Flowers.

'Is it paradise?'

Soft petals murmured under his feet.

'I feel so light.'

The multicolored field of blossom stretched as far as the eye could see, mingling with the clear sky on the horizon.

'I feel so serene. So... at peace. This place is clean.'

The petals waltzed on the warm wind, soaring and dipping, and each petal chanted a different note that accompanied others and created a soothing melody.

'This place is without pretense.'

The symphony of the wind suddenly stopped.

'Pretense? Why am I suddenly thinking about pretense?'

The soaring petals fell.

'If this is a paradise, then how did I die? No... I? What is I? Who am I?'

The colorful carpet under his feet let out a faint tremor.

'...Right. I am a human. A male.'

A tinge of darkness crept into the purity of the clouds drifting overhead.

'I am what... twenty-one years old? No, I'm sure it was twenty-two.'

His limbs got heavier, as though the harmonious vacuum within them was being filled with mute pus.

'I am... Yes. I am an actor. An actor at a big theatre, at that.'

The memory of the stage crumpled the blossom of flowers, the memory of curtains shut down the cracking sky, the memory of ever-changing masks rained down with a cacophonous rattle of ovations.

'Hamlet, Pozzo, Uncle Vanya, Iago...'

These were his names and his faces. Their gazes withered the flowers, their moans fractured the earth.

'Lopakhin, Moncrief, Cyrano, Salieri...'

His limbs were getting heavier with each new mask that dropped from the sky. His movements became sluggish and burdensome, chained by dozens of attires from different eras.

'These are all my faces, but what was the first?'

In his head grew a heavy anchor, a steel tumor of clustered recollections. It weighed him down, submerging him under the ground, which had opened like a black maw. Deeper. Deeper.

'What is my original name?'

Deeper until he fully submerged in the darkness, where no flowers bloomed, where no wind sang, where no sun caressed the skin. Because now he had no skin – he had no body at all.

'Ah, yes.'

A faint ripple resonated through the darkness, as though a drop of ink fell into the boundless sea of oil.

'The name my parents gave me is Cassio.'

The darkness swirled and raged, howling from the storm of memories. Memories of his life.

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'What a foolish name.'

No sooner had this howl turned into a shriek than Cassio could feel his limbs again: sluggish and limp, they moved in the air as if coated in thick layers of rust. Rust? There was indeed something covering his skin, but definitely not rust. The sweet scent of flowers and rot invaded his nose.

Suddenly, a surge of pain shot through Cassio's whole body, stabbing his skin, scorching his arms, wrenching and wringing and knotting his stomach. It felt as though millions of voracious worms wriggled in his veins, wrapped around his bones, squeezed through his muscles.

A tortured scream tore from his throat, but it was silenced by something soft sticking out of his mouth. Soon, this something contracted, wilted, diminished, pushed through Cassio's teeth, penetrated his palate, and wriggled towards the place where all these 'worms' were hurtling - Cassio's brain. Then, a jagged screech thundered through his head, as though thousands of ropes were being stretched and ripped inside his skull.

It lasted only for ten seconds, but to Cassio, it was a torture spanning eternity. He panted heavily as the cold sweat rolled down his burning face like sharp splinters of ice. By the time the screech fully subsided, a new sound had entered his ears. It was rustling and distant, resembling a layered tapestry of whispers.

Cassio moved his toes, legs, fingers, arms - they swept through the air freely, albeit not completely liberated from the constrictive sense of foreignness.

Something was still pressing down on his shut eyelids, so Cassio carefully touched them with his fingers.

'Petals?'

He swept them away and opened his eyes. High above him hung the broad ceiling of a stone cave, strewed with myriads of glowing blue gems that looked like jagged shards of the moon. The soft radiance of these gems dissipated the darkness, unable to reach only the deepest corners.

Cassio frowned.

'What is this place? And how did I get here? The last thing I remember is rehearsing the upcoming play in our theatre... Come to think of it, the play we rehearsed was The Blind by Maeterlinck. I'm in luck to see.'

Cassio staggered to his feet, gracefully bowed his head to the shining gems but then froze with widening eyes. Beneath his legs were scattered white petals, dyed by the gems' radiance in a pale shade of blue.

'The paradise...'

The memory of it loomed somewhere on the periphery of Cassio's mind as an elusive and nebulous shadow, as though trying to flee from the chasing spotlight of his consciousness. He faintly remembered the mesmerizing Garden of Eden and even fainter remembered its downfall.

Cassio's palms got wet. What was that disturbing vision? Surely, it wasn't the Garden of Eden. He had never been a religious person, but such vivid dreams never visited him before.

The thing that concerned him the most, however, was the momentary death of Ego he had experienced while standing on that field. And as soon as he had begun manifesting his Ego back, the paradise had crumbled.

'Mysticism, mysticism, mysticism... Maeterlinck would have truly appreciated it.'

Cassio, nevertheless, had more pressing issues on his hands. He looked over himself, realizing that he was dressed only in tatters. More importantly, his body seemed a bit different. In fact, he could swear that despite the physique being quite similar, this body had never belonged to him.

After their face and voice, an actor cherished their body as the most important instrument, so Cassio knew his body better than himself. The body he was examining now, however, was a bit shorter, although still of average height, and the muscles were less pronounced, although still not enough to make him appear too scrawny. All in all, an ordinary body with the exception of one thing: an intricate tattoo of thorny vines coiling around his left arm and shoulder like a slithering snake.

"Is it even a tattoo?"

Cassio muttered and immediately got startled at the unnaturalness of his voice. It was slightly higher than the one he had enjoyed before and also completely devoid of the silkiness he had been refining for years by proper vocal training. Instead, his new voice sounded grating, husky, and awkward, as though not put to use in a long time.

Cassio lamented the loss for only a brief moment and then turned his focus back to his left arm: the vines seemed as if hiding behind his skin, and although the pale shade of blue gems made everything creamier, the original color of this tattoo appeared to be dark ashen grey rather than black.

The most striking distinction, nonetheless, hid in the amount of explosive power brimming in this new body. The torrent of strength coursed through his limbs, itching to be unleashed. Cassio felt that the source of this power originated not from his muscles but from something else enhancing them.

An uncontrollable shudder gripped Cassio's shoulders when the full weight of realization slammed into him. At first, he had harbored a distant hope that this was all a mere joke of his theatre colleagues, but as far as he knew, neither of them possessed supernatural abilities, especially such miraculous as switching bodies.

'Curse you, Maeterlinck! Is it all your play?! No... what a pile of nonsense. Absurd. This is totally absurd!'

After pressing onto his temples to the point of pain, Cassio calmed himself down with a simple breathing exercise known to all actors and shook his head.

'Doesn't matter right now. An actor must improvise on the spot. If this is the theatre of the absurd, then I'll eventually circle back to the original point - my life and my body. So, I must just go along the script and adjust.'

Cassio knew that the facade of his reasoning concealed nothing more than shaky scaffoldings of irrational hopes, but he didn't have to admit something to believe in it. After all, self-deception was a quality every respectable actor must possess.

The rustling whispers were still echoing from somewhere afar. Cassio sighed and involuntarily murmured the slogan his mother constantly repeated to him:

"React, adapt, act."

Cassio looked around the cave once again: the place more resembled an enormous tunnel, supported by no less impressive pillars that looked like wooden towers holding the fractured night sky. Here and there, shattered cargo carts were strewn, coated by thick layers of dust.

'Is it a mine?'

He touched one of the dark pillars – it was cracked by the passage of time and thoroughly rotten, fragile splinters crumbling under his fingers. Cassio immediately took a step back: despite being sure that a herculean advent of breaking this pillar would be impossible for him, he still didn't want to take any risks with this new strength of his.

'Hm? Am I imagining things or did the rustle grow louder? No... it drew closer.'

Cassio whipped his head in the direction of the approaching rustle. Squinting his eyes, he tried to penetrate the darkness of the other end of the mine where the pale blue reign of gems was much weaker and scarcer. Dozens of dark silhouettes were all marching towards him.

'People?'

With a relieved expression, Cassio took a step forward but then froze in place: the slow march of the silhouettes turned into a sprint, on the head of which ran two creatures resembling disfigured hounds with oversized skulls. And they were all silent – only the rustle followed in their wake.

But it wasn't the wordless dash that made Cassio's knees buckle. Each of these creatures and people had one common feature: they were covered by flowers.

Blooming white flowers squeezed through the cracks of iron armor of ones, sprouted from the exposed skin of others, and tore through the clothes of the rest. Some of the 'people' had flowers nesting in their eye sockets, some in their ears or noses or all at once. Those whose mouths had not been blossomed with flowers were grinning widely.

The grins they carried were not cruel, neither were they sinister. These were the smiles of pure ecstasy and peace. Not a word, not a scream, not a moan disturbed their smiles – the blooming people were all silent, as though any sound itself was the blasphemy against their heavenly euphoria. Only the rumbling rustle of flowers caroled their bliss.

Petrified, Cassio watched their approach.