YHtBtR: The Novellization

by ~TheOneWhoObserved

***
Note 1 - This is based of of Mazapan's game "You Have to Burn the Rope."
Note 2 - Any literary pompousness or undue depth to be found within the following text is utterly intentional. Play the game to understand how epic it is.
Note 3 - This is only labeled "fiction" because of several factual embellishments found in the original game; the story is, in essence, true to real life.




You Have to Burn the Rope:
The Novelization

The Artist: Burk

CHAPTER 1
The Hallway

A hallway.
The floor was rough. It stared upward with a burning look, that dark, primordial knowledge that one is being watched, pierced from some unknown angle by impossible eyes. Hewn stone gazed inward from all around. The rigid and dank cloud in the Hero's mind, so much an ironic beast to him, would not rise, would not dissipate; even as his mind drifted in and out of lucidity, he laughed to himself in a fleeting dream of conscious review: my own clouds I have hewn in twain, and yet this one, newly wrought, deigns to pass over my mind as an infinite labyrinth?
The fall had done much for the unseen lord of the persistent reverie.
Moments later, centuries all told by the measuring of the soul, light found purchase, and at the Hero's first thought the great irony was redoubled, which itself seemed flung from an ancient past. A labyrinth indeed did meet his trained orbs of sight. A labyrinth of doubt. A dark maze of strength and depth and legend. Mass beyond measure, history beyond knowing.
A hallway.
Exploratory steps told the Hero that no slippery trap-smith had willed the place be. No trickery was to be found here, only soul and mind and clouds of misjudgment. He had defeated the fall, and thus it was that the challenge of the hallway was turned down. No longer could is besiege him with its self-wrought lies; little more than comedy they had to offer he that knew victory in the falling dream, the concussion of self and soul. And so it was.

CHAPTER 2
Grins and Lies

But a whiff of the permeating stench of forgotten candles paved a new path of mind for the Hero. Close ahead was no hallway, but a remnant of the land above. Images of banquets and the like fleeted through his mind, but he paid little heed. Determination to forge ahead pulled his axes free of their magic womb of unseen light, the Hero aware that their bloody use was foretold by the odorous lies of memory.
An inch of a step, and a sudden cataclysm. The space had grown wide and tall, and the hallway was out of reach; a portal of stone had slammed down such that the world shook and the soul was besieged. That of the Hero, however, remained stout. He made his rush, toward glory or doom or the hand of fate.
The shape was predetermined in the fire-lit cavern by instinct alone. The axes plunged.
Only dust and bubbles came in deadly return.
The Hero made several fateful leaps as to escape the furious, grinning assailant, but alas, he could not. The bubbles came. His skull met the wall. Run he did; might had no place here.
He spied the beacon. He saw his life hanging in time as for it; it surely was hung far above only for this, only for now.
Skill took over. A torch but appeared in the Hero’s arm. Leaps and ledges placed him effortlessly.
The blow was struck.
The rope frayed and melted as madly as ice on a desert stone. Legend became an action; the Hero had burned the rope, and thus the rope was burned. The crystalline beacon dropped with deliberate grace. The colossus fell in a cloud of lies, of his own sins.
The Hero had bested the soul of darkness.
The world and all peoples were safe.