Jarek: My Immortal

[Zata]

The sun touched, dwelt, nestled: pockets of fading light created a patchwork barrier across the landscape, and shadows gathered and welled, their tenebrous forms vanquishing the lingering light in slow majesty. Once, he had sat, for the course of a night as it had progressed, transgressed into day. Now, it was the reversal of time, and of that tranquillity. The timely dissolution of one form to another; the passage of moments was amorphous and it was deceptively easy to blink and miss it.

Breathe in. Breathe out. And it was gone, the brightness of day aspirated into the blanket of night. It was a period that could easily be erased – that instant when it was suddenly gone, where there was nothing else, nothing else but this. This moment, this age was what held him now, when the world hung, poised to move to its next phase, and the shadows of trees unyielding upon his sobbing, shaking form, each life-bound branch was withered in shadow, stretching and curling about broad-shouldered frame.

He did not, and could not regain control. The pain reverberated, growing with each dual heartbeat; it tore at him, from inside-out. A persistent ache that overcame the boundaries that had been placed, each sob was a wave, battering against the cliff face formed of his own swiftly departing resolve, with each indrawn breath, and broken exhalation, the remaining bastions of his own identity were crumbling away.

He did not think it was possible for anything to hurt this much. It overcame reality with its increasing brutality, leaving him stripped, raw and bleeding. All of it, his sister, his loves, his lovers, his friends, few as they were, his mothers: and his father. Things that burnt – and tears were as molten as his blood itself, denying the veracity of his ability to dry them.

It was not just one thing; it was everything, all of it. It had piled atop him, undermined him, internally and externally, the duality of his emotional collapse was a paradox in itself. He had given everything he had, and oh, the bitter irony curled about him now, the startling realisation that it had nothing to do with him not being enough, that he had not given enough: no. He had done too much, sought too much, and been too intense, too overwhelming, sought to subsume them. His intensity drew them in, but its capacity to consume drove everything away.

It was not quiet introspection that brought clarified mourning for the improbable impossibilities – it was a trial of tears and fire.He was hypersensitive to everything about him, and mouth open to inhale another breath resulted in those acrid tastes sliding across his tongue once again. It was not simply the taste, it was each breath he took, each breath he released, the tug of the faint carrying breeze against his skin, beneath his clothes, the ethereal feeling of fingertips plucking at his very self.

Fear. Hatred. Mistrust. Betrayal. Deception. Pain. Loneliness. Melancholy. Despair. Misery. Resentment. Anger. Depression. Sadness. Violence. Misunderstanding. Abandonment. Sorrow.

They were overpowering and it should have been no surprise that the feel of them in his mouth smothered anything that could be perceived as positive. It was always easier to make people cry than it was to make them laugh. People by instinct, and self were drawn to tragedy, simply because they could all relate to it – from the moment of birth, to the death of a childhood pet, a lover, a friend, a family member, a neighbour, a compatriot, a stranger before their eyes, driven by the very nature of their own mortality, people could more easily understand suffering and loss than anything else.

They could be quantified, blood and its eventual decay, it rose from the soil: metaphysical, metaphorical and here, in Myrken, terrifyingly literal. Myrken and its peoples were curse, are cursed, the only pleasures they receive are granted only long enough so that they can truly appreciate their losses, the losses that would always come. It was a cycle of material and emotional corruption and depravity, and it had taken its toll upon him.

He did not mourn solely for himself, and what was inevitably slipping through his fingers, but he mourned for them all. Every loss, every ounce and gallon of suffering they had experienced, that clogged his throat and made it impossible to breathe, or swallow past the encompassing feeling. There was no cessation, and he was drowning. They were pulling him beneath their torment in this birthing of fire, and what before had only been a taste…the ability to sense truth, lies, fears and lust…it expanded. It gagged him now, sticking in his throat, crawling over his skin, this barrage of emotional negativity.

And he? It was his heat that was swiftly becoming overbearing, body curling against itself, wracked with shuddering cries, desperation for release – but there was none forthcoming. He was alone, yet he was surrounded by them, by their guilt, and their desire to destroy, to unwittingly undermine. As distant as this expanse of forest and clearing was, he could feel the tavern, the connectivity to all those he’d ever encountered, clutching, succumbing beneath the tempestuous seas of their own torment – and they did not even know.

They felt none of it – they could not recognise the crimes they perpetrated upon each other and themselves. And that…that hurt just as much as everything else. How could they be so blind? How could they be so deliberately and maliciously cruel? Injuries caused by accident and on purpose, they were enraged animals circling each other, with hackles raised, and teeth bared, and they snapped out of defence and offence, and offense. It was unfathomable, yet he was not innocent of that desire to hurt, to cause suffering equal to his own, he was no better.

It was wrong. It was so wrong. He knew now where these monsters and demons came from; they were the physical manifestation of the sickness that pervaded Myrken to its very core. That was the source of this apparent plague, it was a cycle of disease and decomposition, winding in upon itself, this paradigm, and paradoxically, in a dichotomy of itself, expanding outwards, consuming all it touched, and touching all it consumed.

He was caught within it, compressed and compromised, collapsing beneath the empathic weight of it. There was nothing but this anguish, this binary separation and closeness that were so interwoven they could not be untwined from one another. All the voices he had ever heard, rising in a discordant cacophony that threatened to break his mind beneath the perpetual roaring sound….

And then…

He did not hear movement, could not sense that presence, but there was a chilled hand to the back of his neck, an oasis within this storm, lips brushing to the edge of his ear, and those words, emerging, soft, and soothing that they were, and they overcame that shrieking, it shielded him, surrounding and enfolding him in the sanctuary of her presence, cooling, soothing, a balm against a self that was bloodied and raw from the onslaught.

“My poor boy, my poor Jarek, I am here now. You are not alone.”