PROLOGUE:

“I still don’t see why we have to talk about this now, is all.”

He smirks at me and shifts in his chair.  Even after all of this, it’s the same conversation all over again.  Maybe its more fitting because of this situation, I don’t know.  I was never keen on philosophy, which is why I hate this discussion.

“That’s just it.  There’s really no point in this at all.  I know it irritates you, though, so I like to bring it up,”

I laugh.  He really is a bastard at heart. How strange it feels to say that phrase about him. But thats one thing I’ve noticed that about people.  As much as they change, they never do.  It’s a paradox, I suppose.  You are yourself until the bitter end, even when you don’t resemble anything you once were.  I’ve told him this, and he just uses it as proof of his point.  Nothing could make that more concrete than this moment.  I hope the irony isn’t lost on him.  He always liked irony.

“Come on.  At least for old times sake.”

I sigh.  I don’t know I had ever sighed quite so much with just one exhalation before.  Do I sound overdramatic? I don’t mean to be.  This kind of situation lends itself to dramatism I suppose.  But with that sigh, I mustered my last attempt to derail him. I knew it wouldn’t work, because it never did before.  But it doesn’t hurt to try when it doesn’t really matter. Its something to keep my mind off of all the important things we are going to have to say afterward.

“I just think its bullshit is all.  I mean, we’re never going to come to a consensus. Either you’re right, or your wrong.  There’s really nothing more to it, and so this whole thing is pointless.”

A little chuckle escapes him.  He knows as well as I do that I’ve given up.  He’ll ignore my point as he always does, because it means we can argue about it like we always do.  One last time.

“Ever a cynic. To the very end, it seems.  Doesn’t it intrigue you to think about it?  To discuss that which we may only speculate?  To theorize about something which we know nothing about?  I mean, where’s your fucking sense of wonder at the ineffable?”

I always hated when he talked like that. It meant he was going to pull out all the stops and be extra pissy about every point I had, just to irritate me.  He knew it too.  If it was to be our last time, he wanted it to really shine I suppose.

“You sound like a shitty poet.  But I suppose we’ve already started, haven’t we?  Alright then, I think that the whole idea is fucked, just because you believe it.  If its an invisible process, and it controls everything, wouldn’t knowing about it ruin it?”

Nothing new will be said.  No change will occur to either of our stories.  I’m not even sure he believes it.  It all kind of just became words to me a long time ago.  But the less I got out of it, the more he seemed to feed on the discussion.  I already told you he was a bastard.

We sat there, arguing back and forth about fate and free will.  It went on for hours, like always. When it started to wind down, nothing had been said that we hadn’t discussed a thousand times before.

“Alright, how about this.  Lets take this situation, right here, right now.  Looking back on our lives, doesn’t it seem like an inevitable chain of events?”

Okay, I was wrong.  That’s new. But it gives me an edge, I suppose, because chance favors the underdog.  Right here, right now, there has never been a canine more beneath the odds.

“That’s stupid.  History doesn’t have a story behind it.  History IS the story.  Its looking back that makes it all seem connected.”

Sometimes you are with someone, and you realize what you have just said or done pulled you directly into whatever scheme they were cooking up.  It’s the eyes that give them away.  I think god gave us such expressive eyes just so that we could see that look exactly in the faces of the people who truly fucked us.

“And yet here we are, where we would have wound up no matter what.  Doesn’t it sting, to know it?  It was there all along, and you knew the whole time.  Every little thing is so painfully obvious it must fester in you like a sore. And now that its too late, doesn’t that make you hate yourself a little, for letting it get this far?”

The eyes again.  They broadcast every evil thing we do, usually far too late to help anyone.  I can barely see his face, and I can still see his eyes mocking me for walking into this cul-de-sac.

“It isn’t too late.”

And the smile is gone.  He is completely serious.  This stopped being a simple conversation and became the most important thing we had ever said to each other, right then.  And he had known the whole time that it would be said.  I hope somewhere deep in him that knowledge itched like a bastard, too.

“Its too late for you at least.  It will end here. Just like it always has.  And the reason you never did anything to stop it is because you knew that you belonged right where you are.  This is what you and I were born for, and neither of us can change that.”

He’s wrong.  I tell myself that, and not just because I’m a sore loser.  Oddly enough, it goes back to fate and free will.  He thinks I never stopped him because I was fated to be where I am.  The truth is, I never stopped him because I believed he might stop himself.  And I wasn’t going to take that from him.


Let me start earlier…


---


the problem with beginnings is recognizing them. He was right about one thing; once you look back everything looks connected. so its hard to say 'this is when it began.' because once you do, youll find something to look back on even farther down the road and realize that it might have started there. and then something else that led to that. the further back you go, the less substansial the connections. yet without even the tiniest of these events, could it all have happened the way it did? you could spend the rest of your life tracing it all back, each thread getting smaller and smaller.

so i wont tell you where it all began. i dont even really know. i just know that it happened, and some of it happened to me.





all my life ive known the world was ending. ive had dreams about it since for as long as i could remember. these dreams are some of my earliest memories. before any other event, its been a landscape in my mind. i never thought about it much for a long time, because it had no real context. like most people, i just thought dreams were dreams. i never thought i was seeing the end of the world. neither would most people. we've all been indocrinated to believe that the end of the world is an event; something that happens in time.

thats not it. the end of the world has an older meaning. If you asked someone about the end of the world back when the world was flat, they might very well pull out an piece of parchment, smooth it out, and show you the empty space on this map that bore the old warning 'Here There Be Saerpents.'

the end of the world is just that. the end. the place where the world stops and the rest begins. where reality mixes with the darkness that lies just beyond.




its hard to pin down a beginning. ive already said that. but rather than trace the threads back to where they fade almost to invisibility, i would cut them off now. if ive lived most of my life with this and still understand so little, maybe im too close. maybe you can see it better if i leave the clutter of it out, and leave you with no back story. no extra context.

because im not here to make you understand. im just here to tell you that it happened. and maybe that is enough.

---

i was probably about 15 years old when i made a pact with the devil.

he didnt actually claim to be satan, but at the time he had me convinced thats what he was. he implies that the reasons he carefully crafted our encounter in his favor was to give me some context to our meeting; and of course, the easiest context is the pact with the devil. so as far as im concerned, it equates to a child making a pact with the devil. although i now know better.



it was late summer, and dusk was steadily approaching. i had been riding my bike around all day, and i decided i wanted to go watch the sunset from a certain hill in a park out of my usual range. being a child, i didnt question my sudden whim, i just acted upon it. i rode recklessly, racing to beat the suns march towards the earth.

the driver of the van didnt see me on the gravel shoulder. as he turned the bend, the sun got in his eyes. he sneezed. thats all. he wasnt drunk, he didnt fall asleep at the wheel. a man sneezed and his side view mirror clipped my elbow, breaking my arm and sending me and my bike off the shoulder and tumbling down. it felt like i hit every rock god ever made on my way down.

i have since learned that god has made many more rocks than i can ever imagine, and no matter how many of them i have hit before, there will always be more to crack my bones and strain my joints in the future.

i lay bleeding and crumpled in a ravine, wondering why i couldnt move my head to see if i was hurt. it took a few seconds to feel my nerves screaming with panic at the general state of my body. i started sobbing, and waited to die. i didnt expect to be found, i was in more pain than i had ever imagined, and i couldnt move. death was all i expected, and i recall i hoped it would be soon, so that no animals would find me first.

he walked up from out in the underbrush very slowly, so as to make as little noise as possible. first impressions are how he gets his kicks. he appeared a man of medium height, slightly slimmer than average build. an immaculate dove gray two piece suit; impossible in the sludge and mud he must have walked through to get to me. later i asked about that he laughed and told me its the details that sell an illusion. his hair was shoulder length, with the slightest hint of a curl. black as a crows wing, and so silky looking that it seemed almost pearlescent. high cheekbones dominate his mostly average face, the only lines on his face two parenthetical creases on either side of his sensuous mouth.

in short, striking without rising beyond the overall impression of utter averageness. an unearthly ordinary, he calls it. i asked him once how long it took him to perfect it and he laughed for an hour.

he walked up next to my croggled form, and bent down on one knee, careful not to let his clothes touch the ground. he stared down at me for a long time without speaking. he waited for me to try and speak first. its an old trick, anyone can do it. no one really likes a long silence. if you force someone else to talk first, anything you say will throw them off if you put half a thought into it.

'...help...'

im not sure i actually spoke it aloud, but that kind of thing really doesnt bother him. its not even worth asking him about. ive found that anything involving how we met is generally a good way to get him laughing. too pleased with his acting to be any less jovial and any more factual.

"for a price. do my work and hear my words, and you shall live."

his voice was like warm honey, golden and thick. it felt like it was coating the insides of my head. every syllable resonated in my shattered bones.

of course i didnt actually say yes. i was too far gone for that. but like i said, he knew it anyway. he smiled, and got slowly to his feet. he held out his hands above me, where i could see them. it looked to me like he was holding invisible puppet strings.

"your life is now mine. to acheive my goals, it must be longer. but i warn you, every change has a concequence, and extending your life will be no exception."

he didnt do anything seemingly magical. he stood like that for maybe 15 seconds, then turned back to the bushes and walked off. i started to finally give in to unconciousness. i woke up in a hospital 3 days later, with many a broken bone but no serious internal injuries. i thought it was all a hallucination brought on by the pain, so i told no one. i healed up, and went on with my life.




thats how i met my own personal devil, Ozymandias. i didnt see him again for 3 years.

---


At first i thought i was slowly going crazy. i started hearing things. not voices as much as the echo of voices, it seemed. i was constantly catching movement in my peripherial vision, only to turn and see nothing. it was like having gone without sleep for maybe 4 days, only it never got any better. it just persisted for months.

and then one day the dam broke, and my mind got flooded out. i was walking down the hallway at school when it happened. it seemed like time slowed as my footsteps faltered and grew still. i felt a membrane in my head stretch with unseen tension; straining to its limit to hold something back. each moment was an agony of fear, and the closer the moment of snapping got, the more i shook.

when the moment came, it was undramatic as breaking the yolk of an egg; yellow and slimy. but it seemed everywhere i turned i saw something that hadnt been there before. everything seemed a different color, and there were creatures that looked like living hot-water bottles tumbling up and down the hallways. there were twice as many people walking the halls, and close to half of these 'people' werent human looking at all. i couldnt describe the variety of strange afflictions some of them had, because the memory lacks focus. there was just so much that was so strange that all i remember is the overall feeling. i seem to recall some had running sores all over, and some looked like they were only half formed clay replicas of mankind, but beyond that, i just dont remember. there was much more than just that.

apparently i started to scream, and before anyone could get to me i collapsed and started having a seizure. in the ambulance, i briefly came to and immediately started screaming again. i was sedated and taken to the hospital. after 2 days in the ICU, where i spent most of my time convulsing, screaming, or unconcious, i was moved to Ward D.

Ward D was the mental health ward, and i spent the next few months there under observation. i stopped screaming after the third day in Ward D, but i was never fully conscious. i remember almost none of my time spent in Ward D. most of the time my mind was with Ozymandias, and it wasnt until after id spent several months with him that i was able to cope with what the world now looked like to me, and could interact with it normally.


it would be just about impossible to describe most of the places we were when we talked. im not sure if we walked through parts of the world that normal people dont get to travel to or if where we were was distorted by the bends my mind had taken. nothing followed anything else linearly, however. we might walk through primordial forests with trees thicker than buildings to suddenly find ourselves at the coast of thick yellow oceans of slime that sent sludgy waves to lap at the remains of rusty metal scaffoldings.

thats an abbreviated example, but thats what it was like. it was as if we wore seven-league boots, and we skipped all the terrain in between.


but i get ahead of myself. i should start with how we made our formal introductions to each other.

i opened my eyes, and i was laying on wooden platform under the night sky. i remember the first coherent thought i had was that we had to be well away from any cities because i could see an awful lot of stars.

i took stock of my surroundings. the platform was about six feet square, and made of thick planks of a dark wood. it was well oiled and polished, free of scratches, and very uncomfortable to lie upon. it stood about 6 inches above the top of the thick grass that grew around it. grass was all there was to see in all directions, rippling like water in the night breeze. i shivered and wondered why i was wearing a hospital gown and thin pajama pants.

"what a silly question. you always start with what you have and get more as you go."

i was shocked so much that i was completly frozen, beyond even starting at the sound. my flesh was already marbled into goosebumps, so i cant attribute it to my horror, but even if it had been 120 degrees out and as humid as an armpit i think it would have been the same.

the source of my fright came from my utter certainty that whatever was reading my thoughts and answering them aloud couldnt possibly be there without being completely outside my experience. some kind of unheard of monster was all i could think of. i knew that i hadnt seen anything but myself and this platform in the sea of grass as i looked around, and grass that tall would rustle considerably. so it either appeared, or flew. neither were very comforting. i mistily recalled being strapped into restraints and sedated, so i hoped fervently that i was merely insane.

i found the thought that i was completely psychotic strangely comforting, because it meant that there were presumably experts at work; analyzing, planning, and injecting, all in the name of restoring my sanity.


he started to laugh at me. he is one of those who gives themselves over to laughter almost entirely. all his laughs are just short of reducing him to rolling on the ground, clutching his stomach. it was the first time i heard it, but it became both familiar and irritating. ive already told you that it happens a lot. hes got a wierd sense of humor, but thats what happens when youre a demon. the whole immortal kick gives you a different perspective is my guess.

"whenever you start to think science or spirituality have the answer for you, remember that medication and meditation are only one letter off, and people have been swearing by both of them for centuries. and in all those centuries, neither has done anything more than distract."

i still think about that whenever im too serious, and it still only pisses me off. well to be honest, at first i didnt understand it, but now that ive thought about it, it makes me angry. firstly because he dismisses all the progress of human medicine and spirituality as inconsequential, and secondly because he might just know enough to be right.

i still hadnt moved. i was focusing on being insane, hoping that whatever this delusion was, it would fade into something less frightening and leave me less self aware. so far my hopes were groundless, and the cold of the wind put a dent in my belief that none of this was happening.

he clucked his tongue in a gesture of reproach. "poor child. alone and cold in the dark against the cruel weight of destiny, arent we? but talks of that come later." he laughed again, loud and earnest. i probably couldnt have been more frightened if his laugh had sounded like stones grating and the damned gnashing their teeth. his jolly attitude only reassured that he had the upper hand here, and that i was completely out of my element.

"wont you turn and face me, child? i didnt come to this place to speak to a stone boy. i promise that im not as scary as the things you are imagining. we never really are."

my fevered mind began a mantra; they eat you when you see them, they eat you when you see them, they eat you when you see them. i pictured all manner of horrors, and the mercy of it is he didnt show himself as any of them. there are some demons that perverse, and ive been unfortunate enough to meet a few of them.

but Ozymandias stood there, looking mostly human. He appeared much as he had 3 years before, in the ravine where i lay spindled and mutilated. the only real differences were that his skin had a golden tinge, and 5 curved horns circled his scalp, making him look crowned and regal. i later learned that demons have no true form, so a fair amount of how he looks to me is borrowed from my mind. features i associate with "wisdom, power, and aloofness, specifically" he says.

i laughed, and told him that i didnt think he was very wise or aloof. he agreed, but told me that he likes the look. it seems that every time i think that ive said something that is going to send him into gales of laughter, he treats my words with the utmost seriousness, and when im asking an honest question he thinks its beyond funny. then any time i try and use that to my advantage, i find out im wrong. immortals have a wierd sense of humor. this one in particular.

"well now... turning around is the hardest step. at least for now. come, child. let us talk."

he smiled, and all my fears vanished. i felt as if my earlier trust in doctors and science to cure me could safely be transfered unto him. he could explain where i was and why i was here, and send me safely back home, unharmed and intact.

i was mostly wrong. mostly.