Thoughts of Wendy - Short fan-fic

[SnowShepherd]

The voice pierced Wendy's mind again, like the stabbing of an ice pick prying at an ancient glacier formation. It echoed, reverberated and berated. The stench of whatever the lanky Maxwell was smoking filled her olfactory senses, and the cajole of his basSoon-like monotone did their timeless best to drive her eyelids apart. There would be no rest for the wicked. Consciousness, her enemy, lifted her, dusted her off, and reminded her of the one carnal desire that would drive her, again, to whatever goals or lack thereof. Good or bad, constructive or destructive, merciful or merciless, in Hell, only two things were certain rewards; eternity and hunger. The hunger could only be persuaded by constant feeding of its gnawing demands for attention. The eternity could not be avoided.

Over time, Wendy had acquired knowledge of all that could be learned from the limits of Hell's lack of ingenuity. She knew that there was a truth to which all things hinted. Whether that truth were real was still beyond her experience. Was the existence of any absolute truth merely another lie? Her goals had long been to find her way to this truth, but her efforts always ended in the same field of mockery into which she was yet again reawakening.

Maxwell scoffed and vanished into a puff of sulfur and smoke and Wendy sighed in retrospect of the duties which lay before her; again. She lifted a piece of flint from the ground, tore off some dry brambles and grass, pulled up a few carrots and plucked berries from a nearby bush. She plopped herself down harshly. How long had she been doing this? Did that matter? Was time irrelevant? Was past, future and present all one jumbled mess? Was there an eternal now or an eternal hunger that no great mind could sustain the sanity necessary to feed? Like a brilliant mind incarcerated by deep poisonous hatred by isolation and loneliness, Wendy chewed the same flavorless berries, the same bland and dirty carrot, and cut herself intentionally with the flint to add some flavor to her food. She wished for something with which to wash that goop down, but there was nothing.

She knew that others were starting the exact same journey elsewhere in this world. Some world, really. One truth about Hell she had come to know was this; that Hell only seemed huge and intimidating because of the threats against her life, but, was in fact, actually very small and very limited. There was no sunlight, no sun, just a peculiar concept of day. There was no drinkable water, no mist, no wind, no dust, no stars in the sky, and only the idea of a moon somewhere in the inky bleak above. There was, however, perfect darkness which itself was a predator hungry only for the meat of sentient being and only those who were wide awake at night.

The others, she had occasionally encountered. There were other humans, and others who were not quite human at all. There were feral races that were only semi-intelligent that could be easily convinced to help or hinder with enough baubles, junk, garbage or most delectably, meat. Wendy had befriended these races, and destroyed them, enlisted their help in exploring the world, and in gathering resources, and had used them for manure, as bait for predators, as distractions against the Others. She had allied with Others at times, and deceived them at a whim in another time. She had killed them, killed herself, killed nothing, killed it all and eaten it, and still her stomach controlled her every action. She had fallen so many times, always forced to get back up, but had never found the secret of rest. She had gone entirely mad several times, some occasions about which she had no recollection any longer, just from the prospect that her plight might just be hopeless and eternal.

Wendy dreaded the winter. She dreaded the sickness of eating the poisonous monster meats before cooking them properly and fully. She dreaded the late fall and the early spring, and their demands on her fervor. She would go hungry to assure some was saved for times when no food could be found. Fishing was impossible in the winter for the ponds froze all the way down. Without laboring for adequate shelter, the rain from the murky thought of the sky above her would sicken her even unto death. Colds, flu, electrocution, burning...she had died in so many horrible ways, yet without fail to awaken from death again and again, alone, in Maxwell's field, and the threat of nightfall.

Wendy recalled a terrifying film she had once watched, called Groundhog Day. When it was only a whimsical tale of an impossible loophole cured by true love, it was fun and romantic. Now, surviving somehow, for some unknown reason in her own timeless place, the thought of the novel the film had been based upon gave her shivers of wrenching madness and terror. For in the novel, love had no place, and the protagonist never escaped his endless day.

A few more brambles, some more flint, tufts of grass, the simplest resources fashioning the simplest tools...she chopped away at a tree whose wood was always too soft and too easily spent in the fire. The tree fell, a squishy noise from inside betraying its inaccessible core of meat or dung. A fire was made, and the night and its insatiable monster descended upon her as always. She pondered by the flickering plumes of dry, odorless, smokeless flame, what she would do this time. Would she make allies or enemies? Would she enslave the feral races or avoid them? Would her loneliness and isolation drive her mad? Would she find the Truth mentioned in the broken ruin of the solitary altar at the geographical center of her bizarre prison world of tiny but deadly sandboxes? Would she die of sickness, poison, disease, starvation; would she be murdered this time, betrayed by the Others, or even trampled to death by the brainless Beefalo?

Only one thing mattered aside from the quelling of blood-thirst and meat-hunger; hold fast to the hope that the Truth was a reality and push far from consciousness the fear of its existence being a lie. If there was no Truth ultimately to be discovered somehow, what hope could there ever be of escaping the madness of that knowing? And what of the Truth itself? Would it bring hope or the same madness of knowing that the Truth is merely a seed of hopelessness? There was just as much to fear of the finding of the Truth as there was to fear of the lack of a Truth.

Tireless and hungry, Wendy ate and waited to eat again.

[ScienceMachine]

I wish I had the attention span to read this, I really do, but I can already see this to be a deconstruction of the soul and humanity of a poor young girl as she was left stranded on the isles of Maxwell's game for eternity.

Good show.