Bright flickers of light, merged with the fading roll of breakers, urging Ulric to wake. Those patterns of light triggered alarm bells and his eyes shot open, adrenaline dispelling the expected hangover. He sat up abruptly and vertigo drove him to roll over and vomit whatever parts of his stomach hadn't already eaten themselves.
He lay curled up on himself in a stop hurting me ball while the universe spiraled uncontrollably. Leaves crished and crackled underneath him and he couldn't stop a low moan from wheezing out into the cool air.
Panting he nearly gathered himself but just as the vertigo subsided the god of migraines inserted one part war drum to 3 parts broken glass into his brain. This initiated more dry heaving as he jammed the heels of his palms into his eyes to keep them from leaving his skull or to crush his own brain and get it over with, whichever happened first.
One minute seven seconds had passed while he experienced a subjective 13 and a half hours of pain. A sighing wind blew over his fetal form. Trees shook gently at the passage and his migraine eased enough for him to roll over onto his back, eyes closed and hands draped over his chest with a mixture of dry leaves and damp foliage cushioning his naked back.
Naked? Leaves? Ulric's eyes opened slowly, the adrenaline ebb and cerebral punishment having dulled somewhat his survival instincts. Something was wrong. Like a painting viewed too close he couldn't rationalize the shapes and colors his eyes were receiving. The dapples of sunlight filtered through what seemed to be a sky made of single branching tree, with a dawn sky suggested beyond.
Abruptly it clicked. Ulric was looking at a part of one large branch from what had to be the largest goddamned tree in the entire world. Slowly turning his head side to side and upwards confirmed that, indeed, it was a tree of mythologic proportion and that, contrary to his initial impression, the tree was but one of an entire grove of similarly massive trees. A quick look down at himself and a cup check also confirmed that, yes, he was in fact naked.
Getting to his feet slowly, his bare soles compressing a comfortable carpet of leaves, moss, and assorted flora, he came at last to a standing position.
"I am so fucking high right now." he announced to the forest. "I'm high, dreaming, or dead." he told the behemoth woods, and their boughs seemed to nod agreement. After a moment of consideration, what was happening right now was so beyond impossible that the likely-hood of being merely high seemed remote. He couldn't afford or know where to find drugs this good. He never dreamed, not so he remembered them, and it would be incredibly unfair to have a dream that started with so much puking so he discarded that option as well.
"Door number three then." he said. "I died."
"It grieveth me that I must bear grim tiding. Thou hast comen to troth on the matter." said the woman behind him.
"FUCKING SHIT why would you fucking- " Ulric spun violently and cut off as he beheld the most perfect physical form possible. The approximately human looking being was immediately identifiable as impossibly too symmetrical, too flawless to be real. He spent a solid minute looking at whatever this creature was, a fresh dose of fight juice pulsing and causing him to dissociate while he took in minutia which might indicate a need to begin mortal combat in the buff or a strategic naked retreat into the bush.
The personification of exotic beauty was wearing a loose robe that seemed made of wide silk ribbons joined in such a way that their colors, blues, greens, browns, and yellows, merged and patterned, in a way beyond mortal ken. The robe ran from left shoulder to right hip that left one utterly perfect breast bared. Long black hair spilled to the ground pooling there but with not a strand out of place. Eyes were ever so slightly orientally slanted but lit like a violet flame from within leaving no doubt as to her status of being beyond human.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
The Impossible, as he was currently thinking of it, seemed content to stand patiently under his scrutiny. An almost uptick of the corner of its mouth suggested faint amusement.
"You." Ulric began, "You aren't real. Are you?" he couldn't keep the tension out of his voice but his aggressive tone slid off the Impossible.
"As are thine own thoughts am I real" It said. "As the forgotten dream, vivid on waking, yet gone in moments am I real." A gentle smile lit her features as she continued "It matters not that thee will forget, for that is what all your kind do, but only that the message is passed and that thine destiny is laid reforged before thee."
"I heard that before. That thing you said about reforging." Ulric's mind swept back to the moment just before he'd lost consciousness. The rushing sound and the gentle voice.
"You were there, weren't you? What happened to me?" Part of him already knew but he had to ask, had an obligation to understand what fuckery was going on that had led to him standing naked in a forest eons old surrounded by trees that dwarfed the Sequoia, like an NBA center standing next to a horse jockey.
"Burned too brightly thy flame did. Burnt itself from the inside, consuming." the Impossible's smile faded to an expression of one long suffering as she spoke.
"Twas not the time appointed, nor the manner forseen, but none was there who could intercede as thine candle guttered. Comfort for thee, I do not offer, but only knowledge. That thou may knoweth that the life thou hast led was not the one intended nor was its end."
Ulric grimaced at that. Sure as hell wasn't any comfort. He'd known he had a problem. He'd known it was unsustainable, that stress. The drinking, the abandonment of his health, the isolation. They were all signs that he'd been grinding himself away only he didn't think he'd crossed some point of no return without being aware of it.
"So what is this place?" he asked, "Am I in purgatory? Hallucinating before death? I'm a lifelong and devout atheist so I hope you'll forgive me not having aspirations to paradise."
The Impossible's smile returned now. "Thou are reforged. I was allowed to gather the embers of thy soul and create thee anew here."
Her arms swept up, palms open and Ulric was becoming comfortable enough with this situation to more than notice the fascinating things that did with her anterior thoracic region. The Impossible gestured to encompass the world around them.
"This land is mine. It is the one given to me to govern, to watch, and to cultivate as I see fit. And as this land is mine, so now are thee. Until death do we part." she told him.
Ulric paused his *cough* examination at that. Thoughts were beginning to run in circles and he wasn't absolutely sure but it felt like an anxiety attack might be coming on.
"You uh…you mean I'm alive? And uh…you're god?" He said that last with a fervent hope he'd be told otherwise.
Hope was consigned to oblivion as the Impossible giggled and quickly clapped her hands with excitation and exclaimed
"I knew it was right to harvest thee, wasted was thy flame on that world. I am the Watcher of this world and thou are reforged, given life to burn anew bringing light into whatever path thy feet tread, for as far as thine wit and skill carry thee."
"I am called a Watcher. But the peoples of thy world called us gods." She continued.
Ulric frowned at that. Rapidly he carried out a quick series of practiced mental exercises to ground, colors: green leaves above, black soil under feet, violet fire eyes ahead, golden star shaped flower over yonder and…there. Brain back on track he considered what he'd been told while the Watcher assumed her former stance of eternal patience.
"So I killed myself on my world and you were able to just…sorta…scoop up my consciousness and rebuild it here?" he asked this question but some of the words the Impossible had chosen were clearly suspect. Harvest, for one, was a word with implications implying.
"Imprecise is thine description. Dying was thy flame, thy soul, so snuffed it out I did that I might hold enough of its heat to reforge it here. I Rendered thou to firmament to make PASSAGE and from the stuff of my world have thou been reforged in the form of the people most like thine own." her voice was even with that same strange cadence until the word "passage" was uttered and it felt like Ulric's bones shook as the Impossible's voice washed over him. Something significant about that then, maybe an expression of power that permeated even discussion of the event.
Then the full impact of her words penetrated and, in his immensely destabilized cognitive state, Ulric swore at god.
"You Bitch! You killed me!? But why, to what end!? Why the fuck am I standing naked in Fern Gulley talking to Queen Perfect Tits the Soul Collector!?"
Composure was gone now, the only thing that remained was outrage. Frustration. The culmination of thousands of indignities perpetrated against him with no recourse but to suck it up and take it, because Losing Ones Temper was Not Done in society.
"What gives you the right to just shave off the life I made myself?" He yelled. "I worked my goddamned ass off, sacrificed everything that makes life worth living, pushed myself as far as I could go and you just wander by and fuck me over?! Goddamn it! Goddamn it."
His voice trailed off the anger running out of him when he thought about just how fucked the last two years of his life had been. The anxiety. The depression. The rut. But he'd been too deep to quit, to get out, to abandon his goals and start over. The sunken cost fallacy had had him by the balls and he'd never even considered it. Not while he'd been killing himself to keep up the cycle. But still. It had been his life, the one he'd made for himself. Emotions crawled over one another, anger, regret, disappointment, anger, sadness, relief, on and on.
And the Watcher let him rage in peace because his frustrations, pains, and suffering she had witnessed in legion repeated over millennia. Time creates distance. Distance begets understanding. Understanding begets empathy, and the Watcher had mastered empathy before this world's star had been born.