Sight and sound returned, but they were all wrong. The world took on a sepia tone. Color practically washed out. Sounds all around, from Pete’s own breath to that of Natalie moving boxes in the closet were filled with a bizarre grating quality. The air smelled stale. There was bitterness in his mouth. And all over his body, his skin tingled, and went numb.

  “I’m dying.” he thought, his mind swimming in panic. “Or. . . I’m already dead.” The universe rushed at him with sudden strangeness. Everything becoming two dimensional. No space. No distance. No room to breathe or move.

  “Existence is a prison.”

  He could sense, more than hear the voice repeating, as if many, all atop one another. An avalanche of thought burying his psyche so quickly, it simply cracked under the weight…

  …allowing mad ideas to take hold.

  “It’s the noise,” he thought. “The noise of the room.” It had turned from ‘grating’ to ‘hollow’. Every sound echoing as though covered in tin. A disturbing audio filter placed over his world. Pete’s hands rose to his head, and he grit his teeth in discomfort.

  But just as he felt certain the metal echoes would crush him to oblivion, there was a shift. A sudden sidestep in demeanor. Pete’s heart slowed. His pupils dilated and his expression switched abruptly to an eerie calm.

  The placid face of psychotic detachment.

  “I’ve got to puncture my eardrums!” He decided, simply. A macabre understanding at the forefront of his breaking mind. “I’ve just got to get rid of my ears!”

  It was a graphic stumble from sanity. On a subconscious level he knew. Though strange as it seemed, the twisted notion felt oddly logical and right. A painful contradiction amid his shattering.

  But, just as quickly as the thought had come, Pete’s rational mind reappeared, beating back the delusion with force. “What the fuck?” his sanity reached out in rescue. “What the fuck was that?”

  There was a brief struggle for order, but it didn’t last. Before he could even answer his own question, his mind slipped immediately back into chaos. Lucidity, now a rope being pulled from both ends.

  His hand reached for the ball-point pen on the desk. His fragmenting mind set on something brutal.

  “No!” his consciousness screamed. “No! Stop!” And his fingers froze mid-way to the pointed object, trembling. He took advantage of the moment of semi-clarity, stood, and walked quickly to the bathroom. His head filled with fear so intense, he couldn’t feel the impact of the steps he took.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Hurrying in, he closed the door behind him, heart pounding. “What’s happening to me?” He begged for answers. “Did I really just try to stab my own ears?” He tried to rationalize his way back to the comfort of the real. “That didn’t happen. That can’t happen! Nobody just snaps!”

  Yet as terrible as the moment was…it was only a beginning.

  Next was vision…

  “It’s all wrong.” He realized, staring wide eyed around the bathroom. “It doesn’t look right.”

  No matter how many times he blinked… the faucet looked strange. There was something “off” about the green toothbrush in the cup next to the sink. The light on every object had a lifelessness to it.

  And in the fast-moving mental storm, once more, a fracture of self.

  Pete’s posture changed. Shoulders relaxing as vacant acceptance suddenly returned. His mind falling into the void once again.

  “Oh!” he whispered quietly, observing his alien expression in the mirror. “It’s my eyes! That’s what’s wrong.”

  A definitive answer. That’s how it sounded. An obvious solution to the part of his brain embracing the madness. “I’ve got to get rid of these stupid eyes.”

  Casually, he reached for the cuticle scissors on the bathroom shelf and pulled open his left eye lid with his free hand. The rational part of his consciousness drowned out with painful finality.

  Yet even in his terror, Pete Bishop wasn’t alone.

  It was at that point when Natalie Bishop realized her spouse had walked out of the room. Strange. She couldn’t say why, exactly, but standing there, alone in the closet, she was hit with an intense impulse, an immediate need to know where her husband was at that precise moment. And to that powerful intuition, she acted.

  “Hun?” She called out.

  The scissors had already made their way inside the distance between an eyelid and a cornea when Pete heard her voice. He gasped and dropped them into the sink as his lucid self was mercifully returned to its place of control.

  With eyes (unharmed), trying to blink out the psychosis, he managed to force a response. “Just in the bathroom.” He shouted back to Natalie. Then, overwhelmed with nausea, he grabbed the toilet seat lid and sank to the floor.

  “My God!” He spit through clenched teeth. “I can’t let anyone see me like this!”

  6E+24

  “He’s lost his Light.” Raphael spoke solemnly as they watched.

  “Yes, I know,” Gabriel replied.

  The two Favored looked on together, peering through a single fractal that had grown large enough to encompass the entire scene.

  “Stop,” Gabriel commanded, his golden wings flaring ever so slightly. In that instant, Pete halted his movements. The entire bathroom froze, as if the moment had been paused in a movie.

  Raphael stood beside his friend, the emerald breastplate of his armor reflecting the light from the scene within the fractal lens. “Poor soul,” he murmured.

  “It never ceases to astound,” Gabriel agreed, turning to Raphael with a sympathetic smile. All Favored shared sadness and loss for the sufferings of mankind. Raphael, however, had always borne that burden more than most. “Are you still with me, brother?”

  Raphael sighed, his gaze fixed on Pete’s frozen image, hunched over the toilet. “Yes, of course. It just seems so pointless. Every single time. Pointless.”

  “It is the way of things,” Gabriel responded. A hint of frustration in his own cadence. “We cannot know, completely, the mind of the One.” He then stepped closer to the lens, studying Pete Bishop with curiosity. “Still... the man is impressive. Being able to walk out of the room, and then speak! That’s unheard of. And his wife just saved his eye. Did you see that? It was her voice that guided him past the initial break!”

  Gabriel then stepped back and folded his arms across his own gold and white cuirass. “Continue.” With that, the scene in the bathroom resumed.

  6E+24