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'The floor feels so cold.'
'The relentless creak, breaking its beat onto my head, over and over again.'
'I step up. I step down.'
'The floor is such a good friend. She always talks to me. Crooked with heat warps, blackened near the radiator. Every night I knew where Mamo was by sound alone. I knew how long she hovered in the kitchen, how quickly she walked to the door. . . knocking? Was there knocking when I was a baby?'
This floor said nothing back.
He moved his fingers along the wall. The stucco was smooth and cold. No marks. No thumbtacks. No pencil lines where someone might have charted growth, year over year.
Every step he took lacked a creak.
Only one panel, near his door. That was the only wood to make a sound.
'Upstairs made sounds. I remember that.'
Jesse ascended the brown stairs. In the entrance-way, a coat hung by the door. Heavy. Not his. He brushed the hem, gently. The fabric was too fine. It didn't smell like sweat or iron or the outside. No perfume, no grease.
He stepped down the stairs again. Nothing creaked. No matter how hard he stomped, the house was asleep.
The walls held breath in their plaster. The corners slouched. No creak.
He ran his fingers along the edge of the entertainment stand. The wood was polished smooth, unbroken, untouched. His old furniture had splinters. Paint chipped from years of closed-fist tantrums.
The house had none of that voice.
In the kitchen, he passed the sink. His clothes caught the light of that metal thing.
'The mirror in Mamo's room had a crack down the center. A fracture running from her mouth to her left eye. Glass was easy to come by. There were so many glass things. Why didn't she replace it?'
The kitchen was too clean. No clutter. No oil sheen on the stove. No chipped glass. No smell of garlic or vinegar.
He opened a drawer and closed it again.
He opened another.
Nothing. It was barely a mess in here. Just space laid to waste.
A mug, drying on the counter.
He lifted it in both hands.
He stared at it for a long time.
There was a mug at home, his real home, that had a cartoon bear printed on the side. The bear was holding a hammer. She drank cheap tea. Bitter leaves from some far-away store, boiled twice to stretch the bag.
He put the white mug back.
Wandering, and waiting by, he found a new book.
He sat down in front of 'M's shelf, taking out a new book. Every few hours, it'd be a new book, and he'd get a few pages through, and he'd put it down again.
This was a struggle for Jesse.
This book, it looked like a good read. The pages were dark with oils and wax stains. The spine had been chewed at the base, maybe by mice. The issue was, he couldn't just sit down and read.
He turned the page. The illustrations helped.
"In the old days before Earth, flowers sprouted on the surface of the world.
These flowers were the souls of what we would call, Gods.
More flowers spread through pollination, or Senso. Senso was currency to these Gods. They used it for all activites, and when they achieved enough, they would grow forms larger than redwood trees.
There was also another species born alongside these flowers, down in the Valley of ἶρις.
This species was known as the Monstraids. Monstraids were an early ancestor of humans.
The Goddess of the Moonflowers sailed down the winds to find these Monstraids. As time passed, she found a specific Monstraid whose name is lost to time. The Moonflower bore her a child, known as Absence.
Absence was an issue to the Gods. He was half-Monstraid and half-God, and they had no idea what to do with him. Another issue that came up was Absence's birth had led to Senso being introduced to the Monstraids, and they were frantically unsure of how to deal with it. After all, Senso was a Godly currency, and could not be handled by mortals.
In fear of more conflicts occuring, Absence ended his own life, and split himself in two."
The next drawing showed two bodies- one upside down, splitting at the waist, the other crawling out of its ribcage.
"His Godly heart fell to the earth, and the Monstraid people mistook this heart for a seed. They planted it, and it grew into the God Midas, the Reindeer King of the Sun. Midas would control the path of the orb in the sky, and would make sure that the Monstraids kept giving the Senso to the older Gods. If Senso was left in Monstraid hands, they would go insane. The sun was a way of extracting this Senso safely. Every day, he would make this path over their world."
A sunshiney man grinned with bronze muscles.
He flipped the page.
A man with no face knelt in a pool of silver. Antlers grew from the sockets of his skull.
"Absence's other half, his Monstraid half, would be cast into darkness. Once part of the light, Absence sought to brighten the dark. The rest of his body tumbled into the "unknown" part of the world. His intention was to serve as fertlilizer, so that life could be born here without the interference of Senso, or the Gods. This world would be his paradise, known as Humanity."
"But when Absence landed, he fell into a brook known as the River Histanai. Histanai was a nymph who, in mercy, turned him into water and absorbed his very essence."
"That river would constantly water the corpse of Absence, and grow into a different world than the one Midas wished for. This world would have a safer amount of Senso, but mainly, would be made of Love. Over time, Midas would be reincarnated throughout the cycle of the river Histanai, bringing a closeness with the Goddess again. The moonflower, his immortal mother, would call her godly form when Midas surfaced, bringing about the end of this cycle, and the start of the next."
He stared at it. He didn't remember the story like that
How did Mama explain this story?
Jesse sat on his bed, book in hand. His eyes wandered about, trying to recall.
"Long ago, before our species of humans existed, there was a flowerbed growing on the surface of the Earth.
Each flower sprouted into a being, a mystic-like person with thoughts and ideas of their own.
These thoughts and ideas bore the fruit of animals, humans, monsters, and other plants.
When these fruit grew taller, they began to produce Senso.
Senso was a sap-like substance that flew from a creature's Soul.
Creatures could not see nor concretely feel this sap, but what they could do, was transport it.
When these creatures produced Senso, they would give it to their forefathers and their brethren that lived on Mount Tan.
Mount Tan was impossible to climb for creatures lower than the flower-Gods.
However, my grandmother says that originally, Helianthus Midas, the Golden Flower, was a human who became the God of the Sun.
She said that this human becoming a God started a great war between the conservacioun Gods, and the magnanimitas Gods.
A long war began, and at the end of the war, Midas agreed to become human again, but so long as in his world below, Senso could no longer be sent to the conservacioun Gods.
The Magnanimatas Gods were happy with this proposal, and became sponsors of Midas' new world, our world."
This distinction between the stories troubled him.
He was isekai'd, so he supposes the world would be different, but this felt, a little too different.
In that lonely, lost state, Jesse laid his head down and fell asleep.
There was nothing more to do with all this loneliness.
There was no point to being awake any longer.
. . .
At every turn of his rest, Jesse felt controlled by outside forces.
It was so difficult to sleep.
Eventually sleep came, and he awoke in a new world. One he did not recognize.
A grey mountain in the distance with blue flames.
A gun barrel shooting missiles into the sky.
A green sign in the heavens. A white table. Blue eyes. Black dust. White voids.
Galaxies far away. Galaxies further away than he could ever imagine.
A grey eclipse. A red tube. Two birds singing. Dancing people. Interconnected hands.
A god of nascency. A god of flowers.
White flowers.
Red petals.
He stood before his God again.
Or, more accurately, he stood before himself, standing before his God.
He had no part to play in this dream.
An outline of himself.
An outline of himself was the protagonist here.
A black shape, an outline of his own body, barely recognizable, with a golden knife in hand.
Spools of chains coiled around this "him" he looked at. The ground was covered in these golden strings.
"He" leaned on top of a coffin, and on top of this closed coffin, his Goddess sat.
She looked as blank as ever, as emotionless as all could be.
In the sky above them all, a woman's face replaced the rising sun.
A woman with white fluffy hair, and her golden eyes.
Jesse himself walked towards this clone and his God.
In his arms, he carried another arm.
It was hard to realize at the time, but Jesse's clone was missing an arm. And so, Jesse approached this figure, and handed over this black, pulsating limb, knowing that this was his sole purpose.
The other Jesse took it with a disgruntled "harumf" and attached it back into place.
This version of himself, looked so miserable.
This solemn state of loss was clear in his eyes, and he could not look away from this woman, this Goddess.
This mess of skin and hair, this perfection amongst the human population.
The beautiful moonlight of golden eyes shone upon the isle they stood upon.
Jesse, our Jesse, looked around.
This place was an island.
An island of rotting waters, and a deadened sky. A world of waste and complicit space.
A world that rots beneath the dead and dying stars and golden lights of collapsing solar systems.
". . . Leave. You're innocent, here."
Jesse turned to his clone.
That voice, was his, but hardened. There was an infinity between the two of them.
"I'm a murderer. I don't think I can be seen as innocent," our Jesse grinned, putting out his finger guns with a wink of the eye.
"You aren't a murderer. Enjoy the life you have now. Take the losses and move on," the clone grumbled, fiddling with his newly attached arm.
Our Jesse shook his head.
"Not until I repent."
"Repentance is a sham. I'm damned for you. It's time you saved yourself, after an eternity of being saved."
"Save myself?"
The other Jesse looked over to ours. His left eye was missing, hollowed out in its skull. A rotating gear made up that space, clicking teeth orbiting around.
The other eye was red, a transplant of some kind, a glowing red eye that reminded Jesse of his God.
"Time is forever," the other Jesse said. "You will eventually be me, and I will eventually be you. The best thing you can do is enjoy what you have now, so I may enjoy it then."
The blood poured out of that open wound in the other Jesse's eye, falling to the floor in buckets.
Our Jesse held out a hand.
"Then, my gift to you, me of the past, and me of the future. My gift to you," he smiled wide, clenching tight his other fist. "Is to grant you this wake-up call. There is not a person in this world who I cannot save."
The other Jesse placed his hand on his head, groaning.
"You're an idiot. I've given so much for you, and all you do is hurt me."
"I'm sorry."
"Do you even remember our first meeting?" he asked, an irritation creeping through his voice.
Our Jesse had no such recollection of the event.
"This is our first meeting," our Jesse said.
The other Jesse shook his head. He pointed out to the God sitting next to us.
"This should be your 271st meeting with her. You are the next incarnation of you, and your Senso. You have made various choices, found various endings, and been eaten by the cycle 270 times."
"That creature. . . is the reason for all of this. The awareness of the cycle. . . human failure. Entropy. Death. Disillusionment."
"She is the red hole at the bottom of the Earth."
The other Jesse knelt in front of our Jesse.
"But. . . you and I have met a few times now. I thought you'd remember. . . this time, naively I did. I thought you'd remember me."
The other Jesse shuddered.
"Whatever. She did something 270 cycles ago, and broke apart herself in the process. This is only a piece of her. . . a card. But, I remember something."
The other Jesse fell down further. Our Jesse backed up to let him fall. The fake Jesse's hand climbed up to his own eye, covering that rotating gear of sight.
"Even I'm beginning to forget all of this. But, I remember something. . . why I'm doing all this. When these bodies pile up high enough, the cycle will end. The entropy will overcome the energy, and she will reconvene with herself, and we can end this false sustainment. We can. . . be a family, once more."
"That's the thing. . . Jesse. It feels wrong to call you by that name. Master, I should say."
Our Jesse stepped back again, looking down at his companion, fading into the dirt. He wanted to kneel down and help him up, but he knew that his clone wouldn't take that hand. After all, Jesse wouldn't take it himself.
"The usable energy in this universe is constantly decreasing," his clone said. "That's the point of harbors. Of Senso. The Gods use us to prolong their own existence. There was a man named Le'stat, who existed sometime 270 cycles ago. He had a dream to end this cycle, and allow entropy to take its course, without energy to redeem it."
"His idea, was that everything should end. The Gods would die, and all of this would disappear.
His actions progressed the cycle even further.
His actions permitted the waking of the God, Stasis. The World, as we call her."
"He was a fool. . . and I don't know what to make of the end of this. I don't know what to do know, except keep killing."
"Goodbye, master. I'll see you again one day, when the bodies pile higher than the Gods can reach."
And the other Jesse vanished into the dirt, melting into it, a pile of gray matter and slush that became the rocks they stood on.
Our Jesse walked forward.
He stepped before the Goddess.
She tilted her head at him with that curious expression, that devilish face she always wears.
She was not fluctuating in this desolate space.
She was whole. Full of the life she had lived, and yet. . . constant.
Jesse knelt before her.
She placed her pale hand on his cheek, gently rubbing his skin.
It looked like she might cry in that desolate golden moonlight.
"I. . . can feel you."
But, it wasn't to last.
"Just this once. Before I send you home, I want you to know. . . I'm happy that you're my child."
"But, it's time to go home."
And with that, the ground vanished beneath him, and Jesse arose again.
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