The Future

The hazy image of a woman weeping entered his vision,

"I will never know what it's like... to be her. She's special, I know that.

But I do know what it's like to want to die.

How it hurts to smile.

What it feels like to wake up, resenting the universe for your failed prayers. 

And you try to fit in, but you can't.

Because everyone is looking."

She took a long pause, something caught in her throat, crawling out in pained breaths.

"Don't hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside..."

Blood littered the marble floor, seeping from a glaring wound on his chest. 

Drip

Tears welled in the boy's azure eyes. 

Drip

"...I miss—"

A flash of white streaked across his vision and the scene changed abruptly. 

Lying beneath a weathered and gnarled tree, snow gathered on the man's metallic visor. He couldn't see anything, the sounds of a distant clash becoming muffled and withdrawn. 

It was cold.

His breaths were shallow and arduous. Pain seared through his lungs with blinding ache.

His mind grew slow and foggy, only the agonizing heat of blood filling his suit reminded him of his continued presence. 

"Your luck runs dry Eyvindr, yet my deal remains."

A melodic and chilling voice disrupted his peace. 

"Else, I shall leave you for the harpies." 

A lithe, feminine figure came into view beneath the illustrious tree, her soles crunching atop the crimson snow. 

Then the scene faded into obscurity once again, replaced with another similarly alien memory.

"I opened two gifts today Father."

A small child with pale ashen skin and hair like opal walked with unhurried steps towards a grand chamber in the center of a ruined cathedral. Depictions of stars and their constellations trailed alongside either side of her through the stained glass windows. 

Opening two grandiose onyx doors, variegated with streaks of opal, the images of constellations were replaced with shattered windows, depicting a harrowing darkness. She pushed with strength unbefitting of a child her size and entered.

There a man sat atop an exalted throne crudely carved from the same onyx. His desiccated and deceased body rotted with putrid horror as rivers of fresh blood flowed forth from his various wounds, forming a series of ornate and complex arrangements along the crystalline floor in a maddening portrait of the profane.

Looking at his hollowed eye sockets, the girl spoke without a hint of agitation marring her voice,

"They were my eyes—"

The scenes continued indefinitely without any semblance of reason. Each was just as strange as the next, warping any sense of time or space. Each memory floated up and then burst in his mind, a cacophony of sensation and senses unknown assaulting him with terrifying and unstoppable force. He was losing himself. 

Then he was a snake.

Serpentine and magnificent, its body was inconceivably vast and ephemeral. Its lightless, dark scales radiating a soft, illusory iridescence in a starless night sky. He tore through space at a terrifying speed but the abyss remained. Only the moon hung in the stygian tapestry, like an omen.

He peered into the distance of the abyssal expanse with hunger and something deeper, aimless, and unfathomable, indignation permeating his very being.

Shifting his gaze to the only visible object in the ruinous space, he looked intently at the dimming moon. Deep fissures and titanic craters plagued the surface like festering rot, pearlescent ichor seeping from the pustules. His gaze seemed to bore into the very essence of the universe... 

Then through it. 

The moon and the surrounding sky were pierced under his ferocious scrutiny. Lines of thin cracks began to envelop the space between, and the illusory veil came undone.

The moon and space shattered, but his gaze did not falter. 

Looking up and below simultaneously, the images of Maxie and the bird overlapped chaotically in his mind creating a staggering juxtaposition, then burst. A rain of shards enveloped his being. 

Gasp!

Maxie was thrust out of his reverie with a ghastly fall, leaving him momentarily breathless. 

He was still looking up at the sky, tracing the constellations, as if the eternity he spent trapped in a dream had never existed.

Except, somewhere, up there— far away in the vast expanse of the cosmos between Orion's Belt and the Big Dipper, the sky rippled... and shattered. A piece of the illusory veil plummeted to reveal a lightless, macabre void, boundless and overflowing with pure madness.

Looking back at him.

"w-What the FUCK IS THAT?!"

Maxie pointed a trembling finger at the sky incredulously, 

Tracing his gaze up to the starry night sky James looked at his brother in concern, a deep frown forming on his face.

"Max-"

"EUAARGHH!!"

An inhuman screech resounded from his lungs as he let out a blood-curdling wail. Clutching his eye he felt something penetrate the dark recesses of his pupil.

Suddenly searing blood ripped from his gut and made its way up his throat, bubbling from his mouth in a grotesquely chilling display as his soul was torn apart, piece by agonizing piece.

It all happened in an instant.

His body buckled and collapsed in a heap of flesh and warm blood, with eyes still peering into the distance suddenly grew vague and hazy before becoming dull and lifeless.

Maxie died that night. 

*** 

He had felt something coiling deep inside him, dark and insidious. The clamor of metallic scales scraping against each other rang through his body as something deeply profound settled in its wake.

The serpent wrapped around itself over again dizzyingly, constricting the very corners of his soul, until his will felt distant and weak. Baring its fangs the snake lashed and swallowed him whole, snuffing out the last embers of his being. 

'No!'

Roaring in indignation, something resurged from the depths of Maxie's soul. An incandescent light swelled from his cry and a terrifying radiance bellowed within the snake's form, growing more brilliant by the second. Letting out an inhuman howl, the obsidian snake shone with the light of a thousand suns and seized, falling to the raging inferno before coalescing and merging with it, becoming its kindling.

It was so incredibly hot. The conflagration of his soul trembled with ferocity. It was an all-consuming, blinding pain, that tore through his very existence, reducing him to ash.

But from the ashes he was reborn.

And he awoke.