Laugh At The Abyss (One-Shot)

The amalgamation of emotions, sight, vision, and hearing coalesced into a rolling ball of sensations, sliding down the metaphorical mountain and plunging straight into my very being.

I awoke with a gasp, my vision blurry and ears feeling like someone had stuffed them with cotton. The smell of coppery iron, burning oxygen, gasoline and roasted pork assaulted my nose all at once. I attempted to move, get up, and the pain shivered throughout my body like an electrical shock, and I almost blacked out from the pain.

My body started shaking, and pain coursed through my being again, and I tried to will it to stop, with no success at all. My breath came in quick, short and panicked puffs of air, unable to hold on to the small amount of oxygen around me that hasn't yet been consumed by the fire.

I pushed through the pain, the full-body shudders and opened my eyes. I quickly realized two things in my hazy and unintelligible state.

One, almost everything was on fire, and it was quickly beginning to catch up to where I was

Two, everything was on fucking fire and I was probably going to fucking die.

I whimpered and cried and screamed—pain, terror, regret, and finally, more pain than what should've been possible flashed through me again, too quick for me to process and digest, before my mind seemingly went through what suspiciously felt like, 'fuck you, fuck me, fuck God and fuck whoever existed and is going to exist, goodbye I quit' and then I felt nothing in the next second.

I blinked suddenly at the abrupt change, and my mind cleared itself and clarity came into being. Is this what apathy felt like? If yes, then God kiss Satan I might just become addicted.

I blinked again and came to a realization, one that I really should've come to earlier.

'Ah, I'm going to die.'

And then I dropped unconscious, and woke up into the nothingness.

I opened up my eyes and unnatural terror slammed onto my being. I saw through Their eyes, felt what They felt, and I begged Them to stop, stop, please I beg you—just stop, I'll do anything, just make it stop, the pain is too much, please, I beg you, what did I ever do?!

They, of course, didn't stop, never stopped, and if anything, the pain seemed to intensify.

At one point, the pain seemed so intense that I began to feel nothing. Like someone has pumped me full of anesthesia, or someone had scooped up my pain receptor nerves like noodles from a bowl and ate it.

Except that wasn't the case now, was it? The pain was still there, and I still saw through Their eyes, felt through Their skin, and I definitely felt the pain coursing through me, from how my hair stood on end, down to the sweat glands in the pores of my skin, but it felt... muted, somehow, like it was in the back of my head, on the back receptor.

If I had to explain it at all, I'd say it felt as to how a surgeon does open surgery. You saw the knife cutting into your skin, saw the doctor opening you up, felt a weird tingling sensation at the point of incision, but no pain at all.

In a way, not being able to process the frankly extreme amounts of pain was both a blessing and a curse.

A blessing, because I no longer felt—(or processed—the pain.

And a curse, for no pain clouding my vision and clarity, it only allowed me to conceive what I was seeing through Their eyes, skin, sensations.

And as I felt, saw, heard through Their existence, I was promptly introduced to another method of torture, one after the next.

And in that moment, never have I ever wanted so much to have never been born or granted consciousness.

I stuck my fingers through my eye sockets, gripped my eyeballs and crushed them and yanked on the nerves connected to them, screaming all the while, though not from pain, for I was too intimate and acquainted with it. The reason I was screaming because even as I did all that, I still impossibly saw through Them.

I held my abdomen and gripped ever so tightly and sunk in my nails, blood weeping from my skin, and I pulled, cracking my skin like flakes and sticking my hand deeply into my intestines, pulling them out like one might pull on a rope all the while I was screaming, though not from pain, never from pain, because even as I pulled, I still lived through Their existence, impossibly and unexplainably.

I did everything in my ability to stop it, to stop seeing, to stop hearing and feeling anything at all, but it was for naught.

[x]

Time, eventually, passed, slowly, methodically. And the terror and torture, eventually, as usually, continued.

I think, at one point, I simply allowed myself to break. Everything was too much and too little. Existence was wrong, wrong, so so so wrong on so many uncountable and innumerable levels.

The damage I did to myself healed in the time that passed.

I didn't bother explaining to myself why I healed even though I shouldn't have.

There was no point.

[x]

Something has changed.

I didn't know what it was that had changed, or was destroyed or created or whatever.

All I knew was that something had happened.

The feeling settled into my existence, wrapped itself around my soul or whatever I currently was considered in this ethereal form and whispered to me delicately.

Something had changed.

[x]

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize They were... not there.

Personally, I didn't believe for one single moment that They were truly gone. Beings on that level of...wrong didn't just fucking disappear from existence.

Something must've happened for them to let me go.

Eventually though, I simply dropped the matter and decided They must've gotten bored with torturing me on a physiological, mental, physical and spiritual level and went on to find another 'ant' for them to 'play'.

I didn't feel bad for the poor fuck who was going to go through what I went through.

I stared at the black abyss.

And thus the abyss stared back.

"..."

A vaguely unfamiliar feeling bubbled up inside of me, not unlike water beginning to boil. It started as small as an exhale of air, slowly evolving into a small chuckle, and before I knew it, mad laughter rang out around the abyss, a manic tinge to it.

[x]

"If thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee." Nietzsche had once said.

And yes indeed, some stared at the abyss, and the abyss stared back.

Some looked inside the abyss, and occasionally glimpsed sight of something that wasn't meant to be sighted and then promptly had a brain aneurysm.

Mortal minds weren't built to withstand the existence of the things that lurked behind the abyss.

Some though, some looked deep inside the bottomless chaste, stared in the face of humanity's worst nightmares and come out half-sane. They search deep, staring at corpses of long forgotten Gods, of black rotting flames and of evil Angles and of whale-singing abominations.

And then they laugh and say, "How adorable."