Tartarus
It was dark, cold, and empty. The air felt dry and exempt of any movement or breeze. The heavy stone walls suckered in any sound, any light, and any sign of life.
Nyro waited in that dense and empty darkness, his sickened stomach turning and his weakened heart racing, limbs numb, expression frozen. Curled up in a ball, he couldn’t move, his entire body rooted to the sterile ground. His existence felt heavy, the gravity of the world pushing his atrophied muscles down to the very depths of Tartarus.
….What am I truly waiting for? Who am I?
Yet, his mind remained dynamic, spinning and screaming like an insane raging sea of feverous images of inconceivable pleasure and pain like no human could ever experience. He was Reinfield, devoting his entire twisted psyche to a lord that had long betrayed him.
In his trance-like state, Nyro’s consciousness drifted within the several timelines that constitute our frail reality. Visions of beautiful sirens that once seduced and destroyed Odysseus’ entire crew, only their eyes were luminescent blue and they smelled of sand and spice. Giant snakes crawled in the air, weightless and terrifying, their deep red eyes tearing beings’ lives in half with a single stare. Stone angels, the worse of them all, approaching him, threatening to consume his decaying body to the bare bone, with every blink of his teary, glassy, lifeless eyes.
…Why am I here? Where am I going?
Quietly, yet vividly hallucinating, Nyro wondered, in his short and scattered windows of sanity, when would it arrive. That moment. The moment when he would understand. Acquiring the forbidden knowledge and wisdom of all existence that would free him from his mortal bonds. Mímisbrunnr calling, only the price to pay would be even higher than one Godly glance. And only for a second, for a wondrous, enlightening second, he recovered clarity. Who he was. What he wanted. Where he was headed. Where he came from.
…Why was he so terrified?
But it didn’t last very long before fantasies of deformed anthropomorphic creatures stitched up in leather challenged his nerve endings to unimaginable, torturous, mindless bliss. And then he lost himself again, his name and identity burned to ashes, his consciousness linked to a binary net far too intricate for him to decode. His most individualistic fantasy, his palpitating narcissism, his sectary memories of poorly shaped childhood experiences, his Donnie Darko, his Jack the Reaper, his Alec Holland, his personal Wesley Dodds, his Onibaba, his Uzumaki. Consuming. Blinding. Paralysing.
And then, he saw.
The air of the cave suddenly compressed, twisted and folded. Once dry, cold and motionless, a million molecules were now dancing in the air. They jumped, they spinned, they embraced, they connected. The air was now warm, wet, exotic, a gate to an entirely different tropical dimension opened where the air folded, creatures of light, naked, covered in stardust. A gigantic orgy of tantric energy consuming the silence of the cave with wild and unorganised synesthesia, splitting the darkness into a million colours.
A symphony of luminescent beings of undying wisdom, their erotic minds exploding into a pink cascade of life that filled the empty space, injecting life in every single stone, crevice and dried out river, growing flowers of all colours and starting entire civilisations with its magic touch. Sacred waters bathed Nyro, an unexpected baptism that blew life into every single one of his shrivelled organs, recomposing his once plump humanity, insufflating light into his crazed mind.
He knew. Now, Nyro, knew. He remembered his purpose, his likeness, his overwhelming wish to be and to love. To connect, to experience. He was ready to escape the cave and face his devils. To climb the proverbial, yet deeply flawed, deeply humane, stairway to heaven. He was ready for the world.
And I truly hope that you will too find yourself very soon.❤️
Dedicated to all of my beloved friends who are struggling. Know that I am always here, even if your suffering takes us apart. Even if you are miles away.
