PART II
[Father Lucifer]
Somewhere his heart pounded with a pleading impotence, thudded against the cage, and needle-like the mouth of nothing opened and sucked out his soul.
My God. His father was a sobering experience.
Part of him was out there, floating in the hall, following the old man's footsteps. Watching, as he walked, the withered hand seeking it's addiction, finally locating and drawing out the white cancerous stick. Bleached as white as bone. Lit and burning now in the darkness leaving behind bitter smoke and ashes. His father never looked so sane.
He knew he could touch these thoughts, touch his father's mind and have it open to him, like a latch on a spring - but he did not want empathy or any other dimension to what he was seeing. The shock of his father's dispassion did not wane but seemed to aggravate a void deep within him. Perhaps even before a blazing shell had left its muzzle with a deafening bang, a dark universe had been born. It waited for him, from time to time it beckoned, but he was not yet ready to tap this world or to want to explore or realize it. But it had always been there - denied.
Staring back at the room where his body certainly lay, he found he no longer wanted the experience. He only wanted to be still, perfectly still. And lost. Until he ceased to exist. Death.
He came to with a sharp sense of nausea and discomfort. For a split second he felt the yearnings of something he thought he had lost - a body. Dry mouth, a tender twist of nervous energy all about his ribs that shifted away, ghost-like. Much like his mercurial partner. The Companion was gone. And his eyes not so much adapted to the darkness of their division - the darkness adapted to him.
As if sensing the inopportune, the lamp before him went out with a mournful hiss. He knew she was up above somewhere, amongst the dunes. But he did not know who she was and what she was - and somehow now that seemed critical - to know her name, to know her words. As if the particles of the air were cleaving forth, parting into distinct identities, whispering his name. If his mind fought for clarity, questions would form; each question making the flesh move, until he was on his knees in the darkness, then on his feet becoming vertical, climbing: the dusty stairs giving way, with effort, to stone. A ceiling of stone, he realised. Had he not attempted to breathe he would have suffocated on his own fear - it was rigid, as was he - the minor panic was a many-armed thing holding him down and limiting him, the scavengers of dread trailing in its wake.
Prometheus.
The word offered itself, with no meaning. He called it in the darkness but found himself, for the moment, voiceless. He knew he was alone, and absolutely raw because of it. But fear was something to be danced to.
Admittedly, he lost it. And like a current trapping him from the other side of the room, his body spasmed and flailed manically, hands scraping the walls above him, nerves screaming an unlearned rage, an unequalled despair. Poison.
Pushing upwards he was free.
The heat hit him first, then the sands and the air; but the heavens, the cobalt sky, harkened him to hope. Desperate, perpetual hope.
After the claustrophobia of the crypt the sudden lack of enclosure was panoramic - and shocking. He almost retched - a sliver of the body-feel he had sensed before rising but not nearly so vaguely. It appraised him like a hand, not grasping, not holding, but touching, stroking, then gone - leaving him just as soon as it found him. Its withdrawal tingled the edges of the vacuum world within him, urgency snapping to fill it - roaring in his ears. Something was happening. For everywhere that caught his eye had momentarily blurred - everything was angry surfaces and madness. But why? Who had made it that way? His presence or her rescue? And which "her" was he referring to?
He could see the pitted tracks left behind in her ascent up the nearest dune - up and away from their refuge - but why had she gone? He could only guess that if The Companion, like him, sensed the distortion in the environment - and she probably did more keenly he - she had gone for reasons of pure insanity. For a change was indeed there, indefinable yet mocking, roiling like some hidden imperfection.
He struggled up the incline and tried not to be horrified by the sheer magnitude of her path. He simply pulled the cowls of cloth over his head and followed. It was the act of searching that reminded him. Déjà-vu. He remembered the atmosphere of wildness that appeared whenever his mother was cycling up to an "event". The way the cold hand would glide up his spine, fusing the bone together. God, say this wasn't about aliens this time. Say they hadn't invaded his soul, his heaven, his hell, and left him alone and faceless, wandering oblivion to the end of time.
*
He had lost track of time, and he had lost his way.
The Companion's tracks were still very clear; yet, despite what must have been hours of movement, the satellite remained high. Time now burned and deceived, and hours had become totally unavailable to him. For he moved or seemed to move without getting anywhere, understanding merely that he was closer. But whether to some elusive target or to the borders of his own insanity, he knew not. He was bewitched and bewildered by the evil sand. As he approached the latest drift, only a spiritual exhaustion gave him reason to pause. So he lay, close to the apex, looking over, the sand offering little resistance to his weight, his hands sinking in the pale earth. In all his time here he had had no reason to feel tired, yet now he could barely support himself. Whatever he was approaching seemed to be drawing from him, as much as it was drawing him near. He felt it like magnetic north, pulsing and ebbing, luring.
Suddenly, viciously, it amplified its entice in pure abandoned pull. Possibly, he cried out, his hands moving instinctively to his temples vainly trying to vent the pounding in his skull. Without warning the chaos reigned in on him.
(Suppose it was not The Companion's tracks he followed? He had never seen her leave any. Had he?)
His body caved, and he fell landing on his back. There was no true pain but on another level entirely he was in agony. He could not hear his own words or screams, if he had any, but felt the sand shift under his writhing body. Then just as rapidly everything, save his mental faculties, shut down. Involuntarily his mind's eye opened and he was still.
Voices. Drifting over the dunes.
(He felt himself tense, then tremble. His eyes were wide. On his back, half buried in sand, blissfully paralysed. But aware - for the first time he saw them.)
Across the dunes the silhouettes of children danced. Far out their presence on the spine of one snake-like dune singling it out in all the arid nothingness. His fingers closed on the sand around him, mesmered.
It was a lazy, carefree, tripping dance of two - a boy and a girl. Half-way along their progress the girl laughed and the boy, extending his arms, pretended to be a plane and flew, as best he could, like a winged locomotive, across the plains - with the girl in dizzy pursuit. The boy was clearly the older of the two and protective of his sister. How did he know? He knew. The information was part of the vision, like a dream is a function of the mind.
(Lying there, he was literally in two places at once, places of the mind and places…places he could not explain. Psychology; Lili would know about that. He heard himself laugh and felt his face, almost despite itself curve into a smile. He was delirious. His smile reflected that delirium. Yet something was bringing him back to where he was lying, though, like a lucid dream, he could still access the running children on the sand.
A shadow fell over his recumbent face. Another girl, God, yet another girl. Who were they all? Her long wavy brown hair was blotting out the sun. Her dress long ago had been expensive, yet she was drawn but determined, and her long brown limbs were lovely, all in conformity with her actual beauty. When she waved her hand before his eyes, he knew he could not respond.
"I don't know you, do I?"
The sound of an American accent in such close proximity should have been traumatic, should have jolted him to his feet, had he not been so convinced he was utterly, utterly mad. It did not matter, she responded to her own question.
"Yeah, right. Creepy, half-dead, delirious guy could confirm that for me." But she did not seem too sure of herself. She looked around, seemingly getting her bearings. "The City is that way, right?" She jerked her head to her right.
No answer came. As he knew it would not.
She looked behind her as if someone were following. Then opened the parasol she had been holding, rested the cane on her shoulder so the shade extended broadly behind her head like a Technicolor aureole. For a moment it seemed she was going to reach down and check his pulse, but thought the better of it. Instead she stepped away.
"Nice meeting you." Another step away. "Got to go." Two more steps "I'll put in a good word for you when I get there."
She moved off. Yet the soft winds blew her voice back to him.
"'I'll put in a good word?' What the hell was that all about?"
He was not going to struggle to process this new element of hallucination. She was gone. And the other area of madness again dominated, swarming him with its mental picture, claiming him anew.
The Children…)
They ran and they ran, twirling about and each time they did he feared the steepness of the hills knowing something bad was going to happen and wondering why they seemed so oblivious to the danger. Then it happened. In all innocence the girl lost her footing (indeed she lost a shoe), and fell head over heels down the bank of the eddying sand colossus. "Jack" came tumbling after, pausing only to scream "Samantha!" before he leapt; so that it echoed around the queer, colourless desert like light refracted through a prism of pain - slicing like needles whomever they touched. The girl responded, her cry upwards a muffled cacophony- the words muted, then lost. Soundlessly the bodies continued to fall, downward, trained in gravity, disappearing. Vanished.
Abruptly his mind's eye closed. He sat up as if from a nightmare.
It seemed darker somehow. A diminished sun remained suspended against the sky. Again, he found himself scrutinising the emptiness, and felt an abstract pain, an abstract longing but chose to ignore both. The 'magnetism' was still there but receding, he could feel it drawing itself in to its source as if it were shrinking, retreating. Perhaps later it would renew its assault but for now he felt safe and strangely secure. Baffled at this otherknowledge, it was all he could do to simply steel himself against the speed of the falling preternatural darkness; finding as he did so that the satellite neither rose, nor fell, but was simply blotted out at night. The cold, like the veils of dark velvet and stars - was immediate.
"God have mercy...", his voice quivered in its own audience and he licked his salty lips: "May God have mercy-"
There was lightning.
As if to respond in kind, the sky sparked. In a star-spilled night, without cloud, it was chastening. He held his tongue. But it did not stop. Vein after vein of the awesome hot energy arced and sliced the sky, followed - with logic - by thunder - horrible, bellowing displeasure. A storm. It was everywhere and he still could not stand, but far from fear now, the ragged beauty it inspired in the feral landscape fascinated him. Flashes of light everywhere, but not quite upon his position, yet it was coming, most definitely for that very spot. He could only marvel at the way the hills were alternately solarized and negatized as the furious power ripped across it. Finding the strength and will to move, he struggled to his feet and almost jumped out of his skin at the figure that had materialized beside him. He started. In the darkness he missed the proportions, mistook it for her. But then, another flash of light (disturbingly closer than before as the storm crept in a league about them) illuminated the features. A man.
"Krycek!"
His voice sounded dusty and hollow but no less loaded with invective and shock. Another spark, then loud, ominous growling thunder. He still could not see as well as he wanted, as well as he would have liked.
"Look."
It was simple yet succinct, and instantly deafening despite the storm. Krycek, the man, or thing beside him raised his arm and pointed - his *left* arm - towards the horizon. Following the line of his pointing finger, the vision raised a gasp. On the horizon the storm had intensified but instead of of lighning, there were great tornadoes of wind, sand and flame. They whirled against the sky-line blotting out all before him in a tsunami of roaring fire, and seemed to remain there unchecked; but as he understood it, it was only as the great distance would have it appear. The wall of fire was actually closing. The storm was its herald.
He was horrified. Krycek remained unmoved, calmly lighting a cigarette, the lighter flame momentarily realising his features, like the encroaching lightning. He, Jeffrey, took in the two arms manipulating both cigarette and match, his mind forming a question, yet hearing his voice respond:
"What is that?"
"Dawn." Krycek answered, turning to face him.
"I thought they cut off your arm?" Now he asked it, wondering whether the question would arouse anger, fear.
Neither.
"Nothing a little voodoo couldn't handle." The phantom replied, flexing the arm's muscle, quite unalarmed. "Aren't you glad you picked the right side?"
"Perfectly."
The lightning glared, as if dilating, and the face of the man next to him was clearer, bathed in light and free of cynicism, contemplating the sand at his boot.
Again the impertinent questions:
"What happened? Did they kill you too?"
Krycek looked up now, holding his gaze with a penetrating, yet serious, indifference.
"What do you think?" Same imploding tone.
"No." His own voice was so small.
Against the flaring light he saw the mad, violet of Krycek's eyes.
"No." Krycek added, just to puntuate.
"Why are you here then?"
"I'm not."
And strange as it seemed he heard a voice behind him whisper his name, and startled anew he turned away from his tormentor.
Suddenly the desert world no longer existed.
Another whisper, only slightly louder:
"Jeffrey."
The white light that fell on him was the light of the moon, and he was cold. So cold. A woman was coming towards him, and as she came into his field of focus the little details of the world around her became obvious. They were in a forest. Somewhere. It was her. It was Lili.
"Jeffrey, you need to come back inside."
Her voice was steady, yet plaintive. But somehow she talked to him as if he were a child. The shadowed foliage of the trees all grew around him. He felt...smothered...surreal. Where was he?
"Jeff, it's me, Lili."
He wanted to answer her, but this world was beyond him, and he could not seem to communicate. Speech did not come. Words did not form. He remained defeated in silence. Her hand crept to his shoulder. She seemed sincere and only a little...scared.
"Jeff, we have to go home."
But where was home?
Chaos now. The world collapsed upon him. Thunder. The storm had come upon him while he slept; he was at its centre. Alone.
"Krycek!" he screamed it at the burning air.
The wall of flame had made half of its violent progress from between the horizon and him - and the lightning was everywhere at once. Slicing around him. And then, in one tumultuous stab, upon him. He felt himself, for want of a better word or feeling, ignite. His world became ubiquitous light and the sensation of sailing through the air came to him only because he was. Soundlessly gravity reclaimed him; he saw the sands above him and the stars beneath him, the former expanding triumphantly in his vision to strike him bluntly in the face. His mind went blank, and a million stars winked out one by one, the shrieking of the winds dulling to a vulgar, distant whistle.
*
[Father Lucifer]
Somewhere his heart pounded with a pleading impotence, thudded against the cage, and needle-like the mouth of nothing opened and sucked out his soul.
My God. His father was a sobering experience.
Part of him was out there, floating in the hall, following the old man's footsteps. Watching, as he walked, the withered hand seeking it's addiction, finally locating and drawing out the white cancerous stick. Bleached as white as bone. Lit and burning now in the darkness leaving behind bitter smoke and ashes. His father never looked so sane.
He knew he could touch these thoughts, touch his father's mind and have it open to him, like a latch on a spring - but he did not want empathy or any other dimension to what he was seeing. The shock of his father's dispassion did not wane but seemed to aggravate a void deep within him. Perhaps even before a blazing shell had left its muzzle with a deafening bang, a dark universe had been born. It waited for him, from time to time it beckoned, but he was not yet ready to tap this world or to want to explore or realize it. But it had always been there - denied.
Staring back at the room where his body certainly lay, he found he no longer wanted the experience. He only wanted to be still, perfectly still. And lost. Until he ceased to exist. Death.
He came to with a sharp sense of nausea and discomfort. For a split second he felt the yearnings of something he thought he had lost - a body. Dry mouth, a tender twist of nervous energy all about his ribs that shifted away, ghost-like. Much like his mercurial partner. The Companion was gone. And his eyes not so much adapted to the darkness of their division - the darkness adapted to him.
As if sensing the inopportune, the lamp before him went out with a mournful hiss. He knew she was up above somewhere, amongst the dunes. But he did not know who she was and what she was - and somehow now that seemed critical - to know her name, to know her words. As if the particles of the air were cleaving forth, parting into distinct identities, whispering his name. If his mind fought for clarity, questions would form; each question making the flesh move, until he was on his knees in the darkness, then on his feet becoming vertical, climbing: the dusty stairs giving way, with effort, to stone. A ceiling of stone, he realised. Had he not attempted to breathe he would have suffocated on his own fear - it was rigid, as was he - the minor panic was a many-armed thing holding him down and limiting him, the scavengers of dread trailing in its wake.
Prometheus.
The word offered itself, with no meaning. He called it in the darkness but found himself, for the moment, voiceless. He knew he was alone, and absolutely raw because of it. But fear was something to be danced to.
Admittedly, he lost it. And like a current trapping him from the other side of the room, his body spasmed and flailed manically, hands scraping the walls above him, nerves screaming an unlearned rage, an unequalled despair. Poison.
Pushing upwards he was free.
The heat hit him first, then the sands and the air; but the heavens, the cobalt sky, harkened him to hope. Desperate, perpetual hope.
After the claustrophobia of the crypt the sudden lack of enclosure was panoramic - and shocking. He almost retched - a sliver of the body-feel he had sensed before rising but not nearly so vaguely. It appraised him like a hand, not grasping, not holding, but touching, stroking, then gone - leaving him just as soon as it found him. Its withdrawal tingled the edges of the vacuum world within him, urgency snapping to fill it - roaring in his ears. Something was happening. For everywhere that caught his eye had momentarily blurred - everything was angry surfaces and madness. But why? Who had made it that way? His presence or her rescue? And which "her" was he referring to?
He could see the pitted tracks left behind in her ascent up the nearest dune - up and away from their refuge - but why had she gone? He could only guess that if The Companion, like him, sensed the distortion in the environment - and she probably did more keenly he - she had gone for reasons of pure insanity. For a change was indeed there, indefinable yet mocking, roiling like some hidden imperfection.
He struggled up the incline and tried not to be horrified by the sheer magnitude of her path. He simply pulled the cowls of cloth over his head and followed. It was the act of searching that reminded him. Déjà-vu. He remembered the atmosphere of wildness that appeared whenever his mother was cycling up to an "event". The way the cold hand would glide up his spine, fusing the bone together. God, say this wasn't about aliens this time. Say they hadn't invaded his soul, his heaven, his hell, and left him alone and faceless, wandering oblivion to the end of time.
*
He had lost track of time, and he had lost his way.
The Companion's tracks were still very clear; yet, despite what must have been hours of movement, the satellite remained high. Time now burned and deceived, and hours had become totally unavailable to him. For he moved or seemed to move without getting anywhere, understanding merely that he was closer. But whether to some elusive target or to the borders of his own insanity, he knew not. He was bewitched and bewildered by the evil sand. As he approached the latest drift, only a spiritual exhaustion gave him reason to pause. So he lay, close to the apex, looking over, the sand offering little resistance to his weight, his hands sinking in the pale earth. In all his time here he had had no reason to feel tired, yet now he could barely support himself. Whatever he was approaching seemed to be drawing from him, as much as it was drawing him near. He felt it like magnetic north, pulsing and ebbing, luring.
Suddenly, viciously, it amplified its entice in pure abandoned pull. Possibly, he cried out, his hands moving instinctively to his temples vainly trying to vent the pounding in his skull. Without warning the chaos reigned in on him.
(Suppose it was not The Companion's tracks he followed? He had never seen her leave any. Had he?)
His body caved, and he fell landing on his back. There was no true pain but on another level entirely he was in agony. He could not hear his own words or screams, if he had any, but felt the sand shift under his writhing body. Then just as rapidly everything, save his mental faculties, shut down. Involuntarily his mind's eye opened and he was still.
Voices. Drifting over the dunes.
(He felt himself tense, then tremble. His eyes were wide. On his back, half buried in sand, blissfully paralysed. But aware - for the first time he saw them.)
Across the dunes the silhouettes of children danced. Far out their presence on the spine of one snake-like dune singling it out in all the arid nothingness. His fingers closed on the sand around him, mesmered.
It was a lazy, carefree, tripping dance of two - a boy and a girl. Half-way along their progress the girl laughed and the boy, extending his arms, pretended to be a plane and flew, as best he could, like a winged locomotive, across the plains - with the girl in dizzy pursuit. The boy was clearly the older of the two and protective of his sister. How did he know? He knew. The information was part of the vision, like a dream is a function of the mind.
(Lying there, he was literally in two places at once, places of the mind and places…places he could not explain. Psychology; Lili would know about that. He heard himself laugh and felt his face, almost despite itself curve into a smile. He was delirious. His smile reflected that delirium. Yet something was bringing him back to where he was lying, though, like a lucid dream, he could still access the running children on the sand.
A shadow fell over his recumbent face. Another girl, God, yet another girl. Who were they all? Her long wavy brown hair was blotting out the sun. Her dress long ago had been expensive, yet she was drawn but determined, and her long brown limbs were lovely, all in conformity with her actual beauty. When she waved her hand before his eyes, he knew he could not respond.
"I don't know you, do I?"
The sound of an American accent in such close proximity should have been traumatic, should have jolted him to his feet, had he not been so convinced he was utterly, utterly mad. It did not matter, she responded to her own question.
"Yeah, right. Creepy, half-dead, delirious guy could confirm that for me." But she did not seem too sure of herself. She looked around, seemingly getting her bearings. "The City is that way, right?" She jerked her head to her right.
No answer came. As he knew it would not.
She looked behind her as if someone were following. Then opened the parasol she had been holding, rested the cane on her shoulder so the shade extended broadly behind her head like a Technicolor aureole. For a moment it seemed she was going to reach down and check his pulse, but thought the better of it. Instead she stepped away.
"Nice meeting you." Another step away. "Got to go." Two more steps "I'll put in a good word for you when I get there."
She moved off. Yet the soft winds blew her voice back to him.
"'I'll put in a good word?' What the hell was that all about?"
He was not going to struggle to process this new element of hallucination. She was gone. And the other area of madness again dominated, swarming him with its mental picture, claiming him anew.
The Children…)
They ran and they ran, twirling about and each time they did he feared the steepness of the hills knowing something bad was going to happen and wondering why they seemed so oblivious to the danger. Then it happened. In all innocence the girl lost her footing (indeed she lost a shoe), and fell head over heels down the bank of the eddying sand colossus. "Jack" came tumbling after, pausing only to scream "Samantha!" before he leapt; so that it echoed around the queer, colourless desert like light refracted through a prism of pain - slicing like needles whomever they touched. The girl responded, her cry upwards a muffled cacophony- the words muted, then lost. Soundlessly the bodies continued to fall, downward, trained in gravity, disappearing. Vanished.
Abruptly his mind's eye closed. He sat up as if from a nightmare.
It seemed darker somehow. A diminished sun remained suspended against the sky. Again, he found himself scrutinising the emptiness, and felt an abstract pain, an abstract longing but chose to ignore both. The 'magnetism' was still there but receding, he could feel it drawing itself in to its source as if it were shrinking, retreating. Perhaps later it would renew its assault but for now he felt safe and strangely secure. Baffled at this otherknowledge, it was all he could do to simply steel himself against the speed of the falling preternatural darkness; finding as he did so that the satellite neither rose, nor fell, but was simply blotted out at night. The cold, like the veils of dark velvet and stars - was immediate.
"God have mercy...", his voice quivered in its own audience and he licked his salty lips: "May God have mercy-"
There was lightning.
As if to respond in kind, the sky sparked. In a star-spilled night, without cloud, it was chastening. He held his tongue. But it did not stop. Vein after vein of the awesome hot energy arced and sliced the sky, followed - with logic - by thunder - horrible, bellowing displeasure. A storm. It was everywhere and he still could not stand, but far from fear now, the ragged beauty it inspired in the feral landscape fascinated him. Flashes of light everywhere, but not quite upon his position, yet it was coming, most definitely for that very spot. He could only marvel at the way the hills were alternately solarized and negatized as the furious power ripped across it. Finding the strength and will to move, he struggled to his feet and almost jumped out of his skin at the figure that had materialized beside him. He started. In the darkness he missed the proportions, mistook it for her. But then, another flash of light (disturbingly closer than before as the storm crept in a league about them) illuminated the features. A man.
"Krycek!"
His voice sounded dusty and hollow but no less loaded with invective and shock. Another spark, then loud, ominous growling thunder. He still could not see as well as he wanted, as well as he would have liked.
"Look."
It was simple yet succinct, and instantly deafening despite the storm. Krycek, the man, or thing beside him raised his arm and pointed - his *left* arm - towards the horizon. Following the line of his pointing finger, the vision raised a gasp. On the horizon the storm had intensified but instead of of lighning, there were great tornadoes of wind, sand and flame. They whirled against the sky-line blotting out all before him in a tsunami of roaring fire, and seemed to remain there unchecked; but as he understood it, it was only as the great distance would have it appear. The wall of fire was actually closing. The storm was its herald.
He was horrified. Krycek remained unmoved, calmly lighting a cigarette, the lighter flame momentarily realising his features, like the encroaching lightning. He, Jeffrey, took in the two arms manipulating both cigarette and match, his mind forming a question, yet hearing his voice respond:
"What is that?"
"Dawn." Krycek answered, turning to face him.
"I thought they cut off your arm?" Now he asked it, wondering whether the question would arouse anger, fear.
Neither.
"Nothing a little voodoo couldn't handle." The phantom replied, flexing the arm's muscle, quite unalarmed. "Aren't you glad you picked the right side?"
"Perfectly."
The lightning glared, as if dilating, and the face of the man next to him was clearer, bathed in light and free of cynicism, contemplating the sand at his boot.
Again the impertinent questions:
"What happened? Did they kill you too?"
Krycek looked up now, holding his gaze with a penetrating, yet serious, indifference.
"What do you think?" Same imploding tone.
"No." His own voice was so small.
Against the flaring light he saw the mad, violet of Krycek's eyes.
"No." Krycek added, just to puntuate.
"Why are you here then?"
"I'm not."
And strange as it seemed he heard a voice behind him whisper his name, and startled anew he turned away from his tormentor.
Suddenly the desert world no longer existed.
Another whisper, only slightly louder:
"Jeffrey."
The white light that fell on him was the light of the moon, and he was cold. So cold. A woman was coming towards him, and as she came into his field of focus the little details of the world around her became obvious. They were in a forest. Somewhere. It was her. It was Lili.
"Jeffrey, you need to come back inside."
Her voice was steady, yet plaintive. But somehow she talked to him as if he were a child. The shadowed foliage of the trees all grew around him. He felt...smothered...surreal. Where was he?
"Jeff, it's me, Lili."
He wanted to answer her, but this world was beyond him, and he could not seem to communicate. Speech did not come. Words did not form. He remained defeated in silence. Her hand crept to his shoulder. She seemed sincere and only a little...scared.
"Jeff, we have to go home."
But where was home?
Chaos now. The world collapsed upon him. Thunder. The storm had come upon him while he slept; he was at its centre. Alone.
"Krycek!" he screamed it at the burning air.
The wall of flame had made half of its violent progress from between the horizon and him - and the lightning was everywhere at once. Slicing around him. And then, in one tumultuous stab, upon him. He felt himself, for want of a better word or feeling, ignite. His world became ubiquitous light and the sensation of sailing through the air came to him only because he was. Soundlessly gravity reclaimed him; he saw the sands above him and the stars beneath him, the former expanding triumphantly in his vision to strike him bluntly in the face. His mind went blank, and a million stars winked out one by one, the shrieking of the winds dulling to a vulgar, distant whistle.
*