I'm not sure if I judge Doctor Danders adversely. He was certainly deranged, and to be both brilliant and deranged was quite the curse, both to him and to others. It seemed to me that his derangement was afflicted on him solely by the darkness of our world. It could be that he was malevolent, or it could be that he was born with some mental defect, and so blamed his pain on a likely abstract aggressor, not having learned any other way to cope. And yet others might say that being so distressed by the world is unavoidable when one is keenly alert to its esoteric workings. Doctor Danders was assuredly burdened in this way. When in his life he went mad I cannot say, but, as his servants wheeled me on a stretcher through the hallways of his undercroft, I caught glimpses of his life through his brilliant work. Glimpses, I say, for as he brought me to where his labors were hidden only by thin curtains, behind which I saw many a strange shadow, my conscious mind roused only in fits.

I tried to take in as much as I could while awake. The good doctor watched me like a hawk, stabbing me with a needle whenever he observed me awake, but he could never manage to inject a full dose, as my skin would quickly close up around the needle and spit it out. Thus I saw his secrets in slow fading blinks, many of them blurring together in my mind to form macabre chimeras. There were many experiments that I could only guess culminated in 'the infant'. I won't relate them all to you, but I will tell you of the worst (the widow gave all she had, suffering is my tithe). My guess is that they all came from this woman, her body in segments, each attached by glossy tendrils that spread outward from a throbbing ganglia. Between her limbs and fragmented torso was a nexus of wombs like grapes on a vine, life within them straining to be free. She hovered in a green sea, eyes agape, mouth and throat filled with a clear tube. She was unable to move, but something in her look told me that she remembered the world outside her four-by-twelve tank. Her eyes followed me as my precession passed, and if it were possible to see a tear in a pond, she may have shed one as the good doctor stabbed the needle again into my neck.

And I too hovered, returned to my natal aquarium where my oldest dreams were born. Light came from a realm of its own, beyond my realm of darkness. Fiat Lux. It tore a circle, a spherical point embalming a dove, its edges bleeding inward like jagged teeth, piercing ever deeper while my darkness pierced ever outward, two clouds, one of light and one of dark, a third of grey between, and in the center a mountain overtaken by a castle, the towers and battlements and ramparts and barbicans emerging from the mont wherever they could make a breach, the two wrestling, nature and nurture, the castle made by time and the castle made by thought, for thought proceedeth action, and thereupon was I molded out of need.

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The mandala dispersed into its atoms and came down around me in a shower so nebulous, its hues changing to war against the dark that threatened constantly to reassert its dominion, and I, naked nascent nescient I, I hovered in the void within the nebulous hues, eyes unblinking, ungendered as Tau, an embryonic palette that looked upward unknowingly at the simple mundane miracle of color, and only when the color faded away did my loins flower, and with that first determinative act my eyes narrowed, my hands became manly and strong, my skin turned the shade of a drained body long ago exhumed, and I groped vainly at the jellyfish that slowly drifted within my reach, but I could not hold onto her for long, as the fire that burns unquenched in the sea did sting me, and she withered as she floated away and I, armored arduous adamant I, climbed the steps of the mountain amid the mountain, walked into its great hall, and placed upon their thrones the fragments of the founders.

"Are you going swimming? Eris is. She wants to spend time with you. These beaches are beautiful. The water is clear as glass and the sand is white as milk."

I said nothing. I was the only one looking out the north window at the cloud rolling over the horizon. It was dense and curdled, grey at its edges, black in its depths, and it spread as far as I could see both to the east and to the west. I, frightened furious fraudulent I, I covered my ears at the thundering of Jove, and felt a tiny finger light a little candle within my brow, and I saw the thin line of light in the cloud, slipped my hands into it, spread my fingers...

I came to with one of the servants on its knees with its head in my hands. There were four of them on the floor, five when I let go of the one I held. I slipped on blood and water when I panicked, but managed to catch myself and remain standing.