Originally Posted: 10/22/08
Everything ruptures in the blink of an eye, spills blood and fluid into the body. Poisons, bile, marrow streaming from pores in the skin, leaking onto the floor as it eats through the final seconds of your life. The flesh decays in instants, consumed by Time and by fire. The eyes change colors, the weight is lifted. I stand, re-made, in the image of the gods. Naked, cold, and wary eyed I stumble, taking the first uncertain steps of a child. Muscles flex and contract, expand, pulsating with newfound, raw power. Predator's eyes sweep this way and that, searching for enemies or food. Taking sure that nothing has come to destroy me while I am weak.
The steps become surer, stronger. The muscles begin to relax, to coil as those of a serpent ready to strike. The path is the same, but the traveler has changed.
I don new clothes to shelter my body from the elements. Silks and satins. Soft, traveling clothes and leather moccasins. A silver circlet crowns my head, and an elegant cape flutters behind me. A sword, lighter than the rusted, blood-stained behemoth I once carried, lays by the roadside. Simple, light-weight, powerful. I claim it and continue on. I have left the old shell, its ashes and scraps of flesh, far behind me. Now the time has come to peel back layers of self-loathing and discard them. Emotional weight that impedes my travel must be cast off, tossed away and forgotten.
There will be no failure, because I will not fail. A layer is torn off. I am strong, I will succeed. Once again. I cannot love another, nor give myself completely, not yet. I cannot swear that bond to your heart, until I've sworn it to mine. Soon I'll be ready. And another layer peels away. I will not bow beneath the burden of suppressed emotion. I will not be controlled by dark things. The light peers through, illuminating parts of me long left to the shadow. I will not be brought to kneel beneath the words and blows of someone else. I am better, stronger, more powerful. To tempt me to violence is to perish. To challenge me is to suffer. I will not fail, because I am not a failure.
The layers are many, and woven together. Often, peeling them requires cutting, tearing. Bloody work, but then all work is bloody somewhere. I tread on, throwing off things that have no use for me. Things that have no use to me. I clean the wounds, but do not bandage them. Better that they heal beneath the sun as it shines through. Better to reach my soul with gashes bleeding, cuts and bruises shown than hidden beneath layers of clean, white fabric. Appear as I am, rather than continue to hide. The world opens before me, in all its beauty, and I catch a glimpse of her again, teal skirts dancing beneath her laughing eyes. She is, perhaps, not far off yet. She looks different, and I am moved to smile. She stops her dance a moment, curtsies. I respond with a bow, and she is gone again. A giggle reaches me, and I am drawn inexorably onward. Toward the union of these paths, but first toward myself. The center of me.
Ahead, there lies an end. A vast expanse of empty blackness where the path vanishes. I walk on, to the edge of a precipice. From a distance, this place a appeared empty but it is not. Stars line the seemingly endless void. Planets, moons, lives flicker here and there, scattered across this place. Far below there is a light. An incredible, swirling malestrom of light and stardust, roiling outward and back to the center. A thing so massive that it holds all the rest in place, so powerful that it creates order among the chaos. A tear spills down my cheek, peels itself off my face and hurtles downward, toward the spiralling light. There are dark things there, things that must be dealt with. Drawing sword, I step off the ledge, fling myself toward the center of it all.
The creatures assail me. Hideous things with leathery wings and claws like rusted daggers. Serrated teeth that sink into the flesh, tearing great chunks away for their meals. But each that strikes a wound on me dies. My steel becomes a blur, a pure extension of the predator wielding it. The broken pieces of their carcasses evanesce, returned to the diminishing darkness that created them. Their flesh, like dried leather, drips with primodrial pus, and their slavering jaws open to devour, salivating at the thought of my body as their feast. But none survive. Hurtling through space, always closer to the light, I have slashed and stabbed them, hacked and sliced through limbs, through flesh and sinew and bone, and left nothing but the vague dust of corpses in my wake. To tempt me to violence is to perish, to challenge me is to suffer. I will not fail, because I am not a failure. I am the God of Redemption.
Embrace me. The heat, the light, they grow within me and in my sight. I fall, arms outstretched, toward the impossible power beneath me. The first golden waves of it wash over me, like plunging into a warm sea. I breathe air that is clear, fresh, unpolluted. I am surrounded by warmth, serenity, and embraced by the center. For a time that I cannot describe, I float there among the golden rays, among the creatures I have created and those that create me. Each is touched in turn, and grants a blessing before departing toward whatever end. Perhaps this is peace, or ecstasy. Perhaps a taste of both, or neither. And soon the power infuses me, imbues me with that which I thought lost, and I find myself back on the path.
Behind me lies the endless space, the void, but there is no darkness there, and thus I move on. I am in the same direction, and the opposite. I have reached the center, now I pass beyond it, toward something greater. Sheathe the sword, take another step. Into the sunlight at last.
There will be no failure, never again.
Beyond the bleakness,
-Nemesis
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