Locked Within

Chapter 7: "Revelations"

I was getting all my efforts out just to survive, trying my very best to reach the surface..

but those monstrous eyes... They are chasing me, swimming to reach me.. faster than I thought.. 

These monster eyes are larger than me.. The blackest veins had slowly shown themselves mighty against the hazel and gold of the eyes, the hazel and gold that flickers.. Such were the damned colors of those eyes...

They are creatures, creatures of this ocean of damnation.. Creatures of the deep and their colors change from time to time or is it just that my brain fails to comprehend? 

I gave it all my best to reach the surface but the surface itself seems to run away from me...

My view of that castle seems to be further and further away from me... And hope though forever absent in this strange world seems to have been even more non existent than I had ever thought of before...

Here I am about to be killed by those monstrous eyes... Such beasts riddled with black veins popping out in great contrast to the gold and hazel that ever flickers like endless blinks of human eyes..

I am slowly coming closer to the surface I am about to reach it... Just a little bit further...

The dark liquids of this ocean will not hold sway nor will they stop me...

I am about to reach it.....

As the man had reached the top of that demon infested dark ocean... The castle seems to be far and blurry as if riddled in a gray cloud of nightmares, slowly getting engulfed in the black fog that divides what is real and what is not...

I have to reach it.. That fucking castle or castles.. I know not anymore.. It seems to be a structure made out of entire cities, I do not know what I am seeing! But I saw it... I will continue to see it.. Holding it at the tight grips of my mind... For how long... I really know not..

 But I have to reach it... Its my only hope... The most defined  mark of existence in this unknown universe... Maybe.. Maybe its the link that I have to reach and maybe it is what holds me back to my world, my life and my reality...

I will reach it.... I will....

What.... is happening?

I cannot see it anymore... The castle seems to have lost its realness now... Its too far, its too unclear and it is too undefined

Everything is changing now... The dark ocean slowly disappeared and got replaced by the...

Wait.... Why am I seeing.... Me?

The man saw himself on Earth, living a life that slowly rots.. A life that is slowly losing its meaning...

He saw the time before he was a detective... He was a soldier... 

Fought in a modern war and is tortured deep within by what he saw..

I was rotting.. I did things that were horrible.. I followed orders... I had no choice.. I killed many enemies... Without second thoughts.. I was a machine made to fight and that was all I ever was inside....

He saw himself after the war, despite being a capable soldier who was decorated... He was broken and torn to pieces though no one really knows much about it because the brokenness is much more profound than the usual and no one could detect it to an extent of which he is much more broken than what the tests show and because of his service to his country, he was given additional training and taken in as a detective...

He was one of the best... He was able to solve many cases.. But the thing is.. He did not have a partner (or did he? Someone wiser than him?).. He mostly operates by himself assisted by officers from time to time it depends on the case but mostly it was just him and his brain and as always he was following orders... 

But what happened to him? Given that he was damaged deep inside and no amount of tests can ever detect because his genuine and unknown brokenness comes at night and in his dreams... 

For when the sun rises, he is not the broken individual that he was before he slept... There were two sides of him, one in the day, the effective and capable.. And one during the night and its dead hours... The one in the night is haunted by the ghosts of his past and the things that exists in a primordial darkness..

Sleep was his only escape that replenishes his sanity.. That is if it is dreamless...

And this was all part of who he is.. Because who he really is goes far more deeper than it should because it all roots from the very beginning... 

The woman he met at the garden.. 

As the man remembers.. He started talking in his mind again

Yes... I cannot remember what or how I met the girl in the garden.. I do not even know how I ended up in that place but one thing I can remember clearly is that we regularly met in the garden.. Two young adults in love with each other but for some reason as I have said and known.. She loves me more  and this I know to be true...

The memory was more real than it ever was now...

They were talking in the garden, fields of beautiful red roses that shines in crimson as the sunset touches it by its light... 

There was something so right about that place that it seems too wrong.. In a sense that its almost like it never happened, its almost like the place never existed...

But why was this so? The details were all there, I saw the patterns on her dress.. The eyes of hazel as always staring right into my soul.. It was real and in fact if there was a genuine form of reality, I would like to believe that it was those days that I was with her in the garden..

Its the reachable kind of heaven, it was as if those times.. Those precious times I have spent with her were the few times that God ever smiled on a human being like me..

But I must not give in... I do not want to cry in this place of horrors.. The day she died in the crime scene was the day that I lost myself and I can remember in clear detail...

I lost myself the day she stopped existing...

I have to know the whys, I have to know the answers...

I have to know.. I will stop at nothing..

But the question in front of me now is how did I ended up here... How?

If this is my afterlife, I shall accept but I know too that this is not the end.. It cannot be...

After all this time... She.. she might be the one who holds the key to my release from this world.. She might be the one who will save me...

End of Chapter 7