//------------------------------// // Grim Descent // Story: Amnesia: To Err // by JLB //------------------------------// He would stand there and look in the mirror. At least once per day he would put the bottle down and just stare at himself. A day of menial work, tracking down unfaithful wives and cheating husbands, going after runaways, beating answers out of those whose ugly mugs would eventually blur out in the salty, bitter afterthought of a life he lived when he came back. Same thing as before, a coat of paint applied. It never mattered.  Day after day, he came back to his apartment and he would stand there, stuck in more ways than one. He would stand there and look in the mirror. Eventually, it stopped looking back. He did not mind. --- The discordant flourish of everything an eye would never want to see carried him sidestream, bodiless and thoughtless, thinking and aching. Ripped from the putrid mess below, he was rushed away, breaking up and blending into the non-reality that the world had become. For a second, he was again one with the world gone wrong, the other Errors’ screeching and yelling in their eagerness to erase him from their existence distancing further and further. As the cut up record fizzled and mumbled in his ear a canary flow of mindmelting sounds, he felt himself being wrestled away by physicality. Cell by cell, he was waking up, and each of those cells immediately reeled and screamed and retched as it realized what was happening to it. He could feel the hard stone floor and the wrongness of a million mistakes in every breath his pores made. “Fix them.” - sorry “You already have. Just do it again. No other choice.” At least he could breathe. “Nothing is wrong.” --- - I must say, your agreement is a great relief for all of us. Any other means of achieving our goal was to be… unsavory. - Look, Agent, can we just make one thing perfectly clear? I don’t want anything to do with your goals. I’m doing this part for the money and part so that you would stop knocking on my door every off day. I don’t care. - Well, as disheartening to hear as it is, it is still a sign that you still have a sense of right and wrong. And let me tell you, Detective, it is a sense that is still tuned right. Remember that. - Just give me the papers and get out. - So be it, then. The Agent had no face. He looked at him with his blinkless stare from behind the dark glasses and talked a mouthless speech from behind the oversized collar. His suited frame threw a slick shadow over the wall, where their delivery pulsated with its blood-red newborn shape. Fixer had other things on his mind. His throat was like sand paper. He wondered if there still were drinks in the cabinet. --- Insanity was not covering it anymore. The term was insufficent, the concept itself was insufficent. He rolled on the floor, aching and nearly fainting back into blackness. Still writhing from the contact with an Error, he tried his best at preventing the mind from pouring away through whatever open orifice there was. He went on for so long, with so little to go off of. Trying to survive, trying to remember, trying to find out. “Writhing… screaming… pathetic. They don’t work. They don’t work. Nothing is wrong.” But the more he remembered, the worse it got. The things that would flash before him and then fade back into the murk of the subconsccious made him struggle to keep himself going. In his various assumptions, all this could have been many things. It started with kidnapping, then there was nothing, then there was insanity, then, for a brief moment, there was Hell, and then there was a theory that he tried to hold onto the hardest. It was that something, or someone, had dealt away with the world as it was, and left a broken playground in its wake, populated with what remained of life and sentience. Fixer just got looked over - perhaps he was even not the only one, perhaps there would be a chance to find a survivor, a close soul with which to fix the world gone wrong. He thought that, perhaps, the fairytale menace Discord had broken out of his millenial imprisonment, or that some other merciless, incomprehensible elder deity took a glance at his old world and left a twisted reality there as a blink. But he would persevere, he would follow the signs and the steps, for some power still guided him and wanted him to succeed - to fix this place, and make everything go right again. All that he could no longer think and be honest with himself. The pictures and the words and the places he saw… no, they could not have been all so convenient. He was not all so lucky. Why did he feel guilt so often? Why did the fear taste so different to the animal fright he expected to feel whenever a bent shape looked at him from the dark? Why were the messages always directly attacking him? What were they trying to imply, was he a part of all this? Fixer did not know. Fixer did not want to think. Nevertheless, those questions crossed everything out, aside from Hell. Hell, however, seemed like a better choice than this. He did not know if it really was in the pits of Tartarus, like most used to say, but if it was, then this was clearly not a pit. This was a universe that consisted of things left over from a life past. This was a broken universe. Hell would have been different. He knew that, if only from passing knowledge. He tried to investigate his own mind on that account, finding it a better topic than his involvement in the catastrophe, biting his lips till they bled, his eyes closed so hard amoebic shapes had begun to spring up in the dark. Met with a burning pain, he shot up, brutally picked up from his joke of a rest. His ears clogged up for a second, and for very good reason. - What is going on?! - he screamed out, if only to counter out the pressing screeching howl that filled the room, flashing and blinking, throwing papers around in a hurricane and emanating the same distorted ripple that he had heard so often. Finally, as the noise had reached its peak, a bright colorless light skipped before the unicorn’s eyes and threw him back to the floor, thumping his body onto the cold stone, forcing him to stare out with the burn in the eyes. So he stared. It was himself. And over his face, violently written letters read: “CONSTANT DISTRACTION NOT HELL WE SEE MUCH WORSE FIXED ALREADY NOW OR ELSE WHAT IS YOUR RATIONALE?” --- They finally left him. Alone, he convulsed and groaned, the sickness taking over his body. It was so hard to think, and so easy to see. He opened his eyes, and saw things. They were no longer comforting. He shuddered and muttered, trying to keep away from them, his eyes shut and the blanket over his head. Then, he would start hearing things. Things that he was saying. The only thing all of him was sure about was that he feared, and feared dearly. --- It had become a blessing that one of the Victims had managed to land a hit on him. The moderate pain, pulsing from his shoulder and chest, allowed him to find something to focus on as his sanity took measures to reassemble itself. In a few minutes, he was still far from crystal clear, his head spinning and his hooves shaking, but it was an improvement. In that improvement, he saw reason to move on, an anger long pent up rising. He trod the stone floors and examined the surroundings. A long corridor, littered with old papers, leading into many rooms - offices - with metal bars protruding from some of the stones, forming what used to be metal gates at certain points, defunct lights sticking from the sockets. Behind him was a set of stairs, but the door was just as dead as the one in the library from so long ago. He almost smirked when he recalled himself back to that point, so naïve and looking for logic, constantly thinking up theories to himself and trying to be reasonable. Whatever reason this place had, it would not be understood by anything sane. He had an argument to prove that, too. It was his own face, staring back at him from the end of the corridor, spastic letters covering it. So far away, he had trouble discerning the features - much unlike the letters - but it was clearly him. The dull, tired stare of someone deeply sick pierced the owner of a stare with a certain amount of mixed anxiety and determination. The same stitched light-brown vest, the same short mane, the same tears, blood spatters and wounds. “Sweet, merciful… I just scared myself, didn’t I. Good fucking going.” It was a portrait, illuminated by a visibly defunct firefly lamp. It was the only proper light source aside from the ghostly rays piercing through the barred windows and Fixer’s own lamp head, which was very fortunately still in his possession and mostly operational. To the left and right the paths branched into other rooms, secluded in complete darkness. Paying another look to himself, the unicorn shuddered, the sheer sight of it ultimately unsettling, and stepped a bit to the side, where a seat and a dead potted plant stood. Flashing the beam over some of the windows in the corridor, he realized that the words once written on them have decayed and gone smudged, but nonetheless, the look and feel of the place brought him back up to speed as to what this place might have been. “This… this is my old precinct. What would it want with the precinct? Why does it matter? It’s been hell knows how long.” A chill wind passed through the corridor, freezing him to the bone, both with the cold and with the thought that wind was never a good sign. Some of the papers flew by, indicating that the gust emerged from the branch on the right. In a rare moment, Fixer lifted an eyebrow in surprise. “That’s far too sharp. Fuck’s sake, I barely even noticed the papers. How do I know that? Wonder what it was like before...” --- He stood over the beaten murderer, staring him down and preventing any means of escape. The plan was for him to hide out in a number of his associates’ residences, each time coming up with a new lie and switching places until the fake documents would be done and prepared and he would flee. This one was particularly smart - having gone on a trail of unrelated places, he actually chose one of the apartments his family lived in, them being completely out of the question for the investigation. It seemed perfect, the police not having much to go on with how little evidence he left behind. Little, but enough. He pressed down on one of the murderer’s wounds, pushing a shriek out of him. He caught himself doing that more and more often. The murderer looked up and asked for one last thing before he would be taken away. His eyes showed dwindling hope - Frame Fixer, the officer that caught him and beat him to a pulp, was not the most sympathetic figure in the current situation. However, he was the only one, the response team still far away. By the time they came in, suspect casualties in LP would have most likely risen by one. - C-can I just… just say goodbye to my daughter? Fixer looked at him again. Beneath, he saw weak, backstabbing filth that murdered someone just to get a bigger cut off a contract. So miserable and worthless, with his eyes pleading for mercy. He was still better than the rest. The unicorn looked on as the murderer limped into one of the rooms, and listened to their hushed voices. The murderer told his daughter that daddy was not going to be coming back very soon. The murderer told his putrid-green, wretching tiny filly to be strong for mommy. Saccharine, foolish, a lemon on her flank. Her father at least did the world some good by getting rid of one more like her. He had it in him to show strength and resolve to end someone else, someone even more worthless. She would be even worse. --- The old, newly warped precinct made Fixer feel uneasy. He shook his head, disregarding the thoughts and the images that flashed in it for a moment. Getting on with the system, he recalled the previous times he found himself in situations like this and reached for the notebook. True enough, it contained a new page. The excitement was short-lived. “DaFRAME FIxER IS CONSTANT DISTRACTION NOT HELL NOT HELL NOT HELL NOT HELL WE SEE THE SAME WE SEE THE SAME WE SEE YOU MUCH WORSE THAN THIS MUCH WORSE YOU WILL FIX YOU WILL FIX YOU WILL FIX YOU HAVE FIXED DO WE SHARE THE RATIONALe others.” The blood-stained memo book practically screamed the words from the portrait at him, mocking his attempt at getting an additional hint. It covered nearly all of the entry - whatever words were contained below were brutally blurred and smudged, even more so than the previous ones. He closed it with unsettling thoughts, trying his best not to think of how deeply he was involved in the horror around him. He would just go through whichever offices would open and then investigate the rest of the dark reflection of the LPPD precinct. Then, he would find his darling Shard and things would go quiet again. That was a good thing to focus on. Much better than the portrait that pierced the portraitee’s soul whenever the latter looked at it. It was wrong. How could it be there? How could a portrait have been taken of him, when it showed the wounds and the marks he received in this twisted world? What did it mean? Exactly the kind of questions that would deter him from progress. “Stop thinking about it. Stop, I said. Nothing is wrong. Just look everything over, find something, and work off of that. Don’t look at him. He’s a portrait. He can’t do anything to you.” Fixer stepped into the corridor, the lamp head levitating next to him and illuminating the doors. He wondered which one to choose, the tainted yellow glass of the offices preventing any possible outside inspection. Shaking ever so slightly from the remainders of the chill, Fixer made his choice and tried the handle of the first door on the right. - Piece of shit. The handle broke right off. The unicorn furrowed a brow and contemplated kicking it out in order to be sure. Having stood in place for a few moments, he caught sight of the picture at the end and, regaining some caution, started with trying to wipe the dust off the window with his hoof. Maybe something would be visible then - perhaps, something was blocking the door as well. The dust layer was rather thick, but just barely enough to veil anything not immediately visible in the office. Stretching his neck and eyes, Fixer looked into the window, blurred shapes of common police office furniture showing themselves to him in the light of the lamp. It could as well have been obstructing the view, the light’s reflection omnipresent on the glass - eventually, the unicorn decided to temporarily shoot it off, giving it a small shake, and looked again, his eyes adjusting to the dark. - Piece of shit, - he spat out, flinching back and feeling his heart race up at the sight in the office. A dull, unmoving equine figure stood there, its head positioned exactly so that it would have been staring Fixer in the eyes had the yellow tainted glass not been there. A brief moment of panic and confused thinking eventually passed, as he realized what it was. “Just like in the cellar with the fucking mirror…” A ponnequin. It was not visible before due to the flash, the thin lines difficult to read in the dark, mostly obstructed by a table and a seat. Now, it stood there, wearing a murky dress behind the murky glass, and made the unicorn who looked back shiver yet again. - Why are they here?.. - Fixer spoke out loud, in part to relieve some tension and in part to finally hear something. It had been all too quiet in the warped precinct. The echo sounded off the walls and gave him further shivers. The unicorn walked away from the office and took a look at the one in front of it, going through the same motions. The results he got were exactly the same, ponnequin included, the sole difference being that the handle stayed in place despite his best efforts. That was barely frustrating, the proposition of having to be near the unsettling statue not being a particular pleasure. They were creepy enough as they were, but Fixer felt strange looking at them. That feeling made his heartbeat go banging in his ears and did not, in any way, help go through the building. He decided that if he had to, he would backtrack and kick the doors out. For now, there was no necessity of so doing. “Nothing is wrong. Just plastic statues. I’ll deal with them if I have to. What can they do to me? Just… stand there and look creepy.” Moving further down the corridor, he felt the last argument repeat itself as his eyes crossed with those on the portrait once again. While much less terrifying than the maze of doors from before, this place was climbing up in terms of persistent wrongness. Thankfully, he had more offices to work on. Looking over them, he saw that four were left, two on each side - a quick look at both he was standing between showed that they were similarly inhabited by ponnequins. Gulping, he looked at the floor, not willing to cross his stare once again. There was an ornamented rug on the floor. --- He came there all the same, delirious and shaking. They tore him into little pieces, they split his mind into so many fractions, and still he came there. Things battled in his mind, wishing to claim that action as theirs, and created further ruckus, littering his aching head further and further. The doors were open. If they were not, he went through other doors. His path did not matter. The destination did. Finally, there it was. So much like his only saving grace, it lay there, broken and soon to be thrown out. He had left so many broken and thrown out. He never acted first. He only cleaned up. But he could fix it. He was a mender. They came to him, one by one, and brought the memory back. He only had to be rekindled in something warm all this time. He was a mender, and he would fix it. Drained, ill and sweating, he got to his work. One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. So little space until the next one. So little time until the next one. --- - dear? Fixer gasped and jumped up as the noise came back, the papers flying around once again and raining from the solid stone ceiling. The world had begun to blur and double and triple in his eyes, his hooves fighting to stay connected to the ground. It had begun to flash, rifting and shifting between places. The rug below him was the stone floor, and then it was the rug again. The dark was the burnt orange light of the endless corridor with the lamps, and then it was the dark again, with the lights dead in their sockets. The distorted sounds and the voice would go mute flash into flash, leaving only his body to be thrown back and forth. - or me how really ever fix it The unicorn screamed, trying to keep balance and not lose himself as the world turned on itself, the doors banging all around him, opening and closing with enough force to blow the dust all over his struggling body. They knocked and knocked, they shuffled and dragged. Finally, he tried to pull ahead, and came face to face with himself. The portrait persisted in the flashes, the only thing to do so aside from Fixer himself and the convulsing lamp head. He looked at himself, and fear drove back, leaving place to clarity. His eyes were pierced, gouged out from the painting. The Shard emerged out of his left socket and threw itself in both directions at once, guiding him to explore the corridors, where he would find his solace. With a titanic effort, Fixer forced his legs to make step after step and finally ripped himself out of the agonizing corridor.  A loud bang, a cacophony of further screams, a struggle of gravity trying to re-establish dominance, and it threw him forward and backwards at the same time, leaving him lying on the stone floor below the portrait, having barely traversed the reality ripples of the world gone wrong. --- They did not want to see him anymore. They would visit before, concerned about him after the accident with the last case. They would give him at least some comfort and he would stop feeling alone. They would come to him, and he would have a reason to let go of the sour salty drink that he downed so often that it no longer registered in his mind how much he had drank. They cared about him. Sometimes, they would even follow him on the streets, standing there in the corners and alleys. Their shapes were so familiar, they gently melted their shapes into his mind, adding perfect finishing notches of metal and gore. He would look at their bloodied, crying faces staring at him from the windows and the doors, begging to save them, to make up for his guilt, and he would feel that his struggle still had a purpose, that somebody still cared. Eventually, they stopped coming. Instead, he would see himself, staring down from long corridors and passways, lurking in the shadows and looking down at him with disdain as bottle after bottle of the salty drink was downed. His visits did not have the same air, always accompanied by the headache rising up or the lungs starting to rip themselves apart again, He did not mind. Perhaps, he did not care anymore. --- His temples squashed between his hooves, Fixer sat out the few minutes that the burn in his head persisted. At last, he was back to a mere headache and stiff legs. Breathing heavily, he got up. - Oh, how the f— It got even heavier and intensified when the lamp, having survived the encounter, showed him the corridor he came from. The ponnequins all stood there, six of them, gathered in a line, deep, brutal cuts on the ground beneath them. The office doors were all still very much intact, and the statues looked as plastic as ever, dusty in their colorful outfits that made Fixer want to hurl as much as crawl into a corner and stay there for the rest of the eternal day. Now standing between a rock and a hard place, he was driven to action, and had begun his way down one of the branching paths, but as he did so, something in the portrait caught his eye. Looking back one more time, unwilling butterflies still in his stomach and the ponnequins’ eyes piercing his back, he saw something even stranger there. There was only one eye missing now, the other one showing no signs of any tears that he had seen during his warping ordeal. The torn section, however, now took up an alarming part of the side of his face. But stranger yet, he had… changed. His coat took a nearly grey color, his face showed signs of even more severe sickness and undernourishment, while his eyes looked like there was actual smoke in the pupils, drawn so flowy that it almost moved around on the still picture. To top it off, the portrait smirked at him in a way that made his gut go stiff and cold. It was so deeply unreal that he actually looked down to check if he was still the same, and was deeply relieved to see himself remain brown and relatively healthy. As healthy as he could get with the fever that has, thankfully, been somewhat merciful the past half hour. “Nothing is wrong. Keep moving. Don’t keep thinking.” So he did, leaving the gazes of the objects that he had sincerely hoped were truly inanimate. Entering the dark of the corridor to the right of the portrait, he feared that more of the figures would appear, unconsciously tensing up before looking around the corner. That was not to happen - the beam of the lamp only caught old stone and metal as the way made an accurate right angle, leading into a large, dimly lit chamber. The few windows on the sides let weak beams of ghostly, unnatural light slip through, illuminating a wall of metal bars that cut it in half, rows of chairs facing it and a number of old wooden pedestals. Held up by stern metal columns, several balconies formed an upper row of seats, as if it was some kind of theater before the world had ripped itself to pieces and mashed it all together, dipping the mulch in Fixer’s memories. Those memories, however, spoke different as the unicorn warily walked through the aisles, examining the surroundings with a shaking grip on the light. He winced as the banging and murmuring in his head intensified, burning the back of his head yet again. “Court room. I’ve been here so many times… It was never in the precinct. I always had to leave the post and take to the other half of town, and then… It was never here. Wasn’t it supposed to—” He shook his head, letting out a dry cough. Like he got to decide what this place was supposed to do and what it was not. What he got to do was shiver at the uneasiness of the place’s presence and step on, to the pedestals where the jury once sat, the rest of the room proving to be little more than chairs and stone. Perhaps, once he got closer to the bars, he would be able to see what was behind them - not that such a thought brought much excitement. As he climbed the elevated platform on which the jury’s section stood, he felt his ears perk up. A moment later, he realized what made his body stop - it was a faint gurgling sound coming from somewhere behind the bars. It was so muffled that even having realized that it was there, it was difficult to conclude that it was not just in his head. Giving the pedestal a couple of weak tugs and kicks to see if it hid anything inside, which it did not, he tried to delay the point at which he would look through the tightly bunched bars and see what was making those sounds. Alas, not even a second inspection of the room, now from a vantage point, held any result. For a second, he entertained the idea of checking the walls for anything, but the remainders of his memories sternly burned into him the realization that the court room never had any secret passages right at the public’s desposal, and pushed him to action. Sighing and coughing, he turned around and pressed his face to the bars, positioning himself to be able to see inside, the lamp giving as much light as it could. - No… - he whispered, jaw agape. He stared at the figure behind the bars with tears swelling up in his eyes and a knot forming in his stomach. The conflicting emotions of anger, fear, repulsion and remorse combined in his mind in a way that had become so painfully familiar, but greatly intensified. He did not flinch as the structure shuddered and the hidden lights all over the ceiling shot back to life, blandly illuminating the surroundings. Neither did he flinch as he caught sight of the ponnequins having gathered in the passway that lead him to the court room. He had no time for fear of the unsettling and the unknown now. Beyond the bars, a Victim was chained in place. She could not move, the strict bondage keeping her standing static, overlapping with the metal implements in her skin. It was her, trying to mumble out the one word she could muster, that alerted him then. Now, only the weak movements of her chest and head gave away that she was yet alive - however much of that applied to her kind - her voice drowned in the thumping of blood in his ears. But she would not be alive for long. It was an electric stand. “She will be broken because of you so what. Oh, dear, sweet and merciful, they will all be broken because of you.” His muscles jumped back into action, leaving him little time or need to pay his own scalding, conflicting thought any attention. He only rushed back and forth along the strong metal bars, hoping that at least somewhere would be a weak spot, so that he could get to the poor thing before it would inevitably be fried with arcane electricity. In his haste, he concluded that it was foolish to believe that the power would be off, that nothing would happen. He had not been in the world gone wrong long enough to understand what it was - but long enough to understand what it wanted. It wanted nothing but pain and suffering. Frame Fixer would not allow that. Kicking and butting, he was trying to break through the barrier, but all was for naught, the metal too strong for him to break through, especially in his condition. That thought, however, did not register in Fixer’s mind as he persevered, an anger rising up and clouding the fear and desperation that inhabited his mind before. At last, it had become so pure that he lit up his horn and stabbed the bars with the Shard, basking in its distorted, screeching light and not for a second questioning where it came from.  It ripped the metal, seething through the bars and cutting a way through, scorching his mind as he gripped onto it and, in so doing, leading the unicorn’s way through the execution room and to the Victim. Drowning in a sea of stretched sounds and impossible images, he walked a feverish pace towards the bound figure. “But you will fix her. You will fix her, and you will fix them all. You already have, and you’ll do it again. You can’t let her suffer, can you? You never could. You are better than that. You are an idiot.” His legs stopped carrying him ahead as he was placed face to face with the weakly squirming Victim. Extatic from the pure, alien emotions the shard gave him, he let the lamp drop on the dusty stones and concentrated all his being on the bloodied piece of radiant glass, studying it with a longing gaze. She was right in front of him, weak and helpless. It would not be long before her body would be fried with lightning and leave behind a burnt, shredded husk. The mechanism for the device was to his right, the prolonged wooden board spotting a fragmented switch in the upper right corner, the rest of it scratched, smelling of blood and tears. He only had to pull the switch. “You are better than all of them.” But he would not. Fixer’s dilated eyes stared still at the Shard. It saw him through unimaginable horrors and lead him through reality’s twisted treelines. It was his only ally and his only solace. It talked to him a calming cacophony of rippling screams of silence. Enchanted, he got himself to lift the Shard up. He would not fail. He would aim for the jugular and fix them all. “They have to be fixed.” - Dm… thc… tv… As the sharp Shard was just to be blooded again, a stinging thought emanated from Fixer’s mind. He screamed out and fell to the ground, the precious Shard escaping his grasp. The confusion that thought caused, however, was so great that the loss of it barely registered in his mind. “Holy fuck, what am I doing?!” He panted and shook his head, lying on his back and looking right up at the Victim that squirmed in her tight bonds. His eyes were about to pop out of their sockets as his mind concocted horrible thoughts. - Why… Why would I kill you? - he spoke out, as if asking the gagged creature. The entirety of Fixer’s conscious was screaming and swirling, fighting with itself for control, one half wanting the Shard back and nothing more but to follow its instructions so that the gleaming thoughtlessness may return, and the other repulsed and horrified by all that it made him think and do. How could he kill an innocent? She did nothing. He remembered so little, but he knew that she did nothing. Worse yet, it was him, him who made her this way and him whom she owes being in the execution chamber. Head spinning out of control, he looked up at her, and realized that this Victim was one he had seen before - the one from the forest, the one that cornered him in the warped tunnel that could never have been, and nearly cost him his life. But was she to blame? In her state, could she even be responsible for her actions? And what wretched being would “care” so much about him to put her in there? - Dm… thc… tv… Tears swelled in his eyes yet again, the pulsing pain in his head intensifying further. He realized that if any more time would be spent in this shocked state, a life would be on his conscience. The distorted, rippled voice in his consciousness screamed at him that no matter where he was and what he remembered, that would never be acceptable. He would shatter and break into shards if that were to happen. Frame Fixer would never be mended. “You have been given the power to break and the power to fix. It took you a great toll to realize it. Why warp everything further? Why sit in denial?” He would not sit. He rose up, nearly blacking out in so doing, and punched the switch upwards, so as to release the Victim. A dreadful half second of anxiety, where he wondered if his tiny fragment of a memory which said that this was where the switch was to go could have been wrong, had passed. To his immense relief, he heard the sound of metal clunking and leather unfolding, followed by a raspy, gurgling breath and weak attempts at steps on the floor. It mattered much less to him now that the next thing she would do was probably going to be kill him. He had done the right thing, whether she understood it or not. In any case, he never had the chance to find out. “You will fix them. There is not going to be a choice. Not then.” The universe roared again. He was thrown off balance, falling back on the floor and away from the similarly stumbling Victim. The incomprehensible screeching noise returned, and the flashes ripped reality in two once again, but this time he was not the center - he was only caught on the periphery. Blown away and into the solid wall, he watched the darkness blink and ripple in the screaming flashes, uncovering a passage in the corner where there was naught but stone. It stuttered and vanished, leaving a new corridor in its own place. The corridor pulsed with color, manifesting into being, and then solidified, sending out one last flashing ripple. Fixer’s entire being reeled and retched at the sheer thought of the sounds and sights around him, but very deep inside, he was calm. For once, he was adamantly sure that he had done the right thing. - quite a you how the mirror so touched Now the unicorn would just need to muster what little remained of his courage and determination to walk into the passage and face the six plastic statues that stared at him from the dark. Behind them was a brightly lit, beautifully decorated room. He knew that room. --- - Oh, dear goodness… why would you be here at this hour? - I needed to fix it. One. - But is this mirror really important enough for you to take a leave from the hospital? And that is not even considering the dreadful weather outside! - I needed to do what was right. It would be broken otherwise. I would have been responsible. Two. - My dear, you really do need to rethink your priorities. Look at yourself, you are so… pale. How did they— ah, what sort of host am I. Believe me, I am so touched that you took the time to come and fix the mirror for me, but, ohhh, how do I… Can I get you anything? Three. - No. Four. - Oh… In that case, would you mind if I asked you a question? Five. - No. - How do you do that? - What? - The mirror… with all due respect to your resilience, you look awful, my dear. But it is put together with such precision… I have never seen anything like it. It was a pile of shards last time I saw it, but now, my word, I can barely see a crack. If not for the piece up in there, I would never have thought it was broken. You are quite the… mirror mender, Mr. Fixer. Mr. Fixer? Um… Frame Fixer, are you— Six. He was running out of time. So little time until the next pillar of all that was wrong with the world. So little space to make his move. The last Shard levitated in front of him with nothing suspended in it, covered in blood and echoing the sounds she made. They calmed him, settling the drive further in and the little screaming patch of doubt deeper out. But two of the words burned in the back of his head, and that burn strained the Shard so much that it had to cut into his chest in order to calm him. He did not mind. The sounds stopped. He would fix them all. --- He had to hurry. His spinning head was still functioning enough to understand that if he was to stay in the same room as the poor creature he had released, he would not be alive for much longer. As innocent as she ultimately was, she still acted in self-defense, shambling towards him and muttering the one word she knew. He did not blame her. If anything, she hastened his resolve and sent him through the hallway of ponnequins faster than he otherwise would have decided to. Fixer stepped ahead, shaking here and there, and tried to keep the ray of light stable. “There is nothing for you in here. There is nothing for you anywhere, unless you fix it.” Wincing out of the sheer wrongness of the act, he slipped through the narrow path the statues left for him. They stood still, arranged in two perfect lines, as if they were royal guards on the way to the throne room. Fixer, however, felt like anyone but a royal guest. The corridor stretched for much longer than he originally estimated. It was not unlikely that it simply prolonged itself as he went on - that would have been perfectly in tune with the twisted world. Taking a look behind, he found his suspicion confirmed, the execution chamber now much further away than it should have been. The ponnequins did not stay static, either - they followed him, keeping some distance, but staring in his back all the same. Eventually, it had become impossible to take their empty plastic eye sockets drilling his back, and Fixer took to running. Panting and aching, he felt himself get closer and closer to the light of the flashing room, distracting himself with the estimations of the warped precinct’s geometry - if he was correct, that was the room he would have gone to if he went left back there at the portrait. That somewhat simplified things - provided the world would decide to make sense all of a sudden. Having felt his eyes shut at the closeness of the white light, Fixer left a mental note that the length of the corridor did, in fact, fit with the structure. A vain attempt at distracting himself from what he heard, and then saw. - rim mor rormir mirrrr In the center of the painfully white, neat hall stood a big mirror, elevated on a platform with steps coming in from four sides. All around it were flowers, sophisticated furniture, clothes, sections of stained glass leaning against the walls and nearly everything else that could classify as colorful. It was all so putrid. It was wrong. - due resilience how would you mind The Error that stood in front of it compared well. It was also wrong. It was all that was wrong with the world. - You… Fixer felt his teeth grind, a slow burn in the back of his head flowing in memories of insurmountable hatred and anger. All that was wrong with the world stood in front of him, completely static, safe for the shattering fragments of its equine-like shape sometimes twisting and twirling in the unnatural bluish light it emanated. It covered the mirror, which displayed a wretched image of colorful designs and other unspeakable things. Nearly falling over in anger, Fixer saw how the ponnequins have disappeared from behind him, leaving the exit from the bright chamber free, no other doors connecting it with the rest of the building. He would not leave. “You saw the wretched scum spit on the image of the perfect world. Their sheer existence was intolerable. You knew what to do. You know what to do.” It no longer spat out chewed up fragments of sounds and words, only letting slip faint echoes of moans and breaths. The Shard felt natural in his grip, washing over with a wave of calm, which only sharpened the seething rage. He walked towards the Error, the room shuddering as the panels around him had begun to shake. The ponnequins stood there, their gazes stuck, incapable of penetrating the painfully pastel-colored wood. For one moment, he saw one of them, only barely peeking out from behind the furthest panel, its legs encased in a placid grey aura, the rest of its body shaking in place and trying to move like it did before. The Shard assured him that nothing was wrong. Even as the Error jumbled something out again, having caught sight of him through the ponnequin, nothing was wrong. - Mister Fixher WHAT are YOU DOING Nothing but the Error itself. He stabbed the shard deep into what all of his being felt was the most awful, most wretched thing in the Universe, and put every thought towards cleansing it from existence. It was them who made the world go wrong. He would fix them. Even as he felt the floor under him crumble and send him flying down the dark, damp chasm, shardless and with only the lamp head attracting to the shining of the horn, he knew he would.