It was hard to tell if the looming figure before me was a human. Black chitin, like polished midnight marble, tightly wrapped his emaciated body. While my past selves stood with amicable posture and friendly — if regretful — smiles, this creature was hunched over with long limbs and fingers touching the ground. His chitinous skin flickered as liquid passed beneath — I hesitated to guess that it was blood — and veins like thick ropes pulsed unnaturally.
The head was sunken into the shoulders, but the face extended forward in a snout filled with teeth like interlocking blades. Long white hair hung from his head, but the back of his scalp was broken by familiar grey stone. Long shards jutted out, as though an obelisk had exploded from the skull. The grey stone extended into the darkness in place of the memory tapestries hanging behind my past lives. Steam curled from flared nostrils as he stared at me with hidden eyes.
Could I see myself in that inhuman visage?
No.
Yes.
It was me, a part of me, I felt that… like holding up two mirrors for the first time in your life and looking at the back of your head. This was the creature that stood behind me, and it was a part of the past that I didn’t remember.
So many years gone...
I strode toward him across a floor woven out of mantra and darkness. Far below me, so far that the candlelight might as well have been stars, my body and the cabbages continued the meditative prayer of dissociation. My steps made no progress. No matter how long I walked, I couldn’t get closer.
“This is not a distance to be crossed by a caravan,” my merchant memories whispered.
“Measurement only turns nature into a field,” said my farmer memories.
“How far is the distance between obeying and breaking the law?” my street rat memories asked, his voice still tired and timid from my drunken reminiscence.
The statements of my past swirled in my mind as I looked into the face of the chitinous creature. With a creak of dried leather and a clack of bone, the creature straightened until it was nine feet tall. It towered above me, skin so dark it blended with the emptiness. A terrible chill emanated into the space, and far below my heart stuttered and the prayer’s monotony skipped. For a moment, I slipped in the darkness and fell.
No.
I was here for Cabbagy.
I was here for myself.
The holes in my identity could not remain forever.
With my desire reaffirmed, the monotonous prayer resumed. Once more, I stood where I was before, with my monstrous self staring at me without eyes. This was not a distance of increments, but of intent. So, steeling my intent, I stepped forward.
And stood so close I could smell the must like blood and tears and ancient stone so cold that touching it would tear skin.
“What are you?”
The creature’s heaving breathing didn’t change, and the teeth didn’t part, but still a word entered the darkness like a stone in a still pond.
You.
It was true.
“You’re what they did to me,” I said. “What they wanted me to be.”
No.
“No?”
They failed.
Staring at the creature before me, feeling the intimidating aura that dwarfed anything I’d felt from Ghost Fang or the tube creatures, I couldn’t imagine what a success might look like. The grey stone jutting from the back of his head must contain the information about the ritual that combined my past selves — and whatever exactly this thing was — into what my current self. Touching that stone would bring that information to my mind, but what else would it bring?
“What do you want?”
To live.
The raw earnestness in the statement tugged at my heart, but I hesitated as my fingers reached out.
“Why do you want to live?”
To kill.
He was almost pleading with me.
“Who do you want to kill?”
Heaven. Hell. Earth. Everything. Everyone. You. Space. Time. Life. Death.
I staggered back under the barrage of words and symbols flashing through my mind. This wasn’t a string of ideas, but a fragment of something vaster than I could imagine. Once more, my mind flashed back to that first fragment of stone I found in the facility, and the vision of a vast rock drilling down from the sky. Where had that stone come from? What intent drove it into my world?
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I looked at the creature, and then I looked down at Cabbagy far below.
“What you want matters,” I told the creature. “But it also doesn’t matter.”
Confusion.
“Yeah,” I said with a smile. “It’s confusing being me, and that’s why you won’t be able to kill everything and everyone: because you’re me.”
With intent surging through my heart, I reached out to my dark, weaponized self. He bent down, crouching, and I touched the grey stone thrusting out through the back of his chitinous skull.
Heat warped the dark space as I fell into memory.
###
An old man shuffled across the floor of a laboratory cramped with equipment I couldn’t identify. He was bent over with age, almost horizontal, and he kept his hands clasped behind his back, his long white robes dragging along the spotless floor.
As he walked around the perimeter, various paint brushes floated behind, marking complicated sigils in red paint on the floor. Whenever a brush got dry, it floated off out of sight, before returning with pain.
He was a cultivator. That was the only explanation for how he could do what he was doing, but why was I watching a cultivator? No drops of paint fell, such was the old man’s control over the floating brushes. It was eerie, but I had no ability to speak. I could only watch. In the laboratory’s total silence, the scraping of the brushes became deafening.
It was so quiet, and his footsteps were so methodical, that I thought I wasn’t present in the room, until a fly whined past my ear. I tried to flinch away, but my body was locked completely still.
What was I doing here? I was supposed to be in my father’s carriage, going over reports. I’d only stepped out for a moment while we prepared to leave…
The fly landed on my eye.
Gigantic, every hair visible, wings fluttering as it crawled across my eye and drank at my moisture. I wanted to flail and scream and vomit, but I couldn’t move. The paralysis was so total that I couldn’t even blink.
The fly crawled, and then it stilled, and split in two. The pieces fell away out of my vision, and the old man floated before me. He wore a blank white mask that only showed his eyes, and held a knife in one hand. The blade hovered a hair’s width beyond my eye.
“There must be a leak somewhere in the facility,” he murmured. “I hope there’s no contamination.”
The knife vanished into his sleeve as he settled onto the floor before me. His fingers swiftly plucked acupuncture needles from my face and throat, and he moved my head this way and that to inspect me.
A young man around my age stood on either side of me. The man on my left had the tan of a farmer, and the one on my right seemed almost starved; countless needles pinned them both rigid to the wall. Just like me. A wound had been opened in their flanks, and blood trickled down to a groove in the floor which led towards a reservoir.
I couldn’t see it or feel it, but I knew I bore the same wound as them.
Not paint.
Blood.
The brushes continued swirling their elaborate patterns on the floor in front of me.
“Please…” I managed to groan. “Let me go, I won’t tell anyone.”
The old man paused, his eyes smiling behind his mask.
“Oh? You won’t tell anyone?”
“My father…”
“You’ll tell your father?”
“My father is rich… he can pay you…”
The old man laughed, and with a flash, he placed the needles back in my face and throat. My body went completely rigid as he left me against the wall.
“If only money could buy what I want. If only…”
He looked behind me and gestured with his fingers. The air thrummed as a large piece of grey rock floated into view. It looked as though someone had struck a chip from a featureless mountain.
A thought that wasn’t mine entered my head: I know that rock.
The old, masked cultivator held out his hands as though cradling a living thing, and the rock followed his movements, floating toward a space left blank in the center of the spiraling blood sigils. The air was trembling as the rock lowered down into that space, but I quickly realized it wasn’t the air shaking; it was me.
The rock touched down onto the ground.
A horrible snap came from my left, and a dripping of liquid. Something wet tore, and bloody bones sailed through the air.
Needles pinged off the hard, white floor.
At the same time, a rushing as though of water in a pipe came from my right, and twisting ribbons of blood arced towards the grey rock. Bones and blood orbited the stone, and then my body shuddered one last time.
Terrible pain filled my mind.
White hot agony, but the needles in my body prevented me from moving, screaming, or even twitching. The pressure was so great my mind slipped free.
I floated above myself as my muscles and organs flew through the air to join the mess orbiting the stone. The blood sigils glowed, and my floating mind was drawn down towards the featureless stone. As my mind, my soul, was pulled closer, I felt the brush of two other souls, their minds like twisting threads in the dark, tangling with mine as we spiraled around the stone…
###
I pulled my hand back from the rock jutting out from the creature’s head. Echoes of pain rocked my body, but far below me, the chanting continued unabated. I turned back to my past selves.
“You suffered through that?”
Their small, sad smiles were enough of an answer. The weaponized version of myself stood, and perhaps there were more answers in that rock, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch it again right now.
I felt as though I could still hear the sound of the brushes as they marked the sigils of blood. When I looked down, I saw the source of the sound. My body swayed, still chanting, as blood spilled out from my fingers. Long tendrils trailed along the ground and traced out the sigils I’d seen in the vision. How long had I been under? How long had I been tracing the pattern?
The candles were burning low.
It must have been hours.
From up here, I could see that the pattern would soon be completed. It was time for me to return to my body. My knowledge of the ritual as an observer and a participant would allow me to oversee the ritual and transplant Cabbagy’s soul into Cabbajoe’s body.
“I’ll see you all again,” I said.
Aiming my soul toward my swaying body, I floated down.
As I was falling, something grabbed hold of me. I had no true flesh in this mental place, but it felt like cold iron shackles seeping through my skin and into my blood. Turning back, I saw my weaponized self holding onto me.
I want control.
“No,” I said. “I am in control.”
The black chitin trembled as it hauled on me like a fisherman with a net. I kicked and fell away, but it lunged after me. Long fingers closed around my leg. The snout flared, and six bright white eyes opened along the length of his neckless head.
I won’t stay in the dark.
I twisted and kicked, but I could not free myself of the ironclad grip.
“Release me!”
Take me with you! Please!
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I will be taking a break from posting from the 22nd of December to the 2nd of January. The last chapter of 2025 will be posted on December 19th and the first chapter of 2026 will be posted on January 5th.
