Awakening
There is a sound. Somewhere. Maybe. I cannot tell.
The air is thick, pulsating. It quivers with my pain. The flames where the raw nerve endings stand out flutter excruciatingly with the change of pressure. Are those shadows, movement? I do not know. Do I care? I do not know what it is to care.
Every feeling, every thought, has been purged from my shattered consciousness. Extreme pain can do that to you. The acid-like burning never ceases. I cannot move. I no longer want to move. I lie here, curled, foetus-like, a skinless abomination unable to pull the fragmented pieces of my mind together through the fog of pain.
I am dead. Or so I thought; perhaps I merely wished it. Cowardly of me, yes. But then, I have always been accused of being a coward, of running from a fight, of burying my head in the sand. I shall pretend to be dead, and ignore the clamouring voices and feelings inside my skull. Turn down the volume.
But the screaming is still there. I cannot hear my mind in its attempts to right itself for the screaming. Am I making that sound? Surely not, after all this time. It must be my soul, screaming for release. I cannot feel it, my soul. Is it lost to me? There is no me, and thus it could be anywhere. So loud. I am deaf to all else, frozen and numb to the world. The world was mine; now I am its prisoner, an inmate who does not speak the language of his captors. Nothing makes sense. I have relinquished the ability to make sense of the world.
I cannot feel it. It could have been that it was consumed along with all the others. All those souls, viscous and glowing, nourishing the hate. But no, I did not consume it. It is all that is left. Corrupted, distorted, and hungry; waiting. No. Waiting implies expectation. I have none. But perhaps it does, this soul, this thing which feels no longer part of me, but greater than I can ever be. It is all of me.
I drift in the red-tinged darkness, and hear the screams. If I try to listen, the focus bears upon the pain. That I cannot endure. Not anymore. I refuse to face it, lock it away. Or so I have done through this eternity of nothingness filled with shards of agony.
A pulse, definitely. Something pierces through the shrieking. I feel it more than hear it – like a soft, warm breath on my cramped and naked limbs. Focus on the pulse. The pulse of the souls beyond my prison walls. Prison of my flesh. Walls of my skin. Ahh, focus brings feeling, my enemy. Feeling is pain; that's all there ever to feel.
A glint of silver and my awareness explodes. The fragments of my thought fly everywhere as it pierces me. It is cold, this new pain; the puckering blisters of ice, rather than the wet sizzling ones of fire. It floods through my crippled form, the form I have given up awareness of.
But now…now it is different. The ice flows through my parched and burning veins, cooling, soothing; numbing. Rushing now, spreading faster and faster, release from the pain; I had not thought it would be possible. Possibly I had not thought. Now…now, I have room for thought. The screaming has faded into static, mere buzzing in my ears, and I can hear my mind.
And ahh…the thoughts. My thoughts. The darkening chaos of my soul unleashed, free to prowl the boundaries of imagination and dredge up that which I have not been able to consider for these long years. My vengeance.
My muscles, forgotten and wasted in their imprisonment scream for their freedom. I cannot spare mindspace to control them. Let them do as they will. Spasms wrack my mind as I grasp the concept of movement, free will; power. My body echoes its internal rapture, and I strain against the walls of my cage.
My naked flesh calls out to its bereaved skin, stretches out its tendrils towards reunion. It feels dull, like leather. Thick and unyielding, my beautiful skin destroyed by centuries misshapen. But it does not matter. My flesh pulls and tugs at the folds of thickness, fastening it into place. This is no longer my flesh. It shall be my cover on my nakedness.
The rapture of insanity, my mind and soul reunited and freed from constraints of dull and plodding thought processes. I need not process, I need only act. I again have form, my soul is not lost to me. I send its wavelength soaring from me in frenetic celebration of our reunion. My power growls within me once more, begging to be unleashed upon this filthy hovel in which I have been incarcerated. I shall satisfy myself with the creatures here. Shapes appear, humans, a witch. They are nothing. I listen to the static, beautiful and monotonic as I dispatch them.
I need not think, only act. Immersed in my soul, glorifying in the chaos, the beautiful unmitigated terror, the unpredictable. I soar upon my wavelength.
The darkness is beautiful, and I am finally free from the light.