surrounded, or spiraling.

[gramarye]

Who: Uri Rosenberg, Jones
What: "We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream."
Where: Ludmead
When: About a day after reality exploded.
Warnings: References to violence and death. Will update as needed.

Chaos erupts all over the city not long after the tears in reality start letting things in -- tears that Wolfgang is unnerved to discover that he can see.

And that not everyone else can.

He might be seeing things. It's been three days since last he slept, and he has the worst headache, coupled with this neverending pins-and-needles sensation. He can't shake the feeling that he's forgotten something very important. Anyway, there are more pressing issues at hand. He's stuck in Ludmead, having come here for work the previous morning and been stuck after the Candlelighter mess in the nearby Mafaton. They're only a few blocks away. Then, when monsters started appearing, he stayed put because going south was generally considered ill-advised, not with the presence of the Fog there. He'd like to go back for his meds, but he'll have to do without for... well, hopefully not long.

Someone's mentioned a safehouse up north in Dryside, and they're trying to safely evacuate as many people from this inn as they can. There's some kind of horrible giant robot a few blocks away and it seems to be moving in the opposite direction, but it's still too dangerous to stay here. He helps because of course he does; there's no other option.

They almost have the building cleared when the screaming starts. It's coming from the basement, which they already know is not secured. They pause. "Someone's still in there," Wolfgang says, and turns in that direction even though one of the other men protests -- there's something down there. He's armed with a machete; he's not suited for close quarters combat, but they don't have access to guns. It's better than nothing.

He's looking for the source of the screaming when an explosion rocks the building and collapses a good half of it. The half he's in.

He hurls himself aside just in time to avoid being crushed, but not enough to not hit his head hard enough to knock him out. It's not a serious injury, but exhaustion and pushing his body beyond the limits of what it's equipped to deal with conspire against his waking again. He is powerless to stop the dreaming again until it releases him like it always does.

But this time, he doesn't wake up; this time, it doesn't end. He just goes deeper and deeper, spiraling into himself and into what feels increasingly less like dreams and more like memories. They've been tearing at the edge of his consciousness for years, demanding he acknowledge their presence, just as he's fled from them, putting distance between them in the form of alcohol and pills and, when it gets too bad, tranquilizers. He has never been able to put enough distance there to feel safe, and this time they don't slip back under the limits of his awareness. Something tears away the veil his mind's been swathed in and suddenly he is aware of a creeping reality he would rather not face.

He can hear a voice screaming in his head, trying to get out -- a voice that is his but isn't his, and a voice that's so used to screaming for his attention that it doesn't know what to do now that he can hear it. It just keeps screaming, a deafening roar, and it wants him to know how angry it is, but what has he done?

What has he done?

(The room erupts into flame, burning the sickly green, slithering thing that's all needle-teeth and spines that was making its way towards him. It shrieks helplessly and curls itself in a corner to escape the fire, burying itself under the corpses of the people it already killed and half-ate down here, but there's no way out. The fire consumes the flesh, leaving it a withering, burnt husk, but it doesn't stop there; it spreads to the debris and licks its way up the walls, smothering the room in deadly black smoke.)

A long falling sensation, like one of those dreams you only wake from when you hit the ground -- but he never does. Instead, he feels himself spiraling steadily inward, reaching a light he wasn't aware was there until just now. It burns as brightly as a star, so brightly that he has to look away or he'll be blinded, but he can't.

At his center, it's a child. Genderless, colourless, like an empty outline waiting to be filled in, its accusing eyes bore holes inside him. He is close enough to touch it but when he holds out his hand, sure that the darkness will close in at any moment to crush it, it turns from him. He can feel its anger, not like a child's spiteful tantrum but the long, burning rage of something much older and darker-edged. Its mouth is closed but he knows that this neverending screaming is coming from it, an angry dirge broken by despairing wails. It comes to him as a dawning epiphany, there is no time for slow awareness -- it wears the seeming of a child because it is one. It has never been able to grow up, only to watch the flesh grow old and decay and die in its prime, over and over and over.

The flesh. The body. His body.

No wonder he feels a tinge of madness in there. He'd go mad, too, subjected to that for centuries.

Then again, he may already be. That's all right, he thinks, floating there somewhere deep in the center of himself, watching his memories rebuild around him and suddenly knowing that they are memories, not dreams, certainly not things he made up for attention. He can handle madness; it's the other option that terrifies him.

This thing has lived inside him for hundreds of years, through hundreds of variations on this flesh. This raging thing, it's him, but it's not him; what does he have to be angry over? Why does he feel so cheated? He can't hear his own thoughts over this screaming, and he is less and less sure who he is as he searches his memories and comes up with thousands of wildly disparate, incompatible thoughts and feelings. He is a girl-child in Athens, a woman in Mumbai, a teenage boy in Guadalajara, and they all end the same way, in screaming and terror and pain, and then an endless darkness. There are always men in different uniforms, sometimes not, but they all have the same name, and they always say the same thing, and every time, he chooses the same thing: death over assimilation. They cannot all be him, he has to pick one, but which one does he choose? Which is true? There's a name like a whisper in the back of his recollection, but he can't make any sense of it.

Who is Uri?

(The fire spreads upwards and engulfs the entire building; on the surface, someone notices and shouts, and the living are barely able to make it out in time before something rumbles and explodes. What's left of the inn begins to fold into itself, collapsing at its center like a deflated balloon. Nobody is staying to watch, they're fleeing as fast as they can while the street warps dizzily behind them, metal supports jutting out of the ground like some mad metal garden, the cobblestones of the streets shoved into small towers, and burrowing deep holes into the sewers underneath.)

There are people in his head that he is suddenly aware of; they have always been there. He's forgotten how long he's been sleeping, a long, terrible time interrupted with painful periods of brief wakefulness, and he pulls that knowledge inside of himself and lets it rest there for the first time. The screaming stops and leaves a shadow where it once was, like his child-self doesn't know what to do with silence. In that void, he remembers that he has heard that voice calling his name, like a hand keeping him from falling down a long, dark hole; it has always been trying to reach him, would have been out of his reach in a few more weeks and he would have severed a part of himself, the realest part of himself, for ever. A calm washes over him as he realises that he's not dying and he's not imagining this -- the unerrable truth of all those lives fall into place like jigsaw pieces, and he knows that he will finally understand who he is, who he has been, and who he will be, as soon as he finally wakes up.

Uri opens his eyes.

---

In Ludmead people watch with apprehension as a building they'd just evacuated starts pouring smoke from the basement, and the upper floors begin curling into themselves like a snail. The surrounding street twists outwards, metal and stone and plant alike, until they surround the slowly balling building like a frozen tornado. For all anyone knows, this is more of whatever is tearing their city apart; wisely, they're already moving away when the entire mess rumbles and then blows, exploding debris outwards.

A lone, tall figure is stumbling-tripping out of the rubble of what used to be an inn, clawing at the air and looking around him with the wild terror of a trapped animal. He can't walk; he keeps tripping over limbs that are far too long, and his body is too big, when did it get this big? On his knees on the ground, he tries to stand and loses his balance, catches himself with his hands hard enough to rattle his teeth and skin his palms. This isn't right, who put him in this body? This grown-up's body. Who did this to him?

"What's going on?" His voice, speaking Hebrew, is querulous with fear, and it's a child's voice coming out of an adult man's face. His fear reflects through his eyes, the shaking of his hands, the way he's gasping air to keep from wailing, like a child with a bruise -- the confusion in his face is genuine, he doesn't understand who or where he is, just that he's alone, and he's nowhere he recognises, and everything is burning, and something is wrong with his body. He has to crawl forward, and even then he overshoots his mark, scrapes up his hands.

It would be funny if he weren't burning from the inside out, if all the nearby buildings weren't collapsing slowly and curling towards him. He is seeing the world through the eyes of his Avatar -- which last remembers him being twelve.

The rattling-spined monster approaching from the south doesn't even get within ten metres of him before he whips around, his face wild with panic, and it abruptly bursts into flames and dies, screaming. This isn't Tel Aviv or Jerusalem or Haifa, and it certainly isn't Al-Shati; the conclusion his twelve-year-old mind is drawing, largely due to the presence of monsters, is the Umbra, albeit a part of it that he has never seen before. Fear freezes his heart.

Did he go too deep?

He grips himself by the arms and digs his fingernails in until he bleeds, clawing at himself as if he can extract himself from this wrong body that way -- tear open the flesh, let out what it houses. "No, no, no, no," he's saying, because this isn't right and he doesn't know how he got here and something is wrong with his body.