Decker 31

It was very hard to determine whether he was enveloped in absolute darkness or brilliant light. For uncountable milliseconds, he fixated on that question.

With slow awakening came a sense of floating bodiless, empty...

It was just...nothing. There was no space to fill, endlessly, and nothing to fill it with. No memory, no motivation.

A distant echo percolated through the void; quiet laughter and an ethereal, ephemeral image of a gaunt Buddha...

The image swelled, faded to near-nothingness, fleshed out, became a round, serene figure ensconced in a summery riparian scene, sitting lotus-fashion on a great tree stump.

There was something in his not-mind, a feather floating perhaps, or an idea... he was supposed to perform some act when he saw this figure along the road...

He was still formless, though he knew it was he that had created all this form around himself. Was he desirous of form?

A blunt-tipped, double-edged sword, broad and heavy, materialized before the Buddha, who glanced at it disinterestedly and returned to his meditations. It hung for a moment, glowing softly, then dropped to the ground and rang like a great bronze bell.

The reverberations precipitated wisps of chromatic fog from the air; gelled around the nexus of his consciousness. He was no longer bodiless, in fact he was a "she", blue-skinned, garbed in scanty silks and hammered, glinting metal.

She reached for the still-ringing khanda, her fingers meshing in its familiar grip, joined her voice with its reverberations and brought its blade around, overhead, down, to cleave the imposter in twain...

...and found himself chained hand and foot to a great stone, himself rent from pelvis to sternum, with vultures gorging on his swollen entrails as a wide river rushed and cackled...

...bounding stone to stone, his curling horns thrust menacingly across a shallow, laughing stream in the direction of his rapidly impending mirror image...

...clucking, proud and sore, leaping out of her still-warm nest, direly thirsty, strutting toward the cool river's edge ...

Faster, faster, projections of sound and vision, buried whims and memories, flooding over his empty dreamscape, chaotic fragments of reality fighting to create the perfect vessel as, all the while, a hungry river roared in the imminent background...

"Wait."

It was a voice he remembered; clear, resounding, defining the boundaries of his skull, his chest...

...it was himself, and memory flooded in, over visions and myth, over superimposed icons and avatars, archetypes and facsimiles...

He was Decker.

But what did that mean?

He stood on the shore of a rapidly rising river; a river that had already dissolved his hiking boots and was creating odd tingles in his feet, his ankles, his shins, his knees...