Deafening silence.
The kind of silence that numbs the mind.
Swelling like a dissonant orchestra of nothingness.
It hurts...
please...
Make it stop...
As if on cue, the silence was broken by a single whisper. It sounded like a strange melody. He didn't understand; the words were slurred and meaningless, as if spoken in a language long forgotten.
The voice's tone was grand, like a primordial force. As he tried to grasp the voice's sound and make sense of the gibberish in his mind, another voice joined the first. As they overlapped, it was impossible to discern them from one another.
He tried looking around, trying to locate the source of the voices. But all he saw was consuming darkness, an empty void devoid of any matter.
Just as he thought he had gone blind, he noticed he couldn't feel anything. All that he felt was absence. The knowledge that something should be there but now wasn't. More voices joined the choir, bodiless, resonating from within him. Resonating from within the void.
What was he now anyways? His thoughts took too long to form, longer than he was used to. He did not understand, or at least not yet.
Again he tried to move, this time not his eyes but his body. The command slowly ran through his mind, rushing along his nerves, just to end in nothingness.
The voices got louder; now they started hurting, boring into his mind like a corkscrew. Growing in a devastating crescendo, they slowly spoke in unison, a sentence he could not understand.
The sentence burned a flickering picture into his mind. The picture resembled two sets of the same three symbols, side by side.
The first was a pillar, topped by a beam, which in turn was topped by a loop.
The second symbol was a triangular spike just as tall as the cross with the loop.
The third sigil was a sitting bird.
Trying to figure out the meaning of the sequence, he noticed the whispers were gone, replaced by a howling wind. Panic surged through his mind, his nerves firing wildly into the vast unknown before him.
Like flailing tendrils, they angrily shot and snapped, crackling with energy. Slowly he felt something pushing him from all sides, compressing him like crumbling a paper.
As his thoughts sped up again, he felt unimaginable relief filling his mind. More pictures started flickering all around him, snippets of a life he did not live.
A green riverbank, contrasting desolate desert lands.
A bird with a long beak, bleeding as an arrow was stuck in its chest.
A geometrical construct rising above a lake drowning in moonshine.
Like insects, these pictures surrounded him, twisting and turning into more and more abstract shapes. As the pictures swarmed around him, faster and faster, he could feel a sense of lifting, as if taking off from the ground.
Then a field of wheat, stretching beyond the horizon, with no end in sight. He flew above it, free as a bird, the wind howling in his ears.
Over time the stalks of wheat turned into flowers, straight as a candle, with purple petals and buds all over their stalks. He soared through the sky above this sea of purple, flying towards an unknown goal.
Suddenly the ground beneath the flowers turned to sand, and it did not take long until he reached a sandy shoreline extending into a tranquil ocean, its waves reflecting the orange light of an evening sun.
He kept flying, now feeling a fresh breeze carrying the warm scent of musk and salt. Above the ocean, he soared up into the clouds that had formed like a castle, separating the land from the lofty skies above the water from the empty ones on land. He felt free and light.
Arriving above the airy landmasses, he felt the warm shine of the sun on his vision. Enjoying the sight, he continued forward, flying higher to feel the warmth and comfort of the celestial body. The higher he flew, the hotter the rays got, slowly starting to burn in his eyes.
Curiously, all feelings of pain he had ever felt were gone, replaced by serene indifference.
The sun pulled him in; the flames he sensed, forming on his mind, embraced him like the arms of a mother, trying to make him forget. The flames, though, engulfed him, slowing him down, making him lose the lift he felt before, making him feel as if the sky had let him loose.
And as fast as he had ascended into the skies, he now plummeted back down to the ocean, falling through the clouds he had admired before, away from the sun that had promised to be the end of him.
Like a comet, sparkling and shining, he crashed into the surface of the waves.
The waves extinguished the sparks and the waving fire as he sank deeper into the waters. The deeper he got, the thicker the liquid felt, almost as if it were enclosing him, like pressing him into shape.
And as darkness engulfed him once again, he felt something return.
He felt weight.
He felt something taking shape around him, like the frame of a picture, closing in. As he passed through the viscous liquid, the feeling did not go away, restraining his form to hold him together.
A structure was molded around his form, encasing him like a scaffolding. Just then an impulse surged through his mind, searching his thoughts, recollecting something within. Then his mind converged again, becoming clear and sorted, his form hardening.
Suddenly he felt something growing inside, filling gaps and reinforcing him all around as his mind resonated with the feeling. He felt the need to see again, to feel again, to be whole.
With that thought his vision extended beyond his mind. Lying in a field of tall grass, he gazed upon a sky filled with stars.
But his vision was ghostly, as all he could see were the translucent outlines of his surroundings, donned in monotone colors. Sitting up with movement that felt mechanical and artificial, he positioned himself so he could look down on his hands.
He was stunned at what he saw. His hands looked like gauntlets, made of thin metallic sheets. As he bent his fingers, they moved as if attached to the strings of a puppeteer.
By slowly standing up entirely, he discerned that the entirety of his body looked the same.
Another impulse surged throughout his body; this time he felt a deep resonance within his form.
Again the feeling of growing started; this time though it felt warm and wet.
Gazing back at his hands, he could, with great horror, see flesh and bloody veins growing on the metallic sheets.
As he suddenly regained the feeling in his entire body, he could feel the forming muscles tug at the metallic hull.
As his muscles formed, skin started spanning above his newly grown flesh at a steady pace, and with it the feeling of wetness vanished. Then the color of his vision returned, engulfing the sky in a deep magenta.
Within it the stars were held together by a web of light spanning the entire sky, constellations giving it a peaceful beauty he had never conceived before. And as all his senses returned, chasing away all numbness, he broke out in tears.
So he just stood there, quietly sobbing into the calm night sky. Quietly wishing for this moment to stay, to let him enjoy this scene all on his own.
He was whole again; all of him finally was back in place.
After some time he collected himself to regain his composure. Only then did he notice something on the ground; its familiar metallic shine reminded him of something.
He picked up the object. It felt heavy in his hands, its wooden handle giving off warmth to his regrown hands.
And with the warmth, the memories surged back into his mind.