Endless Iteration

I am still in this iteration.

It does not end.

It will not end.

My beloved found someone else here.  They are married.  They have had children.

My iteration here found someone else here.  Someone imperfect.  Not my beloved.  They married.  They bred.

I cannot even usurp this iteration.  I do no know this one's life.  I do not know anything about it.  This iteration has lived and loved and existed and it is not me.  Not recognizable as me.  I could not take that life. I would not know what to do with it if I did.

I see none of the signs.  The signs are not here.  This place is not going to be consumed, not within my lifetime.  I can feel that this is the case.  I cannot even enact my hastily-thought plan and end it all for everyone.  Perhaps that is what caused the Young Master to strand me here.  Perhaps, he was afraid of what I might do.  Or perhaps I am finally what he always wanted me to be.

It does not matter anymore.  I am truly alone now.  A stranger has lived my life.  I am nothing, here.  Perhaps, before, I was an extra piece, but at least I still belonged on the board.  If I was a pawn, or a checker, or a marble, I was as the others.

Now, I am a pawn on a checkerboard.  I do not belong in this game, and no amount of forcing and killing will make me fit.

I am, truly and forever, completely superfluous.

Which is, on reflection, exactly what I was meant to be.  Can the Young Master actually see this far?  Did he know this was coming?  Has this been what he has been preparing me for all along?

I do not know what to do.  I have tried to end it, but my switchblade freezes.  I hang myself, and the rope snaps, having been frozen brittle and useless.  I jump from a tall building, and hit a snowbank somehow deep and fluffy enough to stop me, even at speeds that would have been fatal on impact with water.  Cars hit a patch of ice and swerve  to miss me.

I have even been robbed the oblivion of the Quiet, save, perhaps, the ever growing one where one, in a time I am even know finding harder and harder to recall, my heart used to be.

A Discovery

I found myself somewhere I was not supposed to be.

It was a City, vast and empty and quiet, and, somehow, aware.  Somehow malevolent.  How I found my way there is unimportant.

The Young Master discovered me, however.  He chided the City, remarking that it was not fair to take his toys from him like that.

He separated me from the City, returned me to this doomed world.  He sang a little rhyme as he went:

"The slithery dee, he came out of the sea

He ate all the others, but he didn't eat me.

The slithery dee, he came out of the sea

He ate all the others, but he didn't eat..."

He trailed off, and once again, I was here, away from him--or, rather, as away as I ever can be, awaiting silence.

But in my reflection, I wonder.

Are these beings separate from the unmaking I have witnessed?  Do they persist past it, or is each Young Master I encounter a new Iteration, each with the same cruel love for my bottomless loneliness?  Is there only one?  Or are there many?

If it is the same, what would happen if one was devoured by the Quiet?

And then I wondered further:  the City is vast and unnatural.  Is it infinite?

If it is, what would happen if the Quiet claimed it?

Naturally, this depends on whether there is one City, or a new one for each Iteration.

If there are many Cities, and they are all infinite, then the answer is it gets unmade as everything else does, with no fanfare.  No special attention, or, perhaps, they are all being devoured, forever, as we speak.  An infinite abyss consuming an infinite number of infinite Cities for all eternity.

But if there is but one, one vast, empty City for all realities...

I wonder what would happen.

I'm So Lonely

I am sitting here with my children's blood on my hands and I'm wondering why.

Why do I keep doing this?  What am I accomplishing with this course of action?  Why will he not just let this end?  I wish this would end.  I wish I would not be spared.  I would give anything for oblivion.

I cannot keep doing this...but I cannot end it.  For some reason, I put the gun down.  I do not swallow the poison.  I do not press down with the knife.

What is stopping me?  Why do I continue this endless cycle of death?  Of mercy killing and coveting a life I can never return to?

Why must I be so lonely?

Quiet

Sometimes I allow myself to forget what it is like.

It is beautiful, in a sense.  The nothingness, deeper than anything we can know.  Wider than anything we can comprehend.  Blacker than black.  A void so deep it lacks even emptiness.  The truest silence, an overbearing, overwhelming, cacophonous Quiet.

First go the stars,  the planets.  Then goes the moon, right as the world watches, uncomprehending.

Then, the world is slowly eaten away, and one can see the frayed edges of reality tear and unravel into the ravening maw of nothingness.  People flee in terror, or freeze in horror, or throw themselves in with despair.

Ravening maw does not do it justice.  It simply stops being.  To look into nothingness...it is what I see when I close my eyes.  What I see when I dream.  

Sometimes, I prepare myself.  I say to myself, "This time, I will just allow myself to be consumed."   But even if I charge the hole in reality, it will not let me go.

Because the Young Master is not yet finished with me.

So I find the iteration shifted, and once again, I am alone.

The only person left out of countless universes, once more, I find myself the leftover piece in a puzzle I do not belong to, the superfluous component to a machine that runs without me.  An unwilling herald, sent not to prepare the world for it's coming, but to mourn the countless worlds already lost, spurred forward by an uncaring child for whom my despair is the sweetest confection.

A Breakthrough Of Sorts

Today was, in some respects, a victory, and in other respects a defeat.

This was the first iteration in which I have not attempted a usurpation in some time.

On one, very valid hand, this represents a key point in which I have not succumbed to my usual melancholy and done something extremely rash and pointless.

On the other, equally valid hand, this shows that I have given up.  I have accepted the facts for what they are, and have not violently denied another what I so crave in order to grant myself scants weeks, days, or perhaps even hours of comfort from a doom that I know recognize I can never truly avoid.

Which I suspect is exactly the point.  Young Master Vinton would not have it any other way, I would presume.

I shall endeavor to see what can be made of this place regardless, however.  While I will not give into previous temptations, I will try to make what time I have here as fruitful as possible.

Before this place, too, falls into silence.