Book 4: Chapter 57

Book 4: Chapter 57

Kays brain literally could not understand everything that was happening to him in that moment. The part of him that had anything resembling rational thought left wondered if he was processing even a millionth of what was happening. The human body wasnt designed to interact with every piece of existence, even if those moments were happening every moment of every day. There was a limit to the wavelengths of light he could see, but ultraviolet light still passed through his eyes every second he had them open. What parts of this hellish experience was he missing because he was incapable of detecting them? What was happening truly was hellish. Hed read some cosmic horror books and even tried a few of the TTRPGs of that nature with his friends back on Earth, and hed never been able to understand the characters that went crazy just by experiencing something they couldnt understand. He got the theory of how it worked, but it still rang false with him.

Until that moment. It wasnt experiencing something that one didnt understand, it was surviving a direct attack on ones existence. Up till that point hed only experienced the fringes of eldritch corruption, the outer layers of a terrible and unwanted onion. Twisted cultists, scales that let you see every inch of them at once, nausea inducing sensations, and disgusting looking giant legs were nothing. They hadnt been enough to make him understand the true horror of an antithetical existence. He could not be here. Everything he was, everything he had been, everything that he could be and the reality that allowed all of that, his past, his present, and his future, could not exist in this place, and all of it was pushing in on him. It was unmaking him, destroying him, changing him, creating him; all at once.

Pleasure, pain, disgust, joy, hope, ticklishness, anger, the rough texture of sandpaper, the smell of trash, stepping off a train into a storm, the experience of learning to play an instrument, the bite of a spicy pepper on his tongue, the feeling of a giraffe biting his kidney, opening a bag of chartreuse, stepping inside a poker chip, becoming a waffle maker, undoing the scent of a waterfall, downloading a cat, speaking of sonder to a mobius loop, the tune of a simulated forklift, watching a burp of a dying star, smoke whispering colorful secrets, and uncountable experiences and not experiences that were outside of his ability to speak of them, think of them, or have them happen to him, there was too much and too little and too late.

The pieces of him that came together and became a stitched together whole that could have a thought wondered why he still was. He had protection against eldritch corruption instilled into his being by the System, but the little bit of protection that could come with his existence wasnt enough to protect him from this, right? A nanosecond that lasted into three eternities passed slow enough when Kay had eyes for him too see a screen appear in front of his eyes while he still had them, before it dissolved into nonsense rhymes about the essence of the hunt and the lyrical smells of pudding being eaten by lightning with calcium. The pieces of a person named Kenneth realized that he might be getting a little help, and anti-clockwise decided to try and do something.

Doing anything was hard, because doing didnt work the same way here, but Kay tried to fight back against the world inside the leg anyway. Not that it was a world, and it never was a leg. It had only looked like a leg from the outside, which was actually the inside because the whole thing was actually inside out to the way Kay had thought it had been. It couldnt be a leg either, it was something else that was incomprehensible to the human mind, but the closest thing was maybe a proboscis, something that got shoved somewhere else and took something out. Because they had been inside the proboscis the things theyd thought were scales were actually some kind of immune system, or pieces of one. Comparable to white blood cells, they attacked the small things that tried to hurt the proboscis from the inside.

Kay had no weapons to fight back against a reality, but just trying to understand the other was an attack against it. The realities that Kay could exist in, and there were probably more than two given that he had evidence of more than two realities existing in total, included the ability to understand them, to know the laws of physics and magic and work with them. This reality didnt have that, at least nothing that Kay could see as that, and thus even trying to understand what was going on through comparison was a strike that drove back the other pressing against him and allowed Kay to stabilize his being.

Stabilizing his own existence allowed him to continue to stabilize because the idea of stable was not from here, and thus here was pushed back. Pushing back here stabbed deep into here, because here did not have pushing or directions as Kay understood them, and thus here was repelled. It wasnt enough to defeat here, the other that was all around, but it was enough to give Kay a bubble of peace where he could be without the risk of not being. The bubble was not anywhere, it was only a space where the outside here was not, but it had flavors of Earth and Torotia, the places that Kay brought with him through his will and existence.

Kay looked around in his bubble of not there and tried to find an exit. Hed come in, so he must be able to get out. But that wasnt how this reality worked, and he didnt have the power to push back all of there enough for that to change. Using the human traits of anthropomorphism, denial, and misunderstanding, he looked and did his best to understand the world around him enough to move through it and seek somewhere that did have something close enough to an exit, all the while holding back any level of true understanding. It wasnt the inability to understand an experience that made characters go mad, it was the experience they understood changing something about them, but not finishing the process. A person and something outside could not be together like that, and the madness was just the human bodys reaction to having something other inside of it. Or the human mind, or the human existence, or perhaps ones soul struggling against whatever divergence had been left behind by the other.

If Kay understood too deeply, he wouldnt truly understand, he would just be allowing here to slip inside him. He couldnt fight there from both inside himself and outside himself at once, not if he wanted to continue being.

The taste of boxes of light that conveyed information pushed from the same side as the weapons, trying to close the whole even as the weapons fought to keep it open. The weapons were more present and concentrated, but the scent of numbers that grew larger with effort was more powerful. Moments that werent passed, and the kernel merely floated there in the here a witness to the conflict.

A tug on the string pulled the kernel closer to the hole, and for the first time the kernel noticed that the string was connected to it. A spark of curiosity lit, and the kernel tried to figure out what the string was. By trying to understand it, it observed it, in observing it, it learned about it, in learning about it it grew to know more. In knowing more, it understood. The string was a tie of blood. Blood didnt exist here, it was a place of the there before here. Understanding that blood was something wasnt enough to push back against the overwhelming oppression of here, but it was enough for the kernel to remember it had once been Kay and for it to reach out, grab the string, and pull itself across the infinitesimal infinity between himself and the hole between.

The space between was also the space that was all places, and Kay saw and knew all things. That was what his existence was trying to tell him, but he could feel something at the edges of was holding back an infinite tide of knowing and doing, which meant he was only experiencing and learning too much. A vast endless majority of it flew past him and was not retained. As he passed through the unnoticeable gap between the eldritch world he was leaving and his arrival back into Torotia over the course of seven infinities, he only saw or knew five things, four tight strings of of love, care, and friendship drawing him to most of them, and one small string of chance and destiny letting him keep the last.

A rock that contained sparkling possibilities crossed a barrier, seeking the knowledge needed to grow.

A winged beast speaking in riddles that it hated, waiting for them to be solved.

A red ball talking to a ghost about deaths that didnt matter and lives that that did.

A hand that meant death to all, but only sometimes.

A turtle that stretched across a world, the top of its shell covered in stars.

The turtles eye met his as the edges of his being hit the edge of Torotia, and Kay suddenly was Kay, and had a body again. It looked him over, and spoke to him. The words were so loud they shook the nothing that never moved at all, even in the force of its words. The sheer contradiction of that was overwhelming on Kays reexisting mind, and he blacked out.