Eclipsed

I

April 21, 2009 - Original Draft Completion Date
Jan 30, 2014, 4:52:45 PM - Original Posting on DeviantArt

My thoughts sped by, felt but unfathomed, as I drifted numb to everything. Blissfully distracted from the endless distraction of thought, I allowed the noise to wash over me, and slipped into the depths of absolute silence. There was nothing to hold onto, and nothing bound to me. I knew nothing and understood; I found everything in myself. I was without boundaries, my naked soul undivided from the void and the incomprehensible things I encountered there. Sensations cascaded through my mind and ideas, frightening in their clarity, dissolved into fragments of understanding the instant they formed. The eye of the storm stirred with unclaimed dreams. Though I made no move to embrace them, I slipped blind into the one that swelled up and claimed me.

There was no sense of beginning as the illusion engulfed me, unfolding in a flicker of light, a shiver of cold, a flinch of pain—indistinguishable from a caress of pleasure—in an endless stream of disconnected sensations that slipped through me as fast as I fell away from them. Each impulse left a faint impression, a tiny ache of recognition out of which a sense of meaning was born. A hint of truth in the mystery, I discovered that they were all pieces of me, the ashes of my memories. Unfortunately, I had no idea how the glittering atoms of my mind fit together. All I knew was that I experienced a flicker of life each time a random connection was made.

I took a shuddering breath, and moaned, fighting against the impulse to wake.

The sensations coalesced into a dim world of unsettling objects that proved willfully unidentifiable. At a glance, the strange twilight would solidify into a place, but if I gazed too long at anything, it would begin to warp and waver, either changing into something else or dissolving before my eyes. Fragments of a dream that evaporated without a trace as I clung to unconsciousness, in denial of what I was already conscious of.

Once noted, I rejected that denial and forced myself to face the horror of what I had already sensed. I was hurt. I opened my eyes and confirmed the extent of the damage, a body burnt and maimed beyond recognition. I flinched away from traumatic memories of the cause. I saw nothing in what remained of me to indicate who or what I was. When I reached for it, the knowledge of who or what I had been was beyond recovery. I could not account for my survival, but finding my immediate surroundings equally devastated, I doubted I would encounter many other survivors. It looked like the end of the world. It was almost beyond description.

I had woken up in the remains of a concrete walled room, or what survived as the building it was part of had been blasted or torn from its foundations. The dark, bloody cavity of the sky loomed over a slaughtered world. The fields, foothills and distant mountains had been skinned, and shattered buildings had been chewed through to their splintered bones. It was painful to look at, and grim enough to compel me to see to my own wounds.

It took a while, but I found the supplies I needed. I cleaned and dressed my damaged flesh, promoting myself from zombie to mummy, and tried not to think about what it meant that I only felt the faintest echoes of pain. To say I was deep in shock could only be an understatement. I focused on practical thoughts and actions, because anything else would lead to screaming madness. Screw hope. Blind determination was the only thing that was keeping me going. Salvaging what little I could, I packed up and moved on.

I did not even contemplate staying where I woke up. The first thing I wanted to do was leave this devastation behind. I guessed that my best chance of survival would lie beyond the badlands. Given the state I woke up in, I was not surprised to find that my grip on reality was unreliable. As I pushed through the wreckage, I slipped in and out of consciousness, escorted by hallucinations. The most unsettling were the ones in which my body warped and wavered in its existence. At times, I would reach out, and even though I could feel my hands, I could not see them. Even when I could see them, they did not always remain mine. Without warning, it was as if parts of me became fused into the scenery and I would be forced to rip myself free of an arm or a leg to keep moving forward.

It gradually dawned on me that I could not distinguish between waking and dreaming. It was like a nightmare—the kind where I kept waking up inside a dream. I seemed to be doing the opposite, though, falling asleep and dreaming I was still stumbling forward in search of supplies, shelter and salvation. Day was an overcast twilight and night was unyieldingly dark. Because of my lack of coherence, time was impossible to mark. I always thought I was awake, and the only time I could tell I was dreaming was when things got impossibly surreal.

After a while, I began to wonder if this was what death was. It seemed much more like hell. Having no memory of life, or what I must have done to deserve this, only punctuated the feeling of damnation. I did not expect it would take long to descend into madness once I started to have thoughts like that. All I could do, however, was push forward, alive or dead, awake or dreaming.

I only knew peace when oblivion engulfed me. In its familiar silence, I understood, for lack of a better word, what it meant to be me. Rather, that understanding was me. In spite of whatever had happened to me, I still existed. It was enough to bring me back from the edge. In lieu of anything else, that glimmering truth sustained me, gave me focus. Even in the face of my nightmares.

In the grip of one, I found hope.

At the time I was stumbling through darkness, dreaming or awake, I could not know. I pushed on in mindless determination. I fought with despair and frustration, and above all I felt desperately alone. I tried not to think about it, but my sense of isolation had caused me to start seeing or sensing ghosts. Most were mere figments of imagination, just shadows or silhouettes of stone. Some of them were more of a presence, usually distant and remote. Others evaporated into nothing when I would approach. I had trained myself to ignore them by the time the first one spoke. I had sensed this one approaching, and dismissed it long before it came close. It stopped and seemed to regard me, when our paths finally crossed.

“Where are you going?” The words were soundless, intruding upon my thoughts.

Exhaustion muffled my shock. I slowly turned to confront the presence and had a hard time trying to define what I was sensing. It did not have a body, but it felt like a person was there. I cocked my head to ponder that and muttered the first thing that came into my head.

“You’re not like the other ghosts,” I rasped, barely making a sound.

“Nor are you, if you’ve seen them,” the ghost responded.

I stood for a moment without breathing. I swallowed, and asked fearfully, “Me? Are you trying to tell me I am dead?”

“I would not say that. Oh, the lives we once lived are over, but you and I, we’re not quite dead,” it clarified, its presence closing in around me. The contact was oddly comforting and unnerving. The way it projected words into my mind made me feel as if it could peer into my head. “It’s a good thing I found you. If you wander among the dead long enough, it will drive you mad.”

“What kind of ghost isn’t dead?” I demanded, thinking that this ghost was doing a good enough job of tipping me over the edge.

“Well, any soul that has not actually died,” the phantom declared.

I did not find that entirely reassuring. “I don’t understand. How does that apply to me?” I demanded.

“It means, you have been stripped from your body and your mind is trapped in a dream.”

“You have got to be kidding!” I cried out, half laughing. In spite of that, I was frightened. It was as good an explanation for what was happening as anything I’d want to believe.

“It’s better for you if you face it,” I was warned. “Tell me, what’s the last thing you remember?”

I hugged myself and turned away. “You mean, before I found myself here?”

“Yes. Or the last normal thing.”

“There’s nothing, unless any of this,” I indicated the world and the state I was in, “is ’normal’.” My tone made it clear that it was not, as far as I was concerned. “I’m sorry, I just don’t remember,” I confessed, but somehow, it did not taste like the truth. There was a great deal I could remember, as long as it did not concern me. Given that kind of amnesia, and the fact that I was trapped in a dream, I was probably stuck in a coma. “I don’t really know what’s happened to me.”

“It looks like you got torn to pieces fighting to get free.” The observation was deeply upsetting. The words set my horror free. I tightened with apprehension, as I turned inward, unwilling, and was forced to see. The presence behind the words was the only thing supporting me, as I confronted the memory I had not been able to face. It was a memory of the very first time I was touched by another mind. I relived the moment it had seized hold of me and then thrust itself inside. It burned its way into every thought and feeling I possessed and then turned me inside out. Whatever else had happened, I now knew that my mind had been raped.

I hovered on the brink of remembering more, until I understood that I could not bear to. Not if I wanted to stay sane. I struggled to make sense of it, and on some deep level I suppose I did. It was not so much that I could not remember anything, but that my most important memories no longer belonged to me. They had been tainted by violation. The simple act of touching them filled me with a violent urge to tear myself free.

“What was I fighting?” I wondered, careful not to speak the thought aloud.

“You were fighting a demon,” the stranger informed me soberly and with sympathy, confirming that it was aware of my thoughts.

I did not want to believe any of it, but denial would lead me nowhere. My actions, and especially my reaction—tearing myself free of what my mind refused to remember—argued that I had endured something real, as well as unspeakable. It fit with my experience, and once I had accepted it, the implications were clear. I realized the horror in silence, “I will never wake up, again. Or, even if I could, I would not be me anymore. It’s either dream or be undone.”

“No. And, yes. I’m sorry,” the stranger confirmed, and comforted, stepping unexpectedly into focus, her body condensing from the mists of predawn twilight, and adding with an encouraging smile, “but you don’t have to dream alone.” As she moved, the air moved ahead of her carrying the strong scent of rain, wet rock and pine needles. These scents filled me and the landscape changed dramatically. The twilight turned into a stormy sky over a grassy meadow in the middle of a damp forest. The trees danced and twisted in the grip of a vengeful, howling wind. I stumbled back away from the woman and noticed that she stood poised on the edge of a cliff facing me. I hovered formless and insubstantial in the air above her, on the wrong side of the precipice.

“What is this?” I babbled in shock, gripped by vertigo, but discovering I had no body, I was unable to fall.

“This is the alternative to oblivion and death,” she explained, spreading her arms in a sweeping gesture that included a vast panorama of world and sky. When she turned back, she was smiling, and said, “This is what I am dreaming, and I am not the only one.”

I had a hard time tearing my attention away from the vibrant scene and focusing on what she was saying. “Not the only one?” I repeated, encouraging her to explain.

Instead of the response I expected, she asked me, “Do you know why demons try to steal souls?” When it took me too long to process the question, she expanded on it, “More importantly, did you ever wonder what happens to those poor souls? Well, I found out when a demon devoured mine. It took everything from me; my thoughts, my memories, my entire mind was devoured and digested as it swallowed my soul and took over my body. Only an echo of me survived, trapped in the darkest depths of the demon’s mind.”

I let her words play through my mind for a while, and she held silent while I thought. Clearly, I was supposed to understand that she was a victim, like me, but I was still struggling to fit demonic possession in as part of reality. It was not just that I wanted to deny it, but based on what I could remember, it did not seem to be something I had ever deemed possible. “I honestly can’t say I ever thought about it,” I confessed, focusing on the initial question. “Why do demons try to steal souls?”

“If you’ve had any religious studies, you may have learned that demons do not have souls of their own. The same is true of angels. The thing you might not know, however, is that they depend on souls to exist. They are dependent on the soul of their creator, or the soul of a host. A demon is really just an angel that has taken possession of the soul of its host,” she explained.

“You mean fallen angels,” I prompted, discovering that much in my memory of theological trivia. What she was telling me was not that far from what I had picked up in the course of my life. From what I could remember, even religious people tended not to take the idea of demons too literally. “That does not seem to fully answer your questions,” I noticed aloud. “If one soul will sustain it, why would a demon need more?”

She smiled. “That is an excellent question! It turns out that demons are after more than simple independence. Most of them crave autonomy. They want to have souls of their own.”

“I’m not sure I see the distinction,” I protested.

“They don’t always see it themselves. You see, it’s sort of an instinct. I suppose you could say, the demon wants a soul that fits. The problem is, the soul is the source of emotion, and souls that are dominated are full of anger and hatred and resentment at their enslavement and those emotions plague the demon and drive it,” she revealed.

I paused to weigh what she had told me, surprised by how much sense it made. It offered an explanation for the characteristics demons were supposed to have. It explained how, by simply falling, angels became so twisted inside. As it occurred to me, suddenly, the demon that had possessed me would act on my violent rejection in the world I was from. “Is there any way to stop it, or undo it? Or at least keep what I feel about it from driving it to cause harm?”

She gave me an odd look. “It’s been a long time since anyone even bothered to ask,” she said after a moment, with something like respect. “And it usually takes people much longer to figure that side of it out.”

I did not know what to say, so I said nothing.

“As it happens, that’s what I am doing. By giving souls an escape, I help distract them,” she confided. “It’s not really a way to stop or undo what has happened. You lost a lot to the demon, but the violence seems pretty much done with. It should be pretty calm, assuming you heal from the damage it’s done to you. Assume that it wanted to be you, and that it will be content with your life.”

That was disturbing and reassuring at the same time. Besides, it was not like I was in a position to do anything else about it. I tried to focus on the positive. I would not miss a life I had forgotten. Also, having my soul stripped out of my body by a demon and trapped with other souls in its mind, went a long way toward proving things my old reality could not sustain. Spirits and souls really existed, so dying was much less frightening. Finally, I had been offered salvation, a refuge from certain insanity. I sighed and asked her, “So, how does one ‘share’ a dream?”

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