:interim

—

Bloodless lacerations. Painless disintegration. Lying on my back, everlasting expanse in all directions, pierced through at every inch by pure transcendental stillness. My eyes are open, strained, watching great shivering masses pass by one another, crashing and grinding soundlessly above me. Elements of external existence at an impossible scale that even I, lying in what I somehow deeply understand as the creased space after death, can’t classify. I remember having been here, before; a memory clutched tight in the metaphysics I was buried in, unreachable from life.

Suddenly, a break in the continuity — either in my psyche or my state of being — from lying on my back, staring into a vertical hole taking up my entire field of view, to a panicked full-sprint through chest high grass, in a new darkness. Away from something, though I dare not look behind me. Even without observing it, I feel my pursuer: an incorporeal, soundless beast, some embodiment of unseeable dread. No gnashing teeth, no dagger eyes. No spit-slick maw, no bloodied claws. Worse. Something balanced perfectly on the razor-edge of nonexistence and manifestation, formless and silent, chasing me through the shadowed veldt. The grass whispers with our combined movement, whipping against my chest as I run.

Toward —

A shape, spearing up from the landscape. Resolute; dreadfully distinct, somehow, against the pitch. A terrible impossibility in the Interim: an obsidian spire, stretching upwards into unknowable distance. As I fix my eyes on it, tracing its outline up and out of sight, I am clutched by a feeling of familiarity. The shape seems to morph as I observe it, architecture melting in and out of shape like it’s continuously attempting to form itself from a dream, half-remembered.

Another split in the already-fragmented chronology, and I am lying on my back again. Completely paralyzed, I notice, but free from my pursuer. Numb, panic-stricken, but alone again. I do not remember my name.

The masses whisper in sounds outside of language, complex and varied. Near-inaudible, little more than hallucination, cool on the windless air around me. Remembering, suddenly, that I can speak, I call into the brimming emptiness.

“IT’S NOT TIME YET.”

I pause, punctuation catching in my throat. The words feel foreign, the taste of unfamiliarity bitter in my mouth as the cryptic statement is met with an echo — mocking, repetitious syllables — lancing away from me, bouncing off of the seemingly empty space around me. The structure of the words disintegrates with the distance. Roaring, blood-black silence surrounds me, chasing my echo away until it’s indiscernible from the whispering masses. I worry to speak a second time, lest that which borrowed my voice returns with more malicious intent — though its words stick in my head.

It’s not time yet.

—

The masses crawl idly past one another, infinitely distant, inky and apathetic.

—

Sickeningly disorienting — unimaginable acceleration and deceleration in an instant — another shift places me in a garden, mid-step, walking around an infinite blind corner. A dim glow diffuses through the leaves, as if the only source of illumination is a reflection of light long-gone, held tightly only in memory, everywhere and nowhere at once. The damp soil path under my bare feet curves continuously to the right, wrapping around into what I can only assume is a circle, or a spiral. Leaves reach lazily from their stems, hanging over the dirt as I walk. Intermittently, I see other paths branching from the main circle I find myself in, reaching out into impenetrable darkness; though, exploring other paths — or changing direction at all — feels an impossible task. Every attempt to adjust course is met with an impelling paranoia which encourages continued movement around the main circle. I am able to stop for moments, but waiting too long feels like inviting a presence just around the corner to catch up — whether or not the presence is real or not matters much less to me than finding out for sure.

What I am certain of: movement is safety. Movement is peace. The Garden Path winds itself ever inward, myself with it. The longer I am here, the longer it feels like I had imagined all else I knew was real. The Expanse, the Spire, the beast in the Veldt — all mere dreams, or illusions projected from a stranger’s mind. All that remains is all that ever was: soil underfoot, reflected luminance, verdant walls. I do not count the cycles I have turned. There is no path outside, and the dirt here is soft — I can retrace my steps a million times. Even the paranoia finds its rest after enough movement through the Garden. Even the Interim’s formless Rorschach is dissolved in its penetrating stillness.

—

There is dirt under my fingernails. Blood of the Interim, her flesh around me. Earth’s twin, both unborn and reborn, breathing deep as I am transported through her. She knows I cannot stay forever, yet affords me the moments she can spare.

—

I breathe deeply, with her, as I walk. My legs do not tire, nor do my feet ache from the movement. I cannot remember what I look like.

—

I’m convinced: this is all there ever was. All else is return.

—

The next shift happens gradually, after my contented half-eternity alone on the Garden Path. Soil turning to dust, dust to sand. Leaves disintegrate to spores, spores to salt in the air. Weak, reflected light blooms to a dawn, darkness in the Expanse transforming into a sky. My spiraling, circular path evens out into a rough line which ends at the entrance of a translucent house, its foundation half-buried in sand. Waves softly break on the shore, pooling on the house’s front steps and filtering through its cracks, replacing the Garden’s interminable silence with the hush of moving water. The house is barely more than this: salt and light and dust, and the blue-white spray from the ocean — the phantom structure is grey, senescent on the infinite coast. Birds circle overhead, wings beating lightly against the cloudless sky, and nest in translucent rafters. Sunlight drips through holes in the roof, clean through the walls below, and I realize I’m not breathing.

Looking closer, the birds move in slow motion, wings pushing them through the space as if they were swimming, or as if their animation was more program than instinct. Dead physics is succeeded by rigid control logic — wings’ motion a suggestion of flight, life reduced to points moving on a plane. Their young begin to cry out from the house’s rafters, shushed gently by the waves below, and I watch as one by one the circling birds break path and descend. Control logic reaches its return as each parent rejoins its young, and just as the last wing beat ends, the scene freezes in place. Suspended animation holds the waves still, smothers the creaks of the house, quiets what birdsong remains.

After a moment of unbroken stillness, a woman walks from behind the house, sheer white dress flowing behind her in wind I can’t feel. Her skin glows brightly, even in the light of the Interim’s mock-dawn: a warm luminescence, melted from sunlight and draped in fine cloth. She walks along the shoreline for a few steps, then stops, turns slowly, and walks over the suspended waves, stepping over the low breaking crests like cracks in a sidewalk. I watch her move farther out, entranced. Far, now, from the shore, I see hands sprout from the surface of the water, grasping at her ankles, pulling at the fabric of her dress. She does not fight their pull, instead dropping gently to her knees.

Compulsion drives me forward before I tell my body to move — I sprint towards the water and make the transition from sand to sea gracelessly, stumbling a few steps as I adjust to the water’s uneven surface. She turns her head to me as I reach her, the hands still grasping and pulling from beneath. Her luminescent skin is broken only by two eyes, set gently into her face.

She radiates a warmth I feel should be familiar to me. A consuming embrace, contained in a shared moment of eye contact. Safety. Peace. My mind returns to the Garden for a moment as she holds me in her gaze, but I am brought back to the sea when a question appears in her eyes. Her unspoken words fall out of my mouth.

“ARE YOU ALONE?”

Still entranced, I let a slow breath out, hollowing my lungs into the airless space around us.

—

I can’t remember how to feel. I don’t know how to answer. Alone?

—

She reaches out to me, a glowing limb splitting carefully into thin, lithe fingers. I wonder if I was meant to answer at all. My eyes burn, and I feel my throat catch. Pain writhes in her eyes and she turns to face me, extending another hand outwards. An invitation. A tear rolls down my cheek, falling to join the water - salt to salt - underfoot. In what feels more like collapse than intention, I fall to my knees and lean into her. I feel the warmth of her incandescence surround me as she closes her arms around my back and pulls me in. The darkness behind my eyelids is chased out. I can’t remember how to feel.

Another small eternity in her arms, followed roughly by the sixth shift - acceleration and deceleration in an instant, then a return to consciousness. Out of her arms, the space feels frigid. I open my eyes and find myself in the Expanse again, a crop of rocks ahead of me, an intricate sword thrust into its heart. Greenery thrusts itself from the geologic wound, impossibly, light leaking from its depths.

—

The masses crawl idly past one another, infinitely distant, inky and apathetic. The sword hums in its nest.

—

I feel drawn to it, inexplicably. Gripped with reverence for the relic, or for its patron. I wonder if it’s Hers. Reaching to cup one of the flowers twining around the blade, words flood into my mind, falling from my mouth again.

“YOU: HOLLOW-MAN — IMPERFECT VESSEL — CURSED IDEALIST.”

I pull my hand back with a jerk, as more words come to me.

“YOU OFFER TO THE SHRINE, BUT GAIN NOTHING.”

Hollow-man. Imperfect vessel. Cursed idealist.

The flowers say nothing. The blade hums in its nest. The clovers shiver in the blue-bleeding light. I open my mouth to ask what it means, and more unfamiliar sentences drip out.

“YOU PALE IN THE SHADOW OF YOUR CREATION. YOU OFFER TO THE SHRINE BUT GAIN NOTHING.”

My creation? There is nothing here, in the unknown depths of the Interim. Am I meant to understand the words, spit between my teeth? Am I meant to have something to offer? I close my mouth and fumble for something to give, finding it difficult to remember where I would keep anything worthy of offering. Dropping to my knees, empty-handed, I search on the ground for something discarded - some misplaced prayer, or a stream of forgotten thoughts scattered just outside of the Altar site. The ground here is cold, rough; either covered by coarse rock shards and dust, or made of it completely.

—

: record incomplete