Prologue: the dispossesed dreams

 

There was an empty mute land, that day. Little frames of consciousness floated through that side of the Universe. It was me. I was the ghost. Or better, I had just become the ghost.

I could only remember, even it was something confused, the great tide of light produced by The Scream. It had been my last resource to cut the battle down. The battle...

Eleven winged tigers; eleven Riders; every roar could make a planet melt away. They ran across the empty space, from star to star, in order to look after the Symmetry. I mean, they had to watch over  and fight against that strange beings sprung from some black drifts that began to appear here and there among the nebulae. I couldn't tell you which was their shape. They seemed to be an hybrid between the octopus and  the dragonfly. But it would be useless  to remember  that:  the most  astonishing feature of them was their capability to absorb energy and turn it into dust. They could- how can I say?- catch a piece of space, roll it up as it was a paper and then  put it into frames of  subtle  inconsistency: nothing was left after that. I know, i's difficult to understand, but that's it. I can't tell you if they were nourished by the space they destroyed, sometimes I thought that they only feel some kind of luscious pleasure in doing that, nothing more. Surely, after every destruction they got bigger and darker, so dark that they were almost invisible when they hid between asteroids where the starlight didn't reach them.

The Riders of the winged tigers wandered along the Universe and got the battle started, attacking those Odds and making them disappear: every clash ended in a carnage, because planets and comets were sucked away by the strength of the shots. In fact, when a tiger faced an Odd, this one made the space around burn in a circle of upset galaxies and then threw it against the Rider. The only possible reply was a roaring ray of lightening claws which annihilated both the space and the Odd. As you can imagine, when a fight like that did occur, nothing could survive, and where beforehand there was substance, a minute later you could have seen only a spongy black which caused a desperate dizziness.

As the battle went on, many Odds were defeated, but some Riders changed their behavior: they began to strike one another, hurting the tigers. The holy blood of that supernatural creatures fell across the space and was intercepted by the tentacles of the surviving Odds and changed into new energy for them. The obscure essence of those dragonflies-octopuses had poisoned the brain of the Riders and generated the idea of supremacy. No one of the Riders was allowed to feel better than the other ones. They were totally equal. But now they were trying to get a leading position, following the blank illusion that only with a recognized chief they would be able to get rid of the Odds.

The result of this epidemic was that the eleven Riders were beaten by the Odds and fell one by one into the mysterious non-spaces left by the various struggles. They disappeared, leaving a slight golden line of tears all around. The Odds, with the dragonfly mouth, chewed many stars and then blew a firing wind that burned the Tigers which, deprived of their Lords, were like blind worms: the tentacles broke their wings and then squeeze their throats, keeping them from shooting the roars that were able to crumble everything.

I was the twelfth.

I resisted to the impulse. But now I was alone. My Tiger growled and wanted to help its fellows. But I was aware that my power wasn’t big enough to face such a plague. Then I decided to appeal to the last resource: during the training sessions, we Riders had been taught that this Universe has a name, a secret name which contains the essence of its life. Once pronounced, the name would make the Universe itself collapse. I looked at the black lakes of Nothingness which surrounded me and I realized  that there was nothing left to save. What if I had decreed the end of what had just ended?

So I screamed the secret name: suddenly the three dimensions changed into a ball, the Odds crashed one upon another and ended up devouring each other, thinking to survive that way. I was stretched and dragged along during an incalculable space (or time?) and I had the impression to see all the facts of that universe sliding in front of me. My brain burst and finally I sank into a white bubble and lost my senses.

Now I’m awake: Lucy is still by me, her breathe is fair and woolly as always. A gentle breeze of April leaves crawls throughout the windows and the silent Sunday trembles with the first sun rays. Probably I should stop taking those pills. But they keep me alive. No physician can explain my disease, they talk about something like yellow bile overflown into my brain, but that’s a metaphor; It’s like I was living into a body that isn’t mine; or (but it’s quite the same) I’m hosting inside me someone (or something?) who is not me. So I spend my days fighting with this exhaustion: the pills prevent me from falling asleep without waking up again. They “calculate” my sleep time and activate some neuro- w.t.f. which, at an established hour, wake me up from my nightmares. Otherwise I’d keep on dreaming. But I feel clearly that I’m not the one who dreams those dreams… They belong to the other one…