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The pen clatters to the floor with a dull crackling sound, but D3rlord doesn't reach to pick it up.
The weight descends at him at once, ramming against his resolve and finally breaking through, tearing a heavy breath out of him. He feels his whole body shudder at the onslaught, yet it doesnt matter; all of him has become condenced into the gaze of unblinking eyes and his fingertips still dancing on the keyboard.
Rvn, Avery, its here
The code spills out of him without as much as a second look, without a need to turn to paper once again to double-check the spelling. It comes with a certainty, a solid heaviness in his mind as alien and uninvited as the whispers now permeating it. The lights surrounding him turn to sickly, piercing yellow, and D3rlord wants to tear these thoughts out from his brain like a tumor.
He gives into the impulse as he closes his laptop with a thud, tears the charging cable out.
The whispers don't cease with its power dying.
D3rlord raises to his feet, pushing away the heavy hunk filled with electronics and curses. His vision swims; the world tilting so much one moment it might as well turn sideways. There's a scrapy feeling in his mouth, desert dryness mixing with bile taste.
His apartment grows unbearable, stale with the smell of stagnant water, and in his feverish shivers, he thinks the cold walls of cubic stone a welcome thought compared to the tangible ones surrounding him. The yellow lamplight pulses and squirms; mind filled with the conceptual reality behind this reality, almost wanting these waves to drag him away, D3rlord breaks through the surface and slams at the light switch.
The world is plunged in the shadow at once, and it lunges at him, drowning him in his vast insignificance.
He flips the light back on.
He might be getting ill, he thinks. Better to pick up the phone, to dial up the emergency services; what if it's something in his brain. It's gotta be something in his brain. Will it gaze upon the doctors from his MRI scans, worm its way into their pastimes? D3rlord feels a laugh tearing out of him, an ugly, bitter sound. A game. He was simply playing a game, and now he's thinking of his brain being warped in the image of the -
He pushes back the words clawing up his throat, as if even thinking them would taint his reality even further.
Instead, the yellows swimming in his vision turn to crimson briefly, a spill of the blood vessel popping in the eye, and the words come with it, the plea muttered by someone D3rlord is sure not from this world.
It's like, we live in a room, and there's a poster on the wall. We stare at it and we think that's the whole world, the room and the poster. The picture's something nice, a landscape, a famous person. Like in that movie, what's it called, the prison movie?
But it's all a lie. Something to distract us from the truth. It's lying to us. We're lying to ourselves.
D3rlord repeats the words under his breath, his own voice cracking dry and warped beyond recognition. The room's not the world, he pushes out, as his own room grows darker, ever suffocating under the shadows that reach out cradling him. It's a horrible knowledge, to look at the things once familiar and recognize in them his own blindness.
And D3rlord had thought himself smart.
The room is not the world, and sometimes, something crawls out from behind the poster, and there isn't a way to come back from what you saw. He knows it now.
He presses his fingers against his temple and pushes in, claws at the skin, hoping the pain will dull the burning in his mind.
Instead, his touch finds the unyielding cold of the metal helmet, or a smooth marble of the faceless mask, a thousand things of a texture for which no language has words. He tears his hands away, not daring to look down at them in fear of what he finds. His fingers feel sticky wet and smell like something floral of all things.
Oh, there's no way back for him. No way back for him at all.
What is even to become of him? A picture holding the picture; the only child in the room with a hole in him, and through that hole, the things that shouldn't be will leak through, paint the walls in symbols that should never be read or written. He's in a slipstream, no control under control, and the stories untold flash in his mind as he sees his own fate now clear and unchanging, a stepping stone under the King's gliding stride as it tears the veil of reality open to reach towards Avery and -
Avery.
The only constant in D3rlord's sinking mind, enough for his thoughts to resurface gasping once again. Avery, and the ones coming after him to explore. The ones with pens and papers and DCode tabs and the fortitude to go further despite the multitude warnings; and then the ones to write plays and poems of what has transpired, typing the words of "typing the words of horrors unspoken into the black and white screen" into the black and white screen. And the crossroads will unfurl in front of each and every one of them, compelling and inevitable.
His book will scare off the fearful, he hopes, but what of curious? What of the multitudes of D3rlords, waiting in the future for Avery to tell the story and the other entralling voice echo his own in a surge of curiosity?
He turns his eyes back to the laptop, laying dead on his bed. He knows, deep within, that he can't hide it; sooner or later, the twisting fates will bring it to its next owner. He can't destroy it; the hands in yellow tatters will guide his own away from harm. The voices creep at his mind once more, and D3rlord feels his time ticking away, a rise of black liquid in his throat as he sinks deeper, suspended between two suns drowning in endless waters.
What is left of him kneels at the bed once again, and powers the laptop up.
The footage of his last gaming session; a pretty feature left from his failed streaming attempts that he'd never thought much coming in clutch. He opens the editor and stares at the screen, as he feels the invisible hand cradling his hands, black nails piercing skin as something that isn't blood trickles down his face.
There's no way back for him, but he can twist the chain guiding him. Tangle the roads, let the ones who come after him be hidden from the gaze of the One claiming his life for a bit longer. Even as he bleeds dry upon the vision once again and the voices scream in protest, [ ] pushes his cursor forward to place one more black bar atop the footage.
There is a poster on the wall, and he can't stop what's behind it from tearing through. But he can paint over it, hide the sigils and make the picture look like a warning for the ones in the room after him.
This is the only thing he needs to know.