Tower, Temple

October, 2006

Where to begin?
Not at the beginning, nothing is sense there
Let me begin in the middle of the road...
Walking along a high mountain path,
dreamer, child
fair of voice, fair of vice
his wants are simple,
to be loved and to love.
He bounces along the ridged path,
happy, oblivious.

 

There are things that blind people,
armor them against the horrors.
Happiness can make you forget to watch your step.

 

Happily bounding along,
fueled by dreams and hope,
his skyward eyes failed to see the stains
his unblemished soul, the scars
his naive heart, the signs
treacherous, dangerous

 

Bereft of balance, stumbling
he reached out for a hand,
only to bitterly realize that he was alone
he had bounded too far along the path for most to follow

 

As the darkness swallowed him, desperation filled him.
Dire need for survival.
As night fell in his world,
his true nature awoke.

 

Vision starts with wide and blue, with white below
Sensation is confusing. 
Everything seems to hold still.
Frozen.
Yet everything seems to rush.
The infinite whiteness seems closer, larger.
Rushing right at me.

 

That horrible feeling, like my body is torn,
half of it wants to stay in place,
the other half is wrenched along a helldive.

 

The whiteness envelops me, and in it I can feel the frozen moisture
All the bright blue that had been the universe
swallowed by the White.
The whole of creation is white.
A speck...
Something within the infinite white.
The white darkens to a miriad of greys, and the speck grows.
The static rushing continues.

 

Suddenly the white is behind and above me.
Forming a wall that spreads as far as I can see.
The speck grows larger, defining itself.
My heart pounds as the reality of the situation dawns...
Clouds above, ground below,
all the time in creation to know that I am falling.
The speck is dark, hateful.

 

An angel spreads its wings, slowing its descent...
Feathers tear off in the violent change of momentum...
Ageless eyes take in the vista
Barren, blasted.
Nothing moves on the surface,
A lone feature stands out in the entirety of this dark orb.
A spire, stabbing defiantly at the clouds that keep the light from this land.
A tear slides down the angel's cheek at its sight.

 

The dark ground rushes towards me,
yet it seems frozen in place.
Strange how perception plays.
Two minutes of agony seems infinite,
a lifetime of ecstasy passes in a blink.
Panic claws at my mind and heart...
I breathe in.
(Spread your wings.)
What wings?
I'm no angel.
There's no halo.
(There's a dream.)
Oh... those wings.
(Spread your wings.)
Between heartbeats everything stops.
I see it.
The tower.
The only feature visible from this high up.
My lungs empty into the thin air.
I breathe out.
As my mind stills, the ground moves.

 

I slam into the surface,
shattering through it as if it were glass.
Body curls up instinctively, protecting the core.
Protecting the remnant of light.

 

dreamer, child, prisoner...
Alone in a barren cell, chained like a beast to the wall
a frozen cadaver of a soul.
His hollow eyes open and take in his new home for the first time.
At first, he despairs.
What is this?  Where?  WHY?!
Silence answers.
The prison is as hollow as his heart.
Time passes lazily.
It has no need to rush.
With its inevitable passage,
a bitter truth scars his spirit.
The only chains are the ones he made.
First despair, then self-pity.
He weeps at his own hopelessness.

 

I uncurl my arms and straighten my legs
and find myself standing in a rough corridor.
The violence of my entrance fills it with a haze of dust,
Far above me the diluted light of the world blinks.
Something nearby breathes heavily, raspily.

 

He wallows in self pity, feeding the daemons of despair.
He has lengthened his chains enough to walk out of his cell,
into a garden of stone and thorn.
Murky grey clouds fill the sky overhead,
and a black stone finger juts up nearby,
daunting, challenging.
(The top was your path)
He casts his eyes downwards,
letting his fear of failure keep him in his garden.

 

Movement.
The angel's eyes zero in like a hawk's.

 

Any direction is better than no direction,
so I start walking.
The corridor is filled with an ambiant glow,
orange and red like the nimbus around a candle.
My steps are careful and deliberate,
lest I wake whatever snores in the distance.
My heartbeat is a deafening bass in my ears.
I leave behind what I know
I walk away from the comfort.

 

The child has made his home in the thorns,
dreaming up friends and guards.
A lunatic in blue cackles as he falls on his own blade.
A fiend in white stares harshly,
berating everything the child does,
drowning him with derision.
With time, the child fades, becoming like a spectre...
And the host of illusionary fiends becomes stronger.
His spark, his true nature,
turned away from the child's shade and looked to the finger of stone.
Unlike the child, it did not stare at its feet.
It had seen the flying angel.
It had seen the Other One.

 

The angel notes with curiousity
how the tower has grown a ring of thorns around it,
and how the thorns spread across the surface.
The whole planet is a prison to the prisoner.

 

As I walk along, taking whatever turns strike my fancy,
I realize that the raspy breathing is no further from me than when I started.
In fact, even though it is behind me, it is closer.
It is closer.
I stop moving and listen.
Something clicks against stone, something hard and metallic.
A weighty impact disturbs the fabric of reality
without making a sound.
Another footfall, another series of clicks.
Claws.
My feet find wings, and I fly down the corridor.
Breathing becomes a keening howl.

 

The child shade wanders its garden,
all identity lost to the ravages of despair.
Its only companions are sick with madness.

 

As I run along the corridor,
I see older claw marks on the floor, walls, and ceiling.
I am not the first to travel this path.
Perception is the world.
I leap from the floor and twist,
my feet finding purchase on the wall.
The world twists...
And the wall is now the floor. 
An opening appears below me, and I take to the air again.
Landing, curling, rolling, I'm back on my feet.
I turn to see my shadow.
The claws scrape noisily on the stone,
the heavy footfalls no longer stealthy.
Like a crazed predator with the scent of its prey,
it knows that it has been detected.

 

The angel collapses its wings,
diving towards the tower.

 

The child turns from its hateful companions,
crawls back into its cell
drained, faded.
It closes the door behind it
crying softly to itself,
not understanding why.

 

The angel lands on top of the tower,
and notices something new about itself for the first time.
Where a crown that shone like purest light had once rested,
its brow was empty.
No halo danced over its head.
This is no prison.
This is Catharsis.
This is Purgatory.

 

With a snarl I spin on my toes.
I am done running.
My anger fashions itself into blades extending where my hands once were.

 

The fiends looked around,
free for the first time of the burden of their labors.
They had been created as the purest essences
of a self-loathing worm's daemons.
With lunatic howls and boundless energies,
they carved up the garden into claim stakes.

 

The angel-with-no-halo looks at its tattered wings.
This place is sick and contagious, it notes.
But it is not pure, even in its self-hatred.
A spark of defiance, even now, struggles up the side of the spire.
The angel smiles, and knows its labor.
Stone upon stone.

 

My blades flash, and the clawed fiend falls into the chasm,
blood covers the walls around me.
My heartbeat has lulled into a metronome's gentle persistance.
I breathe in, and everything freezes.
Sounds travel from everywhere,
realization kicks in.
Perception.
Perspective.

 

The child's shade grows twisted in the darkness of its cell.

 

The fiends remain unsatisfied with their claims.

 

The spark, the nature, strives onwards and upwards.

 

Above them all, an angel with no wings and no halo happily stacks rocks.

 

I breathe out.
The corridor is gone, and I am standing in a bowl shaped arena.
Pillars with empty chains form a ring around the edge of the pit,
and a terrible beast snarls at me,
hunger and madness filling its eyes.
I breathe in.
Even frozen in time, the Beast shakes with its rage.
I breathe out.
I am standing on a platform, staring at a pillar of ice and metal.
Cold and inhuman,
a man-shaped form looks at me.
I breathe in.

 

The shade's prison is empty.
The fiends lay in pools of their own blood.
Some throttled by invisibly thin wires,
others torn open by an inhuman fury.

 

The spark reaches a flattened out platform,
and sees the wingless one building a cairn in the center.
The angel looks up and sees its halo.

 

I breathe out.
I am standing in a field of thorns.
At my feet, a lunatic in grey rotting armor grasps at me.
Buried in its back is a poisoned dagger.
Its eyes look to me in a deadly fear,
and I know its nature.

 

Self-pity, I recognize you, and acknowledge you.
You are a weakness, a fault.
You tried to protect your charge,
in your own twisted way.
But you lack courage and conviction.
You will have one more chance to fulfill your tasking.

 

I breathe in.

 

The shade has corned the figure in grey.
(act now, or die in place)
The shade... its darkness stands out against the black world.
(you have been found wanting)
It snarls.
(coward)

 

I breathe out.

 

The lunatic in grey lies on the broken ground,
sightless eyes staring up at the sky.
A large hole in its forehead,
The back of its skull missing.

 

I see the Tower,
and it sees me.
Its freezing glare washes through me,
trying to root me in terror.

 

I laugh at it.
Glare all you want.
You are imprisoned and I am free.
You cannot see how your perceptions have trapped you.

 

I breathe in.

 

The cairn nears completion,
angel and spark working in tandem.
They feel no drive, no purpose
other than to fill their nature.

 

Prisoners.

 

The shade moves towards the tower,
feeling something calling it.

 

I breathe out.

 

With the expulsion of breathe,
I surrender my perceptions to the world.
I will play by its rules for this round.
I will walk to the tower.
I will see what is on top with my own eyes.
I breathe in, and nothing unusual happens.
I breathe out and begin taking in my surroundings.
Dry, brittle thorns, stunted by lack of nutrients.
What had created them did not believe in them.
It did not believe in anything except the tower.
Thorns fade to dust.
Fallen fiends rot away to nothing.
I climb the tower.

 

The angel sits below the cairn,
looking up at its handiwork,
marvelling at its own sweat and fatigue.
It had never worked a mortal's labor before.
A memory it would cherish forever.
The defiant spark, the halo
dances around the cairn,
daring all to climb.

 

My hand reaches the final ledge and grabs ahold.
With the strength of pure determination,
I pull myself up,
and my eyes see the cairn for the first time.

 

The whole world drops away from me,
The tower shatters, fading to dust.

 

I look up to the skies,
and through the spark of defiance that dances around my head,
I see the clouds roiling
I flex and stretch
and the updraft fills my wings sending my skyward.

 

A speck among the clouds.
A round shape.
A disc.
A circle divided into four parts.
Two black, two white.
Curled up on one side of it is the shade.

 

With unknowable intent,
I pump my wings,
flying towards the fallen form.

 

As I land, it looks up at me and gasps.
Its hands, covered in blood, shake and quiver.
(forgive me)
It pleads.
(I...)
No more.
(but...)
You have destroyed this temple in your self-hatred.
You have shattered yourself and your dreams.
(please?)
I can not forgive you.
(but...)
You have to forgive yourself.