Blonding

Chapter 56 : Become The Great 'One'

The first thing Three noticed was the way the colors changed.

It all hit her at once. The sights and the smells and the sensations - everything compounded on itself. She could feel a bird perching on a branch a mile away, could sense the schools of fish weaving in and out of undersea caves that nobody ever knew even existed. She felt each footstep, each twitch of the wind in the leaves of the trees, could feel the heat and warmth from the sun just as much as she could feel the gentle hum of the earth beneath her.

Then came the others. They were like whispers in her ears, like a thousand voices collapsing into one. She could feel the world, but she could also feel something else, and it sent a shiver through her spine and into the ground.

She felt the same sensation hundreds of thousands of times over.

She opened her eyes. Shadows walked across the clearing before her, swirling in a roaring tide of indistinguishable voices. A blitz of panic rumbled through her chest as she realized she was alone now - alone in a sea of strangers - but then she felt the same fear through the tree and somehow, some way, it calmed her.

Focus proved difficult, but manageable. She remembered her home, remembered the trees and the sea and the ocean breeze in the late fall that came in from the south and brought with it the scents of faraway lands. The brine, the foam, the quiet hiss of waves as they lapped at the bottoms of the piers during the midday rush. Each thought cut through the thicket of specters, pulled apart the shadows until all that remained was Hoshu, a crowd of monks, and the three blond men.

The colors!

She opened her eyes wider. The trees came through of the shadows, burst through the fog like the sun breaching monsoon clouds. Reds and golds and silvers and greys - the jungle swallowed up the wounds right in front of her, healing itself as she watched.

Three could feel each breath of the forest, each vine tendril and dangling branch and sunstarved stalk of bamboo buried deep beneath the foliage. The same awe, the same reverence flowed through her from countless other minds, each experiencing the world through their own pairs of eyes.

It all made sense. Everything made sense.

The voices, the conversations, the strange manner in which her grandfather lived, speaking in bizarre riddles and tongues. Before, she thought him mad - but now, with hundreds upon hundreds of other Threes from hundreds upon hundreds of parallel realities reaching the same conclusion at the same moment, she understood.

He wasn't rambling. He was talking. Communicating with other realms. When he spoke to no one, smiled at an empty space, he wasn't doing so out of some patronizing, twisted self-indulgence. When he looked Three in the eye, told her something foul and terrible that made her heart stop and soul ice over, it wasn't meant for her.

One wasn't crazy. One was connected.

All ten thousand voices, linked together in one mind.

She looked out across the clearing and down to the sea. She could see the docks from there, could see the place where she had haphazardly tied the fishing boat from the previous night's excursion back to the pier and left it spinning in lazy circles as the tide rolled in.

She expected she'd feel sad; expected she'd be trapped and locked away and unendingly claustrophobic. But instead, with the comforting hum of a million minds alongside her own, she felt free.