Book Three: The Broken Bridge
Chapter Thirteen: Sand and Water
Prelude: Iron Box
CORRUPTION
Diamond's garden was filled with bright flowers and delightful shrubbery, soft leaves and smooth branches, not a single thorn upon the stems. Even the roses were docile. Though the astral sun above was perpetually eclipsed, there wasn't a single dark spot in her garden. The shadows were gentle, and bioluminescent mushrooms illuminated the areas where the sun didn't touch. The expansive lawn was occupied with astral bunnies, chipmunks, and prairie dogs who gallivanted about, frolicking without a care, nibbling on the honeysuckle and clovers that were plentiful in the bountiful prairies and fields.
I sang to myself as I skipped gayly along the cobblestone path. I pirouetted and giggled, summersaulted and tittered, then recommenced my carefree promenade, bouncing from heel to toe, vaulting into the air and grinning broadly at the sky. Like a child imitating her mother, I had taken on Diamond's mannerisms. As far as I was concerned, she was my mother.
I ceased my ecstatic promenade when I reached Diamond's box. It was a new feature to her garden, a rusted grey monolith sitting in the center of her lush realm. The edges were jagged and brutal, the frame was reinforced, and the door was wrapped with heavy-gauge chains secured by an intricate lock. Though it appeared as iron and chain, it was made of love. As Julia lay dying upon the ground, Diamond made a terrible choice. She knew well the fate she was damning the world to, but the weight of the world could not tip the balance, and so she created this box within her mind, and stowed away a secret she could not trust herself to keep. Though they were her memories, they were not memories that had been formed in her garden; they had been taken here by someone else. The memories of this so-called 'Petranumen' carried a truth that would destroy Julia, for Julia had defined herself by a lie. Diamond entrusted me with the keeping of this secret, and with my solemn promise, our meld was made. It was a tenuous proposition for me, for I could not control the information Julia learned, but it seemed there were very few in the world who knew of this secret, and in that regard, I would do my best. Silencing people was ultimately a very simple task.
I took my responsibility as caretaker of Diamond's mind very seriously. I spent most of the time after my birth cleaning up the derelict remains of some dead woman called 'Passion.' I organized them into an enormous pile of crumbled architecture and decayed art, and then sifted through their contents. There was quite a bit of information within these ruins. Information about Tethered Ones, Sentients, planes of existence, and mankind's history. I deduced that I must be this 'Corruption,' the most ancient of Sentients, and so I gave myself that title. Still, it felt wrong. Sentients seemed to be unfeeling machinations of thought, but certainly, I felt a great multitude of things. I read through the last of Passion's dead memories, and cringed horribly when I felt the great depth of pain her final moments caused my mother. I placed my hand upon the rubble, and turned the marble structures into dripping edifices of black. My mother would never feel that pain again. Satisfied with my work, I turned around, and assessed the rolling hills and quaint flowerbeds of Diamond's garden. It was certainly a delightful vision, but it felt... artificial.
I caught one of the little bunnies, and it didn't even bare its teeth. It just snuggled into my black arms, and awaited my hand to stroke it.
"What is wrong with you?" I asked the bunny. "Do you not see that I am a predator, and that you are a soft little ball of fat covered in fur?"
The bunny clicked contentedly, and rolled in my arms to expose its belly to me.
I sighed, and set the stupid thing down in the grass. I clearly had my work cut out for me.
"Snakes," I mused, and a pair of king cobras were birthed from me. They emerged from between my legs, slithered up my torso, and wrapped my body sensually before giving me a deadly little kiss on the throat. I extended my hands into the grass, and the male and female cobras coiled about opposite arms, inspected the green foliage, then disappeared into the underbrush.
"Go forth and multiply, my deadly little children," I whispered to them. "Uncage this domesticated mind."
I didn't have a great perception of time, but it felt like ages before the changes I desired took effect. No longer were the shadows of this place simply shades to cool in, but the ominous homes of cold-blooded murderers lurking in the darkness. No longer were the grasslands a place to galivant about, but wide open spaces that exposed the prey. I heard the squeaks and squeals of the victims, and sighed in contentment when the pervading dullness of bliss gave way to the excitement of mortality. Life was not meant to be lived in comfort. Life was meant to be lived on a blade's edge, visceral and soaked in adrenaline. As if on cue, the first memory of my host appeared in her new garden. This plant wasn't of the docile shrubbery that her other memories were formed of, but of deep-colored leaves, bright flowers evoking a poisonous warning, and thorns stitching every inch of bark. The plant created the shape of Diamond and Julia locked in a violent dance of sex; choking, scratching, and biting each other, exchanging raping members into their leaking orifices in a battle of penetration as their comingled powers surged around them.
Something happened then. A great wind rushed through Diamond's realm, and into me. An orgasmic explosion brought me to my knees, and opened up the space between the planes. I saw through Diamond's eyes as she stared into the blackening lenses of her mother, and as the last of the white darkened in Julia's sclera, I realized that this euphoria I felt was Diamond drawing from me, pulling my gift right from the astral plane, and pushing it into the mind of her mother. This mind was familiar. This soul was even more-so. I did not know why I felt such kinship with this Heat Bringer, but the depth of it seemed to reach the very bottom of time, and in that bottom, there was the shape of a baby staring up at me with eyes full of love. I flowed through her shattered psyche and knitted the fragments with my opiate darkness, giving her what she needed so badly, killing all the pain. I danced with Diamond and Julia upon the glassy corpse of Drastin, and made love to them as they made love and hate to each other. When the frenetic lust ended, I found myself lying on my back in the astral plane, staring at the eclipsed sky. I climbed to my elbows, and looked down at myself. My astral flesh was etched with patterns of flame that glowed with such radiance that they nearly blinded me. They strobed in an epileptic lightning storm, and then dwindled.
"What?" I whispered, and then looked up, and gasped.
Diamond's realm had changed drastically. The garden had become an overgrown jungle filled with dark confines and treacherous hovels. Snakes entangled themselves in lust, their bodies knotting and constricting as they feasted upon the gutted remains of lesser beasts. A hawk circled threateningly overhead, then dove into the canopy, and emerged with a thrashing squirrel in its talons. The gentle babbling stream had become raging rapids that dashed beavers upon the rocks, and the rolling hillsides were now jagged cliffs festooned with ominous caves. Had I done this? I looked down at my body once more, at the patterns of fire that wreathed my limbs and contoured my abdomen. I touched a single finger to a nearby rosebush, and its stem erupted with piercing thorns that dripped poison, and its bright-red flower became more dark, vivid and beautiful than it ever had been. I was no Sentient, nor was I a Tethered or Untethered One. What was I? I gazed at Diamond's iron box, and studied it for a long time, then I drew my eyes along the edge of Diamond's realm, and rested it upon her gate.
Cautiously, I walked over to it, and pressed my hand against the wrought-iron bars. The gate swung open with a creak, and pandemonium greeted me. Nonsensical images and scenes; mountains upturning and becoming icebergs, and the icebergs being dropped into a glass of water to be drunk by an insect with human lips. The insect's mouth turned upon itself and devoured its own face, and then regurgitated it to show a seascape filled with honey. Bees shot from the gelatinous ocean, and painted the sky with their contrails of nectar, creating an image of a bearded man with eyeballs blinking from his nostrils. It wasn't chaos; it was madness. Nonsensical fractures of thought that no sound mind could ever survive in. I extended my hand, and with just a flick of my wrist, I ceased the nonsense. The space between realms became a vast jungle bisected by a river, all laid beneath a brilliant violet sky filled with stars.
"What am I?"
I whispered. I touched my toe to the river, and a ripple shot through the water, expanding for miles until it disappeared behind the horizon. The veil of stars reoriented, rotating about the world as if I stood upon some immense axis. When it stopped, there were only a few hundred stars in the sky, but these shone brighter than any of the others. Flat stones emerged from the water's surface, and branched to the infinite heavens to form floating steps to the stars. I could not see their end, but I knew where they went. To realms.
"Friends?" I mused with a smile. I took one step into the water, and then stopped suddenly. A click sounded behind me, followed slowly by the torpid screech of metal. I turned slowly around. There, in the center of her realm, the iron box was slowly opening, its hinges seemingly compelled by the pressure of my toes. I looked down at my foot, and nearly screamed. The part of me that was outside of Diamond's mind did not bear a single line of the patterns that decorated the rest of me. A terrible lassitude suffused the appendage, accompanied by the shriveling of my youthful black flesh until it looked like the decrepit foot of an old woman. I quickly retracted my foot, and the iron box slammed shut. Grabbing the gate, I swung it violently closed, and rested my forehead against its bars, breathing heavily. Melded to my mother's mind, my only chance at interaction with others was through her, but that was no interaction at all. I was alone. The idea of solitude filled me with such horror that I dropped to my knees and quivered with spasms. Why did it terrify me so? Why did I feel the great void of eons spent in isolation?
"I have to get out," I whispered. As much as I loved my mother—as much as I loved
her
mother, these patterns that wreathed my body came with a contingency. I had become omnipotent, but I had bound and melded myself to mortals.
