Prologue is here: topic52250.html
- Code
Chapter 1 – Sayr
“Meetings & Memories pt. I”
“Your eyes are so clouded
I cannot see what lies beyond.”
-“Why?” by Ayaka
The sands had died down but still the wind blew hard against my face. But then again that was normal. So I should say things came ‘back to normal’…but things stopped [i]being[/i] normal a long time ago. A very long time ago.
Green was already bad enough, sandstorm plus eternal sorrow from a dead and desolate village. Now I was making my way towards Reese. I could already feel the sad little tingle in my heart that warned me of the pain that was to come.
The journey between cities was always troublesome and useless. I still wonder to this day why I do it. There’s no real reason to actually continue. Sometimes I feel I should just sit down and wait for something to just hit me and actually kill me for once. Maybe I’d have to wait aeons for it but I’d wait. Sitting around doing nothing, letting life pass me by. Ridding myself of all the sorrows that come with the cities I move about in. The idea was certainly tempting.
But then if I sit about I’d go mad. Then again if I take on anymore sorrow on me, I’d still go mad. So it’s still a no win situation. And of course there’s the idea of penance. All Humes believe that we are here as punishment for what happened in our lives before the Great Change. Makes me wonder about what happened in their lives making them reach this conclusion. Well none of it matters anymore. Our past is something trivial. It was trivial before it is trivial now. There is only one thing to do. Accept the penance and fulfill it. Maybe one day, if there is a god above, he will pity us and end our meaningless existence. But that day doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen anytime soon. So I accept my penance. And that is to shoulder all the sorrow of the world. To move from place to place and collect all sorrows. Maybe someday it will save me. But for now, I walk a painful and a lonely path.
The wind was still blowing quite hard. But still, my vision was clear. Reese lay up ahead. It was one of the few cities which actually had any remnants from before the Great Change. And by remnants I mean weathered buildings with half or more of them entirely broken down. Nothing ever stirring in them except the random cockroach.
Surprisingly, cockroaches were the only other organisms other than Humes to survive the Great Change. However, the Great Change had no side effect on them. They just continued to live normally, exhibiting nothing supernatural. Sometimes I wished I was a cockroach. As disgusting as it was, I would be just one accident away from Death. And although Death loomed over plenty of places these days, he never loomed over us Humes. As much as we coveted him, he would never look our way. And he probably never will.
Other than the cockroaches there was Silence and Desolation. And of course the Sorrows. But only I could feel them. Nobody else was graced with such a wonderful ability. In fact, the moment Reese came into vision, it kicked in. Usually when it does kick in, my vision often gets flooded because the emotions are so intense and so are translated into visible things. And this was no exception.
[i]
A business man was late. He looked at his watch. He never looked up.
Children were on their way to school. They laughed and played and talked on their way. They were happy. Unaware. They never got to school.
Parents saw their children off. They felt proud to have such children, such bright children. But it was tinged with regret. They knew it would all end soon. And soon it was.
Old people slept and never woke up.
The poor people who were hungry, died.
The sorrow. Sorrow.
Pain.
Sadness.
Grief.
Pain.
People dying.
Children screaming.
Death looming.
Silence gripping.
Silence.
Death.
Pain.
[/i]
As usual, the pain was intrinsic. And obviously, the most lingering. Wouldn’t be fun if it didn’t last for an eternity, now would it?
So on I walked, through the big city shouldering its pains and sorrows. As usual, they weighed me down as if I had the weight of the world on my back. In a certain sense perhaps that’s what I did have: The weight of a dead world. And no one would ever care that I had to shoulder it all on my own 16 year old back. Well technically I’m 20 years old, but my body stopped growing ever since the Great Change. So a 16-year old back it remained.
Suddenly, all the visions I had were encompassed by a single one. Instead of the usual maelstrom of images, there was just one, much more intense and clear than ever.
[i]
A girl. Silence. Scuttling in the distance. Her eyes were strange, one was blue the other was a deep black. They looked up from her little corner and tried to locate the scuttling. It was a cockroach. She pounced. Soon enough the cockroach was wriggling in the girl’s bony hands trying to break free. The girl raised her hands to her mouth.
“Mama!” The girl remembered.
She was no longer skeletal and with mismatched eyes. Her eyes were a deep, warm brown and her hair was long and black, sleek and glistening. Her teeth shone as she laughed. The room she was in seemed very well lived in. Toys lay scattered on the floor mixed with magazines and crayons.
“Mama!” She shouted again.
A woman, tall, thin and somewhat reminiscent of the girl, came into the room, holding a strange object in her hands. It had six objects jutting out of its creamy surface with their tips alit and the flames flickering with the woman's movements.
“Happy Birthday, my little piglet!” The woman exclaimed, making a face at the child’s reaction to her little tag.
“I am not a pig.” The child stated trying hard to sound resolute, but there was still a hint of pleading in her voice.
“Of course you aren't. Mummy was just joking. You know mummy will love you forever, my little tulip.”
Pain.
“I love you too mummy!”
Sorrow.
The scene shifted.
“Mama!” She remembered.
No response.
“Mama!” She cried. Tears began to well up.
Still no response.
The house was broken down. Decaying. [/i]
The vision was too much to handle. Tears began to well up in my eyes. I couldn’t take it anymore.
As sudden as the vision had come, I was locked away from my own body. All the sorrow and pain from the visions were gone too. But I had no control over my actions. Somehow I knew it was a natural reaction. This knowledge of how my ability worked came somewhat naturally. So I knew that there was no threat. I also knew that there was no helping it. What I did was stand by and check what my body was doing.
The Empathic Being, as I had come to call it, was looking for something. I inferred that it was trying to search for whatever it was that was sending off such strong empathic feeds. So while it searched and I was locked inside myself, I just decided to reflect. It was really what I would have done anyway, even if I wasn’t cooped up in my own head.
I reflected on my penance. I thought about the parts of my past that I remembered; what I had done to deserve this. Perhaps if I had been less of an introvert in my time, I would tell myself, I might have been saved. But deep down, I knew the real reason. If only I hadn’t wanted to die so badly, then I would definitely have been saved. But it was what I did. And because of it I was punished. Condemned to walk and suffer. For the first few months after the Great Change, we tried to group ourselves into a community and rebuild our technologies but every time we tried the Earth would retake what we build, either through the storms and the weather or through the frequent earthquakes. We could not live under roofs, for they would fall on our very heads – and besides, the time it would take us to re-grow all our mangled body parts wouldn’t even make it inch closer to it being worth it. In the end we all gave up and just waited. Most travelled in groups or with friends but I was never a people person. I was on my own just like I always was. Although company would be welcome; and I envy people who possess it, I start to think it’s just a burden. The only one who would walk by my side was Sorrow. And nothing would ever change that
Suddenly, I felt the wind blow against my face once more. The Empathic Being had found what it had been looking for. I now found myself in front of a house that gave off such strong empathic feeds that it threatened to make me pass out. I could have decided to ignore it and just make my way out of the place. I could have just turned my back and ran towards the City Gates. But I was curious. I had no idea why this place was so emotionally charged with regret, sadness and sorrow. It triggered what I thought was long dead. So casting one look at the crumbling and decaying façade of what used to be a suburban home, I went inside through a hole in the wall where the ceiling looked somewhat safe. I simply hate to have the ceiling fall down suddenly and get myself trapped along with such empathic feeds. But knowing my luck it would probably happen anyway.
So while questioning my judgment once more on my entering, I heard scuttling from somewhere near my feet. Cockroaches hurried away from where I was standing, afraid of my sudden intrusion. I had quite a loathing for cockroaches mostly because whatever you try to do to them they could just die at any moment. They had what I wanted more than anything in the world. The opportunity to die at any moment. So I shied away from them as much as I could. In fact, if my curiosity had not been so stifled I would have probably run in the opposite direction as far from this house as can be. But still, the source of the emotions was close now. I could feel my skin vibrating.
The interior of the house was as desolate as the rest of the world. What used to be the living room, from what I could see in the Empathic Connection this place created, was half filled with sand and all its furniture was scalded, burnt and worn out. Sand was in piles and scattered all over the room. Empty frames dangled from the walls, threatening to crash and bring the rest of the house down with it. None of that was out of place. What was odd, however, was the air. A stench lingered in the air that didn’t smell like the usual pungent smell of death and ash. It was a somewhat repulsive mixture of cockroach and something which he couldn’t recognize. However, it triggered a long forgotten memory. I couldn’t believe that I still had those things in me. It crippled me as I remembered:
[i]A wide, frigid smile. A cold, hearty laugh.
“Look Garth, it happened again!” The distant woman yelled, showing her yellow teeth. Her breath smelt like poison.
“What a bugger!” A man called Garth cackled. “A pure retard.” His breath was poison too.
“I’m not cleaning that! Can’t go to work with that stink on me! He’ll clean it himself!”
“Well I wouldn’t bet on it being clean anytime soon then!”
“Jesus Christ, what a smell!”
Tears were welling in my eyes. Soon enough they joined the other liquid that dampened my bed.
If only they could see the pieces of my heart that burst all around me, with each word. Maybe if they could, they would stop. [/i]
It took me quite a while to recover from the shock. The memory was so distant, so far away, yet so intense and so real. Tears were already jerking down my cheeks. I didn’t even know we were capable of tears in our state of being. As a wave of weakness coursed through me, I reached for something to hold on to. My hands found nothing. I crashed straight into the floor, tasting the coarse sands and feeling the decayed floor and debris press into me. The jolt of pain released me from my suffering and I looked up, trying to find footing so that I could stand up again. What I saw looking back at me, blasphemous eyes, hair long and matted with dirt, skeletal, bare and pale, caught me by surprise so much more that I instantly sent that memory back to the depths of my mind.
It can’t be. Those were the only words I could dare to utter or think. Disbelief shook me. Was I finally delusional? Had I finally given in to the madness of the New World and become a fool? It approached me, its little feet making small thudding sounds on the floor. I observed closely, and the more I observed, the less I could believe it was madness. But I still could not believe it was real. Everything about it was feral, even the thing’s eyes. One was deep blue and the other was brown. It reeked of strangeness. Every hair on my body stood on its ends. It was a feeling I hadn’t felt in a very long time. A very long time.
Then, it all happened in an instant. The girl rushed towards me and stretched out her hand. Impact.
Her skin scorched mine and caused me to yell out in pain. Memories flooded my head so much that I couldn’t handle it. Both the place where she touched and my brain burned for what seemed like an eternity. Then it all went black.
