Chapter Text
There is darkness curling beneath the surface, and he can feel it.
Sometimes, it’s almost not there at all. It hovers anxiously on the sidelines, fluttering occasionally but containing no malice in the slightest. It slides calmly through world after world, watching and waiting and wandering and he ought not to feel it but he does anyway. He has long known that he may never know why, and with each and every shadow passing by in his peripheral vision the reality of that grows ever-evident.
Sometimes, it is there.
Sometimes he’ll round a corner and see black; he’ll see a chasm of void so dark that it bleeds into his vision and makes him see stars. Sometimes, he has to take a step back out of surprise, and sometimes his axe even has the nerve to tremble in his hand - faltering, weakening, a punch to the gut. But eventually his head sharpens and his eyes clear and the landscape aligns, throwing him back into no reset as suddenly as a flash bomb gone off. He lets it escape his notice on purpose.
He cannot hide what he has seen, though, not even to himself. He cannot hide those all-too-familiar shiveringly dark moments, and he cannot hide the creeping sensation beneath his feet that he sometimes feels when he runs. He cannot hide from the nightmares he has sometimes when he sleeps - not the unlit compounds, not the inky skyscrapers. It follows him even into the city and the world that he lives in, baring its teeth and biting down upon his mind until he is speechless and breathless and turning every corner with a mental mirror. He cannot hide it.
So here he stays, no reset worlds running by in the same way that he runs from the curse. He sees the darkness more than he sees himself, sees it in his eyes when he chooses to look in the mirror, sees the infection spreading like plague throughout his whole body. It eats up the light in his world like a parasite, and he is helpless to it all.
And perhaps that is why Couriway lets the monochrome worlds drown him whole.
There is darkness curling beneath the surface, and he can feel it.