《Writ of Dreams》
Prologue
The weight of the chain suppressed the rhythmic clanging of the anvil and his wife. He could feel a hot sweat and pressure overwhelm his senses. He''d never work at that forge again, there was too much pain. Not a chance in Hell.
Whispers of another world raised from the rippling space above the forge. There was his family, it was all of them together the last time he''d made that cursed motif. If only he had taken them home.
The hammer met the anvil and a steady rhythm like a heartbeat pulsed through in a trance. Fragments of memories of children, of a mother, of a father, of friends, of his wife all danced in the flames beside him. He could see them, it was all so vivid. The haze, the promise to show them his finished piece.
They haunted his dreams. The call of two infernos summoned him that day, one was raging close, burning his skin; the other was this incessant ring, the chatter of a devil looking to bake his heart and sprinkle it with salt. An address and a tragedy, he ran, he ran until he saw it.
There was smoke piling high, sirens sang, mirrors shattered. The reflection of his half broken wife, a thick red wine dripping down from every orifice, and breaking through her skin. A son whose face was peeling off, teeth clear through the left side of his face. His mother and father were all there, and three other cars were torn asunder. That''s what this was, it was all a dream.
The forge was just a dream, he''d never go back there. Not after that day. The statue of that monkey, the cursed motif was just a dream. It had to be!
The metal display plate on the wall, of that whale she loved so much. It was swimming through the sky over that desert. It was just a decoration in a dream. It had to be a dream. The reflection in the plate showed a man with hollowed out eyes and maggots crawling through those spooned out crevices and out through his wide round nose. Worms and caterpillars squirmed from the man''s mouth, breaking through his broken teeth.
It HAD to be a dream.
His head was severed, on a grated stainless steel rack. He saw his pure blue eyes, wide open. The diorama of the monkey riding the whale the shelf above him. He''d made it when he first opened that maker''s space. The plant that was his only pet when the kids were born, was wilted. Its crusted veins made cryptic circles. It had to be!
A dream. A dream.
Bob woke up, a cold sweat soaking him from head to toe. Yeah, that was a dream, but it was all true.
The alarm started blaring, and Bob just scurried to the bathroom. The filth kept piling up, Bob practiced his aim by shooting projectiles from his stomach into the toilet. The dream wouldn''t die, he couldn''t stop it.
He tried to relax, to feel real again. The water running down his body always brought him back to the world he was supposed to be living in. The clanging of the forge kept ringing through his head this time though, his heartbeat matched its rhythm. The pain of that day condensed into a single stream that flowed through his bushy white mustache, down into his coffee and vomit stained beard.
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The grown man: Bob, the father; Bob, the maker; Bob, the builder. He whispered with shaky breath, "Can I fix this?" And for once, he couldn''t, not this time. He looked at his shaking, callused hands forged over decades of manual labor. He gave his youth to the smithy his dad ran. He gave his early adulthood to the construction sector. The manufacturing job gave him his friends, but it took another half of his life. He opened a makers space for his buddies, and it would take him until his dying day.
He just kept listing the reasons he kept living. Just reminding himself of it all, but it felt like a waste. It always felt like a waste, but today it felt like more of a waste since it wasn''t calming him down. There was no overwhelming pressure crushing the dread. It was just despair.
Bob was dressed in a fine suit and cane as he sent himself out into the world. He took a walk to his shop, he stopped driving after the incident.
Thoughts moved back to his daughter, she''d been the first to die. She loved whales, she became a marine biologist to study patterns in their calls. Her team tested a theory that whales had a full blown language. She was always so impressive. The songs followed a consistent rhythm, like his cursed heart. The most common sounds occurred twice as often as the next most common sounds, a distribution that before we thought only occurred in humans.
She''d been so excited on that call, but he''d seen a storm behind her. He asked her to come home before the weather got worse. Then the hurricane started. The sea rocked her off the vessel, and there he watched her die in front of him.
He looked up and saw it. That MOTIF. He couldn''t remember where he saw it for the first time, but it was always there. Now, even the clouds mimicked this curse. A monkey riding a whale. It''s always that damn monkey, even in the skies themselves... and that whale!
No it has to be a dream. He wanted to wake up, he had to wake up.
Bob dropped on the sidewalk. Collapsed before he''d ever gotten to finish that tribute. He lay face up, that cloud above him only felt like it was getting closer. Like he was plankton waiting to be filtered from the water. He couldn''t feel his breath anymore. He couldn''t feel the heartbeat anymore. It felt like peace. Finally, some peace.
His astral form passed through the ethereal baleen, it shredded his soul into pieces. As if all the experiences from his life were being separated and compartmentalized by something greater. One part was the emotional experience, the one that tortured him in life. One part was his experience with the forge. Another part still was his experience raising a family. Some parts were closer to other bits, like they were one. The memories of family didn''t so much overlap with the experience of their tragic loss, but they were close. The memories of individual family members were separated, and like that every creation he''d ever made. Every experience was separated locally, but when you zoomed out it would look like only a few separations existed. Zoom further out, beyond yourself, and you''d see no separation at all.
Stories like that repeated all through space and all through time. On one planet, furred creatures with wings lorded over their world. These were known as dragons, and were the first space faring race. They were reduced to filtered plankton at the end of their several centuries long lives all the same. Size didn''t matter, nobility didn''t matter. You all ended as nourishment for some esoteric actualization of a whale mounted by a monkey.
Many whales existed everywhere at once. One day, the whales began to converge. Serving as ships that carried souls, they all joined as one. With their convergence, a sea of reunions was stirred. Enemies met, lovers connected, and families mingled once again. Bob saw his daughter, his son, and his wife. The him from childhood saw his parents. All moments lasted forever just as all futures were made brief.
The cacophony of uniting souls all joined into one, and that soul was RAGING.
Chapter 1. The Reduction
A ripple in the fabric of the small isolated world demonstrated that the forge had succeeded in its endeavor. A soul is a coagulated mass of experience and skill, this cluster was just a very chaotic soul. The forge extended its tendrils to the raw cluster of souls, and moved it to its mortar.
The mass of souls, content at last. Finally, finally getting to spend time with the families they''d held so dear. Bob for one was thrilled, spending time with his wife, Wendy. They had so much to talk about after the eternity it had been since they''d seen each other. He figured he could spend time with his kids after they''d reunited with some of their close friends. The eerie thought bore upon his awareness for but a moment... The whims of mortals and their souls are not the whims of the gods above them, and especially are not the whims of the horrors above the gods. He felt a distinct wrongness in the air, then all of a sudden, Bob looked up and felt an immense and invisible pressure.
The grinding. The clicking. A billion trillion souls, breaking. The totality of an exhausted eternity bore through the experience of being pulverized. As if their skulls were being ground into dust, stuck to clumps of brain matter, and flung to the other side of the milky way without losing an ounce of sensation. The grains of their astral forms were pulverized once, the chunks of their experiences still partially coagulated. Then the second round of pulverization came in a wave. Now torn in bits, each of the billion trillion souls felt the process in every set of particles that once made up their complete and whole selves. Then the third time. Every bit of every particle reduced to a fine powder, to dust.
They tried to fight back against the grinding of their souls, clustering with all the mismatched particles in that locked space. Clusters of chimera souls of friends and enemies, of sons and fathers, blended together all in their desperation to be a fraction closer to themselves... a fourth wave came. Then a fifth, and a sixth. The grinding kept up, each agonizing second, the thud of the pestle hitting the mortar was followed by a stretched grinding sound that bled into their shared agony.
The tendrils had used the pestle to grind down the cluster into an ensouled dust. The tendrils began preparing a vat of purified essence from the sea of souls. The tendrils transferred its powder into the vat.
The grinding stopped. Wendy took her first breath in what felt like years. Somewhere deep inside, she felt an uneven pulse, her heartbeat? No. That wasn''t hers anymore. The grinding worked in tandem with that beat, it erased her heartbeat and replaced it with the phantoms of something that was once hers. She could feel the expression of her mutilated self scattered in every grain of sand that made up this vast beach. There was a bond with Bob, she could feel it. Bob could feel it too for that matter. Everyone could feel everything. After their maceration, they settled atop the surface of some sort of liquid essence. Settling sounded so nice, a wave of relief danced through the floating beach of chimeric sands. But each grain of sand carried a squirming parasitic tumor, a grotesque reminder that they had been rewritten. The tumor spoke with their voice, and it whispered memories that weren''t theirs. They were no longer Bob or Wendy. They were no longer anyone.
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Every grain of sand was a fusion of countless shredded soul. Each shredded soul felt as if they alone were everywhere and everyone all at once. As if it was they who made up the totality of all experiences. As if everyone else was just a heavy burden they were carrying. But the essence accepted them. At first, they clung to their fading selves, their last flakes of identity writhing in protest. But it was so gentle, so achingly kind; it promised a solution to their plight. Why did they have to resist, it asked? Did they want to suffer? The sea knew what it was doing as the resistance eroded to nothing, and with it their names and their voices. The essence bonded with the burdens, leaving behind something purer, and more... useful.
The powder dissolved into the solution without a hitch. The pangs from its hunger colored the very tendrils it used to forge. It wanted to consume, but no! This was a gift. A creation.
The tendrils grasped at the star hanging above the vat and plunged it into the slurry.
The star sent a massive jolt of energy through the essence. The evaporated fumes from the slurry made mirages of mothers holding their infants, of artists painting their masterpieces, of doctors returning a heartbeat to a previously declared corpse. Each day the heat grew. The mirages grew. The evaporation turned quicker and the slurry began to boil. The bubbles popped through the surface of the sea, producing a physical heartbeat to mirror the phantoms. The tendrils guided a pan through the thickening slurry. The viscous parts of the soul stuck to the pan, as the experiences of love, of security and of pride had their last hurrah in the rippling dances of the mirage. The sea sizzled, the last dissolved powder caked onto the surface of the pan as all the substance that held onto hope or joy was drained away from them. The steady rhythm kept pulsing in the residue even without the bath of bubbling essence.
The soul enriched slurry reduced to an enriched soul residue in the heat of a miniature star. The tendrils reached out and compacted all of the remnants into a brick.
The enriched residue did not resist. It could not.
A progressively more perfect and solid cube glided from tendril to tendril.
The pale yellow cube slotted into the deep green hellfire forge. Once the flickering flames began licking about this new nucleus, they faded to a hauntingly blue hue. Their glow tracing the runes that made up the core of its domain.