Chapter 1
The person we see lays alone, in a dark place, with a knife in their hand. There are lines adorning their body that drip with blood, artistically designed, and made all the more beautiful for the dark and luscious red that wells up and spills down from the deep carvings in soft skin.
As so many people are, this one is not happy, and has not been happy for a long time. Their art is not enough anymore, maybe it never had been, only a distraction.
Maybe it’s time they did something to make it all better.
There is only a moment they waste admiring the knife held above them, they’ve had it for so long, but these last few years…the sight of it has only made them feel a nauseating mix of yearning and sickness when they know what they’ve turned its purpose into.
******
You want it to hurt.
You don’t deserve a gentle death. Such a worthless, useless, pathetic thing you are–but–no one needs you. No one has needed you for a long time now, and you really should have done this sooner. There is no one to miss you anymore that would be shattered to find your stiff corpse, not like you were.
When the knife comes down, it comes down on your only good eye. What nerve you have goes into keeping it wide and your arm as heavy and fast as you can make it. You think you make a sound, a choked shriek, when the blade slices and your little bit of vision becomes incomprehensible.
Your thoughts in this split second as it hits are smoke and oil, but your one prevailing goal means the meager remaining instincts that try to make you yank the knife back out are ignored before they can even object, and you shove the knife in deeper–grating in your skull as it scrapes the bone of your orbital.
Your death is not a quick one, and neither is it painless, but it comes all the same. You don’t know how long you lay on your floor, the knife in your brain making it awfully hard to be anything other than vegetable like.
One by one, or possibly all at once, your bodily functions shut down, you bleed out, and eventually the desperate sparks of electricity forcing weakening lungs to inflate and a stuttering heart to beat fizzle and die.
So you follow suit.
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Falling when you have no form is a strange thing, but falling might not be the right word for it. Are you even moving? Do you even exist? You think you do, but thinking is a generous term for the faint pulsing current of impulse and emotion.
You’ve gone from being a shell of yourself to something that could be called the exact opposite, more yourself than you ever were in life but unrecognizable as the creature of flesh and blood you lived as.
Regardless of what existence you may or may not have, eventually, after what seems like several millennia to a timeless mind, something catches you.
It’s a gentle pull that draws you in, you truly never stop falling but this pull cradles you and holds you close. The core of what you are recognizes what has collected you as something far greater, more immense, just…more.
As you are, you may be ancient, undying, but this one is eternal; never born but also never to cease its being.
Like a blade of grass with a dew drop, it directs you safely with a momentum you can’t consider trying to control.
Released into something new, you fall once more, but you know the plane you unresistingly traverse belongs entirely to that gentle direction.
Unfortunately. Your tranquil journeying seems to be for naught, as once more, you are caught. This is not the same being however. As you are held, you wish as much as you are able that it had never found you. Pain and sadness, fear and despair, seep into your peaceful existence.
Echoes of lives long past try to infect the purity of your nonlife with endless screaming of those your forms had loved. For a moment, it seems as if you are to be smothered into nothingness.
But then it shifts, and you feel a strength like no other. There’s a sentiment from this being of life and dying. It’s not an apology, but it is understanding.
It understands what you are, who you always have been, and all that binds into your being. This presence, much like the first, is incomprehensibly more than yourself, but you find that instead of it existing as peace and control, this being is wild. Devastating. And somehow encompasses the suffering of life that you have always known and dearly wish to never remember.
There’s another shift in their tone of existence, and somehow, you know it has made a decision.
It forces you to know.
Tragically, you have no mouth to scream, to express how much you desire an end to the wretched feelings that crash upon you. You can’t beg for your passive drifting to resume.
It comprehends your unformed pleading, but still continues to drive you to understand it regardless; a branding is this searing thing, a mark and a binding.
When it ends…you understand
and
open
your
eyes.
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When he awakes, the person we know has the shape of a child, and is face down in the dirt. His mind is a mess, jumbled thoughts start up and stall repeatedly as they try to understand each other and the state of his body, but everything is so confused.
The ground where he lays feels like too much on his skin, and it’s hard to breathe.
It takes several jerky, aborted lurches of his arms before he manages to sync up with his own movements enough to push into a sitting position.
He remains motionless afterwards, untangling his own thoughts and trying to make sense of his memories. He was…coming home?
No, he was dying, but, he was almost home? He looks up, it’s night, why is it night?
Nails dig into his thighs unnoticed. Who is he?
‘Who am I?’