Chapter 16: ch16- The Beginning

Zeirdin floated in the black void. He knew not if an eternity had elapsed, or only fractions of a moment. Nothing had any connections in his mind. He was a severed cobweb in a gale. Worries were not a concept in the flowing mind-scape of half-consciousness Zeirdin lay in. Everything made sense.

An equally infinite and minuscule period of time passed. Somewhere along the way, the light of consciousness was lit like a candle. With it came the concept of self. Zeirdin stood at the top of the stairs in his childhood home. The line between reality and dream was incredibly blurred. Rather, the set of assumptions Zeirdin used to draw this line was gone with the wind.

His feet sank into brilliant green moss as soft as wool. Fueled by the moon, the night sky streamed in through the open window like water, a deep ocean blue. The warm breeze followed the light, carrying the gentle, yet distinct fragrance of the lemon tree outside. Knee-high grass that was as blue as it was green covered the floor of the upstairs hallway. Each circular stalk shimmered dimly in the moonlight as it swayed gently. Scattered throughout the grass, hundreds of vividly colored wildflowers lay in bloom, colors as diverse as the coral forests of Pacinica. Once again, the impossible double doors were at the end of the hallway.

Everything held an indescribable air of ambiguity, yet it didn’t. Zeirdin was hit by a torrent of deja vu. Driven by instinct, Zeirdin slowly walked down the hallway, carefully avoiding the wildflowers. In this world, a deep part of Zeirdin that usually lay dormant held a small tendril of influence. Surrendering to his dormant unconscious, Zeirdin touched the chain that held the black doors shut. For a moment shorter than a thunderclap, crimson dyed the hallway. The chain dissolved into a black cloud of thousands of flies. Each fly lacked the steel to exist in the vacuum of ambiguity, vanishing from all moments of reality.

Even the memory of the chain disappeared from Zeirdin’s crawling record of the observed. Zeirdin ran three fingers of his third hand across the doors. The black doors began to dissolve into cubes. Each cube folded in on the others in an undulating sea of rolling cubes. It continued until only one cube remained, a crystallization of probability that could only exist in this world. It belonged in Zeirdin’s pocket where it had always been.

On the other side of the doorway was an endless reflective plane. Blue sky reflected off of the plane. It was impossible to tell which was the plane and which was the sky. It didn’t matter. Zeirdin stepped into the next realm, leaving his childhood home. Instead of solid ground, his barefoot made contact with nothing and he fell upwards. Or was it down? After a momentary lapse of reason, Zeirdin stood knee-deep in water. In front of him fluttered a black butterfly. It flew in a figure-eight pattern while it simultaneously existed in all possible positions along its single path. There was only one butterfly, yet multiple existed. Its wings were blacker than night, darker than the forest floor under the canopy of trees on a moonless night. Its wings obscured reality, instead of an object in the same realm, the butterfly was an animated cutout of a hole in reality. The butterfly instilled a deep feeling of uneasiness into Zeirdin.

He sensed no animosity or malice, it was a neutral being, yet it still brought no comfort. Zeirdin knew that if he extended his finger it would land. The butterfly stopped mid-flight on its figure eight path and turned its head, brushing Zeirdin’s cheek with its gnarled hand of tree roots. What laid its eyes on Zeirdin was not a black butterfly, but an eldritch being shrouded in black formlessness.

Its unseeing eyes bored into Zeirdin’s soul, turning over every rock with tentacles of nothing. The being came to an understanding and waved its antenna. Zeirdin’s ears began to ring. Reality screeched to a halt as it began to fold in on itself. The mirror plane of water and sky shattered. Zeirdin began to fall into the red that lay beyond. The butterfly had conveyed its intentions an eternity ago over a soup of cold metal beads in bed. It was showing Zeirdin the red realm below all.

Zeirdin stood on an insurmountable spire of bent metal spikes, soaked in the space life flowed between. Today was metal spike day, as the rooster who served as his guide had called it. The rooster was currently a tardigrade hibernating on Zeirdin’s nose but allowed him one wooden plank. When the plank was ripe, he could tear it into dust using his fingernails if he wanted to leave.

On the plank, engraved with a thousand bones and stained with the life oil of every living being to ever exist, were two words. Shura’s Contract. Zeirdin could not read it. The letters danced and the dragon of the red fog consumed all thoughts longer than two breaths. Zeirdin came to the conclusion that the spire was too high and that he would rather be on the ground.

Zeirdin stood next to an insurmountable spire of bent metal spikes soaked in the space life flowed between. He had always been here. He had never not been here. The plank remembered though, but Zeirdin dismissed it. The notion that he had once been on top of the spire was silly. Imbued with a fragment of a fragment of divinity, the plank was indifferent to the fluctuation and ambiguity of the tides. Zeirdin respected the plank’s opinion but disagreed. Zeirdin wasn’t sure about the ground he stood on.

It stopped him from falling and it wasn’t the sky, but that was about it. He had ignored them long enough. All around him were black shadow beings. Some crawled, some walked, some rolled, and some had become the ground. They screamed in deafening silence as they attempted to shovel the metal spikes from the spire into their mouths.

The problem was that their mouths were smaller than the eye of a pin, yet their appetite remained ever insatiable. Revulsion welled up in Zeirdin’s patchwork heart of fleece. T

heir screams were silent yet they still chipped away at his mind like sparrows. Zeirdin came to the conclusion that he wanted to be on top of the spire; it was much better up there.

Zeirdin sat on an insurmountable spire of bent metal spikes, soaked in the space life flowed between. He had always been here. He had never left. 14 years had passed in Pacinican seahorse years. Zeirdin’s fingers were bloody as he tore away at the plank, one fiber at a time. At least there were no cannibals.

The rooster on Zeirdin’s nose woke up and promptly screeched, “I forgot to inform you that every day is metal spike day.” The rooster flew off and then vanished into the crimson sky, leaving a trail of dead bees in the air. It took Zeirdin another 14 Pacinican seahorse years to finish tearing the plank into dust. He had enough of this place long ago, but the wood was special and didn’t break unless it was praised. Zeirdin could now understand the screams of the shadow beings.

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Their terrible stories of yarn carved themselves into the fleece of his nightgown. Zeirdin shredded the last fiber of the plank. A pile of wood dust lay on his lap. Slowly, each grain of dust began to vibrate and stick together. Undulating and growing, a shape formed. Finally, the metamorphosis was complete. The plank became a handsome stool of mahogany. Zeirdin used the stool to climb into the sky window that he had never noticed before but always knew was there.

Zeirdin watched himself, a spectator from his own eyes. He knew not how long he had been observing. He just suddenly gained awareness. Reliving memories lived with preconceived assumptions brought back much of the lucidity Zeirdin had lacked for the past few eternities. Memories Zeirdin never wanted to remember began to flow, and he was absorbed.

Zeirdin sat motionless in the wet mud with each leg extended forward in front of him at an angle. His back leaned against the metal fence that encircled the death camp. The cold rain fell, splattering against him. His entire body was already numb. His mind lay in the depths of despair. Fifty or so other Toxda were contained in Zeirdin’s pen, or swine pit #4 as the guards called it. Each was either completely listless like Zeirdin, or curled in a ball sobbing silently.

All the women in the pen were taken away first to have depraved acts committed against them. Only men remained now. No shelter from the elements was built for the prisoners. They weren’t intended to live long. Men, women, children, all those who were in the camps had been lucky, but not the luckiest. They had survived the initial population thinnings but had been detained at borders. Zeirdin was no different. Iris had managed to escape into Exaltia, a neighboring nation west of Gistern. The rest of them had chosen the unlucky crates that were searched. Enith was filled with bullets on the spot while Zeirdin and Filip were taken to the bloody meadows deep in the forests of Northern Gistern.

Filip was one of the first to be fed to the Kritz. Utterly broken by the killing of his wife, Filip did not fight when they dragged him out of the pen. Knowledge of the Kritz and much of the time in the camps were both things Zeirdin had blocked out. Now he remembered. The Kritz was some sort of experimental living weapon that fed upon the living.

The Toxda genocide had been three decades in the making, beginning with the invasion of Gistern by the Mudean Empire. The Toxda people were the perfect target. They opposed the government, they had plenty of assets to absorb when they were gone, and as a people were naturally gifted with above-average mana potential, perfect for feeding the Kritz.

The dream fragment faded to black, having completed its purpose. Zeirdin remembered everything that happened afterward. A rekindled hatred and anger were born within him after reliving his darkest time. A pure, more concentrated desire was born. The spark of revolution was lit within Zeirdin. Before, his thirst for revenge was hazy and had no direction.

The thirst for revenge had transformed into something more. What Zeirdin now desired was change. While he still wanted to punish those who’d wronged him, Zeirdin wanted to prevent those people from harming the innocent. The dark faces of Zeirdin’s family appeared. Filip’s face and his family’s flashed in his mind. Jin and everyone else’s followed. Faint tender new feelings welled up in his chest at the sight of Lumia’s. Zeirdin was going to kill Emperor Kaidu and end the Mudean Empire.

 

Zeirdin’s last memories of the living world returned like flies as he floated in the void. He was either dead or dying. There was no telling how long had passed in the outside world. A thought tugged at him. The butterfly… Shura’s Contract. Things began to click like clockwork. The butterfly had shown him the red realm below. His time there changed him. Perhaps now even fear itself was dead in his heart. Zeirdin firmly called the butterfly with his intention. Given passion and direction, Zeirdin knew what to do.

Without the butterfly, he would go straight back to the red realm below. As if awaiting his call, the black butterfly materialized out of smaller butterflies in front of Zeirdin. It danced in its figure eight pattern, rending space and reality around it.

Zeirdin held his hand out, palm up. Gradually, the butterfly danced its way closer and closer, until finally, it landed on the tip of his index finger. The small black reality of Zeirdin’s lucid consciousness expanded contracted and shattered. Everything was destroyed, reconstructed, and destroyed again infinitely. Pain and confusion filled Zeirdin’s mind, but he did not waver.

An ambiguous length of time passed. Zeirdin stood with his hand outstretched as if reality had never crumbled in an infinite cycle. The butterfly was gone, in its place was an ominous black insignia of a butterfly, carved on the tip of Zeirdin’s index finger. It was time to wake up.

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