Work Text:
Another death.
Another loop.
Another void.
Another-
Gem bites down on her lip hard enough to bleed. It tastes like ash.
“You’re back,” it states. Its head is tilted to the side, calculating, cold, eyes staring into somewhere she can’t hide like this.
She doesn’t want to talk to it. Not now.
She needs to-
Time refuses to fall out beneath her, knitted together with surgical stitches, no longer a gaping maw beneath crystal-cracked hands. She needs to tear it back open.
“Not for long-”
It holds its hand up. “No. You’re staying.”
Like it can keep her here- can it? The thought never crossed her mind until now, but the more Gem thinks about it, the more that makes some modicum of sense. The more it…
It was here before her.
It was here since the start, sitting there acting as if it knew everything about these loops. As if it were the architect of-
“You trapped us here,” it accuses her, instead.
How could she have-?
She laughs, dry and broken and crackling, “I trapped us here? You’ve been here longer than me! If anyone trapped us, it’s you!”
The blood on her tongue tastes like ash. She wants to taste anything other than ash and burnt sugar, cloying her senses with the sickly scent of caramel left too long. Gem wants to tear her tongue out, briefly, momentarily, as if that would fix the damned problem. She keeps he hands on the ground.
Xornoth snarls, composure finally broken.
“I didn’t do anything! You’re the one using chronomancy, you’re the one tearing time open again and again and again, taking us back to the start! I’m trapping us!? You are the one breaking reality into pieces just to serve yourself!”
TO SERVE-?
Hands reach out before she can stop herself, grabbing at its neck, biting at its skin, begging to draw blood, taste it on their tongue and-
Whoops. Right, don’t… don’t listen to the dragon.
She forgot about that.
The bloodlust simmering beneath the surface, slowly but surely boiling and boiling and boiling throughout the loops, demanding its pound of flesh and blood. It wants to feed.
Gem almost let it feed.
Gem almost let it feed on the only person who could ever understand this pain.
In turn, Xornoth tears into her. In turn, she feels hands around her neck.
In turn, she wakes up with an awfully sharp ache in her neck. She doesn’t taste ash; she tastes nothing at all. Her senses feel dulled, bitten into and festering.
She has a world to save.
She's fine.