HEARTS IN DARKNESS: EPILOGUE

[yourkeepers]

When dawn finally comes, you find them.

They're hanging in the grand hall, bound - almost cocooned - in inky black thread. The bodies of the victims, the ones without their hearts, are now miraculously whole. Cold and untouched, as if those terrible wounds had never been carved into their flesh.

They hang in various positions of rest, some limbs tangled and suspended, others simply hanging limply. Their eyes all all closed. The searchlight's body is still dull silver. The singer's hair dangles long and dark. The oracle's robes pristine.

It's like they've been left here for you, within your reach. The rest is in your hands.

Comments

[grotesqueobserver]

It doesn't take long for them to be found. Jeff was there already, having spent most of the preceding hours unconscious in that very hall. "What...What. Haven't you done enough, you unbelievable asshole?" Even he's not certain who he's talking to. "God dammit, God dammit." His voice is unsteady and his breath is hitching as he works to get them down, using his claws to cut the threads suspending the cocoons and carefully lowering everyone down to the floor as gently as possible.

[subtleserenity]

Brimstone's wandered back from the Dining Hall, unable to bring herself to stay in that place with Lights' murderer still alive. She knows that it was the logical choice to make, but she can't help the feeling of impotent rage within her. It's not so much breaking her oath to put a bullet in the murderer's head as the fact that she let herself be talked out of it. She shouldn't have given Angel the chance to speak, to be reasonable. And yet, that earnest reasoning and heart are what draw her, inexplicably, to the bird woman. To destroy her hopes is not something that sits well with Brimstone.

Someone else snarling more vocally catches her attention and she speeds up toward the hall to see the gargoyle and the three bodies. Has he moved them here?

"What's happened?" she demands, approaching him. And then she sees the bodies are whole and stops. "When did you find 'em like this?"

[grotesqueobserver]

He didn't know about Aria.

He sees her face when he brings the last cocoon down, and Brimstone finds him on hands and knees, trying to clear the webbing from her face. When he looks up at her approach tears are flowing freely down his face. "I-it happened this morning," he sniffles, wiping his eyes with his forearm. "S-someone attacked me before the lights came back on. I m-must've gotten knocked out." And indeed, his face shows hairline cracks, and dried blood stains his hair black.

"When I woke up, they were just...hhh...hanging there. And Aria...I didn't know they got her. I tried...I really tried...I shouldn't have let her leave. I just...I...shit." He hauls himself to his feet, hugging himself and turning his back to her. "I'm sorry," he whispers.

[hourglassfigure]

"Oh," says the hourglass, quietly, staring at the bodies. There is something slightly less distracted about her than there has been for a while, and it's probably because the hourglass itself, the object that is her, is tucked under her arm, the falling sand visible through the glass of her elbow.

She's still holding the hearts, one stained magenta and one shimmering yellow, one in each hand. The blood stains her fingers and wrists, but she's made of glass; her skin will be easy to wipe down.

She bobs over to where they're lying, to look at them more closely. It's strange to be holding their insides when they look as if no harm has ever come to them. If they were cut open again, would there be new hearts, cold and dead, inside? The fuchsia one, of course, she thinks, would have always been cold. But not this cold.

She looks at their faces, and then down at the hearts in her hands, and frowns.

"We should probably have a party, or something," she says. "For the corpses."

[hand_of_courage]

The timekeeper entered with the oracle's heart in hand. He'd been searching for her body in the library where he'd last seen it and was not expecting it to be strung up or whole when he made his way back to the Great Hall.

After a moment of staring, he turned to the others with a worried look, "How do we put their hearts back in if they're closed up?"

[hourglassfigure]

In the interest of proper corpse treatment, the hourglass figures, the hearts should probably be placed with their owners. This doesn't feel like a really great time to break out music and streamers, though, in spite of what that book she'd found in the library had said about corpse parties. If anything she is feeling pretty melancholy as she places the the two hearts she's been charged with on the chests of the bodies they belong inside. Maybe the party is supposed to distract you from getting too bothered by the dull, empty corpses of people you remember being alive? She isn't sure.

Once she's set down both the hearts she picks up her hourglass again, which she'd set down on the floor in front of her, and holds it close to her in her blood stained hands.

She's about to ask if anybody has any coloured paper, perhaps, or whimsical hats, when the timekeeper asks his question. She straightens up, and looks around at him.

"Put them back in?" She'd arrived at the confrontation too late to have heard anything about that. She'd only been holding onto the hearts because she'd read that some cultures liked to keep all of the parts of a body together for their burial. "What do you mean?"