91. Broadcast... Dream? Or is it a thought? No way to tell.
You walk through a river of trees that day, with the sky (burnt brown, like the tops of caverns and the--) all red and gold and streaked with blue, like sunset, or like dawn.
Inside a tide is rising, and the tide is (gold and blue, like the power that seeps from your skin when you don't push it down, and like--) red. Like blood. Like an ocean of blood that suffocates, that drowns, that swallows you up, and all there is to hold onto are those endless strips of black fleshy ribbons (things that tear and rend and shred), those endless ropes of white-silver hair (silken, soft. Wrapped between your fingers, falling in your eyes, blurring everything into watercolors and bleaching it into white, so you can't see anything but--).
(The sun is over you, burning gold like his eyes and like your eyes - like the thing inside you, trying to claw its way out.)
--and you feel it - the flood. It's rising inside you every day, drawing up like the ocean, pulled by the moon (and the moon is blood red, too, or wait! - now it's gold).
And you feel It. That creature without a name, and it's all claws, and tendrils and tentacles, curled up inside you, working their way through your veins and through your bones, and poking through your skin, surging under it, too. Yes. Yes, you have chains to bind it, you have cuffs with locks. But even now, those chains are dissolving - spun sugar in water, and you--
(Your heart aches and empties and burns, and you're all alone in a field of flowers and blood and snow, so you breathe. In. Out. In. Out. Hear your heart pounding out rhythms in your ear, feel it in your wrist, in your chest, like music, something primal and overpowering, and much, much stronger... than you.)
And you wonder how long you can keep it calm, and how long those flimsy shackles can contain the beast.
Inside a tide is rising, and the tide is (gold and blue, like the power that seeps from your skin when you don't push it down, and like--) red. Like blood. Like an ocean of blood that suffocates, that drowns, that swallows you up, and all there is to hold onto are those endless strips of black fleshy ribbons (things that tear and rend and shred), those endless ropes of white-silver hair (silken, soft. Wrapped between your fingers, falling in your eyes, blurring everything into watercolors and bleaching it into white, so you can't see anything but--).
(The sun is over you, burning gold like his eyes and like your eyes - like the thing inside you, trying to claw its way out.)
--and you feel it - the flood. It's rising inside you every day, drawing up like the ocean, pulled by the moon (and the moon is blood red, too, or wait! - now it's gold).
And you feel It. That creature without a name, and it's all claws, and tendrils and tentacles, curled up inside you, working their way through your veins and through your bones, and poking through your skin, surging under it, too. Yes. Yes, you have chains to bind it, you have cuffs with locks. But even now, those chains are dissolving - spun sugar in water, and you--
(Your heart aches and empties and burns, and you're all alone in a field of flowers and blood and snow, so you breathe. In. Out. In. Out. Hear your heart pounding out rhythms in your ear, feel it in your wrist, in your chest, like music, something primal and overpowering, and much, much stronger... than you.)
And you wonder how long you can keep it calm, and how long those flimsy shackles can contain the beast.