Ruins

The ruins talk. You can hear the echoes of ancient knights in their noises, never a language, but something universally understood: laughter, snarling, taunting, and if that doesn’t get the message across, their tone communicates everything you need to know. You hear the echoes of their past grandeur, every single rock glued into a tall and imposing structure the likes of which you cannot fathom from their description, but their wistfulness clear in their voice, and you sympathize. Sometimes they beckon you, in this place where time does not work quite right, sometimes you can almost touch the long-gone rocks, watch as it was built to reach for the giant blue sky, and you can sometimes feel the ruins themselves, if only you are patient and kind. 

You do not know why they speak, why they think. Your home does not, the library does not, only the ruins, whose name you still don’t know, only they speak and tell stories of their long ago, only they will whisper of both terrible and great things in your ears. Soon you hear them speaking with bitterness, the way they were neglected and left to rot, and they often murmur of vengeance, coaxing you to join them in the ruins, of how nice it would be down there, how nice it would be to just rest. 

You wonder how many they took that way, slowly etching into their brains until the victim was a mere shell. You know they will come for you that way, you know you will succumb, but still, you return, you speak to them, and you try not to let their words into your mind, but sometimes you do. Sometimes you find yourself thinking of vengeance, an unfamiliar anger borne of neglect that you have never felt before, and you cannot send the thoughts away, and you do not know why your thoughts are not quite yours anymore, half you and half the ruins. In your thoughts, the ruins feel human, sometimes. They almost feel human, but you must remember that they are not. 

You return anyway. The days are boiling hot, the nights are freezing cold, but you listen to their stories about grandeur and wish for more, and sometimes you reply to their words, and you hear their smiles as they reply, as they hook you in deeper, and you follow them willingly, and you find yourself spending almost the whole day in the ruins. You start hearing the ruins even as you return to your house, their snide commentary echoing as you speak to others, and you cannot help but hear all your friends’ dirty secrets as you speak with them, and the ruins themselves do not give any indication of when it is time to go to your house, when you must eat, and so sometimes days pass, sometimes it has been barely a second, and so you cannot help but draw away from everyone, isolating yourself. 

Still, you return to your ruins, and you now find that there is a comfortable patch of grass for you to sit on, and you find that your every whim is fulfilled by your ruins, and so why would you go back to the world, where you have to toil for food? Why would anyone? There is no reason to return home, anymore, and your ruins have truly and utterly ensnared you, even as you feel better than ever before, as they fatten up the pig for the slaughter with garbage and bliss. 

There are more voices now, a cacophony, but this time the voices are human, as human as you, which doesn’t say much about the both of you, really, but it is companionship, and you latch onto it like a starving man, and all of you talk about nothing and everything. You only sit on your patch of grass and talk with the other souls in the ruins. You start to eat less, drink less, only sleeping and talking until you are a husk, bones jutting out, a dry mouth, sunken eyes, and you can’t move anymore, merely sit there and think, merely sit and listen to the ruins speak of vengeance. 

Still, you talk, still, you sleep, and you do nothing else. It is very easy, you find, to do nothing but talk. It is very easy, you find, to ignore the way your legs are sinking into the cold, welcoming ground through chatter, and so you talk, and so you talk. There are corpses in the stone, six of them. You will be the seventh, and last, and you do not know what will happen afterwards. 

It is very easy to ignore your torso sinking in, ignore that soon you will die of suffocation if you can even muster up the energy to move and thrash about, and now you do not talk, only listen as the voices get louder and you hear their now token attempt at getting you to run, and you do not, not that you could even if you wanted to. You sit and wait and cannot do anything else, stuck in some sort of artificial peace, and the voices give up one last time, going quiet until all you can hear is their hopeless sobbing. 

Your ruins are pleased, and the next day, you find your head is all that is above the ground, your mouth trying to gasp for breath but only twitching, and you can do nothing but close your eyes and surrender. What other option is there, when you are already dead, when you are no longer human? Perhaps flesh is already falling off your legs, but you would never know. Perhaps you are already half bone, and even if they aren’t, the ruins own you. You could never leave, and why would you? 

The ruins smile, and you can hear them speaking in words, now, as you sink and your nose goes under, into the cold and soft stone, clogging up your mouth, your nose, and you close your eyes as the ruins swallow you, ignoring the feeble struggle of your body. You take your final breath, and you know no more but the pleasure of the ruins.