Overture - Coming Forth By Night (Solo)

"Ma'am, I'll need you to hold still over the course of the scan.  Are you comfortable?"

Abattoir was not comfortable.  The MRI machine was stiff, awkward against her spine, and there was an unfamiliar chill to the room.

"Yeah."

Although she didn't have any problems with claustrophobia, this whole situation was anything but pleasant: entombed in a plastic coffin, with a paper gown barely covering her pale skin and the glossy sheen of a mirrored surface inches from the tip of her nose.  Abattoir's eyes wandered over the reflection of her face, settling on her fresh scar - stitches crisscrossing over whitened flesh, starting at the right side of her bottom lip and trailing almost halfway to her chin.  It was a memento of Liberty Vella, one she'd carry for the rest of her life.

There were quite a few like it on her.  Despite what the fans might have thought, wrestlers didn't simply cease existing when they weren't on camera.  Even as resilient as she was, she couldn't just pop up from the brutal, violent wars she went through in the ring.  It took time and rest to recover from the big matches, and even then, Abattoir's whole existence was pain.  Something as simple as hopping on her motorcycle sent a familiar shock through her spine, and the steps she had to take in order to sleep properly, well...perhaps it was better not to dwell on that.

She didn't mind, of course.  Pain was natural.  Pain reminded you that you were still alive, something she didn't, and wouldn't, ever take for granted again.  Still, that meant regular hijackings by AFW's medical staff.  In the wake of the Hell in a Cell match, they'd managed to keep her overnight (mainly because she simply hadn't had the energy to leave on her own).  A copious amount of intravenous blood and glucose later, Abattoir had still been dazed enough that she'd let the med techs lead her over to get the MRI done, and so here she lay, listening to the thrum of the machine and waiting for the tedium to pass.

Her gaze trailed back up from the new scar to her mouth, watching the way her lips pressed against each other, thin and bloodless, then up to the trickle of blood weeping steadily from her nostrils.

Abattoir blinked.  "I, um.  I think something's wrong."

Silence.  

She watched the crimson trail wander down towards her mouth, staining her upper lip.  The tips of her tongue poked between them, smearing her mouth ruby-red.  It was bitter, coppery, but comfortingly familiar.

"I said I think there's...is anybody out there?"

Silence.

An agitated sigh escaped Abattoir. She gripped the sides of the MRI machine and pulled herself forward until she felt the chill of the tile floor against her soles.  Straightening up, she glanced around the examination room.  Deserted.  The tech running the test was missing, and the consoles glowed a vacant green.  The nak muay's bewildered gaze flicked back and forth, taking in the suddenly-empty room.  When had he just left?  Why was it so goddamned dim in here?

She took a few bleary steps forward, stumbling a little from the sudden burst of vertigo sweeping through her head, and leaned a hand against the doorframe for support.  Okay.  Take it slow.  She wasn't in the ring, she didn't have to be precise about this.  Abattoir swallowed, straightened her posture, and pushed the door to the examination room open.

He was waiting on the other side.

"It is expected."

He was tall and scarlet and full of terrible majesty, all angles and flowing brocaded edges, and it hurt somewhere deep in her core, somewhere profound, to try to look him in the face.  There was the sensation of falling, and the vague grinding of sandpaper at her eyeballs, and Abattoir was distantly aware of the darkness that existed between the stars.  When her reverie broke, she found herself on her hands and knees, keenly appreciative of the warm blood trickling down her cheeks and over her lips and down her chin.

"Wha..."

His voice was high, airy, laden with frisson; every syllable was preceded by eddies of gurgling echoes of itself, building on each other and rippling into a thunderous cacophony in her head.  The clamor stabbed at her eardrums, excruciating to understand but impossible to block out.  Abattoir tried to focus on the words and found herself stumbling blindly from one iteration to the next, drowning helplessly in a mire of Babel.

"Does it recall the Task that was set before it?"

She shook her head, watching in mesmeric rapture as the blood dribbled onto the tile beneath her.  Abattoir could see herself staring back again, reflected in the spreading red puddle, watching her reflection's eyes seep from the sockets like runny eggs.  She raised her head, shook it in a vain effort to banish the cold gnawing sensation at the back of her mind.

"I...."  She stared, uncomprehending, at the distant blackness of the hallway and how it swallowed the trail of his passing, and felt something snap behind her eyes, a moment of recognition jarring itself painfully into focus.  Familiarity.  "I know you."

Stillness reigned.  A sense of distant frustration permeated the air around her.  

At last: "It will walk with me."  

He turned, and the chill receded with his presence.  Staccato footsteps roamed into the distance of the hall.

Abattoir stumbled to her feet, glanced blindly at the trail of gore she was leaving behind her, and lurched after him into the darkness.

"The others have already begun to succumb."

Abattoir wondered if this was what dying had felt like, that one time.  She didn't remember it - there was a sizable chunk missing from her memory around that whole period - but there was something vaguely nostalgic about the way her head swam, how the glory and the reverb and the building static inside her skull made it feel like she was floating.

"Indolent.  Venal.  Sybaritic."

She was distantly aware that there should be people in the medical facility and that she should be concerned that the halls were entirely deserted, in the same way that she would've noted the oddity of a store closing early when she'd meant to shop.  As the linoleum and floral paintings gave way to moldering stone and the pale blue light of ignis fatuus, the disjointed feeling intensified.  It was a roiling discomfort under a clammy cold exterior, all churning nausea and beading sweat.

Distantly, if she strained, she could hear the sound of water.  A faint trickle, here and there, through the walls.  She focused on it, found it vaguely soothing.

"Does it intend to join them?"

They came to a halt under a row of masks, stark white and contorted like grotesque parodies.  Abattoir heard the shifting as he turned to peruse them, and dared to hold his back in her peripheral vision.  Something squirmed beneath his scarlet finery, an entangled mass of twitching movement, and she found herself briefly mesmerized by the flowing silk and scrabbling darkness before she remembered she was supposed to answer him.

"No."  There was no response.  Long, spindly fingers brushed over the cheek of a mask, idly tracing the contours of the grinning plaster face.  Abattoir fumbled for the words that evaded her, trying to clarify - a blind ant contemplating the stars.  "This is...the fight...the war is all I have."

He turned, holding the mask up to his face - a shock of white mirth in a flood of crimson.  They stared at each other for a long moment, eyes meeting.  She let her gaze roam over him, taking in his gaunt splendor, and then, flying much too close to the sun, peered beyond the eyes of the mask.  An uncomprehending instant passed and then, wildly, something hot like bile heaved inside her core.  Her knees were giving way, blood was sloshing around behind her eyes, and the stone was frigid against her palms.

There was a palpable impression of amusement.  He glanced down at her, one hand holding the mask by its stick and the other rubbing its fingertips against each other like a waiting spider.

"Its strong will has imparted impertinence unto it.  There are things it cannot yet know."

Even without all of this, Abattoir was having a hard enough time understanding the cascade of words boring their way into her brain.  With the addition of this new surge of nausea, she found herself hopelessly adrift.  "Wait, why..."  She coughed, swiped the back of a hand over her mouth, and found it gleaming with a pinkish foam.  "Why me?  Why are you doing this?"

"Enough of Because," he said, waving an impatient hand.  "Is it not contented that I chose it?  Why is it not grateful?"

"I don't understand," she rasped. It was as true an answer as she could manage.

"It was not pulled back from the brink so that I could listen to it mewl and plead ignorance while the Task goes neglected."

Her fists clenched, white-knuckled, and she tried to focus.  There were fragments of familiarity in all of this, bits and pieces she could recall faintly, but putting them all together into a single unified image was proving hopeless.

"...I can't remember everything," she finally asked, sounding as ragged as she felt.  "There's parts of it, but...it's getting away from me.  I can't always see the Task clearly."

The shadow loomed close.  She looked up and comprehended, for the first time, the magnitude of his presence.

"I need you to show me."

A gloved hand, smooth and cold, rested on her forehead.

"It will be reminded."

As a thousand images and sensations and states of being surged through Abattoir's mind, twisting and prodding and forcing into it from every possible angle, smothering her sense of self in a torrent of fire and blood and shadow and iron, she found herself regretting her request.  It was nothing like the apotheosis she'd dreamed about - quite the opposite, it felt like he was tearing her apart from the inside.  Every nerve surged together in chorus, searing with an agony that was almost rapturous in the things it revealed.  As if she'd pulled back a curtain and taken a glimpse into something she wasn't supposed to see, and understood that glimpse, and all of the implications it entailed.

She felt her muscles going before her brain registered it.  They spasmed wildly beneath her, twitching and jerking in what she thought must be her death throes, and then the red-tinged room around her rippled into a burst of dark, anoxic blossoms, and then it faded altogether and there was only the mask, bone-white and fixed in a rictus grin, looming in the center of her vision and then the floor fell out from underneath her and she plunged into the depths below and the tides closed over her head and everything was swallowed up.

It was dark.

Abattoir opened her eyes, and was rewarded with a close-up of her own uncomprehending stare.

"That should finish it up," said the med-tech on the MRI machine's speakers.  "Hang on, we'll have you out of there in just a second."

Sterile white light broke into her field of vision as the world lurched, and Abattoir found herself blinking under the sudden tyranny of the overhead lights.  She raised a hand to her eyes reflexively, paused, then ran its palm over her face as if expecting to find herself mutilated or bloodied or changed somehow.  Nothing.  Things were as normal as when she'd gone in for the scan, and now here she lay, blinking dumbly at the ceiling.

Footsteps at her side drew her gaze to the tech - a scrawny type who'd clearly tried to disguise his lack of a chin by growing a dubious beard - coming around from behind the console to help her up.  Abattoir stumbled up to her feet with his aid, vaguely aware that the gown wasn't doing much to cover her scar-riddled flesh and not particularly caring at the moment because it felt like she'd been turned inside out.  There was a negative zone of sorts in the middle of her left eye's field of vision, as if she'd lost the ability to see the color white, and given that the entire room was white it had started to feel like her surroundings were both there and not-there at the same time.

"So we'll have the scans sent off to the lab," the man said, gingerly helping her up by the arm, "and then within a week or so you should have your results.  Would you prefer to have somebody call you to talk about them, or get--"

She broke into the sentence, trembling and cold.  "I th...I don't..."  It was supposed to come out as 'I don't feel so good' or possibly 'I think something's gone wrong' but Abattoir found, to her growing panic, that she couldn't remember the English words.  She could grasp the concepts but every time she tried to connect them to actual words, they were slipping away from her, leaving her with her mouth open and her sentence entirely unfinished.  "Wha..."

A jigsaw of images flooded through her mind, a dizzying yaw that totally destroyed her sense of equilibrium.  Total sensory overload ensued.  She was being scraped by sandpaper and stroked by velvet, held over the flames and buried in the dark waters, and the contrasts jangled every nuance of her being.  There was simply too much to process at once.

Again, there was a sense of familiarity about all this, and again it was frustratingly distant, like listening to a person shouting at her on the other side of a thin wall.

Abattoir collapsed to her knees, clutching at her eye with one hand and - demonstrating that she still had phenomenal situational awareness even out of the ring - dragging a nearby wastebin over with the other so she could lean over it and support herself.  A disjointed slurry of Enochian phrases erupted from her mouth, followed immediately by the contents of her stomach.

"Aw man," the tech said, patting her sympathetically on the shoulder as she retched into the trash can.  "I know what that's like.  I get claustrophobia in those things too."


=


It was pouring rain thirty minutes later when she stepped out into the parking lot, and she had not dressed for rain at all.  Perfect.  Abattoir cast a dull gaze up at the storm clouds, shook her head, and made her way over the crosswalk towards her spot.

All things considered, it wasn't so bad.  The raindrops were refreshingly cold against her skin - not the consuming chill she'd become all too familiar with, but gentle.  Soothing, despite how forcefully as it was coming down.  It was the only kind of caress she allowed herself to indulge in, the embrace of the water.  Even when she slept and dreamed, it surrounded her, imparting some measure of tranquility.

Still, there wasn't a lot of tranquility as Abattoir came up alongside her motorcycle and swung a leg over the seat.  She'd managed to get out of the medical center after a few minutes of confused aphasia - proper English had come back to her after a while, along with the ability to stand upright without toppling over, and they'd discharged her with a promise of additional paperwork and probably a dozen more inquiries from AFW staff.

Her head felt like it was splitting open.  Like her brain was pushing against the inside of her skull, trying to get out.

Abattoir paused, her helmet in her lap, and rubbed at her temples with both hands.  It was as if her mind had been stuffed so full of information it was affecting her on a physical level, data that she couldn't process because trying to take it all in one lump sum would bring on an attack even worse than she'd just had.  She'd have to give it some time - rest, and see if she could slowly tease it out bit by bit.

The uneasy feeling of someone watching her passed through her mind.  She glanced over her shoulder, red eyes wary.  

Nothing.

Chewing at her lower lip (but not too hard; didn't want to break the stitches), Abattoir slid her helmet on, revved the engine, and took off.

Three days later, Abattoir was granted vision, albeit without the clarity she would've preferred.

The mistake she'd made the first time, when she'd been sent back, was trying to process everything at once.  There was simply too much.  It'd left her with fragments, an incomplete puzzle without the means to piece it together.  She had let herself be overwhelmed, and paid heavily for it.  This time, though...this time, she rested, and let herself recover physically and mentally, and waited.

Over time, it began to come back to her.  It was barely anything at first, just a maddening slow drip of insight, but her understanding was beginning to deepen, however gradually.  One thing, at least, was readily obvious: she couldn't expect it all to stay with her, not after what had happened last time.  The risk of losing her way and wandering aimlessly wasn't one she was prepared to take again.  She'd have to record all of this, and it was just as Abattoir was beginning to curse the fact that she didn't keep anything to write on around that she found herself struck with inspiration.

There was a room at the back of her hovel, more or less unused due to lack of things to put in it.  Like the rest of her home, the walls, floor, and ceiling were bare concrete, and it was this peculiarity that inspired her as she was pondering her situation.  There were several Sharpies in her bag, for reasons she couldn't quite remember.  With enough space...

It was slow going in the beginning.  Abattoir was definitely no Hermes pounding out the emerald tablet; the things that went onto the wall were incomplete bits and pieces of a greater design, scrawled with lip-biting precision as they trickled through her brain, and they barely made sense even to her, particularly without the context to understand them.  But more and more of it steadily came, and the great sigil on the back wall began to grow larger and larger, a spiral of geometric designs and celestial lettering.  Some days, she underwent epiphanies totally unrelated to the greater design, and these went on the other walls, the floor, even the door, and all in a strange haphazard order that seemed fitting for them even though she wasn't sure why.

She found it to be a thing of beauty, incomplete though it was.  There were times when she paused before the sigil, marker in hand, and the intent to update it died on her fingertips.  Times when her skin beaded with cold sweat, when the moment of insight seemed to strike through to her heart and leave her trembling in revelation, murmuring "nonci hcoma io-iad cynxir faboan," oh you, the poisoned one, mingled with the water eternal, and brushing a reverent fingertip over the sigil's edge.

Every day, the revelations grew wider.  Soon, she would understand the Task set before her in all its magnitude.

Soon, she would see to it that the rest of them understood, too.


-end