The mixture of reality upon fantasy and fantasy upon surreality became thrusting, soft, gentle, decaying of its health, decaying of its sense. The air swirled and stayed frozen; numbers lingered everywhere, invisibly, lost thoughts that had escaped the prison of mind, each number representing a code, a letter. The number one stood for a. The number one stood for b. The number one stood for c. the number dark stood for hell. The clouds whispered their nonexistent message, painted across the sealed canvas of no light; the walls of no walls stood still, unbothered, unimportant. The world was at an end, the curtains of finale had finally rung and rattled to the center, indicating demise.
The sun and moon interfered with each other, overlapped each other with flipping pages of nature in the book of life, the phases of the moon intertwining themselves again and again as the sun reversed its path in the sky. Arrows hovered about and lingered in the air randomly, as if pointing, indicating a new road, in every direction. East was north. East was south. South was northeast. West was north-south. The dark pointing arrows never stopped to take a breather, never rested to make sense, not even the smallest slither of recognition fallen upon this new world, this land that could so easily be called an alien of earth. The ground stopped flipping; the earth stopped writhing in pain and dementing itself into horror and mobile petrifaction.
Where am…I? Walter repeated in his mind again, unable to blink, unable to move, unable to breathe the cardiac air. Who am I? He asked himself. How am I…sick? Dead? Ill? Am I… divided amongst… multiplication? Am I overlapped upon emotion with emotion… sewn together by the fingers of fate that no longer knew what to do, that no longer knew how to knit one, and pearl two? Am I an animal? My heart – is it beating? Is it singing, dancing? Are my emotions twirling and whorled around each other while I remain still, tranquil in an ungrounded sense of nature, water? Am I the weather? The sun? No sound answered him. No noise gave retort, gave a choke of instance that would forever keep him alive, forever keep him knowing that he was… a dog?
What was a dog? Reverse became reversed into reversal. The world remained silent in the slow paced crawl of objects and fantasy; delusion danced about the certain thick, thin air, twirling itself in opposition of nature, tickling Walter's face, while he had no idea what it was. The whole world was discolored into a darkroom's noir; nothing but an old movie's black and white, silent with intent. Walter's lips did not move, did not even twitch. There was no longer any need to breathe, to move, to have your heart beat, or have your eyes blink. There was no need of living, or dying, or being dead. There was simply no purpose in this wonderland of mixed emotions that compounded together senselessly, beating each other uselessly, only because the higher powers had commanded them to, to kill each other, to blunt each other into nonexistence until nothing remained but the blatant universe itself. And even then, they would continue to beat at each other, render each other hopeless with their abilities, their lives and power. Fabrics were sewn into blankets of stars in the air that gave no lustrous glow, no luminous breaths that lingered about bodies, retching the stench of fresh night, cold air. Gray leaves were stepped on by invisible footprints as they suspended themselves in the air; blades of grass were indifferent to movement; some simply moved, some didn't.
Some seemed so unreasonable, so lost and never found while still being surrounded by their loved ones. They didn't know how to move, they didn't know how to live. They stood there, pointing at the air, as if it were of interest, or somehow luring their interest, drawing out their thoughts of pique, of curiosity. The ground began to falter again. The ripples of the stone ground began to conceive a bubbling rising of ground; the flat surface now twisting and turning into distortion, into induced implosion. This strange dimension of insensibility continued to falter; the ground before Walter bubbling into a rise of earth, chunks of it beginning to engorge and inflate from the inside, as if they were about to retch something out, sickeningly, nauseously. It gave a cracking sound of stone, a bubbling, drowning cry of helplessness, a gurgle of demon.
The cloud of earth continued to grow, and went on to Walter's height as all he could do was stare and try to depict what was happening before him, blank thoughts full of overlapped emotion filling his mind, unable to comprehend anything anymore. A blank stare filled his mind, filled the dimension. Then, the bubbles of gray began to deflate, and hiss into form, into a human, silhouetted form. The largest became a head as they mixed and churned and weathered itself into sculpted perfection, chiseled by nonexistent hands. The deflation continued; the bubbles formed legs, arms, and a body before Kasumi Walter. The body grew structure, it grew shape. The blatant universe had conceived a new person. – White Cloak.
The enemy stared, stood quietly, solemnly, doing nothing with inactivity, as if he could do nothing in this world as well, as if he, too, were powerless. On some level, Walter understood that, the level that was so far away from his apparent consciousness that it did not even qualify to even be realized with thought. His white had turned into a grayish white; the black of the hood becoming darkened as ever, as if his appearance would never show, as if his eyes, his face were too hideous to reveal to the outer world itself. Where am I…? Walter thought again. Where….where am I? Where am I? Thoughts faded into nothingness again. That sentence made itself into insensibility as well; it had been spoken, or rather, thought, too many times.
"In… I-I-In h-h-h-ell-l-lll-l," White Cloak's voice chimed rather unequally, unconsciously. The figure of White Cloak split to the side, the other side, as if his silhouette had, too, been distorted by holographic images. His body stretched to the right, then to the left, then back to norm as if nothing was wrong. His voice sounded of robotic noise, buzzing in a certain microphone, telegrammed voice. Walter did not hear the words. Or, it was more like, he heard the words, but he did not have the strength to comprehend them. In fact, he was empty of realization that much had been said. "M-m…my h-he-hell, anyway-ays…" White Cloak stammered phonetically in faltering voice. A technicality had been made. His image blurred once more, shifting dramatically now and then, as if he weren't real, as if he was never really there.
What happened…? Walter thought. Why can't… I speak…? He asked himself, as if something were inside him, writhing into possession of mind that would tell him the answer, for it at least owed him that. No answer came to. He had lost the feeling of his bones, his fingers, his body parts, his insides, as if his soul had been drained away, and it lingered now, uselessly, mindlessly around him. It was so close to him, bits and pieces and nooks and crannies flying around him so mysteriously, so suspiciously; he just wanted to climb away out of this dirtied shell of fearless petrifaction and take the shards of shredded consciousness in his blatancy of grasp, and return the pieces to his head, for each one was of enormous value, each photo and film of the scattered page of collage was significant to him, in special ways only he himself knew of. But he couldn't. He didn't feel the need to do it, really. He didn't even, on some level, realize that he didn't feel his insides. He didn't realize on some level, some great level, that he was away from the real world, away into the fantasized norm of crooked mind.
"Because… I control your body h-h-here-e-e-ere," White Cloak rasped. His imaged paced itself uncontrollably to the sides once again; bouncing off the invisible boundaries the real had created himself. His voice seemed radioed, hazing in certain buzz and drone, white noise.
Because of… Walter thought slow-mindedly, his eyes still frozen into their emotionless petrifaction of compliant event. Because it's… an illusion…? He asked his inner self. The teen of green wisps beneath him, hiding in his shell did not answer today. He, too, was isolated upon distant truth of reality, stuck in the white murmurs of death, of noise. The arrows that lingered around him slowed their speed in a way; the moon and stars and sun began to separate their overlapping eclipse, but at the same time, expanding their non-luminal bodies of black and white into great, circular oblivion so that they would forever remain a representation of a diagram of Venn, or at least, in the end, of certain tangence to each other. They gave no heat, no cooling air, for the air was everything to the world, and yet, meant nothing to the skies that seemed so far away, and also grounded to the floor, the rippling stone floor that continued with perennial movement despite the lack of movement, motion.
"Y-Yes," White Cloak rasped unevenly, incongruously. That strange buzz to his voice hadn't weathered a bit into norm; in fact, it had gotten worse, overlapping more and move. "You – you managed to figure ou-ou-out so-so-so quickly," the strange, metamorphosed voice continued to bluster into the air speechlessly, senselessly, as if he were stammering mistakes just so he could accommodate with the constant war of emotions that promised in treaty to become a battle of permanence that would last a full eternity, and maybe even further than that constellation of eras. "This is a s-s-special technique that o-only t-two people share in the whole entire world," White Cloak explained. Walter heard him barely; the words just went to the back of his mind. "I-I am one of the two. You should consider yourself l-lucky to experience it," he said with the most clarity he had ever spoken with, despite that constant rasp of voice. Walter just stared on, blankly, dully. "Now, then," White Cloak went on. What now? "Shall we…begin?" he asked strangely.
On cue, Walter's eyes found their lost fear of his petrifaction. His eyes broadened even further in scarce tranquility on his face; he no longer felt or was normal. His brown eyes that were once piercing of nature became dull, lost of their sharp being for they were no longer cross, they were no longer of dark emotion and secretion of thought. The dark world seemed to falter before his eyes, more than possible, it seemed, into a historic breathing of hell and paradise and disgust and love and lust and all these mixed emotions that seemed to rush into Walter like a crazy, erotic beast.
It ripped apart his soul as he looked straight into White Cloak's hood, directly into it as if he could see his face, like he could find his structures beneath that shadowed hood of forever secretiveness. Then, beneath that darkened hood of noir color world, eyes opened up, showed their grayish color of silent movie, the twenties'. The eyes brought out their deviance, their narrow evil that put chills even to Walter's spin, the boy who had lusted after revenge for so long, lusted for a life without pain, one of his purposes he didn't seem to realize just yet. In time, tough. In time, he will grow to know that that was what he really wanted. Painless life of paradise. Then, the eye morphed into their own abnormalities, as if the world they were caught in wasn't full enough of it now. The pupils began to suck into the air; traces of the only light began to suck into White Cloak's pupils, and began to thicken them, thicken them into life, into recognition as the most noticeable thing. The light continued to be sucked in as if by a mystifying force, and the pupils – they enlarged so that they fully became the eye.
It seemed to eat at White Cloak's external body, becoming out of his eyes' bonds and out to his face, enlarging too much, expanding as they ate away his face, his hood. The pupils became now sucking black holes of hell that became as large as one and a half diameter of their respective eye sockets that lay below under his skin, his blood, his flesh. They continued to suck in light, and as Walter stared deeply into them, looking as if into the future and awestruck with thoughtless thoughts, he began to feel himself lose control over everything, more than he was all ready. Walter's old innocence became drained into the depth of eyes that stared at him wrenchingly before him, darkened in truth, tainted with lies.
Walter found himself swimming in the darkness of White Cloak's eyes, swimming in it, thriving in it for dear life. Echoes of voices poured into his helpless, thoughtless mind continually, repetitively.
"If you must, swim in the lakes of power, drench yourself in the currents of darkness and revenge, so that you can be drowned of your former self, and cease into a new person. The person you always wanted to be. The person you need to be in order to become what you want to become. There is no other way for you. Your fate has all ready been chosen, so erase all small thoughts you used to have of changing it. If you don't, you're more than pathetic. You're dead."
Walter continued to swim to nowhere, half his body gone, and half his soul eaten away. His energy tired from his shoulders below. His head could only jerk to one side to the next, the only reason he was panicking – because he could move. Then, into the darkness he found himself, staring at himself, his back, in the same position he had been outside before the eyes had happened. The image was so clean, so clear and full of sense that it made absolutely… no sense. Then, he saw White Cloak. He saw his eyes open up, and he saw the pupils dominate his sockets again. And then he stared into the darkness again. And found himself swimming, again. Then, he peered into the darkness once more. He saw the back of himself, frozen, once more. He saw the eyes open and suck himself into the darkness, once more. Then again. And again. And again. And again. His fear overlapped into his one body, the emotions multiplying into immense folds; they were unbearable to the human body. He was lost; there was no end to this cycle. He saw White Cloak's eyes, and in White Cloak's eyes, he saw himself staring into White Cloak's eyes, that led to White Cloak's eyes, that lead to White Cloak's eyes, that led to White Cloak's eyes…
Walter's own eyes became widened with shock, horror, heartlessness. He had become faint of heart now. They stretched into spheres over his face; the white part showing completely over as the pupils became isolated now with now lids to defend it calmly. His frozen features were completely overrated, overdone into fear for he had been sewn into fantasized reality of hell, darkness, fear. He felt the fear he had before in the beginning of the illusion, but this time, after seeing into White Cloak so many times, felt that fear, at least ten times over. Then, those images of evil glares that seemed so inhumane, so demonic became images.
They became flashing images of gray, white, and black, full of pain, murder, genocide, hell, blood, suicide, depression, and sickening splattering of scarce love and warmth. Those images then became a sea of flashing noir, clicking each other into differentiating situation one after another, paving the ground that Walter had been standing in, paving the earth that rippled like water insensibly. They became a collage of pictures, flashing pictures in motion, dead motion that shattered every time they showed the blood, the hell that people went through, people with blank faces, people with dull eyes and hot blistering tears and the world of trembling bottom lips. And Walter stood on this rippling ground of collage. He stood on it, without motion, forced to watch them expand before him, flashing in seizure motions, seizure speed. Then, closing in on his eyes that shuddered ever so slightly, so close up you could see the frosty fright inside him, the fantasy somehow began to fade around him, shred into norm reality. The mixing of silence and noise became threatened, and gasped away, whisking itself back into the world of illusion and forcing Walter out. The brown-haired boy, still devastated from petrifaction that brought him overboard, was now weak in the legs.
He fell to the ground, his once confident and cool-headed body falling to the ground. His features still frozen, he had barely even realized that he had fallen to his knees in weakness before White Cloak, who remained hidden beneath that same old shadowy hood; color had been brought back to the world. The illusion was over. White Cloak's eyes were no longer seen. Walter bowed to the ground, eyes still inevitably stretched inhumanly, brought to an emotion of turmoil and chaos. Pandemonium rushed through his blood; he could not feel his heart beat; he could not touch the cool breaths he used to take in to induce tranquility. Shadows fell over his face. The images had died away into nonexistence now, yet the memory still lingered in his mind. He wanted to wash it away. He wanted to wash it away.
Seconds passed, seconds of waiting. Walter's face began to deform horridly, disgustingly, so suddenly that it was shocking. His cheeks began to become perspiration, his skin – his flesh slowly falling apart into liquid, drops of if falling to the ground into doom. His arms began to follow suit and the rest of his body – his legs, his feet, his begging knees and once straight back that now melted into oblivion. His features became demented into liquid, the colored liquid of his skin, his hair, his blue clothes. And those colors began to fade into clear blue; those colors began to fade into the color of water. Nothing remained… but a puddle of it.
White Cloak did not utter a low cry of surprise. It seemed that such a thing was much too low of rank to give shock to him. Besides, using that technique on Walter did not take a lot out of him. It was only a taste of what he could do with those eyes. Those powerful, great eyes that he himself – with another, created. But that was another story. "So it was a replication all along," White Cloak muttered in a clear rasp, a steady voice; his body did not swish to the side and his voice did not blur in radioed automaticity anymore.
Then, a fist came striking from behind White Cloak, thrusting in anticipation and excitement, a rush of adrenalines, a burst of impulse and animation. It aimed for White Cloak's back of the neck. It came closer, closer, closer – it stopped. No, it didn't stop. It was better to say that it was… blocked. However, White Cloak had not turned around. He had not used his body to block it. He did not necessarily use any supernatural powers to block it. And the fist had no intention of stopping. So how did it, really? It was another hand. Another hand that writhed out from the back of White Cloak's neck and clasped Walter's real fist cleanly, purely with those white gloves and sleeves. The fist tried to pull away. The hand had a strong grip on it. White Cloak's body made no further noise, and stammered weakly, toward the floor as the hand began to crawl out more out of the first White Cloak. It seemed so unnatural, so inhumane and nauseating to see a hand just come out of a body sickeningly with the sound of cracking, crisping bone.
Then, the hand began to lead to an arm. The arm began to lead to shoulders, a head, then a chest. The chest lead to a body, and the whole entire body of White Cloak crawled out of his shell, and came to the outside world, feeling the freshness of air on his tickled, delighted selfish face. "So…you're the real one?" White Cloak rasped as the shell of his former self fell to the ground with a dusty thud. It clattered to the surface, emitting young clouds of dust into the air that were whisked away into invisibility momentarily after their birth. Sad. "I'm not losing to you," White Cloak declared as he brought out a blade of bone protruding from his gloved finger. He held Walter in place, holding his fist so he would escape. Then, he brought the elongated bone back, then thrust it forward, and right into Walter's left side of the chest. Right through his heart.
Walter gasped an exasperated cry. His eyes widened in shock, in pain. He retched an uneasy noise from his mouth; his body quickly became derived of energy. White Cloak waited. The world itself…waited. Walter's frozen expression remained thoughtless, emotionless on his face. Was it a lost chance of life? Was he really… dead?
Suspiciously, the puddle of water began to stir behind White Cloak. Then, the water began to strive upward towards the air, forming and twisting into another body that wrapped an arm around White Cloak. The water slowly began to form itself into a body, then drenched itself in solid features and color. A headlock was successful around White Cloak; Walter scowled a bit victoriously, growling hatefully a bit towards White Cloak as he kept his head tight in his arm. "I'm the real one!" Walter growled from clenched teeth. Water began to crawl from the arm and around White Cloak's hood, wrapped around his neck like a film, a suffocating film, and spread to his chin, his features that were now visible silhouettes of water. A straining voice muttered a throttling beginning. Walter continued the above-water drowning of White Cloak. He was confident to win.
"I told you… I'm not losing to you," White Cloak choked. His body began to glow effervescently, darkly in a red radiation of luminary force. Walter stopped a bit, kept the headlock mindlessly, now uselessly. His eyes widened bit from shock. White Cloak's arms lay limp now, letting the glowing red and orange take over him, engulf him in the light. "You're going to die, I can promise you that, Walter," White Cloak gasped. Walter had no time to move. He had no time to think. The light burst. The body burst – into an enormous explosion of blistering noise and crashing sound. A huge explosion engulfed the two of them. And left their presences… gone.