Venom

28: The Ease of Somethings

There is a struggle that happens once a being becomes aware of the fact that they are alive. Pain and pleasure help fill the senses of what can bring agony or happiness, the in-between where the flesh can know either peace and tranquility or the unhappiness that sometimes takes root in some. This can make life harder to figure out. It takes purpose to continue on, it can take drive to thrive and in most cases it all comes down to curiosity strong enough to believe that something better is around the corner. Pleasure and pain, the strongest incentives to arouse curiosity in some. Pleasure or pain, a choice a few think is the only one they have in life.

I was both within my mind and buried deep within the sense of my body. My mind, wide and wild with alertness that there was something terribly wrong with me in every way possible. Tobias was in me, searching, digging its claws into the raw flesh that made me who I was and tearing it apart to pry deeper than I cared to look even for myself. Everything shook as I trembled, what had felt like sand taking hold of me had turned me to sand itself and as my world shook at tremendous speeds, like grains, I came apart.

The cleaning had been an outside source, pulling from the surface anything that had touched me that did not belong to my print. This was an invasion and my body knew it. There was no collective mind or feeling behind the magic taking place but it was the sensation of wrongness that choked me, wrapped around each bone like barbed wire. Phantom sand seeped through my skin, into my blood and intertwined into my being, riding along the map of my body. I was no longer in control, so aware of the thing within me that the connection of mind and body had blurred. I traveled along with that phantom being inside of me, dragged along with it, but lost to where it was. My physical body was being shaken, but it felt as if it were my soul that was about to come from out of me at any moment, pulling away from the confinement of flesh and freed from the earth that tied me to all that was.

"He's in." The voice speaking was distorted in my ears, louder in one ear, like a ringing bell in the other. I jerked, my body trying to evade the echoes that bounced from wall to wall as I lost sense of my feet. They were leaving me. "At my mark raise the seepage."

There was a motion fairly close to me, up and down, an instinctive but rough motion that came with an animalistic sound, different from the shaking of the room. It was getting so warm, briefly my eyes focused on the ground, I squinted to try and force all four overlapping images to come together as the sides of my eyes sparked bright yellow. I tried to push the color away, to make sense of the movement below my feet but the longer I stared down the more it felt as if I would tip over.

"She looks like she's been drugged."

When had I gotten so close to the ground? My fingers spread on the floor, burning my hands in and that did not exist, but feeling it tumble and spill from my handfuls. I raised a fist and hit the ground softly. Once, twice, then again with more force as if it would halt the shaking that tried to make me lose my mind. Still, I fought against the urge to fight back, to lose all control and let it take reign. Tobias moved through my body as it wanted, but I was right there beside the sensation, unsure where it was exactly, but following the sensation closely as it traveled. It did as it wished because I allowed it to and this belief turned into a truth because I wanted to be. Because that was how I worked.

"She's taken to the first stage quickly, her body taking to this is a good thing." I was losing sensation in my knees and it was climbing higher. I looked down at the lower half of my body that looked foreign attached to me now that I could not feel it or control it. There was no euphoria or blissful sensations, just the growing sense that I was about to melt into the ground that had already eaten half of me.

"Then why are you frowning?"

Shutting my eyes did not return me to any darkness, instead I became lost in the maze of direction that did not exist within the room. I was traveling around my neck, swirling down my arms and wrapping around my fingers individually, burrowing into my organs and tentatively reaching out to my core. The remaining rational part of me, understood now why it had been asked of me to pull my magic in before entering the room. It would have been impossible to do that while all of this was happening, the instincts to fight would have been stronger than ever, but as I was now I was unable to unfurl my core, the magic paralyzed by my disoriented state. Guttural sounds came from me as those close creeping tendrils of sand seeped into my core like water, slipping through cracks and holes that had not existed before, a pinch to my chest everytime it found a new opening. My mind was full of steam, the air in my lungs bubbling, scorching my insides. Still, I persisted and burned from the inside out.