She stepped out inter her city. Looking for something but couldn’t remember what, though sure it must be there. Somewhere. Above her the night slipped seductively across the sky, like black silk dropping to the floor. It felt like a wave of dark rolling lust engulfing her and everything she’d known, and changing them. “Forever?” The word filled her with terror and elation.
Like a scarlet martyr she walked barefoot through the long dead gutters. Wearing the fading smog-sunset as her halo she was drawn towards the red-light district. She wanted to watch; and maybe even (really) see.
A tale told by an idiot
full of sound and fury
but signifying nothing
was scrawled on a crag wall in left-handed graffiti. It was in the font of holy scripture and painted in menstrual blood. Lights from dozens of red lanterns tried in vain to cut holes of comfortable reason into the strange night. In their immodest brilliance temple-whores and wasted-saints tried to maintain sweaty fistfuls of reality as they basked in the nothing-glory of their compromises. Even submerged so deeply in their chosen excess-of-indecision they could still feel something new under their skin. And like most, they were much more comfortable with the devil they knew, than the one they didn’t. As solemn as if walking under (holy)water she passed slowly and without a sound.
The deepest shadows began to melt first. Fading from crimson to deep orange as the lines that defined spilled and ran together, and time tangled itself into knots. From nowhere and everywhere she heard a velvet voice, sultry and lush like the insides of a lover. “You are lost Child. Home is coming to find you.” gently penetrated her ears. And with that she knew that the comically clumsy trial-and-error suicide she’d called Life, was over.
Before her eyes the rigid, unyielding city and everything she’d know, trusted, and loved, all melted away into pools of liquid energy. Lovers, friends, family, landscapes, and more all now overflowed through the golden rivulets that were once streets.
All around her appeared the Pure Ones, crystalline-devils and diamond-angels dancing like techno-gypsies to the sounds of conception and annihilation. They weaved in and out of the newborn tawny flames that wound and spiraled their way through that last night.
Soon everything glowed with its own life-flame, her included. She wanted to panic, but couldn’t, Not even when she felt her soul begin shedding its archaic leathery skin, revealing to her, and to all, what she truly was. As it fell she saw at her feet all the ‘treasures’ she was loosing as they rapidly decomposed into the softening ground. The shields and armor and mechanisms she once thought protected her, she now saw had only suffocated. The bastardized ‘love’ she hid behind, she now let float away on the breeze, ready to accept the true kind she’d hidden from. All the confines of her limited mind were gone. She felt no pride and no shame for who she was, or who she had been.
It wasn’t until she saw the living-zombies off in the distance that she felt fear, fear for them. Their mechanical faces rusting and decaying, whining like gears as they sank into the oceans that had once been the concrete and asphalt of their wondrous mediocrity, now cadmium yellow. She was sure she recognized some of them just as a steel riptides dragged these gray-ones down into the holes they’d ripped into Forever with their anti-magick. Holes far blacker than even the solid intangible night that lay atop of her. The smell of their melting souls filled the air and overcame her mind with a swirling drab-green lunatic’s cloud of reason.
Her new lover Night took her deep inside and raised her up on high, until there was nothing to do but surrender completely. She looked above and saw the lights from billions of old dreams turn green, flicker, and go out one by one; no longer needed to remind her to wish.
Below she saw whispers; the prayed, the gossiped, the too weak, the secret, all weaving themselves together into an impenetrable wall of blue/white-noise. A wall that kept out all the visions, sounds, and chaos from places she hope she’d never wish to see.
From everywhere and nowhere again she heard the Universe’s long forgotten truth. “You can never conquer loneliness from the outside in. Only from the inside out.” Its breath was warm against her naked and new skin. The midnight-bluebreeze from it gently caressed her body. It grew warmer, and warmer, and hot, until she felt her moist clay frame begin to dry, crack, and finally splinter. Release.
Soon the midnight-blue wind blew harder, and hotter still, and the new world she had begun to feel, and know, began to grow harder and sharpened its edges. Before long it too dried and crumbled into dust. The air currents snatched up each grain of sand, pulled them apart, and carried them all away. Taking them someplace out of sight, someplace far away, someplace beyond oblivion. Her playa-dust-soul was scattered impossibly small and taken there all the same.
Blowing through Eternity there is a place. A mingling bone-dust ocean, made of the flotsam dreams of lost souls, the jetsam wet-nightmares of Godlings, and countless other things killed before even being named, all becoming one again and again. And again.
