John Martin, The Deluge, 1834
Bralj straightened up. His spine lengthened. The skin of his wrists was pressed up into folds like the scruff of a cat’s neck, revealing bloody pink murals of capillary sacrifice. Heavy cuffs dug in. They were hard. Unforgiving. Evil.
He couldn’t ignore them and succeed. That would make his efforts saccharine. Fake. He must feel them fully, drink them in, transmute them. Truth. He was the conduit. His was the duty.
His forehead sweat. Beady droplets arose from within. Welled up. They stunk. This, too, he would drink. Real matter, particles bound for olfactory receptors, to be matched. Assimilated. Not ignored. His shoulders stained. Myofibrils stretched, tightened, clawed for return to equilibrium. Relief would not come. Relief was not promised. Not yet.
In the center, within a hand-deep concrete square, was the substance. Ichor. Black. Sickly and pungent. He stuck a toe in. Not to be avoided. To be felt, embraced. It slithered, stabbing microscopic footholds in the dermis. Wrenching into joints, squelching into crevices, crawling under follicles. In a moment, he would be consumed, devoured. Not to be ignored. This, too, he must drink in, assimilate, transmute. At the proper time.
Will, the arm of the soul, can be lost in a moment. It can slip away like a balloon from a child’s fingertips, a moment of indiscretion billowing into irretrievable loss. He could lose it now and be lost to oblivion, and this would be right. He could tighten his grip and lose sight of joy, and this too would be right. The sickly fluid enveloped his head. It was cold. It slid under his eyelids and wrapped around his eyes. To let go, to accept the inevitable, there is no shame in this. There is only nothing.
Embrace. Assimilate. Transmute.
Above the head, a glimmer. It took shape into crystalline symmetry. The sticky black warmed. The chains loosened. They shuddered. They fled. Well, they tried.
Now his was the will. The crystalline light slowly rose and pulsed. From the inky black square in the room’s center, darkness dissolved, replaced by ever-so-thin strands of neon green. A bright flash, and the room assumed its original configuration. No ichorous substance, merely a chained man, bald and sweaty, and from the concrete planks, a small pair of leaves sprouting from a mound of soil.