New Skin

 

He woke.

Or rather... he came to some point of vague self awareness
where previously none had existed.

There was warmth.

 

Tom floated somewhere in the nowhere. There was no
sight... no sound...no sensation at all, with the exception of the
all-pervasive comforting warmth.

He couldn’t quite remember...anything really. It was rather mysterious – wondrous even! For no
real reason he found himself feeling quite positively about his situation. He
wasn’t sure quite who or where or what he was but it was ‘pleasant’ even so.

 

He had the oddest feeling that he was not alone. Someone
or something was with him – was close by, watching and protecting him – almost
as if he were held in an intangible embrace. Faint uncertain concepts flitted
through the unreeled cloud of his mind. They were mere words without the depth
of understanding and context but they felt familiar.

he. me.  he.  me.. green.. pretty

He let them flow away. Everything drifted. He could not
hold on to it.

 

Faintly.. as if from far away, there was ...something. If
not the sound, then the garbled half-memory of sound.

Without form, he perceived the merest vibration transitioning from one medium
to another.. The iterations meant nothing and he did not care what was said.

Vaguely he had the impression of emotions.. fear and panic.. urgency.. and also
anger and frustration..

And then with a sudden hissing flash he was in torment! Lines of frozen fire
were tearing him apart, rending his material asunder.

There was no source to the pain.. no rhyme or reason. He felt cold! A cold that was more than the mere
absence of heat. Temperature had as little meaning as direction in this place. This was a deeper cold –
cold only because the mind could find no other term to capture it.

Cold.. death.. silence.. entropy...division. Wider than
worlds – sorrow!

 

.

He screamed without a voice.. writhed without flesh...

Had he possessed a coherent mind, he would have lost it as
the excruciating agony went on without respite, seeming to grow ever worse.

...

......

 

When the pain stopped, it was as if it had never been
there.. There was no lingering afterache.. no memory
of the sensation.

 

The warmth in the wake of the pain seemed...more..though.
Closer..

It was... It was a feeling he couldn’t put name to – a
feeling he had never had before.

It jarred janglingly with the
disembodied emotions accompanying the garbled not-sounds from without.

There was horror there; shock, regret and fear

.

He tried to turn away from those perceptions and focus on
the soft comforting glow of the warmth.

It was very nearly surrounding him now..

Surrounding and penetrating ever deeper.. there was barely
any sense of ‘near’ or ‘outside’ to it now..

...he was within it.      

....He was part of it.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

Author
note.

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