Charleshun Akthikik was a hero, at least he hopes he was. He was a simple mushroom farmer and the roachkin baker’s 8th son. He lived in a multi-hive colony as a peasant many, many, many years ago. He was destined to live and die as a member of the Kithkis caste, the servile cast of most insectkin cities.
He used to dream of riches, of being a warrior that served the court, of glory and wealth that he could ever use in a lifetime. What a fool he was to believe those things. To aspire to become a tool for those in power.
When the otherworlders came, the demons, the cultivators, and the metal, they brought with them new ideas. A lot of them detest oppressive systems, but just as many used these systems to procure power stating that this is how the world works. Charleshun was of the former, having seen the atrocities made by those who hurt his loved ones.
He formed a gang of misfits scrounged up from the dregs of society. One was a disgraced rat prince that was probably gay, or not. Honestly he probably doesn’t even know it yet. Next was a red-haired human with more booze than sense. She has good ideas though…. sometimes. A batkid that always said the most embarrassing things coupled with a short fuse. What’s the word that? Oh yeah, cringe! He was cringe. Last was a goblin mathperson that did math things. Really loved math, except he was bad at it.
Charleshun didn’t know how they managed to topple the sin lords from other worlds, but they managed somehow.
He was Charleshun, the dawn of rebellion. He was powerful enough to topple kingdoms single-handedly, but he knew he was never fit to be a ruler. Because he knew that he was still the nymphling back in a mushroom farm that wanted peace. His brown glossy chitin now darker, and his once bright eyes now duller still held the same spirit of a child yearning for what was lost.
Now he’s alone here in an empty void, trapped in a prison made of patterns, without his friends or loved ones. Cursed to repeat the same pattern of thought for all eternity. He remembers each one and he forgets it every time the cycle begins again. Ironic that the one who made cycles is trapped in one can’t even break. He’s tried several times already. He even tried to obliterate his sputtering soulflame in a desperate hope for annihilation and ego death, only for it to drag him back here and repeat a neverending loop forever. Now no one can save him. At least he made sure everyone was safe.
He misses them. He misses La hire and their ceaseless rants. He misses Judith cheating at cards. He misses Wyatt and his awful attempts at wooing women. And he misses his rival Dennis always plotting something trivial. He was glad he knew they existed, even if he was stuck here.
So he weeps silently again for a number of times that he has lost count of. He’ll forget, he always does. Then remember it in the emptiness again, and again, and again. So he starts forgetting his name again, then the farm, then he forgets his face, then the foods he’s tasted, the life he lived, his friends, then the very words that he uses to speak. So it wraps around him in the darkness, in a pattern that screams forever.
So he counts down from memory to memory until it silently becomes nothing anymore.
..1
…2
…3
Now he forgets his name.
….
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
He waits for a moment.
He can still remember his name.
He can make new sentences again. He can have new thoughts again! He hopes that this is not another cruel trick of his memory. He clings to it, he clings to the void that imprisons him. He clings to the patterns desperately trying to rip the thing that is immutable.
The void of patterns ripple as if in pain.
Then it bends as it has never done so before.
Then it sings a new song.
The emptiness, ever-permanent and inconcievable, shakes.
A hand bronze, flaming, and smells like excrement, shattered the darkness. Flames burned him and spread all around him and he cried.
Salvation
The patterns warped and sung a new song. Not one of memory and cycles, but of a serene burning palace away from all burdens.
He knows this place. It was Judith’s soul realm. The realm was a pristine palace with embers illuminating the sky. It existed beyond reason. A set of symbols he could never decode, but understand fully.
नित्यं ज्वलन्तं स्वर्ग
The ever-burning heaven. He said under his breath, struggling to pick up the shattered semblance of his psyche.
A wheel formed of blue cold light around him searing his very chitin. The fire around him promised oblivion, it promised total and true annihilation. The wheel promised him silent mercy, it promised absolution and end. The two things wrapped around him. He can form new thoughts again. He can feel again.
He was in pain, he was dying, he was being reborn. He knows again. Words fill him of a world beyond the forgotten. He can speak new/old words, he breaths the burning air as the wheel suffocates his soul and brings it life.
Pain, Terror, Love, Hope, Joy, Memory, Hatred, Scorn, Pity, Ecstasy filled him as if he was a worm that was given the thoughts of all beings that is was and will ever exist.
Blinding words flooded him, old and new concepts seared through his psyche, breaking him and showing him the terrifying beauty of existing. It was too much. Far too much as new rules carved itself in his very being.
A wheel was there. One that bound him and also set him free.
What else could he do except scream at the beauty of it all.
Then a light spreads and forces everything to flicker and burn.
Then a spark filled the room
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wyatt was furious! Dennis was off to the mausoleum after interrogating the four guards. He didn’t need their help to open the way, after all he made this very tomb and tower. He scratched the space he occupied and displaced it. He reached the core of the dream room in record time.
*Shhhhpoooommff!*
That sound has been happening all morning and he just knew Dennis was there. He didn’t know what was happening, but he sensed a divine entities’ intervention detected by the few hundred scanners he spread around the area.
A fucking God messed with his tower! I mean it’s not his per say, but it might as well be.
*SHHHHPOOOOMMFF!* A snapping sound reached outside the non-room, vibrations escaping where matter did not exist.
He shoved the keys that he took from the four guards into the mechanism and ripped the shapeless gate from it’s metaphorical hinges.
He was a frankly, a fucking great space mage that could seal almost anything, yet the stronghold he made for his friends in hopes to one day bring them back was now a forest. The room he made out of thought and dreams, which is incredibly hard by the way, was now some grotesque mockery of a garden with flesh colored skies and pulsing ground. Everything here was alive, sickeningly alive. The air and stone was now sentient, the space was decomposing and reproducing, and time itself could feel everything around it.
His tower was now having a literal tumor growing inside it. Granted that it probably wouldn’t destroy his stacked dungeon-tower-mausoleum, but it meant a mockery to him and he just couldn’t have that.
“Shhhhhpaaaang!”
He ran through the rooms.
The hall that used to house complex arrays now a garden, check. La Hires tomb which was a transfinite spiral suspended in non-space, check. Judith’s room with no woman frozen in time inside it, che-
He back-tracked at the scene in disbelief.
A sound of shattering glass filled the area, snapping Wyatt out of his daze and refocused.
He quickly ran to the last room that was left. The room of his former party leader, Charles.
What he saw was three very exhausted looking pieces of shits. One bloody rat bastard fully nude covered in gore, face first, ass front, on the ground making Wyatt blush. A red-haired terror bleeding from all her orifices screaming and breaking rock. And a Roachman spasming and emitting a shrill chirp in the ground covered in vomit.