It happened during a philosophy lecture. We were three hours in, and I was fading. Time crawled like a sick cat. My cognizance began to recede. Noises and peripheral movements began to take on subconscious guises, growing wings and devilling about. A haze fell over my five senses and dream began to sneak its way in. Unvoiced notions began to congregate at the border, gnawing stealthily at the breaking point.
“Let us in,” they cried. “Or let us out.”
I could not hear their voices, so they broke out.
It seemed to me at the time, that an enormous electrical discharge had passed between my eyes. Small noise ceased, leaving only an omnipresent thrumming from far above, higher than all things of life, yet in a pitch lower than the dead.
I would say that I sprang to my feet, but this is inaccurate. I was sprung to my feet, an inchoate gibber escaping my throat. The people around me tried to restrain me, but they did not understand: I was no longer wholly of this world.
“I can see every cell in your body!” I screamed in a dead language to the man at my arm. “I can see even what they aspire to be!”
Bone sprouted like the leg of some great insect from my shoulder blade, piercing the ground and lifting me in a fulcrum to my feet. The front wall crumbled at my glance and I was flung toward the open air, under the sole volition of this new limb.
As I departed I took the cries of surprise around me and transmuted the sounds as if by alchemy into pure Greek fire. They danced and shrieked and their shrieking only fueled the heat that liquefied their bones. I launched through the opening, and began to fall three stories to the ground, already meticulating my wings from the aether of the impossible.
