No one has experienced death.
Now, you may be saying 'Duh', and yes, that's fair. Once you die, you lose your ability to experience. All we can offer are our interpretations of the event, and while people can come to realize that life is transient (which it is, you can only live for so long before something keeping up the machinery of life within you fails) when they study philosophy or live through a near-death experience, you can only imagine or theorize what comes after it.
There is always a degree of separation between 'them' and 'me'. You can see a thousand people die before your eyes and feel nothing. You can also see a thousand people die before your eyes and become terrifyingly aware of your mortality. Approach death itself, and this awareness can be life-changing.
But no one actually dies and remembers it. Once you're dead, you're supposed to stay dead. Even if it were possible to resuscitate the dead, they probably wouldn't remember an afterlife, if there is one. The hippocampus would need sensory data to store the memory in the first place, after all, and there is no sensory data without organs or organelles to sense with.
Ignoring the digression, people can't truly experience death, only ever approximating it with near-death experiences. Once you are dead, you can't experience anything.
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For the sake of argument, let's imagine it. An experience of death. What would it be like?
There would need to be three constructs necessary to hold an experience of death. One, a way to maintain senses during death. Two, a place to store the data the senses collect during the event. Three, a way to process the data to form a recollection of the event and to truly understand it.
If we were to imagine a soul that could experience death, it would need all three components. However, since the mind (which contains the three components, most importantly the one that interprets the sensory information) is in the brain, and death is defined by the permanent failure and data loss of the brain, death deletes all three components. Thus, the paradox establishes itself.
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It is not an axiom, a rule of law, that the mind is stored in the brain. The mind, as we define it, is metaphysical, with patterns and circuits in the living brain being the only manifestation we know about.
However, while the brain is the definitive manifestation, the mind, as a metaphysical concept, isn't necessarily limited to it. The mind, the collection of the components needed for experience and much more, has representatives in the lobes and circuits of the brain, but it isn't just those lobes and circuits, even if those lobes and circuits are the only manifestations of the mind we know about.
Going back to the hypothetical, we can offer alternatives to the paradox. While death is the destruction of the brain and data loss inside it, if the data were to be somewhere else - if the mind weren't fused to the brain - then the data would exist somewhere. If one were to do the same with the components of the mind, then, theoretically, the paradox would resolve itself.
Thus, in our completely hypothetical scenario, it would be possible to experience death.
Unfortunately, you don't get any EXP for dying. A shame, isn't it?
They had always been aware of 'it'.
'It' had been there from the beginning. 'It' had always been there, from the moment, they drew their first breath to this moment now. They didn't even know what the 'there' was, only that 'it' was there.
Whenever they thought of 'it', their eyes would burn. Perhaps 'it' was the reason their eyes were so disgusting, so repulsive, so… unnatural.
Perhaps 'it' was the reason their life was so awful.
They hated 'it'.
But they could never get rid of 'it'. No matter how much they clawed at their head, trying to scrape 'it' out, 'it' would never budge. Even attacking 'it' with their strange power did nothing. Their power, for some reason, treated them and 'it' the same way. They couldn't attack 'it', not without suffering the same penalty. Vindictive as they may be, they didn't want to sacrifice their entire lives to destroy 'it'.
Their mother hadn't wanted him to destroy 'it', or at least, that's what she said. Using their powers and perception, they knew that their mother was lying. Their mother had sacrificed everything, leaving home, family, and country to protect them from the world that feared them and their abnormalities. Their mother loathed 'it' much like they did.
Their mother loved them, but she also told them to hide their eyes, to mask those purple markings on their cheeks. They had tried a blindfold, but they couldn't see through it. Eventually, they made do with a long hood that she pilfered from a clothing store. The markings were a little easier, as they could use mud, dirt, or their power if they were in a pinch.
'It' had cost both them and their mother everything. They knew their mother loved them, as she wouldn't go through all this trouble otherwise, but they could tell that she resented them as well, on some level. They had told her of 'it', to make the distinction clear. She had acted supportive, but they knew she thought they were crazy.
And sometimes, they thought so too.
'It' kept on infringing on their life. 'It' would make them stop for no reason. 'It' forced emotions on them that they didn't want. Every time they thought about their troubles of their life, 'it' would awaken.
Even in their happiest moments, when they found enough to eat well and their mother would smile genuinely, 'it' would always be 'there', watching.
Even when their mother left forever, 'it' remained.
Once they were left to fend for themself, they had nothing but 'it' for company. And because of that, they became of a frightening fact.
'It' was growing stronger.
Perhaps 'it' was always doing so, and they hadn't paid attention. Regardless, now that their mother was gone forever and they had nothing left to distract them, they were painfully aware that 'it' was becoming complete, wherever it was. The interruptions 'it' created occurred more frequently, and soon, the only thing they could do was try to survive with the skills their mother had taught them. 'It' would remove their control often, leaving them weak, prone, useless. 'It' would force emotions, desires, and memories on them.
They did what they could when 'it' relinquished control, but that grew continuously infrequent. Soon, they were left starving, sitting in their meager shelter. 'It' would only give them control for seconds at a time, then instants.
They hated 'it' with all their heart.
And yet, strangely, it became harder to hate 'it'. Soon, they were left hating themself. That was confusing, at least until they thought about it for a little while. Then they came to another horrifying conclusion.
They were becoming 'it', and 'it' was becoming them.
It grew harder and harder to tell the difference between 'it' and themself. The lines blurred, and soon, they felt their desires, emotions, and memories ebb away… no… they were falling apart. They could still feel everything that made them, 'them', but now they were like 'it'.
'It' and 'them' were both pieces of a larger whole. Even as the piece of 'them' that could perform logic deconstructed, 'they' could recognize similar pieces materializing in 'it' to match 'them'.
And then it was soup. 'Their' mind, 'it's' mind, both floating around in pieces in the soup of his soul. Still, pieces of 'it' came.
If the pieces of the mind - its components - were to be separated and detached from the brain at the moment of death, then the mind would theoretically remain, even if its manifestation didn't. If those pieces were to be placed in a different brain, then they could theoretically be reconstructed into the original mind.
However, there is the matter of the mind in the brain of arrival. Both minds would be in the same place - was that a paradox?
Of course not, but it was hardly feasible. The brain wasn't capable of holding two different minds, each separate. Each mind would use the same pathways, so the minds wouldn't be able to distinguish between each other.
The last piece appeared. For an indeterminate while, both the pieces of 'them' and 'it' remained lifeless, drifting aimlessly in the sea of the soul. Then, something strange happened.
The mirroring pieces of 'them' and 'it' started merging. 'Their' happiness and 'its' happiness were now the same, just as much as their desires and memories. Soon, the pieces of the fused mind started coming together, reforming a new mind.
There was no longer a 'them' and an 'it'. The two were now inextricably linked.
They were one.
They were Viper.
They had experienced death.
Thus began the Serpent's Game.
This is the first of ten chapters. I decided to write ten chapters of this fic before uploading, so soon you'll see the other nine. I'll continue this note on the last one.