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Hollowed Divinity
3 - Confinement

3 - Confinement

“So, here’s the thing,” Aila’s sister said while clearing her throat, “we’re going to have to keep you alone until you find a name.”

“You’re going to confine me?” Hale was flabbergasted. It’s like they kept piling more shit onto more shit. He really had no idea what to think anymore, this was all just so ridiculous.

“I wouldn’t think of it that way,” She said before pausing for a moment before continuing, “I’ve heard that meditation can speed up the process. But, it’s really not that bad.”

Hale fell silently into thought. She wasn’t going to tell him anything else and he could tell that she was getting annoyed. She seemed to be much less forgiving compared to Aila.

In the end he was brought along to a new room that was on some basement floor. It was completely empty inside besides a lone toilet. The room was also covered in white padding. It looked exactly like a room out of a mental asylum. Maybe he was in one right now and hallucinating? No, probably not. Probably. Hale calmed himself and stepped in before the door slammed and locked behind him. There was a singular bright white light in the room and the place had tall ceilings so he had no chance to touch it. The light plus the white padding made for a nearly blindingly bright white room with nothing to do.

Hale spent the first few hours pacing around the room. He had gotten time to be completely alone and spent that time to absorb and catalog all of the new information he had been exposed to before coming up with some rudimentary plans. By the end of the first twelve hours Hale had calmed himself and gotten a decent grasp on the situation he was in. What he wouldn’t realize until much later was that the Hale from before his awakening wouldn’t have accepted the situation so fast or been so calm through the whole endeavor.

The comment about meditating hadn’t slipped Hale’s mind either. He was fairly sure that this whole thing was about his ‘concept’, whatever that was. He was now grateful that he had gone through a short spiritual phase and had learned to meditate.

He sat and tried to meditate for another few hours until he heard a sudden bang from the door. Looking up from his criss-crossed position he saw a slate in the door had opened that he originally had not noticed. Then he watched as a tray filled with food was pushed through. Hale let out a relieved sigh, he had started to get hungry hours ago and had been hoping that they’d feed him and not just let him starve. The food wasn’t even half bad.

After finishing the food and sliding the tray back through the slit Hale sat back down and returned to his meditation. He was starting to feel like a proper monk. It could have been placebo but Hale felt significantly calmer and more clear-headed, but at the same time his frustrations were growing since nothing had happened and he wasn’t even sure what was supposed to happen.

Time passed and at least another day passed but Hale had long ago lost track of what time it was. He was relying on the food drop offs to know how much time had passed.

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On the third day, or what he presumed to be the third day, he had given it some thought and came to the conclusion that the only thing he felt changed were his eyes so this day he decided to focus on that. After getting back into his meditative stance he began to focus on his eyes. At first nothing happened but at some point his eyes began to hurt. It felt as if he was staring at a light yet he had his eyes closed.

Then it was gone. And Hale was left in the padded room. But Hale was absolutely ecstatic. At first he had started taking it seriously because he had nothing else to do in the room but now that he felt that light it changed everything. It was euphoric, the light wasn’t even bright, it was quite dim or dark but it gave the feeling of being bright. It was a contradiction but there was no other way to explain it.

Hale then spent the next two days trying to recreate that feeling but nothing was happening and it had started to affect his mental state. Some have called solitary confinement a cruel and inhuman punishment, Hale never understood that point of view until now. He really felt time slipping away from him, it was a surreal feeling.

The next day, he decided to slightly change his plan of attack and focused on the one thing that had a concrete change during his awakening. His eyes. He focused on the feelings he felt in his eyes and what he saw while his eyes were closed. The meditation was slow but later that day something miraculous happened. He saw a bright light, as if entering “the light” when dying and he felt a connection. It was like a part of himself, the feeling you have of knowing where your arms are without having to look was how it felt. Hale focused up and stretched out to reach that feeling and some understanding seeped into his mind. It was like he was unlocking memories he had always had but had forgotten about. He suddenly knew his concept.

He opened his eyes, a refreshed feeling on his face. He felt complete, but he also had a pit in his stomach from being ripped away from that something. After collecting his thoughts Hale stood up and started banging on the door. After a couple minutes the slat that food usually came through opened up and after some explaining, Aila's sister came to the door half an hour later.

“So, what’s the name of your concept?” She said in a disbelieving tone. It had to be known that many times this exercise is something that most people would fail to grasp within the first week and they would be let out at that point and given the chance to try again in a couple months. If one was rather skilled they would get it in their second week, and only the greatest could grasp it on the last day of the week. This situation of having someone grasp their concept on the fourth day was not something that she had ever seen before. Of course, this was far from the first time in all of history but from her limited experience this was unbelievable.

“I never got your name the first time.” Hale said, slightly smug and still riding the euphoria from him touching upon his concept.

Her face creased up as her eyebrows pushed together. This was obviously not amusing to her but she responded anyway, “Shira.”

“Well, Shira, my concept is…” Hale held his tongue for a moment, not for dramatic effect but because he felt some sort of energy pushing into his mind and body, coating it all as he said the next words, “Hidden Knowledge.”

With that said the headache from when he first awakened came back, and even Shira and the guard that stood next to her found themselves rubbing their temples in pain as a rhythmic pounding pervaded their mind. His violet eyes began to glow, and the shadows around the room darkened as eyes opened within the shadows. Hundreds of eyes all staring at Hale.

He had now officially stepped onto the path of godhood, and left something precious behind.