Familiar

(2) The Power Of A Thought

I had known of her fear of me. It had hurt terribly, a deep and agonizing pain that had eroded everything it had come into contact with like a disturbingly powerful disease. Imagine a child knowing that its own mother feared it, for that was essentially what had happened. Her own mind had created me, given me my form, yet the same mind had been struck down with terror.

I had waited for a name, knowing that as long as she feared me, I would never acquire one. So I had changed. Partly, it was by her own fear that I had been moulded into something far less frightening, though mostly, by my power, I had humanised myself.

My new form had been far more acceptable to her, I had known it from the way she had reacted when I had appeared once more, begging for my name to be heard.

As for my revamped appearance, I had taken inspiration from the things that I had known she had liked. I had grown my hair longer so that the black coloured strands tickled the base of my neck, and the oppositely white coloured fringe spiraled to rest level with my chin. The shadows around my eyes had faded minimally, but just enough to reduce the appearance of empty eye sockets. In short, the transformation from the grotesquely petrifying, had resulted in more humanistic features on appearing on my strongly defined face.

My arms had lost their bone like construction, and became more like the arms of a muscular man in his late twenties. The hands themselves had lost their spindle like nature, and had reduced to the size that would be acceptable on an unusually large handed man. My thumbs had become stubby and angular, and the fingernails cut to the quick. My fingers had still held their long elegance, yet had no longer held the inhuman qualities that they had had before.

My chest had filled out so that my ribcage was no longer visible, and my stomach had no longer been inhumanly and surrealistically thin.

The wisps of smoke below my waist had separated into two long twisters that had eventually formed my legs. 

Though I had made myself more human, I had kept a few inhuman qualities, I wouldn't be myself if I had changed completely, I had wanted to still be recognizable to her, yet hopefully not as frightening. Large ridges like canyons of split scars and scabs poisoned with ink in my legs had ripped open and had become less numerous the closer to my waist they had gotten. Large undulations had stuck out of the ridges in blunted spikes like mountains. They had knotted together in jagged shards, wrapping around my feet to form hard skin on the heels and soles. Yes, I had crafted long black boots to my feet. My shoes were my feet, or rather, my feet were my shoes.

Of the antlers that I had grown from my head, stemming from her closeness to deer, I had coloured one black and one white. Maybe I had hoped that she would connected with the idea that I was a light to protect her, and the dark to fight for her.

For years in this renewed form, I had waited to be named.

As a figment of her imagination, technically, she would name me herself. However, though I was an imagined being, called into existence by her mind, it did not mean that I was not real.

If something is in your head, is it therefore, not real?

Does thinking not exist?

Do tumours not exist?

Does your brain not exist? (I dare you to use this one on your closest enemy!)

Descartes once said 'I think, therefore I am'. What about 'she thinks, therefore I am?' She thought of me, and here I stand.

Maybe this is a step too far. How do you explain the world of magic to a first-timer, a non-believer? I could put it as simply as I am able. 

The Observer's Effect, or the Observer-Expectancy Effect is the principle that when observing a phenomenon, in doing so, you change the observed.

This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. You must be aware, on some level, that all things with energy, have mass? Einstein theorized that E=MC^2, meaning that Energy is equal to Mass times the Speed of Light Squared. Therefore, energy itself has mass, no matter how large or infinitesimal that amount is.

Now ask yourself, what is a thought? I realise that it is a hard question, one that scientists are still debating in fact.

If I tell you that a thought is pure energy, the by-product of a chemical reaction in the brain, then you tell me, does that thought have mass? Does that thought, therefore, have the ability to effect the things around it? Therefore, in observing something and thinking about it, do you change it? In that change, are you therefore creating something that you want and/or expected? Are you therefore, bringing something into existence that wouldn't have existed without your intervention?

On this train of thought, there are many other paths that I could take, leading you even further into the realms of the unknown, but I will depart at this station. I could have asked you, 'does this creation then make you a God of your surroundings?' Or, 'Is everything we observe a product of our own imagination?' But I didn't...

...And here I will conclude, if that one thought was of a being like me, then with enough belief and intent in that thought, would I be standing before you as your own creation? That one you need not answer, for I am here, and I do exist. If I am wrong, then explain how and why I exist. Riddle me that!

Whatever the reason for my being here, it was by her power, and her methods that I am able to tell my story, which I will swiftly return to.

It was years after our first meeting, that I had appeared to her once more. her quest for knowledge had brought her, once again, in my presence.

 ..................................................................................

'Dear bully, I don't hate you. I pity you. The thing to fear is not me and what I believe in, it is your own personal demons.'