[open quest] final round: and with strange aeons, even death may die.

[Sabra]

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<p class="sabra_name">Sabra</p>
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There's a ripping seam in my chest already, the heavy weight of regret drumming like endless rain on my head. When the words turn into violence, I am hardly surprised. There's so much anger in the air, it feels like a living thing, as hungry as the ones it inhabits, as the one who created it.

It is not surprising, but it still hurts when the first teeth sink into my shoulder. A groan of pain rumbled through my throat, but I don't have time to react beyond this before the assault begins in earnest.

What I expect is not what occurs. I feel the dull ache of jaws clamped tight in my flesh, but they do not rend and tear. Instead my crowding mob seems to have united in their cause, to drag me by wing and throat and thigh and a dozen other pinching points, away into the deepest entrails of the earth.

I'm weak by now, exhausted by the twisted road I've taken, by the relentless assault my heart has taken. The arcane whorls of sickly algea darken in my eyes. They spin and collide in dizzying ways, blurring together in some grim message I feel I could understand if only I could stand still. But I have been lost, hauled along ever faster as the colors bleed to darker shades, blood smeared on the walls.

The choking tunnels spit us out. A new cavern, and for a moment I think we're absorbed by the empty depths. My breath is a reedy, halting thing, escaping in frightened gasps that vanish in the humid air. The air is painful here, damp and acidic where it runs along my sinuses, burns my lungs. The howling herd is throbbing with unseen energy, waiting, waiting.

I hear it.

A wet, squelching wail. The darkness writhes.

The pit is a living thing. The suggestion of pulsating flesh, the ruddy gleam of fungal glow on weeping sores. Beyond this my mind refuses to process. It's too much, too large, too horrid. The laws of creation have forsaken us here, and the chattering horde grows ever louder, proclaiming my sins to the eldritch night.

A moan of endless, eternal hunger tears the toxic air. The darkness yawns, and the throng dances towards it. Into it. The bodies are gone, but the voices remain, louder than ever. They chant my name, the litany of all things I have done wrong, and I feel it. The beckoning void that has always called my name. The emptiness that has always been my birthright and my sentence.

Dazed and bleeding, I blink unseeing. There's nothing to see, even in a room filled with Everything. A high pitched laugh bursts unbidden from my maw, the familiar gleam of a broken mind shining in my eyes. "I owe nothing to you! Nothing!" My voice crackles out in a pitiful thread. "You hear me? I have fucked up. In so many ways. But they were my choices, always." I stepped forward on unsteady hooves, eyes searching for something, anything to focus on. It was hopeless, but then I knew it would be.

"I hope you've had fun. Cause I think you've finally put me where I belong. I've finally found Hell."

I'm stumbling, tripping over my own feet, falling. The weak red light winks out like dying stars, and the endless night swallows me whole. It crushes me with a merciless grip, squeezing my body and then my essence until there's nothing left but my name on the lips of the ones I've disappointed.

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<p class="sabra_quote">I wanna be Immortal, like a God in the sky
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I wanna be a silk flower, like I'm never gonna die
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<a href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-wearing-dress-shirt-lying-on-bed-3373401/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="padding-top:10px">Photo by Kareva Margarita</a>
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