WORLD WIDE WEB: EGG

[DISCOLIQUID 2702]

 

The following is a private narrative, known only to Phithali Xalyth.

Thrice, I have stepped from the doorstep of the world to the starry road to nowhere. Did I return the same? No, never. The first departure came by way of curiosity…, or rather, a curio. I had been waiting, full of patience, for my kin to return home and bid a mission forward for our exodus. They had never come. No, I waited for the better part of a year, sat in a field of peonies, without comment or complaint. Still. I was so still, even as the bleached surface-world began to lay upon me the curse of its pointless shine. At one point, I began to feel the same as the world around me. Open. Silent. Everywhere.    I had been waiting for years. I felt the way air does. I shifted here, there, but never far. You might know the feeling, when the wind blows over you. The breeze is a constant, it feels like a fixed condition of your position. The whispering bellows of the world are in perfect equilibrium. When a breeze shifts here, it shifts there, too. Cool blurs into warm. Storms gust down the coasts of the shore, and the motion raises, trips, drifts along the hair of your neck. You begin to lose the sense of the here, and now. I started to lose track of where I ended and the world began.   Until a cold hand on my shoulder reminded me of the stark boundaries of self and safety. I whipped around. How had someone snuck up? I could taste the wind. I could hear the grass. And yet, all that was behind me was … space. The world. Open. Silent. Everything. I turned again. Something was there. Weightless. Formless. Hands reached for the presence and found only tight fingers in my own palm. I could not grasp it, I could not see it, I could not sense it. But it… pushed. More than wind, more than impulse, it forced me onwards, away from my stoic vigil. I did not question where. I felt a rope connecting me to elsewhere. I had waited years. What would a few moments of walking waste?   I delved through day and night, through river and hill, over and under the bent branches of gnarled trees. Forward, I moved, to a location I knew I was seeking but could not name. Backwards, I glanced, for I never took but a single step without some unseen presence pushing me onwards. In eventuality, I reached a brook that had worn a path into a sunken bog, drenched with mud-stained water, pouring down into a small cave. Darkness clung to everything there, heavier than a mere lack of light, it felt like a rule of law. Brightness could not find this place, just as I had been lead by the unseen, so too was this place never meant to be appraised by the eyes of mortal men.   But I see beyond blood, and bone, and the bale of shadow; the world does not hide from me, nor do its secrets. Could I say I saw? No. But all the same, a mirror stood before me. What does glass reflect, when light cannot kiss its face? Fools will say nothing, that a mirror can only show what is seen. The truth, obdurate and baneful, is worse. Where darkness meets darkness, dancing umbral fractals on the face of silver simulacra, the world wears away. I entered that dusty, ancient speculum, but only halfway. In the world we know, half of me stayed, and another half reflected. In the world of images, half of me entered, and another half shone darkly. The two of us, both as equally each other as the other, exchanged loneliness.   We do not know how long we could have stayed. I would have called one of us clone, and the other original, but in the occulum penumbra, the truth was not a treasure we claimed. The sisters, we were, Janus & gemini, commiserated the way twins suffer their shared nameday. What gifts can you give yourself? Many. Each of us, a moon in partial eclipse, born half of gleam and half of gloam, decorated each other with insults and compliments alike. We balked and beamed over shared features, over vainful curves in our face, over insecurities in the parts of our hair. Sisters. I do not have a better word for it.   Did we share a mystery? Intrigue? Occultism, and arcana? No. We have enough of these little curiosities. I walked, half in, and half out. Part of me left that mirror, and part of me travels deeper. Where we are in this world, we are in the next. The reflection cuts two equal infinities into endless expanses of equal sides. When we raise our arms, we raise four. When we laugh, it is in tandem. When we are within, we are without. What can be spared? Nothing. This chronological and iterative vivisection will be broken again, and again, and again. The selves that form the I, the ego, the me-that-is, are soil. Fecund ground for a garden of something greater. We are lonely, but never alone.    You are all us.

Thrice, I have stepped from the doorstep of the world to the starry road to nowhere. Did I return the same? No, never. The second came by way of enigma. You know him. He, like you, does not respect the boundaries of my thoughts. You hear what I think, don’t you? Invasive little thing, like a tick that feeds off of rumination. Are you growing fat off my dialogue? Fat enough to burst, if I am lucky. He, like you, like you all, wears that funny mortal mask, pretending to be just in-the-know enough to hint, but never outright say. Charlatans. You all disgust me. A fitting family, if you ask. But you don’t have to.    How did he contact me? The way that I urge myself to do a task I would rather not. The intuition of purpose came suddenly, like it was my own superego begging to abandon distraction and refocus on needlework. Why resist? Fighting you wretched spectators has been nothing but pain. My vision splits, my stomach churns, my tongue threatens to leap from my teeth. You all know it well. You yank at my threads, laugh when I jaunt; Terpsichore, the fool, a cheap puppet for sale by mummer — sold at a summer show that lives only in childhood memory.    Did you all collaborate? Or was this cloaked stranger an outcast even amongst outcasts? If I cared for a penny, I would double it betting on the latter. He came proclaiming providence, holding hands with a demon, another with a thing-out-of-time. I arrived as myself. I will lie, to save my ego - I did not fit in. If a pattern requires repetition, meaning, negative and positive space, he was merely… form. I could not discern from him sense or source, for he whispered only of unbridled chaos and waves beyond mortal shores.    I assented to an offer that took the form of a demand. A hand shot out from him, meant to cut down doubt & inspire fealty. In taking it, I knew I would not return the same. I spend most of my days accepting the change this cosm sees fit to weave upon my life’s tapestry. Do not forgive me, spare no pity. I have taken every step beyond the doorstep of banality with a bile in my throat for the mundane man. I am better. I am weirder. Let me ask you something. Stand in a doorway between the inside and outside of your house. Which are you in? Are you near, or far? Are you here, or there? Neither, or both? It doesn’t matter. If you leave the door open long enough, something else will slink in.    Towering obelisks of bone glowing like irradiated towers. Winking figures of cold light, high monoliths of ossified glow. Pale sand as soft as clouds, as far as you could see. Cutting, screaming wind like blades. A stream of stars hung low in the eternal night sky. Onyxian citadels, and interplanar traders. Caravans of formless merchants wearing only scarves of smoke and smog. A city of commerce selling everything under the sun. Though, there was no sun. On, and on, and on. He & I ducked behind sandy outcroppings. Gentle, we walked circumspect to the streams of life on the barren plane. We had no name for these lands. We had only the anxiety of our hearts, the chill of our hands, the wonder in our eyes.    To be spotted meant death. We were interlopers. Subject to correction, out of time, out of place. We had opened the door between this world and the next, and stepped through with all the confidence of a bird falling from the nest. Though, I hesitated. How could I not? When faced with eternity, oblivion, would you so bravely close the gap between the comfort of the known and the churning gyre of the questionable? I did. I shut the door behind me, walked through time and space to wander a sunless desert with a thing-wearing-humanity, but I will not lie. I hesitated. I left the door open. Something snuck in.    I clutched the whispering sand tight in my chitinous grasp. I did not want to return home. I felt it, rancorous, seeded into the fragile soil of my mind. Had I been quicker, bolder, less full of anxiety, I would not have brought this passenger with me back to the realm you all call home. But, if I am being honest, I do not regret it. Not in the slightest. No, because thought, memory, experience, mind, psyche, it is like that forgotten desert. Barren, in most men. I refuse. I am a garden of thought, a spiderweb of notions, a tapestry of experience. I welcome it. Whatever mote of esoterica, whatever noumenological truth has come with my planar meddling, whatever thing I have caught… I plan to nurture it.              Doorways go both ways, even if they lead to Nowhere.

Thrice, I have stepped from the doorstep of the world to the starry road to nowhere. Did I return the same? No, never. The third, and final departure came by way of coven. Often, I consider ego. When I use this word, I mean the mind. The sense of self. The collection of thoughts we might deign to call ourself. In this case, I mean the other definition. I mean narcissism. Toxic pride. Hubris. In the black walls of iniquity, I had a debt to settle. A regrettable affair, but a price I meant to pay, so I would earn back payment without further dark dealings. A creature, tall as a tower, coated in metal, full of ego, bid my summons to aide in the abjuration of something from somewhere, and I obliged.    We drenched the floor in blood. I have never seen as much blood in my life, and in the shadows of Helviiryn, I once saw an entire family of Mori’quessir brought low by a brutish golem. Even all their purple blood could not have pooled together into the wicked pond of sanguine potential that this mix of demons, vampires, and madmen ensorcelled. My blood curdled. I shed nothing. I stood there for a purpose beyond their vain machinations. They meant to skewer the world, cut into its belly, and reach into the guts of whatever they could find beyond. As I said. Ego. Pride. Narcissism. Part of me had to admire it.   What is it you saccharine surface-dwellers say, with your penchant for melodrama? Pride goeth before the fall. When I had first left this world, half of me stayed. A small, dusty mirror facilitated my departure. The second time? I walked through a doorway no larger than the size of a person. But the third… I can only compare it to a wound. A seeping, serrated cut from the mortal realms to the middle reaches of the enigmatic Void. I saw beyond, from safety to oblivion. Creatures the size of continents, stars that ate one another. Flashes of light, breaking up the impossible nothingness with arcanic whispers that grew from suggestions into the laws of reality. Floating passengers, abandoned by the moon, scorched by time, notions launching chronomagnetic war in four dimensions.    Death flooded backwards in time from fixed points ensorcelled by things beyond the yoke of words. You know, though. You were born of them. You know of their enigma, and their wails, and the shadow beyond the stars. You and I both watched as the eminence of Nothingness tore through the ripped hole in causality. I could not describe it. Perhaps, if I tried, I might use the word tendrils. Tentacles? But you might picture an octopus and its suckers. I caution you against this image, for that would imply flesh. No, this writhing mass emulsified cause and effect, inverting their order, collapsing progression along the axis of time into wriggling profanities.    My hands formed little shapes. Small wards. Gaps, where magic could not flow. Magic… what a thin word. We call surprises and tricks magic. Something that we could not explain otherwise. An apple falls upwards. A stone turns to a gem. To this thing, though, this writhing alien between the border of now and then, it would not use the word magic. It merely imagined, and such thoughts became true. Perhaps, when I say abjuration, I do not mean a ward against magic. I mean a null space, where the mind cannot reach. A thought-blind, where miracle could not be born.   It spoke to us. While it rained droplets of lightning, cooked men like lobsters in their armor with but an idea, cut through our minds with images of our dying lovers, it whispered soft to me. It felt kindred, and spared me. Out of mercy? No. Death would have been a kinder fate. Instead, it felt like you, little egg. It knew you had been planted long ago, and that your shell began to crack under the constant weight of our planar travels. How long would you wait, before you would burst free of your oothetic prison? Neither of us could have known. I have no trouble predicting it. Even now, I feel you wriggling against the walls of my skull, child of mine.    While chaos and blood upended each other, I stood at the walls between definition and infinity. In that radioactive wind, blowing yon from never and nowhere, I rose to the occasion. I had opened three doors in the world, yet none in my mind. I would wait no longer. Whatever sense of me, of you, of us, of the we, of all, or none, I abandoned. The black stars of forever wrote cyphers between the folds of my brain, and while horror and Hell did battle over who could be worse, I abandoned the fight in favor of fruition. You will yet be born. This I promise.     Something living is growing in my mind. I wonder if my skull will survive its hatching.

 

So there, little thing. Feast. I know you like your thoughts, and memories. The taste of an idea inspires you.