Corellia
Ravenmoore Asylum
Days flake off in paint chips,
skkrkk, flpfpflpflp tchh, skkrkk flpflpflp tchh
Drugged to the gills, staring at the wall.
How many days minutes years seconds seconds seconds
An Initiation takes place outside time.
Three attempted suicides old. The medicine won’t help.
The medicine won’t help because it’s poison. They are trying to kill him, and he knows it. He shouts and shouts and shouts, then drools, and drools, and drools.
Today, he received a letter:
Benedict -
There's a new patient here, a young boy that looks remarkably like you. He visits me sometimes and we talk about his parents. I don't understand why he's here - he seems perfectly normal.
He's too young to be here.
Maybe it's a gift. I've missed so much of your childhood, and what parts I knew I can barely remember anymore. Your father says it's a side effect of my medicine. To forget. I don't want to forget anymore, I want to remember.
Won't you come see your mother?
Have you heard from your sister?
I miss you both so much.
He had seen Avalore, somewhere in the blur. There were tears, smiles,
something
An assemblage of facial features that didn’t register anymore.
Did he have a roommate? Who was it who talked to him, who scribbled the equations upon equations of blood upon the wall, deriding the firmament, beckoning the sky to fall?
Who whispered encouragingly in the dark?
Another pill, another pill, two new colors within the beige,
the dripping from pipes.
A sore face.
A memory? The pain echoed, lingered, resided, but
was it here, now?
Someone had hurt him?
Toxic shock from feces-soaked rags, ripped from drain pipes, gagging him.
A change in the staff, an orderly downstairs. Benedict yelled at the holovision rabbit, and he had no idea why.
Had he been raped? What was his brain telling him anymore?
Another letter:
Still no word? Not even a simple reply? I see now, like your father, you've abandoned me to this hell. Left me alone to rot with my failing mind and this accursed child, this infernal boy who serves as nothing but a reminder of everything I've missed and cannot have.
To hell with you - demon! You can join me there.
Not long now.
This could be now. This could be forever.
Is it
then? Please, God, be
Then.
Crying in the dark, drawing pictures for the nurses to make them like him more. Childish vies for attention, appeasement.
The chaos of pissing yourself, of relying on someone else to change it for you. Hunger strike. Pills. Force feeding.
Mother says:
He's coming for me. He knows now I can't be cured - and neither can you.
He'll come for you, too.
I know what you did to your sister, wretch.
“He beat him half to death. Anti-Social Personality Disorder, Acute Schizophrenia. He has made literally no effort to cooperate or get better.”
Bright white light. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t see. A man in a long overcoat, walking on stilts, leaning over the bed, strapping electrodes to his head.
He was saying something through his mask (Why was he even wearing one?). The doctor was muttering through paper…It sounded like…It sounded like….
“Anja.”
ZAP!
And then everything stopped.
A lifetime of watching roaches climb the ceiling.
Another letter came, but the staff didn’t know how to read it to him:
Sintt Ishgre
Inhix.
Flohlu l'olath kaloth ulu l'llarnbuss uoi'nota.
Please, God, let it be
Then.
~*^*~
The Labyrinth
Mountain of Memories
I…uh…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zZfBBp-j6I
He had crossed the Abyss, hadn’t he? Then where was we? Why couldn’t Benedict Eden hear the Benedict Eden inside his own head?
Only Stillness. The scraping of combat boots upon rock. The mocking whistle of that phantom wind, breezing through a land without air. He scaled the mountain, driven by a force as arbitrary and nameless as anything else. The tails of his trenchcoat were rustled by the gust, a ghostly approximation of company kept, and by implication, company lost.
What of the little boy? Well, he did what all little boys do.
I…I…
He grew up.
There was a path along the rockface, never intendant on acting as a deterrent. It cost much to get here. By now, the travelers had paid their due. Benedict reached the final reach, successfully scaling the Mountain of Memories. And from there, at the center of the universe, he looked out over the Labyrinth.
And instead saw
The Sprawl.
I….I….I…
Not just one city, but all of them. Coruscant and Aldera, Cinnagar and Nar Shaddaa. Even Coronet, broken and burning. He spun around, every one accounted for, frozen underneath the amber of smog, the stars twinkling overhead. God…He knew deep down that the stars were somehow profound, but for the life of him, he couldn’t remember why – some ancient, distant pang of awareness from the bottom of a well. He hadn’t seen them in a literal decade.
I….
But the humble celestial bodies were outshined by the city lights, glowing like Christmas bulbs; mysterious, inviting…
Magic.
How he would have ached to see the city like this again; as an outsider, one last time. All the potential, the connectedness. Countless people all moving together, the hope of Gravity challenging the isolation inherent in the galactic natural order. In a place this big, there has to be more of your kind. “I don’t want to be alone anymore,” called the Universe.
But there it was, Coronet City – Shattered, dismantling, on fire. He could feel himself screaming behind his face, well-worn synapses of anxiety reminiscent of the Vong-formed Aldera, the perpetually-lost Coruscant…
I…I…
…that ultimately went nowhere. Intellectually, he understood there was no saving anything in the end, but even here, he could still hear them crying. He buried his face in his hands, trying to smother away what he was seeing, what he was hearing, what was causing his the shatterpoint in his chest to seep and bleed. And when he finally lowered his hands, he saw her.
Mom. Mad, insane.
Lost forever.
I…I…
She plunged her hand into the fracture, causing the dam to burst, flooding out in…
And he dropped to his knees, struggling to breathe, to catch it all as it poured from the cavity in his chest. And he opened his mouth to scream, light-like-syrup drooling from his lips in…
And from his eyes, from his nose, the final weapon he swore up and down he didn’t have and he didn’t need was running over, spilling its contents in...pooling around his fallen form in…baptizing his rotten heart in…
Purple?
Blue?
No.
Indigo.
I…I…I..can’t…I can’t…
"How can I make her love me?"
He couldn’t find himself anymore. That swagger, that one-liner, that stupid goddamn defense mechanism. Little indigo moths ascended from the pool, fluttering from his wounds …their wings, so, so loud. Again, he tried to scream, but it only begat more, circling him in a storm, settling down on his skin.
Taking itty-bitty, excruciating bites of him…
"Well, kark them, then – Their loss."
“Where’s my mommy? I can’t find my mom!”
“I don’t get it. Those lizards are trashing their own homes by rioting – Yeah, that’ll prove they’re not savages.”
“Renee’s going to karking kill me…”
“How am I going to make rent this month?”
“…factory conditions so poor, workers were literally jumping from the building during their shift.”
“No, we can’t get you a McYoda meal! We don’t have the money, okay?!” “Nobody even knows I’m down here… “
“I’ll sleep for a half hour, maybe she’ll have texted me back by then…”
“Six months and I’ve only lost ten pounds…why do I karking bother?” “Over 300 dead” “Please, oh, please, don’t karking call on me.” “Forget him, man, he’s pretentious, is what he is. Why else wouldn’t he listen to me?”
“The worst massacre in memory since Alderaan” “I don’t know, Thom – I’d have a hard time calling a place where a stormtrooper can flat out execute my son in broad daylight ‘my home’.” “My husband’s been deployed for six months…Look, I don’t want anything romantic, I just need someone to touch me before I lose my mind.” “I’m sorry,sir,your Unemployment’s run out.” “We found that toxins in the town reservoir had come to render your breast milk irradiated…” “This is the last hit, I swear to the gods…I can get clean any time I
want.” “’We’ll call you’ – Yeah, right. Am I actually obsolete? Am I going to die in the street?” “I guess I’d always meant to…I just never got around to it.” “Mesa sorry, please, mesa can’t pay.” “I thought I was going to move back in with my parents, pay off my students loans – That was 13 years ago” “Twenty for tongue, fifty for sex. Please…forty….Fine. Thirty.” “Whenaskedwhytheyburnedthetwoyearold’sremains,thebrothersreplied'Wedidn’twanttogetintrouble.’” “Youeverwonderifthisisallonegianthallucinationbroughtonbysnakevenom,andifwedon’twakeupsoon,it’sgoingtodigestus?”“Shewillnotabandonyou.Shewillnotabandonyou. Shewillnotabandonyou. Shewillnotabandonyou”“TrustintheForce.It’sallyouhave,intheend.”
"HELP ME."
He gave himself freely, his happiness, his experience, his memory, his laughter, his energy; opening his heart to the world
And it ate him alive, leaving nothing but a skeleton, bony arms splayed out to the sides.
I….Sahasrara.
…and a silly, black trenchcoat, blowing in the empty wind.
The Passion of the Guttermage
