#nanotph

“Unhappy? I. Happiness. Is like the gods. Everyone says that they are real. Everyone has opinions on them. Some people even attest to their goodness. And there’s. Evidence. It looks like there’s evidence. But, in the end, I don’t know anything about them. It’s so far removed from anything I’ve ever known. I don’t know if there really exists this thing that truly resembles the way people talk about it.”

“There doesn’t.” Then, after a pause with no response from me while I hid my face in my kneecaps, he said with a softening tone, “Indris. You’re my student. I’m not just here to teach you about opera or music or stories. I’m here to help you become something greater. To take control of your life and your destiny. That is why you are here, is it not?”

“I don’t know anymore.”

“Indris,” he scolded me. The way he said it was comforting somehow. It held a strange familiarity to it. “If you were anyone else, if you were a spouse or a child, I might try to comfort you. But you’re not. That’s not what our relationship is. And that’s nothing I want to do. And, so, I ask you. The same question I asked you so many weeks ago: why are you here? What is it that you want?”

I just felt. Defeated. Drained. “Does it even matter?”

Castle Fenix had been lost. I didn’t really know anything about it. The room was being used to temporarily house the dead and dying that had returned.

I was there because they were infected.

And the army needed the extra eyes.

The officer in charge, a Lieutenant Wels, had brought in my department to give an evaluation of the cases. What strains. How severe. Whether they could still perform. Whether they were useful in some other way. It was not a situation I would’ve ever willfully put myself in, but there was no use in voicing any sort of opposition.

Those we cleared–well–they’d get put with the Breach. With us. With quarantine. They might get sent back out. I don’t think anyone batted an eye when they didn’t come back. Others had told me the active duty soldiers with the Breach were deliberately sent on suicide missions. They didn’t want them to come back. But couldn’t afford to waste the resource either.

Sometimes they’d need medical care. Sometimes you could just cut off the arm or the leg. The infection hadn’t disseminated throughout their body yet. They could be saved. Saved, yet subjected to continual testing and quarantine procedures nevertheless.

Or were we? What was something like it looking at when it saw me? What did it see? Could it even see at all? It had virtually no expression, no indication of character, no reaction to the fact that I had seen it and clearly recognized what it was.

Did it see everything? Could it see what had happened to me? What would happen to me? Did it see me how Kakeska described, as a mere ripple in a vast ocean?

I was too terrified to move, to speak, too broken by the implications of what it was, what it might think of me, whether it was capable of thinking anything on me at all. Half of me begged to be on my knees, to cry and whimper and talk of forgiveness for the things I had done, for the thing that I was, the other half thought it would kill me despite its supposed nature and screamed at me to run away from it.

But it did nothing.

I thought to say something, to make myself known, to question it, to force it to acknowledge me, but nothing that I could think to motivate me to words felt right. It was all wrong, it was all frivolous, none of it mattered anymore. What were questions of goodness when I was faced with the reality of a thing that existed so beyond anyone's ability to comprehend it? Even the idea of the words I could say seemed offensive to me, as though they described only shadows of the things they talked about and the gods knew well the things themselves. I could only be wrong.

Thousands of years ago when mankind was saved by them, did they speak to each other? Were the gods even capable of speech? I knew nothing to tell me otherwise, and yet it did not seem possible. The very idea of speech seemed too infantile and crude for such a being as the thing in front of me.

Its eyelids fell and its dull, soft irises of unnatural color shifted to the corners of its eyes. Slowly, it turned its head away from me, then shoulders, then began to suffer to movement again, walking away from me, its stride regulated, but surprisingly natural for what it was. It had offered me nothing, done nothing, changed nothing, acted on nothing, acknowledged nothing, yet I felt something vital to me had been taken, carved out of me, to leave me with only the chill I felt on my skin as scaffolding to keep what was but a hollow shell together.

It was gone, but I still could not bring myself to move.

Trying to loosen up.

I’ve been bummed that I draw faces so much. Today I had this thought that was like: “I like drawing faces. I just need to draw the best damn faces ever and then it won’t be so bad that I don’t really draw anything else.”