(( ooc ; this is a story of what's going on with Giggle while she's MIA. Timeline is vague, and time may not even pass in this place at the same rate as in the 'real world.'))

She didn't remember fear.

Not like this.

But then... she didn't remember anything, anymore.

There was once a time when she'd been born--at least, she thought she had. She remembered bones, and a blood-tinged bird that bit her--... Had he bitten her? She remembered blood.

Or did she?

Her mind was muddled. She didn't know if it was this place. Or the fear. Or the never-sleeping. It was her life, now. Or her un-life. Her reality.

She remembered--vaguely, and only when she focused hard--a pit of bones. In her mind, now, they swam and danced and shifted, leering at her, mocking her in a language she didn't understand. A language of symbols and markings.

She remembered that once there had been life all around, a mesh of life and death that had spoken to her and guided her. That, she remembered most clearly.

But it was gone, now.

Other faces drifted past her, sometimes, in the darkness. Or maybe it was her memories.

She remembered the triple white heads of the dog. It had guarded her. Or had it attacked her? Or maybe it had been her child.

She had forgotten.

Everything was black, now. She was always falling, but always standing on nothing. She couldn't breathe, yet she was never suffocating. She had no food, and had forgotten what hunger, and thirst, were.

At first she had been terrified.

What was Bones? I remember Bones. His face--

She had thrashed and screamed when she awoke--and who knew how long she had floated in the void before then.

She had fought it, scrambling and crying out and calling for someone--anyone--to save her. At first she had tried to think straight. She remembered that she had been with others, and then the darkness had simply pulled her away.

Had swallowed her.

But no one had come. Heart hammering in her chest she had waited, running along the eternal black plane. She had found, before long, that she could run up and down as well as side to side. And then she had realized that up, down, sideways--these words had no meaning, here.

It was merely void.

He was young. He was--my son? No. He streaked blood upon the walls, and it glowed and lit like the lights and the shapes moved along the walls, and--

She shook the thought away. It wasn't right--it couldn't be right--but they were all crooked, here. All her memories. Reality had fragmented for the hyena, nothing remaining where it should have been in her mind. After too long in the darkness, she had begun to hallucinate.

At first it had merely been faces.

She would think she heard the voice of a friend--or perhaps it had been the void creature taunting her.

Then she had remembered entire conversations, seen meetings she had attended with the others. Heard their voices as if they were all around her, the clarity unmistakeable. At first she had had some measure of control: she could push her own thoughts away, sink into frightened emptiness, the blank terror of being permanently lost held at bay.

But before long, her reality was swimming with it. There were only so many times one could shove back the terror, try to accept this fate, to rationalize it. There was only so long one could go hearing nothing, seeing nothing, feeling, tasting, touching nothing.

Her brain had attempted to make up for the lack of sensory input, and the hallucinations were her reality.

The hyena lay quiet in the void, staring and twitching as Kerberos strode by, entrails dragging from his clawed paws. She didn't know who he had killed, but the streaks of blood filled her vision, and then it was Bones's paws dabbing in them, dabbing and painting images across the black.

Bevy.

The small black-and-red bird stared at her in the darkness--but then it was not Bevy, it had but one eye, and this centered in its head. And it was black, as the void--but the eye was indeed red.

Its caws echoed, and the hyena perked up her large, round ears.

This was one vision that she believed in. It came to her, time and again, and it called. She was not sure why, or where it had come from, but when it landed beside her, she could feel it. When it fluttered past her, she felt the brush of feathers on her fur. It was urgent, and it was the only creature that had been able to find her, to enter her hell--and to leave again.

Before Giggle could react, the bird was gone, a flash of black feathers in the shadows. Its loss filled her with maddening grief--she was alone, again, before she had even registered that the bird had returned--and she began, more like a wolf than a hyena, to howl.

Her ragged, gasping, screaming cries filled the void, and some twisted part of her in the back of her mind said "maybe this is what it wants." Perhaps the void fed on her pain, her growing madness.

She no longer cared.

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ROLL THE BONES

She lay silent for awhile, floating, collapsed, heavy, weightless, in the darkness. A lion stood above her, but the instant she lunged for it--not hesitating, her fanged jaws snapping for its muzzle--it was gone. The loud clack of her jaws should have echoed, but the sound was muffled, stifled, lost to the Void--like everything else.

Hours passed.

Perhaps days.

She stood, and paced.

Nothing changed.

She attacked the darkness, challenging it, spitting oaths and foul swears--half she'd heard, half she made up as her rage overcame her. She seized nothing in her jaws, and shook it, thinking that if the nothing all around was her enemy, then she would kill it.

She exhausted herself before realizing that she could not kill nothing, for there was nothing to kill; and then she stood, head pointed downward, sides heaving as she gasped for air. Froth dripped foaming from her mouth, and she could only hear her own cackling echoing all around her in the void--even though sounds could not echo, here.

She wasn't sure if she was making the noise, or if the Void was mocking her. It didn't matter. She didn't care.

She had tried to kill herself--to gnaw her legs, her chest. The pain had been excruciating, and the black bliss of death had taken her each time--except then she awoke, unharmed. Had it been a hallucination? A dream? Or was this some hell where she simply could not die?

For a time she had considered merely trying, again and again, until she got it right; but the pain wasn't worth it.

Nothing was.

Hours passed.

She tried to grow her mushrooms. Sometimes, they thrived, flourished--then withered and died, all in seconds. Other times they did not take root to begin with. Sometimes they grew, but vanished the moment she stepped away, consumed by the blackness; at these times, she thought she understood it all. It was a place where each was alone; it was reality, it was the great blackness of existence. Then her mind fell apart as she tried to comprehend it, triangular pieces cracking and breaking away and she couldn't think about it anymore. It was too big.

She sat, for a time, and cackled at nothing, instead. Her laugh, she mused, was broken.

She held conversations with herself. At times, even aloud. Often, her voice was hoarse from the cackling, the screaming, the growling and swearing.

"We're never getting out of here."
"We are. We just need to wait. To be patient."
"Wait for what?" "--maybe this is a test."
"It's not a fucking test." "We're going to die here." "We CAN'T die here."
"Shut up."
"Stuck here forever. The bones never predicted this. They said a long life. A--" "Shut UP."
"Going to die."
"Do you think everyone else is stuck here?"
"Bones, I hope not." "No use saying 'bones,' they abandoned us. There's no bones here. No bones. No bones."
"Shut UP!"

"If they're not stuck here, then, do you think they're worried about us...?" "Bones might be. I miss him." "I don't remember him." "Fucking be quiet. Just--be--QUIET." "There was a Kerberos. Do you think he's looking for us? He might be in trouble. He might be dying."
"And we can't help."

"Shut up shut up SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!"

The hyena turned, violently seizing her tail in her jaws and biting down, jerking on it hard, ripping flesh and hide and hair.

Then she woke again, lifting her head with a jerk from the nightmare, still snarling and gibbering, eyes ablaze with fury.

Hours passed.

Eventually the idea had occurred to her to consult her magic, after all. Not the bones--no, she couldn't touch them, here. No... see them. Yes, that was right. She could not see her bones, here. No bones. None. She could not see any bones.

But--! ...The other magic, the stuff she'd touched on, once or twice. Not the fungus, no; but the other stuff. The magicky sparkly stuff that danced in the aether, and was altogether not here. Still, perhaps it could show her things.

Like, how to get out.

The hyena lay in the darkness and stared at nothing, for a time. She forgot what she'd been thinking entirely.

Hours passed, and she remembered, still lying in the darkness, although this time she was lying vertically, staring into the sky. It was called a sky. It was called black.

"What will happen to me?" she asked softly, in a singsong, daydreaming voice. Her magic shifted within her, reaching out like tendrils of their own into the tentacled blackness, reaching for reality. Searching for the truth.

Giggle had not blinked in days.

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ROLL THE BONES

There is darkness still. But the vision begins to change, as though this isn't darkness in real time - no, it's more like the fastforward of a video on a screen, with blips and flashes of some subtle shift in the shadows. Then it begins to slow, and everything falls away to black. Nothing moves. Nothing breathes.

The darkness has returned. It shifts and crawls, moving this way and that, pieces of dust so loud and so fast that they sound more like heavy breaths of wind in their latent left-and-right floating to the ground. The darkness pulses, the movement of some creature far off, so sensitive that even a heartbeat is an earthquake. It swallows whole.

The darkness is still here. It is groaning now. There is movement to be felt everywhere, tugging, pulling at the skin, beckoning the creature in every direction. There is a blinding flash of light.

@Giggle

Giggle lay silent in nothing, nothing supporting her yet she did not fall.

Or, she was always falling.

Her magic twisted here, spearing into the black, returning to her mind the truths of the future. The reality of it.

Visions assailed her; in some ways it was a relief to be away from the infinite nothing. Yet as she saw what the magic brought back to her, and as she wondered if it were the future--or individual, possible futures--horror filled her anew. After all, some of them seemed to show her locked in this reality, forever.

The first was just the blackness. The darkness. It remained as it was: black, yet something beyond, something just past her vision. It was like something visible "out there," only she couldn't make out what, and the idea that she was not alone here filled her with hackle-prickling fear. Her only consolation was that the image seemed to fade not into madness, or eternity, but death. As if, eventually, she might have the luxury of starvation and dying.

She could only hope for such sweet release.

Or am I already dead...?

The second image hit her before she had a chance to process this thought. It was moving, now. The darkness. Somehow even the tiniest things were deafening, and she realized that having gone so long without sound or vision, this made some sense. The only noises she heard, anymore, were her own breathing, her own heartbeat, her own screams.

They were too loud.

Her mind's eye tracked the motes of dust as they fell through the black; she was unsure how she could see them, but it was a vision, she supposed. More than that she could hear them, and she instinctively knew that this, at least, would be true. They sounded like the breaths of some massive beast, and then the darkness came for her, and she was engulfed.

Am I dead?

It came again, and Giggle twitched and shuddered, lips curling over fangs, foam dripping from oblivious jaws. She still could not tell if the vision was linear, or if this was a third option, but this time, things were even more different: the black was in motion, groaning, pulling at her. Pulling her apart...? Or merely separating? Splitting?

There was a blinding flash of light.

Something screamed in her mind, something broke or made a connection and she wasn't sure which it was but as her eyes snapped open she found herself screaming a name.

"KERBEROS!"

She looked around, dazed, blinking at nothing.

Blind.

Fear gripped her again as she realized she might not be alone here at all, and she cowered where she "lay," trying to be as still and as silent as she could.

The flash of light at the vision's end gave her some hope--the first she'd had in days, and she clung to it.

The thought of death, even, gave her hope.

But--Kerberos?

Her mind flicked, a broken slideshow, and she saw the three-headed white puppy snarling at her. His bones. Play a game.

He'd wanted to play a game. A game.

A game that was going to end in death, if she didn't stop it.

The hyena shattered her own silence with another broken howl, deafening herself. She cut it off abruptly, cowering down as she again realized that the darkness might hear her screams.

Might hear, and come for her.

Wanted to play a game a game fought back won taught him taught him LISTEN SPEAK LEARN LISTEN LEARN LEARN SPEAK LISTEN--

The spotted hyena trembled in the black, wide dark eyes peering around unseeing as she listened.

She had listened for days.

She had nothing to learn.

And she had nothing to say.

Puzzling over her vision, over what it might mean, Giggle tried to pull herself together. To organize her thoughts, to figure out how to get out of here. Her mind fixed on that white flash of light, and she clung to it, her only hope in this misery--the buoyant ring tossed into her sea.

But she didn't know how to use it.

She was still drowning.

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ROLL THE BONES

The bird came to her, time and again. She would lie apathetic and empty for eons, eyes open in the darkness, yet unseeing. And then would come the distant caws, the flutter of wings, the rush of deafening gentle sound as the bird lit beside her in the darkness.

Caw. Caw. Caw.

Giggle slowly raised her head, reaching her nose out to it. She'd considered, once--briefly, in her madness--eating the bird. But it was her only company. The only company she ever had, in here.

Sometimes, she wondered (in a vague and broken way) why it came to her, and more importantly, why it came back to her. The thought had occurred to her--and stuck--that it was a part of this darkness. Of this void. But which part? The part that was her? The part that wanted to end her? To torment her? It did not seem tormenting. It would flutter off again, vanish into the black--but it would always return, peering at her, even picking at the fungus on her coat.

She never stopped it.

Sometimes, she wondered--again in a vague and broken way--why she interested it. Surely the void here couldn't do it any good. But soon enough it began to pick at her. To prod, and push. To shriek at her when she lay still, and peck until she stood, and moved, snarling dully to get it to leave her alone.

She was in its domain, she realized.

Yet over time it seemed to accept her, too, perching on her, pulling threads of her loose fur out and taking them who-knows-where. It even used her as a lookout post, though there was nothing to see in the darkness.

Today--tonight? Now, in any case, it had been floating before her face. She wasn't on the ground, no, but neither was the bird; it merely hovered before her, wings half-spread in the void as if it floated in water, suspended. And it stared at her.

CAW. CAW. CAW.

She stared back.

"What," she muttered, no energy in her to fight.

CAAAAW. Then it began to scream, a haunting, deafening sound that rang and reverberated in the darkness, the way her own muffled noises here never could.

"Leave me alone," she growled, and then panic immediately seized her that it might leave her alone, and she quickly retracted that. "Don't leave me here," she pleaded. Her voice was rusty, breaking.

The bird tilted its head, then with a sudden flutter it was on her forepaw, staring at her. She felt the faintest touch of its thoughts in her head, or maybe it was her own thoughts, cawing and fluttering in her skull, beating frantic wings to escape.

She closed her eyes, and she muttered to the bird, her desperation cracking her broken voice. "Please, get me out of here. I don't know what you are. If you're this Void. If you're the games it plays but please out, get out out, I want to see what I knew but I forgot it all. I can't remember them, and I don't want to but not here, please..."

The bird just stared at her, its single red eye regarding Giggle's own dark ones. Then it had flitted up, into her mane, and she felt its thoughts more strongly.

She was-... nest. Home. Not in words, but in thoughts. The flow of that magic--that aether spark that danced in the future and in the walls and inside of them--now stretched between them, a thin and tenuous tendril of what she imagined was very silver string, like water, or web.

The bird was comfortable with her, and she felt a sudden flood of gratitude, and warmth, so deep as to overwhelm her. She buried her head downward, in the dark, a soft mix of sobs and laughter escaping her.

The bird listened. It felt, too; it was emptier than she, calmer, colder, but not out of any malice. It just didn't have the depth of emotion, or perhaps madness, that Giggle did. Her... love, if it could be called that--her clinging to it--affected it, so that it nestled closer to her, but it did not react too much otherwise.

"Please get me out of here," she croaked again, her cry breaking halfway through.

She felt the bird listen.

She felt it consider her thoughts.

And then, it seemed to come to some decision. Wings spread, and it swept forward, and away, out of the blackness and out of her existence. Their link severed, snapped, gone, and Giggle was left horribly alone.

She sat stunned for a moment, grief and horror welling up inside of her, but before it could take hold she realized that she wasn't alone. The bird--it was still out there, somewhere, and she could feel it, and the sensations of light and warmth and color flooded back to her along their thin connection.

Yes. Yes! ...Find them... find them... bring them to me... Bring me to them. Please...

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ROLL THE BONES