Page 128 of Discordant Cultivation

The basement felt different at night—more honest somehow. Kieran kept the lights off, navigating by muscle memory to the studio booth where he found a pair of noise-canceling headphones.

He settled cross-legged on the concrete floor near the chair he had his first basement session in and opened the notebook to pages he’d filled with lyrics he memorized from before meeting Vale. They were songs that lived only in his head that didn’t require guitar or piano, electronic pieces he’d never known how to produce but had written anyway because the words demanded their own rhythm.

‘Back to the Pit’.

The title stared back at him from a page covered in verses about self-destruction and cycles of behavior that felt prophetic now. He’d never tried to make it work as a song because it needed beats he couldn’t create alone, percussion that lived in his body rather than his instruments.

Kieran put on the headphones, cutting himself off from everything except the sound of his own breathing and the feel of concrete beneath his knuckles. He started tapping—simple at first, then building in complexity as he found the rhythm he’d been hearing in his head for years.

“Mind’s a fucking battlefield, thoughts like razor wire;

Every step I take just feeds into the fire;

Know it’s gonna hurt me, know it’s gonna sting,

But I keep coming back like it don’t mean a thing…”

The words came easier in darkness, flowing with the percussive patterns his hands created against the floor.

But the chorus remained elusive, the bridge between verses that had never quite worked no matter how many times he tried to force it. The old lyrics felt too abstract, too protected from the emotional core the song demanded.

I need to go deeper. I need to access the place this song is really about.

The bag sat in its familiar corner, black fabric synonymous with breakthrough performances and devastating honesty. Kieran stared at it in the darkness.

This is insane.

But maybe that was the point. Maybe he could use Vale’s tools to understand what Vale had done to him. Maybe if he put himself back in that sensory deprivation, back in the place where all of this started, he could make sense of the contradictions tearing him apart.

Already his hands were moving, reaching for the fabric that taught him what it meant to perform without protection. He pulled it over his head, surrendering to the enclosed, claustrophobic place he learned to breathe poison in.

In the darkness behind darkness, the words finally came:

“Back to the pit where the demons play,

Back to the place that steals my days away.

Sick and ashamed but I can’t break free;

From the cycle that’s destroying me.

Back to the pit, back to the pit,

Why do I love the things that make me sick?”

The chorus unlocked something in his rhythm patterns. Kieran’s hands hit the concrete harder, knuckles splitting against rough surfaces as he added layers of percussion with his knees, his forearms, his whole body becoming the drum kit the song demanded.

This is a hi-hat, this is a snare, this is the kick drum that drives everything forward.

Pain became texture, became timbre, became the authentic foundation for words about cycles of self-destruction and the terrible comfort of familiar damage. Blood made his hands slip against concrete, but that added to the song’s honesty—art that cost something real, art that left physical evidence of its creation.

He lost himself in the repetition, in the building intensity of percussion and vocal delivery that felt more honest than anything he’d created since “Poison Saviors.” This was his song, his process, his choice to dive deeper into the pit that had always been waiting for him.

Strong hands caught his wrists, stopping the relentless rhythm mid-beat as the bag and headphones were yanked off.

“Kieran.” Vale’s face appeared before his, pale with fear, his eyes wide and his cheeks wet with tears.

When did he get here? How long have I been—