Chapter 13

What are you playing at? Are you trying to collide your reality with the story? Was this your plan all along?

“I’m testing a theory,” he says. “All it needed was planting a part of myself in the story. Scary, isn’t it? The mysterious JJ hides under a flawless invisible shroud within your mind. Even this pup of darkness fears me.”

Won’t it mess up the story? He smirks.

“Do you think I’d let it?” He asks in answer. From somewhere in his own memory, I hear a deduction. An answer in the form of a question suggests the person is hiding the truth. “Ok, enough chit-chat. Shroud back on.”

alter



“Yeah…” I said. Ernie took a large gulp of beer. “Just bothers me a bit.”

“I’ve got like twenty things that are bothering me right now, man,” he said, putting the bottle to his lips again. The remaining contents drained in a few seconds. “Like, where is my garem? How do I become a full Garavand? Or why can’t I connect to my own kind at all? There is this thing called the Dream Vestibule, but I can’t find any Garavand in there when I travel. It’s like I’m some sort of shadow outcast.”

“Maybe you’re the last Gara-whatever in existence,” I said, feeling stupid. Garavand were THE darkness. There had to be some of them out there in the darkness of space.

“Oh, thanks Finn,” Ernie said. “That’s a cheery thought. You sure do know how to cheer up a monster.” Sarcasm. Someone once called it the language of idiots, but used in that manner, it exposed more than it hid away. Ernie was suffering, possibly drowning his sorrows in any way he could. Was Agi the only thing holding him here? Maybe that was the reason they were in this constant fight. It wasn’t my place to pry in the matters of the stars, but it felt like such a human struggle. It helped that they were both in human skin, something I found hilarious.

Doc walked in through the door before I could ask Ernie more about his kind. The both of us felt invisible as he ignored that we were even there. I looked at Ernie and he shrugged.

alter

No way. Do I see correctly? Is that JJ under the influence of writer’s block? What a pathetic choice to throw my voice into the mix and save your own character of what to write next. What you’re doing is a paradox of the mind.

“Well, what do you expect?” he asks. “I’m uneasy about this one guy who has mental issues trying to order something where I do my writing.”

Besides you? Do you differ that much from him? His insanity is more visible than yours. Look upon him once more. That is your future if you do not make good on our deal. Nobody will be able to help you at that stage, so seek help now.

Now, about the story. I, as in the person I am in the story when I’m flawlessly shrouded, would like to know more about the Garavand things, even though your mind mentions them already. Remiona is a strange name.

“The whole point.”

Well, besides that. Doc is still a mystery, Agi could have been caught, and Fiona’s baby could be maturing rapidly. Those are all the ideas you already had, but didn’t accept. Are you worried I’ll fight you on that? Well, let me assure you that I will, as long as you find yourself some new comforts. For this writer’s block, go with the Garavand things. From what I know, what you know, his abilities are different from any other Garamant and he has no garem, so I’m curious how that occurred. Aren’t you, JJ?

“Indeed,” he says with new brewing thoughts.

alter

“I’m sorry,” I said at the comment about Ernie being the last of his kind. “I don’t really know anything about Garavand or Garamant, so I shouldn’t have much of an opinion on the matter. I’d love to know more about that, if you’re up for it.” Ernie shrugged.

“Sure,” he said. “You’re in this baby-deep anyway. If it doesn’t work out with Fi, Agi and I can just make all this a long dream for you. They play with memory, and my kind do dreams. One might argue those are the same thing, but so were the Zaxi and Garavand once long ago.”

“What do you mean?” I asked more about stuff not working out with Fiona, but Ernie took it as my curiosity for the latter idea.

“The running theory is that the stars, Zaxi, and the darkness of space, the Garavand, were once just one being. The fork in this theoretical depiction is that the first Garavand ever came to be thanks to two other powers, a Tisyros, the destroyer, and a Trevit from Secear, the inventor. Together with a renegade Zaxient, this team killed and consumed another Zaxient, receiving the fate of being melded together into a brand new being, a Garavand.”

“Uhh,” I said, having no idea what to picture at all. A star was a star, but how did a Tisyros and a Trevit look like? “No idea what Tisyros or Trevits look like. Sorry.”

“No sweat,” Ernie said. “They actually already exist in human mythology and stories. Let’s see, the Tisyros is pretty much a succubus, and they can transform so the known form is an abbreviation of how they act toward humans when eating their ‘souls’. As for the Trevs, that’s just like a purple goblin. They’re good at swindling just as legends say, but they are quite good at building stuff out of nothing. That should get you partly to imagining how they might look melded into one, but it’s better to just see it firsthand so you’re not frozen in fear if you encounter one.” He stood up from the couch and cracked his neck.

“You’re gonna show me?” I asked.

“Well, yeah,” he said. “Haven’t done a full release in a while, so pay no mind to my screams, ok? You might be tempted to attack me out of fear, but remember it’s just your pal Ernie.” After shedding his clothes he dropped to all fours in gray smoke and hit the ground a few times while grunting. He started screaming right after. My heart beat faster, but I kept watching his transformation. When the sound vanished, gray smoke encased him whole, towering above me in the room. There was something within it. I squinted, but it didn’t help. What came out of the smoke was at least three meters tall, and set my heart racing.

There was no head, just three strange tendrils protruding from the shoulders. The arms were bulky clubs of gray flesh with fingers twitching like dead insect limbs in different directions. Some black floppy spikes protruded from the shoulders. The mass of the chest was filled with muscles in the wrong places, flexing at random with veins of white bursting out. This being had no legs, but a weird goo with dripping black ooze that stuck to things. I fought the fear back, reminding myself it was just Ernie.

“You ok?” I asked, and immediately regretted it as the chest opened to a giant maw with sharp white teeth. From inside the mouth emerged a long white tongue and reached out to me. I fought back the urge to hit it away and run as it extended toward me. The surface was cold and dry, like paper from the freezer as it touched to my skin.

#Yeah,# a voice spoke inside my head, Ernie’s voice. #That’s pretty much what a Garavand looks like.# The tongue lifted up and folded behind him to reveal Ernie’s face on the underside, frozen in utter agony, glued to the white flesh of the tongue. I gasped and was glad when it unfolded to touch my skin again.

#The face is human,# he said. #I don’t know what a pure Garavand has there, but Garamant have their human face, frozen in the last face they made before releasing this form.#

“Enough, enough,” I said looking away. With a puff of gray, Ernie was back in his human body, but naked. He walked over and put his clothes back on.

“Sorry that I exposed myself to you,” he said. I wondered if he meant human nudity or his Garamant form. “Garavand are ugly for a reason. If the origin story is correct, they’ve done a horrible thing, so it must be their penance. At least now you won’t freeze up if you see one of those, not that you’d be around them anyway. Hell, I don’t even know how to reach them, or if they’d want to know me.”

“I’m sure you’ll find others eventually,” I said. “So Agi’s your anchor here, right? The forbidden romance between a star and the darkness?”

“Huh,” he said. “I guess she is. All the more reason I should be looking for her. I wanted to blame you for the fight we started. It had to do with that human-Zaxi baby Doc allowed. Agi wanted to try a Garamant-Zaxi one, but I was against it. It doesn’t feel like it was your fault in any way. I’m just not ready for that commitment, I think.”

“You barely know who you are,” I said, coming to his defense. “Once you figure that out, you can try experimenting with new life.” He smiled and chuckled.

“Says the human mixed up in astral matters,” Ernie said. “It’s really strange how calm you are about these things, man.”

“I might be a sociopath,” I said, with a thought to the past. Was that the problem in my previous relationships? Were those connections just not enough to raise my pulse, to draw fear from within? Ernie punched my shoulder to draw me away from the thought.

“Don’t sweat it,” he said. “Come on, I’ll show you something cooler that a Garamant can do.” He stood up and turned his hand gray, shedding smoke into the room. With one motion, he tore the air apart from over his head to the ground. While the gray hand held the line open, he reached out his other hand.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Anywhere you want,” he replied. “But let’s find a dream to invade first. When you’re in there, don’t let go of my hand. The Dream Vestibule is a big place. You wouldn’t want to get lost in there.”

“Dream Vestibule…” I repeated while meeting his human hand. When I was close enough, he grabbed my wrist and jumped into the vertical gray line of smoke. There was no opening big enough visible, but somehow that line absorbed us in just two dimensions.

“This,” Ernie said, waving his fading gray hand over the scene, “Is the Dream Vestibule. A place where all minds rest. Go on, think of some person from your past who’s still alive, an ex or something.” Before I had a moment to take in the wide open tunnel of spikes, they shifted like a sort of intricate puzzle, and the nearest spike looked to bear the face of my previous girlfriend, Anna.

“That’s my ex,” I said, pointing her out. Ernie motioned a hand and the cone opened from the middle of her forehead to a pathway into more darkness.

“Beyond is her dreamscape,” he said. “We can just observe, or we can interact, but bear in mind that while being in her mind we will hear all her thoughts. You might not be prepared to hear her unfiltered notions. Do you still want to go in?” I nodded. Ernie smirked as we drifted into Anna’s dream.

She was in a cozy embrace of two muscular men while a third was on his hands and knees as her seat. So that was what she was like on the inside. She did a good job hiding it until I became the problem. I was tempted to dig into her mind, but just watched her pompous-self use men like slaves. When she commanded one to a sexual act, I had to step in.

“Finn?” she asked, as the slaves faded into the background. “What are you doing here?” The scene snapped to the small café where we first discussed our breakup. I sat down at the same seat as back then, but this time she couldn’t hide anything. Ernie stood at my side, no longer holding my hand. She didn’t seem to notice him as he stepped away and took a seat near our table.

“Why are we here?” I asked, feeding the same words into my mouth as at the initial memory. “We met here.”

“Right,” she said, with a tortured look. She thought it was regret. “We’re here to talk about where this relationship is going. I’m ready for the next step. Are you?”

“The next step?” I asked like last time, but she had a thought.

#If you’d only submit yourself to me, this wouldn’t be happening.# Before she spoke, I shattered the scripted memory.

“Submit to you? I asked. She gasped. “That’s not normal, Anna. A relationship is a partnership, not the interaction of master and slave.” I said so in anger, even though most often in relationships there was some small aspect of one person controlling the other. She was speechless.

“I- but- no,” she stammered, but righted her mind with a snap to a palace of her own. Guards pointed spears at me. “This is MY dream, you weakling! You bow to me!” I looked around for Ernie but he wasn’t around. Could I actually die in someone else’s dream? I touched the spear closest to me, cutting my finger. Blood gushed from the opening. Not good.

A guard stepped closer all swagger with his spear not pointed at me. When his helmet came off, I saw it was Ernie. He turned toward her, took a bow, and coated his hand in puffy gray smoke.

“My humblest apologies, Queen Anna,” he said, shedding the armor in one instant. “But now, it is your nightmare.” His hand moved a few times as the guards undressed with hunger in their eyes. It was a revolt.

“You can make nightmares?” I asked.

“Oh, Finny,” Ernie replied, opening the cone we entered through. “I am the one true nightmare. I am the boogeyman, the monster under the bed AND the one in the closet. Garavand like to think they are fear itself, but we’re just shadows, nothing without light. Let’s go, unless you want to watch her get devoured by these men. She’s bound to wake up soon.”

“No, let’s go,” I said, and in the blink of an eye, we were back in the room of the hidden apartment. Doc sat in the corner with a glass of water in his hand. He stood up and toasted as if the liquid was alcohol, or was it actually a full glass of vodka?

“How’d you like dream-jacking?” he asked, taking a large gulp.

“Interesting,” I replied. “Is that vodka or water?”

“Water,” he replied. “Though my metabolism perceives your molecules of said water as the same thing that alcohol is to humans. Short story shorter, I get drunk on water.”

“Frankly, I’m surprised he’s not always wasted,” Ernie said.

“Water poisons you?” I asked. “You sure chose the wrong planet to live on.”

“Did I?” Doc asked, then started laughing an old man laugh that turned to an unsettling cough. Whatever he was, he seemed to be dying, or at least ill to some degree. “How goes our experiment? Have you deposited your reproductive component inside Fiona’s uterus yet?” It felt like a personal question, but Doc meant it more as a scientific procedure.

“Haven’t you spoken to her?” I asked. It was unnerving that both Agi and Fiona weren’t around especially since humans were after them.

“They must be with Luke,” Ernie theorized. I breathed a sigh of relief even though there was no guarantee that’s what they were doing.

“Where did he go anyway?” I asked. “After the orange beams came down in the forest, I haven’t even seen him once.”

“For one, he’s probably no longer the Luke you know,” Doc said. “I found a way to transfer him to a new skin without mental damage. I think he only wore that for Monika, or he’d have let me do it a while ago. That girl has one twisted mind.”

“Is she a Zaxient, too?” I asked.

“Nah,” Ernie said. “She’s a rare instance of humans let in on Doc’s operation. We should contact them though.” There was a chance they were together, but I had a sinister feeling that something was amiss. I didn’t want to project it, so I kept my mouth shut.

“The headache’s back,” I said. “Hey, Doc, I heard from Fiona that you had something that could expand my mind to help all of this painlessly.” The old man put a finger to his chin.

“I do,” he replied. “But you’d end up less human as a result of it. I’m not sure how Fi would feel about it. Ask her first. Zaxi tend to have problems with things from Secear. It’s a dimension without stars, you see, an internal world lit by some purple gemstone they call Ekha. Nobody really knows where it is, but time runs fast there, turning billions of years into mere thousands. A human wouldn’t last more than a few minutes there, so I don’t recommend a visit.”

“So the inhabitants of that- that-.”

“Secear,” Ernie completed, “Trevits. They’re the purple gobs.”

“So they live longer than stars?” I asked. Pain mounted again in my head.

“Their lifespans are closer to Tisyros,” Doc said. “Which only ends if the body is destroyed, but the bastards breed like Earth rabbits. Secear is always overpopulated. They’re smart though, and their tech is the envy of all worlds. They can prolong their own lives with it, much like humans do by replacing parts in transplants.” They sounded like fun creatures, but a few minutes in their dimension would end my life. What a scary thought that was. This was too much information at once. I felt the pain build stronger.

“I have to lie down,” I said, making my way to the couch where the experiment began. “Can either of you go find our stars? I’m not sure if it applies to a Zaxient like Fiona, but pregnant humans shouldn’t strain themselves.” Before the light in the room turned to needles of pain on my optic nerve, I buried my head in the pillows. Maybe some rest could recover my sapped brainpower. I was of no use to anyone in this condition. Was that Trev tech the way to go? Sleep took me into a dream inspired by Trevit kind. Purple goblins living in a cavern world of purple gem lighting, huh?

alter

You’re forcing too many things into my story. Is Rassot that much of an influence to you? Not everything has to come together in the end. Not to even mention how sexual that sounds. Meanwhile, you’re still toying with the notion that Agi and Fiona were caught by humans. Why are you putting my pregnant star in danger? How can I be ok with that? How can you? And how can you resign from seeking happiness? I thought we had a deal, JJ!

“I don’t want to live in the city,” he says. “But I don’t know how to get out. It’s always so easy to tell someone to ‘seek happiness’ from a position of happiness, Finnelgamin. My world is not kind to dreams, especially those not fully developed.”

All the more reason you should put your whole heart into developing them. At least if you fail, you’ll have no regrets. Believe me, many fail.

“Says the figment of my imagination who uses my mind for reference,” he says. “This is just glorified talking to myself.”

And yet I’m asking you to lead a better life. That means you already know all this yourself, but your lack of trust in the world extends to even your own mind. You created me to fix yourself. Don’t you see it yet? My own story is just payment for services rendered. You sold your mind to me for this purpose, yet you resist my ideas for betterment.

“Because I’m afraid,” he says, with a hesitation in his thoughts. The pause of his mind took minutes to distance him to various other locations. He ran to pleasant memories of imagination where he was not a recluse. He dreams of a good life, yet reality bites the hand at his reach for it. Licking his wounds, he dreams more, eventually reaching less and hesitating to attain what his heart desires that much more. If I fail, he will die in this manner, gradually crumbling from the inside, and he will become just like many of you. I can’t let him fade into just another person of the world. I hope you understand this later on.

If you have a chance to save someone from becoming as cold and bitter as you, wouldn’t you take it? Maybe you aren’t the person I’ve described, but who would choose to watch others create rather than doing it themselves? Stories drive the world forward, and that reach for dreams is the one story understood the utmost. He’s still running around his mind, taking refuge in bits of comedy rather than facing me. I sometimes wonder what I am to him. Am I just another detached personality fighting for control like beast and JJ? If I was so, he would never let me do this. He’s coming back, nearly oblivious of what we discussed.

“Let’s just get back to your story,” he says. I will fight him again. That’s what I’m there for, in his mind, and yet I want to be in Fiona’s arms, with our child cradled in mine. I might betray JJ in the end to reach for my dream. Call it a cruel twist of writing my own destiny.

I’m ready, JJ. Send me in…

And he closes the notebook for another time. What. An. Asshole.

alter

break




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