@cllgood asked: I was always told that you were the one without fear. Was I misinformed?
Time’s stretched, now. Time’s the film between the lungs and ribs. Elevated. From the ceiling. If he thinks (thinks?) too long he sees himself like dust. Hard to pinpoint. Reflecting light. Fractals. Fractured. He can catch the stream sometimes and then his hand’s pale in bright water, and the sunlight is the sunlight of the bayou. The chatter – first cicadas in summer Louisiana heat (sweetest honey-tea) then Hiss then the babble of the employees, all mixed up in his head like a love letter – propagates against what used to be his spine, and now’s a field. There’s no toes to curl. There’s no skin to crawl.
Be. To not-be. To be to be to be not-being. Do-be-do-be-do.
He’s not anything now when he’s still himself and something more. He’s blue (ainthesetearsintheseyestellingyou) and there is danger, danger here! it’s dangerous to go alone sears, white hot, in the disarray that were retinas once implanted in the eyeball deep. So much for curbing archetypes for the sake of the stability of the Bureau. He has no hands to hold them back with and the hands he has are busy drawing water from the drying well amongst the five pillars of Slidescape 36, this here-now that tastes of marigolds, and the thoughts, all thoughts, have opened an impossibility of being.
He chose Hedron. It chose him too, and the Bureau is nebulous, blue, curling in the skylight of his consciousness like endless smoke. He never smoked, it was bad for the lungs, bad for his cardio, but Trench smoked all the time and the ashtray protected that habit from not blossoming rancid. Beyond that crooked hallway the downfall, and deeper still the reckoning become salvation. He knew it now. He saw it now: the Oldest House yawned wide, pregnant with the horror and its beauty. The fractals inside his skull have opened, splitting the bone to blossom flowers between the fissures. In the eye inside of him he sees (t)Trench(es) smoking with the aftermath of ruination. If he tries to call out to the thing he knew he was before he cannot even if he sees it across the expanse of himself.
Time unfolded before him. And he found that he was fibre with the Oldest House. That Hedron had welcomed him and in that opening he had enmeshed himself forever with the concrete that had been his family. Pillars of steel. The humming of the ancient technology. All of it, inside of him, now. He is in the air. He is in the projectors. It is because the new Director is part of it, too, carries Polaris, a kernel of hope inside her that Hedron harmonises with. If he reaches he can almost touch his own cheek and remember the shapes to be human. But fully, truly, he is not Casper Darling anymore. He is the echo of him, the ghost bird drawn from the fibres of his memories. If he were to meet himself in full he would not recognise himself. He has seen what lies beneath the Abyss. He has seen the winding stairways of the Tower. He has come, full circle, ἄλφα καί ὦ μέγα, (I AM WHAT I AM) and he has become beyond the confines of his flesh. But for all his knowledge now that has phagocytized him, the edges are brittle just the same even though Hedron holds him tightly. Because where the Hiss cannot enter, Mister Door can slip his blackened fingernails between fissures to pry open like shells and drink the sweetness he finds there.
And for the first time since he has become More Than He Was, the-entity-that-has-been Casper Darling is afraid.
