#but. weirdly comforting to know that lil freak is out living his best (worst) life somewhere

[iamnottoph]

My fic for @sparingiscaring for the @fallenlondonficswap! Sorry its a little bit late. (576 words)

Things in Parabola rot much the same as other things rot. It is a process, not of destruction per se, but of reclamation. Putrefaction. Transformation. Bacteria and fungi, bugs and worms, rain and wind and soil and sunlight; all take their piece, eat their fill of blood and skin and marrow, make a dead thing into a fractal of new life. On the other side of the mirror too, does its reflection die. Its name is scattered to the ever-whispering wind and among the ever-mumbling trees, syllable by syllable. Its walls are colonized by slim vines of poetry and metaphoric wildflowers. Its tiles sink into the mud of allusion and memory. Mushrooms in viric and cosmogone sprout upon dead nightmares, frothing with the uneasy but ultimately comforting relief that comes when one awakes from a bad dream, its visage already slipping into nothingness. A whole becomes fragments, and the fragments become wholes - divorced of context, scrubbed of their past by the wear of a thousand hands. Stripped down, bit by bit, until only what is utterly indigestible remains. GANT. The colour that remains when all else is eaten. The remainder-colour, the one that stains bone and offal. That which is left behind at the bottom of the Waswood's waters as the present burrows unceasingly into the future. The colour of that which has been abandoned - unimportant, undesired. The Wizened Silverer studies it carefully, the cosmogone of his spectacles shielding his eyes from the otherwise undeniable desire to flick it to the ground as unwanted garbage. A broken fragment of something - smooth, and shiny. Red, once - the patina of something-not-quite-black hasn't quite spread around to all of it. The only clue to its origin is its rather more dramatic partner - a skull, jawbone missing, its back shattered. a bullet, half-buried in the damp earth beneath it. All of them consumed with that selfsame colour. A rejection occurred here. A brutal, final, undeniable one. Something unloved died here. Not this man - at least, not just this man. There is a reason he found this here, in a half forgotten little pocket of Parabola, seemingly shunned by the roads and paths that would usually swarm and slither so eagerly to it. This was the betrayal of a promise. The shunning of a past, the murder of a future. Everything this man was and represented, was rejected earnestly and utterly. An absolute excision. What else was there for his remnants to do then, but reject themselves? The Wizened Silverer shivered, despite the jungle's eternal heat. This was not a good place. Good men who had lived good lives did not die such deaths. Still. He had found this place shunned and tucked away, an ugly scar hidden from sight - but he had found it. The Is-Not, in the end, truly rejected nothing. For every Wasn't, there was, somewhere, a Was; for every choice, there was a twin. If every mirror must have a reflection, then every reflection must have a mirror. Parabola had many roads, and none, in the end, were untaken. Nothing had loved this unfortunate fellow; and yet, someone, somewhere, must have. He did not know who, or where, or why. He did not know what kind of life this skull's twin lived. But it was good, the Silverer felt, that he did. He stood, and strode off from the clearing; there was nothing suitable for his work here. Let these bones rest, and dream of somewhere else.