He heard, through the static in his head, the crackle of electricity. Someone's voice was barely audible, breaking through the noise. He tried to open his mouth, to say a word, but his body seemed unclear and scattered. Axel, he thought, but the name would not come through.
Suddenly, the light shorted out with a fuzzy snap, and everything turned to darkness. For a moment, his mind and heart seemed to stop—and then started again, painfully, as light began to skip toward him in electronic streaks. Then he screamed as the light began to drive into his skull.
Numbers burned his brain, dancing in successive lines, as fast as light, boiling his mind beyond what he could bear. He wished that he could die, could slip into the deep unconsciousness that lay below the surface of the pain. He could feel the numbers warp his mind, bending it beyond the peak of torment to a flat pulse of burning re-write, pounding in their unblinking rapid flash of data a new path of thought and personality. His silent screams died in his throat as his memories faded. He could not fight the loss, and his struggles seemed to turn to distant memory as new memories spread across the surface of his heart. He was losing consciousness of what was happening.
I'm losing myself. I'm falling apart.
And then he really was falling, tumbling through air toward a spot of light inside the darkness, a spot that grew into a city.
Twilight Town.
The ground sped toward him.
I'm coming home.