Sins of the Reaper - 10

My breathing eventually slowing, my awareness of the ground beneath my reclining flesh began to dissipate, and I finally drifted again to sleep.

Just as Orpheus lost Eurydice – body and soul – I lost both Bea and Lilly. But no amount of longing in the light of day could restore either. Not even in my dreams. In the whole of the many hours slept I failed to conjure either of the women I had once loved.

Instead, I wandered alone, my feet growing heavy as I struggled to continue my march to destinations unknown – like a sleepwalker passing through a dimension where even the sleeper is too weary to dream. Eventually I lay down in utter exhaustion and fell asleep to dream within a dream.

Within the helpless immobilization that followed, I watched through shuddered lids a woman with enormous wings sail slowly above my reclining figure, her skin as white as hoarfrost, her eyes in contrast as blue as a cloudless summer day.

An audible voice caused me to sit up with a frightened start, the grassy place where I earlier reclined transformed to a rock shelf overlooking a deep and misty chasm. An ethereal song floated sunnily overhead, its notes infused with the power and purity of the cardinal’s song in spring and yet fragile as the thrush in the silent hush of the deep wood. It was unspeakably beautiful.

Lifting my head, I noticed a shadowy figure crouching at a green wood’s edge, the pigment in her skin mimicking the dappled surrounding leaves. Save for her bright eyes she was almost invisible.

But once my eyes connected with hers, she poised as if to dash away, the air suddenly filled with laughter and light, a flush of warmth filling my chest as I experienced a moment of profound and elemental connection to my surroundings. As she stood erect the illusion of vegetable skin revealed itself as water rather than flesh, the camouflage of the bushy foliage behind her no longer disguising her bodily composition.

A sudden gust of wind that rustled the leaves on the trees lifted her bodily into the air, her arms and lips beckoning as she floated above me, a mystical magic drawing me upward into her embrace, her eyes, like bright green gems, blinking with terrible magic.

Pressing her lips onto mine, I was overcome by an impossible desire to merge liquid with flesh, her watery body conforming to my outward contours, beginning to surround and engulf me. But before I disappeared into her liquid depths she pulled back her face from mine, her eyes staring with utter frankness into my own. “What would you give,” she suddenly demanded, “to be fully alive?”

Surrendering myself completely to my desire, I tightly wrapped my arms around her glistening form as she tried to pull away, the pressure of my embrace bursting the viscous membrane sustaining the sensuous illusion and causing the now formless liquid to crash onto the stone as I fell to the earth in shock and surprise, the water racing across the ledge before cascading into the chasm.

But as I bent over the abyss that claimed her, the wind swirled joyfully past me and into the heavens, his roaring voice commanding a billion fresh droplets from the clouds above, reforming in an instant her emerald figure. Laughing with surprise, I playfully skipped across the short expanse that now separated us as she leapt merrily into the arms of the wind, her bubbling voice all the while taunting my feeble efforts, “What would you give . . . to be wise? What would you give . . . to be just? What would you give . . . to be free?”

With each laughing “What would you give?” my desire to wrest her from the rollicking wind drove me to chase her with such frenzied abandon that I forgot for a moment my fear of the cavernous emptiness below.

But landing at the cliff’s edge and whirling violently to confront me, the sudden anger in her expression brought me to a stumbling halt, “Time to choose,” she demanded, her hand gesturing violently into the billowing mists and motioning for me to follow she turned and leapt into the updraft driving out of the chasm, her sapphire beauty ascending briefly into the sky above as I raced across the wet stone and into the airy emptiness above the dark expanse, stretching my arms outward for a second embrace. But as my hands slipped around her waist she exploded in a millisecond of radiant glory, a myriad droplets floating away upon the wind’s back, a faint “What will you give?” barely reaching my ears as I fell backward with a stifled cry of fear.

The fall emptied my chest of breath as if it could really kill me even in my dream, the sense of urgency to awaken from it of greater import than merely dispelling the terror of the imagined fall. I have often wondered if I might one day experience a taste of the true death in a dream, my body lying broken on the dreamlike earth as a bright light beckoned or my thoughts disappearing into oblivion. Does the fear of the dissolution of self cause me to awaken or occult terror? With so little prospect of future happiness, why should I fear death at all?

But this time was different. I felt the same terrified powerlessness always experienced in falling dreams and yet I did not wake. I felt a malevolence drawing me downward as I rocketed into the misty abyss and yet I did not wake. I felt death rising with the updraft to meet me and yet I did not wake.

As my body struck the water at the bottom of the abyss the force of the fall knocked the wind from my lungs even as my still plunging body descended into its depths. The further that I sank the darker the surrounding water became until light was utterly absent. When I finally hit bottom I began to merge bodily with the surrounding mud, my consciousness retreating . . . scattering . . . drowning in a terrifying baptism of water and earth, one self sacrificed in order to resurrect another – much older self.

As if conceived in darkness, the flesh of this ancient self felt heavy with anger and grief, as if a storehouse of memories my mind could not bear alone, the viscosity of the amniotic fluid surrounding me keeping me from emerging from the muddy, surrounding womb. I struggled for seeming hours within the watery muck, but without hard earth beneath my feet or something or someone within the reach of my arms it felt that I might never see the light of day. Finally, my head broke the surface of the water and I crawled hand over hand through the shallows.

As I rested in exhaustion, the sky began to darken, the ghostly voices from my forgotten past returning as they always return, some shouting with deep throaty anger, others weeping with inconsolable grief, the weight of their pain bearing down on my shoulders as if a fleshly affliction rather than an emotional one.

But weakly pressing myself to my knees I saw people approaching through the surrounding fields – thousands of them, their silent purpose and solemn expressions strangely affecting. Perhaps they too had seen the singer in the arms of the wind and had come with ritual offerings. But the fingers they began to point were not at the sky where she had earlier appeared. More and more it appeared that their destination was me.

The thought of unwelcome attention awakened an unexpected fear, a hard place in my rib cage causing my chest cavity to swell as my torso distended and my shoulders hunched under unexpected weight. I wanted to run away but my body seemed to move of its own accord toward the approaching people rather than retreating. My arms and legs grew swollen as elephant limbs as I begin to move on all fours, a terrible burning sensation building in the stoop of my now massive back, my enormous legs causing the ground to tremble as they churned sluggishly through the waters toward the shore where the pilgrims were now attentively gathered.

The man leading the multitudes cried out with great emotion “Who is like unto the beast, and who is able to make war with him?” Turning to face the people crowding restlessly around him he pointed to my head as he yelled, “Behold the fatal wound that was healed!”

“Who is like unto the beast?” ten thousand voices boomed as I looked on in horror, leathery wings bursting violently through muscle and flesh and stretching themselves powerfully above my stooped and scaly body. But as the multitudes bowed in worship I shook my head in terrified dismay, my wings now large enough to flap in an effort to lift my monstrous form from the earth and escape into the darkened skies above. Opening my mouth I tried to speak, to tell the people I am not a beast as a terrified roar emerged from my mighty jaws.

The prophet ecstatically spread his arms as he cried again “Who is like unto the beast?” the multitudes echoing his call –

“Who is like unto the beast, and who is able to make war with him?”

The second time I tried to speak my heart filled with sudden rage, fire raining out of the skies at the sound of my command, flames filling the air with the smoke and stench of a thousand battlefields, the atmosphere shimmering with terror and death. Who is like unto the beast?” I roared, fire erupting from my maw as my feet stamped with terrible joy, the prophet careening through the fleeing multitudes like a human torch.

The slow and powerful beating of my wings fanned the flames devouring the surrounding fields like swarms of unearthly locusts as I danced drunkenly through the burning sacrifice of the multitudes, the savor of roasted flesh stoking rather than quenching my monstrous rage. But as the conflagration grew even I began to feel the effects of the heat as it penetrated my plated flesh, and I awoke slapping invisible flames on my arms and chest.

The power of the dream clung heavily to my psyche for almost an hour, my body trembling a little even now at the thought of it. I remember the winged woman formerly tattooed on my left arm and the dragon on my right with such clarity that I am tempted to believe it is a memory rather than a fanciful idea, a daydream empowered by a forgotten youth who’s flesh was once hale and true. Despair replies to my dream with such force that I helplessly bow my head in answer, a still and somehow foreign voice whispering “I am born of the flames and they of the dust – I am better than them.”