Formless voices circled around the half-lit structure, chords of resonance unstruck, strings of tension lulled from pastures illicit to the scanning light of consciousness. “Is it a privilidge...”, a voice farmiliar wrought with the conviction of some unknown code of ethics groaned inside me “...to solve a mystery that had forgotten its own solution.?”

    Is that what I had found here in this accidental congress of shadows? was it a divine enigma, alive in these temporary bursts of sonic ether? A creature who sustained its own dwindling presence by echoing itself? A sleepwalking refugee from a land where all the forgotten, unlearned and forbidden forms of man’s ideas went to forget themselves? a land where wet nocturnal bodies bloated with unrealized truth descended to slumber; their messages, like invisible innards, discarded by the minds who had unknowingly spawned them?

     The blind force of one of these mouthless voices coursed a toddler’s breadth from my face. It issued a devastating wetness on my cheek which assumed the texture of a rapidly crystalizing mineral, composed of some urgent heat. For a moment the side of my face the half-matter stained pulsated, as though my brain involuntarily lost comfort with its own design. Paniced, I rubbed my hand across the anonymous bacteria. The unnerving heat only spread as my hand invited it to new pastures.

    An udderly unfarmiliar feeling coursed through my bodily orbit, a poison ache that thwarted the security of skin. The sensation was swift and subtle, barely felt, though it saturated me from core to perimeter. It wasnt as much felt as sensed. The hurt was more cerebral than physical, as though my body, spurred by an image baring likeness to its own darkest artifacts, was remembering its most legendary pain. The moment of infliction itself, by whatever insideous weapon, seemed ancient, predating the body I wore now. A scab on my immortal soul had crumpled, and the sick air seeped in again. In my mind concave walls of logic feudally attempted to deny the acidic memory, to entrap it in shallow barriers of assumption and common sense. The reawakened torment had forgone the defensive walls of cell and soul, taking instead the short cut to life’s ungaurded origin; a well deeper than the ground it was set in . As I cringed a sudden image took shape in my mind: a spinning shrapnel, darker than the blanket of empty space, piercing through the glowing dusk of the first star. I vaguely realized that this transmission from within depicted the weapon whose handiwork I was experiencing.

     I looked down at my hand amidst this cellular hysteria just in time to glimpse the symptoms of my body’s intimate tradgedy: the fingers of my hand dissappeared in waves of half transparence. Was I being treated to a magicians dream mirage? Was the credibility of my eyes defused merely by shock? To have skin that imitates glass was not the biproduct of any science I had studied.

     The unlikly moral I had gained in coming here was that inside each thought mankind could conjur lay a kind of embryo. Intuition is man’s subconscious memory experienced when that embryo stirrs, like a baby kicking inside its mother’s womb. It was the seed of a rare plant grown endemic inside the fertile clay of the neverending mind; watered by the soul, sunned by observation. These entities, these undead hymns, then, were the fruit of denied ideas. The bastard children of those who refused to nourish their own thoughts with wit or recognition.

     Each billowing moan encircling the perpetually changing tower acted as a cell in a compound to form the secret being. Each amplfied whisper was a half-real particle linking to it’s twins in a helpless attempt to mimic life. At this thought the pain lessened a bit, as though my own accute logic was the only weapon against this contagious nothing. The assault within was this thing’s ritual, and I the sacrifice that might appease the void and win it a body. I was begginning to understand the game and its rules, and in turn shed my helpless amazement with this nameless opponent. I closed my eyes and became consumed in rhytmic waters.

To speak, even within myself, is to mock the silence of the dark.
My mother grew this body for me, but I dreamed my true self into being, and remembered the dream as I awoke from the sleep of the womb.
All is within, my circle complete, its outline infinite, its contents reality.

    Inside that meticulous flame of knowing, both night and day had their own special dawn. I celebrated my own visions, my own exploits, my own misgivings, my own satisfactions. The shadowy contagion struggled to numb my mind, to level the internal mountain from which all my blessings avalanched, but it was a slave to life, like a shadow to its substance. It was trapped in the space between life and death, between thought and action, between desire and consumation; I was the chord threaded through both. In me, life and death abandoned their surface competitions and made love like magnets. All my affirmations mounted, a delicate puzzle of senses massaging my bloodstream. As i opened my eyes, a throbbing terminus of light broke from me and bathed the tormented things. The glowing flood found seven sources in my body, or perhaps through it.

    The lightning will scittered along each of the predestined pathways, dancing through the invisible war and pacifying its participants. They passed through the fields and forests around, past the fake borders of men and their sleeping countries, beyond the earth itself. They seeped into the heart of every life; both the enterer and the entered felt welcomed by the mutual presence. The beams were collecting strength from every version of breath imaginable, signatures on a petition against parasites. The wishes of the infinite population of space joined the streams. They returned before they left, finding their center in me. I felt their ever changing colors inhabit me and the air around, until there was no seperation at all.

    For a singular moment, I was somehow made omnipotent, the messages of every voice composing mine, the motions of every wind and limb in my own stride. A messenger made of energy had taken inventory of the universe and its extended family, and returned the news to my feeble doorway.

    The ever-blanket thinned a bit, solidifying back to my singular situation, and I knew alas where I was. The tower before me which, like its hunger pained devotees, evaded a single state, was, in essence, the portal to the netherworld. It was the gateway to that fabled grey field whose infinite distances housed every spirit wandering without destination. All knowledge and sensation denied the inhabitants of that place, their only distraction was dust. They were led on in a desperate pilgrimage to that eternal somewhere, disbelieving themselves, mindlessly treading over the places they once loved in life. The seven slippery rays converged into a single blade of white heat outside the entrance to the portal, then entered.

Then a flash, sustained forever.
Everything that spoke of itself was reconciled to the other.
The seven continents united into a single island, barely visible, expanding.