Re: quiet home garden: alyssa & damian
[Al Gol lineage stretched back to the dawn of time. It stood from primordial soup on shaky legs and only a sliver of sentience. It bled forward and up, into the black belly of the sky, where its seed spread in insemination. A stellar system was born pulsating. The Demon Star, an omen of violence and extreme misfortune. Back on earth, descendants, cosmically tied to forefathers, carried out the duty of destruction. This was Damian's heritage. His mantle and reservoir of power both. As the sounds in his brain, boiling there, intensified beyond the threshold of sanity and understanding—the nails on the chalkboard—this is the mire into which Alyssa would sink.
He heard her. Among the cacophony, in a voice that felt like gentle touch—only recently known by Damian—and in syllables long dormant. 'You're just like me.' He peered at this woman, or he would have. In his mind's eye, he simply envisioned her. She was monstrous there, with a hole bored into her skull from whence brains dripped gelatinous in the jam of viscera. He would have smiled at her, if he could have. He had never shared camaraderie with anyone.—The world shivered and split. Two realities played out, as a scene in overexposure on silver film. He did feel the black blades of grass against his palms, but too, he was enveloped in a cascading, cosmic coldness, then born before beauty. And it was truly beautiful. Even as the concept of 'beauty' snapped in half in his mind, he knew, still, this was breathtaking. (Perhaps it was only that he could not breathe here.)
The minuscule atoms he had seen moments before charged, shook, and popped into planets as a child's marbles on infinite black floor. The man, God, creature, being, concept overhead was watching over them, and even his calamity was familiar to Damian. The edges of the man's mind were beginning to peel away, uprooted by sheer force, but he did not seem to notice. If he was unraveling, it did not occur to him. Both mutable and rigid at once, he was a host of contradictions, and this did not change that. His mind was weak and invariably strong. Madness coiled within him already, a seed not yet unfurled, but long ago planted. Alyssa was the downpour, and she came with blood.
Damian felt it, on his face. Then, he tasted it on his tongue. Then, he blinked and the garden existed in an overlay of some far away jumble of life and death and cosmos. It dimmed, it dimmed. He released Alyssa's thumb from his lips, forgetting the sound of his own laugh as it left him.] It must be so, [was his agreement. War did not worry him. It was his destiny.—He looked around, his brain precarious on stem and thoughts reeled, rupturing. It was as if he had an understanding he had not known possible and it filled him. He pressed his palms together, fingers lacing with nearly enough violence to break bones.] Shall we begin?