Aftershock
Chapter 13: Ruin to the Truth!
Hiding something never erases it.
It always hangs somewhere in the back of your mind, rotting away, and where a human being hardens and twists to cynicism in the absence of light, a single matter only grows more and more tender with time. You may grow as calloused a shell for yourself as you like, you may tell yourself it's a weak, sordid issue, that it has no place in your world-wise mind, that it was just a childhood disappointment only painful to the most spoiled and bratty children, and the death the well-deserved destruction of two hopeful, sheltered fools, but the thorn refuses to come out of my wound, and it's only pushing deeper with every mean-spirited word I shove into it.
And I know that whatever ploy I may use next to hide the truth from myself, whether lust, hatred, or madness drowns out the subtler ring of the pain, everything shall fall but not this one keystone of my identity. Not because I would cease to be Luphinid Silnaek, if the one deepest portion of my existence is cut out from me, but because nothing in my life exists with the warmth to heat this core, which shallow passions can never dream of touching. I am only pain, pain with the clothing of malice, and the incandescence which propagates itself so effectively through minds with even the smallest seed and the undefeatable will that constitutes its nature is entirely absent from me.
Is there light somewhere in the universe? I remember it streaming from the open skies and scattering into a million dazzling shards at the mention of the old Saffron buildings, and I can swear something made its wandering way through all the dark holes of the encircling forest, transforming carbon-based organic matter to what I could see as nothing less than pure angel's gold, but certainly that was only the complex manifestation of energy particles in the theoretic plane. I saw happiness in its true form in consciousnesses in that plane, and it was nothing more than emotion. A thought bent into a certain shape and purpose, invoked in response of the mind's personal experience to favourable stimuli. Or should I say the destructive and selfish passions of the average pond scum? I don't know what I should think. Being entirely truthful robs me of identity, more mildly than but as inevitably as healing certainly would.
And so now I stand, fallen from the rights of the meanest beggar. Is it possible that I may have a connection thicker than memories to Amaren Kelanis? Anything I say to myself towards the contrary sounds like an empty lie, but why is it that I can't see one fraction of his joys and sorrows? I can connect the dots; the overprotectiveness of his family leading to his thirst for accomplishment and action, his mind drowning the stagnant grief of their death by this very thirst and leading him to pokèmon training, and the collapse of this system when grief finally overpowered his nature and devastated him; I know every inch of his mind, but I can feel nothing that he felt. All I have is a longing for his life, which I have glorified beyond reason. This is me.
And I am so foolish, so very foolish, to hide this. Ah, but so typical. It is sin to milk the opportunity of my abilities to their full! It's a betrayal of my very self, a betrayal of the ghost at Lavender—and we know where betrayers go to after death: the ninth circle of hell, and its deepest and darkest. I only wish I could hold it off at least so long as I live.
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This is as far as I remember of the events immediately after the teleportation. My uncertain theory is that I slipped into a strange state of unconsciousness, in which a large amount of experiences and thoughts passed through me in the form of dreams, but some quantity of delirious musing remained for me to sully the paper with its nonsense. (Poetic nonsense notwithstanding.)
The next known fact was that of standing bemusedly in the middle of some species of melancholy garden, looking out over the surface of an artificial pond paved with marble towards the silhouette of a sycamore tree. This was quickly amended to one of looking away bemusedly from the silhouette on account of the direct glare from an early evening sun, and further the bemused expression and emotion was also omitted. I was never known for losing my bearings, and I required something to keep my record.
Fruitfully, I spotted a sign placed upon an austere-looking adjoining building: "House of Kobbit". The gaps in the muddled past events began to fill.
Nearing the moment when the exact destination of the teleport would be summoned in my mind and read, a strain of that despicable merging sound had entered my mind and wreaked havoc with my memories. The single compressed thought which comprised the Kobbits' life, faint as it was, imposed itself onto mine, and merged with the thought then prevalent from my own consciousness, the thought always prevalent in my mind: my memories. I presumed that the emotion most matched to my own was best represented in their minds by this place: their old house. And so, my usual instinct to envision a destination place when teleportation demanded it was responded with this.
One shred of information still remained out of my reach: my physical conditions during my dream-state, which were known to be notoriously jumbled in such situations. I could obviously see my imperfect envisioning of a teleport destination did not give me any embarrassing side-effects, i.e. any split limbs or scattered body parts around all the vague places I might have supplied, but one never knew what other oddities one could pick up. Certainly an extra finger would be taken for granted until I closely scrutinized myself, and if I was in fact in a dreamscape or the fantastical universe of a deranged man, I would be faced with an entirely unique set of problems. What would I do when the dream decided to terminate?
It was, therefore, at this moment of complete recognition of my physical state, that reality entirely impressed itself on me. (Alternately, it was possible that I had exited some earlier dream-state and entered fully into reality.) The sunlight! I felt my skin beginning to recoil, and fled, only half-noting at the time that the burn was little more than that of keeping a [I]normal[/I] hand in sunlight for any large amount of time. In retrospect, perhaps this was the reason for my endurance outside for the considerable time I spent in looking for shelter.
At last, I swooped into a sealed furniture shop and ran to a convenient mirror. I saw only subtle differences: a possibly imagined growth in stature, mainly height; a concentration of my overgrown hair into an outcrop of black invading the small of my back; and a suddenly realized amplification of both psychic and physical stamina, which had apparently remained outside my notice until this moment. Also, I remembered looking into the mirror moments before the Riquanne Halls party to see only one remaining streak of certain brown in the pupil of my right eye; this had disappeared with the other changes to form a homogeneous dazzling silver with only the vaguest hints of grey.
All these details could be explained with a dusty calendar hanging on the wall above the mirror: while it seemed badly outdated, the year written conspicuously at the top was at least fifty years from my last known time. Whatever strange mental realm I had come into, I had remained in unconsciousness there for (as confirmation later proved) exactly sixty-five years.
Some of my more shrewd readers may see the relentlessly fast and reckless pace of my life. Not only do I write only the chief events, which either represent or affect my personality as it evolves over time, but the very style of this story is more rushed than a man in my position may naturally make it. I wish to make this clear, so that no reader assumes this is the result of only impatience on my part: my life is themed exactly as it seems to the reader of this biography, my memories recalling clearly only the most major events of my lie, while merely sketching less important themes. I seem only an old book, once read with no great attention and largely forgotten with time, its composite parts hardly meaningful to any perception (though only my own perception can attempt to confirm this).
And so little shall be said of my immediately following thoughts: apathy, for the most part, eager as I was to reach the finale and the end of my two-hundred year life. I continued life as usual, quickly acclimatizing to the shifts in technology and cultural systems, and responding with characteristic amusement to the shock of the few acquaintances I still had. I did not particularly create a wave with my return through any circle, righting or otherwise, and so it was no triviality when the Gym Leader of Saffron summoned me to the gym.
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Decades had passed, but no insistence on city maintenance would change the sight of that ancient establishment. I saw with an expression of blatant disinterest what Amaren had looked out with awe, perhaps ninety years ago: the dark, cavernous room, with its inadequate rows of giant lighted candles and bleary-eyed hospital beds, and the shabbily dressed old man who hurried anxiously to my side. Material extravagance might not be distinctly necessary for psychic enlightenment, but experience had taught me it proved no hindrance, and sensibility demanded it.
The eternally exploring distinction of a mind practiced in the psychic arts touched my own, and the old man to whom it belonged gave a start.
[Is that really you, Amaren?] he relayed to me, in a distinct style of communicative thought (mainly) unburdened of the contradictions of any language. Physically, he peered at me as though unsure his failing eyes were serving him correctly. [I remember clear as day when you first came, and I herded you to your own preliminary test. What happened?]
[Oh, come on,] I replied, [you know you psychic pushovers will coax it telepathically out of my mind anyway.]
He recoiled slightly, and made an expression as though bracing himself. [Follow me, then,] he murmured telepathically.
He led me to an invisibly unobtrusive portion of wall, directed an invisibly unobtrusive concentration of thought towards it, and the two of us ducked into the wall with an invisible unobtrusiveness, entering a hall which satisfied my standards of physical extravagance.
The carpet was lush red, embroidered with gold thread which ran past the edge of the cloth and up the sides of the walls, giving the impression of a solid gold building. Curtains lined the wide arched french windows, two on each wide wall, their position making it apparent that the windows were never meant to be doors. True lighting filled every corner of the room, giving it an otherworldly sparkle, originating not from any single object but from everything at once—to the style of my own decoration during the Riquanne Halls. At the very head of the hall (with a vanity greater than even my generous expectations), lying limp on an expensive throne, slept—
[Sabrina,] I said with mild amusement. Of course, there was no unconsciousness about the young figure but a superconsciousness, a state of heightened psychic awareness.
[Tell me,] I continued, [how did you manage to prolong your existence this far? Certainly your highness didn't subscribe to the coarse practice of assimilation heightening.]
She ignored this. Investigation yielded that the ancient creature had been sustaining herself entirely on thought converted into energy, and that her true physical form had been covered discreetly with a less nauseating illusion, as that of the old professor.
Even so, her illusory image was intimidating in its own right. The same subdued eyes peered out of the same refined face as in the old illustrations of her form, and the lack of her sinister animated doll did nothing to dilute the dark introverted glory of her thoughts.
Ah, typical Luphinid. Comparing all things with himself. This figure did not awe me personally in the least.
[You have heard,] said she, [of my earlier crisis with multiple personalities, very early in my life.]
[What about it?]
[I realized some time later that my existence in that form could have went on, and very agreeably. That young child, my other personality, craved release from my utilitarian lifestyle, and she was slowly attaining this. With every passing day, I and my opposite were becoming more and more separate and distinct, and I predicted a time when the girl would disengage entirely from myself and become an independent living being.]
[Ah, how clever. I read about your persistent attachment to art. I suspect this would be the greatest form of the 'creation' you have such a fascination for.]
[Correct. And so I began perfecting this new art, creating not a piece of writing or painting but complete, functional organisms. I made DID into an art!]
[And what on earth did you bring me here and tell me this for?]
[I haven't finished yet. It seemed my practise held intense side-effects—I did not divide as a cell might, with no losses to either myself or my creation, but as a piece of inorganic matter. What experiences I used to shape my creations were lost from myself, and what I omitted from the creations were entirely absent from their own minds. I (and the resultant being) would look back to see gaping holes in my memories and thoughts; several portions of my life were wasted away through this.]
[Well, you reap what you sow.]
I still had no conceivable idea what she could have meant with this story, and made such apparent.
Keeping me ignorant still, she turned to another subject abruptly.
[I hear you are planning to take on the anomaly 0A1 at some point in your life.]
[If 'hear' is synonymous with 'fish telepathically in my mind', then yes.]
[Then do you know that death may not be the only possible reward for failing to right this.]
[What do you mean?] The Mightyena's ears rose, tense.
[You may be subjected to any number of fates, some of which both death and your species of half-life pales in comparison.]
A long-held hope suddenly collapsed. No death? All my bankings had concentrated to this beacon of faint release from my existence, and where cynicism could crush all other lights in my perceived future, nothing had held me from basing every shred of what little still remained in me to this one assurance.
No, but this was simple.
Death was still possible for a victim of the wrong. It would be inevitable. I didn't care what little proof I used to hold this up, but I knew it would come. I had all faith.