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This place is an endless, ever-shifting thing meant to stand until either the end of eternity, or the end of you.
Whichever one comes second.
Your heels sink softly into the carpet that remembers the colors from long before your creation. The walls shift and breathe and remembers voices that once echoed through its corridors, and now belong to people long dead. The lanterns that hang from the ceiling flicker with flames, and the small amount of smoke they emit carries secrets long forgotten by mortalkind, but never forgotten by you. The soot has stained the ceiling so thoroughly that only you remember what it used to look like.
It was once glass, so you may look upon the Universe as you pleased, and now it is blacked out by thousands of years of words that were never said.
Even if you do not know how many of those secrets are simply the words I love you, nor how many are I hate you, but you know both far outweigh the rest.
You cannot forget the sins and blessings of your people, of the gods that linger here, nor forget your own. This place will not let you, simply because it is you.
Statues line the whispering walls and stare as you continue down the twists and turns that change with every step you make. They are empty things not meant to hold the Universe nor its children. Their stone eyes stare at you and cannot blink. They cannot move, cannot shift, cannot speak.
Your only company these years are the secrets of the Universe. Is it company, though, if you are the secrets of the Universe made manifest?
…
There was someone here, once, but that was long ago when you were young and thought you had already seen everything there is to be seen. Someone who was an equal, meant to be greater than you even, who had visited back when you thought your only purpose was to watch, and not change. You had thought you had known the Cycle to its fullest, and had thought nothing could break it.
They had thought otherwise.
But that person is long gone as well, never to return to a place whose people loves them, never to hear the Wishes of their people.
Never to hear your own Wish to speak with them one. last. Time.
The body you walk with is alone, but these halls are not quite empty. There are footsteps here that do not belong to you, that the whispering walls echo.
They were people, once. Maybe some still are, though you do not know. You are not sure if you want to know. It has been centuries since the youngest had kneeled to you the same way the others did, and you broke the Cycle of their soul so they may become history incarnate.
So they would become timeless things, living records of the past designed to watch. They were meant to only stand from afar and record a history with too-perfect memories you had given them, until the end of the Universe.
You still know their names. You cannot forget, forgetting is not in your nature.
Memory. Secret. Oath. Truth. Lies.
You see them, sometimes, though not as often as you used to. You spend far too much time in this place, compared to them. Too much time within yourself and in the recesses of your mind, compared to how they fly freely across an ever-changing land. Even still, once every few years, fluttering wings and bobbing antennas move in and out of the corners of your vision before these shifting halls whisked them away and you are once again alone with yourself.
…Eternity used to wander these halls, too. You still remember giving them their name, a symbol of time. A reminder of how long they were meant to last for, how long this country is meant to last for, and that they were meant to witness its growth and eventual decay when the Universe collapsed.
You wonder if Eternity is still their name.
Is it selfish, you wonder, to hope that it still is?
Eternity became a torn thing, and you had not cared when your gift of flight was ripped from their grasp. You had not cared when the lanterns whispered their pain, their regret, nor the burning determination that was born. The remnants of their wings fluttered behind their back, but they could not fly, and you had not cared enough to mend them.
The wings were a marker of their purpose, you had said. You had told them that you will not mend them because they are meant to be history incarnate, and now part of their history is their gift of flight being torn apart. You had told them to bear those torn wings until their namesake had come, and the Cycle had ended things for good.
You will never get the chance to mend those wings, no matter how much you desire to now. Eternity has left these halls, and their voice will never sound in the recesses of your mind again.
You can only hear the lingering secrets that the smoke whispers, carried over from a country across the sea when it was first founded. You have not heard them since.
Even now, you don’t quite know what that means. It is a secret you will never learn.
The walls remember them anyway, and so do you. Every flap of their wings back when they were whole, every proud smile, every devastated expression, and the curse that spat from their lips before exhaustion overtook them, and you left their cries to the lanterns.
Those same lanterns will whisper your regrets until the flames finally burn out, and you are no more.
…
Something pale flickers in the corner of your vision. You would think it Lies, had you not seen their flutter thousands of time.
The walls echo with giggles, and you are not alone.
Something is there that does not belong to you, but the smoke does not betray their location. The walls do not shift to show where they stand, and the endless statues stare at you with empty eyes.
You begin to move.
Your heels sink into the carpet as darkless fur flickers in the corner of your vision again, and you turn to give chase. The halls twist and turn and Change as you follow the giggling phantom deeper into yourself.
You notice when the carpet begins to wear and fray, but the ghost continues to stay ahead of you, and you do not stop your chase.
It does not belong here, and neither does this body of yours. Still, you dive deeper into yourself.
The breathing of the whispering walls begins to slow, the brick does not bend so much as it rattles and struggles to convey the laughter of your ghost. It will not be long until they begin to bleed from centuries worth of witnessed agony you did not bother to try and stop.
Even still, you are haunted by something that does not belong here, and the halls Change again.
It is getting darker now. Not even the sun can penetrate the ash-covered glass. Fallen soot stains your heeled feet and the ends of the wings that hang behind your back that have not taken flight in centuries, you do not know how much deeper this will go. You cannot stop moving, not even as the lantern light weakens.
You cannot stop even as you enter into halls where the lantern light has died, where the carpet has been eaten from moths whose corpses line the repeating pedestals.
There are less stone eyes on you, now, as you continue on. The statues never change but the pedestals are ever-shifting in their positions as you continue on, some have the same statues repeated over and over again. The pedestals are beginning to crack, now. Some are already crumbling, and you pass by one that has crumbled so far as to be nothing more than a pile of rocks.
A funny thing, how they are still prone to decay, when you are a thing made for preservation and remembrance.
…Soon, all of the pedestals will be empty of anything but rubble, save for one statue that you have long since given up on.
Your ghost has a light, one you can see now while traveling underneath dead flames. The light is steady, and bright enough to illuminate the giggling spectre as the last of the lanterns above you flicker out.
You are being Guided, and yet, you do not sense Death in this place.
Why?
…
It has been a long time since you had retreated this deep into yourself. The walls heave and choke with sobs you tried to forget, the pedestals lay empty and broken down, and the glass above you is cracked and yet you still cannot see the stars. The carpet has long rotted, and the ashes of secrets forgotten by all by the Universe clings to your robes and wings like desperate hands reaching out for comfort.
The halls Change once more, and you stop and witness your Guide.
They stand before a pedestal still standing among the rubble, a lantern in one hand. They are looking down at the pedestal, at the carving of two of the celestial gods. A pair of twins that hold hands, one whose face is covered by a glass mask, the other whose expression is hidden behind their veil.
The statue is covered in cracks from being shattered centuries before, but the cracks are now filled with golden metal. It shines with a color that does not belong to you, has never belonged to you, and will never belong to you.
You had shattered that statue with your own four hands long ago, and picked up the pieces with those same hands.
You could not bear the idea of them being broken until the end of the Universe, even as everything else crumbled around you.
…Your ghost’s body is made of the same stone as the only statue that sits this deep into your mind. They are covered by fabric, a cloak with a ring-like pattern, and a dark dress with circle charms hanging off the edge of the skirt. Their short hair and polished horn reflect the light of the star-shaped lantern they hold in one hand and against the closed umbrella they hold in the other.
They are draped in pearls and rings all around their body, around their horn, their neck, their waist, their wrists, and tail. You cannot stop from staring at the rings.
Rings, that reflect a golden color in the lantern light. The same color used to mend the little statue.
The stranger turns to you- their stone body moving like flesh and bone- their carved hooves clacking against the marble floors and tail flicking side to side.
You recognize those eyes. They are the same eyes painted onto the glass mask of the statue on the pedestal- a circle, within a circle, within a circle. You had thought it an odd choice by the artist at the time, though now you wonder if they were given a gift of prophecy by the Universe itself.
Those eyes are golden now, and filled with so much more life than you could ever hope to have as a stagnant thing of memories and whispers. The ghost that haunts the hallways of your mind blinks at you, and a lopsided grin appears on their face that couldn’t be done when you had first met them as a tiny statue on a pedestal.
You recognize that face as well, back when it was a face of flesh and bone. It had belonged to someone by the name of Mercury, who had charged with sunfire in her eyes and a sword in one hand in the name of ending a long, and violent war.
Truth had reported that she had founded Vaugarde across the sea, and had died in the offering bowl of her chosen god. You had thought it foolish, then, to offer oneself so clearly and thoroughly.
You understand why, now, she had done what she did. Perhaps she had known one day that the one before you would need a face of their own.
“Hello, Butterfly that Recollects,” they greet with a cheer you cannot fathom matching, with an ease you cannot find it in your cracked glass ceilings to have, “Long time no see!”
You know this spectre, or rather, you know who they used to be.
The walls heave with broken laughter and choked sobs, and you do not greet your ghost with a name that does not belong to them anymore.
You greet them with a name they have chosen for themselves centuries ago.
“Hello, You Who Changes the Days and Nights.”