01: Rebirth
A vast, parched gulf of deprivation.
Split and screaming across the sky, a ripped seam through space. From beyond the veil, a torrent in scarlet.
Red chords strung together a million tiny gears buzzing about the air. Deprivation plunged them into madness, and they tore each other apart for a drop of blood. They found none. The swarm was individually composed of husks recollecting parchment.
Even the strongest of the swarm budged to the Styx for want. The bare material of Earth was carpeted in nothing, and the sky began to hum.
From the deep, gentle resonance; deep, gentle waters, blue like milk. They swept the first life into new materia and coalesced into the seas. The sun-scorned Earth was nurtured into desert bloom.
“It was at this point I woke up,” the Man In Yellow muttered to no one in particular. He thought back on his wife’s sleeping form next to him, how she rose and fell with each gently screamed breath; he remembered the soft, deep blue–the dye of midnight that crept, gently, through the blinds. He remembered the smell; the heather-grey smell of sleep from a lovely slumberer, the acrid stench of fear emanating from some forgotten cranial node of his own. And he remembered nothing more.
As he walked, the Man in Yellow felt that broken haze calcify into a stone above his tongue, lumping into a stalactite from the roof of the mouth. Half from penitence, half from curiosity, he did not allow himself the liberty of thinking out loud anymore. He shut his mouth, captured the malaise within, and the stone formed. It leeched its sour taste into his mouth, the prelude to acid rot, eventual necrotic consumption, a million days of hell in a single second. He saw decay as an approximation of undeath and himself as the subject. The world he dwelled upon as an imperfect godcorpse. The
The Man in Yellow collapsed under the growing pressure. His body impacted the meaningless street and the stone broke loose, fizzing a sweet scream into his tongue for a chalky haze of a crater in his palate. He pulled himself to his knees, dry heaving from his mouth and eyes. The idea of bleeding from either approached and receded with no catharsis. It pooled behind his face as he kneeled, in silently shaking deference to an agony caged within his body.
His body.
The characteristics of “the form” which made it his. The face on his drivers license, the chest his wife lay her head on as she slept, the arms scarred from who-knows-what, the brain, a blade dulled by many trials. All degenerating in a desperate implosion of psychic vectors aimed at the core of his being.
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It felt like induced nothing. The moment before pain registers, neurons as conscientious objectors aimed at coherent perception. Laying down arms, refusing to fire. Everything was so flat. The way space went numb laying sick in bed, staring at the ceiling for days, but from a second of the night sky.
The almost sonic sweetness congealed into a mist almost tangible with a living warmth, the air around dreamed-in dirt. Something burned like angelsong behind my eyes for a sputtering few seconds before smoothing to a cool glow.
I got up, dusted myself off out of habit (I was clean) and stood in a shocked stillness. Jolted by the glow. It may have seemed to an outsider as though I were basking in it, the sensation of incursion; anything transcendent about this came from within the Body.
I heaved my vision forward, realigning vectors on my neck and wobbling like a compass, my face pointed true north, to the tree-like spire upon the horizon. It was shocking even in dulled bronze, an incursion against the blue midnight. It gleamed skyward with the same rhythm as a dead eye in a living socket. As a structure, it felt sick, and as sweet as it was, that node of nectar rhymed. It made no sense to me. It made sense, for reasons that did not.
There was an almost physical sensation of degeneration within my brain, heated to a fever pitch by the dissonant rhythm of misfiring synapses. Faulty neurons clumsily laying threads on maps and tracks to follow, crumbling with the tacks and stakes. I could see it. I could see the hidden red, louder than my first memory and glowing twice as ardently…
It screamed.
That scarlet nothing screamed.
My head split in half bloodlessly.
The sourceless ripping called my hands flying to the origin of my agonies, scrambling futilely against the unbroken scalp. It tired me far too much. The primal dive to the source of my agonies revealed no cause for concern. It was probably just a poorly-timed migraine,. Maybe stress. Probably stress. Nothing to worry about.
Fibrous stray flecks of scarlet, nectary blood caught in water, dashed their roaming paths through my molars. Materia seethed warmly. Warm matter of the universe shot from my skin and scattered, dividing to nothing in the cool night air. It was the heat of a postphysical metamorphosis.
I smelled metal. My scalp was not bleeding.
A flash tore through my frontal lobe, and the roof of my palate became stone-dry again. Words like “hunker” and “trenches” and “brimstone” and “torment”, words I’d heard, of course, but never known, resounding as if I had.
Armored in entropy and fueled by the fumes of realization, I set out on a meandering path to the tower in the distance.
This city was like nothing else; I had lived in Wintertree my whole life, grown up pacing these streets–
And still, that tower…
It wasn’t a new sight, but it was like one I had never noticed before.
Almost familiar, like a structure from a strange dream or something with bones shaped significantly to humanity. It drew my eyes and comforted me in that fact.
So it was, at that time. My bones were soaked to the marrow in a deep crimson resolve. Even if this path was paved in pain, I would cut my way to the tower.
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Diary Of A Magician
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“In this world, there’s an invisible magic circle.”
These words ring out in my ears, a recalled sensation from a forgotten dream. There’s not very much I can remember of myself aside from that. The otherness that comes with. Trying to list out my traits, likes, and dislikes distressed me, with how little there was to catalogue, so Alice suggested I do this to improve.
…I don’t know how much it can really help me. Even trying seems like so little effort that it makes my face warm. But if it will help, if she thinks it will help, I’ll keep at it.
Maybe someday I’ll look back on this version of myself more gently.
–Ash Nameless
02: Death
I closed the notebook with a sigh. It’s a good thing my handwriting is too bad to read anyway.
A sharp pain dug itself between my scalp and skull, just above my left eye. My fingers twitched in a wave across my left hand, sending a slither to my shadow.
My shadow…
It was a hazy thing, cast in the blue glow of my abandoned computer. But in that moment it sharpened with its movement, and then moved again of its own accord. I watched, perfectly still now. The edges spasmed like exposed muscles induced to movement, again and again, into a beating heart.
The shape grew heavy, teetered to bursting, rippled within. The shape of its fullness in flux bent and snapped in gentle waves. The edges wavered as I stood, frozen and hyperaware.
And with a silent crescendo, the form broke open. The fragments scattered in two dimensions, dancing with the peaceful chaos of petals in the wind. As usual, I was so lost in the beauty of my dissolving copy’s song that I failed to notice–her.
Alice Nightshade. She jumped from out of that papery space like it was the floor and she was powerful as nothing human.
With the delicacy of a butterfly in flight she landed silently, enduring the sound in a low crouch. I felt a horrible twinge of envy for her grace. She stood up–looking straight forward–and met my eyes.
“Hello.” She smiled like she’d gotten away with something and my chest hurt. It wasn’t unpleasant at first, but it grew to a glowish point; I recalled a beam piercing my sternum that never happened. It was somewhere like a battle, an unpleasant somewhere. I wasn’t safe at all, the last time I felt like this.
“Hello? Ash?” She repeated.
I jumped to attention. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I know I’ve been slacking and there’s a lot that needs to be done if any of that is going to happen, but–“
“But you need to be here. You’ve been working hard, rebuilding your fractured Ego Circuits and holding down the fort.”
“I need to be doing more. My work is just getting in the way. From the start, I shouldn’t have had to rebuild myself.”
There was a pause.
“I’m sorry.” I continued, feeling like I was digging my own grave.
“Don’t be. I know. It’s ok.” She didn’t apologize. I loved that about her, and about anyone like her, with no reason and thus no desire to apologize. “Have you noticed anything strange?” She continued.
“Have you noticed anything normal?” I strained to stay neutral without getting cold.
“Have you noticed anything ‘glowing in the haze’.” She worded it like a question but declared it as she spoke. I could feel vertebra after vertebra crumpling, coiling into a shameful spiral. I hunched forward against her like I was breathing my last and seeking comfort. “Tch. So dramatic…” Breath (hers) hit my neck like numbly brushing against one’s own skin. I only noticed for how little I felt and how much I felt I should have. She seemed equally listless and without intent.
A jolt shot through my left arm.
“You’re cruel.” I made a point to reply lightly, with the all-gentleness that absolutely abandoned the hand closest to my heart.
The flesh… I could feel it all start to temper and slough off the bone again. My gaze traced the path of an invisible and cornered animal about the room, resounding hollow and silent off the walls once in a while.
Each hollow heartbeat, marking the utter unpresence.
The inside of my skull was acoustic fuel.
My brain seemed to burn up.
In that unbearable light, my shadow could not exist.
I looked through thick glass, smudged for my safety, back to that room bathed in pale blue. The lenses of my eyes grew sharp and smoky like quartz. Tangible dread sloshed around inside me, heavy water of mental pain sent floating in my unbalanced approach to the cold haze on the floor.
I fell, and fell, and never fell. Instead I found myself in the depths of a heat unwell like a brain fever. The oppressive tiny motion in the air jostled the brain in extremely perceptible ways too small to see but just small enough to feel. The unempty peopleless streets watched me walk alone. My vision shimmered, my body shuddered, the world seemed to shift with dissonance, and
and I kept walking.
Though I knew myself pained and unwell, I kept walking.
The blinding road and miles of light began to degenerate into dappled shadow. The hard slap of my boots on pavement eroded to a thin crunch. Scraggly gravel over packed sand. The trees grew dense and gnarled, the grass tall and thin. I continued down the path into a breezy hallway of green and black and husk-tan. The air was warm with loose life, a heat from decay drowned to odorless in the scent of a sea. I pressed on through the tightening trees to the light that smelled of tears. Eventually I was pushing past brambles on the path, then through them, seeing nothing but the unfiltered light ahead. The brush grew thicker still until it exploded to a low sky over a thin beach and past a sea, mountainous through the blinding gloom. It was a cavernous room, outside, before me; an organ of the body world filled with heavy water. The air held a communicable malaise throughout its vastness. I could almost see streaks of necrosis tracing still ribs gone soft with the weathering stillness. It stunk like a hum and touched me with
The blinding road and miles of light began to degenerate into dappled shadow. The hard slap of my boots on pavement eroded to a thin crunch. Scraggly gravel over packed sand. The trees grew dense and gnarled, the grass tall and thin. I continued down the path into a breezy hallway of green and black and husk-tan. The air was warm with loose life, a heat from decay drowned to odorless in the scent of a sea. I pressed on through the tightening trees to the light that smelled of tears. Eventually I was pushing past brambles on the path, then through them, seeing nothing but the unfiltered light ahead. The brush grew thicker still until it exploded to a low sky over a thin beach and past a sea mountainous before the gloom. It was a cavernous room outside, before me; an organ of the body world filled with heavy water. The air smelled communicably ill, and there was this awful buzzing sound abojt, assonance to With effort, I swallowed the urge to hold my breath and survive.
I drowned and saw a shawled figure, rocking slightly in an ordinary chair. It bounced from the soft sand like wood, even as I approached their veiled facelessness and my feet sank in the grains. The inconsistent ground was feathered in shards of yarn, and as I watched, new scraps floated down. The sand was so blinding–and the wool, so gentle–it almost looked like snow through the heat.
Eventually a head poked through the cloth, a face unidentifiable and achingly beautiful.
I am going through life with a sore hole in my chest.
This person, and Alice, and who knows who else… That girl from that book who can warp reality and her classmate with the link to the Data God. The lady knight I am in the dreams that don’t wake me with tears. They all made my chest hurt to think about. I think that lady knight was from a game, or something.
This person spoke in a voice that cut through my thoughts with a–knifelike glass chime lyricality–I wished to emulate it more than continue the act of breathing.
“What has your notice? Are you alright?” She shuddered. The pile of cloth that seemed to indicate her being, as a body would, shook. I caught fleeting strained glances through lace after lace but did not recognize her beyond vague familiarity.
I opened my mouth to assure her, I’m fine, are you ok, out here shuddering and collapsing under a million veils and the sun? but when I opened my mouth it sang strange and acid. I gagged on dry air. My teeth seemed full to bursting with skimmed blood, throbbing in tune with the waves and in odd compliment to the deathly hum. Mentally, I’d grown numb to the stench of the rotten sea; physically, it was absolute.
“Recollection… That’s my job too.” I jumped at how suddenly she spoke again, even so quietly.
“Can you tell me who you are?” Maybe that was blunt of me.
“Can you?”
“There’s no time for this.”
“I agree,” she said, and in a red flash of pain, I was back on that street and on my stomach. Metal claws ribboned my back in razorblade stasis, gravel lounged in my mouth and blood flowed out of it.
In this moment I saw nothing but knew all this.
On that unseen street, in that mysterious city I had always known, I watched my form reach a point of absolute death or rebirth.