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All That Lies Between Gods & Mice

part 1

The sound of snapping twigs and brush crunching underfoot filled the air as I scampered aimlessly through the seemingly endless forest. Trees came into view with barely enough time for me to pivot and turn as I continued my frantic flight through the thick and pervasive fog. As I bounded over a thick root protruding through the soil I did not feel the sensation of soft soil against my paws that I was anticipating at the end of my jump; my nimble leap became a clumsy fall as I continued to plummet, spinning head over tail as I flailed my arms and legs desperately looking to find purchase on anything solid.

I hit the ground with a loud THUMP. Though the wind was knocked from my lungs, I did not feel any pain, only the disorientation of sudden impact and pressure reverberating through my body. As I lay there, recovering from my daze, my heart began to steady and my mind began to calm. The hysteric fervor that had been carrying my paws forward had left me and I now lacked the strength to even so much as twitch a muscle. Slowly, I realized wasn’t sure what I had been running from, or which way I should be running for that matter…

Images came into my mind, and I could not tell if they were memories or visions. Then, suddenly, as if something had been forcefully snapped and locked into place, I realized that everything was wrong. This ebb and flow of unstable consciousness, the remembering and the forgetting… this eternal cycle… was a dream. Like the wheels in my old cage, I was stuck here running without purpose.

“My wheel…” I said aloud, as if I needed to feel myself say the word, hear it, feel it. “Wheil… Wehl… wheeeeel…” I played with that word on my tongue as I turned over the concept in my head, spinning it on its spoke and axle. As these noises, these words flooded my mind, feeling novel and familiar at the same time, and the more pieces came together deeper I fell into thought.

‘I was… a lab rat… no. mouse. I was a mouse. I was on the other side though….’ I remembered the underground laboratory. It seemed so long ago, although I felt as if it was a fresh and vivid memory. My mind ached as it contorted to try and replicate and mimic the smaller and simpler brain it used to inhabit. Even as a true mouse, I knew what I had observed there. Day after day there were many rats and mice kept in that lab, and I was one of the fortunate ones… “an excellent specimen.” I never knew what that meant, but those who were not “excellent specimens” were promptly moved to the “bad side” of the room. Where the rest of my litter and kin were kept, locked up near the many snakes that were caged alongside them. I had been fortunate though; I had made it to the “other side,” the good side. I pondered that for a moment with this new sense of clarity. I saw again in my mind the images of mice, just like me, being picked up cruelly by their tails, and dangled over the snakes. Those men reveled in torturing us as they teased their snakes with us… their food.

‘There was that… place…’ My simpler mind had never known the human word for it, nor any human words for that matter, but suddenly I knew how to think in these words, and what I was thinking of was a “maze.” I fell back into thought, ‘Right… the maze… what was it again? What was it that I…’

CRRRRHFFFF!!!

The ground shook violently. I quivered from the tip of my snout to the end of my tail. After the world steadied, I slowly crawled out of the pit I had fallen into. I peeked my head out of the hole and looked around. The fog had lifted and every tree around me was now felled. Even with the forest leveled to my feet, I could not see an end to it in any direction. My heart sank, knowing that there was never any end to this cut deeper than simply not knowing when it would end.

“It’s just a dream,” I said out loud. “It’s okay, this isn’t real.” As soon as I got those words out, intrusive thoughts rushed in. ‘Then why do I feel SO cold.’ I folded my arms, tucked in my chin, and hunched forward, trying to conserve warmth.

Don’t look.

My head snapped up. Those words were not mine… and while they did not feel like thoughts neither did my ears twitch to follow any sound. Was there a sound? ‘Don’t look up,’ I thought to myself… “Don’t look up…” I said out loud, as if I still did not understand the words. Curiosity crept down my neck like a cold, prickling sensation, urging my muscles to contract and turn my gaze upward despite the words that surrounded me. I began to turn my head towards the sky, but then my muscles locked and wouldn’t budge, as if my muscles themselves were frozen in terror.

‘Is this sleep paralysis? It’s just a dream, just look. Just turn your head!’ I shouted at myself in my head as I fought against my own muscles and pushed through the fear, turning my head a bit higher in each attempt until I finally locked eyes with the heavens.

Staring down at me were seven slits of light splitting through the sky like wounds in reality. They were arranged in a symmetrical pattern, with three pairs of horizontal slashes and one vertical slash above them. As I gazed into them, I felt as compelled to keep staring as I had felt hesitant to look in the first place. The light that poured through the lacerations in the cosmos above held a sort of texture, a gradient—I could see the light originating from the center of each slit and moving out towards the edges like ripples in water. I tried to fixate on the center where the light began, and then the slits blinked. When they reopened deep black pupils were staring back at me.

I looked away in panic. Holding my head in my paws as I tried to comprehend what I was seeing. “It’s just a dream… It’s just a dream…”

Then… I FELT a sound. The waves of the sound rippled through my fur. My ears tingled. My mind panged … but I didn’t HEAR anything… then it came again, bypassing my ears and drilling straight into my mind. It started as a brief, high-pitched ringing in my ears that dissipated with a blip ; then a longer noise like stone and metal grinding together followed, punctuated with an intense explosion that left a ringing in my ears, leaving me writhing in agony. I folded my ears down over themselves and held them closed tightly with my paws, but it did nothing to ease my pain. The sound cut straight through to my brain. I could do nothing but endure until the ringing pain subsided.

When my mind steadied, I slowly let go of my ears, listening for what might come next, not knowing what sound was coming. After a moment there was a rustling, like a whisper. The noise was less intense and seemed to be coming from every direction as opposed to nowhere. My ears twitched every which way, trying to catch the faint noises and put them together. After a while, I noticed a repeating pattern of unfamiliar, but very distinct syllables. Vi’eh… yah… liu-h… iru… r’rn… And then I heard silence. Not that it was silent… I heard silence… My ears no longer rang and not even my breath made a sound. I tried to speak but my voice could not pierce the deafening and commanding quietness around me; it was as if the quietness had become manifest; it was as if the absence of sound had its own form and took the place of a spoken word; as if someone else far louder, more powerful was screaming in an earsplitting silence that drowned out all other noise, forbidding any sound to exist. I felt as if the air was being pulled from my very lungs, suffocating in the stillness.

When the hushing presence finally passed, a voice spoke, though like the sounds from before it did not hit my ears or tingle my tympanic membranes… but seemed to emanate directly into my brain. It was as if I were hearing the thoughts of another entity. It felt no different than an intrusive thought, but I knew it wasn’t mine. It was truly an intruding thought. I looked around, unsure of what was happening around me or even within my own mind.

“I-is someone out there?!” I finally squeaked.

The intrusive thought resurfaced again, more comprehensible this time, although it was still more of an impulse or a feeling. ‘What is this… the urge to jump…? To give in? To give up?’ I paused and tried to unravel the abstract jumble within, but I was cut off by the voice cracking and shouting again from somewhere both inside and outside of myself.

“RUN!”

Without an instant of delay, I was skittering off, switching from a bipedal sprint and a feral scamper on all fours as I leaped over the fallen trees and tread on uneven ground. There was only one thing on my mind: Keep Moving Forward. With each fallen tree a hurdle and every ditch a pit, I could only hope that my instincts would guide me to a clearing.

Time passed for me in a way that I could not comprehend. I was lost in the flow of my own thoughts, swallowed whole by fear. By the time I finally stopped again my mind had atrophied once more. I had no idea what I had regressed from, what I had forgotten. Pieces of me fell away like sand in an hourglass until all I could remember was that I had forgotten everything. I entered an endless era of frantic flight. All sense of self dissipated, the only thing that existed was putting my paws forward and pushing off the ground, over and over. No other thoughts could pierce the overwhelming dread that took hold of my soul—there was only “RUN!” Every aspect of me was consumed anew by a terror I could not understand. Finally, I was able to steady myself and find cover in a large depression in the ground. I again lay limp against the soft soil as I caught my breath and slowly remembered who I was for the umpteenth time.

‘Why am I here… where IS here?!’

I stood up and practiced walking with an even, bipedal gait, trying to find the right way to maneuver my tail as I struggled to balance myself without the forward momentum of a desperate sprint to keep myself upright. I tried to talk to myself out loud and assure myself that I was real, that all of this was real, as I tried to relearn how to be myself again and manually guide myself through simple motor planning, attempting to move my muscles without the rush of fear, without cortisol and adrenaline flooding my veins.

“I was a mouse. I am still a mouse? I’m more than a mouse… I am more. More. But what happened to make me more? Am I the same as when I was less? No, more is more… but I am still what I was when I was less… I’ve grown. And I’m stuck here… but WHERE IS HERE?!”

I clenched my hands into fists and tensed every muscle in my body. I pinched at my skin and slapped myself in the face. I licked the back of my hand and registered the salty taste of my own skin and took in several deep breaths through my nose as I tried to become keenly aware of every sensation my mind could notice.

“Okay, everything feels so real… But this… this place doesn’t make sense. Everything feels like a dream, with walls appearing in my mind, partitioning parts of myself… a fragmented consciousness where my ‘dream self’ forgets who they are and becomes engrossed in a story… a stark tale of grim horror… what exactly is my mind trying to tell me?!”

I looked around again and found a place in the pit I had been hiding in, where there was sturdy enough footing for my feet to find purchase and firmer soil for me to claw and dig into. I slowly scaled my way back up to higher ground until I could hoist myself out of the pit I had been hiding in.

“Shff!” I could not help but gasp in horror at what I saw. The trees were now standing tall once more, but rotted through. They were husks of their former selves with holes thoroughly perforating them, their insides oozing out from within. And though I had not noticed it, the ambient light around me had vanished. Although I could still see, there was no longer any light or shadow around me. I scanned my surroundings and my eyes were drawn to the large depression in the ground where I had just been hiding. It had such a specific form, and several long, thin depressions branched out from it. I walked around until I was standing on the opposite side of the giant imprint in the ground and then, suddenly, it clicked.

A cruel laugh emanated from deep above as if it were amused.

I looked around, but my ability to somehow still see in this darkness had instantly vanished, taken away as unceremoniously as it had been bestowed. I stood blinking in the blackest pitch, with no difference between eyes opened or closed. The heat drained from my body as well, leaving me shivering in the endless night.

“What’s wrong little mouse?” The voice finally manifested itself again, and it curdled my blood as soon as it hit my ears. “Are you done cowering in my clawprint?”

I stiffened and shivered, unable to respond, if I had anything in my bladder, I know it would have burst. I had never known such fear or felt so small in my entire existence, even as a mouse in a cage. Not even the sensation of being lifted by my tail had elicited such absolute panic within.

“Are you finally done running, my little morsel?” The voice spoke again after a long pause. “You were so talkative before, am I such poor company that you’d rather talk at yourself rather than with me? How insolent.”

As if at their word, the ground turned cold beneath my feet and crumbled away like corroded iron. I reached out desperately for anything to hold onto, but every hold of firm ground I could manage to grasp quickly turned to sand in my grip. The more I struggled, the faster I descended. Before long, I could feel nothing solid left to hold onto, as if the world itself had disappeared. I was drawn in and down as if caught in a riptide. Desperate for survival I kept reaching out, hoping to find something to hold on to until finally my fingers hooked around something. It was firm and taut like a rope but also felt squishy and soft in my tight grip. I tried to pull myself up, but there was no “up” to pull myself to. Whatever I was holding was all there was left of the world… it was the very last thread… Light erupted from below and I looked down to see the seven eyes of a massive beast and an endless expanse of teeth and ridges of a cavernous maw with a tongue that curled and coiled with a twisted playfulness.

“Why resist, little mouse?” a malicious voice said with a laugh. “There’s nothing left to go back to.”

I was too scared to speak. My mind was too overwhelmed to think. All I could do was tighten my grip and close my eyes, but I still saw them even when my eyelids touched. I could not look away. Every way I turned my head those eyes followed seamlessly. I could not tell if I was at the center or they were. “IT’S JUST A STUPID DREAM” I shouted.

The immense figure below laughed with an intensity that shook the very last thread of reality, it took everything I had to keep my grip firm.

“A dream, is it? Then why resist so fervently? Just surrender and wake up.”

‘Is… is that what I’m trying to tell myself? Is that what this dream is?’ I considered everything I knew and everything I didn’t know. I thought of every impossible fact of the place that had just crumbled around me. ‘This place CANNOT be real…’ I lifted my head, knowing not if I was currently staring up or down at the incredible monster before me. “Just surrender…” I said it out loud as I contemplated the thought. If this were indeed a dream, there was no other way it could end… and if it wasn’t… if this thing were real, it could just take me at any moment… If this wasn’t a dream then I was already dead, holding on to nothing.

I tensed and relaxed my arms. I flexed my fingers lightly without losing my grip. I took three deep breaths as I counted aloud… then three more… I lost track of how many times I attempted to psych myself up and prepare for the end. My nerves were frantic and I had truly lost my grip on reality… Or was about to… I did not know what was real anymore, or if any choice I could make would even matter… and at last I released my grasp and let go of the very last thread of my sanity, letting myself fall upwards, pulled towards the beast in abyss below and above.

My body hit their immense tongue, which began to curl around and envelope me. It writhed, wriggled, and coiled around my limbs as it strangled me in an unsettlingly pleasant warmth. Once I was in their maw I felt as though I was falling even faster than when I was before. The horizon of teeth that encircled above rushed down to meet the view beneath me until they clasped and disappeared overhead with a thunderous CLACK! The air was pushed from my lungs as I was crushed and pulled down deep into the belly of the beast, and as the walls of their viscera closed in around me, the monster shook with the sound of their own insidious laughter. It echoed in my head for as long as my mind held on to consciousness, until the desperation for escape finally faded.

Fear, stress, pain... every negative sensation dissipated, and were devoured from within. No joy nor pleasure rushed in their place, for those had been taken too… But I felt an unsettling calmness, a hauntingly serene release. The burdens of choice and consequence, of thought and volition dissolved and I succumbed completely to the sweetness of total surrender and descended into the heart of the darkness within until nothing of me remained.