Energy pulses through my bloodstream; I can feel it squirming like an insect, crawling through my veins and arteries with its legs. A millipede, maybe, just scurrying and scurrying, legs pounding out a frantic tempo, staccato and stacked on top of everything else.
My blood-insects push me to the edge; they leave me dangling on the precipice, clinging to the edge of stability and trying desperately not to fall into the yawning cavern of instability that roars below me. I can hear it, the roar-- it's a low, rumbling sound at the back of my mind, a cracked hum, a shattered song whispering about all the things that could happen.
Slithering, sinuous black snakes flow out of the cliff-side like oil; liquid, gravity-defying, they swarm my dangling body and cover it--their scales, rough and thorny, scrape my skin as they slowly, leisurely wind around me. The blood-insects whirl up in a frenzy, scurrying even faster, their mandibles frantically clacking away and slowly tearing away my insides.
Just drop, the roar whispers. Its cracked hum rises in pitch and further muddies my thoughts; it becomes a vibration across my entire body. It warbles and croons, and every cell screams alongside it, their voices rising and falling to the tune of its rusty, deep, abyss-like tone.
Oil-snakes writhe around me, nosing underneath my clothes. Their fangs dig into my flesh; tongues flicker into my bloodstreams and draw out blood-insects to scurry across my skin. They scream through the rhythm of their legs, the beat of their clacking mandibles; they dig into my eyes, my mouth, my nose--anywhere and everywhere to return inside, to feast more upon me, to breed within my organs until I'm bursting with their young.
"Enough!" I scream, through the blood-insects scurrying into my lungs and against the pressure of the oil-snakes wrapped around my body. Trembling, I dangle on the precipice and slowly unwrap one hand from around the edge; my body swings wildly to the side. Unable to my hold my own weight alone, I fall, screaming alongside the roar and the blood-insects and the oil-snakes, unwittingly dumped into the yawning cavern of instability by my own inability to grasp on.
As the roar grows louder, the vibrations across my body increase and shake off the blood-insects first; they dig their mandibles into my flesh but flake off, one by one, legs flailing wildly in the air. I scrabble at the sinuous bodies of the snakes, but while their rough scales tear my hands to pieces, I cannot grasp them.
As I continue to tear and claw, the roar rises to shriek, mind-numbing, and I spread across the chasm into millions of separate cells, each screaming alongside the shattered song. The snakes fall off, unable to grasp onto what is not there, and I am alone, surrounded by frantic blood-insects and liquid oil-snakes but unafraid of them anymore.
Slowly, one by one, my cells reassemble into one entire shattered being; the roar dies back down to a low rumble, a cracked hum, a shattered song barely above a whisper as I fall back onto rocky ground, more cracked than before. The insects thump onto the ground beside me, legs scurrying uselessly in the air for moments until they manage to flip over and disperse rapidly; the snakes follow soon, immediately fleeing back within the ground as if they were never there.
Alone--except for the whisper at the back of my mind. I begin to walk aimlessly, dripping blood onto the ground behind me, the only sign of anything living, and with every step, I feel something deep within my organs pulse and grow. The shattered song whispers to ignore it, though, so I do, the memories of everything before quickly fading in the abyss that hums a cracked tune in the back of my mind.
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