(A/N): I know, I know. The next thing I upload will be Kingdom Hearts related, I swear. Preferably an update on Burning Bridges. But I bought this game as an early birthday present to myself (the 29th, if you're curious) and just...wow. Love it or hate it, it is definitely unique. This fic contains spoilers for the entire game. Fair warning.

Disclaimer: I'm glad I don't own it. I would've butchered the ending.

Dream of Silence

He freezes, and burns, and freezes again as he traverses this desolate dreamscape, all the wonder its splendors once instilled in him long since dead and turned to ash. The landscape is not important. The voice in the back of his mind, the sword in his hand and the steed racing beneath him – these things are important. These things are real, and true, in a world that seems to fade a little further into hazy unreality every day.

And the girl. The girl is real. Even now, when he can't always recognize his own face staring back at him when he pauses to drink from the shallow streams, he knows her face, her name. Mono. He thinks that when the world finally falls away there will still be the girl, the god, and the next mountain waiting to be slain.

(x)(X)(x)

He is forgetting to remember, or remembering to forget. His eyes burn in a face much too pale, and he can't quite bring himself to meet his own gaze in the water, so he studies the strange markings staining his skin with shadows instead. For a moment, he thinks they might be important, but then Dormin whispers impatiently in his head and he forgets to care about what's happening to him.

Surely nothing is more important than the next colossus. Nothing is more important than setting his world right again.

(x)(X)(x)

Shadows pierce him, staining him further, and he falls to the ground in a haze of pain that used to mean something. When he wakes in the temple he finds it's a struggle to push himself to his feet, and the way his breath has begun to rattle in his chest would surely concern him if it weren't so unimportant. What is important is that Mono regains a little more color as each statue crumbles, until he can almost believe she is only sleeping.

He wonders if she dreams of death.

He wonders if he's part of that dream.

(x)(X)(x)

Though his vision sometimes swims with exhaustion, he comes to resent every necessary period of rest taken in the shadow of the small shrines. It is wasted time, and he begins to forget to tend to his own wounds.

The girl.

The god.

The mountains.

(x)(X)(x)

At last, the final colossus falls. He falls with it, and the force with which he hits the ground has to be enough to kill him, but he opens his eyes again and he's in the temple once more. There are other men there, the first he has seen in months, but they are not important. Shadows grow and converge on the edges of his vision, but they aren't important, either.

He sees only the altar, and the girl, still as death. He needs to reach her, to feel the warmth return to her skin and the breath return to her body, needs to know that he has not given himself in vain. He needs to see her live to be saved.

The men speak, meaningless phrases that are unimportant until the blade punches through his chest and out the other side. He bleeds, of course he bleeds, and as he loses the last pieces of himself he reaches for her one last time.

This is not the price he expected to have to pay.