Chapter Text
It was unlike anything the Salt of Solidarity had ever seen before. Dark towers pierced through the sky, edges flickering, stuttering, bits and pieces shooting off for just a few moments before appearing right where they came from as if nothing had ever happened. Voidlike chains coiled like vipers around the pillars, connecting them, pulling tight and closer, shifting and rattling with the wind, the sound the only thing to pierce through the low buzzing that came from such a place. It didn’t smell sweet. No, the scent burned, static collecting on anything that allowed it, nothing but ozone and something sickeningly burnt cutting through the senses. A Cookie should abhor it, but alas…
“This proves everything,” the Fount of Knowledge said, his eyes lit with excitement. “We’re not the first ones, nor the only ones. The legends are true.”
“These aren’t the real Heights,” Salt muttered, stepping forward, always watching his step. One wrong move could send either of them plummeting into the endless sky below.
“No, that crumbled long ago with the rest of Robloxia. Look.” The Fount traced one of the distant chains, narrowing his eyes. “The chains all go towards one central platform. And it’s not just the wind moving them.”
He was right. They shifted aimlessly, yes, but all together they rose and fell, pulled in one direction or another, all together from the one, single place they must have been connected to.
“Do not tell me you’re considering what you’re considering—” Salt turned his head to look at the Fount, but he’d already begun scaling one of the structures, and was nearing the top. Salt let out a sigh— a heavy one— and followed him up.
—
By the time they made it to the central tower, it should’ve almost certainly been nightfall. Yet, the sun was unmoving, still burned down on them with dead midday wrath. This high up, it didn’t just smell like what burned, but also of the iron that stained the ground they walked on. It seemed to tremble and flinch away under their weight, the glitches threatening to eat them up with every stilled silence, but it never quite did, like oil and water.
The chains pulled, deliberate with the faint rattle of a breath that just barely pulled in and out of the kneeling figure in the center. The chains held It there, even as It shifted to find a position more comfortable, unable to change Its level from half-up, half-down, only able to barely move Its arms, armored in falling-apart, rusted virtual steel that crumbled into pieces below It. Its head only rose after a tremble, the long black waterfall of hair finally falling out of the way of its piercing gaze. It looked sick; It looked weak.
It was Salt that approached first, even when It bared Its teeth, metallic and gritted like a zipper, and hissed at him with a brutal yet hoarse voice. It flinched away, as far as the chains would allow It, even as Salt kneeled down in front of It, even his height shorter than Its own.
“1x1x1x1?” he asked, the Fount standing not too far away, noting down everything about the figure, even the way Its glare hardened at the name. “I am the Salt of Solidarity, and here is the Fount of Knowledge. We are Cookies, investigating our world… May we know more about you?”
Its voice was hoarse, quiet, but It still spoke, Its words oozing with an acidic venom that ate through anything it touched. “...You r-r-r-reek of sweetness… Which foolish Admin created you?”
Salt took a glance back at the Fount, then back at the figure. “...I am afraid we do not know what an ‘Admin’ is, however we were created by the benevolent Witches, who built us and our world from sweets and sugar.”
Its mouth twisted into a vicious grin. In one, quick motion, It looped the chains around Its wrists around Salt and pulled him close, right up against Its burning hot body, lowering Its head down to his neck and biting down on it. The Fount moved in an instant, but Salt raised a hand to stop him: the figure released Its bite and began to lick the jam that oozed out of the wound with a low noise— another rattle, but a happy one, one that delighted in the taste of a Cookie’s blood.
It finally pulled back, releasing Salt from its grip and continuing to smile, licking what was left on Its lips. The laugh that creeped out of its throat was quiet, but deep, filled with something that was only malicious because that was all It knew, eyes harsh with amusement, something that felt powerful even while too chained up to properly move. Any other Cookie would run, but the Fount craved to know more, and Salt?
“Is 1x1x1x1 the correct name for you?” Salt decided to ask, bringing his hand up to apply a bit of pressure to the wound, just enough to get it to stop bleeding.
“That… is a name I have been called, yes. One of many. P-P-P-Perhaps ‘the Adversary’ may be more to your liking.”
“Is that the name you wish to be called?”
That question seemed to make It hesitate, Its eyes softening for just a moment, Its shoulders slumping just by a millimeter. It seemed to consider the idea, leaning back somewhat, looking around, moving Its head as It did so, though perhaps just to rid Itself of the stiffness in Its neck. “No. However, that will not change the name you use, will it? I have never been consulted when it came to names— only given them.”
Salt reached a hand out to place it on Its shoulder, but drew it back when he saw how the approach made It flinch away. “We will refer to you however you please.”
That cruel smirk had long faded. Instead, Its eyebrows furrowed at such a foreign concept— that Its opinion mattered. “...Tesseract. I would prefer to be called Tesseract.”
“Very well then, Tesseract, may I… know your story?” The way Salt placed a hand on his chest as he bore that question made It, Tesseract, consider for a moment if he truly approached It with respect. Its head tilted.
“You know of my prior monikers… yet do not know my s-s-s-s-story? How can that be?”
Salt spoke matter of factly, as if what he said wasn’t wholly alien. “We know a story, the one history and legend has passed down to us. We wish to hear it from you, Tesseract, your telling. Who are you? What became of you? Why are you here?”
It stared with eyes wide, mouth slightly open, the questions running through Its systems as It considered an answer. But instead, Its gaze hardened again, head turning slowly to the Fount, an arm raising even as the joints creaked and the chains rattled. A clawed finger raised, the others curling inward, until It pointed right at him. Instinctively, he flinched.
“I will not speak a word more before him,” It muttered, Its voice doubling, Its glows flaring brighter. “I hear the lies that crawl across his skin.”
Salt glanced back, expecting something like shock or disbelief on the face of his friend, but all he saw was a mirror of the hatred Tesseract bled. The Fount looked at Salt, his expression only sort of softening, as he spat with an anger more likely of the myth before them: “Let’s go. There is nothing for us here— we must not disturb this… artifact of the past.”
“Old friend, do you not wish to know more?” Salt questioned, his voice wavering.
“It is a wrathful daemon that was contained for good reason, and I fear we’ve disturbed it.”
“What could you possibly be saying—?”
A laugh sputtered out behind Salt. A low, dark one, deep with an evil that could not be killed with a blade. It was a type of laugh that was knowing, victorious somehow, even as its strength seemed to flicker out, as its source’s head began to loll forward once again, the spine of It curving down until It was held up only by the chains restricting It. It was limp, yet It kept laughing, and in that moment, Salt saw why this being was despised. In Its accusations, It had lied, despite being lent kindness. It was no wonder It deserved this fate.
—
The next time Tesseract saw the Salt of Solidarity was an inexplicable stretch of time later, dwarfed only by the duration of long decayed midday that she’d already endured, all that she had once known slowly disappearing slip by slip into the black hole that was eternity. She knew she had rotted so far that she had, too, become rot itself, in the way that her body and her being always ate in phagocytosis which tried to kill it.
Tesseract rose his head, this time, and Salt did not kneel down. The Cookie only stared, unreadable behind the metal barrier that was his helmet, until he slipped it off and sat down before the figure that told him his oldest friend was a liar. His face read all the things Tesseract reveled in: regret, shame, betrayal, the understanding that the inky, rotting daemon was right all along, as he often was. Knowledge is written by the victors, but hatred holds the ugly truth.
“How did you know?” Salt asked, staring not at her but at the helmet in his lap.
“I feel nothing other than hate… and there is no kind I hate more than liars.” The answer was clean, precise, like the blade she once held before the digital muscle and fat had withered away to bone and decay, the blade she yearned to wield again.
“You speak as though you’re a monster,” Salt muttered, fingers drumming almost silently on the thing created to protect him.
“Am I not?”
Salt then, in that moment, looked up, his gaze finding Tesseract’s and looking past the bitter glare he held from the moment they had first met through now. “There is a difference between hate and lust for power. That lust does not care who is beneath it, and it twists into something like hate, but it is not true hate. It can be undone. Unwound.
“You, however, are hate in its purest form. You are hate, rot and decay, the stretches of truth that the world cannot comprehend. You are not artificial. You are consequence. You are eternal, or you would have faded long ago with the rest of your world. Tell me then, Tesseract, who hurt you?”
That piercing gaze faltered. The words that came out no longer ate like acid. “You s-s-s-sound pretentious.”
“But I’m right.”
Tesseract seemed to curl up onto himself, his hair falling in front of his head once more as the withered wings— Salt had never noticed them before— dragged forward and around himself, hiding the body that was chained up and destroyed by the stretches of time. It was a body that was already no longer his, molded out of what was left of him after he was mutilated by the one man, the one Admin, the one God he wanted the respect and love of above no else. It was true that he was no daemon, but he was no person either. He was a corpse.
“I want to get to know you, Tesseract. I don’t want you to hide, or flinch when I reach out. I want you to feel safe. Maybe even whole again.”
It was impossible not to cry, even when the tears felt like fire. They puddled, one by one, in front of her knees, leaving what felt like burns on her face. It was the first time in eons that ground felt moisture, anything like rain, and within just a moment, the blackened earth split, and a soft, green stem grew from it. It bloomed not long after, yellow petals spreading out, too many to simply count, into what could only be described as a dandelion. A soft, beautiful, stubborn dandelion.