Page 8 of A Love of Wrath and Rapture

Can there even be any means of freedom for me?

I cannot know that my thoughts are real—that my memories are real. I feel myself eroding away with the imaginary elements, fading into the dull gray soup that my mind ponders over. Perhaps I’m another illusion, wandering an existence with no meaning.

The wind blows more violently.

I can hear the rush of a river that isn’t there. The strong current unsettles fish, taking them warily downstream.

“Xeros, you flatter me far too much. You know my heart belongs to?—”

I turn my head to see a flicker of Dila, who vanishes and then reappears behind me as my eyes struggle to follow her. She appears somehow ethereal, but she’s wearing a strange expression, as though she’s concentrating on something. I still enjoy the way her nose twitches when she tries to focus, though it’s all a bastardization of reality.

“That’s not what she said last time,” I muse to myself, slightly disturbed by the revelation.

None of this happened. It’s all a concerted attempt to bind me forever—to trick me into accepting my prison.

But I have to wonder if the illusion is breaking before my eyes, or if this is a more intentional design of my captors.

A mirror image of her appears behind me simultaneously, and now they’re both speaking at once, but saying different things. My head darts from one reflection to the other, though I wish I could tune both out entirely.

Then two more duplicates appear by my side, their words now dissonant to me.

Doubling still, now there are eight copies, an abomination of an attempt to recreate a distant memory.

If the dark elves aimed to breed insanity in me, they might be succeeding. Around me, the copies of Dila all speak at once, saying contradictory things in similar ways. It’s as if I’m seeing different versions of histories that never happened to me, entertaining fantasies and nightmares all at once.

I close my eyes to try to make sense of the noise. Then I realize that the lapses in their words form a new but familiar meaning.

Okta delima propo, vilenci abrada. Porti fre ciso, mileni litumi, librateri al vrida!

Their voices have changed. They no longer sound like Dila, but an entirely different voice I know I’ve never heard, but which clings to my memory as though familiar.

“It’s the chant,” I say aloud, feeling the first drops of rain on my face. “The chant nobody will ever speak aloud.”

But I shouldn’t be feeling anything at all. I haven’t felt anything in decades, or centuries, or even millennia.

I open my eyes, seeing that the bright, sunny sky has turned dark and cloudy.

I am alone again. But the wind is almost tornadic, the trees nearly uprooting themselves before my eyes. I could fret for my being, but I know that I am bound and safe, subject only to my own mental anguish.

Seeing a bright light, I crouch out of the way, hearing an almost deafening crash mere feet from me.

I look up at the dim gray sky, still alarmed that the droplets of rain fall upon my onyx skin.

“You missed,” I say, wishing whatever force is causing this chaos would just finally strike me down. Then I would have peace of mind. Then, I might join an afterlife greater than this shell of an existence.

Flickers of Astreldi I used to know appear before my eyes, as I walk forward through the stormy forest, indifferent to my own survival but unnerved by the chaos. My clawed talons dig into the soil, and I realize that I can feel the moisture upon my feet.

“But how?”

That’s when another flash of lightning nearly strikes me.

Yet this time, I’m not blinded, and realization tugs somewhere at the corners of my mind. I can feel myself adjusting to a new reality against my will.

I realize that the ground beneath me is being pulled apart and that the thunder is not thunder at all, but the unsettled earth trying to swallow me whole.

I’m not going to resist.

I can only hope that when I let it take me, it won’t bring me back to this accursed dreamscape. A faint hope lingers in me that this is my release - that in this prison, I’m finally being allowed to die.

---