the spectrum heart cathedral system

(written all at once, without warning, as it was happening ( stream-of-consciousness). left unfinished. god willing, will re-enter this timespace and finish the event in the future. nevertheless what is written here is real.)





Jewel Lightraye stepped onto the battlefield, sneakers crunching in the snow.
Everything was so pale. The ground was covered in a bleary cold whiteness, forbidding life from growing, the low wind blowing away all footprints in swathes of dusty, frigid air. It didn’t even look clean, not underneath that dark and dim of a sky, suffocating in a fog so low and thick it felt like being trapped under a carpet of insulation. Everything was painted the dimmest shade of bleached-out indigo. Everything felt dead.
She stopped, shivering hard all at once, as the temperature data finally bit into her, like needles through her summer clothes. Her body responded with the sudden urge to cry and curl up in a ball in that dingy ashen floor of a snowdrift. Her reply was to reach up and adjust her baseball cap more tightly onto her head, before taking a resolute step forwards.
The crunch surprised her now, even though she had heard it just as clearly the first time. After having taken in all that desolation, the sudden squeak of ice and rubber soles was shockingly alive, a sign of something moving, something with hope in it yet, striving forwards—

“Jewel! Is that you?”
She spun to her left at the sudden voice, in time to see three familiar and beloved individuals appearing out of the dark fog, running up the sloping hill to her.
Ryou was the first in line, his arms wrapped tightly about his signature blue-and-white striped shirt. At least he’s got long sleeves, Jewel thought amusedly.
“Yeah, it’s me,” she replied, feeling oddly nostalgic at that. “What’s up?”
“What’s up?” Ryou repeated, eyebrows raising slightly. “Where are we? What is this?”
Jewel peered over his shoulder as he spoke. Marik was there, but he had pulled on his old Rare Hunter hoodie, which was virtually the same color as the sky here. Despite having more clothes cover than the rest of the gang, he looked positively distressed, at least as much as he would let show like this. He was shivering more than Ryou.
She shrugged, focusing her eyes back on the snow-haired boy before her (the flakes weren’t even visible in his hair until they melted into drops; if it wasn’t so depressing here it might have been pretty).
“I have no idea,” she stated, “but that’s typical fare for us I guess.” Ryou smiled at that, but it was tinged with something like… regret? Sadness?
“It is.” His voice was starting to sound like the weather.
A small silence settled into the wake of those words, and Jewel, heart beginning to twinge with concern, pushed up on her toes to peer over Ryou’s other shoulder. Sure enough, there he was.
Standing with his back half-turned to her, a creature looking like the ocean tide personified stood in silence, wrapped up in himself just as much as the rest of them, his gem-green eyes rife with enough turbulent anguish to drown everyone around if it got loose. The very sight of that sent a lightning-sharp strike of pain straight through Jewel’s heart.
“What… were you all this sad before you came here? Or do you not know?” she asked Ryou, as she began to shiver for real this time.
“I’m not sure,” he replied. “It could be both.”
“We were all sad and this is making it worse,” Marik’s voice sparked like a dying fire from under his dark hood.
For a moment no one said anything, then all their attention turned silently to Chaos 0.
His wet eyes darkened. “There’s something dark and carnivorous here,” he began, his voice far more level than his friends expected in this situation. “It’s in the air. It’s in the snow.” He turned his deep-sea gaze to Jewel, so pointedly that for a moment she wasn’t sure where she was. “Where are we, Jewel?”
Now both the other boys turned to look at her.
“I…” she faltered. She had said she didn’t know, but now thinking it over, she supposed it was only half true. She had no idea what this place literally was, true, but if there’s one thing she knew for sure about Heartspace it’s that it was always, always, adherent to that term.
Whatever place they were in right now, it had existed inside them first.
“…Hopelessness,” she said all at once, and saw a flash of pain sear through Marik’s eyes. “Despair. The sense of being lost and not knowing where one is, let alone where to go.”
She paused. “…Loneliness? I-I mean,” she faltered, “we’ve got each other, but—”
“…Do we really?” Ryou responded, and everyone looked back at him.
“I know you all feel it,” he continued, his voice picking up a twinge of too-dark paranoia. “Who are we now? Where DO we go from—“
“That’s the REASON this place is like it is, Bakura!!” Chaos suddenly snapped, like a dam breaking. “You—you were never this existential, you were never this doubtful of your own existence! Markus, you were never this scared!!”
A sudden profound silence fell over them. Chaos had used Marik’s new name.
“…It’s a little hard not to be scared with that in the air,” the boy in question replied, withdrawing further into his hoodie. Whatever fire was in him before was now turned to slush.
Chaos looked up, starkly into the distance, as if planning something. Then he turned back to Jewel.
“This place is unstable, Jewel. I know you’re trying to hold it together but the very nature of this place is messing with everyone here. Including me,” he added, pressing a hand to the gem in his chest. Jewel
was struck by the sudden remembrance of it. “Whatever this place is, it IS from us, and we’re here because we’re here on the outside too, and we need to get through this.” He winced. “…Or we’ll freeze to death.”
Jewel set her face like flint at that. Nodding once, she turned to the right, raised her arm, and sent a tunnel of fire blasting through ahead of them.
The two boys watched, wide-eyed, as the fire seemed to stretch on terribly far, even as the fog swallowed it up.
“Shoot,” Jewel said, a hint of despair creeping into her voice.
“Don’t,” Chaos put a huge clawed hand on her shoulder. “Don’t give in. It’s hard enough for me to hold out for your sake; if you lose hope we’re all doomed.”
She looked up at him, heart aching with what he had just said, but she nodded again. “I’ll try,” she said.
He smiled, just as achingly. “You’d better.”
“…Jewel?”
She turned back around to see Ryou—or was it Rio now?—wringing his hands with a sudden lack of fright, and an equally surprising clatter of insect-claws against his arms.
“I’m sorry,” he said, somewhat confusedly. “I’m… let’s just go.” He took a few steps forwards to stand beside her, eyes shining blue, and still following where the fire had gone.
A giant spidery figure crept up to overshadow the boy.
“Rio,” it pronounced, and Jewel swore it had managed to say both his names at once, “Walk.”
He did. One step in and he quickly turned to look at Jewel, a pleading sort of helplessness in it, a total lack of understanding that required as much support as it could get.
In turn, Jewel turned her head around to give Markus (as he was now, so many years later) a look of fire, of confidence, a silent statement of “I believe in you and I want you with us.” Then, unable to help it, she grinned in her lopsided way and motioned for him to follow. A tiny smile crinkled his violet eyes in response, and with one last (and not unmissed) glance towards the shadows behind him, he hurried forwards to join the rest of them.

“So why is Lethe here.”
Rio looked scared at Jewel’s blunt question, and opening his mouth in surprise, failed to say anything at first.
“I—”
“He needs to carry his fears separately,” the monstrous being replied with unusual calmness, looking down at the boy. “They will devour him otherwise.”
Rio said nothing to that-- he only tightened his lips and kept his eyes locked straight ahead.
“Markus,” the daemon spoke, “you should do the same.”
He flinched hard at the near-accusation. “I-I can’t,” he stuttered in real fright, “I’m not ready to face her yet, not like this—“
“You may have to,” was the reply. “Especially in a place like this.”
Then, silence. Jewel looked back and saw that Markus was looking down, fighting back real tears. This was so unlike how he used to be when they first met—all proud enthusiastic daring—that it broke her heart. She hung back a step to fall in sync with him, and tentatively put a hand on his shoulder. He looked up at her, his deep bronze skin seeming washed-out in the pallor of the place.
“You don’t know what she’s like,” he whispered. “She frightens me, Jewel. She’s…” he broke off momentarily, struggling with words. “…She’s a reminder of what I’ve been trying to ignore all these years-- a blatant, un-ignorable reminder.” He took a sudden breath as his eyes hardened. “She’s an in-your-face statement that ‘you’re not as tough as you think you are! You’re just a scared little kid playing God to forget the fact that you’re terrified and helpless and you’ve never felt so alone in your life.’ And then I met you guys.” Almost apologetically, his voice softened again. “Then I… I slowly stopped wanting to rule the world. I slowly started to be happy with what I had. But I was so scared of losing it, losing you, all of you, in any way, that I… the fear just changed shape. And now it looks like her. She’s pride and glory on one side, and helpless despair on the other.”
“Rags and riches?” Jewel offered.
Markus chuckled. “Kind of. More like… power and the total lack of it. Success, and the total lack of it. Gold and dirt. Rags and riches,” he shrugged, and laughed a little more genuinely this time. “I guess you’re right.”
Jewel smiled too, but it was still sad at the edges.
“So your Vice is… what? Pride?” Chaos asked, his brow furrowed.
Markus shrugged again, quickly, as if trying to shake the thought from his shoulders. “Maybe.”
“What does she feel like?” Jewel asked.
Markus considered this, looking momentarily up and ahead at Rio, who as obviously listening but not daring to turn or stop with his own embodied Vice pushing him forwards.
“--Rio, what does Lethe feel like?” Markus suddenly asked, audibly pushing through hesitation to do so.
“What?” came the baffled reply, as the boy faltered to a stop to turn and face his friend. The creature in question did the same, its single eye appearing to smile, as neutrally as one could imagine.
“I…” Markus’s hesitation replied in the shadow of that thing. “…Y-your daemon, it… aren’t daemons supposed to be Vices? Worst fears? Your biggest shadows?”
”Yeah…” Rio began, noncommittal.
“Well…” Markus gulped. “W-what’s yours?”
Rio said nothing for several seconds. The question hadn’t appeared to fully register, and it was obvious he wasn’t planning (or able) to respond.
“’What do I feel like,’ you mean?” Lethe murmured, amused. “Tell them, Rio. Tell them how I’m your fear of what lurks in the dark when you turn off the light, or the utter lack thereof. Tell them how I’m the sound of nothing when you lock all the doors. Tell them how I’m the redness behind your eyes--”
“Okay, okay!!” the white-haired boy nearly sobbed. “Lethe is… my fear of my unknowing. He’s my fear that nothing out there really exists, or even worse, that the only thing that exists is nothing. I’m scared that… I’m scared of everything out there that can turn me into nothing. Of laziness, and “Sloth,” and of not wanting to do anything but waste my days away with addictions and distractions because I’m scared of facing the emptiness beyond. I’m scared because I know he’s right, but I don’t know how to… how to learn from him yet.”
“It takes time, River,” the daemon spoke with unusual softness. “But the waters will move.”
Chaos visibly pondered that.
“You’re forgetfulness and death,” Jewel suddenly said. “Lethe and Styx.”
“I am,” he replied. “I am emptiness. I am the Void he runs from.”
“But I thought Daemons held both good and bad sides of the coin?” Jewel continued unsurely.
This time, Lethe’s smiling eye was far darker.
“Do I not?” His voice was like distant thunder. “Tell me, Jewel. Who is Dendrite to you?”
Jewel was the silent one now, her mind outright blanking out at the question. “I don’t know,” she said simply.
And Lethe laughed, a low watery rumble of a thing that shook her bones. “You run from your own heart and interrogate others who do the same. Be not a hypocrite, Jewel.”
Shamed by the harsh but too-true accusation, she lowered her gaze.
But… Dendrite. The name of her elusive alleged Daemon. Jewel knew she existed, but… where? How? Then again, Jewel had never given much of a thought to her own “vices,” had never even considered that she might have any at all… her innocent ignorance of sorts had gotten the better of her. Now, it seemed that the simple reality that she HAD a Daemon manifested somewhere was unsettling enough.
“…What is death, but only a door?”
She looked up.
“What is forgetfulness, when tied to fear?” Lethe continued. “Consider it, Jewel. A Daemon is a curse and a blessing. It is our nature. We cannot be otherwise. Fear us as you will, but remember—” and he smiled again, like crinkled silver—“we cannot exist without you. We are of you. And if there is any good in you, then there is just as much good in us.”
“…And what if there’s a lot of bad in us?” Rio mumbled, his voice almost stomped flat.
Lethe turned to him now, and in one liquid motion, curled up to be almost face-to-face with the boy. “What is ‘bad’ to you, Rio?”
“’Bad’ means harmful to my soul, or someone else’s,” he replied, a bitter sharpness creeping into his tone.
“Am I ‘bad’ to you, Rio?”
A pause; he was struggling with the question. “…I’m… not sure. You feel bad, you feel like all the bad in me, but you’ve never done anything to hurt me…”
“Then take that as a lesson, child,” the creature responded with subtle gravity. “You do not have to act on it. You can die to it. And then you can forget being what you were when you fell victim to it in the past.”
“Why would I want to forget the wrong I’ve done??” Rio burst out.
“So you can move on,” Lethe said simply. “Forget, after you have died to it. Don’t go back. Don’t drag yourself back into the grave you must rise from.”
Rio was again silent. His face was hot with tears and confusion and he looked even more knotted-up than Markus had earlier.
“Does that answer your question now, Jewel?”
She jumped, surprised at the Daemon’s sudden question. “I—yeah. I’ll have to think about it. But I’ve got it.”
“Don’t think too much,” the spidery thing chuckled.

They started walking again. No one was speaking. The fog and snow continued to whirl about
them, as dead and cold as ever, and Jewel noticed with no small amount of fright that she was starting to numb to it. Her mind, in an attempt to “protect her” from the inclement environment, was shutting down her ability to feel the cold, to see the shadows.
Almost impulsively, she flared up another burst of fire around her body, and flung it forwards into the half-night. Again, it seared through the fog and snow, but this time, the further it went, the darker the sky got around it, until it seemed to hit something solid and pitch-dark.
They all stopped at that.
“What are you trying to do, Jewel?” Lethe lazily inquired.
“Is that a wall?” Chaos questioned agitatedly. “Is this a dead end??”
Almost instantly Markus ran up to it, his hood falling away in the sudden burst of speed, champagne-gold locks catching a few feeble snowflakes. He closed the distance between them and the wall in a surprising matter of seconds—as intention tended to do in Heartspace—and without warning, began striking at it with the bladed end of his Rod.
“No!! This can’t be it!! You can’t just trap us here, you can’t just block us from getting any further!!” Furious and despairing, he struck the wall again with all his might. “Damn it!”
A solid chip of wall shattered off and flew to land on the ground behind him. The snow was fading here, the cold was dulling out, the sky above them losing what little color it had. Everything was now slowly vanishing away into that odd brassy-black stone, into an even more pervading sense of night… or no, something even darker than that; this darkness was in the absence of a sun or a moon, the sort of total black one only felt underground.
Markus was sobbing now, slumping against the wall, Chaos standing behind him in a desperate attempt to comfort. Rio appeared torn between numbness and compassion, and some awful sort of fear was holding him still, tears streaming down his face.
A voice came.

“Markus.”

He jumped notably, his whole body convulsing with fear. “No!!” He cried. “No, not you, not now, not here!!” Hysterical, Markus ran into Chaos’ arms and clung to the blue creature, almost choking from terror.
At this, Rio cast a heart-wrenching glance towards Jewel, and in that moment she understood just how lost he really was here, in the place that was just as white and dark and lonely as… wait.
Her eyes widened for a moment, but she cast that away just as quickly, refusing to dwell on that detail when it was obvious he needed support now. She moved over to him and wrapped her arms about his shoulders. He returned the gesture, tangibly relieved, but still shaking.
It struck her that he still felt as young as he did years ago, that he still felt safe to be around, like this. Despite his fear there was no ego to it; there was no sense of pride or performance or pity to it. No, he felt a need for love and he turned to someone he knew he could feel that with. There was nothing but childlike trust in that, something she treasured, something their quadruple-friendship here was built upon. Whatever bitter edges he had begun to show earlier had been completely rubbed down to velvet nubs now, so to speak. Everything was as soft and safe as it should be.
She wondered if Lethe’s appearance was responsible.
“Jewel,” Rio began, his voice thick with regret and apology.
“Yeah?”
“I… I’m so sorry, I didn’t know how to comfort him, I—” he broke off, audibly crushed by this.
Jewel looked at him compassionately. “Maybe don’t try so hard?” she began. “I mean… you and me, I think we worry too much. Chaos just kind of… went over there. He didn’t do anything, but that might’ve been intrusive? I dunno,” she hesitated. “He was there when Markus needed him. He was close enough.” Another tight pause. “And I was here for you. Maybe that’s all we can do?”
“Hm,” Rio considered. “You sure that’s enough?”
“Maybe we should ask.”
“Rio!! Jewel!!”
They both turned at Markus’s shout.
“On second thought, there’s our chance,” Jewel said, and the two ran over to their friend.

Rio began apologizing before he even stopped running. “Markus, I’m so sorry I didn’t come over here earlier—”
“You had that thing behind you, it’s okay,” the violet boy said-- and then appeared abashed for having expressed such a sentiment in earshot of said ‘thing.’ “I’m sorry,” he added ruefully.
“You know she’s here,” Lethe stated simply, and Markus’s face turned into a tangle of frustrated fear and sorrow all over again.
“Of course I know,” he spat. “I knew as soon as I saw her wall. She always…” he swallowed. “She always traps me in here.”
“Seems rather indicative of your subconscious,” his friend’s Daemon again calmly retorted.
Markus clenched his fists but remained silent. “What, that I’m trapped in here with her?” he replied at length.
“No, that you’re trapped because you refuse to face the minotaur. There is a way out of this labyrinth, child,” Lethe continued. “But she is guarding the exit.”
…



“…I’m scared of her,” he whispered once more, terribly vulnerable in the confession.
“We know,” Lethe observed, but his voice was oddly reassuring. “As is right, for we are indeed Daemons. Rio is terrified of me as well, if you have not forgotten.”
“But—but he—“ Markus gestured with a sort of frustrated despair at his friend. “But he’s letting you near him!! He’s TALKING to you!!” He stopped, his breath hitching, as his eyes caught a new light emanating from somewhere above—something gold. “How can he be scared if he’s just… letting you be there?”
Rio fidgeted a little at that. Lethe gave him a knowing look, and waited.
“…I bury it, Markus,” he said at length. “I… I’m scared of admitting that I’m scared? You’re a stronger man than me in that respect.”
“Oh, only that respect?” Markus retorted, a slight but brave smile in his shaking voice.
At that unexpected, familiar jab, Rio actually smiled back, a real smile, with a real chuckle lighting it up. “Y-yeah,” he added, just as bravely, and reached up with a slightly trembling hand to indicate his thick smoke-blue locks. “That and your hair game, I’ll give you that.”
And Markus laughed.

The gloom around them was suddenly warmer. The indigo shade had now shifted into something strangely luminous, even in the pervading shadows-- something bringing out a glint of sun-yellow even in the black walls.
Every one of them was smiling now, remembering what life had felt like back in the old days when they were kids; always joking with each other like this, never doubtful of each other no matter how dark it got. And now, once again, they were all momentarily wrapped up in nothing but that simple happiness, the lightness of being so suddenly triggered by a genuine bit of laughter, of good humor, of optimism even in the midst of strife… …And Lethe was still there.
He slowly curled into Rio’s shoulder again.
“So how does it feel to forget?”
Rio’s smile disappeared. Yet his face did not darken—instead, his eyes widened, his mouth now quiet with surprise.

Markus was still giggling at that old injoke, fingers playing with his gold-dust hair, but his eyes were wet, and his voice was quickly changing to match.
“…Markus?” Jewel asked, hesitantly. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he insisted with an oddly bright calmness, but he was smiling up at her with those same sad eyes.. “I’m absolutely fine. And this is what I never want to lose, ever,” he emphasized, his expression now beginning to crack at the edges. “This. I don’t want to go back to being afraid or confused or alone or—I don’t want to lose this anymore—”
“Have you ever really lost it, Markus?” a voice cut through the air.
And he breathed in as sharply as a knife.
Something gold was stepping out of the shadows behind Rio, where there was no trace of fog or snow, only the edges of a maze deep beneath the ground.
It was a towering, sharp thing, with limbs like needles, clock hands, dagger-blades… it walked with unfaltering precision, with unsettling poise. Everything about it was polished and deadly.
It stopped, thirty feet away from Markus, and gazed down at him with a single, brilliant yellow eye.
Then its gaze softened.
“Markus.”
He clamped his hands to his ears and fell to his knees, sobbing.

Rio was now looking back and forth between boy and beast in utter shock,



“Why are you so afraid of me?” she asked, quietly.

 

It suddenly struck Jewel that she’d never seen any of their Daemons act so kindly before.

 

***daemons do love their partner-souls but they also TAKE NO SHIT. They will NOT mollycoddle ANYONE for ANY REASON. If markus is running from his fears, his daemon is going to catch him and make him face them, no questions asked. A daemon knows ones bleakest parts and it exists to help you RECOGNIZE AND TRANSMUTE THEM. They literally cannot help you if you wont accept their existence— as rejecting them is rejecting that part of YOUR SOUL!!! The shadow IS vital for growth! A daemon just makes it that much easier to grapple with, when that dark awareness is held in something with a face and a heart that loves you, even if it has a rather sharp way of showing it. If you can learn to love them in return, then congratulations, you can now love yourself the same way. And that love is MANDATORY to reach one’s best self. The toughest part is the first acceptance though… that initial cognizance of what a daemon IS, what it carries, and the fact that it is part of you. The shame, guilt, fear, anger, and denial can be potent. Hence the separation of selves—if you can’t accept that part of yourself literally at first, at least accept it in them as something taken from you. Again, the ultimate goal is to learn UNCONDITIONAL LOVE for yourself and EVERYONE ELSE, without losing honor and righteous devotion. It’s a process and at first it is indeed rocky. But step 1 is always to open your mind and heart. It all goes from there.***

 

“We are not evil, no more than you are. Take that as you will.”
But Markus’ face was shaken.
“Why is everyone here so afraid of being evil?” Chaos frustratedly spoke up from behind his friend. “

 

Later, in response to “what’s Infinitii’s vice, then?”
“It’s… the vice of not realizing that my vices are vices.”