Stories from RhyDin & The Rings

February 03, 2008

"-- and in the event of an emergency, who should we contact?"

How did I get here? Peasant eyes, brown as wet earth, watched how the pen the nurse held tapped with no rhythm against the clipboard she held. Papers were thin but these bulked up when stacked a top each other. Her writing was sketchy, unforgiving, the calligraphy of a woman who had given up caring what people think of her professionalism. Half the questions, from where he was sitting, were not answered; did she ask me?

She cleared her throat to engage him. Stared too blue eyes at him.

Who?

"Hayden Chambers."

Another clear to her throat. Her patience was dwindling as his answers were not only slowly delivered but cut in pieces.

"Five-five-five. Six-Six-Eight. Five-Four-Two-Nine."

Hayden would never answer. That phone would ring until the end of days and there would be no voice on the other end. There hadn't been in years but Jace was out of options; it was the only number he could remember.

He sunk his fingers into his eyes to rub away the blurring around the edges. It felt as if he was seeing things distorted, unnatural, and had to have tied into the lucidity in his head and the ache in his bones. Nausea came and went, a thick fire in his throat made his words burn, and the ringing in his ears was reminiscent of being in close proximity to a gunshot.

How did I get here?

"On a scale of these faces, the first one being no pain and the last one being extreme, where would you rate your discomfort?"

This was a universal tool that spoke to all by facial expression alone. There was no need to have a thread connecting them via language when one could just point to what they assessed to be how they felt. The first face was smiling, brows up, green as a clover and eyes bright while the last was a carmine red with the distinguishable sad mouth and tears. Rest of them were moderate, nothing extreme.

"Two."

"So mild discomfort that can be ignored?" She sounded annoyed.

"Yeah."

He wanted to ask how he got here; did someone drop him off? Did he walk here? There were no keys in his pockets and his jeans were not dirty from crawling through the city. Instinct told him his journey was not a rough one. There was a bad taste on his tongue. Metallic, the lasting impression of copper that you may get from sucking on a dirty penny.

Another wave of nausea caused the reaction in his face. Ticking a flinch in the rough grove of features. This was worse than light passing of sick. It made him clutch the edge of the cushioned table he sat on, crinkling the paper that was a staple to medical facilities like this.

"What else can you tell me about how you're feeling? You know, something more than mild discomfort."

He could tell she was judging him. Dragged him into the category of an addict, maybe, who was here to attempt a score. His tall tale wasn't fooling her; she thought his attitude, his state of being, was a clear indication that he was high, maybe coming down, maybe needed to go back up.

"I feel sick."

"Obviously." She sighed.

"No, you don't understand --"

"Everyone feels sick when they come in here. Look, if you're just trying to get something out of this, I can tell you now that that isn't going to fly. We'll run your insurance until it's bone dry before we g--"

She didn't finish. Stopped in her tracks when he heaved a mouthful of blood. It evolved from a mouthful to a stomach full, even more. She was shocked as it splashed from the old yellowing tile to her blindingly white shoes, stains of it seeping into the muted pink of her scrubs.

Jace couldn't revel in her expression. Couldn't be amused at the way he had shut her up. His eyes rolled into the back of his head as the world turned off the lights.

February 12th, 2008

Red. This color was dominant in a wide open space that was inhabited by nothing but his lone figure. A sky (if it could be called that) was a dim lit pink, reflection of the carmine he stood on, and there was no other pigment to be picked out from an atmosphere of nothing. Cryptic, eerie, a sense of dread while also being at utter peace. This was a land that was not visited, an unknown foreign element caught between reality and concept. He noted the quiet that could be shattered with a single breath, even a whispered word might ignite an echo loud enough to rupture the stillness. Far, far in the distance is where he set his sights to try and gauge a horizon, if anything may be tangible in the miles that stretched all around him. He came up empty handed and just as empty in understanding where he found himself. There was an instinct to yell because being this alone was what drove men like him into madness. Was it a prison, a dreamscape, maybe a nightmare he was immersed in?

Beneath his feet was blood. He didn't know how he knew but it was thick like syrup, glossy even though there was no immediate light to shine on it, and he barely moved to confirm just how watery it was when puny ripples expelled outward only to fade back into a station of tranquility. The depth, however, he was unaware of but it seemed like he wasn't even an inch into it, no sinking to warrant hysteria. Again, the Delphian essence of this existence was peculiarly neutral.

He felt no reason to panic.

"Who. Are. You?"

A voice that wasn't his own came up from beneath the cardinal red he was standing on. The baritone of it shifted the very liquid to pulse outwards, replicating the birth of tidal waves that began minute and would soon swell as they swayed out into the vast landscape to disappear the further it went. Different shades of timbre, echoes amid echoes, the fallacy of one voice splitting into thousands of different ones all in unison. He felt like he was being consumed by the question, by the very voice that heralded no face but quaked beneath his feet -- yet, still, he felt no terror. No, he felt, but what it was seemed unreasonable for what was happening: Jace felt connected.

He spoke and it was his own voice. No others to inspire collusion.

"Jace." Why am I so placid?

An eternity felt like it passed him by but time didn't exist here. There was no reason to collect seconds into minutes, to breed hours into one another. He wanted to hear it again, though, wanted to understand that this was not a purgatory meant for one. Others had to be here; he couldn't sustain on his own memories, his own unethical judgement to himself. Could this be the blood of those he buried, those he hunted, the villains-to-be which might have been heroes-in-action had it not been for the blinders his superiors put on him?

A crane of his neck sent his attention to below, where he stood. Prideful even in the midst of falling to a possible hell (What fresh hell is this?) where his body was wired in sinew, scars, a galore of unhappy endings. What he was greeted with was a reflection of himself. Of his true self; there were bones shifting into skin, knots of memories tying it all together, the constant ebb and flow of words either spoken or unspoken. Where his eyes should have been were old gold coins engraved with markings he did not know but they flipped, back and forth; heads or tails. From that image uprooted finger tips, then hands, lengths of arms followed and all the while the blood they rose from began to harden into a crust of decay. Pungent, sickeningly sweet, dead flesh with drops of jasmine perfume.

And the arms kept rising. Rising higher, becoming longer, the fingers looking like gnarled roots of Yggdrasil. In the pockets of where skin should have been, the divots and clefts, river roadwalks of hand prints, were sharp lined eyes that all moved in different directions. Their colors ranged from bright skylark blue, pebbled rocks across grey beaches, core of awoken magma, the green of unspoiled clovers, to some that lacked any distinguishing chroma and so were black as a starless sky to the innocence of lacework white. Each of these eyes, they knew him. Recognized him and he felt how they peeled back the layers of his walls, crumbled his masquerade in a blink, and saw him as he was meant to be seen.

"Can. You. Save. Us?"

It was no longer a splintered voice that ricocheted in every direction but one that spoke in his mind, took a front seat to his thoughts and motivated him to listen to the presence of new sounds: Chirp of birds clashing with the songs of the dying, west winds that shed temperature like a snake would leave behind its skin, rupture of glaciers warring against one another. All the sounds of a world not inhabited by man. A world before. An old world that had not sung its ode like this in a millennium. It, this, whatever it was, it reached to adjust palms of growing hands (the roots had shifted, the texture had collapsed; this was not wood but bone) to hold at his face, tentative at first and so gentle that it could not be a devil -- could it?

At that moment there was nothing but a sudden shock of pain, of knowledge, of the intensity which erupted in his very marrow.

All Jace could do was silent-scream as this world went white.