The Fire and the Fury

AN: This is my first publishable piece, and is a framed one-shot describing the pain of vampiric change. Thanks go to my sounding board, phantom-writer3739. I make no ownership claim to the works referenced here. For curiosity's sake, I wrote this under sudden, intense inspiration while listening to Dvorak's symphonies. Every word, every symbol was carefully chosen. Look intently for meaning before you question.

Appears an ineffably aged, faceless, white man in the darkness, beckoning: "Come, my student, and see the tales of the web…"

The darkness lifts, and the infinite dimensionality of what is-was shifts into view…moments, days, eons pass before the chaotic scramble of sensations settles into a recognizable form.

Doors. Tiers, stacks, twists, racks of wide, narrow, plain, filthy, bloody, shining, or intricate doors; and yet the intrinsic nature of these doors is the pure essence of a gateway: each encapsulates a life.

These lives, from the brilliant flashes of mortal life to the less than blackness of entire continuities, make up the web-lace of what used to be.

The man speaks once more. "Some of the lives were more pivotal than others. Shall you be guided by my hand, or woudst wander unaccompanied?"

Of course, he is already certain of the road to be traveled, and so permits only those choices with outcomes he needs not guide.

Instant arrival. Another immeasurable period passes in the perusal of the door. This life was special, even among the immeasurable uniquities observable in this domain; she chose the curse of bloody immortality with the purest of motives. With the application of attention, the door opens, as does the perspective of the one whose tale this is.

This is a moment from one of the tales of the web.

~\ /~

I knew when we made the decision that I was volunteering (putting myself in the way of!) intense pain, but, notwithstanding my previous experiences with other pain and even this same pain, I was unprepared.

The bites and the injection came almost anticlimactically, without appreciable stimulus; they were there, then gone, pinpricks to be ignored with the long experience and detestation of needles.

I had known pain.

Skinning knees to bleeding rawness, falling at the wrong angle on ankles, twisting shoulders past human ranges; these were all part of my memories, in multitudes. A sort of mental anaesthesia would block anything but blood, allowing me to find help. After being cared for, healing was annoying, but with its constant presence, I was only aware of it during the lulls of its absence.

Then had come the experience with the internal pain of this metamorphosis. A single limb, being burned and torn from the inside out as the torturer wound his way slowly, cruelly, purposefully, inevitably, to my heart. At that time, I was grateful to the angel for removing the impossible pain. (Now, of course, I must consider that pain to be laughably insignificant…)

~ \ ~

And after periods of togetherness and love and removal of (all but one, stupid moral centenarian gorgeous beau) boundaries, pain assaulted me once again, but on a completely separated axis. Falling…blindly flailing, weeping, tearing at the inside of the heart like the implosion of a world…

Because that would be an apt description. My angel, who loved me, accomplished his dread purpose in bringing me ultimate agony. Perhaps there should be a scale for pain—the doctors can work on neural impulse speed and magnitude sensors for the former axis, while the psychos babble on about quantification on the latter. After taking my veriest essence, the remainder held together only by his constant presence, he said I had his own…lies, lies, blackest of profane lies! Then to remove my necessary support: all light and warmth and comfort left on his absence. Grey set in, lifting only under persistent effort on the part of a carefree friend. Even then, the falling only experienced the reintroduction of sound.

I felt nothing. If I had felt anything, I would have, without Pandora's last, broken personification, left the null grey for permanent darkness.

After an interminable period, a light appeared at the end my whirling, bruising tunnel of aching. My bolster, my love, returned to me broken as myself. Became obvious that the tools to fix either were themselves ruined, so no chance obtained but to rebind our lives to the unity he had sundered. Recovery would always be incomplete, but the state of conjoined souls was vastly improved over the lonely wandering both had and would have experienced.

So ended the most horrific pain.

~ / ~

This, though—this was a…sensation…I had yet to experience. As I understood the process, my body was being streamlined on the inside and exaggerated to perfection on the outside. The result would be perfect beauty, record-breaking intellect, immeasurable (through lack of instrumental capacity…) strength, and untouchable speed. On top of all these existed the possibility of another sense, another capacity.

But that was before. I was no longer aware of anything but a sensation that was intrinsically, elementally, pain. I could discern differences in the onslaught, of course.

The most easily noticeable part was my body; the doctor had hypothesized (He would never be so cruel as to experiment, though he was observing my exterior carefully at the moment) that the venom was in fact an unexplainably personal agent. This could be possible; my skin, to the bone and through it, was being pricked at every point in a ragged rhythm with the jagged end of a live electrical cable.

Electrified, barbed, molten, twisting, binding wire. A symphony of despair at its omnipresence and unpredictability echoed in my heart; only the vague impression that it would end eventually kept me still.

My senses were the first complete modifications I noticed; of course, that meant that my brain (mind?) had also been significantly expanded. That pain in itself was unbearable…black hellfire burned between glass shards spinning too quickly to see at the edges of my mind, burrowing through the edges of my no-longer-bone skull to meet…more pain. Some sort of color was there, like the flash of red between the sea and the clear sky. It was that colored knife-edge where I found my balance between the equally indescribably agonies in body and soul. That edge expanded at the edge of my imagination into a cracked, featureless desert. Finding patterns in the shiftless dust pointlessly kept me from being drowned in the tides of death that pounded on either side.

Having to see the blood in my eyelids wither and flee before the darkness was nothing to hearing the constant, brutal concussions from lower down, beneath my breasts. I felt each shift in my skin and muscles, sparking audible stitches in my nerves and spine from tailbone to the sparsely sketched surface beneath my toenails. Scars from bumped ledges disappeared in the sculpturing of a new person; every cut, blemish, birthmark, freckle, was subsumed into anonymity in the brittle, fractured eggshell that was forming out of the dying detritus of my former body. Organs—liver, kidneys, various bladders and extraneities—were palpably disintegrating under the force of a whirlwind-gale carrying diamond sand.

Only the balance and power of my new mind kept the necessity of silence at the forefront of my unaware conscious: the angel would be pained if I were to give any indication of the depth of my agony. The angel must not be aware. In pursuit of silence, I remained so completely immobile that my bones seemed to bruise from the force.

I knew that three days must be passing quickly when I felt the internal tidal waves increasing, nearly swamping me on the edge in my mind; forcing my toes and nails into the cracks in the desert kept me from eroding away like my body had.

And then…

Time-space-matter-energy burned, whirled under its own influence, and coalesced into a beacon. Blackness, pure void, flashed, and I was spun in dimensions uncountable, landing in the vacuum left by a final exhalation, in my body.

~ X ~

Reunion, sweet, blessed reunion of body and soul! And my soul spoke to me in the exhausted, multiply dulcet tones of an insurpassably tuned and unified orchestra.

"Bella, my love…!"

~/ \~

Pulling away from the moment induced disorientation, much like that which was described in the picture-memory.

"Did you observe her technique, child?"

Technique…? Ah, the avoidance visualization. Simple enough…

"Of course. I am not limited here."

Scornful, patient laughter sounded for time, and times. A gathering force could be perceived behind the invisible white.

"Then, your Arrogance, apply it…to this."

Space, unpopulated by light (?), appeared in every limit. An illusion, easily dispelled with a sharp movement towards reality—any reality. NO!?!?

"Retreat, as your teacher did." A foetal position, so to speak, became the frontmost mindset; the void (for it was void, not even the ether existed here) remained. "Not so. It seems you have more to learn than you imagined, yes? Admit your conceit and balance between your mind and reality."

nothing

nothing

Cogito ergo sum. Cogito ergo corpor sum. Cogito ergo mentem sum. The mantra did nothing. Perhaps, as the man said, balance must be found. And so, teetering, the continuity containing doors flickered into visibility once more.

"Very good. You have previously been kept stable, which state you must now maintain for yourself."

A short pause, in which a dynamic is formed between the is, the is not, and the in between.

"That one."