Chapter 6: light my lonely way back home

(We can save them all. You will finish this story yourself.)

And now here we are, and I fear that all the story I had in me is gone. We are here in this place, and as strong as you were and are to pull yourself from nonexistence in order to listen to me, you will undoubtedly be gone soon. And then, soon after, I will follow.

What was that?

What…? No. I don't especially think that –

I –

Oh!

No, you're right, you're right, of course you are. There is absolutely no point in giving up. I don't know what I was thinking – it must be the effects of this place. I would normally never – I wouldn't – I –

Never mind that, now, we must find a way to leave this place. I am without any sort of powers, so we will have to be creative. Do me a favour, look beyond the barrier with me. Maybe if we both concentrate, we will be able to see beyond it – back into the real world.

Do it now. There's no time to lose!

Back in the realm of existence, a long way removed from where we are now, Steel has just seen Sapphire fade and collapse, and oh, he is furious. He is quite the sight to behold – brows narrowed, lips tight; an utterly intimidating immovable object and unstoppable force all at once. He is trying to contact Sapphire, but she is not responding – any signals sent out to her just reverberate back to him, as if they are hitting a solid surface and bouncing back, unheard.

The storm is still raging outside, and the telephone has begun to ring again, which means that the creature within the telephone can't be done yet, and it's only a matter of time before Steel is taken the same way that Sapphire was. Now that it knows they're there –

So there's no time to lose, and Steel needs to think fast. And think fast he does.

Here is what he knows.

The creature in the telephone isn't necessarily always in the telephone, and at the first sign of danger it is able to retreat to somewhere else, somewhere that it can't be caught, not by them anyway.

The creature is connected to the people it has consumed, and directly – you cannot have one without the other.

The creature needs to feed – on living history, no less, and by the look of it, it's been requiring more and more of that energy recently. Desperation equals recklessness – more chance for success.

If the creature could be convinced to stay inside the telephone, then it is more than possible that breaking the telephone itself could restore sense and equilibrium to the island. Or maybe not convince, not in the traditional sense – forcing it to stay within would work equally as well.

So this is what happens. Steel forces himself to a state of calm, and steps back towards the walls of the room, away from the telephone, even as lightning crackles and thunder roars like the furious howling of an ancient god. And as rain begins to fall all over the island, and the temperature outside drops, so does Steel's own temperature. Down, down – edging closer and closer towards below zero, and dropping quicker and quicker. He's shaking almost imperceptibly as he stands up, but he steps towards the phone with the bright red telephone on it with a singleminded determination.

Seconds before he touches the phone, it stops ringing, and the thunder above cuts off abruptly – as if the creature has suddenly become aware of what is happening, and is trying to escape what it does. But for the thing inside the telephone, it's far too late.

As soon as Steel's hands contact the red plastic, frost spreads instantly – covering the phone in a thick layer, spreading out to the table, freezing it in place. It shouldn't work to actually hold the creature inside the phone for a great deal of reasons, but Time and Elements have always worked in strange ways.

There is a scream – terrible and distant, with the voices of a million horrors. And outside, the storm freezes – clouds stop moving and the rain stops falling – actually halting in place, like it's been put on pause. Then the raindrops crystalize into ice, and fall – shattering as they hit the ground.

Everything's silent and still outside. But it's not over yet – no, not quite.

Steel's movements are stiff and shaky as he leans heavily on the table, frost forming on his ashen skin. He never should have attempted a full lowering of his body temperature without insulation, but there was simply no time to call Lead in for help.

He has one last thing to do. The irregularity may be inactive for the moment, but it is still there; trapped like a malevolent genie inside its bottle. And there is only one way to deal with it.

Steel swings clumsily at the table with an elbow, and knocks it over. The telephone tumbles off it and skids across the ground, practically frozen in a block of ice, cracks already beginning to form.

And Steel looks down at the telephone with an impassive expression, and violently brings down a foot on it. The force behind it is enough to shatter the phone completely, breaking it into millions of tiny, frozen pieces. And that's enough. Just like that, the irregularity has been dealt with – it is gone forever.

And then something, somewhere changes. There is a burst of light, a ray of sunshine, a crescendo of song, and –

With a sound like an eternity's worth of rushing wind, everybody spills out of the other place. Hundreds of thousands of years of vanished beings – animals and humans alike – all end up in the lighthouse, crammed into the engineer's room, tightly packed around the balcony of the light, spilling down the stairs. It's noisy and chaotic; everybody is talking at once – emotions ranging from confused to joyful. The residents of the previously-empty village are reuniting with each other, with people that they had once assumed to be lost. Mothers rush to their children; husbands to their wives, and Steel is pushed to the side in the rush of people trying to get to each other.

And he's scanning the crowd impatiently for a flash of blue fabric or blonde hair, but she's not there. Not yet.

The Elements, the ones that were trapped alongside with all of the humans and animals in the telephone, they come next. Maybe it's because they just had so much more history, or maybe it was something about their biological makeup, but they took slightly longer to emerge from the other space. And all of them, they're there.

Magnesium, sparking and crackling as she lands inelegantly halfway down the stairs and has to steady herself against a wall. Charm, who appears completely unruffled by the experience, and levels one of their inscrutable smiles at Steel, who is sitting down heavily near a wall – the change in everything has warmed him considerably, but he's not quite recovered yet.

You can tell Ruby's there because she starts singing, the melody rising up above the crowd without any words necessary. And then there's Cerium and Titanium and Copper and Jet, and there's already silent, not-quite out loud questions flying this way and that as for the first time in millennia, a large group of our number are together without any idea what's going on.

Sandstone emerges from the top of the stairwell, tracking chalky dust as she goes, and right behind her Agate's there too, skin sparkling faintly in the light that's now streaming in from the windows.

The door opens, and Lead is now visible, holding it open so everybody can leave. There are large bloodstains all over his jacket, but it's mostly disguised by the darkness of the fabric. And he's grinning ever so widely, so nothing could have gone that wrong. His booming laughter echoes out around the lighthouse, and it gets even louder when he sees Bismuth, who has just arrived and is beaming like the sun at his presence.

This place has been cold and empty for so long, and now it's filled with all of the sounds of warmth and happiness.

"Aha," says Jade, who abruptly begins to exist halfway through her bending down to retrieve her peacoat from the ground, where Silver folded it earlier. "You kept my coat," she says to Lead, which is the closest she will ever get to thanking somebody, and gives him a nod and what might be the beginnings of a smile.

The crowd is beginning to move down the stairs – they are all quite confused, but know that the lighthouse isn't a place that they want to be in. The animals that haven't already left are herded out – birds and cats and donkeys and the rare horse.

And during all this, Silver arrives, materializing rather suddenly to land cross-legged on one of the engineer's beds. He is grinning widely, and completely whole. There is no indication that he was ever stabbed in the first place. "I take it that the irregularity has been dealt with?"

Steel looks him over once, then lets slip a rare, genuine smile. But then he looks grim again, and eyes the shattered pieces of the red telephone without a word. He's shivering lightly still.

"Whatever's the matter?" Silver says lightly, teasingly. "No need to look so unhappy, Steel – aren't you relieved it's all over? Why –"

And then Silver realizes. You can tell by the look of realization that creeps across his face that he's seen it – seen what, or rather who is missing.

"Oh, no," he says softly, "oh dear. Steel – where's Sapphire?"

And all Steel can do is shake his head.

But I'm fine, of course. Silly man. I'll be with them in a moment, but I have some things to deal with first.

Back in the other place – the place where all the souls were up until very recently residing – there are three beings left. There is you, of course, who has elected to stay with me until the end of this little misadventures, and there's me.

And then there's the engineer.

He is no longer faceless, but he looks horrified at what he's done and terrified of me. And rightfully so. He caused all of this – perhaps not directly, but he was the one who fed thousands upon hundreds of people to the creature in the phone so that he, personally, would not have to stop existing. He did it to them all, until he was the only one left, and when the creature inside it because too impatient for ready-made, pre-packaged meals, it ate him as well. Poetic justice, in a way.

The greatest monster of all – humanity, at its worst, at its most desperate.

But now he'll be allowed to leave. He'll be allowed to go back to his lonely job at the lighthouse, and continue work – and now that the barrier is gone, he'll have to do the work he is meant to do. Maintaining the lighthouse, not feeding innocents to a creature beyond his realm of imagination.

He's so scared right now. He thinks I'm about to snap, or perhaps snap him. Maybe that would be poetic justice, too, if he died in this place that he himself enabled the creature to create. It might even be satisfying.

…but you're right. That isn't the type of story we are telling here.

So we'll let the engineer go – see, he's leaving already – and let Time take its course on him however it wishes. Perhaps he'll drown tomorrow, or in a week, or maybe he'll live long enough to see new generations move on and off the unnamed island. Maybe he'll move off the island himself, or maybe he'll stay there forever. Maybe he'll die. Maybe he'll live. Who knows? He's already gone.

Now there's just the two of us, alone in the place.

I wonder how this story ends?

Well, I can promise you this – when you leave this place, you'll have forgotten everything that I've told you. I'm really very sorry about this, but there's really nothing I can do about it. All of the other humans that have already departed are already going about their lives as if nothing had ever happened, and maybe that's a good thing. Humans really aren't meant to experience that sort of trauma.

And – yes, well, maybe you could be trusted to carry all this knowledge, but I can't go around making exceptions, and besides, it's not really up to me. It's up to Time, and Time isn't very lenient.

We should be going soon. I'm sure this place will cease to exist shortly, and I don't think we want to be here when it does. That sort of thing is never pleasant, trust me.

Ah. I see. You don't want to forget.

That's reasonable, I suppose. But as I've told you already, there's nothing I can do.

I –

Hm.

Well, maybe there's something. It really isn't much, but… well.

I've been telling this story to you the whole time, and that's mainly because I played a leading role in it. But you've become a character too, in the time that we've spent in this place, and I feel that you have just as much of a right as I do to tell it. So, here's what I propose.

I will leave this place first. And by the time you exit, I will be gone, because the only reason the rest of the Elements are still outside is because they're waiting for me. But while you still have that moment of uncertainty – a lack of knowledge of what's going on – you can finish the story for the both of us, and describe how all of this ends. I know it's nothing grand, but perhaps the act of concluding will fix it in your memory better than anything else ever could.

Oh, I know. Whatever you decide to tell may not be accurate to real life, but it's not as if anybody is going to come and tell you that your version of events is different to reality, because nobody will remember. What you make up will be as real as anything else ever could be.

I will likely never see you again, my friend, but it was a pleasure telling my tale to you. You are a truly remarkable specimen among humans.

Goodbye.

How you decide to end all of this is up to you.