Quoted By:
“Honestly, I could name a thousand reasons: I don’t like Prometheus, and I don’t trust him to mold me like a piece of clay. I’m not you, and I don’t want to be— hell, I don’t think I’d even <span class="mu-i">deserve</span> to be.”
“You wouldn’t-”
“There’s only one person in the world I’d want to trust my soul with,” you interrupt, “And it isn’t your dead boyfriend. I have things I worked hard for that I want to keep, people who I really want to stay dead, and I owe a debt of gratitude to the Architect for giving me this opportunity in the first place. I like power, I like having more than other people, but, more than anything…
I want to be free, and I want to be myself. If that means I don’t get to be happy, then, fuck it, who even needs to be? I have a <span class="mu-s"><span class="mu-r">more powerful impetus</span></span>.”
You spread your arms wide, the fake soul of the fake you conjured by the Grand Art creaking and chipping beneath the pressure exerted by your real might, crimson light pouring through the breaks like water from the cracks in a porcelain vase. Arms painfully burst from your back, skin tearing and blood pouring out from the ruins of your tattered sweater. The limbs flex their freshly minted muscle, caressing the soft, tender pink skin, newborn, almost infantile despite their long, sinister build, You topple forward for a moment the weight cracking your spine under its crushing weight until your body reorganizes itself, reinforcing and regenerating shattered bone and torn sinew with metal and divinity, your skeleton shivering and popping as your new anatomy settles into place.
“...I see. Well, it was a free choice, a true choice, so a number of possibilities exist. I guess this just happens to be one where things turned out wrong.”
“You’re too vertical, both of you,” you sneer, “Your world is dead. The man who killed himself was someone you never knew, and he died for someone he never met. As far as I’m concerned, all of those “what if”s are only as real as any other predictive model. A glorified simulation, really. Well, if it’s any consolation, I believe your wish to have been granted before you ever made it: you have never been me, and you never will be.”
The other you remains silent, but you press on, the constructed world tearing away as your Impetus overrides the Grand Art, its caster no longer present to protect it from your will. Your body lifts into the air, scarlet fetters burst from your fingertips, slowly taking the qualities of the Sunset, first hard to notice, vermillion and magenta, then, less subtle, gold, lilac, blue, white, black. The chains bind to the fabric of the incomplete reality itself, each wild movement of your arms tearing out another piece.
