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Epitaph of Anguish: There are No Birds in Alagadda

After being damaged by 682, 035 falls into dormancy and recalls meeting 049 for the first time in about as close to a dream as it can get.

Warnings: Graphic depictions of violence, Gore if someone reading this is a plate or other porcelain product, Shakespearian English, Very long Flashback, Gratuitous French, Past 049 Having Absolutely no concept of personal space, Pestilence

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Wall.

Wall.

Wall.

Wall.

Splintering.

Dark.

Gloves.

Glass.

The Mask should have never tried to best the lizard. 

Should have never tangoed with death even with its desperation for a host. That sweet temptation of having someone strong enough that their mind was beside its own rather than beneath it.

At first it had succeeded. The lizard calm enough and following command as it led the creature out of the facility. The exit point had been layered red, a scar deep into the earth that could hide the facility within those striped walls so easily. It had bid the lizard to climb, and yet the beast hadn't wanted to.

No. It couldn't convince it, each step a struggle, and then, it couldn't control it either and everything went awry.

The Mask became well acquainted with those red and black stripes, slammed into them over, and over, and over, and over. Until it felt something give, and the wave of nausea spiking it to the core seemed to make the lizard falter if only for a moment. Long enough for it to release its hold and fall into a newly developed fissure in the stone. It didn't move. Not for a long while. Because the lizard had felt the crack too. Because the lizard wanted it dead and just kept going, ramming the wall over, and over, and over. The cracks in the stone wall spreading further, spilling sand and debris into the river below.

A loud, angered shriek, and the lizard was off, falling down below as its lower half severed in the efforts of the Foundation to recontain it. Longer, the mask did wait. Until the ringing in its consciousness drowned out the roaring of the beast's mind. Even then, even when it tried, it could not reach out to the minds it could still hear. As though its mental tongue of silver was frozen solid with the gripping realization that it had almost died.

It took hours of the research team that had so eagerly set it upon what it had thought to be its true, final escape to fish him out of the crack in the wall, thickly gloved hands held it far from where corrosive may have dripped upon weak, thin skin that would have given so easily, and simply dropped the Mask into a case of thick glass, leaving it at an angle that had it wedged into a corner, face tilted somewhat downward to look at the bottom of the case, and, eventually, the metal base it was set upon. 

With no space now for that maddening, pain-stopping adrenaline the lizard had nearly drowned it in, the distant ache now became something far more severe. Another spike of that awful nausea, the Mask's frown deepened, porcelain jerking and struggling to unfreeze until it simply gave up on moving it. The corrosive of its eyes lessened in viscosity and pooled at the bottom of the glass case, running along the fresh, deep crack now splitting the porcelain in a fissure that travelled from its left eye over its nose all the way to the top lip on the opposite side.

Disfiguring.

It would heal. Though. It would. It had to, but not for a long time. And certainly not now. Now, it would hurt, and badly at that. A tearing agony like the Mask hadn't felt in a long time.