The 13th Chime

Chapter 9: Beyond flesh and soul

I don't know how much time has passed since the light shone down upon this throne of thorns and bones. Babel moved across the wastelands as it continued to traverse the world, causing destruction and corrupted reformation to anything that it saw. I don't know how I understood the abomination of a creature, nor do I understand why I have this bell, but it doesn't matter now. All I am is a mere source of energy and recollection for the corrupted creature.

My sense of self has become a fragmented, elusive thing—a faded wisp of individuality amidst the roiling tides of alien thought and sensation that now dominate my existence. I am a passenger within this grotesque, ever-shifting form, a single mote of consciousness adrift in an ocean of transcendent un-being.

Through the kaleidoscope haze, I bear witness to Babel's inexorable progression across this blighted, unraveling plane. Great furrows are torn through the decaying earth with each ponderous step, the very ground shuddering and rippling like disturbed waters in our wake. Trees uproot themselves and take staggered, lurching steps to join our procession, their tangled limbs fusing together into a trailing arboreal cortege.

The air itself warps and shimmers with refractive distortions, as if the hard boundaries of reality are softening and unwinding all around us. Here and there, patches of the blighted landscape momentarily flicker and dissolve entirely, revealing brief glimpses of other worlds and other realms beyond the veil.

Yet through it all, the unraveling force at the heart of this nightmare persists in its implacable, single-minded purpose. I can feel its thunderous will reverberating through the latticework of tendrils and wood fibers comprising our shared form—an impetus as indomitable as it is ineffable.

To unmake. To unwind the woven threads binding existence into its discrete shapes and patterns. That is the sole, all-consuming drive that propels this eldritch amalgam ever onward. I am a mere fragment, a lingering speck of mortality swept up in its cosmic ambition.

My corporeal form has become little more than a vessel, a conduit for the unraveling forces that lash out in every direction with each resonant peal of the bell. With each chime, more strands of material reality fray and dissolve into ephemera—less than dust, but the very un-stuff of creation's primordial loom before the first weavings took shape.

And yet...there remains a single, gossamer filament still tying me to some semblance of cohesive selfhood. perhaps a memory. A fragment of the person I once was, now buffeted by the cosmic tides yet still stubbornly intact.

It is that lingering essence that affords me this still, small voice of introspection amidst the sensory cacophony. An infinitesimal flicker of "I" amongst the churning, indescribable vastness of our shared existence.

There are moments when that voice seems poised on the precipice of oblivion, when the roiling immensities threaten to subsume and scatter even those final, errant thoughts into the source less ether. But inevitably, it is the bell's peal that anchors me—the single point of coherent focus in a world of constantly unraveling narratives.

I cling to its clarion resonance, letting its hauntingly familiar tones resonate through my fragmented being like a beacon in the formless void. For in that singular instrument, that ethereal chime, I can still sense the faintest echoes of another plane of existence. Of Earth and the life I once knew, however fleetingly.

It is a mere wisp of nostalgia, quickly subsumed by the oceanic tides of our shared un-being. Yet it is enough to afford me these fleeting moments of lucidity, watching in mute detachment as Babel's unraveling cavalcade lays waste to entire landscapes.

Each chime of the bell ushers forth a fresh deluge of unmaking—a cyclone of distortive forces that reduces all in its path to prismatic streamers of errant calligraphy. The air shimmers and undulates as once-coherent patterns of matter and energy lose their previously woven forms, devolving back into the raw, unspun stuff of potentiality.