Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 43557 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 218(@200wpm)___ 174(@250wpm)___ 145(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 43557 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 218(@200wpm)___ 174(@250wpm)___ 145(@300wpm)
And then I am being sent back to the stage. The crowd is not done with me. The music compels them and me to continue. But I’m not the singer anymore. They’re the singers now. They are chanting at me, and I take that chant up and repeat it back to them.
“NOTHING! LASTS! FOREVER!”
The crowd shouts every single word with me, a hundred thousand voices lifted in ecstatic celebration of life.
NOTHING LASTS
NOTHING IS LOST
NOTHING LASTS
NOTHING IS LOST
I feel pure freedom rushing through my veins, an almost transcendent bolt of realization that is so much more powerful than any of the drugs they are giving me.
Nothing lasts. Not this moment. Not this tour. Not my fame. Not me. Whatever I am sacrificing now, I am sacrificing forever because it will never come around again. I have to live as deeply and as fully as I can in every moment, because there is no again. There is only forever, and the iterations of forever, each of which is more alien than the last.
I feel something in that moment of openness, a darkness creeping behind me, a congealed event horizon of all things in the past. It moves steadily behind me, never catching up, never retreating, the black edge of annihilation and irrelevance. It’s the window wiper of time, and it wipes the windscreen of creation completely clean.
I look down at the crowd, at all their smiling, joyful faces. I no longer see them as individuals. Instead, I see a great loving creature, one with a million eyes and arms. It bays for me, cries out for me. It gestures to me and it welcomes me in. I suddenly know that is where I belong. This is the creature that has drawn me so far from my home. This is what I have been hunting. This is what I have always craved, to be one with this mass of loving, celebratory intention.
I beam back at them and once more cast myself into their loving arms, or I would, if not for being suddenly stopped by the monstrous scaled arms of a dragon monster looming over me.
“NO!” Zayne shouts the word at me, makes it boom around my skull, makes it sink into my skin and get under my flesh, and wrap around my bones. He’s doing it again. He’s ruining everything. He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t see the beauty.
He picks me up and carries me away. The crowd surges for me, its many arms all too short to grasp me. I am in the grip of an even more powerful creature than the crowd, and that is a concept that boggles the mind. I lie back in his scaled arms and feel myself engulfed and protected and carried into a brilliant, beautiful future.
6
Zayne
Lyric is absolutely incoherent as I rush her back to the ship. The concert is over less than an hour after it started, but I am not leaving her to continue to trip proverbial balls on that stage. It’s obvious someone slipped her something, her pupils are as big as saucers, and she’s talking like someone who just tried psychedelics for the first time and is absolutely astounded to find that everything is nothing.
“I love you,” she says. “I love you so much, dragon lover man. You are the one who keeps saving me, over and over again. I feel like nothing can ever happen to me, because you’re there. With me. You’re everything. You’re inside me.”
She says that last part of the sentence in an adorable whispered hiss.
“Sex,” she clarifies. “We do sex. Let’s do sex.”
“Let’s wait until your head is clear. And I’ve finished dealing with you. You know better than to crowd surf. I’ve had that conversation with you before.”
“But time doesn’t exist,” she says with a petulant certainty. “So you might have had that conversation with me before, but really, you haven’t had it with me yet. Do you see? Do you see how unfair that is? Fundamentally?”
She’s absolutely out of her mind, but she is also absolutely coherent, and that makes for quite a challenge while handling her.
The ship’s medic is waiting for us with an IV, but of course this time Lyric doesn’t want her sleepy time IV mixture. She wants to ride her trip out. She wants to feel into every part of her expanding consciousness. She was enough of a handful before being freed from the bondage of common consensus reality.
“No! I don’t need the sleeping needle. I’m awake now,” she insists. “I’m awake, and now I can see. Not just with my eyes, either. I can see all sorts of things. I can see myself. I can see yourself. I can see the parts and times when we all merge, and we’re just…” She pauses for dramatic effect. “Ourselves.”
There’s a silence.
“I think I want some lemonade.” She slaps her lips and puts her hand to her throat. “I feel really dry all of a sudden. Is that what the universe is really about? Being dry? No. It has to be wet. Wet is how you make life. Can’t do life with dry only.”