Loss of Control

The wind through the desert, once a gentle, comforting whisper, howled a malevolent specter, roaring inside Emma's ears, reflecting the chaos being nurtured inside her rather than outside. The Optic, kneading against her skin, pulsed with some malignant energy, throbbed in time with her wildly erratic heartbeat.

It was more than ownership; this was absolute usurpation; this was dark direction, a puppet-master pulling the strings of her very being. Her once-guiding study schedule was now an exploded pile of rubble, scattered like the ruins of a bygone civilization. Rational thought, the very foundation of her knowing herself as a scientist, was disintegrating into dust under the artifact's onslaught. The gradual transformation had been insidious: subtle changes, a warped sense of time, an eerie premonition dangled at the edge of her consciousness.

Vivid hallucinations gave birth to grotesque visions dancing in her line of sight, sneering at her futile attempts to reject them as mere stress-induced fatigue. Now, they had become her reality, overwhelming her senses, pitting her actions. She realized she was performing activities, making decisions, not of her own volition but of an unseen force, a wicked puppeteer pulling the strings of her body and mind. One moment, she was painstakingly cataloging ancient Sumerian cuneiform tablets; in the next, she was tearing pages from sacred texts, seized by an unfathomable urge to obliterate the very knowledge for which she had dedicated her life.

There was a need to break, shatter, destroy; a ravenous beast gorged with famine and ire took stalk of her will and gnawed unmercifully. With shaking hands working to close the gap in its sweet embrace, she was now building destruction. She could see her in a huge piece of obsidian shining back at her, a stranger gazing back.

state back, her eyes festering with fevered fires, face contorted into a silent scream. Though once a sacred space of order and such lofty ideals, her apartment now stood as a grotesque theatre of her mind. Books were haphazardly strewn about the floor, pages ripped and flying on the wind, here and there smearings of ink and teardrops where annotations had once been painstakingly crafted.

Meals half eaten sat, congealed on their respective plates, forgotten in the rush of her accelerating freefall. The once clean, sterile environment had become a battlefield in a conflict that was raging inside her. At first came the whispers, soft, almost inaudible, murmuring just under the radar of conscious hearing. They seeped into her mind, twisted her thinking, and injected horrible thoughts.

They were not voices in the accepted sense, but something more like sensations or impressions; malignant tendrils creeping into her mind, weaving themselves into the fabric of her daily life. They intensified her paranoia and increased her fears; every shadow became a threat. She suspected her colleagues, her friends, even her family, had waged war against her; that they intended to steal The Optic and exploit its power. Each look and each casual chit-chat were signs of some impending aggression or betrayal.

Her once-upon-a-time-support system turned into a swirl of suspicion and distrust, the relic's poisonous work. There would be no respite in sleep, for its landscape was one too treacherous, peopled with her nightmares. She dreamt of unremembered gods and ancient ritualists, dark figures intoning incantations in languages she could not name yet somehow grasped at an instinctive level.

These were no fantasies; they carried with them a weight in portents, a glimpse at a terrifying future she had become powerless to stop. The line between dream and reality became seamlessly thin, cut with the artifact's will. The physical symptoms were no less disturbing. Sharp, excruciating pains tore through her, as if her very cells were revolting against this insidious invasion. Her skin stretched taut, burning with an inner firewall, while an icy cold made its way to her bones and left her shivering uncontrollably, a strange twist when one considers the incredible heat of the desert.

The sunken eyes stared back, devoid of the illumination of intelligence now, sunk deeper in the accumulative fatigue of sleep deprivation and agony. When she looked in the mirror, terror immediately washed over her. The visage mocked her. The woman was demoralized and faded, a shadow of her former self. The surreal demolition of her once lustrous auburn hair, now matted and gray, was remarquably afflicted by the insatiable artifact feeding off of her vitality. She thought she could see what lurked beneath; ancient and malevolent, struggling to break free from its human prison.

Desperate measures were to be the order of the day. She attempted to snap the connection with The Optic, cast it aside, and run away from its hold. But the artifact had passed through her and developed tendrils woven into every pore of her being. Each of her attempts to free herself brought forth a different kind of torment, nudging her further towards the cliff of insanity. She tried different kinds of ancient counter-spells, which she had read about in profound tomes with the questionable effectiveness. The rituals ended up contributing to even graver chaos, launching her symptoms into a waking nightmare.

What started as a well-manicured apartment became a shrine of turmoil dedicated to the muse of her obsession: scrawled all over with cryptic otherworldly symbols that she attempted to draw to bind the forces she called upon.

It had been unleashed. It, however, had deepened the penetration of the sinister into her heart in her quest to gain control and understand the Optic's power. All the ancient languages she managed to unravel seemed to speak straight to her very beings, filling her fears with an anxious longing, whispering promises of alluring yet dreadful power. The seemingly unending attack on her sanity threatened an irreversible damage to her identity. She had fought to keep her sanity by hanging onto the few shreds of her old self: such trivial matter as a drowning woman going after a bit of driftwood. Now it was paranoia, terror, insipient fantasy warping what passed through her mind.

She had become a prisoner of her own mind, lost in a convoluted labyrinth of lunacy and despair. The once-bright archaeologist was becoming just a vessel, a host, for something dark and ancient, losing yet another piece of her autonomy over her body and mind. The once-mystical world of wonder and scientific inquiry distorted and warped, becoming an active engagement of the macabre drama inside her own mind.

Her known faces transmogrified into monstrous caricatures; what should have been comforting noises mutated into a dissonant symphony of dread. The walls between the world and reality melted away, leaving her at sea upon a raft of hallucination. Her grasp on sanity had slipped. The Optic's previous allurement now transformed, coming instead toward calamity to whisper not knowledge, but the ultimate death of her being. She had tasted the power; the price to pay would be her demise. The unraveling had reached completion.