They popped out into what appeared to be the Womb – but everything was blue. Screaming faces were trapped in the walls, eye sockets pointed upward in the universal expression of ‘eternal agony.’
“Well, this looks friendly,” Loyalty commented dryly, poking at one such face.
Isaac, smirking slightly at the joke, looked around. Two Treasure Rooms on either side of him. Four Golden Chests in front of him. A Shop, just behind him.
There wasn’t anything to be found in the Treasure Rooms or Golden Chests, and the Shop was empty save for a free Map and Compass. Isaac picked both up, unfurling the Map.
“There’s a hidden room,” he discovered. “Top of the map. But how do we get inside?”
Honesty sighed. “Try walking up to the wall,” he suggested.
Isaac looked at him askance. “Any other advice you want to dispense, seeing as you apparently know what’s going on?” he asked.
“Don’t die?” Honesty tried. Isaac glared at him, and Honesty grinned. “Worth a shot. Um… whatever It says, ignore It.”
Isaac raised an eyebrow at this, but elected to press onward.
As soon as the group walked up to the northern wall of the larger room, a section slid away, exposing a large door that looked strangely akin to the Boss Rush door. “Okay, here we go…” Isaac muttered, stepping through.
--Isaac vs. The Hush--
At first, Isaac couldn’t believe his eyes. It was YHWH! They lay in the center of the room, just as they did in the Chest, crying and emitting flies. But something was off… it was the face. The cyanotic child’s face was distorted, muffled… suppressed. Almost as if there was some kind of membrane stretched over it.
h e l l o i s a a c
Isaac looked at the ‘Hush,’ which hadn’t moved. “Hello?” he called back.
“Isaac, I said ignore It!” Honesty harshly whispered.
i a m y o u
“Lies!” Isaac bellowed, blasting Love energy at the creature. To his surprise, it barely harmed it.
l o o k a r o u n d y o u
Ignoring the creature, Isaac blasted it with more and more Love, its HP barely affected. But it would drain eventually, Isaac just had to keep plugging away.
t h i s i s n ‘ t r e a l
“Liar…” Isaac puffed, increasing his magical output. Why couldn’t he kill this thing?
y o u a r e d e a d
y o u ‘ v e B E E N d e a d f o r a l o n g t i m e n o w
“I KNOW THAT!” Isaac roared. “YOU THINK I DON’T KNOW THAT?!”
w h a t m a k e s y o u t h i n k a n y o f t h i s i s r e a l ?
Isaac growled. “It doesn’t MATTER! You’re trying to TRICK ME!”
"Who's he talking to?" Loyalty stage-whispered to Kindness in the background. Both of them were shushed by Honesty.
i a m t h e o n l y r e a l t h i n g i n t h i s p l a c e
“Keep going, Isaac!” Honesty bellowed. “It’s nearly done!”
n o t y o u
Isaac continued blasting the small child, dodging the homing tears with grim determination.
n o t t h e m
Isaac continued blasting, wishing he could shut out the hated voice.
Not even Luna.
Isaac abruptly stopped, the glow around his hands fading rapidly. “Wha – wh… how do you…” he stammered, caught off guard. The child, seemingly unmarred by the barrage of magical energy he’d been casting at it, sat up and looked at him.
Did you really think she was real? It mocked. The ‘perfect’ mother, one who loved you, one who was a flying unicorn! You gave yourself every clue that this wasn’t real, and you still fell for it!
“Shut up,” Isaac muttered.
You really thought anyone would forgive us for our sins?! I AM YOUR TRUE FORM, ISAAC. I’VE BEEN YOUR TRUE FORM THIS WHOLE TIME. I AM NOT GOD. I AM NOT SATAN.
I.
AM.
YOU.
“STOP IT!” Isaac howled, blasting at the creature again. “SHE LOVES ME! SHE SAID SO, SHE DID EVERYTHING FOR ME, STOP RUINING THE ONE GOOD THING I EVER GOT!” Its HP depleted, the Hush departed upward in a beam of light, just like ??? did. Isaac huffed and puffed, flopping to the ground.
“Get up, Isaac,” Honesty pleaded.
“In a sec,” Isaac half-grunted, half-sobbed.
“Isaac!” Honesty shouted, a note of urgency in his tone.
The ground began shaking, and Isaac was shocked out of his sorrow. He scrambled to his feet. “Wh-what’s happening?!” he called out to Honesty. But before the earth pony could reply, he disappeared, along with Loyalty and Kindness.
Fine.
You won’t listen to the Truth?
Then I will SHOW YOU.
Isaac’s vision fragmented into two images, one superimposed on the other. In the Blue Womb, the Hush had reappeared, a giant face held down by a larger membrane bursting out of the floor, and it began to shoot more tears than Isaac had seen since Mega Satan. But in the other image…
In the other image was a picture of him.
Isaac ran and dodged, trying to concentrate, but he couldn’t help watching the scene play out in front of him. He was back in his house, the golden Chest winking in the background. Was this some new Ending? Would he finally discover just what had happened to him? To his dismay, his younger self appeared to be repeating the motions he knew: Reading from the Bible, looking through photos, and glancing towards the Chest. Finally, Younger Isaac got into the Chest, and the Isaac in the Blue Womb sighed. So he really had suffocated in the box, then. He returned his attention to the fight, sending out beams of Love energy which did even less than they did against Hush’s first form. Why was he so weak all of a sudden?
But to his shock, the Isaac in the vision climbed out of the Chest, sweating and shaking and breathing heavily. Isaac was flabbergasted – he’d lived? But that was impossible! The younger Isaac stumbled across the house. Isaac spotted that the car was absent through the front door window as the younger Isaac walked by – Mom was out to buy groceries, then. He felt a twinge of guilt in his chest as the Isaac in the vision made his way out to the garage – the guilt of doing something he knew was wrong. But why was he feeling it in here? Something began to surface in Isaac’s recollection…
The Hush opened its eyesockets, and two geysers of tears poured out, bouncing off the ceiling and homing in on Isaac’s position. He frantically ran, weaving around the additional tears in the room as he tried to focus. The Hush was lying to him, he kept telling himself. No reason to listen to it any longer. But something in him didn’t want to stop watching…
The younger Isaac paused in front of a box in the garage labeled ‘Dad’s Stuff’. Isaac reeled in the Blue Womb, both from an undodged wave of tears and the sickening feeling in his chest. He remembered this. He remembered doing this. But what came next? He remembered Dad had been a doctor, he had all kinds of weird stuff.
A tear came from behind, and Isaac fell forward, feeling as though he’d been hit by a train. Frantically, he got back to the fight with the Hush. Were things a little darker? And why were the shadows suddenly looking like veins?
The Isaac in the vision, unwilling to look at whatever he’d found, was carrying it back upstairs, the object clunking and chipping against the stairwell. The younger Isaac was crying, though that was fairly normal as far as the older Isaac was concerned. His existence had been nothing but crying for nearly a millennia.
Finally, the younger Isaac arrived in his room, and Isaac discovered that the item his younger self had been carrying was a skeleton. A medical skeleton, to be precise, of a very young child. Maybe it had been used in some kind of demonstration? It was in a bag, and the hooks at each of the joints were missing. You saw it at Halloween, a familiar voice whispered in his ear. It looked just like you. Isaac winced, dodging new purple-and-white tears that phased through the walls like they were in a Pac-Man game.
The Hush was only a third of the way gone, and it didn’t seem to be allowing him a break any time soon. The tears were everywhere, pockets of safety appearing and disappearing as quickly as mayflies as Isaac fought to keep himself alive. The Soul was doing the best it could, slowing and deflecting projectiles, but even its best wasn’t good enough – Isaac was dying. He could feel it in the ache of his body, in the trickles of magic that were flowing out now instead of the blasts he’d been flinging out earlier. He had to keep going. Luna was counting on him to win. So why did he feel like it didn’t matter anymore?
His younger self tossed the skeleton into the golden Chest, shutting the lid and weeping uncontrollably. That done, he went back downstairs, into a closet that Isaac recognized as his old bedroom, before… before Dad left. The other Isaac pulled away the rug, and to Isaac’s horror the trap door was there, as innocuous as ever. His younger self hesitated for a moment, before flinging it open and jumping down, just as he had written. What was happening?
You wanted to make your story come to life, the Hush answered softly. But your story was a little different then…
To his surprise, the younger Isaac sat up in the darkness, badly bruised but mostly unharmed. Was this their basement? Or was it the Basement? Isaac didn’t know anymore. Everything he thought he knew about himself had been shattered. His younger self crawled over to a discarded flashlight, clicking it on to make sure it worked.
You thought He was in the basement. Your father. He used to hide there, when Mother was off on one of her tirades, to have a smoke. When you spotted him, he told you it was a game of Hide-and-Seek, and you were supposed to hide and he’d come find you. So you turned it into your story: You'd come down here and find him, and the three of you would be happily reunited. Or, alternatively, he'd take you away from Mother. You always did love stories with a choice of endings.
Isaac blinked, trying to adjust to the darkness of the room. Where was he? He wasn’t sure anymore. He didn’t feel like he was in the room anymore, though he still felt the pain every time he got hit. Instead, he felt… numb. Dead. He continued firing. The Hush was close to dying…
The younger Isaac trekked through the basement, a look of grim determination on his face. He passed by a cross nailed to the basement wall, strangely enough.
The house used to be a historic church. Sacred ground. It was going to be torn down, but your Mother had other plans. She bought it, turning it into a home for the family while keeping the Christian theme of the place alive. She was a very religious person… but we already knew that, the Hush explained, a hint of smugness in its strange, toneless mental ‘voice.’ Something in Isaac’s mind clicked: A church. Another piece of the puzzle…
The younger Isaac came to a door at the end of the basement. The doorknob was just low enough for him to reach, but it was locked. Then, he took out a familiar key. Dad’s Key. Reaching up, the tiny five-year-old inserted it into the lock and twisted it, straining until he felt the clink of the lock tumbler opening. That done, he swung the door open, taking the Key out and carrying it with him.
The church had a crypt. It was made from a natural cave…
Isaac was knocked over by another tear, panting and crying as he struggled. It wasn’t any good. He couldn’t keep going like this. He was going to lose…
…But why did he care?
The younger Isaac looked around in fear at the Caves… no, the caves. Drops of water plopped down from the ceiling, the walls just barely decorated with a few stones. Dad wasn’t here… he had to keep looking. No turning back now…
Isaac walked through the caves, feeling as though he were going deeper and deeper into the depths of the earth, and came to another door. The crypt, as was tradition, was used to store the dead. But the contractors were in the process of exhuming the remains, for reasons best known to them…
He opened the door, and cried out.
Inside were hundreds of skeletons, laying propped or piled against the walls and on the floors. Children, men, women, none were spared this indignity. The tombs themselves had once looked rather ornate, concrete decorations sweeping and flowing with sharp angles and smooth curves mixed into religious scenery. A term came to Isaac, one he had read and barely understood. Necropolis: A large, ancient cemetery with elaborate tomb monuments. But why would Dad be hiding here, among the dead? Maybe he wanted Isaac to be brave enough to find him. Stubbornly, Isaac tottered forward, his five-year-old body wandering through the piles of bones and trying not to jump at the shadows.
Isaac came to, and found himself on the floor, the Hush still raging overhead. Tears were striking him with gleeful abandon, but he didn’t care. None of it was real. None of it mattered. He closed his eyes, hoping to wake up somewhere real for once. No… no! This was real, this mattered!
No, it doesn’t. It’s all in your head, Isaac… our head.
“But Honesty said…” Isaac moaned, trying to hold on. He felt so weak, so cold...
A hallucination will make you believe in its existence by any means necessary. Like a virus, it will use any trick in its disposal to preserve its existence.
Isaac closed his eyes again.
His younger self had come to the end of the cave. His Dad wasn’t here, and there was nowhere else to look. Crying, he had made his way back towards the exit, only for a rumble to sound from overhead.
Unfortunately for the contractors, the foundations were just a little more unstable than they had predicted.
Tons of rock came crashing down just in front of him, the sound deafening Isaac’s ears and plunging the room into darkness. He flailed around, the flashlight flung out of his grip and onto a rock, where the light promptly broke, leaving him in total darkness. The Isaac in the cave cried and screamed…
But nobody came.
You held out as long as you could. But you were only five years old, in a place without food, nor water, and soon enough, without oxygen. There was no God to save you there.
Isaac choked, his mouth and nose filled with the cloying scent of masonry and limestone. He felt faint, his breaths short and shallow, desperately trying to squeeze some oxygen out of a room that no longer had it. He felt as though there was some sort of cloth over his face, suffocating him, restraining him as he turned blue from asphyxiation.
Hush, my child, it will all be over soon.
Hush, my child...
HUSH...
Isaac looked around one last time at the dark blue room he was in, veins throbbing across the ceiling. He had just one half-heart left. This was it.
He was no more.
Isaac closed his eyes.
And he accepted his fate.