From Strike to Termination

From Strike to Termination

By Apeiroschema:


My world shook as Venerate moved closer. The frightening presence thundered forth from that figure. And I fell. As I lay here under the Drift, the back of my eyelids still echoed those bleached lines. They were forked with the crackling streaks of energy that had torn up through my left sleeve. Those figures of light became sharp and piercing once they touched my skin, worming their sharp edges through my veins, cutting and tearing through them from the inside out. A horror and maleficence caused that force. It felt as though I had made the cuts to my own flesh, and that fear and isolation had driven my hand. And as my hand cut the warmth of my body willed itself out, leaving me with a frigid peace that bled from the wounds onto my body. The green brilliance had only sparked its life upon contact. How could I have avoided such a clandestine strike? It appeared once it had hit, and it shimmered away in termination. But the mark remained, creeping and etching up my arm as I fell to the Sand. And then I felt the leaching, the draining of life, of control, of motor, migrating away from me and towards Venerate. As my knees sunk into the Waste, my arm dropped to my side lifeless and rigid. The only movement that came from it were the involuntary spasms of a dying body as it tightened to rest in its motionless spasms evermore. It was a change in form so sudden and unaccustomed that the Being could not accept it. It, a feeling that could be felt even with the escape of that which gave Being presence as it turned to inanimacy.

All of that preceding and succeeding cycle had been blocked from memory. As I lay here under the sands, I could only think of that moment of awe-struck-power coursing against my body. Though my corpse now lay motionless like that dead arm, I ached to feel the ridges that were carved upon it, to probe the depths of its wounds, and to analyze the cracked carapace that had rendered one of my so utilized extremities stern. The want got to me, and I softened the static wards around my right arm. And as I did so another pain forgot came back. The squelching innards of another wretched arm worked what little motion they could muster to bring my right arm to the left. I told my fingers to articulate, but they only responded with a numb and tingling sensation. The stiff hand with its stiff fingers fidgeted in its handicap, but a fingertip found its way to the coarse edges of the leaching. Where there should have been soft flesh was stone, harder than anything that spent time under the Wind and Light. Fear once again dominated me and let loose a dry tear. I returned my malformed right arm to its resting and solidified the ward once again. Perhaps I should put my mind in stasis as well, for this time for me to dwell on my pains, to play back that moment offered me nothing but an extension to my captivity below the surface.

But to escape myself...what would that mean? How would that change my corpse? Would I truly die here? With so much left to do it did not seem like an option. But that was a way of thinking I still preserved from living in… where had I lived? As I probed my mind further in this anxiety my thoughts began to seize and force themselves into a cold surface, impenetrable and stiff. It was a feeling that worked its way across and through my body. I stopped thinking. That cool feeling coated my body and gave me reprieve from the Heat that for so long... I think so long, I had lived under. There was nothing my mind would tell me. Which meant that there was nothing left for me to do, that I had nothing to hold onto, there was nothing left of me here. I was a corpse. I was a corpse? Though, given the right motivation I could move, there seemed no reason for it, no source of movement. It was an involuntary reaction by a body that had sought to persist. But what does it mean to persist if there was nothing inside that body? If the origin of its impulse was nothing other than the impulse itself, was there any reason to preserve it? It functioned to function and there was nothing more. A Valueless Value. It could not persist without persistence, and thus it had no reason to continue. So I slipped my mind behind that same ward that held the rest of my body and being. And my world stopped shaking.