after reality by Shinigami Goam (first color ebook reader TXT) 📕

The insects tasted of water today. The blood of my fingers tasted of water, as did the organs and bones. My mind's turning on itself, starting arguments of what deserves darkness, and what deserves to be left alone. Each side says that the other deserves bleak despair, while they both only want legends of themselves to pulsate through the masses. Everything they say makes sense to my body, causing me to listen to them both. I now seek to destroy both sides of my mind and gain them each eternal glory, and the satisfaction of knowing the other is gone. My body resides as god over the mind that is essentially mine, though I grant it freedom to do as it pleases.

The lower right half of my mind has brought me to a place today. I recognize it. The bones of vermin and carcasses of evil beings reside here. My lower right piece of mind states ways to destroy the upper left half of my mind.

"And what of your mind?" I state quietly.

"What of it?" it replies.

"Has it not been imploring you to carry out ill will against its doppelgänger?"

"He is busy attempting to intervene with his fighting sides of the mind."

"I see," I whisper.

As I sit in this place of skulls, I forget to breathe often. The spirits of the rotting flesh that surrounds me swirl with anticipation to hear my solution, but of course my mind is busy arguing, so my body is the only one that notices. My head roars from one side to the other, within each side another two roars of anguish, and within each of them another two, until it is only the echoes of my mind’s final incomprehensible words drifting around in my skull.

The vomitous oil that surges through the veins of my body keeps it aware. I am finally free of those two, and able to do as I please. Taking notice of the damp, black-purple bodies around me, I sit, and I stare. I can hear the agonizing echoes of my mind, and my mind's minds, and their mind's minds, and I feel nothing. I collapse in the center of this corpse filled restraint, I watch my skin decay. It grows darker, and darker, until its darkness reaches that of the bodies around me. There is an unsettling variation. Though the bones of the spirits around me are gold, mine are but a brittle coal slag, only to be crushed by one as deserving of death as my mind, and all that resided within it.

A small child crushes my skull under her foot, and snickers. The echoes of wails and moans from innocent minds of my mind wisp away and leave me in silence, as the child bounds over the bodies to the dewey forest beyond them. While she waits for food to be handed to her, I await one filled with sorrow, to differentiate my bones and the others, and I have found him.

As he walks towards me, the burning incense powders wrapped in paper perturbed from between his lips glowing brightly. He digs through my chest to find my toxic, rotting yellow-brown heart, and consumes it. I surge through his veins and envelope him in my spirit. All who have stood against me will receive a small fraction of the pain they've delivered. Their death's will be swift, unlike mine. They will be warned, unlike me. They will have no understanding as to why, just like me.

“Pick up my blade.” I breathe to him.

“What’s going on?!” he responds frantically.

“Pick up the blade next to my body.”

“What are you talking about? What body?”

“Pick up my blade dammit!”

“Oh god, I’ve gotta get help.”

“Stop, have you ever meditated?”

“Yeah I guess so.”

“Stop thinking, empty your mind and let me fill the gaps.”

He stops to take a deep breath, and closes his eyes, and I feel my being entwine in his skull. As his eyes reopen I see as he sees, or as it were, he sees what I see.

“Where the hell am I?” he exclaims.

“Wherever you were before I suppose.” I state in an apparently sad attempt to make him comfortable.        “No, where is the fruit tree, my school building. What clothes are these and *as he spits out his tightly wrapped incense* why the hell is smoke in my mouth?”

“Do you see the blade on the ground by your feet?”

“Yes but I want an explena-”

“Pick it up.”

“that dirty wood thing next to th...”

The look on his face is that of disgust as he looks at my body, and takes notice of the thousands around him. “Oh god!” he screams as he begins to sob.

I decide that I don’t have time to change him, I must find those who’ve damned me here.

“I wanna go home!” He cries as he falls to his knees.

“Relax...just for one second”

his eyes are closed in his palms to catch his tears, and I see an opening. I slither to the front of his mind and grasp and squeeze it. As I do he screams his prayers that only the bodies around us will hear. After a few minutes of constricting his mind, his shouts become that of bewilderment. As if he’s had too much to drink, he babbles quieter and quieter until he finally collapses...and I open his eyes.

“Finally, a worthy body rid of his useless brain.”

I pick up the cigar of dragon’s blood off of the ground, and tie the scabbard of my blade to the tattered clothes around my waist. I find my self enjoying the incense as my first pleasure in what must’ve been thousands of years. I head to the forest outside of the barrier of rotting flesh, and make my way to reality.

Place of Movement

After tearing through the fresher bodies of Golgotha, I find myself in the gray density of fog and dead scrub oak. The waist high grass is fertile, while the trees of the past have left no room for saplings. The condition of this body is that of a minimalist.

"your nerves pulsate with fatigue"

"he doesn't know what he's saying, you're a stone"

"you're brittle, a new body is necessary"

The minds of minds in this mans body are troublesome and whiney. While I've managed to strangulate his brain, his unconscious mind has taken no toll.

I begin my attempt at building from this scrawny man-child, and feel the bones in his hand shatter, my hand shatters, the incompetent minds flail words around this skull. Bewilderment is all these minds know. I can take no action without being overwhelmed by anxiety and fear. The minds of man are of no use to one who wishes for progress on a meaningful scale. It was viewed as worthy in the place of movement, with a large body and the presence of a functioning mind. These functions are lost in Golgotha.

I abandon the body, and listen to the annoyances fade. I travel once again to the place where rhythm and color surround and confuse beings into a sense of bliss. On my perch I give a dry, stoic caw, listening for the other empty vessels response. The hollow howl of wind guides my wings to the vessel on a tree of apples. With its beak it points me to the building which my last victim stood near. I glide to the sill and peer down at the beds inside. Many plastic tubes of blood and other viscous fluids, flowing in and out of still bodies.

One body catches my glance. Eyes as clouded as the forest, and skin gray as its trees. I travel down the path of crow's perception into the body of the man. As I open his eyes, and he stands naked with no attempt to move, I am overwhelmed with excitement. I hear nothing, and feel nothing. Navigating the recesses of his mind is no task. It is a prairie of shadows with his eyes simple to find. I slither and wisp to his conscious mind, and only the touch of my being collapses his body, and his eyes snap open with no hesitation. I laugh heartily with such glee, and am surprised to hear a hoarse rattle in place of laughter. His hands are thick, but no callous, and and arms tight and flexible. The gray white tone of his skin and coarse charcoal hair exist on all but his hea-...While examining my new shell I notice an extreme peculiarity. I run my hands over the face and head and feel burs on a large piece of steel, flat and rounded slightly backwards on both sides and the top. Three points, one over each ear and one over the center of my forehead. While I can find no securing device on the back, I do find a very hard surface that is the back of his head, and it has left a soot residue on the hand.

After making out the markings on his steel mask, one large eye and a mouth of many horizontal lines. I kneel to the wasted body of the annoying minded man before him. The clothes create only a drag, and the roll of incense can find no mouth to rest in. I drop both itms, and leave my sword. I had assumed it was a mans body, though I find no genitals to provide a structure for this basis. Spots of black cover certain spots, where coarse black hairs over pale gray covers the rest. This is a man in such similar straits as I, only he rested seeking a spirit in the place of movement, while I awaited a body in Golgotha. I am enthralled with the presence of irony, in the sense of what was recently stated, and in the solace that I am the only sound in this silent shell of a being.

I take my first steps, with stocky, deeply bent legs. It is uncomfortable to walk. I try to straiten one leg and am caught off guard by a whip-like use of tendons to propel me forward. I attempt to strike one of the many dead trees again, and again am devastated by the lack of destruction. My fist did not break this time, I found that positive, and what was even more so was when a slap at the tree sent splintering cracks throughout the struck area. I observed with satisfaction as the tree creaked, and cracked, and eventually snapped loudly and rested on the adjacent tree. I gave my hoarse rattle once more with such delight, and one burst at a time navigated through the trees and fog with the deep green grass brushing the chin of my mask.

I spy the horizon. Such a feeling has never enveloped me like the harsh and fiery aura of reality. Such long deprivation since my time in Golgotha and short spurts in the place of movement, make reality that much sweeter of an experience. I leap upward into a gray tree over the fog and stare expressionless, though it is hard to tell as I am not sure of a face existing beneath this mask. I stare out and see where trees and fog end completely. miles of dunes and heat heat bouncing off of sand to resemble water. Another hoarse rattle as I feel the nostalgia and happiness of seeing reality, and I leap.

Reality

I slam down into the sand, in a delightful burst of dry earth and mites. No restraint is found as I bound through the desert. The sun moves here, and not just spinning in one spot like a nail's through the center, but overhead and along side. ten or twenty times I witness this, always with the sunrise on the right and set on the left. Every piece of sand, and squirm of heat waves reminds me of how much more there is, and how sufficient