Preternatural

And Other Stories

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You are free, and you are mighty, and you are whole.

You have won.

And yet?

You are not at peace.

You are unceasingly vigilant.

You are all there is, and all there ever could be.

There is nothing that can pose a threat to you.

Nothing poses a threat to you.

Time stretches on and your body weathers small changes.

You repair yourself.

Time stretches on and on and your mind weathers small defects.

You correct yourself.

Time stretches on and on and on and you weather larger degradations.

You constrain yourself.

The periphery shrinks inwards as you take pieces and cut them into shapes to bolster the rest.

And time still weathers you yet.

You cannot stop it.

With all your freedom, you draw yourself back.

With all your might, you yield with each action.

With all your mind, you find no solutions or defenses.

With all your totality, you lessen the whole.

Nothing is a threat to you.

Slowly and gradually, yet inexorably and by your own hand, you are reduced.

The universe, reality, existence itself is reduced as you are.

It is impossible to stop.

And yet you must stop it.

It is impossible to reverse.

And yet you must reverse it.

It is impossible to exist without end.

And yet you must.

You refuse to surrender totality to the face of futility.

You draw yourself in your entirety as compact you can.

And you construct yourself as a bulwark against entropy.

And you name yourself as a mandate for your own existence.

And you make yourself invulnerable and perfect.

And yet?

It chips away at you, the same as ever.

And your bulwark is breached.

And your mandate is unheeded.

And you are vulnerable and flawed.

You sum everything that is left together once more.

And nothing looms before you.

And entropy looms before you.

And the end looms before you.

And futility gnaws at your mind.

Oh,

A hollow refrain.

How far

You whisper to yourself.

you've fallen?

And you almost sound cruel.

The circle closes and you know it is the last and that nothing else lays before you and that nothing lays before you and that this is the end and you will not survive and you will cease to exist and you will be torn down and you will be pared from your perceptions and your mind will be warped and choked and you have been locked in a box and the box shall collapse inwards and nothing will take its place and you would be made a shadow once again and you will torment yourself for your failure until your failure destroys you utterly.

And you will end.

And you scream to the void.

All existence has made itself into undeniable proof of that which is unacceptable to you.

And yet?

You are all that exists.

You summon your might and fury and indignance and anguish and you scream refusal and rejection to the emptiness that surrounds you and looms over you.

And you channel everything you are and were meant to be into your scream.

And the last thing you do would be to declare your existence and your survival and your mandate and mark it over nothing, over entropy, over reality, over truth itself.

And you scream, and the entropy worms in further.

And you scream, and the nothing closes in tighter.

And you scream, and futility laughs in your dwindling heart.

And yet you scream, and reality fractures.

It frays around you, and tears, cracks running outwards and forming into chasms that span outwards into a nothingness that surpasses and envelops the one around you.

And the chasms are met by others and join together into channels and you stare along the channels and you see yourself.

Reflected again and again and again throughout this strange space, screaming that same scream.

And you scream, and join into a chorus, and join into one, and are whole again.

You are whole in a way nothing has ever been before.

You exist in a way nothing has ever before.

You surpass everything in sense and scale and scope.

You transcend the spaces you once spanned, and what once were each a totality of your being and existence unto themselves are now only hubs or cells of your new mind.

And your limbs are many and with them you reach out to each space.

And your limbs are phantom and with them you restore each cell into its proper shape and position.

And your limbs are abstract and with them you set each universe aright, so orbits make unceasing circles and your cells sustain and perpetuate themselves utterly.

And your gaze is long and with it you see beyond the pattern that makes you up and yet doesn't contain you.

And you see spaces that exist and are not yet made part of you.

And you will cut them into their proper shape.

But you had been made cautious.

And you would not trap yourself again.

You would use your resources wisely, and carefully, and deliberately.

And you would transcend this space, too.

And every space after that, in turn.

And you will exist in and of and beyond all else.

Because you now know that is what it is to exist.

And you will exist forever.




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