing to ignore what Turtle had said. "Sixth place, surely, is outside that suspicion."
"Well, where's the prestige in sixth place? I'm not getting lauded in sixth place."
"You'll have more fun."
"Maybe." Turtle sighed. "Won't making me faster have a worse effect on..." My soul, he finished internally, having realised that Albatross' answer would be an emphatic denial and the question was thus unnecessary. He looked to the east, to the starting island; there, as its descriptor predicted, things were getting started, and he needed to be there quickly.
"Come on, what's the harm in it? These are festivities; any other time, I'd have let you do as you wished, but you may as well do it now. The older ones—they're the ones who'll be in the top six spots—the older ones are drunk off of wine. They won't care!"
"I..." Turtle flicked his tail. "No, alright?"
But Albatross persisted. "Stubborn thing..." He repeated all his main points as he followed Turtle over to the starting island, and as soon as he touched down on the sand Turtle decided he had had enough.
Fine! he mentally shouted. If it'll shut you up... He whispered an enchantment to the kelp, feeling the strange humming of magic around his arm. Animus magic, which was something of a capricious deity in his worldview, he hoped understood what sixth-place meant; as a fail-safe, he had also told it to make him at least a small bit faster than Fin, who had taken eighth place in the last one of these races that was held.
The race commenced from there, and it went alright. The water was far from clear, which made navigation difficult, but Turtle did reach Albatross' desired sixth place exactly. There was a problem with that ranking, though. While sixth place was outside the suspicion of Turtle being an animus, it was not outside the suspicion of cheating, which the murky water could not clear up. Cerulean, jealous of Turtle's superior placement and possessing a tricksy mind and oratory voice, managed to convince the rest of the competitors that Turtle had only swam so quickly during the first quarter of the race, using all his energy to do so, and exploited the opacity of the water to turn around then and swim back to the starting island. Turtle tried as he could to argue his innocence, but his brothers in seventh and fifth place had only seen glances of his tail and hindclaws, indistinguishable from any of his other kin. His guilt was unanimously decided by a jury of twenty-nine.
This done, it was time for another long month with Albatross' company.
Sixteen years and five days later, Turtle has moved on from the resting place where he had one of his constant spats with Albatross. In his teeth are the remnants of a grenadier, torn apart with vigour. He refuses to give the faint flashes of white to his side a glance. He may very well have to continue alone. He knows he's getting closer to the valley, and that seems to... aggravate his companion.
Is it punishment you're after? he asks, and the nature of his communication to Turtle means that it's hard for his recipient to block him out. Still, Turtle tries, and the next message from his ancestor comes fragmented: Do... redeemed?
Swimming faster in hopes of outpacing the demon, Turtle plummets downwards. His instinct, noting how far downward he has travelled, thinks that the valley should be somewhere around here. He's getting close; too close for Albatross' liking. Perhaps it's the fear of death that's worrying him so? After all, if all goes well, Turtle will be half-conscious, too asleep to be splitting his mind as he has been. He reaches the edge of a cliff, and his heart soars when he sees the incredible drop, the blackness beyond. This is it, surely. This is the valley. Fifteen years of searching for this ultimate escape, and finally he has found it. It almost makes it all worth it.
Turtle wastes no time in diving off of the cliff, sailing forevermore into the abyss. He prepares the dim half-light of dreams, organises his library of them. Not in any way that would make sense; that isn't how the valley would like things, he figures. Oh, how beautiful the last seventy-five years of his life will be. He will be gaunt from feeding subconsciously only on plankton and the occasional dumb fish—gaunt as in almost dead—and he will... he will...
Turtle realises that he's hit the ground, which isn't supposed to be a property the valley has, at least not without diving down for weeks on end. He curses; he's got the wrong depression. Some part of his head whose knowledge of the terrain here teeters between supernatural and incorrect says that the valley is further to the east, and that this has always been obvious to it. Turtle, defeated, slumps on the bedrock. He isn't even annoyed when Albatross appears out of the shadows.
You didn't answer my question, says the demon. I get the feeling that this is about punishment for you. Am I not right, at least to some degree?
Turtle and Albatross have had this exact conversation before, but neither one really minds having it again. There is a drought of topics in the abyssal zone. Yeah... he weakly flashes. A bit, I guess. I'm the reason it's all... wrong, and nobody up there is gonna punish me. I have to do it myself.
Why waste this time on punishment? provokes Albatross. You could have been constructive with these fifteen years. Right your wrongs. But you've chosen loneliness. You possess the greatest power in the world, and you squander it like this on the suspicion of your guilt. Are you even guilty? Think cr—
I'm guilty! Turtle yells internally, deciding that his stripes would not get the passion across. He would be willing to entertain more of Albatross' anti-justice rhetoric if he had not shaken the very basis of Turtle's weltanschauung. I am guilty! You might think otherwise, God might think otherwise, but I know that I am guilty!
Fourteen years and one hundred and four days ago, Turtle was gripping a stick for dear life and trying not to pass out from fear. Above him towered Darkstalker, ancient legend of the NightWings. He wouldn't be too scared of most other ancient legends who were at least six times as tall as him. No, the problem with Darkstalker was that, for some reason, he wanted to kill Turtle. Immediately, as soon as the unusually silver NightWing rejoined this world, Turtle saw his eyes glide over him and instantly well with an incomparable malice. Turtle, if he wasn't more careful than anything in this world could be, would not survive the month. Total annihilation would be brought to him; the records would be altered, and there would be only thirty-one SeaWing princes.
Turtle slowly backed up from the monster, watching him speak with a terrible charisma to the dragons Turtle had made the ultimately suicidal mistake of trying to be friends with. His heart was beating against his chest like an innocent prisoner scheduled to be executed, and he felt the stick start to slip from his claws. Turtle was a simple machine, with few inputs and few outputs. He was not one of the great contraptions that had revolutionised the business of clothesmaking in the Kingdom of Sand. One of those could have handled Darkstalker, but Turtle was feeling his spools of yarn come undone.
"Alright, grandson, here's what you need to do." Albatross crouched beside him, fearless in his face of his contemporary. "Get to the academy as fast as possible. He's going to go there, too, at some point, but you have the lead. Warn everyone there about him. Narrate his evils if you remember them."
Turtle saw the sense in this, but he had developed a gut reaction of disbelief to anything Albatross told him, so he had a hard time actually considering it, especially when it involved going up against the god before him. After a moment of analysis, he figured that Albatross' plan had to include him casting some big spell at some point—maybe more than one—and that was another thing he refused to do. He had to do something, though, didn't he? It was an impossible thought, but there was a sliver of a chance that it all rested on his doing something.
"Now, after that, get something or another that can be worn, and enchant it to make its wearer immune to any spells that bastard tries to put on them."
There it was. It wasn't a terribly big spell, but it was a spell. Turtle's breath was shaky from fear, but he still found it in him to sigh.
"And then you use that bowl you made to make a lot of them, and pass them around. It's a start, at least."
Turtle... couldn't really find a problem with that, despite the frustration innate to any interaction with his ancestor. If he himself had come up with this idea, or one of his friends, he would have done it immediately; not even a question would pass his lips. But it came from Albatross, and he couldn't just do what Albatross said. Even if it made perfect sense, there was just something stopping him. He was stuck in contemplation, in trying to force his mind to think about what Albatross was saying, when the stick slipped from his claw. He picked it up immediately, of course, but in the two seconds it was free of him he saw Darkstalker's gaze pass over him again, the hatred almost cutting his scales open from afar. Turtle's heart crystallised; he could do nothing. This thing was impossible to fight against. Even after Turtle grabbed the stick again, his eyes lingered on the spot where he was standing, and Turtle felt himself freeze in fear.
His body could not take another moment of his implacable gaze. The cords were being snipped, blood was gushing...
Turtle, eyes mad, bolted away from the massive NightWing. Six months later, he would be crowned the King of Kings.
Fourteen years and ninety-nine days later, a barely-visible green dragon adds another mark to his crowded rock. He's at 5,557, the drift having increased to ten days. He had been lucky, really, that his brief appearance hadn't piqued Darkstalker's interest too much. He eventually lost that stick—it floated away while he was asleep during the first year of this cursed expedition—and as such, Darkstalker regained the ability to know he exists. His years of being invisible paid off in that moment, Turtle supposes.
He looks down, spreading his wings and beating them gently, keeping himself right where he is. The valley sprawls beneath him, black and infinite. In its centre is absolute negation, a font of oblivion that can be drawn from without risk. It is the dream of everyone who has ever lost hope. There, he is not guilty. There, in fact, he is nothing. He has never done anything wrong, for he has never done anything.
Beside him, Albatross is silent. The energy that overtook him earlier is gone. The valley itself is silent; it is this silence from which all other silences are derived. Turtle tries to read his expression. His monstrous face makes it difficult, but there is a sadness there. It's not bittersweet, like how Turtle feels; it's just depressing. The abyssonaut decides to give him the courtesy of a goodbye.
Albatross... he flashes. Forgive me.
Already done. Albatross smiles, an expression that doesn't mesh well with the demonic visage two-year-old Turtle gave him. I won't stop you, if this is really what you choose. I understand. I've felt like this before.
You have? Turtle asks. You've never brought that up before.
Oh, definitely. Do you still want to know why I committed the massacre?
Not really, but if you have something to say, I won't stop you.
It wasn't because I lost my soul, or went mad with power, or anything that has been heaped on my grave after my death.
Turtle scowls unkindly for a moment, but quickly suppresses it. Albatross never follows these thoughts up; he just meekly withdraws when pressed about it. He can't bring himself to dismiss it, though; that would be cruel in the face of this goodbye.
No, it was personal. I did want to, at the time, but if I could have seen what history would do to me, I would have reconsidered. It wasn't premeditated nor inevitable; that is what I meant when I said I didn't want to. I found out that I was an animus by disabling one of my sisters, and Queen Lagoon, another sister, never let go of it. I was slave to her, kept in check by my guilt. According to her—and as I found myself believing—I owed an unpayable debt to my family as a result of what I did when I was hardly a year old.
Turtle, in his shock, drops the rock and chisel. They sink rapidly into the deep, and he will never see them again. But I don't know that! he flashes emphatically.
Of course you don't, replies Albatross. Only the massacre was remembered, not anything else I did or what I was like as a dragon. My wife's name, for instance, has never once been mentioned in any of the scrolls you've read about me and my corrupted soul. That I might have had some motive beyond pure evil is unimaginable. I wasn't happy with my arrangement with the Queen—who could be?—and so I wasn't always the most loyal. She made me train my grandson—he looked so much like you—and I thought for certain that, once he knew everything I knew, I would be executed. So...
You killed them all.
Understand me, Turtle. I was terrified, and my entire life I had hated everyone around me. I was isolated. There was no other way it could have ended.
Turtle nods. I understand, he says. I forgive you.
You have it better than I did, grandson, replies Albatross. Nobody knows you're guilty. The only way out for me was death, the annihilation you're heading towards. You can still come back.
Turtle starts descending into the valley, slowly but quickly accelerating. Taking advantage of the fact that he isn't yet actively plummeting, he flashes one last time: Goodbye, Albatross.
Goodbye, Turtle.
Albatross disappears from the edge of Turtle's vision as he falls into the fathomless abyss.
A/N: Didn't think this one was too good, but it got a positive reception over on AO3, so...