I am here, but where are you?

The night is dark here. I don’ t know how I got here, I don’t even know where I am. The only thing reminding me that I am still alive is You. Me knowing that I have to find you, will to You. I don’t have to know who or what I am. Knowing that I’m looking for you is enough.

I cannot remember when was the last time I saw the Sun, the blue sky or gray clouds. Everything but the black sky full of alien stars is but a memory lost a long time ago, reminding itself as nightmares every time I sleep. I don’t remember how I got here. I cannot be certain that “here” is actually here, that I am here. That this world is something else than a wraith in my mind.

What do people look like? How does water taste? I can no longer remember. Time holds no meaning here, there is only eternal darkness. Awaking and falling asleep between worlds, from one world into another, all of them essentially identical. If I only could, I would name one of these worlds a dream and would thus bring order under the black starry sky, but I cannot. Every time I try to bring order to the place, everything is lost once more, the next time I wake up.

I don’t know if I am alone here. Sometimes I hear the echoes of footsteps on the other side of my beingness, the other side of the limit of my universe. Steps which awaken either memories or phantasms of a frail two-legged creature who is like I was once, but yet is not. Often moans of pain and wails of torture accompany these steps and then later I hear these steps again and the worn out crying that comes with, as if all power had been sapped from them.

Sometimes however I hear the Universe itself vibrating as would the strings on a guitar. I cannot be sure if these sounds originate from some place other than myself. Can these be anything else at all but evil visions conjured up from within me? Could they at all have “their own connection” to that distant and eternal sky full of stars?

I don’t know. I no longer know nothing. The worlds are indistinguishable, reality, dream and phantasm are indistinguishable. And I have stopped trying to understand. It is not real. I am not real. Nothing is real. It is all a single nothingness dancing with itself to not go mad and lose itself. It is nothingness that is afraid to perish when it loses its cycle of awakenings. Afraid to lose itself through it, to forget that it exists.

Please forgive me! I have lost You. I no longer know how to escape from here. How to reach You. I no longer know how to help You. The only thing left to me are these phantasms I see again and again. To awaken from one phantasm or a bout of nostalgia into another. To awaken into darkness devoid of even stars.

I don’t want to wake again. I want to stay here, at the end of the phantasm. Remembering, but no longer living.

*

It always begins the same, with me in my cell under the barred window, which is letting in faint starlight. My hands and legs are tied up and my body lies on a soft leathery floor under the window. I don’t know how I got there, I don’t know where I am, what I do know is that there is no escape. That this is my fate, to wait for the end in some cell, forgotten. For the end that never comes. That the only thing I can do is to watch the starry sky turn into a blackened darkness and then blackened darkness back into the starry sky.

I hear voices in my universe. Voices and sounds of which I cannot tell whether they come from within me or the space around me, sounds with which I cannot relate in any way. Sometimes it feels like they don’t originate from one or the other but from some third place after all, from outside space. These voices speak about me. The say that my time is coming. They want to help me, free me of my torture. Sometimes they are accompanied by faint guitar sounds which often predict the return of the voices.

I know I must escape, escape as far as possible from these voices. But there is no release. However much I escape in my wishes and phantasms, still I find myself bathing in the light of distant stars, still here, still waiting. Being afraid of voices coming closer and closer, speaking of me more and more, but never reaching me. They laugh about me, mock my torture. And the feeling within me of needing to escape, to get away grows stronger. Even death would be the sweetest companion to me. But I cannot. I am but a rock in the middle of a field, under the unbearably hot Sun. Nothing more.

And then… something changes. The starlight changes. It is no longer just a glow coming from the window, stroking my face and also the soft and pale floor. It is something more. It is the Moon. The Moon is my only solace. Pale Moon raising into the sky reminding me that I am still at home. That I am again, or still, in the world where I was born in, that I still have some relation to the world outside the place I have been cast into.

The brightest and warmest moments of my current life all happen in the light of the Moon. The Moon always reminds me of You. You were lost in the moonlight and I see and feel that same pale Moon in the sky, which uses it’s devilish light to obscure all those alien and evil stars around it which usually torture me. Which are trying to convince me that I am completely alone, that besides me and the face there is nothing else but them and the empty endless space which keeps us apart. They are standing there, far away from me, disinterested but they keep observing my torture as a source of bland entertainment they force themselves to watch. Not that they would like it, but only because it is unpleasant to me.

And then something changes again. The Pale Moon suddenly turns blue. The moonlight itself turns blue and I can feel it, I can feels its weight, its pressure. I feel how cool it is, stroking my face. I see it shine through everything that lies between me and it. How the walls of my cell turn as ephemeral as starlight. The shine of the Blue Moon cleaves apart my universe and show me that it is not a Universe, that outside of it lies another world. Much bigger and wider than everything I have thus far experienced or even imagined.

I feel myself change as well. I feel that I have a body, a head and face, arms and legs. I feel tied up. That I’m lying on a soft floor. And then suddenly, I feel like the bonds around my hands and feel loosen. I feel how I just pull my hands apart, pull my hands through the bonds. As if the bonds, or myself had suddenly turned into a ghostly moonlight. I stand up to see the bonds which now lie on the floor, unbroken.

I slowly get up and stretch myself in the moonlight. I admire my skin and clothes which shine like You did on that fateful misty night. The wall before me no longer looks like a wall, more like a curtain of rain, painted by the light of the moon, being no significant barrier to me. I am just stepping through it into the bright circle of light on the other side. I take a breath of the cool and vaporous night air and jubilate in my escape. That the Blue Moon helped me, that it doesn’t just spirit people away to… that I can still retrieve you.

And then darkness falls. The blue moon disappears, the moonlight goes out, as if somebody had turned the switch. Only a faint glow remains behind the clouds and the Suns of far and forgotten star systems reappear, still grinning at me. Darkness falls all around me and brings along the feeling that I have not escaped. That I may be further from my cell but but it changes nothing. That I am still doomed, in a cold and dark, soaking and foggy night. In an alien world in which home is but a warm memory. Oblivion, amid a cold black town of the dead.

All of a sudden, yellow electric light ignites. All the windows of the gigantic castle behind become illuminate, reminding me how big it is. Reminding me how small and insignificant I am. And then I hear the barking of hellhounds and ringing of alarm bells.

I start running. Towards wall of fog in the distance hanging above the grassy field. I don’t care what lies ahead, be it a graveyard, open graves, scary dark forest or something so evil and scary that it needs no nature to keep people away, only its own unexplainably frightening mystery. Which at the same time is natural and yet monstrous. To which everything normal is but a hollow spectacle.

I don’t know what’s going in. I run through the fog, not knowing where I am running in. Not knowing whether or not there is a void under my next step, cutting me down and dooming me. I don’t care. Doom of every kind is netter than ending up back in there.

I stop for a moment, sensing that the barks of the dogs have grown distant. Likewise the castle awash with light on top of the hill from which I escaped has grown distant. Not yet far enough, it is still appearing far away in the distance, slowly creeping closer.

I continue running. Across the wasteland until I a reach an empty roadway hidden in the fog. It makes me feel safe. Knowing that I am back home. In a world that at least looks like the world I once knew. In which I once was and walked as if it was mine. And then I see it. Far away, precisely that far that I can see the railroad tracks crossing the road, lying at the border of the wall of fog. I walk closer to them and look at the broken pavement between the rails.

Everything around me is so bright, even though the sky above me is black, full of faint stars. It feels like all the light radiating from the milky mists around me is as pale as the moonlight. Maybe paler. As if the Moon had found some other route to illuminate me and the world. It had even asked the night fog to render assistance.

I walked along the rails, only to discover it was only a pair of rails. Two seven meter pieces of rebar in the correct shape for use by trains. It came from nowhere, it went to nowhere. There wasn’t even a railway dam visible anywhere. Only emptiness. Only barely visible gray field of grass. Only this wall of fog emitting soft light. The ebbs and flows of which looked to be in a constant play of twists and vortices while the greater mass stood still.

Suddenly, I feel something freeze in me. Some kind of feeling of direction appears, which forces me to continue onward. Not along a safe edge of the roadway where the only dangers are the fog and mysterious ghostly vehicles speeding in the night which take people along with them and then after disappearing behind the turn, evaporate into the night. No, instead I head across the field by the side of the road. A field that always stays mowed, where grass is always low, despite nobody having herded animals or cut hay there for over 30 years.

I look back and see the fog close after me. Becoming again a uniform wall. Returning to try pass through it seems like both an insurmountable decision as well as bottomless stupidity. I know the fog would not let me pass, even if I tried, it would throw something before my feet to trip on. Just to remind me the lesson that grandparents teach their young as the first thing in life: you cannot go against nature.

But I don’t have to return. I feel like something is pulling me along if it it has tied a line to me. I feel that if I follow the pull, then in the end I will find You. A feeling that the path I have taken is the correct one to reach you despite all the dangers. A feeling that I cannot be wrong if I only trust myself.

Slowly, low junipers begin to emerge from the mists. First there were lone bent and twisted trees like headstones in a huge yet barren cemetery, of which the fog was allowing me to see only a small section. I am not afraid. That is the weirdest thing.

It is the middle of the night, I am at a place no villager would dare to step in the dark for the fear of creatures both real and imagined. Ghosts and the undead, those men in black from the North, whose cars seems to float above the ground. Spirits, monsters, sky people in silvery encounter suits. The forest people living in the Crazy Woods. Or all those people who have gotten lost in the Devil’s Mire without ever returning. From lost vikings and crusaders to Russians militarymen who sneaked to the Mire to relieve themselves.

I’m not afraid of anybody. Not even this weird fog or moonlight flowing around me, showing me the way and at the same time following me. I am not afraid despite having already taken more than ten steps into the Heavenmire. In the middle of the night. In the middle of the fog. In the middle of a cool recognition that it might be a Thursday. That all the elements for the Witches’ Night and the Black Moon are coinciding. I know there is a time when all forces magical, unknown to the human kind and indiscernible in time and space are at their maximum. When it is prime time for all those beings who the mediums divide up into ten kinds of star people. Each of whom have have filled the lands with their bases regular people cannot even find because all the qualities of that matter lie outside of what can be perceived with the five senses known to us.

And still I am not afraid. I look at the mists flowing away and uncovering something from underneath. Smoldering remains of a farmstead right next to a large bog pool. I head towards it, feeling the sting of wet smoke in my nostrils. Only the corners still stand, the bog has claimed everything else back, some of it has been destroyed, but some has been preserved for all eternity. The bog has chosen to preserve these to commemorate the injustice that transpired here. To remember and remind everyone who happen to come here that that it is all their fault. Fault of those who said to themselves that it does not concern them.

Here is the border people have demarcated. Border between what is known to them and what is not, yet what they want to meet, what they want to learn of. A border between human world and secret knowledge. And it is also a border of human will. Between the areas of what they want and how much they are willing to sacrifice for what they want. This is the border where the fog is no longer my friend. Where the fog no longer cares. Where the fog no longer gives me way but forces me to continue. This is the last place of living, dying and resting for the Metsla family.

Under these same ruts and plants of Labrador tea, between stunted and twisted junipers. Here was the border both in time and space. Here ends Heavenmire and begins the new Devil’s Bog. Here, the fall of man begins due to him thinking that to interpret is to understand. That knowledge is only information, that magic only lies in rituals, and life opposed death. Her the fall of man begins with thinking that knowledge gives power but demands nothing in return.

I leave behind the remains of the Metsla farm and try to go on, but fall on my knees in damp ruts. It feels like something has grabbed my head and is now twisting it hard towards the ground. Forcing in ever novel knowledge of things I possess no faculty to understand. Which I can describe only as I am doing it right now. Pain I can feel but the source of which I do not know, pain arising from… knowing. From knowledge being incompatible with the organics. I can feel the tears on my face and enormous emptiness in my chest produced by this knowledge.

I have to continue. I have to get up, I have to… I have to! Find! You! Yet the knowledge is telling me that I cannot find You. Knowledge is telling me that I cannot get to you. It is saying that you are lost forever. That You were lost even before I lost you. Just that it was not allowed for me to understand why or how. Or when.

I wipe my tears and rise again. I do not trust knowledge. Knowledge creates emptiness, knowledge always lies. Because I cannot, the human kind cannot understand knowledge the correct way. All our tools are useless. Two and a half thousand years of philosophy and mathematics are but drops in the ocean we live in. Just a dull spark in the magical fire which burned on this planet millions of years before us or the dinosaurs, and the glow of which still surrounds us, even if we cannot see it. Ancient magicks next to which our technological achievements are just a rotting crutch we use to prop ourselves away from the ground, towards the heights but also towards the bottomless black pit.

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I do not trust knowledge. I have faith. I believe I can find you again. I don’t know from where. I don’t know how. I only know I have to move forwards. I know I have a lot to learn, I know there are many things I am not able to understand but which nevertheless needs to be poured into my brain and consciousness in order to find you again. Knowledge may lie to me, but I don’t care. Knowledge may try to convince me that I am mistaken, but I do not care about that either. I want to find you again. And I will.

Knowing. This place. Devil’s Bog, the Forbidden Forest on the background… they can do all they want, torture me with knowing and understanding for as long as they want. They can force me to carry a lantern to the market and preach the hidden history of the entire world. I care little about that. I am not letting my mind or my nails go of neither you nor of this world before I have found You. Not until I have seen You one last time alive and free. Not until I have laid my fingers on your skin once again.

I am walking the fog between bog pools. I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know even if I’m going straight. There are but two things I do know: in the fog and straight across the Devil’s Bog, no man has yet returned to tell of his travel. And second, up until now, no bottomless pit of muck had I found under any of my steps. But now I am thinking there is a third thing as well: I know where I need to get to. I know what I must do to reach You.

I must understand that like mathematics and philosophy are mere drops in the ocean, so is all religion. I sense something lying beyond, but the fog will not reveal it from underneath itself before I start stumbling on forgotten headstones and footpaths. Not before I reach the vaulted walls. I don’t need to see it, I already know.

People say that shadowed in the most poisonous and alien woods of the Devil’s Bog and the Forbidden Forest, there stand the ruins of an old chapel. Chapel and the graveyard around it are a memory of a village which got in the way of a base when it was being built in the 1940s. Just a memory and nothing else. Just like the bog is letting damp smoke rise from the burnt remains of the Metsla farmstead on the nights when mists wave high and strong, the Devil’s Bog, or rather the Forbidden Forest has decided to preserve this chapel.

The chapel may be within the swamp, but this is no swamp. Under the bottomless layers of peat are the twisted roots of the Forbidden Forest which the woods have sewn into the earth for decades. Starting from the moment when the people who lived here were ripped away and taken from their land, their food and their lives, and the other humans used violence to re-imagine the swamps and the forests.

Maybe somewhere else in the world this would have succeeded, but not here. Here, separate rules were in place. Here, the swamp and the forest conquered the village, revealing that gunpowder has no domain over forests which had sourced their power from starlight aged millions upon billions of years. From starlight which was billions of years old even back when our Universe was but a hot soup of newborn matter.

Here the Eastern and Western Holy Roman Churches with their silver and bronze crosses met both black sections of Soviet armed forces, as well as a special mission of the Third Reich, sent by their government-in-exile in Argentina. Here was their secret battleground nobody remembered nor admitted to. Because a mixture of magic and rituals aged between thirteen years and thirteen thousand years destroyed everything living.

Truth be told, nobody knows what happened. Not the soldiers, no the villagers. Only nature itself knows, only the Forbidden Forest itself knows. What happened was what was supposed to happen. Magic ignites magic. And a meeting of such forces, millions of faithful across the world, awakened the magic that the star folk had left behind here. Only for moment did it awaken, only to protect itself from the eyes of those who do not possess the faculties for comprehending it.

Does the sky folk not visit this place for that reason? Would they also not want to participate in worshiping the Old Gods and the power they have dominion over? The power they learned to feel and govern a long time before discovering our star system and this corner of the world. A power which they developed and practiced undisturbed to learns it’s peculiarities and mysteries. Here was the perfect place to do it, as this corner of the world was relatively quiet compared to the dead planet in the light of the black stars hanging in the sky. And then at one point they all returned to their black stars, and after them, all others came. To research and otherwise delve into everything that the star folk did not bring away with them. To use it to develop a magic and a world around us these days. The most primordial power of the Old Gods and the Star Folk.

Argh! Again I fall to my knees. Again, pain. Again knowing, grinding itself against my spirit and mind right inside my skull. As if grinding away my brain to make more room inside my skull, to become a new sensory organ which would allow me to fathom all this history and magic. Again, emptiness in my chest getting deeper. A feeling I cannot remediate.

Again, the knowledge ridicules me, saying that I cannot win. I cannot continue. That my only hope is to give up. If I at all want to remain who I am and not lose myself into the Forbidden Forest or the Crazy Woods. That my only hope is to surrender to my fate chasing after me and not continue. That You are lost. That I will also be lost should I continue my search. That I will never find You but become like ordinary folk of the Crazy Woods who worship a stick on the ground as the center of their world.

I do not believe in knowing. I do not trust it! It lies! It wants to turn me away from my way. Back. It knows! It knows where You are! It knows why you are there. It won’t tell me! But I do not care! I will get my hand on all of those answers! I will get my hands on… You. Once yet again. I will find You!

Slowly, I push myself back onto my shaking feet. I don’t know for how long I have lain in the fog near these ruins, but all my clothes are wet. For how long? The answer has no meaning. Here it is irrelevant. This night is unending, this fog is unending. The World and the Forbidden Forest will hold onto the night for as long as it is necessary for me to find You or to surrender. And nobody will ever know! None of the living will ever know!

Again I feel I must continue. But now I know where. Into that patch of forest nearby. Into the Forbidden Forest where fog is no longer the king, but instead the forest itself with its endless paths and mysteries. I start running. Through the misty brush, through the dried and dead woods and over thick roots jutting out of the ground and creating an obstacle course for me. It was impossible to find the proper path between them. But I have no interest in a proper path. I know where I have to reach.

Somewhere in the Forbidden Forest is a lake on the bank of which strange events come to pass. The lake by which You became moonlight and disappeared. Somewhere in the forest is our playground, old vaulted cellars now half-filled with mud. Somewhere is a fire ring around which the youth gathered to drink beer and play guitar. And they are still gathering around it, despite nobody knowing who they are and where are they from. And somewhere is an abandoned and forgotten church the existence or even the appearance of which nobody remembers. It it not just a simple church, it is something more grand. I can sense it’s tall walls and airy cupola with broken and fallen in sections, along with a broken steeple and belfry.

A church is a church, regardless of the religion. Regardless of who is using it. It is and will forever be a holy place. Something more than just a building. Even when forgotten and abandoned, even when overgrown with ivy and other plants. Even with a half-broken cupola, the arches of which the mosses have broken into dust. I don’t know how old it is. I don’t know if the concept of age even applies to it. To call it a church and possibly a cathedral, I do it so only because that is what it reminds me of. I have no idea if it has ever been used for worship and for whom. The moon and the stars? Christian gods? The mystical pantheon of the star folk and the Old Gods? Some third party who has drifted along in space for so long that it no longer has a name?

It is not of any importance. They only thing that is of importance it that it now stands before me. I can sense it. I can feel the walls and the arches with a sense that lies beyond my five senses. I can sense that You are there, that it is related to You. I can feel that I must enter this place. I can even feel that tonight, something must happen in there. Something I have no idea about. Something big, heavy, powerful and… unbelievably ancient. Older than the village or the Forbidden Forest itself. Here, tonight… when time starts moving again something will happen that is so incomprehensibly old that it can only be related to the star folk. Or perhaps… it remains unnoticed even to the star folk, because it is so inconsequential.

And You! You are in the middle of it all!

Something awakens in me and thirsts for life, as I sneak along the edge of the building with my heart fluttering. I try to peek in through the windows as I pass them, I try to find the smallest view port through the piles of refuse and broken benches heaped in front of the windows. I am unsuccessful. I cannot see anything. Only broken and still breaking pieces of desiccated wood.

But there is something else, something I cannot see. Something that cannot be seen at all. Something in me tells me that this church is desecrated. Something in me know it. Knows, that hundreds of years ago, it was built as an important Lutheran church, but years perhaps even decades before the church and the village were wiped off the face of the Earth, something happened. The youth of the village started to act out against the public order as well as the church elders. They destroyed the interior of the church, ruined the holy icons and statues, they even broke the silver cross in half. All Christian imagery was throw aside and was replaced with a stone tablet depicting weird underwater plants, which was found in a field near the Southern Village. Reportedly it got there a long time ago when a nearby grove was cleared away and the secret buried within were covered up for all time.

I advance slowly, towards the other side of the building, towards the main entrance hidden on the other side the blackened thicket. On the other side of all remaining options to stumble in a rut or a hidden root on the ground and fall face first on a sharp little stump. To have it penetrate my neck or eye and thus become yet another lost name and forgotten face. To become yet another random skeleton in the Forbidden Forest, offering my blood and flesh to fertilize both its future and growth.

A few steps further, some more tall grasses were hiding stones fallen from the church walls. Also copper decorations covered in heavy patina, but otherwise still as sharp as ever. And suddenly there I was, before the doorless main entrance to the desecrated church, looking into an empty dark hall. Sparse rows of black wooden pews between pillars that supporting the vaulted ceiling, bewitching in their slimness. Some of the pews had collapsed on their own, others had marked signs of violence inflicted on them. And these were not the original pews either. Older items much more elaborate in decoration were piled up into the windows so that people outside could never see what transpired within. Only faint glow of light may have been seen when young men in red hoods carried out their rites with the help of books secretly taken from the Institute.

This church had stood desecrated for years now. Older people said that no man could be alone in the Forbidden Forest. A presence of somebody else always lingered along. This may have also been the reason why the youth were attracted into the forest in groups. But the church was made of a completely different stone. Here, not only a presence could be felt but also the presence of something alien. The presence of something that did not originate from under our Sun. Something which called the eternal depths of the world’s seas its home. A place where life had a completely different meaning than in sunlight. Where one could find tons of little animals with transparent and sometimes bioluminescent bodies. The depths which had gigantic oily black tentacles as its masters. Tentacles which seemed to have no beginning. Which rose from the deep caves as if sensing that another consciousness was present. Trying to reach for it to destroy it. So it would never carry a message to the surface that a portion of the star people had never left, that they were only slumbering in the secret places of this world, waiting for the time when man and all his folly with its 110 chemical elements have fallen into dust.

Signs, that the alien and blood-curdling knowledge now invading my brain was the real truth, were everywhere around me. Air in this church was forever full of mist and carried a salty taste. The pews around me had no moss or lichen like in a clean breathing forest, only mold of different colors. And to top it all, there was no sign of a pulpit at the other end of the hall. Christian God who had created the world because he had no ability to see what lay beyond his unending had long since been exiled from this church.

Instead of the pulpit, there was a stone platform, and on top of that, right under the fallen in cupola, there was a wide table. Perhaps an altar... full of countless small nicks, as if numerous lives had flowed through here. Hundreds of people who had been tied to this altar only to be sacrificed under strange planets and stars to some unknown Sea God. Sleeping on the ocean bottom of a moon orbiting some distant gas giant. Using each night to seep into the dreams of all men who have unknowingly opened their minds by learning of it’s existence.

I slide my fingers along the iron railing on the edge of the altar table. I can not find any use for them. Why are they here? To tie up the sacrifice? As decorations? As part of a ritual where the intersection of stone, steel, human blood and “closed words” lie? “Closed words...” the secret words that the human vocal apparatus is not capable of sounding out in their true form.

Not far from the altar there stands a huge block of stone. Almost three meters tall, over one and a half wide. A massive upright sarcophagus. But this is no sarcophagus. There are no secret texts or signs, just a big stone pillar of orderly shape. Brought into this church for some unknown purpose. For which, I cannot tell, and neither can that defiling secret knowledge breathed into me from the mists of the Devil’s Bog and Forbidden Forest.

Suddenly, the cloud continents in the sky drift apart and I can feel the moonlight falling on me. It bathes everything around the altar in a ghostly radiance and undoes the darkness, uncovering infinitely more detail than my eye should be able to perceive. The bloom shines especially brightly onto that big rectangular stone standing before me. And the stone no longer looks like a stone, the moonlight paints it a block of ice which I now see is clearly sublimating in the light, giving off jets and outflows resembling dry ice or even liquefied nitrogen.

What are you doing here?” A dreamy voice asks of me.

It stops the blood in my veins, freezes the heart. The world suddenly become a thousand times more phantasmal and a thousand times more real.

I turn around slowly and… You! It is You, standing before me! Looking like you last did when I saw you, made of bright shimmering moonlight which now cast from the opening in the cupola. You are not sublimating like the block of stone behind me, at the same time I can see through your figure. I can also see how the outline of you which is not illuminated by moonlight is constantly dissipating as mist or smoke.

“I… I am...” I am unable to form any coherent thought or word.

“What are you doing here?” You ask again in that distant dreamlike voice, as if the words were being repeated on a magnetic tape.

“I came to find you, Rheya!” I could finally utter.

“Me? I don’t need to be looked for. I am… here.”

“Here? But you are made of moonlight…?” For the life of me I cannot understand her.

“I am not here.” You say looking around.. “I am here. Here where I am.”

Something in your voice is telling me that your ‘here’ and mine are two very different locations.

“You should not be here.” I hear you say.

“Why? Something in me told me that I must come here. That I have to see you again and find you!”

“You should not be here.” You say again, in that dreamlike and distant voice.

“What happened to you!? Why are you only visible in the moonlight? Why are you made of moonlight?” I can hear panic seeping into my voice.

“Happened? I don’t know.” You say. “You have to go. You cannot be here. I cannot stay with you any longer. You have to go, before something happens.”

“No.” I refuse. “I am not going. I am not leaving before I find you!”

“You haven’t found me. I am here but I am not here. You have no need to look for me for I cannot be found. I am there, where the libraries are endless and the spires reach the black stars in the sky. I am not here, I am here.” You say. “We will meet again soon… at our secret playground.”

“Like last time?” I ask with tears in my eyes.

“Last… time…?” You ask with confusion on your face.

“Yes.”

“It is very difficult for me to talk when I am here like this. Do you understand? Now please get off the stage.”

“The stage?”

Confused, I look as you step off the raised area around the stone and the altar without touching the ground. I watch you head into an aisle between the rows or broken and disordered pews, and then follow you. I follow you into a line of pews lit by the moonlight and then watch you dissipate into thin air.

I turn around. Towards the altar, to see that the big pillar is no longer stone. It is now giving off quite a lot of mist and most certainly looks as if it too was made of starlight. Out of nowhere, you appear before the altar and lay down on it. A moment later, out of your figure rises a shade much more aetherial than your figure. She steps aside, to spectate everything. You are all almost equally made of the same blooming moonlight, yet as I examined it before, it was but ordinary gray granite.

Then I notice something. In the surface of the stone I start to discern outlines of something superfluous. As if the stone really was a sealed sarcophagus with no joints. With somebody’s remains in there. But it was somehow different. All of the stone was made of moonlight now, even the sides not directly illuminated by the moon. I look at you approaching the stone and reaching your hand out to it. A moment later a shudder goes though my heart as something grabs your hand and uses it to support itself.

A male figure steps out of the stone. Taller than you, perhaps even taller than me. Your shade directs the figure towards the altar where you are still lying. Your shade hugs the male figure once more and then approaches the stone again, stepping into it and seemingly becoming one with it.

By the altar, the male figure bends over you and… I can see him sucking your misty figure inside himself! I scream loudly. The scene having burnt into my mind for all eternity as was your last breath accompanying the process.

The figure, which had grown more definite by absorbing you is jolted. It raises its head and looks at me with a blank space where a face should have been. It stares at me for a few seconds and then starts moving towards me. I retreat slowly over the broken rows of pews, seeing how the block of stone in the back is no longer made of moonlight, it is back to being ordinary rock. The male figure approaching me is now morphing. It is becoming smaller yet more definite, finally attaining the outline of a female figure. Your figure. The next moment I stumble and fall on my back. I clearly see the figure step out of the moonlight and into the shadows of the church walls. It is corporeal! Her face is clearly Your face but the eyes are black and alien. A few more steps into the darker shadows of the walls and then in a silent agony, she silently disappears.

I use the soaked wooden pews to support myself as I get up. The church is empty. As if nothing had ever happened here. As if everything I just saw was mere phantasm and a dream. I rush towards the altar once more. I step towards the stone and raise my head to look at the hole in the ceiling through which the Moon is visible. An ordinary Moon, just as I can remember it from my childhood. Nothing inordinately bright or mysterious. Whatever happened here, it has now ended. You are lost to me. Again.

I fall on my knees with tears, crying. I don’t know what to do next. I have lost You again.

*

I do not want to wake from this. I do not want to awaken into a world where I have to experience it again. I don’t want to awaken into a world from where I might awaken yet again to experience it all again. I can change nothing. Time and time again, I come to look for you, whether I want to or not. Whether I am acting by virtue of my conscious mind or not, I find myself here again and again.

I don’t know if your words carried any meaning or not. I don’t know whether I am closer to You or not. Whether everything I saw was real or just a bout of madness. Whether the secret knowledge now haunting me is real or but madness. I don’t want to know. I will keep looking for You. Forever. Until I find You. Or it dooms me.