Another Collector

CHAPTER 6 💚 The Lost And Found

There were a few things that seperated this prison from the hell that was the Anti-Void in The Conserver's opinion with the most obvious being the change in scenery. The Anti-Void was endless white where the only sound was the sound if your own footsteps with even the hum of what most people assume is silence also being gone but here it was almost opposite.

This place was called the In-Between and it was made of a cavern with large holes, paths and tunnels that stretched in every direction possible tinted by a vibrant but ugly green light accompanied by streaks of red and pink across the protruding rock surfaces. Everything was sharp and cut off at unnatural angles which only made the place seem even more dangerous, then there was the dirty dark green lake that stretched across the floor of the place drenching everything in a thick liquid he could tell would be hard to move in despite not having been down there to feel it himself. Here everything was stuck in an echo that never stopped and the closest you could get to the noise dying was it quieting to the volume of a hum.

Another thing that contrasted between the two realms was that in the Anti-Void magic was constantly flowing and couldn't be stopped which was the reason for the mutations which occured in anyone placed inside it but here there was no magic. Attempts to use magic just resulted in it being absorbed into the rocks or the pool below and ended up just making the user more tired. Yet another parallel between the two was that the Anti-Void was empty with nothing inside while the In-Between was full of everything possible making silence impossible to achieve.

Sometimes if you managed to get further inside the In-Between you could find basic structures or broken down buildings, the one that stood out the most to the Conserver was a broken down steam train that circled the left wall of the dome shaped part of the cavern his prison was floating in. It was dripping down from a tunnel in the walls with the back half worked into the rock and fused with the tunnel, there was glass made of a black translucent mirror like material similar to that of the cubes which filled the place.

The cubes were also noteworthy, they acted as mirrors or windows into another realm with some leading to one's more familiar to the Conserver and others to places he wasn't familiar with in the slightest. He eventually managed to figure out that the cubes with a yellow-teal shimmer lead back to his realm deemed the Demon Realm by whatever this place was. He kept most of those cubes around his orb and made sure to keep the one connected to his stone tablet near him at all times even if he couldn't use it while the tablet was covered. It's impossible to keep that thing covered forever afterall and someone will have to end up removing the cover eventually right?

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Alone. Alone for so long. It was maddening.

The Conserver slid around the orb going in backwards circles with his body moving the opposite way it normally would if he was just levitating and wasn't literally connected to the wall. He stopped near the top sitting in an upside down cross-legged position with his arms resting where his legs would have met if he was physical.

The Conserver was used to isolation from his time in the Anti-Void so this wasn't a problem for him, what made him panic or rather made him really worry about this entire experience was how the Collector was handling it. The Conserver wasn't an idiot, he understands the only reason he doesn't feel anything when he's abandoned foe a long time or left alone in a place for a long time is because the Anti-Void forced him into centuries of torture and isolation. Unfortunately, or fortunately, thr Collector never had that experience and didn't react that well whenever he was left alone for any longer then a few minutes and hours made him break down.

It hurt imagining how his little brother was probably heartbroken and terrified from being alone for so long while he couldn't do anything about it. Not much had changed about the place over the last few... months? years? He didn't really know, but still not much had changed apart from the Conserver's greatly increasing unease and guilt over what happened to the Collector and dragging him into this. It would have been best if he had just shut his mouth and left without taking the Collector, that way they wouldn't have been dragged into this.