[ti]solo[/ti][thrice] upon a time

tw for self-mutilation and cannibalism

No matter how long—or how hard—you stare at the Murkrow, you’re greeted with a wall of silence. A wall of silence that you’re terrified of broaching even further.

For some time it’s just the two of you, standing there—not moving through this warped, corrupted area—simply staring at one another. The multiple red eyeballs blink back at you—not all at once, at different lengths of time, which only makes this even more worse than it normally should be—before you feel the sudden urge to turn away.

You taste… something at the edge of your mouth; and despite that same curiosity getting killed by the Purrloin, you lick at it; the better to understand what the fuck’s going on out here.

While it doesn’t necessarily taste of anything, it feels like… like sand. A rough kind of texture, but no definitive taste to it. You feel your fingers brush against it; and pulling it away to take a closer look, instead of seeing red you see that it’s black.

Odd. Since when did your own blood run black anyway? You know blood normally should have a metallic tang to it, but this wasn’t that kind of…

A morbid sense of curiosity overtakes you, and for a few moments you thought you saw the fingers on your right hand black out—not white, but black—and take on the same color and texture as that thing you tasted mere moments ago. Stretching from the tips of your fingernails, rising upwards until your entire arm is the same color, and texture, as the ichor.

Of course curiosity would kill the Purrloin. Of fucking course, it would.

Entranced by the strange sensations that make your hands move without your conscious thought, you the digits to one side of your face—reaching in, and pulling.

(What normal human being would do something like this? Plucking their own eyeball out?!)

Then again, nothing in the Corruption was normal.

Instead of seeing blood splatter and drip all over your blackened hand, you see that same blackness, hanging off a string of something that you’re sure is what connected this… this eyeball to the rest of your body, and you turn the eye over in your hand.

Funny how these things work, don’t they?

Instead of white sclera, it’s black. The iris is still the same brilliant green that your eye(s) are, though.

You hear the fluttering of wings from behind you; yet you don’t turn around to face the Murkrow. You just know all those eyeballs are watching your every move now. It’s like you sensed his approach without physically seeing it happen.

What’s unusual is despite your right eye staring at… at yourself, your field of vision hasn’t distorted much. Out of the left, you can see the glitching landscape as normal.

Out of the right, you can see… your body, flickering between what’s normal and what isn’t.

Somewhere in the back of your mind, you faintly remember the ‘serpent’ ripping your chest open and taking you apart, before violently reconstructing you back together.

The only other noise you hear is the fluttering of the distorted wings of your companion; as even this curiosity gets the better of you, and what you see out of your right ‘eye’ changes to something as you—

You take a bite out of your own eye.

500 / 600

One half of your field of vision witnesses the shifting of your physical manifestation between the normal and the eldritch, pale flesh blinking out to a mass of black with red irises staring out of the depths.

The other half of what you can see abruptly shifted—and Muninn is staring at you again; all the red eyeballs blinking at different intervals, a quiet witness to what happened just now.

In minutes, the eyeball you previously held in the palm of your hand is gone; now half of what you can see is just… darkness. A compelling void that stares back, before—

You blink.

‘Fighting me, aren’t you?’

There’s a quiet thudding noise that resonates in your ears.

‘You already agreed. In exchange for meeting him again, I share your existence. What you see, I will see. What you learn, I observe. And maybe. When I’m satisfied with what I want you to do for me…’

The same thud, thud, thud—

‘…I’ll allow it. You’ll see him again. But only I determine when that will be.’

Thud, thud, thud—

The realization sets in the moment it hits you.

‘You cannot get rid of me.’

Thud, thud, thud—

‘For we are one.’

400 / 600

The insidious whispering stopped the moment the silence between yourself and the Murkrow had shattered—their last words made your eyebrows rise up.

“How. Did you know my name? Not—not the name I normally go by, but… that name?”

You remember telling a single companion of yours about how you have a life outside of the game, yet somehow. Somehow, the Murkrow called you by your real name, not your in-game name. And you know that he’s not the one who’s aware of that fact.

“Who. Told you?” you breathe out.

The jarring noise still hisses in your ears, but it’s no longer a systematic thrumming; it instead became an irregular beat; one that you belatedly realize matched the same beat you could feel inside your chest.

“Did… Leanne tell you?”

You feel something stirring in the empty eye socket in your skull; tempted as you are to pull your other eye out as well, something compels you not to. To leave that eye alone.

Because you’ll need it.

‘…she did,’ was the wily corvid’s affirmative answer.

300 / 600

With half of your normal field of vision seemingly obliterated out of existence, it takes time to adjust to having just half of what you’re normally accustomed to seeing.

The sense of balance feels awfully off; and if you took another look at your arms, you would hiss a little bit; both of them were now seemingly coated in this very thick, very ‘shiny’ layer of ichor that looked like it had multiple little eyeballs staring up at you from it.

No matter how hard you would shake it off, no matter how much you tried to scrub it away with your fingers—the sensation persisted. Was this… was this also a part of you now?

(Or was it just while you were out here?)

‘I told you, again. We are one now. You can never get rid of me.’

“…can’t blame me for trying,” you growl under your breath—for a few moments, though, you feel like as if your center of balance was wildly thrown off—you stagger for that infinitesimally small blink of time—before finding yourself upright once again.

“What did you do?”

‘Would you want to fuck around and find out, then?’ the serpentine voice would hiss, fangs bared in your face as you ‘close’ your other eye and see ‘them’ staring out at you—seemingly from another side of a ‘mirror’ that only the void of your missing eye can see.

“What. Was that.”

‘Again, as your kind call it, fuck around and find out.’

200 / 600

While that fancy little exchange between you and the Murkrow is happening in the ‘real’ world—over on the other side of things, at the realm only your right eye can perceive—the sibilant hissing continues from the ‘mirror’.

‘I should’ve killed that bird when I had the chance.’

“But you can’t. You can’t touch a Pokémon, can you?”

‘I can attack, but I am unable to turn them against you.’

“Why the fuck would you do that?” you growl, raising a fist and making ready to smash the mirror when—

When the same sensation from earlier happened again; your center of gravity wildly shifting, and for some reason—the air suddenly squeezed out of your lungs, making you gasp and claw at the empty space.

In turn, you make your own hissing noise, trying to grab the serpent with your other hand; yet the lack of oxygen is getting to you. You feel the sensation of your lungs being crushed by an invisible force; the air being ripped from your body with every passing second, making you beg—but not making you scream.

(For screaming would be a sign of weakness.)

‘I told you again. Fuck around, and find out what I’m capable of since I hold your life in my hands now.’

“S-st-stop,” you gasp, still trying to claw at the ‘head’ of the Beast in the mirror; the better to get them to cease whatever they were doing to you from deep inside your body.

‘What if I don’t want to?’

And this time, you feel another immense pressure—from deeper within. Much like how a human body gets ragged around when caught in between multiple situations all at once that result in heavy, internal, potentially life-ending injuries—

“P-p-p…please, s-stop,” you’re choking on not just ‘air’, but your own blood as well as that same overwhelming presence wreaks havoc inside your chest cavity.

A spike of alarm courses through your body as you bend over double; before you expel a substantial amount of the dark, murky, crimson liquid—

…were you seeing things, or were there eyes in your own blood?!

‘As I told you. Fuck around, and find out.’

You fall to your knees.

100 / 600