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What could go wrong when tinkering with the Akasha, you think? You’re so sure of yourself it’d be sickening from anyone else… Yet that brilliant intellect behind your bright teal eyes, that sense of truth in every word passing your chapped lips, it makes one trust you. That self confidence is inspiring, if deeply unnerving.
They would reluctantly follow you to the end of the world. They did follow you into that bet.
But despite how irrational it is, how that irrationality is the opposite of what you strive for… You’re too full of Dendro, of Wisdom, of your Archon’s favor. It saturates your being and your every endeavor. It was a given, then. That despite your thorough calculations, you would react poorly to that gamble. Rationality ends, where the divine starts.
The tinkering backfires. The Akasha doesn’t like it – it doesn’t do well with inputs of instability, with clever disruption. It’s a system, a homeostasis that bites its own tail. A single spark is enough to send it reeling. You should have known that, Alhaitham – to you who loves stability more than most, the Akasha is a kin soul.
And you happen to be right at the center of it all, a tasty mind for data sickened and corrupted to latch on. It seeps into your thoughts like a fire in the forest, like life trickling from a wound.
Your eyes are blood-red when they dart back up to take in the universe around you. Forgotten the bright blue-green full of pointed wonder. That window onto your soul is closed, out of business. Is there even a spirit left to see? Your companions loathe to admit they doubted it. Forgotten the composed Scribe and his calculated precision. It’s all harsh breaths and gnashing teeth, overwhelmed by the sheer mass of the Akasha deconstructing and reconstructing the world around you. It does so in a handful of seconds, in flashes of truth. The kaleidoscope is too fast to follow, but you can’t escape it – not when it keeps playing like a projection at the back of your eyelids.
It’s a queasy feeling – like seasickness ; like drowning. You’re suffocating, dragged under by thick molasses of thought. Your own teeth feel sharper than they really are as they catch on your lip. A last-ditch, oh-so-human attempt to get back that dearest of control over yourself. Instead the metallic flavor of blood graces your tastebuds and it’s exhilarating in its vileness, like a violent tingle coursing under the skin.
Yet all you should feel is disgust and terror at such spectacular failure, at the hands of unfathomable truth served directly into your brain, on a silver plate, with all due honors.
Everything out of place ; like the capsule took the worst of your days and increased the volume ad nauseam . Pushing you out of your own flesh. Pushing abysmal concepts into your veins to take your place, feeding off of your pride, absolving common sense.
The external world is lost to you, for a limbo of time. You’re lashing at people trying to move you, with hands bloodied from your own nails tearing into your palms. Like an upset stone ; like a once-peaceful river forcefully torn from its bed. Their voices echo yet your beloved words do not make sense – like they’re speaking all languages you know at once in an insulting jumble.
Your wrists are gently bound yet even those pinpricks of pain reverberate inside your brain. You scream and roar, in a manner so raw and unlike yourself everyone thinks you're gone forever – but a shell of a beast, perhaps deserving of a merciful end. Ethical qualms to entertain the Akademiya for years to come. You would be curious about the debate, if you were here to witness it.
For a time there’s nothing but the divine and the beating of your own heart. Which is the most deafening of the two, you cannot tell. Knowledge, awareness, consciousness . They elude you and hold onto you in equal parts. Growling at the intrusion, and embracing your presence like a child his genitor. Fighting for the scraps like starved animals, a pack among which you become your own beast, soul disputed and torn and put back together with no rhyme nor reason. Amidst it all, purpose is lost.
The more it continues, the less you hold on. It’s like fighting a stream of water – lukewarm and corrupted and vile, but water nonetheless, slipping between your fingers the more you attempt to reach for air. The unfamiliarity itself becomes familiar, in all its misplaced and ugly glory. Numbing. Sleeping while asleep, dreaming while awake. Endless skies weep for you, and you gaze at their tears in a daze.
Maybe the vain attempt to process bears fruit. Maybe learning to let go is the first step past the point of no return. Maybe it’s the first stride on the way back.
You wake up and see red like blood in a heavy veil over a confused universe.
Red is the color others see when they look at you.
Gone are the fine amazonite eyes, layered with deep carnelian. Bright rubies remain, spurning the world around them. The curiosity remains in them, somewhat – but it’s the kind that eats, that devours, that destroys what it touches. What you’ve become doesn’t have what it takes to be careful. If it had, you’d be thankful to be chained like a rabid animal.
The eyes blink and there’s a thousand words pressing behind the tongue, but the soul is silent and terrifyingly still, and no words make it past the lips. The swirls of meaning lose to bottomless oblivion, absorbed by it. Negated like a storm eats itself until it’s no more and only spiteful wisps remain, mourning the destruction they caused.
The turmoil spits you out.
Maybe it has eaten its fill.
Maybe the coarse flavor of your rationality doesn’t please its palate.
Maybe it is tired of hearing your friends' woeful cries.
Maybe your God wrangled the Akasha into submission through her sublime wit ; and weaved your dreams back into shared reality.
Whether you accept them back or not is your own bargain.
You wake up and see red.
It's the color of sunset eyes gazing at you, of cheeks blotched with anguish and fear. Recognition isn’t something you grasp yet. The world is unfathomable. It can wait.
Your eyes blink and close, welcoming the darkness.
Anything but that fire burning under your eyelids.
You wake up and see a beautiful ocean of teal, as in a welcoming and sunny dream.
It is blurry and soft and weirdly misplaced, as if you slept for a very, very long time.
There’s a few extremely peaceful moments – the most calm you’ve felt since childhood, perhaps. Floating in a hum of fading dendro, softly enticing you to wake from your cursed slumber.
Then reality comes back to you alongside your sense of self, and dawns the ominous feeling that something spectacularly outside the scope of your meticulous calculations occurred. Something entirely out of the comforting boundaries of logic. You breathe carefully, as if testing the waters. Only the unmistakable scent of Sumeru surrounds you, and you feel entirely too relieved though you don’t remember why. It’s uncharacteristically strange.
Your world is slightly tilted. Not enough to change your role in it, your perception of its graces. But enough to break the compass, leave it reeling. A miniscule imbalance with no way back. It’s probably okay. Refreshing even, like new clues in your quest of veracity.
You wake up and they see dull green and tired rust – they see your colors and you don’t bother to know if your own vision is blurry from your slumber, or if their eyes glimmer with tears. What an off-kilter sight, people being upset over you. They’re usually annoyed. No more, no less. Another thing that derailed from habit. Another thing to ponder.
But for now there are voices reaching your ears and you wince from the noise. The jumbled mess slowly morphs back into words, mostly a word that is your name.
“Al-Haitham! Al-Haitham, can you hear us?”
You’d never felt your tongue so heavy in your mouth nor your words so hard to pull from your brain.
“Yes,” an unused voice croaks. It’s yours, raspy and even lower than usual. So foreign to your own ears you already long for the familiar pressure of your earpieces atop your head. It would have to suffice. You close your eyes again to stop the world from spinning but the residual kaleidoscope behind your eyelids is no better, and somebody must understand your struggle because there’s some shuffling before the tension and noise in the room lowers sensibly.
“Haitham?”
“M’ere.” You’re used to no less than clarity, your slurred speech not quite on par, but enough in that it carries a message, at least. You are here, not that mess of deific molasses tangled into your brain like vines full of thorns. You . Not that mass of twisted knowledge, that better stay buried under the sands of the desert.
And if you sometimes weave in a tapestry of dreams more grand than your own experience could ever explain ; if glints of red shine in your eyes, if gentle but not quite controlled lights of dendro coil under the ceiling in your presence, before you sigh and forcefully pull it all back ; while your Archon chuckles kindly and assures you it’s alright – … it is still you.