An eerie glow encompassed a distant violet forming a whole background to the void Cassian stood upon. He gazed up and to a star, an orb of light luminous for only the sky, leaving the ethereal ground and its surround blank. He was naked, but acknowledged it only subconsciously. Cassian began to walk along the nothingness, his feet, with every step, dispatching ripples into the darkness that disappeared from view within meters, disappearing behind a kind of fog of war.
As Cassian sauntered through the empty space, objects began to take form out of the background. First, they assumed shape, and differentiated themselves through colour, and pattern. While similar at first, their uniqueness came to fruition rapidly, and what were initially unidentifiable geometric arrangements became posts, doors, and trees. As the world took shape, Cassian quickly realised he was standing in the middle of a cement street.
Where previously he stood over the abyss he now stood upon Humanity, and felt through the pads of his feet toil and murder. To his left, and his right, sat curbs raising plots of grass upon which sat houses, trees, finely tuned shrubs, perfection squared, and in-ground pools. ‘Suburbia’ he thought to himself, running his hands up his face and back over his hair, flattening it. “Makin’ me feel a little gun-shy.” Cassian smirked the sun’s smirk, wide and to his ears, searching the land for a point of interest, and in finding none amidst the emulations opted to approach the nearest residence, a low ranch style bungalow with needless excesses of brick supporting its subtle use of faux wood siding.
The house was guarded by a low ice-white picket fence set in six inches from the edge of the yard. The grass that approached the sidewalk frayed and transitioned into decay and dirt toiling in the shade of the pickets and waves of weed-killer. Cassian passed through an ajar gate, and weaved his way along a dotted stone path that wiggled right and left, flanked on both sides by pockets of multicoloured flowers set over rich brown mulch. He ascended a set of four stairs leading onto a low, covered wooden deck. It was decorated sparsely with a loveseat swing, two deckchairs, their fabric a cliche blue-striped-white, and a few orange clay flower pots.
The door was deep brown given texture by two central rectangles set out by trenching and supported on either side by heavy boarding, and two tall arched windows with an unnecessary volume of pane-dividers. Each instance of glass between the dividers opened into a rainbow of colour, a spectrum wheel of every conceivable shade round and round, and as Cassian studied one in particular he was drawn in by a force of wind, bringing him to trip forward through the glass, and rendering him dizzy by the motion.
While collapsing Cassian pulled himself into a loose roll, emerging standing on a floating hemisphere in grey-dotted purple space. The township was gone, and all around him objects were moving, floating in patterns or flying through, and past, and off into the unseen distance. Close-up stars sat radiating distinct blue-to-red luminescence, and yet did not blind nor burn him, and further beyond these fantastical orbs lie what Cassian identified as planets with clear distinctions between oceans and continents, and upon which he swore he could see aliens dancing around big bonfires. He had returned to space.
“What beautiful people. . .” Cassian spat with a slur, rearing his head off to the right, and in doing so rocketing himself a thousand miles east, the space around him turning oblong and to a blur as it shot off to the left, and with it the planets and stars were replaced in space and form in turn. To the left thereafter he reversed, and sent himself into another daze. As Cassian rotated so too did the colours he perceived, that formed lines stacked atop lines, casting him freefalling into a whirlpool prism towards its sable base.
The darkness enveloped him, and forced upon his skin and muscle the feeing of rotational motion, ultimately releasing him into a rapidly forming low and wide cave. A singular, almost wet, ‘thump’ placed him central in the space. Cassian felt damp and cold, and brought himself forward into a crouch to avoid scraping his skull on watery stalactite that rendered into existence within seconds of landing. “Oh Cassian—oh. . .” He started to speak amidst a bout of laughter at his narrowly avoided injury, but lost his train of thought as voices pierced his ears from the distance. He perceived a calling, and started towards them. The low room he had arrived in opened to a tunnel tall enough to permit him to come again to stand. The space appeared natural, and lively with creatures shifting to and from holes in the walls that formed a honeycomb pattern and intrigued Cassian enough on his walk to pay heed.
Of the bugs Cassian observed, one in particular stood out among the rest, a beetle of noble origin that glistened with sparkles of purple about its singular central and mighty horn that stood proud with supple curvature and the red stains of victory. It paused its venture between two gaping escapes to bring Cassian to hear its call, and lofted two pincers in vibrational articulations.
“Stride not saunter, infer not listen, and wish… act upon your birthrights, Cassian, act upon them, and arrive where we shall make feast of your flesh and bone.” It spat a shocking hiss, and twitched a forked serpentine at Cassian from betwixt its pulsating pincers. “Longing swallows the brain. . .” It came to cackle harassingly, instilling within Cassian a fury. He lashed out and smashed the wall with his hands, and left his maw agape in silence. His screams fell upon deafness, and in his rage he crushed the bug into a green mush before collapsing back in tears.
“The brain, the brain, swallows the brain…” A voice regurgitated in Cassian’s head, speaking with a sing-song voice… “The brain, the brain, consumes the brain…” He began to shake, and the beads of pain turned into rivers as Cassian came to cry.
The beetle’s laughter rang in his ears for what felt like hours before his weeping surmounted it, revealing again upon the natural patters of the cave. Cassian looked upon the fronts and backs of his hands, studying the cracks, calluses, and discolourations. The natural bend of his fingers accompanying the perceived damage evoked feelings of age and decay. He turned his hands down and planted them into the loose dirt floor, feeling its cool trunk, and using it as a brace to stand again.
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Once vertical Cassian shook loose the lingering dust from his extremities, and proceeded to begin again through the corridor he had been traversing. He crossed a meager ten meters before it opened into a tall circular chamber. The ceiling was decorated with reams of coloured ribbon, wide and with tooled edges displaying a zig-zag pattern of faint gold crossing faint silver. At each end, where the ribbon connected with the wall where it met the ceiling, hung a furtherance of ribbon that twisted into a gyrating spiral giving the illusion of infinity. Between the decor lie frescoes of amazing colour that maintained dynamism that yielded a perception of three dimensional movement distinct at each iteration of colour between the diving reams. Every so often they seemed to metamorphose into recognizability, displaying, at the time of Cassian’s onlooking, an idyllic scene of a farmhouse in the background of rolling fields of green and red and gold before again losing shape and all understanding in the blink of an eye.
The center of the chamber was dominated by two low couches and a lounge upon which sat relaxing humanoid figures who were strangers to Cassian. Two women, and a man, all scantily dressed in brown satin covering little of what he self-described as the bodies of angels, yet otherwise featureless, obscured as if by smoke. The trio laughed and spoke and ate from bowls filled with red grapes, and in doing so paid Cassian no mind, as if they had failed to recognize his entry, and concealed their utterances under whispers of air so loud as to drown out comprehensible speech.
However, the silence of their conversation lasted only shortly. As Cassian breached the threshold of their arrangement of furniture, denoted by a faint dip in the floor, the man, with golden locks of hair that seemed as if to flow about the air as hair would whilst submerged in water, and a sharp, painstakingly cut and symmetrically beautiful face, absorbed Cassian’s attention, adopting the aforedescribed as if like an alien turning human. The man’s smile was fantastic, warming, and inwardly drawing.
“Hello Cassian, could you help me?” The man asked, speaking up in a break from his conversation with the women, as Cassian took another step nearer. The vibrations of sound that gave meaning to the movements of his throat and jaw pierced Cassian’s gustatory glands, and evoked a sense likened to hot chocolate. He set aside a glass of wine onto a central circular dias Cassian had hitherto dismissed in his periphery. The glass found space aside some bottles of a dark liquid, weird orange plastics, and mounds of finite crystal similar in appearance to a powder. They were not Cassian’s, nor of interest to him, his attention remained affixed on the man whose hand he took, allowing himself to be led around the divan towards a wall he could’ve sworn was previously impeded by one of the living frescoes. Now, instead, it gave way through an orange arch into a private space, blockaded by a heavy masking sheet.
The man let go of Cassian’s hand and fell upon a bed of pillows and furs, and in taking this action too shed his coverings and lay before Cassian in all his glory. Every inch of skin wrapped tight muscle, and revealed an almost herculean figure that Cassian couldn’t help but envy. He had grown angry and tired with the entire experience that he demanded of himself should manifest lust, but rather Cassian could only feel a blockading kind of frustration and jealousy. Cassian loathed himself for the power it wielded over him, he felt choked and unable to act naturally. As if wearing a collar he could not remove, and as he leaned in to embrace the man at his behest the world fell apart around him, shattering into pieces of reflective glass playing back, as they fell, the scenes of the cave.
The shattering of the walls devolved into dust and into atoms as they disappeared into the downward void, and all the decor of the room followed in a suit like dominos. The man was gone, and Cassian stood alone and defeated in darkness.
“Fuck my life, and fuck these fucking illusions!” Cassian gripped his hair and tore forth flesh and blood in fistfulls of locks, “I love you, you sick bastard… come back.” He cried out into the abyss that hugged him in cool stillness. Blood trickled down his forehead and temples, and dripped from his chin into nothingness.
His thoughts and statements moved at the speed of light, and with each pass around the centerpoint lacerated the tissues of his brain. “I am self destructive. . .” He shouted out, and beat against his eye that rebounded like a drum, and rattled his skull till it cracked, and in its newfound give lost all music. As silence settled around him, Cassian allowed himself to collapse backwards, and splash through space, emerging on the other side in a pool of a beautiful blue that clung with warmth against his naked skin.
A melodious ‘good morning, good morning…’ rang in the distant sky, a soft blue dotted with puffy ivory clouds. As he surfaced he too stood, and took in a welcome summer breeze that cascaded across his body as lovingly as the spring-water had. The earth around the pool was a kind of tan that yielded quickly to a yellow-green arrangement of grasses that yielded quickly to a verdure of all manner of flowers and ferns serving as a border to an endless forest.
For all the warmth and comfort of this place, Cassian felt dismissed and chastised. He shifted from side to side, and sent floating distant pads dusted with bright white water lilies that slipped from his skin, and left in their place a translucent jelly that radiated spirit and helped to settle his nerves. He wiggled about in place, and moved himself towards the shoreline, ultimately wading up to the sand where he brought himself down onto his knees, leaning in over a range of blooming blankets, buttons, and cones.
The colours were fantastic—vibrant sunrise reds and oranges, pinks, purples, and violets—picturesque flawless beauty each affixed to a loud central bulb protruding a still-life of spikes. The breadth of warmth pulled Cassian in and encapsulated his olfactory senses in pollonous wonder. Never, he thought to himself, had he before experienced a singular scent of such beauty, and in that moment the god that shredded his passions vanished from memory. Engrossed, Cassian edged himself ever forward until his balance gave way and he planted himself face first into the bushes.
His vision devolved through yellow-orange, into green, and finally black where he awoke into a sheet of darkness. He gasped for air and drew only in the fabric of a face covering, and panic ensued. Cassian tore into what lay atop his form, and to no avail sought an edge or corner which to grab and tear into freedom. His throat tightened, and his chest began to pang, feeling full and weighty.
The panic became the sole focus of his psyche, and Cassian’s vision became blurry, beginning to evoke feelings of lost impetus. While his arms moved, and fingers grasped, he felt only numbness, encompassing numbness. In a flash of a second Cassian entered quietus, and felt a singular burst of pain in the center of his chest preceding the nil.