Xavier Cross struggled to open his eyes fully.
He flitted his eyelids in protestation against the kind of bilious flat light that had always repulsed him.
He felt the compulsion to raise a hand to his eyes to scratch and to calm them, but he found that he could move neither his hands nor his arms.
All around him he could hear animals breathing… panting… craving.
His heart began to pound and an anxiety that bordered on terror began to constrict his chest.
He could feel the space around him writhing languidly and expressing emptiness from tiny fissures in its fabric.
Inasmuch, as he was able to raise neither his hands nor his arms, he frantically blinked his eyes in an attempt to better discern the dark, angular shapes that he perceived peering down at him from above.
It was difficult to breathe.
He craned his head unto the static sky, wondering when and why the dark shapes looming above him seemed to have come closer.
The shapes were other people.
He could hear their voices…
Their laughter.
Proof of their disdain for him and anyone else who might have aspired toward the realization of an exquisite dream of which he had caught a fleeting glimpse when he had first closed his eyes.
No measure of reasonable, bearable light would sustain itself on that landscape.
Bitter tears filled his eyes but would not fall.
The space writhing around him was not space, at all.
He was surrounded by bodies.
Frozen, fading bodies.
Hastening unto death’s threshold.
Except for him.
He was consigned to remain…
Here.
Wherever it is we are.
He could smell the decomposition of the dream.
The onset of dire reality.
Of realism rendered by realists too mired in practicality to allow for any trace of magic in the world to disrupt the cycle of obedience to the rules of humankind.
The dark shapes above had come just enough into focus for Cross to have understood that they were soldiers.
They were soldiers on one side of a conflict, when clearly… he and the other bodies around him were on the other side of it.
Whatever that conflict was.
Whatever ideas or beliefs a person can have to get one’s self shot and tossed into a mass grave in some pale, obscured place.
It occurred to him that he could not move because he had been tightly stitched into a cloth sack.
There was no way out.
He began to writhe along with the rest.
Soon he was moving in unison with countless bodies that had once been filled with life, but had become as cold, dead hosts.
They writhed as if in the rendering of a belated complaint against the very nature of the world.
He felt the compulsion to close his eyes forever and to give in to the truth of things…
The reality of the way things…
Are…
No matter how sickening.
“It’s just who we are,” some voice risen on a gasp of sulphur muttered in his head.
“It’s just what we are.”
And then…
As if he were being called back by something…
Other…
Called back from an abstraction in which the dull but persistent intravenous induction of nausea and acceptance scraped like a needle at his epidermis so as to finally penetrate it and reach the marrow…
He awakened.
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