The light had enveloped Agent Hawkins right on time, his chinos wrinkling and loafers tapping while he waited impatiently for it to finish. He had been briefed, and had been told to say his goodbyes. They had offered a severance to whoever it would be applicable.
Hawkins knew that they knew there was no one. It stung, the little dance of questions and the many stings involved. And after all he had done, all the remote viewings of crucial info -- though not too crucial. None of it mattered.
Hawkins didn’t matter, and that’s why he was chosen. To those around him it probably looked at Hawkins with boredom. He didn’t act differently, and certainly no external insanity would cause his death. To everyone else it would just look like he fell asleep, no truck or anything else involved.
Various noise of the soup shop and scattered chatter were ping-ponging in the high roofed restaurant. Soup, it was going to look like a fuckin’ joke -- like he drowned in soup. Or maybe not, but the most nerve-racking part of the whole thing was that he wouldn’t know where or when it would happen. All he knew was he couldn’t take it off, and that it would happen eventually.
He played with the ring while he waited to shed the coil, and now that the process had begun to take it off would be to summon his next body as a half formed corpse. It was too late. Perhaps it had always been too late, even after his birth. First breath, and damned from say-go.
The summon ended and he was in the ‘blink’. The tunnel that he had been through so many times before, but all in projections -- ‘shadow forms’ as they had termed them. Monochromia the whole world over, static as far as the eye could see.
Now it was an orgy of many flickering lights intermingling with the crescent eyed laugher of the beings of the static in-between. The things of malice eating and being eaten by benevolent non-minds while chilling claws of celestial bodies dug into foreboding stars that made up the thousand-thousand eyes of creatures unknown. Warped and warped and warped again it felt like the sensations of ten thousand things, pleasurable and painful -- wracked his body to turn it into a jellied mush where the only thing left was a mind hanging on a thread.
Laughter. Screaming. It all intermingled into a nightmare fantasy of obviously cosmic proportions. Hands made of dead stars and threads of celestial gas-bodies made stringy musculature of grand corpses slain from braying beasts of one universe consuming the flesh of a dead other. All so great, so wonderful in scope and horrible in proportion, cast itself like a kaleidoscopic hellscape at one moment and an equally kaleidoscopic eternal bliss where cherubs and angels seraphim and jolly deities made love between tree-clouds of plenty and twinkling waterfalls of magnificent beauty.
Then he warped ever-more, where even these great things were lines on a page and Hawkins' own mind was a lick-spittle shoulder shrug of a suggestion of consciousness. It was all light one moment and all darkness the next. A blinking binary of white and black. Screams and silence.
Then Hawkins was standing, shaken (even for someone as trained as he) in the middle of a marble platform. He was steaming, white curling wisps as he was still dressed in chinos, leather loafers, and a white-collar shirt and brown tie. He kept his breathing semi-stable. He tried to settle his mind back down. But he had seen something. Something that, throughout the whole thing, had watched with silent malice and malicious glee. Soon, though, two others touched down and snapped him from the cold-horror that had crawled itself up his spine -- even more than the fact that ‘he’ was probably face down in a cold bowl of tomato-bisque.
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A girl to his left and a boy to his right. He knew where he was, the summoning hall for the King of the Western Kingdom. He had seen it in monochrome, been cast here before as a silent observer. They knew of him, of them, but they could never see him.
Now they were looking straight at him. The Great Technic and his biomechanical horror. The Twins and their annoying synchronicity. The Generals, though one was conspicuously absent with the other two looking quite worse-for-wear.
And, of course, the boy King -- fifteen and so cold in effect that Hawkins felt a chill in the room radiating from him standing only ten feet away. And his smile watching with none of it meeting his eyes.
“Welcome.” said the twins, the king keeping eye contact with Hawkins. “Oh [Hero]es.”
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Terror ran like thick tar through Thomas’ veins, and so did his feet dig furrows into the ground as he threw away any kind of caution to run through the small ‘hole’ that the ‘cave dwellers’ had left open while rushing towards him. He heard a bit of a laugh, a chuckle like in a distant seat in a theater, and his eyes pivoted (his field of vision shifting in a strange near-360) towards the floating ghost-like projection of Guiro.
“Why are they chasing me?!” Thomas asked as he barreled through a little gray gibbering monster, tossing him in the air and hearing him scream in a gargling warble until he landed somewhere behind him. The closing gap closed further as the dim perfectly-round eyes of the creatures ran towards him faster and faster.
“They’re probably angry about the lack of a massive mana-sink that was here just a couple minutes ago. That was a risk we had to take but --”
Another larger of the gray clad creatures came in with an overhand swing of a stone-chipped tool. Thomas smashed him in the face, his skull caving in on itself as his eyes swung loose of their sockets and he tipped back while floating back with the inertia of the hit. Thomas crawled over him much too fast for even his own liking, and tossed the corpse behind them.
“You’re getting good at this. Soon enough you’ll be casting aside steel-clad knights and silk-robed cultivators.” Guiro complimented him. Thomas tried his best to ignore him, and keep running towards the edge of the crater, having covered enough ground to -- normally -- have made him gasp with exertion. Now, so close to the rim, he couldn’t spare a thought to the new morphology that had changed him.
More, a front facing wall of screaming little monsters, came at him with primitive weapons held high. He didn’t think he even needed to do much of anything, just barreling through the creatures -- with even that breaking bones and shattering teeth, arterial sprays of blood cast in wide arcs.
He was at the edge, each pump of his legs bringing him further from the encroaching horde and closer to the fantasized end of whatever nightmare he was in. Soon he crested the lip and stared for a moment, even with the braying creatures behind him barreling up and trying to catch him. He couldn’t help it -- what he saw was a terror and wonder all at once.
A landscape of devastated old churches, spires that clawed the sky with tips of jewels that refracted the gray-clad light of the sun, broken nature and ancient trees that all seemed to go this way and that with statues that rivaled even the trees in height cracked and missing limbs. Massive rents in the land, large enough to swallow vehicles and definitely people, striped the land with putrid black smoke belching from this one or that.
And all of it was beneath that gray cloud sky dotted with massive shadows of winged beasts.