A Self-Study Within A Broken Mind

Two days later, I came back feeling bad about how I left. I had moments like these with Finn and Rebecca, but they were not… real? There was no proof that Lila was real either, but could I really invent a whole society with different bodies that looked human enough. Rebecca and Finn were both humans, at least at the start. I was not sure what Lila was. The library was empty. I also looked through the garden, and scanned the outside with creationism, bright lights bursting in all directions of the dark. No matter how much light went into the endless, the only parts that illuminated were the invisible vines that allowed my creationism. I imagined that the vines were veins instead and let the light fill them to the brim. As the brightly glowing gas expanded further and further in that dark, I created an endless lift to push me outside the cluster so I could see how far it reached. The further the panel of metal took me, the more contrast I saw of vines and darkness, until the gas reached ...

“Hey,” I said, appearing weeks later past the fumbling of the device update and a mishap of a keyboard messing up quotations. The first part took an hour, while the keyboard took just ten minutes. I had been avoiding coming back, but did not prepare an excuse for being away. Lila sat in the corner of the room, eyes closed. For a moment, I thought she was sleeping, but when I came up to her, she leapt into the air and pushed off my back as I turned in recoil to land gracefully on the table of the room. “You’re late,” she said. “I’ve been doing some mental exercises. Without new stories to entertain me, the sentence feels like a real downer.” “Isn’t it supposed to feel like that?” I asked. “And that’s the first time you used the word 'sentence' to describe it. Anything you want to fess up to?” I studied her child form as it aged to a woman. She bunched up her shirt to reveal the triangle opening positioned perfectly over her lower back where the branched spine opened up. Her type...

When I awoke, I was nearly covered up by snow. It resisted soaking into my clothes because of the cold, and my skin felt like stone. I did not know why I was sleeping outside, but I could not recall much of where I had been before going to sleep. I knew but two things, my name, and the name of my trusted sword. ”My beloved, lend me your strength,” I spoke, trying to brace the cold threatening my life. I pushed my being into my arms, feeling the heart pounding in desperation. When it got to my hands, the energy of my body shared itself with the steel, casting alight in the namesake. “Nastu no Atsusa.” The outpost of heat from the blade huddled my body around it, keeping a stance of my arms tightened to channel energy into it that warmed beside me. It felt less to me like the summer heat the sword was named after, and more like a hot iron bar that could burn me if I was not careful. It melted some snow around me, and I could stand, still sinking into the packed snow below. The first thin...