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Everything seemed gelid and slow moving here. Garamonde felt like he was moving underwater - simple forward momentum required effort - but the ship had near-normal gravity; he didn't need any mag boots to move through the ship.
Not that they'd helped Murcheson's team, any. He came into the mess hall and was greeted by the surreal image of carnage strewn across the walls, some chunks still spinning gently in the air (could the artificial gravity be getting less room by room?). But in three distinct places throughout the room, he saw standard Imperium-issued Arbites mag boots, held firmly to the ground. Only one, behind a toppled table, stood alone without a mate. Emperor knew where the other leg had gone.
Garamonde spared a moment for the men, but quickly composed himself to move forward.
"You little shit!" Garamonde stopped, his lungs nearly collapsing from shock. He found it hard to breathe. It couldn't be.
"Get back here!"
Garamonde turned around, dreading the sight he knew he'd see, but more terrified to keep his back turned on it.
There, with a strange bluish haze around it, stood his father, looking much smaller than he remembered, but still larger than the young child stood defiantly before him. For a moment, Rufys felt an imbalance in his head, unable to tell if he was witnessing this scene from his childhood, or if he was imagining an older version of himself watching it from afar. He felt there was a real fear of falling inside his younger self's cranium, and had to shake his head to regain the proper reality again.
"What!" young Rufys demanded, crossing his arms.
"I heard you saying them prayers again," Oxlard Garamonde said, the crumbs in his scrofulous black beard bouncing around as he spoke.
"So? The Emperor protects."
"Like hell he does! Look at this shithole. What I done to deserve this?"
"Maybe if you'd prayed a little harder, you wouldn't be–"
The smack was telegraphed, but young Rufys had no interest in fighting back. His older self remembered that burning desire to invite the pain, invite the punishment. Try to make his slow, stupid father feel some shame about treating his child this way. Knowing it was futile, but gaining some cruel, atavistic pleasure from the ongoing attempt.
Oxlard began undoing his belt. "Now you bend over that bed. You try praying real hard and see if the Emperor don't save your mouthy little hide."
As young Rufys turned, the Rufys of the present turned his back on the scene. He didn't want to see his eyes, the tears he knew that would spring up in them as soon as he'd turned away from his father. He knew his prayers didn't cause any immediate surcease to the pain his father caused him. That had come years later, from lung disease picked up while working in the coal mines. Divine intervention? Probably just dumb luck. Everything in Oxlard Garamonde's life seemed ruled by it.
Garamonde moved into the next room, each step causing him to gently leap through the molasses of the air, and saw the ethereal image of himself at the Naval academy. He was stood near a tree, watching an agitated young man walk away while young Rufys held a hand out, mouth slightly open, unable to find the words to assuage the pain he'd caused.
Torlyn Vespire. Older Rufys watched his ghostly form walk past him. The young man's hawkish face seethed as glowing blue tendrils of fog steamed off of it. For the life of him, Rufys couldn't remember why the end of their tryst was so difficult. Those were days when everything seemed more important and more hurtful.
Rufys walked past his younger self, the air growing more torpid while the artificial gravity had less sway than ever. As he descended through the air and moved through the tree, which still hadn't faded, he shouted, "Yes, we all have pain!" His words came out thick and difficult. Even moving his jaw required massive effort now. "So?"
Suddenly the tree did disappear, and Rufys was greeted with a vision of himself, and he wasn't sure when this was from. He looked much as he did right now - down to the same outfit, sans saber, even - and he seemed to be floating slightly above the ground, as if he was midleap, grasping for something. The other Rufys saw himself and his eyes showed a moment of shock, but then they focused on whatever was in front of him.
It didn't matter. Through the next doorway was the bridge.
Rufys hit the button, which took far more effort than was normal. The door opened in slow motion, and Rufys walked onto the bridge.
What Rufys Garamonde saw went beyond disappointment, beyond sadness, beyond pain. The scene before him promised nothing but madness if he continued moving forward, possibly even less than that.
Vwahl Kenek floated motionless in the middle of the bridge, a rictus grin frozen on his face. He was positioned far enough forward that he was actually inside the Bloody Eye. This was made possible because the front of the ship was actually missing; the emptiness of space took up what should have been the very forward hull of the Ira Populi.
The fact that they could breathe defied all logic as Garamonde understood it, but from the stillness of Kenek's body, he realized that the distorted logic that ruled this world made it possible. Anything that ventured into the Eye froze, not with a drop in temperature, but froze in time. Even the vacuum of space ceased to function or have any true meaning beyond being a fly trapped in amber forever.
Near Vwahl – too near for there to be any chance of Rufys rescuing him from the Eye – floated Gaius Whit, or whatever was left of him. He was all there, but his body looked as if it'd been torn apart and put back together, badly. His face floated among a horizontal arm above and a horizontal leg below. Those dark curls, so lovely on his head, showed up at different seemingly random places on the malformed creature, like the words on the folded paper puzzles he'd played with as a child.
Whit's mouth silently, slowly gawped, possibly trying to form words, or simply let loose pain in some manner.
A horrifying other creature, looking like a lesser entity than the one Garamonde had sliced into pieces on his own ship, stood on the ground. He also looked like a tesseract of knitted flesh, its face asymmetrically poised on something resembling a shoulder. Where a head should normally be, a thick ruff of maroon feathers.
It hissed at him. A warning, no real anger there.
"Tzeentch welcomes you, little flesh puppet."
"I don't … I don't understand," Garamonde forced out, though it took effort. He kept glancing between the creature and what was left of Whit, estimating the force needed to reach him.
"They keep the glory of his name from you, man-thing," the creature continued. "Tzeentch is the many-in-one, the one-in-many. He is all things, as he is all times. Stagnation is death."
"Then how … how does this serve him? This is immobility!"
The creature chuckled. "If he is all things, he must also experience the states of being that he is not."
"That doesn't make any sense!"
Again the creature seemed amused. "Your understanding is … limited. But now you face a choice. Choice is all … until it isn't." And with that, the creature folded in upon itself, disappearing. Rufys shuddered, the air growing briefly colder than it already was.
To jump would be suicide. To jump would be meaningless. But wasn't everything meaningless, at the end of the day? The only meaning existed was the meaning which we impart into the universe. What if he could somehow free Whit? Defy this creature's will?
With a strangled cry, he leapt forward, one arm outstretched to grab Whit. For a moment he glimpsed a figure in front of him, on the ground, looking up at him. He glanced at it, narrowed his eyes. They opened in surprise as he recognized himself from a few moments ago.
Quickly he reasserted his gaze in front of him, making sure he was angled toward Whit.
As he toppled forward, he felt himself slowing, slowing. Infinity encased him. His breathing slowed to the point of nonexistence.
He wasn't certain what he was even trying for. To extend his time with Whit? Even if Whit hadn't been mangled, it was destined to end anyway, as all love was. Everything ended. Perhaps this was a way to defy that. If nothing moved forward, it couldn't end.
Rufys gritted his teeth, or imagined doing so, and tried to flex his fingers tighter, but it was a fruitless exercise. He was now trapped as were the others. He tried to lock gazes with Whit, at least, though the world had taken on a decidedly reddish tint now, to the point that he was having difficulty differentiating objects.
Silence. The figures remained motionless forever in a frozen tableau.
