Chapter 21 - Truth of Lila
I came back a few days later to the same feeling of warm comfort I hoped it still was. Having become comfortable in another gathering of people, I just disconnected from them again. It had to happen. Both JJ and beast started bleeding through. While an imaginative kid could use some friends, beast was not someone that deserved to exist around others. Just like before, I would miss those few I grew fond of, but they were better off not knowing me.
The warmth I felt around me was also wet. With that in mind, I could only assume I was in a womb. If this was Lila’s womb, I had no idea what the birth would look like as that part of her being’s life cycle was not known to me. I knew two things other than this: that I could not see, and that I had no way of editing my predicament. Whatever this was, I would have to let it play out.
In a strange way, I did not want to leave this comfortable embrace of warm wetness. It was like a sensory deprivation chamber, only you did not float in water, but in goo. I surrendered to the sensation of belonging just as a bright gap opened to spit me out. My eyes hurt with the light, so I shut them. There was no reason I could be happy feeling the cold air outside, so I burst out crying. Hands picked me up from a hard surface, bringing me closer to something soft. By instinct, I found a nipple, positioned it in my mouth and inhaled sweet, warm liquid that made me feel at home.
Hands and arms held me to the surface, cradling my tiny body to the skin that tasted sweet with the creaminess of the milk of a mother. Even when I was done eating, I kept sucking on the nipple for comfort, but that was taken away from me. Once more I tried to grow back to my current age with creationism to no avail. As for who it was holding and feeding me, I could only see the silhouette against the brightness of light around me.
I had to wonder whether this was me, or if I had been simply placed within the mind of a child born to someone I knew. When the woman departed from my side, I saw the golden ceilings of the library and knew where I was, but not why I was locked to the body of a baby. This would take some time, if I could ever get back to who I was. Maybe it was better this way. It was possible that I caused this to happen when I ventured into the untethered space, looking within myself for help in a situation I created.
“Lila,” I felt my mouth say. The silhouette of a woman returned to my side, bending down to hold her forehead to mine. I could still not see her face because of the brightness behind her. The word felt weird in my mouth, alien. I had not spoken before. No sound came out of me other than cries at leaving the warmth of the womb until now. “Lila.”
“Shh, now,” said the woman, extending her arms down toward me. The fingers glided over my face, smoothing the little bit of my hair back. I was happy at the skin contact, giving off an involuntary giggle of amusement. “Sleep. Get some rest, my little one. Everything will make sense in the morning.”
I felt the lull of sleep as the baby, and as myself in reality. Disconnecting from what I considered friends had a dampening effect on my mood, as it should have. It was for their own good. I knew I was poisonous to them, and would eventually learn about their vices to hurt them just right for my own amusement. That part of beast I detested the most. He would take something valued by a friend only to make light of it to the point of causing them pain. It just meant that I was a horrible person beneath the skin, and was right to keep away.
I missed the warmth of the womb, with darkness, but the comfortable kind. The day was starting in my reality as I set the device aside to try getting a few more hours of sleep. Perhaps some music could help me.
break
The next day, I was feeling better. The heavy impact of leaving comfort both in reality and inside the untethered space was slowly dissipating. Back when Rebecca was with me, in the created world, I had a similar space to escape to. It was a place I should not have made in the first place, much like the confines of my old school, and like the confines of my high school’s library that remained in my heart nonetheless. I gave what I had to Tiarto, or maybe we connected because of the common theme.
It was hard to explain how ideas arrived when everything already existed. The ideas you would find were simply a take on that which shaped you from another universe across the Infinity Void, with a different life attached to it. All things in life operated this way. Humans wanted a familiar feeling, but strived for a new story, the origin of the word “novel” after all. I only wondered why I ended up in the untethered space, the raw darkness before the spark of imagination drew from it to create something.
When I opened my eyes, I was on my back. I reached up, realizing I was still a baby. The ceiling of the library felt so far away, and I was powerless. I tried to say something, but a baby would not be able to do so for a while. Instead, I fussed until a familiar face stepped into my vision. It was Lila, middle-aged, but still beautiful.
“Hey, Jack,” she said. “I know you can’t talk yet, and I’m sure there is a reason that you are stuck in this form, so for now just listen.” I let my arms rest at my sides.
“I saw what you did to look for me,” Lila said. “I found the lift you made, and when I reached the top, it took me a while to understand what happened. By the time I got up to where you were, you were just a tiny embryo. I was terrified. I didn’t even think, just placed you inside me. Then I gave birth to you. I never thought I would be a mother. My life has been one constant mental block. I never intended to bring life to my world because I knew I could only create monsters thanks to my view of the world. My life wasn’t… I didn’t have a family.
“I’ve been passed around as a child, always causing trouble because of living outside the box in all areas. I had no restraints, so it was similar to floating in darkness, learning the worst things and exploiting the most hidden natures of those older than me. I said that in my world they teach everything to even children. That was a lie. The people who I encountered being a child alone in the world shaped the world for me, exploiting me, abusing me, turning my mind to new horrors that I wasn’t ready for. That’s what living outside the box gets you.
“I learned quickly that men want to use my body for sexual means even if there was no way to access the opening on my back. They were the few to know me before I started killing them. It hurt to be their plaything, but it awakened pleasure for me very early. I was mentally grown by the time I realized that what they were doing was wrong. By then, it was too late. Even after killing them, and continuing to kill more monsters like them, I felt ruined. The girls I saved from the hungry dark of depravity, didn’t want to keep living.
“Whoever I could, I saved. The others simply took their own lives, each a cut over my heart I couldn’t heal. You’d think something like that would turn my stomach enough to keep away from it, but the sensation from my childhood, though mixed with horrible memories, was pleasure. There had to be a better way of combating those individuals who would one day abuse young girls and boys, from their younger age.”
I felt as though I knew where she was going with this. Preemptive strikes made the world go round. All one party needed to do was have a grudge against another, even without evidence of wrongdoing or reason, to strike them down. That was the vigilante way of circumventing the laws put in place to defend those committing the most horrible crimes. The true popularity of some superhero stories was the fight for justice by instilling their own that superseded the common laws.
“My team of abused girls and boys devised a way to rid the world of that,” Lila continued. “We took positions of power, pretending to be just as bad as the people we were there to eradicate. You see, there isn’t a way to rid the world of this, because there are so many that hide well behind a facade of a regular life. So there was only one way to win against depravity. Kill them all.
“The group expanded, everyone spreading to every corner of power. I was no longer in control, but supported the few that led us to a better world. When it came time for me to sacrifice myself, I did so with a smile on my face, but not before my consciousness was recorded to use in mechanical contraptions for devotion of destroying everything. My body was gone in a blast of billions dying, eradicating at least thousands of those monsters hiding behind their families to abuse others.
“By the time the ‘fireworks’ stopped, our world was gone. I was still alive in the minds of machines. I was eternal. In time, I figured out a way to escape that world, the clump of stone and water, detonating it to clear out that corner of the universe, making sure that none of those monsters that created me survived out in the universe. You have to understand just how surprised I was when someone found me in the emptiness of space, drifting with a thousand minds no longer connected to each other after the blast.
“I was saved, but not really. They preached some sort of order in the worlds and universes, that I did horrible things to the inhabitants of my world. I explained to them what they did to me, destroying chances of a normal life. They felt conflicted. There was much debate over what they should do with me, seeing as I was just a consciousness from a world no longer in existence. They were afraid of me, and I knew exactly why. Much like the beings of my world, the mature parts of their kind abused the younger parts. They were scared it would come to light. So I decided to kill them all, too.”
At that point I had to wonder if this had anything to do with the Order of the Keir, and keeping a sort of multi-dimensional order in place. Perhaps Lila was so deranged she created such a thing, but I was equally deranged to think up the Order of the Keir. I wanted to believe that she was just making this story up, but the amount of detail defied the idea. Though she was not done talking, I was done listening. I was stuck in the body of a baby, with a demented psyche of a genocidal killer of her own species as the caretaker. Why did she care for me? I closed my eyes in the library and drifted away from there.
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