by a_seagulls_hubris
Rating: Mature, Other, Complete Work
Published 15 March 2023
After coming home from the Abyss, Ajax reminisces about what he has seen in the eternal darkness.
Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Tartaglia | Childe (Genshin Impact), Body Horror, Tartaglia | Childe Character Study (Genshin Impact), Character Study, with claws and teeth and bone all that good stuff, you can smell the magnus archives influence, Angst
My hands itch. It claws at my flesh, my skin, desperate to taste fresh air again. It’s been days, maybe even weeks, since I’ve arrived at this place that’s too quiet and too small. I don’t know. It’s hard to count when the claws sink themselves into your brain and lodge themselves there.
It’s not painful, exactly—it’s just so irritating. I can’t do anything about it, and I doubt the others can. I think I knew them once. Two of them call me their child. The others insist I stay in this too small, too quiet place to rest. They say I need rest, that I’ve been through such a horrible ordeal, lost in the snow for three days.
There was snow, I remember. But the claws dig themselves deeper and I know, I know that before that there was darkness. It embraced me, despite my struggles and protestations. And in time, I learned to embrace it as well.
It is futile to struggle against nature. I think someone told me that once. I should have remembered that, but I did learn fast. Have you ever reached your hands into the warm corpse of a wolf? Flesh and blood gives way easily enough, until you are left with the bones.
No matter how we try to cover it up, with flickering flames and warm wrappings, what is underneath, what persists, will always be bone. I saw it under her guidance, the branching, calcified frame that sustains the world. She taught me to hold it in my hands, to know that it is all that will remain when you are chewed up and spat out.
Don’t be so surprised. It happens to all of us eventually, when we get too complacent, too content, too weak. You can try to run, but the slow, agonising rot that plagues this world settles into you from the moment you are born. It waits until you can no longer fight it, then it devours you, cell by cell, limb by limb. It grows through your lungs and into the ground, where it chains you to the remnants of so many it has claimed before.
Funny, it seems, that the only cure is to devour. To rip apart the world with your claws and sink your teeth into its heart. To become one of those things with too many teeth that hide under children’s beds at night. That is when the rot begins to fear you. It is too late, then, to wish for the peace that it brings you. You will leave when something else, something stronger, rips through your ribcage and hollows you out. Reaches your bones, and throws them aside.
Unlike rot, bones demand to be remembered. You may be no more, but they will fear your name for years to come, whisper it over glasses of alcohol in the dark, threaten their children with it when they don’t go to bed. Perhaps this is the eternity that so many of us are obsessed with, a refusal to be swallowed up by the earth.
I dream of claws and teeth, too long to be mine. My bones morph, always into something bigger, hungrier, and I welcome it with open arms. I only ask to be able to sink these real, fragile fingernails into something raw and fleshy, if only to feel real again. The darkness is cruel, but it brings truth. A truth I spent months carving from the corpses of things with so many eyes and teeth. My heart belongs to the goddess of ice that governs this land, but I want to feel that truth on my tongue again, to burn it into my skin, until they can see it on my bones. Is this heresy?
There was a time before, I think. I had no words for it, but the rot crawled under my skin and hollowed me out. Maybe that was why I tumbled out of my window in the middle of the night, sword in hand. Humans don’t like being empty.
Some will call this a bad hand dealt by fate. If you ask me, I would say that it was a fair trade: my ignorant bliss for the claws that will cure my rot. I am not so arrogant to say that it has chosen me. It just feels generous sometimes, and I will fully appreciate the gifts of its charity.
If I had rejected it, maybe I would say that there is nothing human left of me. However, I am not so much of a coward that I will not claw apart this fragile shell that restrains me, at its behest.
For the first time in years, my limbs can stretch to their full length. I can finally take a full breath into my cramped lungs. The wretched, divine things that cling to my bones taste fresh air and unfurl themselves, and I am free.
Does it matter that I no longer have a home? When I can hold on with my claws and bite, I do not think that matters. Not when the surface of the earth will make way for this horrendous, beautiful form.
Been feeling a bit unhinged so I found my favourite outlet and wrote this. Heavily inspired by Episode 32 of the Magnus Archives podcast (Hive). Go listen to the podcast it's very good