[INDENT]Day One.[/INDENT]
A man stands alone.
Figuratively and literally; this is how we live, how we die - alone.
The world around him is a desolate wasteland devoid of comfort. A harsh, hard setting surrounds him.
He blinks.
It is like waking from a dream, like being trapped in that moment between reality and vision. Anything is possible but nothing is real. Confusion abounds.
Who are you? The figure of your dreams, endless and boundless or less... a man fragile, a man without a name. Perhaps both, perhaps neither. The self does not obtrude. It is hidden, subfusc.
He turns slowly taking it all in and yet absorbing nothing.
What do you know to be true? What facts prevail?
He is naked, his body grime-soaked and stained. A biting wind moves across the barren plain, blows his sweat drenched and stringy hair.
His body trembles, cold. Arms wrap around him, his own and yet alien to him. He is but an interloper, he does not belong and yet exists, is trapped. A part of something he does not know and yet bound to play the role assigned him.
The air tastes sour, like destiny. Fate is at work. A force moving for him, it compels him and in his empty state he cannot resist it.
It feels to him like a city, or the memory of one. Mountains formed of rubble are here looming high and ominous above him. They are to him as though toppled buildings, scrapers of the sky torn down, crushed under foot by some mad god. The ground itself is not unlike a road, a city street, but upturned and worn by the passages of time, the ravages of nature. And yet nothing seems to him familiar, nothing brings him any comfort.
He continues to tremble with such potency his knees cannot sustain. Collapsing as he imagines these towers have done falls to the ground and finds himself sobbing. The tears trace crisscross patterns along his cheeks, cutting through the muck that conceals his features. He feels pity, pain and loss. But these emotions, these sensations so twinned with death, destruction... they are not his own but they come to him still, come up from the ground, saturate his being like the wind, like the dirt.
For a time he remains here, lost and consumed by it until it ebbs. Waves receding from the shore, it passes slowly.
Slowly, exasperatingly, he crawls through the debris ploughing a path through the detritus. Textures rough cut through his flesh drawing crimson rivulets behind him but he feels no pain, only numbness. A sound has come to him and though unable to place it, another object of indefinite confusion such as the landscape of which he has become integral, it draws him on. His eyes see all yet his minds, his shattered memories, are at a loss to explain what he sees and so, as an infant new born, he struggles. Needs, necessities such that carry genetic memory function, but in a far off manner.
Nearer he draws himself leaving bits behind coated in blood until a dawning understanding, a burgeoning realization, comes.
An object, a shaft, rises up from the clods. It seems to him like a thing known, yet forgotten. The shape is roughly straight, roughly true but the aspects of its dimensions confuse him for it seems split by a cross bar, a cross, near its top. And on that cross shaped top, hatched and flapping in the breeze, seems something like a cloud caught in tow. He reaches for it, extends a bloodied and dirty hand, clutches it and pulls. It comes free, falls around him.
He feels sheltered, less cold now. Understanding, knowing, he yanks the thing around himself until it finds purchase, holds and enwraps his body. Soft to the touch yet embedded with the dust that inundates everything, he calls it a word.
“Cloth,” he speaks.
But the voice scares him. It is not to him known to be his own and the formulation of sounds, of words, is new. He repeats it, drawing from the sound of his own voice consolation. With each utterance it becomes more a part of him. Cognitive logic is born.
Again he reaches, now with his other hand, the left. Closing fingers around the shaft he again pulls but this sensation is different from the last and it causes him to cry out... in pain. A great welling of the reddest ichors swells in his palm, courses down his arm and pools at the bottom of the shaft. He clutches the wounded limb, automatically wraps it in the fabric adorning his naked self and pulls it tight. The pain continues, though abated, as his blood mingles with the coal coloured stuff.
It goes like this for a time and with each attempt he learns, garners wisdom until finally deducing – holding the object by its highest precipice he is able to right himself, to regain his footing without pain, without injury. Successful and taking some small measure of joy in that triumph he knows, applies the same logic to the world around him.
Hours pass and words come, spoken aloud. Knowledge begins its slow return enabling him to, eventually, make some sense of the place he now inhabits. Soon he is feeling brave, adventurous yet frail, malnourished. He pulls, shakes, wiggles the shaft loose of its prison until he is able to lean against it, and to move it freely. Knowing, if this item could do him harm, could rend his flesh open, then perhaps it could do the same to others, could protect him, he drags it behind.
Setting off in to a wilderness unlike any other the day draws to an end.
[INDENT]Day 2.[/INDENT]
Sleep is a predator and exhaustion its medium.
He awakes where last his body fell.
His mouth is dry, parched. A rumbling emptiness roars at him from his abdomen and the sting of infection bridles in his wounds. But sleep has done more than just worsen his condition. It has brought dreams.
Some small part of him remembers, and it speaks through his dreams.
There, in the land of imagination ruled by the subconscious, images coalesced. Shapes, sounds and smells all made sense, were part of a cognitive world he remembered there and only there. Though lost, perhaps amnesiac or worse, his mind worked to draw wisdom from these events which, shaped by the dreamscape as they were, served him well in some small capacity.
Words form in the back of his mind, struggle to form sentences against the cracks in his lips and the dried saliva coating the back of his throat. It seems an impossible task.
“Who?” He asks. “Where am I?”
Queries preceded by ‘W’ are interchangeable. One question equals five. But no answers are forthcoming.
He takes some reassurance in their putting however. It is a sign of progress.
Progress...
Ironic, he thinks distantly surveying his surroundings. How far had he come? He doesn’t know, it all looks the same. Miles, maybe. Likely less, but nothing has changed. The world around him is still barren, empty but for the ruins of a bygone era. The remains of a fire, still smoking with glowing embers yet illuminating the charred coals, lay in a dejected pile before him.
Did he create this? He doesn’t know, he doesn’t know a lot of things it seems. But there it is none-the-less. It makes no sense, he has nothing… nothing but his tattered, makeshift robe and the shaft.
He looks to it, examines it, and another word forms. Again, he gives it life.
“Sword.”
Something stirs inside him. A memory, he realizes, attached to the item along with a sense of belonging, of possession.
“Good morning,” utters a voice behind him interrupting his reverie.
Scared, the fear response kicks in. Adrenaline pumps through his veins. Conflict arises, quickly answered though without effort or thought. Flight, or fight.
He spins, scrambles, grabs for the sword. Movements instinctual, not conscious, overwhelm him like a beast, an animal raised in captivity and suddenly provoked. As though taken grip by a million years of evolution, he lashes out.
It’s a blur and a part of him hides from it pressing shut his minds eye and as soon as quickly as it came, is gone.
Breathing hard, he collapses. Seconds pass and it is not until a groaning, pained sound penetrates the fog and sound of his own pulse pounding in his ears and in his chest.
A shape is crumpled, bent at an awkward angle, moving, twitching. It is, he knows, a human. Or it was. Whoever this person was it’s death is not far off, a death brought on by him and by the sword still gripped in his palm. The pool of blood is reaching out to him.
He feels compelled to do something but nothing comes to him, he is gripped by fear and indecision. Still he manages to move closer, to focus his vision on the creatures face. Between the dirt and sores he can tell, it is female… or was.
“Why,” she breathes her last breath. “I helped you…”
And then it’s over, she is dead.
Another mystery without answer, perhaps never to be resolved, for he is standing already, gathering himself for a panicked sprint.
His feet carry him with uncanny speed, he vanishes in to the waste only to stop when his body shuts down, forces him to rest.
Another day slips past and the sword lays by his side again.
