marlowemuses | Adam/Ronan ~ Prince of Hell

Adam's existence commences all at once, as he is hurled into the world, and it is the only world he knows.

There was a Before. He knows this logically and viscerally, but his mind can only reach as far back as the Between, and that is slippery. The Between was a blank space, a vast nothing, that stretched forwards and backwards and beneath into infinity, and Adam does not know if he was in that timeless place for seconds or centuries.

He hits hard on his knees, splitting open the fabric of his jeans as he lands on rough, sandy stones.

He knows what jeans are, what a t-shirt is. He knows there are things that exist--trees, apples, wool, potato chips--but he no longer has context for this information.

The place he is in is wreathed with fog. It tendrils up from the ground, which is lukewarm where it bites rocky teeth into his knees, into the colder air that pricks at his spine and draws gooseflesh along his arms. This is no place for staying. Not dressed as he is, and he feels a clench of hunger in his belly, which has an emptiness that is both old and new.

There's no sun in the sky, but it may simply be hidden behind fathomless layers of fog. The light seems to come from everywhere and nowhere, an endless twilight that folds shadows into the wisps of fog on all sides.

Adam's heart pounds with an instinctual recognition of danger. He pushes himself to his feet, knowing that he must move, even though he has no inkling of a safe path through this directionless place.

Time does not pass as he walks, or if it does, it makes no change in the light. Adam's hunger pulses in his belly with each step. It is a visceral hunger, as if his body is new-wrought, and there has never been food in this mouth, this belly.

There are trees, wizened and bare, and sometimes there are glistening bushes heavy with dark fruits. They are not inviting fruits, and Adam does not dare to eat them.

It is an hour, perhaps, or more, before he encounters the first denizen of this shifting landscape, that is hell and nightmare and fever dream all at once.

The thing hops at him from the edge of a rocky swamp, which bubbles thickly and smells of sulfur and frankincense, arcane and profane and cloying. It has too many limbs, most of them too short, and set at the wrong angles, except for the one grasping, too large arm that claws at the ground between them as it hops.

Lost? it rasps. Hungry?

No, Adam says, retreating away from the thing. He stumbles on a cracked edge of ground and nearly falls into the clutching, steaming liquid of the swamp.

The thing grabs the edge of Adam's jeans, smiling with its too-wide mouth and teeth like stones, with its enormous blue eyes that are so human.

Adam kicks it in the face and runs, until the landscape of the swamp shifts again into a maze of chasms, and he can no longer hear the rasping, mewling hunger of the wrong-limbed thing.

Terror lodges itself under his skin, minute by minute, creeping in with each breath of the fog-heavy air, which is sometimes sweet and clear as rain and sometimes choking and black with cinders.

It's in the maze of the chasms that something catches him, something with spidery limbs each three times the height of Adam, furred and white, an albino spider with a tiny body and a crumpled face that is human in the most awful way, and when it opens its mouth, the whole head hinges open to reveal a triple row of tiny, needle-sharp teeth.

"Leave the boy."

The spider-thing pauses, inches from Adam's face, holding Adam entangled with black threads of nets around his arms. The nets loosen an inch. The head twitches--tic, tic--to one side. The teeth shimmer white in the non-light.

"You heard me. Leave him. Get."

The voice is commanding. Musical, almost, with a kingly charisma. It comes from above Adam and around him, but he is paralyzed with terror as much as he is paralyzed by the twining black nets, and he cannot look.

Teeth snap in his face, but then the thing is retreating, and the nets are slipping away. A set of stairs carves itself obligingly from the rock face of the chasm.

Any fate is better than the nightmare that found him. Adam climbs the stairs at just short of a run.

The man at the top is danger and charm, with curling dark hair and sparkling eyes. He is demi-god and rock star, and he is, at the very least, less teeth than the nightmare in the chasm, though the teeth he shows when he smiles do not soothe Adam's fears.

"Aren't you a surprise," says the king, the trickster. "Remarkably powerful, to transport yourself here. Unbelievably stupid."

Adam keeps his mouth shut and his muscles tensed. He wants to run, but unlike the nightmares he's encountered so far, he knows that he cannot outrun the god of this place.

The dream-man opens his hand, and within it is a tiny black mouse, fast asleep. It warps as Adam watches, lengthening and twisting, features vanishing as it writhes upward, dancing like a cobra.

The black cord reaches toward Adam, and as he yanks backward, it snaps forward, faster, curling itself around Adam's neck and tightening, so that Adam's momentum ends abruptly as he hits the end of his tether, and the man with the star-black eyes has a tight grip on the other end.

Reality shifts around them with a roil of fog, and the chasms and wastelands unfold into a garden.

Adam yanks at the velvet collar around his throat, which is intimately snug and soft as mousefur. There is no give to it, and while it is less final than the hungry nets of the spider, it is more humiliating.

They're standing at the bottom of a grand flight of stairs leading to an expansive palace of black stone, wrought in exquisite detail, gothic in grandeur and dripping with power. On the other side are gardens, overgrown and wild, soft as meadows and filled with beautiful, delicate flowers like stars.

"Ronan," says the Dream-King, and it is a command.

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Adam's attention lingers on them until they're out of sight. He thinks about it, mulling over what Ronan has said and what new information it provides. "What do you think will happen to you?" he asks, because he's learning that Ronan is intelligent and attentive, even if he's had the fire ground out of him. He suspects Ronan has thought about it before, or specifically avoided thinking about it. "You don't even have a purpose."

He already seems more than half hollow. Nothing seems to sustain him or appeal to him other than the drinking. And Adam, now.

Adam finds he doesn't mind being the focus of Ronan's fixation. It's nice to be fascinated upon, as if he's something wondrous. I'll give you a purpose, he thinks. Worship me.

It's a strange thought, and it makes Adam wonder who he was, and why he wants it. Ronan's docile servility in the face of his captivity grates at Adam's temper, but there's another feeling mixed in with the irritation. If Ronan's going to be obedient, he should be obeying Adam.

Ronan slows to a stop, his gaze dropping - not quite to the floor, but to Adam's hands. What will happen to him? He never cared to ask. Or if he did, the moment faded with so much of the rest of him.

"It must have happened already," he muses, dull and passionless. He can't think of any part of him that would be missed if his father saw fit to carve it out. His identity is one that was bestowed upon him. He doesn't know what he was before that, if he was anything at all. There's nothing about the tower, even, that might make it a home he could miss. Except, of course, that an afterlife in the tower would be easier than an afterlife full of suffering.

Ronan's gaze returns to Adam's face. A strange thought strikes him, then, and a cold jolt with it: That he would miss Adam, if Adam were taken away from him. Ronan quickly looks away, his brow drawn in aggravation. "I don't have anything," he reiterates, as if to convince the walls around them, though the walls know that's untrue, because he claimed Adam for himself the moment Adam arrived.

Adam goes a few steps past when Ronan stops, and then retreats back to stand in front of Ronan, very close, looking up at him. He watches the pained realization and then the jolt of something, and the upset that follows. Adam feels a bit like he just held a mirror in front of Ronan and forced him to look into it. It's a handsome face, but pale and drawn. A bit what you'd expect of someone who lived in that tower prison.

"I have a purpose," Adam tells him. Calm and certain. Adam still knows what he is, even though he doesn't remember why. He will fight the god of this place to keep his purpose, if he needs to. "You can come with me."

Then he turns and resumes their prior course. He knows that Ronan will come with him. He knows that Ronan will not endure having Adam out of his sight, unless Adam demands it, and even then he might not.

Everything in Ronan tells him that he belongs in this place, in this tower, in his dungeon. So Adam's simple and plain invitation stirs up the immediate confusion of wanting something very badly when it is in every way a contradiction to all that Ronan knows about himself. He should not want to go anywhere, but he wants nothing more than to stay by Adam's side.

Ronan retreats a step, nearly following fear's suggestion that he turn around and bolt back up to his room. Then, instead, he hurries forward to join Adam again. "Your life is over," Ronan reminds him, because the newly dead have trouble understanding that. "If you have a purpose, this is the only place it could be."

"We already know that," Adam reminds him. "I came here intentionally. My purpose is here."

Even though Adam doesn't remember who that purpose is. He can only hope that he'll know him when he finds him. A jolt of recognition, or a flash of memory. He's had that already, and it's also possible that he had the sense to build some kind of homing beacon into the spell that brought him here. Some way to find his lover, or to indicate who it is.

"This place is enormous," Adam says, still holding back the question he wants to ask, the one he's wanted to ask ever since he saw those chains in Ronan's room. Why the chains? Are they for me or for you? "Does it just go on and on? Are you taking me outside?"

Ronan scoffs, because whatever it was that Adam came here seeking, he's certain to fail. It's already faded from his memory, that all-important thing he risked his soul to find. And it doesn't get better from here. It gets worse. But Ronan, because he takes no pleasure in cruelty, leaves that conclusion for Adam to reach on his own. He's given his warnings.

"I'm trying to," he answers. "But maybe the walls heard you making wicked plans and now we're being denied our garden." Adam underestimates this tower, Ronan thinks.

The tower, Adam thinks, underestimates him.

"Is this entire world filled with lonely, sentient things?" Adam asks. It's a depressing thought, and mostly rhetorical. "Are you not able to teleport, the way your father did? You did at first, didn't you?"

He'd appeared on the garden steps, as if from a shadow, when they'd first met. Adam doesn't know for sure that he wasn't simply there on the steps, and that the god-king had taken Adam to where Ronan already was.

Adam knows the answer to the first question, so Ronan answers the second: "I didn't teleport. I was summoned." If his father wants him somewhere, then Ronan is there, regardless of whether or not he'd like to be. In this case, he was very glad to be brought to Adam.

That makes sense, though it isn't ideal. There's a lot of walking to be done around here. Even if they aren't in any particular hurry. They have all the time in the world. "What are the chains for?" Adam asks, at last.

He raps a knuckle against one of the walls, and says, lightly, "Gardens." It isn't a command, only a request. Less than a request. A whim. Ronan and his father have hinted--and outright said--that Adam is powerful, though he doesn't have any idea in what way he's powerful, or how to wield the magic that brought him here.

Adam/Ronan ~ Prince of Hell

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