For what feels like ages, I drift.

Without the light on the threshold, my sense of position is gone. Where once I walked on unseen path, my feet now find only emptiness. I am not falling into some endless pit, for that would impart a sense of movement. I only am.

Time passes.

I calm my initial panic with measured thought. I reflect upon the actions that led me to this moment. I mock my childish reaction to the rejection of the academic board and the shame I deserve for my outburst in their chambers. I curse my poorly thought plans of revenge via success, berate myself for thinking that I was to be the catalyst for the next grand discovery in Void travel.

I reckon with my reality. Perhaps this is simply a dream? Or a vision of brain death in the moment where the somatic tethers failed? Any number of rationalizations could explain the situation, but none feel legitimate. Where I am now is beyond reckoning.

Time passes, immeasurable.

I turn to planning, fumbling in the darkness for any source of sense. I consider the viability of tying robe as noose and dying into waking. I flail in the empty, thinking perhaps I could move as if in water, eventually colliding with some distant shore. I even briefly consider calling out into the darkness for either aid or destruction to free me from this stasis, but some instinct holds my tongue. After pointless thrashing for an age, my limbs fail to respond, and so I rest.

Time passes, unknowable.

Thought fails me. I feel the darkness clawing at my mind, reaching for the core of my sanity. I attempt to insulate myself and raise walls of memory, idea, action. They slough away into the black. The caustic silence erodes my defenses, and without sense, my thought soon follows.

Time passes, but without direction. It too is lost in the dark.

I briefly regain sense of self and realize I am afraid. I am surely to die here. Or find whatever death may be in this space without time.

Time has long since lost purpose. There is only now.

And now, at last, I feel sensation.

A fluttering of my robes. Movement. Something stirs the air once more.

My dormant mind awakens, but still only offers fear.

I feel two forces. The first, of my dream-flesh transposing. I am moving, though in which direction I cannot know. The second, of force upon myself. I am not falling through darkness with single directional purpose. I am being moved. I feel as if I am being swallowed, the throat contracting and guiding me along twisting path that moves at impossible angle.

The dizzying return of sense assaults my atrophied mind, and I struggle to prevent myself from fainting and returning to unwaking once more.

Fighting to regain my bearings, I search for purchase within the force that is ferrying me through the dark. I briefly make contact with solid surface.

Fingers close upon my palm.

Reflexively, I scream, and in that moment the forces stop.

I am greeted now by new sensation. Solid, rough surface beneath me. The feeling of cold, stale air against my skin. I feel sweat running down my brow, and the acrid scent it carries is welcome compared to the nothing from whence I came.

Then sound.

A slow, labored shuffle occurring in measured intervals. It is wet and heavy, as if sodden cloth is being dragged across weathered pavement.

The sound draws near.

I hear in greater detail. A swarm of gentle scrapes, undulating and pulsing in time with the dragging. In the intervals I hear soft-wet thunks. Flesh impacting surface. Footsteps.

My breathing hastens, and after breathing for the first time in aeons I realize just how loud aspiration is without familiarity or competition to dull it.

The footsteps stop.

I hold my breath.

Unlike the lack before, I can hear my heart pounding in my chest. I feel sweat running over fingers, damp with the moisture of breath and skin as I grip hold my hands to my mouth, desperate to prevent any disturbance by which my dreamflesh may betray my position. I feel my eyes dry as I hold them open, hoping for some glimmer of light to offer a point of escape.

I hear the swarm of soft scrapes, undulating still, pulsing in the same cadence though footsteps no longer dictate time.

And then, silently, I see light begin to form.

It runs as liquid, unceremoniously from a point in the dark as a slow, viscous stream. It falls in solid verticality from its source before striking surface and pooling. The pool grows wider and at exponential pace, reaching me within seconds. My eyes, deadened from aeons of darkness, see only blinding white overwhelm my vision.

Burning pain assaults me as retina are forced into action once more, and I blink away tears. Eventually, the world around me falls into definition, and I at last am able to view my surroundings.

But first, I see the source of the sound.

I behold a gnarled bolus of grey, twisted arms supported by scarred misshapen legs, veins bulging with effort to maintain the mass. The arms appear to be of multitude source; slender, muscular, young and soft, old and weathered. They reach desperately at nothing, grasping at both empty air and neighbor limb. Some hold fast, while others claw and scrape, the rough nails leaving shallow marks that close as quickly as they are made, as if the flesh was formed of sculptor's clay.

In the moments between footsteps, the limbs writhe without purpose in all directions, but with each labored advance the limbs ebb and flow from rear to front. I am reminded suddenly of the multicolored anemone painting the bellies of Orokin sky-sea enclosures, shifting gracefully in the gentle currents. The comparison is laughable.

Some aspect of my restraint is broken by this memory, and I inadvertently laugh. A sharp, sudden outburst. The limbs recoil away from the direction of the sound. The creature shifts what I can only describe as its "front" to face me.

I hold my breath once more, unsure of how this monstrosity will act next.

Though I feared it would suddenly rush towards me with aggressive intent, it instead falls onto withered knee. The limbs pull taut, no longer grasping, but coiled like carapace. They point forward and align, fanning outwards to form a gaping mouth. Within, only darkness. The arms furl inwards, weaving, pulling deep within the mass. The figure shudders, and wet churning noises grow in volume as the arms continue their search.

All at once the arms stop, but then just as suddenly they lurch deeper inwards with greater force. The arms on the surface of the beast realign, gripping the reaching limbs and pulling in concerted effort. With visible difficulty, the creature draws something from within itself, the sounds of wet and throat growing in volume as the creature intensifies effort. Whatever it has grasped is stuck firm, deep within the impossible depths.

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Suddenly, legs appear from the maw, yet no sooner do they pass the creature's mouth are they yanked back in. Whatever this creature has claimed, it is fighting back. The legs kick at the grasping arms, and the carapace shifts once more. Further arms sprout forth like a set of second teeth and join their siblings in hauling the figure from within. The struggle persists for a time, but then there is a sickening pop and brackish gray fluid ruptures from the creature's approximate lips.

A slick-wet form emerges, drowned with amniotic. The creature's arms yank their prize into the open and discard it unceremoniously onto the floor before itself. Maw still wet with the expulsion, the creature shuffles to its feet and turns opposite from me. It slowly ambles away, the thumping and shuffling of its march fading with distance. In its wake, soaked still with gray birth-fluid and clumps of pallid clay, the humanoid form it created.

I approach, curiosity changing to horror. The figure smoothly rolls itself over to face me. Black pits without focus above a widening, predator's grin. I meet my own gaze.

Once again I feel the urge to laugh. There is some grand mockery at play, and I feel resentment in suffering the role of the fool. But before I can make a sound, my doppelganger shudders. Still smiling, it begins to seize. The convulsions become violent, arm and leg thrashing as if fighting some unseen assailant, and in the invisible struggle my other brings its body against the floor with desperate force, and breaks itself upon it.

Still smiling, empty eyes locked to mine, it continues. Again and again it brings arm, back, and leg against the floor. Gray flesh warps, then gives to the assault. Bone splinters and punctures through skin, adding sickening scrapes to the wet impacts of meat on stone. Its wild flurry of movement spatters the same brackish fluid of its birth across both the stone and my robes like a painter's brush.

One of its arms, bent wildly at the elbow, detaches and spins across the floor, trailing spiral patterns in its wake. Legs contort horribly, angled closer towards its head than away from it. Its spine, shattered, in disturbing relief where it pushes against the skin. Still my other shudders and thrashes, though the artifice nerves that made it whole have been severed, and extremities dangle helplessly at the ends of torn muscle that tenses in vain.

Shaking with the last of its energy, my other slowly opens its mouth. A groaning, popping noise emerges from its twisted throat.

I am reminded of a time when I was on stenographer's detail for a high Archimedean, documenting the growing discontent on some nameless asteroid colony flirting the edge of the Outer Terminus. Food was scarce in all the system at the time, and there on that far flung rock, even more so.

I don't recall the exact purpose of our trip. Documenting colonial collapse of resource harvesting outposts for triage I believe. Regardless, our role was to observe the situation devolve, not provide any semblance of aid.

On one excursion through the slums, a man rushed from an alley with twisted length of metal in hand, searching to place it deep within the Archimedean's back. I doubt there was any greater purpose in the attack, only seeking to strike the icon of the empire striding proudly through his dying home.

Regardless, our escort Dax moved as lightning, and struck a mortal blow to the man before I even realized he was a threat. The Archimedean and Dax moved on unbothered by the assault, but for a moment I remained, watching life drain from the desperate assailant. The man's lungs filled with blood, and his eyes stared through me into some unknowable horizon. The sounds of his last ragged breaths, of him sucking blood through wound and throat, would stay with me. My other echoes those same sounds now. Despite the horrifying display, the sound is all too human.

At last, it arches its back one final time, then collapses still into the pool of its life fluid. Eyes still upon me. Still smiling.

I fall to the floor and retch, though fortunately it seems my dream flesh stomach has no contents to expel. I compulsively wipe the spittle from my mouth with robed arm, and spread my other’s blood across my face. It smells of nothing.

Before I can express disgust, my other speaks.

"Looks like you finally grounded yourself, yes?"

Shattered bones give its neck sharp form, and while its head is twisted at impossible angle, the voice still rings clear.

"It takes a while to get there, but once you do, you realize you were there from the very beginning."

I stare, mouth agape. The absurdity of the situation strikes me, and once again I laugh. Longer this time. More desperately.

My other smiles wider.

"I haven't the faintest idea what you are talking about." I finally respond, wiping tears from my eyes and spreading more of my other's blood across my brow.

My other smiles, even wider still.

"That's alright." it replies.

"It's not important that you understand. What's important is that you hear it." Weakly it moves its shattered limbs, as if to move itself in turn. The effort is fruitless.

"But what’s more important is that you finish what you started. If you can't reach the end, what was the point of even beginning?" The smile fades and my other assumes a look of mock concern.

"You gave up the stone, but you still have the mortar." It swivels its head on twisted neck to look at the surroundings.

I too, at last examine the space I am in. A room small in width, but with walls stretching upwards into the infinite. Not darkness as I had expected, but merely a continuing passage terminating beyond what I can perceive. In fact, the entirety of my surroundings are well illuminated, and I am reminded of the figure on the threshold. No shadows are cast, and everything exists in total, neutral detail.

The surfaces are formed of stone or marble, weathered and filled with trace lines of spiraling patterns. The patterns are chaotic, as if a moment of cataclysm had somehow been captured by stone, sediment casting shadows of destruction in the regolith before impossible stasis locked it into its final shape.

Beyond the room, narrow hallways branch outwards and turn beyond sight. The painted footsteps of the creature from earlier have already dried on the floor and crumbled, quietly joining the thick layer of dust that coats the surfaces here.

I look away from the surroundings to address my other. "You need something more?"

My other addresses me in turn, face solemn. "Always."

I throw my arms wide, dried blood falling from my robes and billowing as plumes of choking dust.

"Then what are you waiting for?" I ask defiantly. "Take it! I was never in control of this, and you waste words pretending otherwise."

Within my other’s empty eyes, I see a faint flicker of light. "Learning fast. Always one of our good traits."

My other begins to shift. The shattered form loses definition, and what was once a mangled corpse becomes a shapeless, sloughing mass. The form spreads as liquid, then sinks into the floor, leaving patterns in the outline of its gore forever merged with the stone. Before I can bring my arms down from their outspread position, I feel a great, rending pull. Something yanks me forward on invisible strings and the force tears the breath from my lungs. I lose balance, but am suspended mid fall by the same force that pulled me off my feet. I gasp for air, but can no longer inhale as my throat is distended.

Fiber rises in my throat and pushes past my tongue. I begin to suffocate. Thick strands are pulled from my mouth, my chest, my eyes. I feel as if I am being unraveled from the core. As if this force pierced beyond my dream-flesh and raked the surface of my being into long coiling threads.

The grey world fades to black as my dream-flesh asphyxiates, but before I lose consciousness, the pulling stops and I fall forward. Unable to brace myself, I strike my head upon the floor and my vision is filled with multicolored static.

I lay gasping for breath, blood trickling from the fresh cut on my forehead. As the darkness retreats from my vision, the floor rumbles and groans, dust and gravel cascading from above in thin sheets. I see the walls sprout a dense webbing of cracks, portions falling outwards from the surface and scattering across the floor. With a deafening shatter, the room is sundered. Air rushes from beyond the borders to fill the space, exciting the once still dust into opaque clouds.

I bring myself to my feet, squinting as the dust billows around me in the maelstrom. Light pierces in slowly widening shafts and when at last the dust no longer occludes my surroundings, I see the room I was in no more. Instead I am atop a pillar of stone overlooking an infinite sprawling expanse of abstract structures. The sky is stark white, but still, no shadows are cast. Every surface is a variation of an indefinite neutral tone.

Awestruck, I examine the skyline and see movement. The city teems with numerous copies of the many-armed creature I first encountered in this new place. They crawl upon roof, stand impossibly upon sheer wall, and flit in and out of vision through openings in the structures. From their limb-ringed maws they expel thick grey matter that flows in all directions and becomes solid, freezing into deliberate shape and form.

For a time I watch the creatures work. Despite their horrifying appearance, they seem here as almost normal. Not an unknowable force, but something comfortably familiar. Congruous to the world of waking.

I find myself strangely assured. I see reason here. And in reason I can remain afloat. I will not drown here in this dream. I shall traverse this plane and emerge once more into the world of waking as a revolutionary.

Emboldened by newfound resolve, I find a nearby stairway and descend from my lofty pillar into the dense forest of the city below.

JAHU [https://i.imgur.com/mWH6okB.png]