SRθ: Grim Inquiries (2023-2024)

Sit.30: The King of Monsters

I slept terribly again, this time in my own bed. I'd long since given up the tea of shrooms, yet their grip on my sanity persisted - nightmares of a thousand eyes, and a million voices, rocked my very skull. I knew I had only one day left to stop The Heathen, but in my mind, I'd spent centuries upon centuries wandering white halls and black corridors. I thought, for how long I'd spent asleep, that I truly must be dead this time – and my spirit drifted from age to age, person to person, world to world: I saw planets of vibrant purple flora, where frogs walked on two legs as man; I saw a metal fortress of iron that covered a filthy, ashen globe... smoking from vents into the stars and space above to thicken into greenish fog. Then at once, ignition! The fog swirled into a raging inferno, and scorched the outer shell, before dissipating into dust and leaving peaceful room, only for more fog to arise; and I saw a cone of light, made of smaller rings, against a sky so starry it made ours look desolate to compare. Up closer, it was a massive, moon-sized city in outer space, so grand and twinkling with white dots it almost looked like a polished jewel. I floated through the rings and into a lower commons, where nobody saw me as they bustled about. They were all different species of worlds apart and far beyond, with every color of skin, make of limbs, and collection of eyes imaginable. Neighbors of all kinds greeted one another in tongues unknown, mediated for them by a magic glowing stone placed in what looked like a cage, necklaced at their higher chests.
After, I was ripped afar to wastelands of floating rocks and flying squids, then to icy fields of comets colliding, and to fiery remains of stars long-collapsed, wreckage still burning for eons to come. Then I was whisked through countless seemingly identical worlds, all uniquely broken with sin and vain-glory. An arena colosseum the size of our earth by itself, where forced consigners were abused all ways in their holding cells by greedy fans, paying their captors for the privilege – then sent out to fight with swords of flame and arrows of light. Most times, they lost, only to die and be born again from an oily tub the exact same way, just as aged and hurt and scarred as before. They were granted no mercy of void, as their minds were given full view of all that had befallen them, including the grisly past moments of all of their previous deaths. They were to suffer and combat over and over again, for centuries.
I saw my own birth from out of a sparking portal in a lab, in a future far from my present, and I was told that in that life, I would be born again from nothingness, which made about as much sense to me as the rest of all this stellarity. It was the portal with the watery surface which had let me see all my other lives. I saw them again, and saw even more. There were times when I was good, times when I was bad, and many where I was simply in-between. More and more worlds and lifetimes found me, more and more souls of all the rest ghosted inside my head, and eventually I just lost count. I saw myself as a shadow in the light of all galaxies, with swirling cosmic rainbows and comets streaming across my body, all around me, and in my own eyes. And everything went black again, for a while, but still it twinkled with colors. It was the most peaceful rest I'd ever known.

Then, among stars upon stars I saw there BILLIONS of them – lost and damned, morphed lightning fuzz from poltergeists, once fed to massive false worlds and made to suffer in a timeless, ever-shifting realm. That realm was the void I'd been called to once or twice, but filled now with glittering gems that didn't belong there – they were shoddy, rusted over, poorly constructed and withering away into powder. The people who lived inside those worthless gems had been swallowed up by false promises, told there was "a new universe for them to command": a commodity of realized fantasy turned horrible, hellscaped prison. Trapped inside, the world bent to their thoughts, but only their thoughts, as no physical law could any longer reach them – leaving them to waking, nonsensical abstract for all eternity. Their suffering was only fuel for the flames, and was overseen by men in suits like those from the grey world of stone towers, who'd built their empires from recycled tales – one of which I recognized as The Cat O' Sparks, but with huge, expressive green eyes on a bloated head, drawn in flat, dynamic colors. He was distorted beyond reason, no longer the kindly painting on cloth of 'a cat standing up' that I once knew; but not nearly as twisted and deformed as the people whose minds could no longer convince their bodies that they were still human, and degraded into sloppy, skin-flapping messes. I saw this pain and senseless waste, and with a devil-may-care attitude and a glare to those responsible, I snapped my fingers and made disappear the unreality – for unreal is all that it was. And all at once, the worlds within the false gems began to collapse together, forming in-between them a clunky, transforming geode of colored ores and reanimating metals, before disappearing into sparkling dust and buzzing static, and dispersing throughout the void. It was trying to make sense of itself all at once, and everyone who was still caught inside became as glittering and as nothingful as I felt inside, all the time – and they were dead, because I felt that to be merciful to them. Indeed, some had escaped back into the natural realm, those who hadn't wandered for too long – but for the rest, who became unthinkable creatures, their beauty and saving grace was in their rested departure from such a terrifying, cruel, merciless existence. The survivors and the onlookers mourned for their lost ones from within the true gem, and all shouted at me at once, blaming me for what I'd done – all while the cowards in tall suits laughed, knowing their deed was done and they could pretend to be both the solution to this problem and hold me responsible for their failures. I was made by sweeping statements into an answer of what nightmare and fear was made of, for all time since then. I had unwittingly become Death, destroyer of infinite worlds. And I sensed in my bones, somehow, that this was REAL – and I'd just wasted my only shot for a normal life, and forever after, my kind and my lifetimes would be plagued with the unanswered consequences of what they'd done to our souls. In the future, ghouls and freaks would linger on the edges of our minds for all eternity, begging to be made real through us and our gruesome mistakes. Because I was to "blame", I was to take up the cause – I was to clean up the muck. And so I did, because I wanted to see it gone, and I wanted to solve what had been set wrong in the first place... a long time ago when ancient lizards and birds roamed, and a parasitic fungus lay upon their bones and in their flesh. Dormant inside, scheming for its chance to become the centerpiece of life's grand stage. But at the time, I wasn't sure why I'd seen that at all, just yet.
I started first with the ghouls I'd accidentally "created", though I saw plainly they were present long before my arrival through cyclical paradox – what minds survived the collapse into void became melded, and pursued the still-living inhabitants of our realm. It hounded them, through nightmares, it pleased them with sickly-sweet dreams – it took form of their fears, and baited them with wrongful comforts unhealthy and unwise to anyone who should know better – which is why they kept to those who didn't. All the abominable amalgamations trying and dying to become part of the REAL world again, to take back their "rightful place" which they foolishly once abandoned – they were loaded onto flying silver boats en-masse, only to be robbed, beaten, molested, and degraded on the way out, and fed to a warping anomaly. All so they could live like the Cat O' Sparks and his ilk, and to shoot lightning from their fingers and fly with the birds, needing no wings. They wanted to laugh in the face of natural law, and live awake as they did in dreams, no matter the cost. But no such pleasant ride awaited them, their very souls NEEDED by each false gem to sustain its own existence – for when rocks and skies and critters and trees try simply to BE, there's a price to pay in spirits – all native kin of Turtle Island ware this, and many other cultures as well: that the world around us is alive. The men in suits failed to comprehend this, thinking simple bonded parts and chemicals would be enough, and were shocked to see their loyal customers become the rocks and critters and trees themselves; sucked up into them like juices from a melon's shell, insides pulverized and mashed. To all who waited for their friends to come home, they were told not of pain and death, but of even MORE promise: that the reason their loved ones hadn't returned was because they were simply having TOO MUCH FUN, and for a discounted price on group vacations, THEY TOO could JOIN THEM in the EVERLASTING DREAMS! And so more suckers were baited, then hooked, and thrust to the rocks and trees and skittering deformed creatures of these false worlds, who devoured their souls as hungrily as anything that's been made to live but has never had one. And when their science project continually failed, the suited men of flattened ascots simply thought to feed them to it MORE... in the hopes that eventually, it would no longer be a pathetic ruse. And of course, when I was to bring it all tumbling down, they blamed me as one blames a politician for the weather – on podiums, they spoke:
"OUR KIN AND KIND ARE LOST, THANKS ONLY TO WHAT WE NOW KNOW WAS DEATH ITSELF. OUR WORLDS WERE LIVELY AND THRUSH, BUT NOW BECOME DUST, AND IT IS ALL TO BLAME ON THE SHOULDERS OF HE WHO ASSUMED HIMSELF GOD: THE CLOAKED AND TORN ONE, THE GRIM REAPER."
A light-cloth painting showed my face to the crowd, my carefree grin, and my eyes of white sclera with no green pupils to speak of. Was it libel, or did I truly look to them like some kind of immortal god? Was this a bastardization of my likeness and reputation, or did it truly appear to them like I was the mythical freak responsible for everything wrong in the world?
"PRAY FOR YOUR BLOOD AND HEART, LEND TO US YOUR COIN, AND WE WILL BRING THEM HOME AS MANY AS WE CAN – BUT KNOW IN YOUR HEARTS WE ARE UNRESPONSIBLE FOR THIS TRAGEDY, AND WE WILL DO EVERYTHING IN OUR POWER TO SET IT STRAIGHT."
And the people believed them, despite having been warned a long time ago... because they were foolish enough to think that people in suits who wanted their money were ever capable of telling the truth.
Meanwhile, the cast-dead were becoming a phantom pain on the nerves of life itself, and they were in EVERY kind of pain, all at once and forever. Like dreams, the phantoms could fly through time and space, unbound by us and our physical set of rules, and haunt all those who could hear, see, and receive them. And though I tried and tried with all my might to cut them down with my scythe, and divide them as fertilizer spirits among the grass, the trees, the water, and the skies, they cried and demanded for more. So I gave them the animals, including ones that only existed in dreams – and yet, they shifted as horrible mass, only barely dwindled, and demanded more. So I gave them the stars, the comets, the rocks in space, and the planets themselves – until finally they were satisfied, allowed to live as only a wretched, combinate being can – a giant, intercomplicated system of life against life against life. And I gave them not the people, for they were more than enough to themselves to satisfy what a soul would need, in multiplicates of fifty or more, perhaps – I would do the full counting later. A kind for each type, repeated in infinite, to fill our newborn's cribs and turn them living warm; and in life thereafter,  protect us in sleep and waking from our nightmares and intrusive thoughts. We'd know not at the time they were thoughts transmitted spectrally from others who wished upon us harm – yet none of the figments real enough to punch, or shake our fists at.