The Sketch Rift: The Seal of Demons

Tears Or Saliva

Soal's eyes spent half a minute deciphering whether or not his surroundings were composed of physical matter in the darkness, but the darkness was disrupted by the delicate green light of Irene's eyes, now a soberly distorted rendition of her historical contumacious playfulness. A weighty sack was slumped over her shoulder, while she quietly peered down from above at Soal, who had apparently rolled from his bed unconsciously.

"I'm leaving," she rasped. "We need to get up."

"Is it an attack?" Soal moaned without the movement of his limbs, inhaling and exhaling with tremendous exhaustion. "Have I slept until 9101?"

"You've slept long enough," Irene bent down to offer a hand. "We have to escape this place."

"What changed?"

"Nothing changed," she responded morosely, but not by Moth's standards. "That's exactly why we must leave."

"But we have a reason to stay," Soal wheezed as he rose, accepting her extended arm. "Is it worth risking failure to survive?"

"We'll survive anyway," the former Green Phantom frankly argued as she urged Soal along. "It doesn't matter what happens. We're Blessed that way. Nathaurus was right."

Soal could make no verbal reply as he surrendered to his companion, defying the orders of the Ambassador in evacuating his confinement of adobe. Irene had already assembled all of their belongings within an inconspicuous fabric container, and he hobbled alongside her in the mist, emerging from the city as if their freedom were at stake there.

"You know where you're going?" an aloof Soal inquired, remaining skeptical.

"You'll see," Irene hastened her pace, taking notice of a tender pitter-patter surrounding them, interpreting them as footsteps of snoopy scouts from Domus Lepidopterus. This onomatopoeic awareness heightened to distress as it increased in volume to a nearly impossible value. Inexplicably, their clothes and hair were continuously drenched in liquid from above, and the mist that penetrated the ruins which defined their destination thickened, while visibility fell drastically. Despite these bizarre conditions, there were no scouts, and the destination was reached with a lack of fanfare.

All that still remained of the Sketch Facility's now-outdoor time machine chamber was a garden of fallen scaffolding and an asperously decayed elevator-like structure perched nearly perpendicularly to the ground, laden with detritus. It seemed almost as a courtyard amid the equatorial vestiges of Lint Corp's empire. Panting in their debilitation, a towering character arrived to taunt them, although not quite in the expected fashion.

"You did not think this through very well," Moth, dripping with the strands of precipitation, addressed. "I already wrote to you both about Hemingway's temper tantrum in the second chapter."

"So you aren't just a dictator," Irene scoffed in shock. "You're a stalker as well."

"I had a purpose in my presence. You had no reason to panic," the Ambassador folded his arms, wary that he had cornered them at their most vulnerable. "I currently refuse to entertain my capability to punish, but that does not refrain me from a fact that you must now learn."

Soal looked on with prodigious dread, blinking the unnatural rain from his eyes. "We're your friends, Moth." This only induced a brief raise of the autocrat's eyebrows, supposedly due to his potential mindset of their inferiority. "But you don't have to worry about us anymore."

"Oh; I know what may be on your mind," Moth divulged from his Cofontorian teachings. "The Bejirian Incarnation had birthed a falsehood. Nathaurus was wrong."

The Master Bringer glowered wordlessly. To their abraded minds, there was no longer a Planck length of cogency within any Henderian, particularly Moth. Their only trust was in the hands of one another, whose psychological rope would be imminently severed.

"She was only half wrong," the Ambassador delineated.

Soal and Irene preserved their poise, prepared to instantly flee at the signification of a betrayal.

"There is only one Blessed One. As for whichever one of you it is, we have no way to know. Only death tests the Blessed."

"So you're going to kill us, aren't you?" Soal sibilated in his celerity. "You'll kill us both, and whoever is left will be the 'vessel'." Irene simultaneously backed away as Moth declined to advance.

"What balderdash!" he wheezed. "You must be considering Heminglock. I, on the other hand, will only query the one who is knowledgeable of this, and to nurture you both into combat against our foes at my side."

"You called?" Nathaurus materialized before the elevator-esque construct, stoically facing her fellow member of the Great Five amidst a blinding new fog, beleaguering the Blessed One(s?) as a shallow puddle reminiscent of those under the Great Shadow formed around them. "You certainly aren't Blessed, Maxwell, aren't you?"

"You are mocking me almost to the degree to which the Kyueb Reacsoa may be," Moth contemplated in his constant revulsion. "Although whether this storm is that of tears or that of his spit, I shall never know. (Master Bringer, you are fortunate to have me at your back.)"

"You, butterfly, are not my primary motive for this visit," Nathaurus harrumphed, averting her focus to that of the violently irked Master Bringer. "I can service your wish, Irene."

"Thank you, but..." she stammered, turning back and forth between her possible savior and her longtime comrade while a wormhole of the Riverift came to existence adjacent to the Bejirian Incarnation. "Soal. Come on! I know you have a duty in Hendera, but... but..."

"Irene!"

Soal leaped for her hand as she was whisked into the past by a benevolent Nathaurus, but as the light shed by the Sulukridger diminished and ceased, he failed to clasp that hand. He had been hindered, and the rain only struck harder as only a twosome remained.

"Right as he had almost gotten there, a place where his friend could hang on, Soal's dive halted.He glanced upwards, and realized all of the kiwis had jumped off after Soal to catch him. The sacrifice stunned him, but Martin's plunge forced him to contemplate the means by which he was the only figure responsible for the hampering of Articulus's smothering of each Plane, one by one."

Moth had spoken those words. "As your faithful Commander Porter, General Soal," the Ambassador once more placed his hand on Soal's shoulder once more, overseeing his silent lament on the ground on which he had once trod to return 'home', "...my only role is to protect you. Even if it means that Irene will suffer a backstab to the seductive talons of Nathaurus, or that she may never return, you are our sole hope."

"It's August," Soal groaned as he struggled to stand, the former Formulator granting him a generous (and unfitting) helping hand.

"Huh?" Moth cocked his head.

"It's August nineteenth," Soal croaked as he began to hobble away. "My family is in crisis, Irene might not come back, it's almost September, and I have nothing left to live for. Irene should be the Blessed One."

"So these are your tears after all. Kyueb Reacsoa?"

".enO desselB eht eb dluohs enerI .rof evil ot gnihton evah I dna ,rebmetpeS tsomla s'ti ,kcab emoc ton thgim enerI ,sisirc ni si ylimaf yM" .yawa elbboh ot negab eh sa dekaorc laoS ",htneetenin tsuguA s'tI"

"Don't say a word to me," Moth sighed, hushing his old student as he guided him along the obscured passage. "I can take care of everything. There is a city awaiting our return."