Death...and Rebirth

I stood there for a bit contemplating my current predicament before commenting again. “I need to find a way to co-opt this thing, to integrate it into myself, stop the outright fighting with it.”

“Wisdom sprouts forth from the barren soil at long last.”

I shook my head, looking up at the Tree, “You can’t even compliment me without a snipe, can you?”

I was greeted by silence, well actually by the random swaying and sighing of the leaves, with no discernible words coming forth to answer my last query. But I did sense a deep rumbling chuckle that came from deep inside the trunk.

I closed my eyes and took the quick route back to my body.

I opened my eyes to see myself standing in front of that mirror. I was naked, of course, and my skin still shone with beads of sweat. The black worm-like things continued to crawl along visibly within my skin. I had to resist the urge to scratch, since I knew it was solely in my head.

Instead, I spread my feet just slightly wider apart and bent at the knees just a little. I dropped my arms loosely to my side and drew a deep breath (again more for psychological reasons than any need to actually breathe) and rolled my shoulders. I was determined to ground and center and focus.

Whatever the thing inside me was, however, was having none of this attempt to calm my senses and center. I continued to feel flashes of pain and pleasure as well as flashes of burning heat in some spots and cold spots in others. I even felt the raising of imaginary hairs on the back of my neck.

But I continued to bring myself into focus, ignoring all of those wonderful feelings that had been lost to me for so long. I knew they were just an attempt by this thing to lure me into a false dependence on it. Instead, I focused on just one of the hundreds of little black threads burrowing through my skin trying to build a false web of neurons.

It took longer than I would have liked, but I finally grabbed one of those little buggers with my Will and forced it up into the palm of my left hand. It squirmed uncontrollably, but finally emerged through the skin and rolled into a little ball just like all those little pill bugs I had tortured in my (often) misguided youth.

As I focused on this single little speck, I could feel the hundreds of others literally explode into activity, trying every trick in their vast arsenal to distract me.

But I was having none of it. I remained focused on the tiny little critter in the palm of my hand. I could feel its desperation, its fear as it sensed its weakness.

Keeping enough attention on that one worm to keep it in place, I reached out with a smaller, but still considerable part of my Will and located another desperate worm, forced it up into my other palm, where it had a similar reaction once it emerged from my skin, rolling into a little ball.

Feeling my oats now, I reached deep down inside it myself with a sweeping sense of power, gathering up hundreds of the little buggers in a wave of euphoria, forcing the critters up from legs and down from my scalp and into my arms, until my palms became a seething mass of roiled, squirming worms that quickly began coalescing into larger and large worms by the sheer force of my Will.

Soon the two squirming masses of inky blackness that were my upturned palms were brought together to form one giant mass of darkness. I stared into the roiling dark ball of energy and could just make out images forming, including the face of that bitch, Ma Grendel, stare back at me briefly before disappearing again inside the mass.

Calmly, using every ounce of Will I had left, I sucked the entire ball of dark energy back inside myself and openned my entire Being to it, absorbing the mass of dark, chaotic energy like a thristy man drinking down a glass of cold water.

At that moment...

We both died again.

During that moment...

We were both reborn, not separately, but together.

In that moment...

Two became One.