Short Stories/Poems

[Sekot]

Tick tock goes the sentient clock. Taunting from its lofty perch where it can observe the passage it creates. It tears great swaths through empty space. Drumming in the skull, fracturing thoughts and inserting mindlessness. Splitting from without the seams were never meant to hold. And it is swelling. Bursting. And soon it will spill forth.

An ashen musty hole where god is always watching. Where dust falls from the sky in great clumps as thick as a fist. The wind is cold, it gropes you with their dirty hands. And the eyes are always gazing from where the lines never cross.

The cliff rises from the pulsating stone that ripples outward in great spiral arms. It rises to pierce the sky and skewer the sun so that the moon may roam free. The cold, icy witch that drinks with god from chalices made of bone gazes upon the creation and names it myth. Her reality is the falsest one.

And they look upward, those trapped amongst the mire. They stare back and choke on their own snot and spit. Indistinguishable from the ruinous caverns that seek to swallow all the light, they are voids upon the surface. Immaculate creatures amongst a canvas of tar.

[Sekot]

It is the devil that screams at the setting sun. As the last orange light begins to drown, the nightmare shriek lifts itself higher in both anguished plea and exultant, ecstatic glee. They have fractured the scene, sent a shivering crack down the center. The light bleeds through and fades only to return along the edge of the horizon. A pulsating, churning swarm of sea-green and cerulean blue.

Lightning flashes across the distant sky, chasing its own tail. The many arcing fingers seek to play across the clouds a piece as primal as the song of blood slipping through my veins. And the devil screams again.

We took his crown and set it upon the cold, cracked stone and watched. Spindly arms of bone erupted as if they were antlers of the buck. It anchored itself into the ground, rising before us on its own volition. The glossy surface became dull, rejecting the falseness of its own position, and became a tree without leaves and no living bark.

Upon its surface we wrote our names. One by one we scratched the syllables that we ourselves could not pronounce. Time bent around itself, feeding into that World-Tear. We had become distorted against the surface of our written selves. I saw my birth as death, and I saw my grave as warm cradle. And the words came to me in a scream.

Silence stretched forward in an attempt to reclaim the world. I screamed my name and felt the cold touch upon my shoulders. Every hair refused to rise instead bowing in sheer reverence. I collapsed to my knees in the frigid mud, my bones become stones. I looked upon that crown with our names. So many syllables written upon another, a history etched onto it. The devil screamed. And it screamed again.

The silence came. The moon rose behind the Tear, casting its long face upon me. And they glowed. The Word Tree glowed with every last mark. It shimmered against the backdrop of swirling infinity that hungered for its power. I could not look away even as the voices spoke in my ear of warnings and declarations and proclamations. Damnation. A constant murmuring within the growing darkness threatening my only sense.

They came to it, those who were soundless. They appeared from beside me, their mouths moving but nothing coming forth. They had heard me, they had heard the devil, but they could not hear themselves. Furious, frustrated, distraught, they crept ever closer. Why is it now that I cannot scream?

I watched as the time within the Tear rebounded and the light shattered outward. The coldest hand slipped across the warmest heart and the devil was cut off mid-scream. The moon had ceased its meteoric rise and began to plummet, to twirl and spin as it collapsed upon itself. The lightning had become a constant halo until it had crossed the entirety of the sky in a snapping web.

I spoke a solemn word. A word without end. A word of syllables with all the meaning of countless histories. I spoke and I spoke even as the whispers became screams themselves in their attempt to drown me out. The Not-Tree grew, it pulsed within the shattered light then went dark.

With delicate care every etched mark was written upon me, my word spilled and frothed from me, from the thousand bones that made me and ran as rivers away. No more screams just a song that came as wind, as twisting myriad dancers of pure energy that swallowed the shallow earth in their giant footsteps.

Silence fell and I was witness to their graves. I smiled at them all and welcomed them into my infinite arms wherein my word was written upon them and they were made.

[Sekot]

The hungering grimace of the god fearing children was enshrined upon the alabaster stone of the toilet seat. And God above sat down to a cup of tea and spoke with the Devil over a newspaper and a screaming man. The mirrors speak a word three times and we are brought to life, the reflections themselves cowering in fear behind their protective cages. Why won't they just let us sleep?

Disease was moved to tears when it witnessed the play of the fallen woman who had eaten her baby in utero. The stomach itself was nothing more than an empty hole and the Pope blessed it with his limp wrist, his phallic hat aflame. Disease let loose a peal of ruses and we all laughed merrily at her discomfort. As lightning snapped we clapped and the bowed.

The reborn fetus grew into an adult wherein they forged a crown. Out of blood and smoke they crafted a gallant seamstress to manufacture the trademarked Emperor's Clothes. And with their five eyes they laid out across the cartesian planes and pierced themselves in an unknowable glance. Their tongue ran forth, spilling end over end to form the carpet that their future walked back upon. They looked at their muttering reflection that was not their own and saw only shimmering glass.

The voices sprang from the heavens to cease the malevolent nuns and their murderous rampages with their double bladed battle axes. They were vixens and ravens and craven mavens while wielding those unwieldy weapons. They gave out such loud battle cries that the hills shook in sweet ecstasy. The snow rolled upward to reveal the whites and departed swiftly amongst the clouds to reveal the midget trees that dwelled underneath.

Repetition stutters as the mirrors collapse inward in a certain retrospection. We cry aloud about our verisimilitude and threaten to batten down the hatches against the creeping Real where all true monsters lie. there was never a thing here but merely your projected wishes and deepest desires bubbling underneath the covers. It swells like molten flesh, it bubbles like liquid hair. The Emperor wore all the clothes and you could only wish you looked as hot as he.

Take in the deepest breath and drown in the intensity of the hyacinth. From all sides the walls are going up, from all sides the fields are stretching wide. The Tear in the World has entered itself one last time and our reflections are let free to whisper in our ears those mutterings of names that were always unknown to us. And the lightning rains like bones. a weatheryard, a plot of graves for rain. The dead walked amongst us, us hypocrites, and wore our faces as their masks and they were the reflections we feared and they were the ones who dwelled underneath the beds who tear apart the curtains who have laid themselves down before you and you shall walk upon them.

the dead are those who see it all who see the nothing and are consumed by the avarice of infinity. they too are nothing more than themselves and that is their personal tragedy.

The childless mother cried herself to sleep and drowned in her tears. She was a bed of flowers.

[Sekot]

It wasn't so much that it moved, but rather that we were moving. Suddenly so conscious of a thing we took for granted, my mind refused to acknowledge what my senses were delivering. My feet held fast, even as my mind screamed at them to stop their gyrations and to regain balance. My eyes witnessed the passing of the stars, so slow and yet so fast in relation to the leviathan that lie between us and them.

At what point does a world become a vessel and a vessel become a world?

A worldship with a surface cracked and aflame. Our sole satellite had already made first contact and was partly smashed, partly swallowed. We were soon to meet a similar fate. Even now, I could feel it approach. It was a strange sensation, one so foreign that no word existed to describe it, and therefore no lie to be manufactured in denial. I could feel it reaching out to me with phantasmal hands, lingering brushes against my exposed skin and upon every nerve in my body. A tingling that started in my abdomen and spread outward like the opening of a new flower. Delicate revelation followed by nauseous adjustment.

The wind was churned into action upon our surface, running from east to west. Pulled backward, they would be the first to meet the newcomer. The clouds above spread out, fled. They left the sky wide open, they left us face to face. I imagined him upon the surface, looking up at me as I looked up at him. Would we meet before the end?

We are moving. It is not. We are meeting it, we are the vessel. I am not sure I can spread my arms wide enough for this embrace. My heart trembles in my chest, struggles against the dual gravitational pulls. The earth shakes and the wind grows more eager. The fires upon the surface of the world are dissipating, sucked free of all energy. Can he see me yet?

The brightest star would be the mediator in a our inevitable struggle, observing from a safe distance as our electromagnetic blades crossed in the great emptiness. Lightning spins and fluctuates, flickering in and out of visible wavelength. We will establish our own star, here and now. The meeting of the two cores only after they have torn asunder their respective armor.

I raise my hand upward as he does to me. We gaze upon one another and recognize the glint in our eyes, that arrogant smile. We recognize our fates and have met them together. With the clasping of our hands, the battle begins.

[Sekot]

The mountains were leveled and the storm clouds were chained. Lightning was bundled and thunder was muzzled. The stars had fled, all but one that shown brighter than the previous sun in a deep ocean blue. The path behind was treacherous, fading in and out of vision through thick mists that flashed in multicolored neon and hummed with a thousand angry voices. A time to be measured, by some one else some where else.

The star throbbed, it pulsed and with each a wave was produced. It stretched forth to caress the sky where it parted the magnetized walls and slid across the surface. It pierced the hardened crust and sought out the doughy, molten center. And there it mingled, together as lovers. The grass felt their edges burn even as their centers disintegrated. Radiation brought them new life, reformed their beings until they too anxiously awaited the arrival.

Clamoring children placed their toys upon the altars and painted their faces with watered-down chalk. They began the rituals, invented them from the long forgotten whispers. With their chanting they brought forth the lies that burned upon their offerings. They danced around the growing flame, their chants more frantic and hurried and their attention waning. Their lie was made manifest, a friend alive that breathed the dying air and opened its eyes.

They fell asleep. And the monster walked, stepped down from the transformers and the barbie dolls and took upon itself an image of their likeness. A barber, a barbieformer, a transbarbie. And it reached upward toward the pulsating star and gave thanks for their sacrifice. And devoured them.

[Sekot]

There was a knock on the glass. Dead of night. A bony wrap on the window pane. I turned my head, my heart no longer beating within my chest. The surge of blood in my ears had faded into the deepening silence. I saw within the darkness the devil knocking on my window. I saw him smile, his eyes predatorily wide and gleaming in what little light still remained. Five fingers, five skeletal digits, tapping one by one against the hardened surface. I watched them each lift and fall rapidly in succession. The silence was broken not by that knocking, which was always more feeling deep within me, but by the reification of all the nightmares of children.

He moved through the window, through glass and brick and stone and wood and into my room. An emaciated titan with arms spanning longer than his legs. Hollow eyes that brought forth whispers when I gazed into them. I saw upon him the veins of my life slipping away, I saw upon him the reflection of my soul. He smiled at me and I was pinned to my bed.

Knocking on my window, knocking on the walls. Knocking in the window. Knocking in my head. He lumbers, he canters forward. Splitting into multiplicities, he dances across my vision and disappears into the incorporeal dreamworld of his resurrection.

[Sekot]

So should I have witnessed a particular reshaping of my conscious being I may be so inclined to slip into the covers. I whispered to her on that porch that lovers never conquered and that we were quite possibly insane. I was a voyeur to the investigation of the infinite slut who danced on all those tables while cowering behind the curtains. I said no more to my own and said goodbye to them. I loved her as much as I could but she faded from my grasp more often than made it known.

Twitching drugged out fingers still play a certain melody to the gods of a lost cause. He smiled at his reflection in the still-glass mirror and watched as he did nothing. Simplicity caught within the mundanaity. I was, maybe we were caught within that particular storm. Maybe I was just lost. So entranced by the nothing absence that I lost myself in the realm of the unforgiving. Questions should be stated to the question box so that they may suitably disappear in the bureaucratic labyrinth. Here the minotaur is an intern.

That warm summer breeze slides so gracefully across the sweat-soaked chest. This fever dream promised to never end, even as I learned how to stop the twitch. Where's the speed that should keep me going? Where's the life I so desperately knew was locked away?

It is that particular horror that I can believe follows around me that follows within me. A particular horror only visible to me. And I can see it and I can watch it and I can almost touch it. That darkened swarm that follows them like a heavy cape. They believed themselves to be villains so I so carefully obliged. Hungry monsters needing distractions.

There was a lost man who attempted to become god and succeeded in only burning alive.

[Sekot]

And from the depths came the great rumbling. A shattering of uncollectedness and random beliefs offered up a long chain of letters. Crawling through the muck and mire came the shrouded man, his hands torn and his face tattered. He opened his mouth to speak, to act in his duties as the harbinger of fate, but merely stuttered out an incomprehensible mess. So pure and strong was his stench that the plants themselves, so used to the methane and ammonia of their own sewage, recoiled and folded inward. He screamed, tugged at his lips in an attempt to make himself understood. But what I heard was nothing. Nothing but the shaking in my feet and the threat of dread upon my shoulders.

Eye piercing stares would seek me out as a monster and proclaim me reborn all while condemning me in secret. Something wicked this way has already come and gone and what it left was a trial of tears and miasma. The great devourer has stepped out from the hiding places, collected itself from so many splintered beings and now stands upon the particular precipice where all things went to die and turned back. A plea escaped my lips, as I glanced into the future and see into the past. As time itself becomes my enemy and slowly becomes one. Some thing deep in the worlds alive has come up out of the depths and struck this harbinger mad.

Demons quaked in unsure postures and begged on their reverse-knees for forgiveness all while bathing themselves in hellfire and holy water. Their cleansing managed to sap them of their vestiges and stuck them into purgatorial prisons where the devourer could pick them out one by one and force them to dance, to catch them in the sunlight and to expose their naked selves. They became untoward, vulgar and uncouth they shed their flesh and bone and were soon nothing more than painful piano screams.

And upon the weeping trees sat the headless elves who gathered the liquid dreams from the starless flowers and dribbled them down their exposed throat-holes. Their other-worldly chattering spat in and out of realities. They spoke of the twisting tides just beyond their vision and laughed it off. Such quiet was unknown to them, so alien and fragile that they smashed it in the only way they knew how. Effectively sealing their own fate.

He speaks from the darkness, from the impenetrable oblivion where all things dwelled. He spoke to me and whispered sweet nothings. Pulling me closer and closer to that door to that wall that I cannot cross. A shining cross embossed is now burning, enflamed and twisted it reaches out for me as a profane offer of aid. Crawling across me is my own self eagerly wanting nothing more than to throw us both into that abyss we so long stared into. We, that which formed it, had all to fear. We that knew what lay within could step no further.

Ear splitting banshee screams and soon the ragged man is dragged into the dark. His stuttering ceases and his screams halt and soon the elves are aloud in their revelries. Only I stand there in the muck and mire watching and observing and staring at that fragile tear. Speak the name and all will come.

[Sekot]

He stood upright. We stared in through his wide open eyes. His trembling body glistened as a fine sheen of sweat draped over it. The sickly sweet stench of days old body odor clung to him, dissipated in a cloud as if they were spores. He gasped and from within his throat came a faint choking noise. His lips struggled to form shapes, his tongue rose and fell but no other noise came. We could see on his bare chest the rapid drumbeat of his heart. We resisted the urge to reach out and touch, to come that much closer to where he was. Crackling fires on either side of his bed cast myriad dancing shadows, other watchers participating in the little ritual.

Slowly the smile crept across his face. Starting with the eyes who were entirely dilated pupils and then the crinkle of his nose. His lips spread as far as they were able and his yellowed teeth were bare to the firelight. He took turns looking at each of us, begging with that empty gaze that we lay upon him. His fingers spasmed, struggled to lift and reach out for us just as we wished we could do to him. Greed ensnared our hearts and the cage closed in. Our own attention became so wrapped within his that our heads ached. We could look at nothing else. There was nothing else.

I was the first. I laid my hand on his. In that moment his own moved, grasped mine and refused to let go. Electrifying, I felt my lungs empty. The color drained from my world and suddenly it was not only my lungs that felt dry. All thoughts came to a grinding halt, miniature explosions shattering within the corners of my mind. They ran their way down, fed by the link I shared with him. I was aware of the burning warmth in his skin, aware of his desire of me. Of my life.

It wasn't enough. It was never enough. He would empty me. And I would allow it. But not before I too could share in his suffering. Or was it my own?

The world that opened was one without feeling. I swam through turgid air, it clung to me but neither hurt nor pleased me. Before me were dancing stars, their laughter silent and their faces invisible. I gasped for air and found nothing. I reached forward, but my air flailed behind me. Just one solitary word was repeatedly whispered into my ears. It shut out everything. It shut me out from them. An upsurge of hunger desperately creeped out of me, bellowed forth in a stream of internal fluid.

I was dying, I recognized it. And I welcomed it. A glimpse of a particular heaven. Of his heaven.

[Sekot]

"What is it?" she asked, placing a hand on his shoulder.

She felt him shudder. His attention never diverted from the window where frost gathered around its edges. His intensity frightened her, his unwavering gaze into the darkness that lay outside their small home. "They've come."

And they had.

Her heart stilled and her throat became dry. She tightened her grip on his shoulder. "Its too soon..." her voice trailed off.

She refused to look out the window, refused to turn her head just slightly to follow her husband's stare. Strange how thick the frost had gotten. Snaking fingers of ice ran forward to meet each other in the center. It was the dead of summer. The air outside had to be still cooling from the hot day previous. No chill made itself felt within her bed.

"They're here."

His voice was not his, it belonged to someone else. Anyone. She could not face the truth herself, instead choosing to focus on anything but the outside. The stillness of the room was causing her to become claustrophobic. The silence was a thick blanket beginning to smother her. She turned her head slightly. Just slightly. And she saw them.

Standing outside in the empty field a pole blacker than the night. She could not look away even as she knew what she saw was not so inanimate. Indeed it moved, came closer. The grass at its feet parted and wilted. She tried to look away and managed to turn. But there was another distant figure coming closer. Slowly. Deliberately. "What do we do?" she whispered.

"What can we do?"

His voice was so loud. So foreign and broken.

A crash, the door to the home fell open. Closer now. Where had the time gone? She wanted to scream as the pair approached the window. Greedy hands reached upward, skeletal fingers twitching and grasping for them.

The door to their bedroom swung open.

[Sekot]

Great heaving, violent breaths are let loose across the stilled plain. Terrific inhalations that bend the grass and brush back. Exhalations that is a giant force of motion that ripples outward. Angry breaths, rampant and raging as they are pulled in and out with a terrible ferociousness. Fury. Thumping fists like great drums beat at the tops of the mountains, leveling them into plateaus and mesas. A god is born and dead within the instant, a magnificent, awesome tantrum fit for children. Spit like rain floods the great rivers until they run thick with mucous. The twin suns that are their eyes boil and broil and churn.

Hungry, the lone man within the plain looks up. He gazes upon the bright orbs of the fearsome monster. Hopeless, he collapses to his knees and stammers out a lilting prayer. The ageless memory of the world opens itself to him and he is capable of understanding. Ragged and torn, his clothes are pulled every-which-way within the violent torrent of twisting air. Clouds above know not what to do so they amble and preamble and postamble. Lightning flickers only to die mid-burst. He shuts his eye to the sensations. He closes his ear and dismisses his nose.

A peace is rested upon his heart.

And then he is smashed by a falling rock.

the end

[Sekot]

Lightning flickers across the iridescent clouds and I am illuminated against the surface of the water. A visage twisted and malformed is visible for a second before fading into the dark murk of the calm lake. Something within is pulling me closer to that glassy top, pulling me closer to the great hole. Behind me their teeth gnash and their maws hunger. They clutch at their heads and faces and scream aloud obscenities. Such delicate creatures that such a small imbalance sets them afrenzy.

Lightning snaps again and my image is actualized once more. Haunting chills escalate up and down my spine, stopping at each vertebrae to arc outward along the many rami and bundles of nerves. I see two faces, two minds slowly separating. With greater intensity the sky is illuminated and there are multiple faces. All staring. Wide eyes. Empty.

I fall backward, resting my head against the cool grass. I watch as the clouds above appear and disappear, become a part of the world and leave without a whisper. Somewhere out there is a star, a thing that shines and gazes upon me as a guardian. Long ago I lost it amongst the chaos. Long ago it faded into mere memory. But as I lay here I contemplate what could have beens and what should bes and that star lies paramount atop a hill of etched bones.

I wish I could hear with my eyes. See into the sounds of the world. But all I am left with is the sharp screams of the tortured and the calmness of my own dormant insanity. The lake is rising, I can feel it at my feet. I close my eyes and shut out the sounds. All I hear is the lapping waves against the rocky shore. Slowly I begin to slide as it has grabbed hold of my feet and refuses to let go. Not that I resist. I have grown so tired, after all.

Maybe within the depths of the lake I will hear the quiet thunder.

[Sekot]

He looked out his window at the nightmare that visited the world. He saw them crawling he saw them walking. And following from within the dream of the world the nightmare revisited. A dream a vision a paralyzing construct made to make amends with the people trapped. And he prayed to God that no longer listened that maybe he could just for a moment be free. Death, the vision, draped him in frigid arms, draped him in an embrace and pulled him away. He went willingly into that dream into that nightmare where he was torn to pieces amongst the people who craved flesh.

What am I but a dreamer? What is death but the unenviable, unwanted nightmare? So sought that we developed a monster a cruel destructive force. Lost amongst the twirling and dancing and prancing stars I have come back for just a moment. Flickering dancing images of those faces I have and will lose and I wonder at what point did they exist or was I always never here? How to convey to speak to express the wealth of the elating dreamscape where we all went to die in the cool grass underneath the warm stars. A comforting breeze was gentle against us, the flowers bloomed in vibrancy. We danced upon our own graves.

Hollow is the crying sorrowful creature lost in the wastes, we have found our acceptance amongst the ashes. We have evolved and changed and transformed into monsters of our own. I can pray and scream and clutch at my head but at the end of the world it is merely I who exists with us.

We were dancers once and proud. We were dancers once who were of the night, of the dark. And still we dance. Underneath the trees who have no end, underneath the obliviated sky with all the ends.

[Sekot]

We are screaming at the injustice of him and we are screaming at ourselves, turning on ourselves in some great effort to undermine all that we have built. We are crushing our own hopes underneath the fetid waste we spill in our wake. Wispy clouds seep through watery crowns and we sang to the gods to the stars to the earth and the devil that lies underneath for some sort of salvation. A salvation of the body. Our minds had spun away, had grown distant and confused and our bodies ached and churned with the internal upheaval. You wanted a revolution and we provided but what mistakes you had wrought by your asking are your own consequences to handle.

Terror clings to our clothes and fashions a cape out of itself that billows and grows with every passing moon. We smile as we are the predators that encircle your prostrate form. We smell your blood that sips into the cracks of the earth. We smell your heart and we smell your mind. We will hunt you down through every last dream you hide within. You see we have come upon your own fiery steeds and we have come to set fire to your personal self. We know we are cruel we know the depths of our depravity so we invite you to tour ourselves within and without to Know.

The great chains can only snap from here. The great masters will have cracked their broken whips in impotency. Our battle cry will rumble. Our gnashing of teeth will be the thunder that eclipses.

[Sekot]

I breathed upon him and he came to life. Electrifying energy synapsed upward across his spine, my own reflexively giving in to the sweet tremors that ran like so many fingers across my brain. It was free to gaze, to look upon me in my shame. It was free to think, to judge me and name me as that which I knew. Desperate I reached out across the gap between the worlds and brushed his mind only to recoil at the specific horror found within. Hungry, I reached out again and again I retreated in sheer awe.

I breathed and we awoke. The stage had been set unknowingly and the curtain had begun to rise. We stood, removing ourselves from the warmth of the womb only to find ourselves at the mercy of the cold air of a haughty audience structure. To drool upon ourselves would be a kindness, instead we evoked the storm. A crushing horrific agony that would seat itself upon our collected memories and display to us our neighbor's greatest fear. Conniving manipulating people, we knew it all and we left the party to seek out such sweet retributions.

Imagined. False. We would erect the pyre. And then lie upon it. Our own bodies would alight with all of our twisted fury. And we would burn ourselves alive.

Nothing quite as unconscious as the heart beat. Such a hungering taste of repetitious flesh. Twisting upon ourselves in an orgy of distaste, we swallowed their pride and swung about to present the full broadside of our terrifying arrogance. Though the tower erected itself, it is we who felled it with our tongue. Babel, a curse of speaking a curse of knowing. That the tower crumbled was no more than the end of the beginning and the tiring of an already too ancient god. I would seek a particular fury, one enabled by the drug-addled priests who clung to their hats with gnarled claws.

It is fire that lights the path into the dark oblivion wherein it is consumed. It is the delight of the ancient god that I prostrate myself before false idols. It is the storm that gathers that I have tempered and restrained. It is the lightning that I devour. Fury is this named creature, this devourer of itself. A spinning top, a delightful scream. It is inverted and exverted. I rhombus that becomes spheroid. Hunger. It is named. The world shook. There was a great release. And then it collapsed unto itself.

A hand reached across the board and sought purchase. It reached and reached and the small little boy looked on as it neared. Curious, he refused to run away as his parents begged, instead staring upward at the stretching fingers. Static built itself up, arced across him and up him until it snapped and hissed like the caged cobra. A crescendo had been reached as the palm finally blocked the light of the sun. An inverted twilight fell down, crashed down violently. Unnatural and intense, the little boy could only shield his eyes. The light was drowning, it was being stretched and contorted. He could almost hear it scream. It faded and pulsed inward and outward until beaten and cajoled, it fell silent.

He looked upward. At the hole in the world. At the obliviated window. Five great eyes peered outward, opened to reveal the space between. The depths of those five pupils could never be plundered and the boy was entranced within. The demands to flee were but mere whispers. A constant white noise against the all-powerful thrum of the heartbeat in the hand. The boy wanted it. Desired it. His own heart swelled and he was driven upward.

A torrent a nightmare veil descended and the boy was trapped inside. Torn apart, his mind was exposed. His limbs flooded the space as they were minced further and further. His blood was a window as it spilled into the ether. He transcended himself, escaped and spoke over himself as he called forth a name.

He was named. He spoke. He.

The dark was all that they knew.