February 12th, 2008

Red. This color was dominant in a wide open space that was inhabited by nothing but his lone figure. A sky (if it could be called that) was a dim lit pink, reflection of the carmine he stood on, and there was no other pigment to be picked out from an atmosphere of nothing. Cryptic, eerie, a sense of dread while also being at utter peace. This was a land that was not visited, an unknown foreign element caught between reality and concept. He noted the quiet that could be shattered with a single breath, even a whispered word might ignite an echo loud enough to rupture the stillness. Far, far in the distance is where he set his sights to try and gauge a horizon, if anything may be tangible in the miles that stretched all around him. He came up empty handed and just as empty in understanding where he found himself. There was an instinct to yell because being this alone was what drove men like him into madness. Was it a prison, a dreamscape, maybe a nightmare he was immersed in?

Beneath his feet was blood. He didn't know how he knew but it was thick like syrup, glossy even though there was no immediate light to shine on it, and he barely moved to confirm just how watery it was when puny ripples expelled outward only to fade back into a station of tranquility. The depth, however, he was unaware of but it seemed like he wasn't even an inch into it, no sinking to warrant hysteria. Again, the Delphian essence of this existence was peculiarly neutral.

He felt no reason to panic.

"Who. Are. You?"

A voice that wasn't his own came up from beneath the cardinal red he was standing on. The baritone of it shifted the very liquid to pulse outwards, replicating the birth of tidal waves that began minute and would soon swell as they swayed out into the vast landscape to disappear the further it went. Different shades of timbre, echoes amid echoes, the fallacy of one voice splitting into thousands of different ones all in unison. He felt like he was being consumed by the question, by the very voice that heralded no face but quaked beneath his feet -- yet, still, he felt no terror. No, he felt, but what it was seemed unreasonable for what was happening: Jace felt connected.

He spoke and it was his own voice. No others to inspire collusion.

"Jace." Why am I so placid?

An eternity felt like it passed him by but time didn't exist here. There was no reason to collect seconds into minutes, to breed hours into one another. He wanted to hear it again, though, wanted to understand that this was not a purgatory meant for one. Others had to be here; he couldn't sustain on his own memories, his own unethical judgement to himself. Could this be the blood of those he buried, those he hunted, the villains-to-be which might have been heroes-in-action had it not been for the blinders his superiors put on him?

A crane of his neck sent his attention to below, where he stood. Prideful even in the midst of falling to a possible hell (What fresh hell is this?) where his body was wired in sinew, scars, a galore of unhappy endings. What he was greeted with was a reflection of himself. Of his true self; there were bones shifting into skin, knots of memories tying it all together, the constant ebb and flow of words either spoken or unspoken. Where his eyes should have been were old gold coins engraved with markings he did not know but they flipped, back and forth; heads or tails. From that image uprooted finger tips, then hands, lengths of arms followed and all the while the blood they rose from began to harden into a crust of decay. Pungent, sickeningly sweet, dead flesh with drops of jasmine perfume.

And the arms kept rising. Rising higher, becoming longer, the fingers looking like gnarled roots of Yggdrasil. In the pockets of where skin should have been, the divots and clefts, river roadwalks of hand prints, were sharp lined eyes that all moved in different directions. Their colors ranged from bright skylark blue, pebbled rocks across grey beaches, core of awoken magma, the green of unspoiled clovers, to some that lacked any distinguishing chroma and so were black as a starless sky to the innocence of lacework white. Each of these eyes, they knew him. Recognized him and he felt how they peeled back the layers of his walls, crumbled his masquerade in a blink, and saw him as he was meant to be seen.

"Can. You. Save. Us?"

It was no longer a splintered voice that ricocheted in every direction but one that spoke in his mind, took a front seat to his thoughts and motivated him to listen to the presence of new sounds: Chirp of birds clashing with the songs of the dying, west winds that shed temperature like a snake would leave behind its skin, rupture of glaciers warring against one another. All the sounds of a world not inhabited by man. A world before. An old world that had not sung its ode like this in a millennium. It, this, whatever it was, it reached to adjust palms of growing hands (the roots had shifted, the texture had collapsed; this was not wood but bone) to hold at his face, tentative at first and so gentle that it could not be a devil -- could it?

At that moment there was nothing but a sudden shock of pain, of knowledge, of the intensity which erupted in his very marrow.

All Jace could do was silent-scream as this world went white.

April 20th, 2009

"How long will we be like this? You and me?"

Until we fade.

"That doesn't really shed light on anything. I'll fade before you, won't I? Physically? I'm only a man. And you are --"

Not a man.

"Exactly. But, I gotta tell you, this isn't normal for me. Talking to you like this. You kept me away a long, long time."

Time is a man made construct. Those of us that are of the infinite hold minutes, hours, days, even years as nothing. Our assimilation was necessary for us to continue.

"A fucking year is not nothing to me."

Yet you awoke feeling it had only been days. Again, time is a man made construct.

"..............."

You are upset.

"Being upset is probably a man made construct, too, right?"

Yes.

"But here you are, fucking upsetting me. Look, let's backtrack a little, okay? I've been awake --"

You were not asleep.

"-- I've been awake for a few days now and remember everything in that time. But you never answered me when I asked why me?"

Others had not been as worthy. Strong.

"How many others had there been before me?"

I do not wish to upset you.

"How many?"

.....

"Come on, man, just tell me."

I am not a man. I am --

"I don't fucking care what you are, just answer the question. Damn."

Seven hundred and fifty three were before you, Jace.

"....."

Would you have preferred a lie?

"I'd be able to tell if you were lying, wouldn't I? You said so yourself, before, when I was asleep."

Yes.

"Because ... we are one."