Post by Kyle Shane on May 7, 2018 17:47:32 GMT -5
When he looked up, he was in the middle of a lonely country road, pine trees on either side of him. He was stripped to the waist, wearing nothing but shorts and a muscle shirt that clung desperately to his sweat-glued body. His head was on fire. He had no idea how he'd gotten out here, nor did he know where "here" was, specifically. He knelt, if only to wipe away the sweat and massage his temples for the pounding of his head. He tried to think of where he was before this.
Images, scattershot. Him calling Array, getting into an argument over the phone with Alastair, who was talking about pressing charges and getting a restraining order. Him reading a book about quantum physics and the intersection of the unexplained with the scientific. Thermodynamic miracles. Him in the sound booth where he sat and filmed promos addressing his opponents. Gabriel, it would be a miracle if you managed to beat him. That sort of thing.
His head. His head.
The oppressive heat and sweat made it feel like he had been fired in a kiln but his head was close to being so fired that it broken like brittle clay. There was fire in his brain. Agony. The headaches had been getting worse. Lost time. And now, sleepwalking.
As he watched, in the middle of the dark road, a stag walked out. He blinked, sure he was dreaming. The stag was black and swirling, a mass of midnight with white eyes. The dream stag turned, running down the stretch of road. He closed his eyes, willing away the vision, trying to clear his thoughts. To cool the burning in the base of his skull. And then the ink black stag walked alongside him. Between the treetops overhead, cosmic play was going into overdrive, the stars elongating and firing off like comets, moving around the velvet canvas of night. He turned, disoriented.
"Thermodynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold."
It wasn't clear if he said that, or what voice was saying that now. The black stag, walking by his side, just looked at him with it's softly incandescent eyes. He held a hand up to shield his eyes, squinting.
"You want the universe to hum to your precise design, to massage probability to fit your capricious whim. Because as you understand it, the universe is orderly, everything born with a specific purpose. A makerless mechanism that will work for you, rather than you serve it. This is what it means to be your own master. But other people do not fit your plans, and they challenge your perception of the universe by consterning against type, playing the longest odds against their ordained roles in probability." A vein in his head beat with every word.
"What are you thinking?" Array's voice murmured, whispering from the trees. And as expected, his voice, much younger, had replied to her, the other half of the equation. "I wish we never had to leave this room."
"You call that love, boy?" sneered his father's voice, and he was there, watching, sneering. Panting, his head swimming, he saw the shade of Eric Shane there, walking by. "You never learned how to do that. I saw it when you were just a little brat. You never had the ability."
And as if there were windows, portals open in the fabric of the world, he saw movie scenes playing out in front of his eyes. Him bringing two girls he'd met at a club home with him, surprising Array from the couch and him being too wasted to care. Array on her birthday, waiting by the phone in a dark apartment. Array out on the streets, seventeen years old and walking a beat with local hookers. He shut his eyes against the visions. And then he said, "I was never good to her. She had every reason to hate me for how I treated her when we - when she was a kid. I was, I am cold. But if you want a miracle, it's there. Against all the odds of probability, a girl who left everything she'd ever known when she was still a teenager and lost everything afterwards found enough strength in her heart to forgive me. And she did love me. That is a miracle so astronomical that it defies the universe."
"Are you just telling yourself that to justify the way you're acting now?" her voice said, softly. Her shade was there, on this ghost walk down the deserted stretch. Array's voice had her usual tenderness, and tact, but she was firm in her hurt, too. "Or are you still trying to find a way to manipulate the odds?"
"I'm not manipulating anything," he protested to the girl who wasn't there, "What we have defies all probability, we've proven it time and time again that even though we should not work together, we do. There is nobody else like you in all the worlds, Array."
She looked down at the ground with a sad, beautiful smile. "Or maybe you're wrong, and the universe put us on different paths. Doesn't that fit your normal world view? That the universe has an underlying order and a predictable track?"
He wanted to reach out for her, grab her by the shoulders, but his hands wisped through the shade. "Array," he said pleadingly, "You and I break every order, every bit of sense, of logic I can try to ascribe to it. Doesn't that make us something special?"
Array's shade pursed her lips, and she walked up the road, joining other ghosts walking like fog, rolling across the asphalt. She linked hands with a tall, slim necked shade. The black stag bounced by.
"You don't care about order. You care about baubles! You care about lining your trophy case! You care about the spotlight!" whinged a mewling, pathetically wasted shade of a man, cringing from a bent spined position of subservience. Kyle cocked a look sideways at it. "Shut up, Gabriel."
The apparition just kept walking, muttering the same thing. Same as it always does.
The black stag stopped running around him, and came to a stop, it's haunches tight.
Above them, the stars swirled. He stood there, looking up into the night sky, his body shining with constellations of sweat. And in his burning state he looked at those stars, asking what the universe was trying to tell him.
"It's telling you to choose what you want to be."
His voice? Gabriel's voice? The voice of the stag?
"If you want to be a servant of the universe, to go with the grain of it, surrender yourself to that."
He argued back with the voice "Then I'd be nothing more than a Follower under another name, worshipping just another Seromine."
"Then make the odds work in your favor."
"If you push molecules of oxygen together, you can create gold. It's so unlikely that it may as well be alchemy, but it's there."
He looked at the stag. The eldritch creature turned it's tail, bouncing away. And he thought he understood.
What his fevered brain was telling him was that he had allowed himself to passively observe the universe for so long, to react to what tracks it had put him on and he was sick of that. Whether it was Stormm and Matthews stealing the World title, Grimm being named his contender without his input, Array deciding to start dating her co-star, he had taken a spectator position for too long. If he wanted to shape a world the way he wanted, he had to take action. He had taken a step down that path at the beginning of the Icemann Tournament. That itself was an ordered field, with many of it's front-runners on a seemingly preordained track. This then was where he tested his hand at pushing molecules into different orbits. Where Tyler Scott was knocked from competition, and Gabriel was put on a track where he would have to redeem himself by competing first against Stormm, and then maybe, just maybe, down the line, Seromine. In the madness of fever, he finally saw the underpinnings of it all, and he realized it wasn't out of character for him to want this. It was him taking his first steps out of being just a stander-by in his fate for the first time since he'd claimed the title.
The burning in his head subsided, somewhat. He blinked, and the ghost walk was gone, the black stag was gone, and there he was, half-naked and sweaty in the middle of a two-lane stretch of country blacktop. The lights in his eyes were just headlights. He shielded his eyes with the flat of his hand as a door slammed.
"Sir, do you know where you are?" An officer wearing a green uniform called over to him.
Panting, dehydrated and disoriented, he had to admit he did not. "What day is it?"
He saw the officer lower his hand from his gun as he approached. "Sir, you are about 5 miles outside of Acton. Do you know your name? Where are your clothes?"
He wiped the sweat off his upper lip, squinting in confusion. Acton was at least an hour away from home. He thought of the headaches, and the lost time, and a chill grip of panic squeezed his gut. He tamped it down, trying to present as normal a front as he could for the Park ranger kid. He could bullshit it about sleepwalking from home, but not 30 miles worth... He held his hands up in supplication. "What day is it?"
"It's Sunday, sir..."
He nodded. That was a start.
It took a few more minutes of uncomfortable conversation with the ranger before he got around to being offered a ride. In the passenger side of the cab, he looked at the ranger's cell phone blankly. Sunday. Day before he had to go to work, and he was missing a big chunk of time. His conversation with the universe aside, he was a little bit worried about the missing time and the burning in his head, and the walk in bare feet miles from home. He dialed Krista, getting the beep of her machine.
"Krista... hey. Those headaches I was telling you about... it's something else. Look... I'm missing time now. I think we need to do the MRI like you were talking about. Just call me back in an hour, will you?"
He handed the ranger back his phone with a silent look of thanks, and he looked pensively out the window. He began questioning everything that happened, wondering if his brain wasn't just finally breaking. Was it the universe talking to him in riddles tonight, or just an overcooked and fracturing brain talking to itself in tones it wanted to hear? Was it the one, or the other?
Certainly his thoughts about taking control were resonant, and relevant to him, coming from himself or not. But if he thought of the universe giving him advice, when you got down to it, wasn't he really no better than Gabriel, mouthing off about how all the attention in the world should be given to his Lord, only his Lord? He grimaced into his reflection, refuting that as not satisfying. He did not worship the universe, or consider it's laws absolute. He thought again, that he had begun doing what he was doing to exert control. Control was a thing that Gabriel would never, and could never give himself. He couldn't even assert himself to go against his master's will. That was partly what the impetus for intervening with Gabriel specifically was for. Left to his own devices Gabriel could not have beaten Tyler Scott. Scott was a hungry young blade, apt to prove himself. Gabriel is just a washed out, pathetic also ran, still running in the same circle as always. Want to be successful, can't get too successful or it'll displease my Lord. Want to win tournament, can't win tournament against my Lord.
And for crying out loud. How many times are we going to hear him talk about how Rick Majors overdosed, died, was a wasted life until he was reborn as Gabriel.
Intervening in that had been trying to set a thermodynamic miracle in motion, forcing Gabriel into a position where for once he would have to cut the shit and finally stand up for himself. The odds on that were so astronomical that the payout for it would have been rich. But in every day terms, day to day? Gabriel remained the same. He stood less than no chance of achieving any measure of success until he fought against the chains of Seromine. And yet here he stood, as always, framing their conflict in terms of "Kyle Shane disrespected my Lord, took attention away from him." It was asinine. It painted Rick Majors as a servile toady. And that was why at the end of the day Gabriel had such little success against him, because in reflection, with tonight's events in his mind it was clearer to him that he was the type of person that would at least try to go against what the universe wanted.
A dark, sickly thought prickled at the base of his skull, coming from some lizard brain, and he asked the ranger, "Hey, can I see your phone again?" The kid, moon-eyed and innocent from the driver's seat, looked at him and handed it over, eager as a puppy.
The universe listened silently as he dialed Array's number from the unfamiliar phone, and he set his lip. Rubbing the forehead which had begun to pulse and burn again, but his only thought was of trying again to force molecules into the same orbit.
As the ranger's truck rattled on down the road into town, across the asphalt, a coal black eldritch stag hopped and leapt, before disappearing into the brush.
Images, scattershot. Him calling Array, getting into an argument over the phone with Alastair, who was talking about pressing charges and getting a restraining order. Him reading a book about quantum physics and the intersection of the unexplained with the scientific. Thermodynamic miracles. Him in the sound booth where he sat and filmed promos addressing his opponents. Gabriel, it would be a miracle if you managed to beat him. That sort of thing.
His head. His head.
The oppressive heat and sweat made it feel like he had been fired in a kiln but his head was close to being so fired that it broken like brittle clay. There was fire in his brain. Agony. The headaches had been getting worse. Lost time. And now, sleepwalking.
As he watched, in the middle of the dark road, a stag walked out. He blinked, sure he was dreaming. The stag was black and swirling, a mass of midnight with white eyes. The dream stag turned, running down the stretch of road. He closed his eyes, willing away the vision, trying to clear his thoughts. To cool the burning in the base of his skull. And then the ink black stag walked alongside him. Between the treetops overhead, cosmic play was going into overdrive, the stars elongating and firing off like comets, moving around the velvet canvas of night. He turned, disoriented.
"Thermodynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold."
It wasn't clear if he said that, or what voice was saying that now. The black stag, walking by his side, just looked at him with it's softly incandescent eyes. He held a hand up to shield his eyes, squinting.
"You want the universe to hum to your precise design, to massage probability to fit your capricious whim. Because as you understand it, the universe is orderly, everything born with a specific purpose. A makerless mechanism that will work for you, rather than you serve it. This is what it means to be your own master. But other people do not fit your plans, and they challenge your perception of the universe by consterning against type, playing the longest odds against their ordained roles in probability." A vein in his head beat with every word.
"What are you thinking?" Array's voice murmured, whispering from the trees. And as expected, his voice, much younger, had replied to her, the other half of the equation. "I wish we never had to leave this room."
"You call that love, boy?" sneered his father's voice, and he was there, watching, sneering. Panting, his head swimming, he saw the shade of Eric Shane there, walking by. "You never learned how to do that. I saw it when you were just a little brat. You never had the ability."
And as if there were windows, portals open in the fabric of the world, he saw movie scenes playing out in front of his eyes. Him bringing two girls he'd met at a club home with him, surprising Array from the couch and him being too wasted to care. Array on her birthday, waiting by the phone in a dark apartment. Array out on the streets, seventeen years old and walking a beat with local hookers. He shut his eyes against the visions. And then he said, "I was never good to her. She had every reason to hate me for how I treated her when we - when she was a kid. I was, I am cold. But if you want a miracle, it's there. Against all the odds of probability, a girl who left everything she'd ever known when she was still a teenager and lost everything afterwards found enough strength in her heart to forgive me. And she did love me. That is a miracle so astronomical that it defies the universe."
"Are you just telling yourself that to justify the way you're acting now?" her voice said, softly. Her shade was there, on this ghost walk down the deserted stretch. Array's voice had her usual tenderness, and tact, but she was firm in her hurt, too. "Or are you still trying to find a way to manipulate the odds?"
"I'm not manipulating anything," he protested to the girl who wasn't there, "What we have defies all probability, we've proven it time and time again that even though we should not work together, we do. There is nobody else like you in all the worlds, Array."
She looked down at the ground with a sad, beautiful smile. "Or maybe you're wrong, and the universe put us on different paths. Doesn't that fit your normal world view? That the universe has an underlying order and a predictable track?"
He wanted to reach out for her, grab her by the shoulders, but his hands wisped through the shade. "Array," he said pleadingly, "You and I break every order, every bit of sense, of logic I can try to ascribe to it. Doesn't that make us something special?"
Array's shade pursed her lips, and she walked up the road, joining other ghosts walking like fog, rolling across the asphalt. She linked hands with a tall, slim necked shade. The black stag bounced by.
"You don't care about order. You care about baubles! You care about lining your trophy case! You care about the spotlight!" whinged a mewling, pathetically wasted shade of a man, cringing from a bent spined position of subservience. Kyle cocked a look sideways at it. "Shut up, Gabriel."
The apparition just kept walking, muttering the same thing. Same as it always does.
The black stag stopped running around him, and came to a stop, it's haunches tight.
Above them, the stars swirled. He stood there, looking up into the night sky, his body shining with constellations of sweat. And in his burning state he looked at those stars, asking what the universe was trying to tell him.
"It's telling you to choose what you want to be."
His voice? Gabriel's voice? The voice of the stag?
"If you want to be a servant of the universe, to go with the grain of it, surrender yourself to that."
He argued back with the voice "Then I'd be nothing more than a Follower under another name, worshipping just another Seromine."
"Then make the odds work in your favor."
"If you push molecules of oxygen together, you can create gold. It's so unlikely that it may as well be alchemy, but it's there."
He looked at the stag. The eldritch creature turned it's tail, bouncing away. And he thought he understood.
What his fevered brain was telling him was that he had allowed himself to passively observe the universe for so long, to react to what tracks it had put him on and he was sick of that. Whether it was Stormm and Matthews stealing the World title, Grimm being named his contender without his input, Array deciding to start dating her co-star, he had taken a spectator position for too long. If he wanted to shape a world the way he wanted, he had to take action. He had taken a step down that path at the beginning of the Icemann Tournament. That itself was an ordered field, with many of it's front-runners on a seemingly preordained track. This then was where he tested his hand at pushing molecules into different orbits. Where Tyler Scott was knocked from competition, and Gabriel was put on a track where he would have to redeem himself by competing first against Stormm, and then maybe, just maybe, down the line, Seromine. In the madness of fever, he finally saw the underpinnings of it all, and he realized it wasn't out of character for him to want this. It was him taking his first steps out of being just a stander-by in his fate for the first time since he'd claimed the title.
The burning in his head subsided, somewhat. He blinked, and the ghost walk was gone, the black stag was gone, and there he was, half-naked and sweaty in the middle of a two-lane stretch of country blacktop. The lights in his eyes were just headlights. He shielded his eyes with the flat of his hand as a door slammed.
"Sir, do you know where you are?" An officer wearing a green uniform called over to him.
Panting, dehydrated and disoriented, he had to admit he did not. "What day is it?"
He saw the officer lower his hand from his gun as he approached. "Sir, you are about 5 miles outside of Acton. Do you know your name? Where are your clothes?"
He wiped the sweat off his upper lip, squinting in confusion. Acton was at least an hour away from home. He thought of the headaches, and the lost time, and a chill grip of panic squeezed his gut. He tamped it down, trying to present as normal a front as he could for the Park ranger kid. He could bullshit it about sleepwalking from home, but not 30 miles worth... He held his hands up in supplication. "What day is it?"
"It's Sunday, sir..."
He nodded. That was a start.
It took a few more minutes of uncomfortable conversation with the ranger before he got around to being offered a ride. In the passenger side of the cab, he looked at the ranger's cell phone blankly. Sunday. Day before he had to go to work, and he was missing a big chunk of time. His conversation with the universe aside, he was a little bit worried about the missing time and the burning in his head, and the walk in bare feet miles from home. He dialed Krista, getting the beep of her machine.
"Krista... hey. Those headaches I was telling you about... it's something else. Look... I'm missing time now. I think we need to do the MRI like you were talking about. Just call me back in an hour, will you?"
He handed the ranger back his phone with a silent look of thanks, and he looked pensively out the window. He began questioning everything that happened, wondering if his brain wasn't just finally breaking. Was it the universe talking to him in riddles tonight, or just an overcooked and fracturing brain talking to itself in tones it wanted to hear? Was it the one, or the other?
Certainly his thoughts about taking control were resonant, and relevant to him, coming from himself or not. But if he thought of the universe giving him advice, when you got down to it, wasn't he really no better than Gabriel, mouthing off about how all the attention in the world should be given to his Lord, only his Lord? He grimaced into his reflection, refuting that as not satisfying. He did not worship the universe, or consider it's laws absolute. He thought again, that he had begun doing what he was doing to exert control. Control was a thing that Gabriel would never, and could never give himself. He couldn't even assert himself to go against his master's will. That was partly what the impetus for intervening with Gabriel specifically was for. Left to his own devices Gabriel could not have beaten Tyler Scott. Scott was a hungry young blade, apt to prove himself. Gabriel is just a washed out, pathetic also ran, still running in the same circle as always. Want to be successful, can't get too successful or it'll displease my Lord. Want to win tournament, can't win tournament against my Lord.
And for crying out loud. How many times are we going to hear him talk about how Rick Majors overdosed, died, was a wasted life until he was reborn as Gabriel.
Intervening in that had been trying to set a thermodynamic miracle in motion, forcing Gabriel into a position where for once he would have to cut the shit and finally stand up for himself. The odds on that were so astronomical that the payout for it would have been rich. But in every day terms, day to day? Gabriel remained the same. He stood less than no chance of achieving any measure of success until he fought against the chains of Seromine. And yet here he stood, as always, framing their conflict in terms of "Kyle Shane disrespected my Lord, took attention away from him." It was asinine. It painted Rick Majors as a servile toady. And that was why at the end of the day Gabriel had such little success against him, because in reflection, with tonight's events in his mind it was clearer to him that he was the type of person that would at least try to go against what the universe wanted.
A dark, sickly thought prickled at the base of his skull, coming from some lizard brain, and he asked the ranger, "Hey, can I see your phone again?" The kid, moon-eyed and innocent from the driver's seat, looked at him and handed it over, eager as a puppy.
The universe listened silently as he dialed Array's number from the unfamiliar phone, and he set his lip. Rubbing the forehead which had begun to pulse and burn again, but his only thought was of trying again to force molecules into the same orbit.
As the ranger's truck rattled on down the road into town, across the asphalt, a coal black eldritch stag hopped and leapt, before disappearing into the brush.
