Content warnings for this episode include: Impending Demise
The Interrogation - What of You
Nikignik
I have been away a little while, dreamer. Perhaps you have begun to understand why. I did not mean to leave you in silence. I can only hope that you have gotten along well enough without me. But look at you. Of course you have.
There are things I do not have. Three eyes I am missing now. I do not have my freedom. I shall be confined in this interrogation chamber of the Industry until they return with my sentence. And I do not have the willingness to tell you that I am going to be fine, when I do not know what that sentence will entail.
Ironic, for Syrensyr, Reclaimer of Fire, to claim to hold me to the fire of justice for the death of Marolmar. I have long held such anger for the very same. And yet, his auditor assesses my guilt, twists my words against me in his clinical fashion. And what verdict is there but guilty? They will destroy me and shatter my eyes beneath the boot of their iron law. But I am caught in the jaws, and all I can do is wait.
It has been a comfort, in the most painful of these moments, to look somewhere else, somewhere far away, and find familiar faces going about their lives. To see how the passing seasons have shaped the course of your world. Your nature is the same, and so are the pines, but you each have changed your surface. It is a reminder of the difference in scale between us—if I lose focus on you again, for even a little time, I may look back to find that your life came and went, that each moment of it passed in what to you was the slow and meandering present, and is gone.
For Scout City, look at how the tree that the herald of the end planted has grown. It lifts its great boughs over the forest, and drinks deep of black water with its roots. The tree that Jonah planted may well outlive even the embers of your kind—if it does, the writings of barkbeetles and humankind alike will be engraved in its skin forever.
And how the mysteries that are hidden within it unfold. Two shaken groundskeepers return to the city to find its landscape forever altered. Scout City’s sheriff and deputies, after a decade of wishing to be the only voice of law in Scout City, achieve it at terrible cost. The city’s matrons hold each other, with the memory of the past years blurring further with each passing season. A friend reluctantly wears a metal visor, and she dreams of the Botulus Corporation, reverting control of transport assets and drones long decommissioned to Box Polaris. A door opens. A botanist believes he has determined how long humanity has left, and his friend the flower does not doubt it. A brother, a city planner, pets a cat and a three-legged dog and wonders what to make of his sister’s notes. The city’s eccentric widower and its undertaker, free of strings, recover from their nightmares in the comfort of the Upper Trunk. Its mayor watches over all, and wonders what is left for her in a world where everything dies. And four masks, of piano and horn and drum and string, sit in an empty warehouse, waiting to be worn again, waiting for blood, waiting for Scout City’s reckoning.
I hope I am there to see it, dreamer. To share in the end of all your mysteries. But I am not sure yet what shall happen to me now.
I have not always been kind to the Industry in my words, dreamer. And I wondered if they were listening. How much now is this an opportunity to silence my voice before I ever raise more than that against them.
Do I regret it?
I do not know.
Your world was on the brink of devastation, waiting for his rise, emergent from the heart as a great tree from a seed.
And we spoke, dreamers, and I was surprised that his voice was not the source of comfort I remembered it to be. That his kindness I no longer starved for, that I was not so wounded by his malignments. He had died, and I had died then too, and those of us that remained were neither of us the same. Somehow I had never until then dreamed that if he were to return, that we would not fit together the same as we had before. I do not think he had less need of me now than then, but perhaps I outgrew my place in his heart.
I did not want him to die. Even then. But for your world, for your kind. For the universe. I did not lay a hand upon him, but neither did I intervene as Diggory Graves woke with the light of Irene Mend in their eye, pulling the energy of an unborn god into their hands. A life for a life for a life.
I killed him, and I loved him, and I think those both can be true. I do not expect the auditor to understand this—nor you, dreamer. I know, in the end, that he will never truly be gone. But one way or another, I am done with my mourning. I do not know if this is the end or the beginning.
If this is the last that you dream of me, know that I am sorry I could not see the end of your world. Marolmar will live on in every one of his creations, but I? I live on only in a story and its echoes, and my words may outlive all my eyes as the trees will outlive you.
Or there may be a way out of this that I cannot yet see. No matter what the future holds, I have been your loyal host Nikignik, waiting at the changing of the age for your return to the Hallowoods.
The bonus story that goes with this episode is called 'File 11: The Heart', and is available on Patreon.com/hallowoods. Because Hello From The Hallowoods is created without advertising or sponsors, we rely on patronage to make this show possible!