ORIGIN

Her eyes were unfocused. They stared off at nothing as she rocked unsteadily onto her chest from where she'd laid on her side, and her gaze didn't even approach Wilder. It was drifted off to the black cat's right, looking past her, past Canis, past the caves even--trying to find something, anything, of all she'd just Seen.

It was a muddle of imagery and knowledge, packed too tightly to unravel just now. And she felt herself...

The old hyena hesitated, trying to focus on the feeling she now felt, the one that was sweeping in around her like a tide. She felt...

...cut adrift.

Unloosed. Unchained, in her own way, but--no, untethered was more accurate. She blinked, eyes focusing, and looked around her.

Canis felt somehow alien. Her home--her lifelong home--felt foreign to her. It was... wrong. No--she was wrong-? It was all wrong. She was in the wrong place--the wrong time. But I'm not, it's the right one. But how many have there been? How many are there--will there be? When are they-? When am I? It's one of them--one of all of them--which one? Nine. It's Nine. It's Nine. I'm in Nine. -That's right... right? She tried to think back to all she'd just seen, to try and make sense of it, to summarize it for her own mind. But when she reached, it was the chaotic tangle of billions of pieces of information all struggling to come to the surface. Too much to categorize, to pick through. It all thrust for her consciousness at once, a thousand new words and concepts battling for her mind. She fought, for a moment, to try and remember: Nine what? But words that seemed almost nonsensical battered at her, a feedback echo that could not quite bring with it the related knowledge. Nine-... Coil. Cycle. Recoil. Recycle. Coil. Coil. Cycle. Recoil- She winced, taking a short gasp--and her gaze fell suddenly on Wilder, quite by chance.

Realizing she wasn't alone was a shock and, blinking, Giggle belatedly realized that Wilder had spoken.

It felt like the cat was someone from a lifetime ago. A thousand lifetimes ago. With her new perspective, Giggle felt as though Wilder was... a distant, faint fragment of a memory. All of this felt that way. The caves, her entire lifetime, Giggle herself: the briefest blink of a flit among-... How many years has it been? It was meaningless, all of this. All of them. But--not, too, it was-

She struggled to bring herself around. No doubt to Wilder she'd look dazed, lost, unfocused still. But after a moment she grimaced and studied the cat, and fought to find her name. That name was dredged up, after a beat: tugged through the muck of a hundred wars and the lives and deaths of billions of others.

"...Wilder," she managed, and hesitated again. "I knew you." Her brow furrowed as she fought to reassert herself. "I know you," she corrected herself. Because Giggle lived here. She lived her life here.

So why did it feel like she was someone else, now? Like she had crossed the span of all time, seen all things; like this place was only a blip that she'd once visited?

It was Omen's presence reasserting itself that steadied her some. The bird had been there, as shocked and jolted as she by the imagery, but its simple mind was quite unable to comprehend these things and it'd been spared, somehow. Maybe Giggle's own subconscious had blocked it away somehow to save her, or maybe the bird had passed out, or-... she didn't know. But now Omen's mind was frightened and yet soothing as she flitted down, her feathered body pressing to the hyena's flank. Giggle looked down, startled, and nuzzled her and that act grounded her. Grounded her, and also made her feel suddenly fragile, like an ice spire that might any moment fracture and fall.

She wasn't sure that she wasn't.

She wasn't sure who she was.

The link was not... unwelcome.

But it-... Giggle tried to focus, to understand what she was feeling; and Wilder, should she so wish, would be privy to it all.

She took a moment, cat crawling--purring--into her "lap" of upright forepaws--to think.

Sometimes, when she'd had a bad day, Giggle would simply go to sleep. Waking the next morning often seemed to put a bracing distance between her and whatever had bothered her, so it was easier to handle, as though it'd cleared her mind.

Grief was easier, over time. The pain never faded, but it passed.

Passions--short-term interests--muted as the weeks went by.

This... was something like that. It was like, in the blink of an eye, this--all of this: Giggle, Wilder, the caves themselves--had become a distant memory. But... they hadn't. She was here; she belonged here and now and she knew that. But it was hard to reconcile that with the distance she now felt. As though "now" were some time long ago; as if Canis was someplace she barely remembered. The backdrop of so much time, of so many lives and so much birth, death, and war, had shrunken Giggle's world to a pinprick in a tapestry of other things.

Yes, it was also hard to focus on one thing amongst the chaos now churning through her mind: all of that information, even condensed, even packed away, was hard to sort through. But-...

She shook her head as if to clear it, and looked down at Wilder with a slightly furrowed brow. "Thank you," she said quietly. "For that, and-" (and her paw nudged slightly beneath her) "...this. I'm here. I know you, it's not-..."

She was silent for a moment, and Wilder would feel the odd sensation of no thought. Of that sense of being cut adrift on a sea of other things, a sea so vast, so dark and so deep that that tiny rowboat of Giggle's existence felt... forgettable.

"This feels so far away. Like so long ago. That doesn't-... Make sense. I was just here." Even her own words felt hollow, unimportant.

That was it. Unimportant. Just a speck, a grain on a beach. Not lost or overwhelmed, just...

...It was like she didn't care about any of this, anymore.

But she did--didn't she? That's what made it all worthwhile, what made life beautiful. The families and the relationships and the love and stories, threads that ran through that whole big tapestry, even if they were just individual threads.

She took a breath, and winced. "It's hard to think," she confessed, peering down again at Wilder with furrowed brow and empty eyes.

And then--pondering--"Is this what you feel like? That-... Madness?"

Giggle was silent again as she listened, her gaze alternating between staring almost emptily at Wilder and staring very emptily off into the distance. She showed no sign of whether the purring helped, or not. She didn't know if it did. She didn't even know how she felt, in that moment; she felt... empty, as though her eyes only reflected her heart just then.

Does it not feel real? she wondered, as Wilder spoke. It feels very real. Too real. So real that-... Again, that sense--that this was only a meaningless brief moment in one of a billion places--struck her. She tried to shake it away with a faint grimace. The idea that Wilder had gone to the surface struck her, too, the words penetrating past her thoughts. Five minutes ago that'd have shocked and intrigued her but now-? She thought almost indifferently back to what she'd seen above.

Tamulus, she suddenly remembered--and remembered him looking right at her. And-...

"Noctua," Giggle suddenly said, aloud. She squinted, brow furrowing, and peered down at Wilder. She ignored Wilder's just-spoken question--the cat had asked if Giggle would be okay. She couldn't answer that, because she didn't know; she felt fine. But this... this was more important, wasn't it?

"It was there, with--clouds, and a tall..." Giggle hesitated, trailing off. The thoughts, even now, were so hard to pull from the tangle of all she'd seen and... what was the name of this thing? She nearly gave up, for a moment, instead straining to simply show Wilder, but nothing came. Giggle suppressed a new (yet somehow distant) panic that her magic had been damaged, in some way, instead buckling down to try and explain it. "Storm clouds. A tall--building? Like the Palace. She--it? Said you'd find it, first-..." Black muzzle wrinkled back in another grimace as she tried to puzzle it all out. Had the building been speaking to her? Or something else? "I don't know if that word is the name of the building, but you're supposed to find it." Her affect was still flat, empty, but there was at least a little intensity to it now.

That being said, her mind was drifting back as though tugged by impossibly strong tides: she was plunging into clouds, into thunder, into War and Birth and Death, and she had to fight to claw her thoughts free.

She crouched, head buckled down as though straining at a burden, and exhaled heavily.

There was so much, and there was nothing, and-

The nothing eclipsed the rest abruptly, Wilder's guidance taking hold. Giggle's gaze sharpened a little, and she looked at the cat, considering her words; then her black muzzle wrinkled back in an ugly hyena grin. "I'm all right," she assured, and seemed more herself, just then. Dark humor, tempered by far too much trauma into stubborn amusement. Yes, she'd seen the fabric of reality, but she was a little hungry, too, and she could feel rock beneath her paws, and Omen at the edges of her mind (and Wilder there, now, too) and that was all bracing enough to slowly anchor her in the here-and-now. Admittedly there was so much more now swirling at the edges, but with a shake of her head, Giggle dismissed it.

Or, tried to. She did her best, in any case.

"I owe you one. Maybe more than one," she amended hoarsely. "You're right, it is a lot. A lot to pick through but... I'll need time, for that." Time, and maybe bones? She looked off toward her bone pit, thinking, but nowhere in these visions had she seen a hint of bones. She shook her head and looked back to Wilder. She'd been so fearful she'd find out that her fortune-telling was somehow false, but after all she'd seen it hardly seemed to matter, now. Going forward, in any case, she could use them to focus her thoughts, maybe--to meditate on the tangled chaos in her head, to try and sort the individual threads apart.

Well-... she'd see. "I'm trying to think too much," she admitted, with a sigh--and that was with Wilder's help. "To do too much at once. I need to rest, yeah. But I owe you one," she repeated, quiet, dark eyes earnest as they sought Wilder's face.

She'd been given a real vision, one of everything, and for what-? To pay back some vague perceived insult? Well, that had been paid back a hundredfold easily, and now she was in a little cat's debt. Somehow, for once, she found it hard to be annoyed at that.

The come-and-go, ebb-and-flow nature of the pressure on her mind was disorienting. As Wilder's presence receded she felt it rise in her thoughts again, pressing down--but now it was easier to recognize, to at least try to organize too.

She looked around, barely hearing at first. Her mind was on Canis. I have this one life--at least, I think I do--and I'm spending it here..?" The thought was one of dismay. All she'd seen, and she was wasting her life in a mold-choked, bare stone cairn..?

It took effort, real effort, to turn back and to focus on what Wilder was saying. She blinked a few times, suppressing a grimace, and managed a nod. Thoughts buzzed in her mind but she pushed them back, for now. "I will. Thank you," she managed, and then flicked an ear with another, more visible grimace. "I think I'll need time," she agreed, her emphasis indicating what she was realizing: that it'd take longer than she'd thought. "Andromeda," she parroted back after a beat, tone empty. She was absently repeating it, and it took a moment more to focus past a shuddering of new memories. "...I'll do that. If I need it, I mean. -If I can help with anything, I will be here--I think," she finished, squinting around.

Her mind wandered, again, for a moment. It flickered weakly over the conversation they'd just been having, and Giggle winced with focus, looking sharply back to Wilder.

This time, her magicka took--and the surge of relief she felt wasn't hidden; she didn't have a chance to. But she brushed it aside, brow furrowing as she struggled to focus on what she'd seen. It took great concentration to summon it back up, to dredge it forth past a thousand other images and to hold it there. And even then, it wavered, somewhat fragmented and confused... but she did her best.

...'But through the purple-tinted sky she saw the flash of an owl. WISDOM. It circled where she looked up to it from her PERSPECTIVE, circling through rolling clouds of shadow. NOCTUA. The image of a cathedral shifted within the clouds and was gone. DEATH. A gaping green maw billowed from the clouds and swallowed the owl whole.'

She passed this on, then let out a shuddering exhale and allowed the vision--and the link--to slip away. She didn't speak further, letting it speak for itself.