Robert
Sigrún's heels tapped against the side of the rock she sat on, staring at the still water. There were no trees around the little pool, letting the twinkling stars land on its surface for a moment before the first watercolour swells of sunlight washed them away.

Under her heavy mantle of black leather pans silvery spikes, her stomach is wrapped in a coil of cold flesh, the faint outline of suckers shifting around each other; she hadn't needed that old comfort in ages, before she lit in this place, but it was difficult not to feel like a child, now.

A smile curled the edges of her mouth, but it didn't quite lift the rest of her features.

"Good to meet you in the flesh, Basil."

She keeps her distance. It's more than she afforded him in that other state.

"I hope that's not a cruel pun. It really is good, I think."

"Well. It'd be nice if you weren't stuck here."

Sig drew her knee up to her chest to lean her head against, mirroring Basil's position. The movement cast new shadows on her rock; curled around her perch were more of her limbs, perfectly mottled grey to match it. 

"You don't look so good, *Bror.*"

Her voice, level and low, was a far different beast than the one that had screamed its curses at those corrosive golden eyes. Its presence was more than its body, then—the boy before her across the pool looked like he had been fighting tooth and nail for far longer than anyone should; the animation in his chest was stilted and uncomfortable, as though he were unused to taking anything but shallow breaths. The sight of him ached.

Sigrún's silvery eyes were nigh-unreadable, but they met his and they held there.

A heavy sigh rolled out of the girl on the rock as a number of things suddenly made terrible sense. A high wind blew through, rustling the branches above them.

"You're not an unforgivable thing for feeling like one."

The lightless sky was always an embrace, cool hands over cool skin, the permeating loneliness a presence in itself—her tower, sunk beneath the haze. But, under this mournful moon, soon to vanish, another sat with her in the pressure. She felt light, but weighted down by the weeping pit in her stomach. 

Strands of loose, wavy blonde hair slipped in front of her shadowed face, glinting gold in the crawling sunrise.

"Your beast spoke of grief..."

Blue fingertips pushed them behind her ears. Sharp teeth worried her lower lip as she chose her words carefully.

"It aches to breathe, ja? When you're a shape that's growing too fast to recognize... You were failed too?"

The fleshy spirals looped around the rock tightened and twisted into angry, writhing knots as Basil spoke of how he was failed. Sigrún's mind filled in the blank spaces of his ragged tapestry; neglect, blame, the pain of drowning and seeing no one above the ice who cared to intervene. *No wonder he's furious. No wonder it's eaten so much of him.*

*'We?'* They couldn't breathe? The phrase called back an old disk with his name on it—Levi's power in his lungs, his plan to disappear into the Cradle's incompetent grip in hopes of finding help. *We...*

How much of himself had this kid really lost? How much had been carved away by the ages stuck to his lover's side, his identity dissolved into the corrosive pattern of nothingness? Apathetic eyes had given him that first push, but Basil continued to dig his own bitter claws into the soft flesh he blamed for his purgatory.

Her leaden face curled into an angry mask for a moment, before the claws receded and she remembered herself. Basil moved through his emotions a mile a minute.

"*Devil in hell...* You have every reason to want to tear this place apart." Sig's voice, the cold, even ocean, was shot through with vents of volcanic heat, thrashing in the pitch. "We-the-monstrous have little patience for thumb-twiddling..." A sharp exhale, and she softened, near-imperceptibly. "And so much beauty to be crushed beneath ignorant thumbs."

"...Also, 'she,' *What?*"

Sigrún leaned forward to see the little dragon-thing closer, adjusting cloaked limbs for balance. An odd thing it was, staring up at her while its master's tale of love and woe unfurled further.

His devotion was something out of a story bound in leather and iron, painful in the way only ancient yarns could be, yet stinging like a new wound. She recalled the recording, hasty and desperate, and despaired alongside him.

"Nope."

Simple as that.

"It's all a murky fucking mess. Hate feeling trapped in those."

She spoke almost more to the dragon-thing, not breaking the eerie eye contact.

"Ooooooh," She hummed, sliding her cool fingers over the regretful creature's (scaly? Rough?) brow, lightly scratching its snout like a puppy's. Though her expression remained still, her nose wrinkled a little at the faint sensation of pins and needles. Her hands rippled through the scraps of colour coming through the trees.

"He... He reached out of it, and grabbed on," She murmured, deep in thought. "It was like I saw straight in, and then he saw straight out..."

"It's different for you, though, isn't it—the thing guarding the gate is the one you made, gripping you like a... Sphinx or something."

Sigrún slid off her rock, closer to where Basil sat, scooping his regret into her lap. *Curious little creature.*

"That's... If I pulled on your hand really hard like with Levi, what do you think would happen, even?"

An uncomfortably long few seconds of silence was shaken by the sound of Sigrún sucking air between her teeth.

"I, sure. Yeah." Her tone was still even, but contained the slightest hint of incredulousness, as though the next thing she was planning on saying was *'shit, that's what I've been saying'* Or *'of course, stupid.'* Being stuck in a void with *Anyone* For that long, even someone she liked, sounded like hell. Ugly thoughts were necessary, and to be best observed in forgiving solitude. She sighed.

"It's not the sort of thing you *Kill*, Baz. You know that. Your power rubs it in your face, doesn't it! What a bitch!"

Sig scooped up the dragon in her lap, scooting closer to Basil. The no-doubt bewildered lizard blinked an inch from his nose. 

"Look at him. Regret, in the, ehh, not-flesh-but-close-enough. In the gravity. Look at this little face, and tell him he's no good? That he deserves nothingness, little thing that he is—*Ooh, he's got some heft to him*—anyway." She sets the creature down, rubbing snd shaking out the bare fingertips that touched it. "You're right, at least, that this is your monster to wield. Your pesky prophecy, your sacred blade..."

The crouched girl's fingers dug into the murky silt just below the edge of the water.

"It's all energy, in this world. Organs, spirits. You put some out, and you gain it back, one way or another. Else you're walking around hollow, or constipated. You've been *Ten years* Stagnant, friend. You've already carved this thing out of your side—I know that, because I looked it in its eye and I called it names..."
_ _

Sig chuckled to herself, as though the blinding rage and terror were already funny stories. She absentmindedly twisted her hand as she talked, tracing looping patterns through the air. As she turned back to him, this hand suddenly split, as though it hid behind its own shadow, the form of human fingers mirrored with a squid's sucker-lined gripper. The shape melted out of the folds of her leather jacket up to the elbow, already adjusting to reflect the colours in the early dawn sky. Her two forearms split apart and wrapped around each other, two halves of a whole, graceful in their way of being disturbing; if they looked long enough, which of the two was there first might become less and less apparent.

"It's all just you, anyway."
Mary
Basil watched the distortion of Sigrun's hand, curling around and over itself. His red and green eyes bore into the sight with rapt fascination. For the first time in *~~how long? How long has it been?~~*, Basil took a deep breath. The entire being shuddered and shook the little blades of grass under them.

"It's still you, isn't it?" 

The angry shape deflated, slowly, slowly, until it started to take the silhouette of a boy. The last time like this has been when Levi *~~was still here~~* Had insisted they meet with Dae-hyun and Danica, converse with them, accept their gifts. 

Ever since Levi had gotten free, everyone had seemed to forget about that. 

"It's just me now, isn't it?"

Before Sig sat a boy, or what remained of one, chin resting on his knuckles in a painfully human-like gesture. He tilted his head a bit. 

"Im just all that's in here. Hayleys gone. Levi's gone. It's just me."
Robert
Sigrún made no polite efforts to conceal her fascination with how Basil's form warped and reshaped itself, sharpening around the edges, softening in the face. *Somebody* Around the Cradle owed him genuine interest anyway, she figured. *At long last.*

She nodded slowly, an array of strange colours streaking excitedly through her oddly-curled expression. It softened, though, when Basil turned to face her again.

A cool hand, clad in a fingerless glove painted with bones, rested hesitantly but solidly on his shoulder.

"And you have a moment to breathe, finally."

The girl's tone is gentle—a practiced sort of gentle, an effort.

"The way I saw it, at least. It's a good thing to love people, to protect them, hold them together..." She zones out for a second, watching the sun come through the trees. "But you can't stay coiled up forever. Not even for their sake."

Songbirds rustled high in the trees. It was a lovely morning for somber things.
Martin
Basil slowly nodded.

"Do you think," He said, "I could do it? Break out of here? What would even happen?"

The black hole, devoid of static, did not encroach on Sigrun's flesh, nay, only her thoughts, simmering below their hand like an inky pool, echoes of a silent wave slipping out.

"I'll crush this damned place with my bare hands if I gotta. I don't want it infecting anyone else. And if Hayleys alive, I'll strangle her with it."

The angers claws landed on his shoulders again, gold surging into his eyes. And why shouldn't it?, he supposed. Hayley LaFontaine had locked him, ~~and Levi~~ in here to *Die.* 

Trapped be damned. They weren't meant to make it out. ~~And Levi had~~. What a wrench in the plan, Basil mused. 

"I'll make her feel all of it. That's all I've been able to have. I've only been able to *Feel*. Did you know there were years we couldn't even see? Could you imagine that, huh? Stuck. Stuck and you can't even see. You can't hear anything that's not under a million fuck-off layers of– Of that damn *Noise.*"

The birds stilled. Darkness crouched over the grass. Basil shook, ever so slightly.
Robert
Little met Basil's questions, strung together like firecrackers, but the same eerie silence that he had created. Sigrún merely tapped her fingers over the well of shark teeth and poison she seemed to hover over (sit next to?). It was strange, now, to see the proper source of that venom, to rest next to them while they ranted—the effects were still there, set in the ache of her jaw that she clamped *Hard*, but she just didn't want to tear his head off. *Funny.*

She didn't move her hand to accommodate the claws, but neither did she shove them off of his back.

"Don't need to convince *Me* You have good reasons to be fucking insane with rage right now," She chirped, turning to look at those burning gold eyes. *Really* Look at them. Sigrún decided she liked how they made her own water a little.

"If you tore it apart, and her next... It would be a fiery display, for certain, claws, teeth, chemical change..."

Her voice turned low and dreamy, but she still stared into the golden blaze. 

"You'd make up for so many years blind by never blinking once, if only to see every detail of your anger cracking the stones beneath her feet—it would feel like wrenching a piece of broken glass out of your chest, and it would hurt, accordingly, like a *Bitch*."

A sharp rock, half-buried in the sand, digs into Sigrún's fingertips.

"You let out a beast that big, you leave a gaping, ugly hole that nobody can ignore, ribs and acid, and torn muscle; you cage it again, and it eats your spine away."

Despite the gruesomeness of both options, the tall figure leaning back on its hands' delivery was almost like a campfire story, her eerie eyes darting about as though catching details from the woods behind him to weave into her tale. 'Good' or 'bad' weren't concerns, merely the spectacle of it all, the animal craving of something breaking between one's teeth.
Mary
I RESPOND TODAY POND
Robert
Sigrún's eyes rolled to Basil, then her shoulders. Its head lolled to the side, eyebrows pulled into a slightly quizzical expression, mouth leaden.

"You tell *Me* This, like I wouldn't understand? I just said so."

Over the shadowed side of her neck, something twisted and shifted. The root of nebulous anger that dug into the ground closest to her was wrapped in a strand of cold, cold muscle, rippling with strange colours.

"I've been here... Half a year? And I want to flood this dump until it's just rebar and punching bags—sometimes I wonder if this will end with me peeling my skin off." A shadow grew around its eyes. "I can't imagine a decade."

Sig pictured it for a moment, the Cradle, eroded away to little more than bitter memories by the force of the sea it stole her from. A sour, sharp thing, with spiralling blades and a nauseating ooze, twisted in her stomach. That used to be where she felt something else; the pull of the compass, the current flowing around her soul, rushing through her powerful form. The anger that Basil's monster had seen in it that fateful night bubbled back up, bestial and lost.

The sharp, sour thing twisted again when she thought of what tied her there, and she blinked the dryness out of her eyes that the wind insisted on bringing.

The red-patterned girl had hardly noticed the odd crackling to the air until it dropped so suddenly, like her ears popping after climbing to a lesser depth. Or a greater one. Which way had she gone, with this furious shade she might call a kindred spirit? Her head turned, sluggish and then quick, if only to find a face to reassure. Perhaps her word would mean more to him, who only knew the ways they were similar.

*What will he do?*

Sigrún thought of the ones she might like to keep safe herself, and tensed a little; *Gabriel. Violetta. Mimir.* They were all on varying levels of needing to be free from the Cradle, and a brief image of falling and rotted debris around their haunts stained her mind's eye. It paused, though, and thought a little better of Basil. What would freeing them be if they were just fated to be rubble?

"As long as you'll not harm the rest of us... Stuck here."

The invisible loops of muscle wound around her in every impossible way coiled just a little tighter. It flopped onto its back on the cold earth, watching the sun drench the tips of the tallest trees in melted butter-light.

*"And just slip me a note when you're giving our shit back. Faen."*