(17) DOOMED TIMELINE
Oct. 17th, 2024 11:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
paradoxicalrenegadethis is the seventeenth entry in a 31 day microfic "challenge" (self-imposed) i've been doing for oc-tober. most of the other microfics i'm writing are novel backstory, but i looked at this prompt-- that i wrote myself-- and thought "well, there's only one person this could be."
On the thirteenth floor of the hotel is a room locked by three different keys. The night manager has one. Concierge has the second. The third has been missing for an indeterminate amount of time, as the hotel itself is somewhen that Time cannot reach.
None of those locks matter a whit to Annabel Lee.
It isn't a secret that she spends most of her time here. No one tries to stop her. No one says she can't go in. She is unbound from the contract that trapped her with the anomaly on the ground floor and her name is held by a second anomaly she found chainsmoking on the roof. There was never a lock that could keep her out of a room when she was alive, and that certainly won't change now that she's dead and bound to the hotel.
From the hall it appears like any other room, the one four doors down from the elevator with a creaky floorboard just outside. Inside, she sits on a field of pale red grass (not pink, not quite) and folded paper flowers, and lays back to stare at the ceiling, where she can see every moment of her death across every world she has ever been in.
The living cannot comprehend something like this. There is a madness that comes from being contracted to the Queen of the Dead.
A phantom breeze ruffles her hair and the flowers that surround her. The moments of her death aren't exactly visions in the clouds, nor are they seen at all. It's the only word I can use to hope to describe the sensation. As I said, the living cannot comprehend something like this.
If you were to conceive of this as a spiderweb, or perhaps more like a window broken by a baseball or medium-sized rock, then her fall from the top of the lighthouse is the point of impact where everything broke. It doesn't prescribe her other deaths, but it does preclude her soul becoming stuck after every time she dies. Within the memory banks of Corvus. In the House, and the hallways of the Hotel. Woven into the summoning name on the back of the professor’s tongue, and burned into the heart of the Ceaseless Howl.
Here, surrounded by every death she's ever had, Annabel finds every missing, shattered piece of her soul to piece back together. It's the only place left in any world where she truly feels whole.
On the thirteenth floor of the hotel is a room locked by three different keys. The night manager has one. Concierge has the second. The third has been missing for an indeterminate amount of time, as the hotel itself is somewhen that Time cannot reach.
None of those locks matter a whit to Annabel Lee.
It isn't a secret that she spends most of her time here. No one tries to stop her. No one says she can't go in. She is unbound from the contract that trapped her with the anomaly on the ground floor and her name is held by a second anomaly she found chainsmoking on the roof. There was never a lock that could keep her out of a room when she was alive, and that certainly won't change now that she's dead and bound to the hotel.
From the hall it appears like any other room, the one four doors down from the elevator with a creaky floorboard just outside. Inside, she sits on a field of pale red grass (not pink, not quite) and folded paper flowers, and lays back to stare at the ceiling, where she can see every moment of her death across every world she has ever been in.
The living cannot comprehend something like this. There is a madness that comes from being contracted to the Queen of the Dead.
A phantom breeze ruffles her hair and the flowers that surround her. The moments of her death aren't exactly visions in the clouds, nor are they seen at all. It's the only word I can use to hope to describe the sensation. As I said, the living cannot comprehend something like this.
If you were to conceive of this as a spiderweb, or perhaps more like a window broken by a baseball or medium-sized rock, then her fall from the top of the lighthouse is the point of impact where everything broke. It doesn't prescribe her other deaths, but it does preclude her soul becoming stuck after every time she dies. Within the memory banks of Corvus. In the House, and the hallways of the Hotel. Woven into the summoning name on the back of the professor’s tongue, and burned into the heart of the Ceaseless Howl.
Here, surrounded by every death she's ever had, Annabel finds every missing, shattered piece of her soul to piece back together. It's the only place left in any world where she truly feels whole.
