The Story Of Sarelle (Twilight)

Chapter 55

Endurance is one of the most difficult disciplines, but it is to the one who endures that the final victory comes. - Buddha

Trees. They blew and wind howled, a storm, a pathetic fallacy of myself.

Soil.

Raindrops.

Lightning. Or was I the lightning? I felt so charged, as if my very being was at one with the central energy of the earth. I wasn't singular anymore, I felt like I was eveything and nothing at the same time. I was a disintergration of molecules and yet I knew I had to still be me, still whole, somehow.

Pain. It was unbearable, ravenous for my screams, yet its hunger was never sated.

Darkness.

Pain. It has no mercy yet with each moment I feel it my body grows to endure it, enjoy it. Pain begins to develop flavours and differences, sharp, aching, rolling through me. Each is different and each exerts a new form of torture.

Concrete.

City lights.

Alley.

Fire.

Darkness. My eternal friend.

This had been the cycle my body had run through.

Time was distorted to a point that seconds felt like hours and hours felt like split moments. Everything was fracturing, causing me to jump repetitively, or at least that's all my mind could comprehend beyond the agony.

My body was in a constant flux of numb peace and blazing fire. In the times when I was paralysed in a new scene I would feel nothing. Not even a breeze on my face but then the electricity would pulse again, and I would fall off the stable dimension of time and space into a place too obscure to belong in the physical world. There I burned.

Every limb raged with fire that threatened to leave me as nothing but ashes, blackened, and surely too ugly for a place in heaven.

With every jump I had one short moment of recognition before the energy started to build and everything I knew became muddled.

My breathing was panting now as I lay in dim sunlight, trees surrounding me while my body rested in the forest debris. All I could do was lie in my broken state, the acidic tears pouring down my face as I watched the clouds race through the sky. I could feel nothing as if my whole body was in that state of numbness before pins and needles. My ears were filled with a faint buzzing like static ran through the air around me, though I could hear sounds that distorted and changed from nearly silent to crystal clear. It was as if my head was being repeatedly taking in and out of water.

A spike shot through me and my paralysis lifted enough for my screams to burst free. I knew they did because my throat ripped at their force, but somehow my ears registered nothing but silence. Was I deaf to my own pain, or was my body so broken that my voice no longer made sound?

A crack sounded somewhere close by but I could do nothing but lie helplessly in the dirt while its creator neared me. My body thrashed against my will, although I could feel nothing that caused it. The paralysis was back. I was nothing physical, just my mind although I knew my body existed as a solid object in this place.

As I fought the unknown, my movements caused black spots to form across my eyes damaging my vision.

"Sarelle?" A soft voice tickled my now functioning eardrums, piercing the static.

Another convulsion rocked my body, but this time I wasn't allowed to break my own bones, instead a force held me to the ground while my tendons strained.