FALLING INTO DREAMTIME

IT'S A VICIOUS, KEENING THING, the wind that drags him down in its dusty cloak, with edges like wire - he can feel it sawing at the metal skin of his armor. He can't see in this liquid darkness, all is a velvet-smoothness of fog and night. There's a cold out there that burns like the hottest fire.

He feels like laughing, so he laughs. He has no breath to laugh, but laugh he does. It shudders out into that liquid howling night, bounces into unseen corners, comes back to him dry and rattling. Slightly mad, that laugh. Oh, the things I've seen, the things I've seen, the things I've seen. Why not find the edge of the abyss and throw himself over?

Look the monsters in the eye. There's one. There. Another, and yet one more. Where do you come from? Do you know, does anyone? Can I call you monster?

I'm the monster, he knows, I'm the monster, the whipping fear that makes all horror so horrible, so utterly retrograde to the things we think we need. Let me be the monster. Stay clean, you judges of ourselves. Stay clean, by all means. He keeps forgetting that he was human, once.

He feels blood well in his throat, breathes it instead of air, tastes that copper tang of mortality, remembers when pain was something he felt but never knew, not that intimate partner it had become, would and must become to every warrior. We live in pain because we don't trust a life without it. What's that mean, anyway? My pain knows I know it well. It drags me from nerve to nerve to severed nerve, to hollow eye, to bloody tongue and words that always sound like accusations.

You could have done more!

Tomorrow. He'll go scrabbling along the edges of abysses, some of his own making. Some abysses and monsters the same thing, some not. Pain gnaws at him, starving, slobbering in its zeal like a demented plague survivor, crawls up his side, looking for a coiled space in his brain to slip into, to squat and grin at him like a saw-toothed Cheshire Cat, to talk of kings and sailing ships and Armageddon and that happy genocide that crawls from every 'What's in it for me!?' and desire and need and those instances where we forget that living is only something you do, not something you can get done.

Feed me!

These are not things that satiate Fate, however. It has its own damn games.

Did he want this death? He'd had so many opportunities before, so many chances, but he was a selfish bastard, always needing just one more day to set things right - whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. No. Never be cynical about death. He may have been leery of life, never trusting it could or needed to be good, but death… death he understood. Like a master gambler, he'd dealt death so often, every pot belonged to him, the game damn-near always rigged in his favour.

Not today. There were benefits to it, to death, to expiring, shuffling and mortal coils and all that.

Ghosts cast no shadows. Ghosts are past regrets.

He opens his eyes in the now-red darkness, falling through blood now, falling into the fading embers of stripy dusty light, dimming as memories died. He knew that tomorrow was farther away than he'd ever reach. He laughed again, blood sprayed the inside of his helmet, a spontaneous crimson Pollack, art for art's sake. It coated his tongue, tasted like fear. He anger-spat the fear from him, wanting no part of it.

I cast you out, unclean spirit!

Falling.

Bless me Father, for I have sinned against darkness and am yet unrepentant, I will sin straight into heaven. His fingertips remember her delicious coolness, the satin perfection of her skin. The memories are scarred, but they remember. He remembers her skin, but not her name. He sees a hand, a bloody one, weave across his eyes, waver in his vision. One, two, three, four, five. It looked like his, but he wasn't so sure, not anymore. Could be anyone, could be anything, could be anywhere. But not here. There was no one here. No one. Never again.

I understand defiance, he told himself, I understand the need, how it can ache, I understand those visceral howling desires. It's all about what you're willing to sacrifice, but there's nothing noble in it.

He hears his mother screaming, his sister muttering the words of an old prayer that will not save her, his father howling like an enraged betrayed dog. One-by-one they say goodbye, and one-by-one he offers them his life instead. It does not save them. It has never saved anyone.

I know I am an I, but I can't remember which one I'm supposed to be. The darkness seeps through the spaces in his armor, seeps into his eyes, and it feels like at last he can rest and breathe his long-drawn sigh of relief.

Now I lay me down to death

For you my love, a single breath

A single rose a single tear

One single kiss, one lingering fear

Unfinished - life, love and debts

I can but go with no regrets

Then the coldest heat unimaginable, it feels like mach-9 falling through broken glass, through a tornado of razorwire, through knives, through shredding, burningburningacidburning... cuttingslicinggratingflaying… blackness so sharp, light with a samurai's cutting edge, each breath an inhalation of a volcano's guts, a clarity so clear his eyes can see through and around and farther than anyone has ever seen or even tried to look. There is no sound save for the roar of his own life hurtling away from him, one last laugh before impac

Somewhere, someone calls a name he no longer remembers.

Somewhere, someone insists he leave the Dreamtime.

Duty calls, duty calls, duty calls.

Somewhere, she marvels as he resists.