#19 - The Vastness

I am a stranger in a world where everyone is both the same and totally foreign at the same time.  It is as though some foolish artist has rebuilt the world around me with mechanisms that look identical to my family and my people.  But not one of them reacts properly.

I sat in the tub with the almost searing hot water bubbling around me, Pelahir naked sitting across from me, Limyé… thankfully not one of my ghostly mechanisms because I do not know him in my world… sitting in the pool as well, in a tunic that is girded up and shines blinding white against his dark skin.

I had no energy to rage at them, to scream at them to leave me alone.  If they weren’t going to beat or torture me why were they there?  I am the rotting corpse of their friend, their love, their leader, however much I seem to be healing.

Limyé takes one of my arms out of the water, dries it, drips one of his medicines on the thick pad of callus there and the new, raw teeth marks I have just put into it.  Like most Imaryan medicines it doesn’t burn or sting or do anything more than sooth.  I caught my breath as the pain in that arm went away.  That brought tears up to my eyes in a way that the worst agony would not.

“No, please…” I am reduced to begging him not to ease my pain.

“It is all right, Dark Ahrimaz,” says he.  “It will only take a moment for me to do the other arm.”

“That’s not what I meant… oh, burn and scorch it, you’re taking more pain away from me!”  It is the most I can muster.  He pauses and then continues patting my arm dry.

“I understand.  You are clinging to any kind of pain because we are starting to show you that life can be different, that you don’t have to nest that pain inside yourself so that you can use it as a shield.”

“A shield. Yes.  It is the thing that made me real.” I clenched my eyes shut as the pain in my left arm, and that tightness there, eased and flowed away like this water on my skin.  “When I was a child I used to cut myself.  My father caught me at it and forbade me… saying I’d maim myself and not be a good warrior.”

“In his inimitable way, no doubt,” Pelahir chimed in.  “I’ll bet that’s when you started biting yourself.  You could blame that on an animal or a victim if your father noticed it.”

“My youngest brother was the first one to bite me… and gave me an excuse for father. So, yes.”

“Let me guess,” the Cylak goes on, just talking to the ceiling, not to me so I can actually bear it.  “You needed ‘toughening up’.”

“I wasn’t ‘manly’ enough for my father, ever,” I said to the insides of my eyelids.

“Such a dreadful outcome of your first Emperor, a man who wanted all power to himself and destroyed his sister to get it,” Limyé said.  “He must have started this insane ‘Emperor training’, when he forced his nephew to forget his mother.”

I thrashed up and out of the pool and stood, shivering in the cool air against my exposed flanks.  “I… don’t know why… I can’t… I… I…!”

There was nowhere to run.  There was nowhere to go away.  I tried to fling myself into the pool to break my own neck and drown, just to make it stop.  Just to make it stop.  But I should have known that the bastard would catch me and haul me up to his chest, even as I thrashed and howled and then I did manage to find some kind of darkness though I could not say I was completely unconscious.

Somewhere in the soft and warm darkness wrapped around me I heard, distantly, Pelahir’s voice.  “You’re right, Limyé.  He’s getting worse.”

*

“You are not alone, my son.  Even as you descend into what feels like death, I have you.  You are not going to manage to throw yourself into the Lava Pit for eternity. Your suffering is mine.  Give it to me.”

“No.  My prayers are to my fictional God.  Not to his fictional Wife.”

“We are not fictional.  We are here.”

I feel a drop on my tongue in the world and fall deeper into darkness.

“How are You not fictional?  And how can You still call me Yours when, in my world we’ve burned and slaughtered and raped the women who prayed to You?”

“Their pain was short compared to what their spirits received.”

I am looking out over a vista of mountains and forest, like the land around Innéthel. There is no city, only the river, forest growing to the edges of the water and the rock.  Then there is an overlay, a village, then one where the land is the same but it is a desert, a city, a volcano, a battlefield, a blizzard scoured waste, hundreds then thousands flip past my eyes and I understand that this is the same place but each one is very different, lying one next the other, like pages in a book.

Then it is my Innéthel and my House of Gold.  And we fly up and up and up till the world is a ball of green and the Sun is a cold and tiny marble then there are tens of worlds in a line, then hundreds, then they become a block and then the block becomes a cube and then… it fills my sight and understanding and I scream as there is too much to take in.

I fold myself shut tight as a seed and it all goes away, the vastness of worlds and the vastness of darkness and the vastness of time can all hammer on the outside of me for a while.