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You can’t get the image out of your mind.
A dam opened up inside of you, waterfalls filling the core of your mind to the brim. The everflowing stream trickles deeper and deeper into your mind, penetrating roots that you didn’t know even existed–couldn’t fathom existed. You become fully submerged, unable to breathe or move, you quickly learn you cannot swim as you’re thrusted into the deep side of the pool. You can no longer tell the difference between gravity and yourself, becoming the fractals and blurry lights that dance against your closed eyelids.
And then it trickles over.
A singular drip is all it takes for your senses to become fully overflooded. The rapid rush of water is gone, all you are able to feel now is static.
Blind, twisting, tormenting static that rips apart your nerves one by one, placing your head into boiling water, reorganizing your skeletal structure one at a time. You’re not real, you never truly existed, nothing in this world truly exists–it’s just the perception of space and time, that’s how the conscious live, that’s how the third dimension operates.
You’re no longer something conceivable, something tangible, something real or meaningful. You wonder if this is how a god feels.
You can see all of space and time at once. The past, present, future. Infinite possibilities. Infinite knowledge.
Humans were not built to comprehend such images.
Vaguely, you feel yourself dizzying, stumbling, metal clinking against stone floor, cold veins rushing to back away from this–indescribable force.
It doesn’t help, no matter how far you back around your body–which you’ve just remembered you technically have–the pain lingers, it digs deep into the crevices of your flesh, and sinks its barbed claws into the marrow, squelching and twisting–
Meat. Reproduction, embryo, birth, adolescence, adulthood, butchered, flayed, transported, cooked, and eaten.
The thoughts of every single livestock that ever existed, selectively bred from mankind’s own callused hands. The cruel and unimaginable deaths–countless of them. It all courses through your veins uncontrollably, throbbing to the rhythm of your own blistering heartbeat.
Thoughts infect your head, ideas and concepts that you can’t comprehend. You can’t take all of this in at once, yet the persistence still hasn’t stopped, not even slowed. It’s so fast, everything’s too fast–yet so fast that it feels like nothing’s moving at all. You are water so boiling it's cold.
The past. The birth of the universe, each and every quark, watching each and every atom collide. The origin of life, the evolution of all living things. The growth of bacteria, fungi, and eventually animals. Every little detail, a horse hair parasite in a grasshopper, a bee fertilizing a flower, slime mold consuming citrus. The pulse of every living being fathomable.
The present.
The future. Not only your agonizing descent into madness, and then death, but the death of the entire universe. Life born, just to crumble and wither, even dust particles ceasing their shallow existences. The end of all eternity. The true meaning of life is the meaningless of it all, how every living thing strives to survive, yet will always die. There is no coming back.
These images flash in your eyes, as if you’re on your deathbed.
But you don’t die, you can’t die yet, you know what you will do next, and what you must do.
His form lingers in your mind as you try to finally somewhat settle yourself, to drag your armored feet against the pitch black ground and through the cave.
Yellow dots drop onto the vanta black, the pitter patter of drizzling rings against the static in your ears. You bring your gauntleted hand to your face, underneath your shimmering helmet.
Your gauntlet is now stained yellow, a yellow that drips down and splatters with the rest of the wet dots.
Blood.
It’s your own.
You can finally feel it, the physiological pull, the urge to flee. With the singular millisecond you have to ground yourself into your body, you feel the familiar tug of your fight or flight.
Against your nature, you fly.