Twilight in Wind

content:

TODO: note to self: write a 3rd draft to make it not suck!

The moment I brought myself back from the dead, I started counting the seconds.

In truth, I wasn’t at all sure if I had been dead, or if my mind had simply keeled over and gone limp after eons of staring into the Void, broken only by the stray lifeless objects passing by. Or maybe the mindless voices had finally drilled all the way through my ears, after an eternity of steady drivel and dravel, and had poisoned my head from within. It had taken the sheer power of logic, and ironically my sense of hearing, to defibrillate my brain. That made as much sense as being able to breath in a space without air.

But whether I had experienced death or hallucination or some other event, I didn’t want to experience it again. I could not bear remembering that feeling of… Nothing. Of Nothing forever. Not seeing, not feeling, not thinking. What if I had failed to hear, too? That would have completed my state of Nothingness absolute. I would do anything and everything in all the power I had to prevent that from ever happening again.

I took a deep breath of phantom air, and it came out full of sharpness and a blight to the darkness – even if it wasn’t really there. I smiled, though neither I nor anything else could see it. And unbidden, I began to count: 1, 2, 3…

So it begins.

My eyes were drawn to that bright orb – a pinprick of a star so far, far away, and yet it shined such a vivid yellow as though it were a firefly on my nose. I was sure I wasn’t hallucinating it. It wouldn’t matter if I was – by now, I was either hallucinating nothing or hallucinating everything. My near-death experience, with or without the “near”, had taught me that.

The orb’s light was doing strange things to my body. Reflection. I raised a hand and turned it about, watching the reflections change. I watched as the orb’s rays met other objects of the Void and bounced off at awkward angles.

I tried to pinpoint exactly when it had appeared, and when I had started floating towards it. Maybe I always had been; perhaps this was always my destination, and only now had I become close enough to catch its rays. But no – my trajectory had been pushed off course twice, by that creature of the Void and by Barlibur. And, I recalled, that I had been blown about in wild directions by a great wind a long time ago. Months, years ago it seemed. I could no longer recall the passage of time before

And yet here I was, still counting the seconds: 996, 997, 998, 999, 1000!

I was getting uncannily good at it. I found myself perfectly able to count each second, to the millisecond even. And I could stop thinking about it completely, turn my thoughts to other things, and when I would return to counting I’d find that I’d been ‘counting’ the whole time, somewhere deep in my subconsciousness. 1032, 1033, 1034…

I was, quite literally, keeping perfect track of the time since my rebirth. How could I do that, and yet not remember anything of who I was and how I got here? The mystery only deepened, and it only gave me a crawling, uncomfortable feeling. I was not in control of my own mind.

And still I counted. It was distracting – and comforting, almost, as they pushed my fears back into their caves.

1080, 1081, 1082…

…2498, 2499, 2500. A reflection flickered in my peripheral vision. I turned round.

I was shocked to find that I had been leading a convoy of sorts, quite inadvertently, this whole time. For what seemed like miles ran a meandering line of obedient bits and bobs: objects, debris and even some things that looked alive; or once alive. Shards of rock littered the stream. A flock of reflective discs of some kind floated placidly not far behind me, each one spinning hypnotically – these must have been what caught my attention. And behind them was a great, lumbeirng boulder, just shy of being perfectly spherical. A shadowed body with five legs floated along as well, but by a glance I could tell that it was dead; nothing alive could look so stiff, or have its body torn open an stuffed with sand. A trail of sand grains spewed out behind it.

I turned round to the front, and noticed with growing surprise that this invisible river of debris continued ahead of me, winding round and round as it ventured towards the orb of light.

What in the world had I stumbled into?

…19998, 19999, 20000.

The river grew and grew. I didn’t know how they seemed to appear, perhaps drawn in by separate currents to join the greater flow. I now realised I was floating down a meandering torrent of trash, and its current drew an endless line behind me and ahead of me, winding and winding beneath the starlight of the orb.

How such a thing had come to be was beyond me, but surely something was bringing all these things together, me included. Was I hallucinating all this? No – the density of objects had come to the point that I could reach out and touch them merely by stretching my arms. I grabbed one, one of those reflective discs. They were hundreds of them in this river, flitting by like flocks of fairies. The disc was mightily thin, and was flimsy in my grasp. The centre of it was molded into some confounded divet, and concentric rings ran around along the thing’s surface. I reached back for my rucksack and tossed the disc in. The rainbow lights of the Tablet shined within for just a moment.

A sooty explosion sounded behind me, cutting through all the other noises of the Void. My neck was getting tired of looking all around myself – I’d taken the previous inaction of my environment for granted, it seemed – but saw nothing but the snaky tail of the trash river.

…49998, 49999, 50000.

My mind was hazing in and out of consciousness. That was dangerous, wasn’t it? Couldn’t risk regressing to that state of brain death…

I tried to feel afraid, to jolt my bloodstream. But I didn’t need a bloodstream. I didn’t need anything at all.

No, no! I need to be alive. I need to be…

…50015, 50016, 50017…

…79998, 79999, 80000.

A commotion behind me. An old-looking doorframe was ploughing through the river, sending pieces of debris flying as it collided. At once my mind flung into action, swerving just in time as the doorframe passed. An electrifying, confounded smell shot up my nostrils. Its surface peppered with smoky cracks, whizzing now ahead of me. It narrowly dodged confounded metal wires and a herd of silvery white fragments.

The frame had the parasitic stench of wood smoke – my heart seemed to quiver as if recoiling from a half-remembered dream.

…119998, 119999, 120000.

I was keeping myself well awake now. Once upon a time I had been unsure of whether my eyes were really moving around when I willed them to, for no matter where I looked it was always the same dreary blackness. But now I could grip my sockets most intently, and watch the hive of activity of the river. I watched them float by, all their journeys combined into one – a journey that I had now joined. They were alive, so I was alive, and so was my sight. And even if my vigilance were fruitless, I could always look up and see the orb, that bountiful starseed, that we all were travelling towards. A warm drop of dew danced about in my heart, as if it were an essence of Barlibur’s Azure still undiminished inside me.

Perhaps we were all brought together by our willpower to survive. Yes. Yes! That was the only thing that made sense. We were to survive through these inhospitable wastes to treasured lands of warmth and love. Yes!

You are going insane, part of me said. Objects cannot think. You are the only thing here that lives, you fool. You are still as alone as you ever were.

I shut that part of me out, and got back to counting.

120187, 120188, 120189…

…169998, 169999, 170000.

I had a true connection with the river, and it was a glorious feeling. I’d formed a deep bond with the flocks of discs that flitted about me, with the lonesome mammoth boulder that tried his best to catch up with us. Perhaps that doorframe had been in a hurry, trying to find her loved ones who were only a few thousand seconds ahead. Maybe she was to find the door that left her incomplete.

The river was our spiritual friend and guardian, taking us on the easiest way to our destination. When we all finally reach the Legendary Orb of Starlight, we would all bask in its glory and live out the rest of our days on solid ground, breathing the fresh air around us, and tell each other stories about our journeys throughthe black aether and learn to make Azure from the flowers. We’d watch cheerful nightingales flitter and twitter in the skies every sunset, and enjoy ourselves forevermore.

Yes! I cried to myself, letting the manic euphoria consume me.

I stared dreamily into the Orb, our saviour from the dark and dreary. I smiled again, wider this time, and now there were those with me in the river who could see my joy. My ears let go of themselves, letting the voices of the Void enter my mind – they could not hurt me now. I watched as the Orb drifted slowly to my right.

…and it was only now, 170554 seconds since my rebirth, that I realised the Orb was no longer directly in front of us, as it had been when I had discovered up there in the Void. It wasn’t my imagination that it was now ever so slightly to the right. Maybe the river was not taking us to the Orb after all.

Perhaps the river was taking us around it.

This is a revised version of a story from 24 Aug 2022. I really don’t like how I wrote this one, and the current rewrite/draft I’ve written has not made it any better. Real awful prose, 9 minutes of time-wastage. I don’t yet know how to fix it, but it may need a complete rewrite in the 3rd draft sometime in the future.