A Storm: A Reverie

A short story.

The sky darkens. I see flashes of lightning from my cracked window. The door rumbles as the winds try to overpower it. I can hear the familiar ripples of water. I know it's my stone bowl. I run to it. 

My Eternal self smiles in it; smiles at me. It's gentle yet uncanny. His arms gently appear on the rhythmic surface and his fingers point toward the door.

"Go."

The doors seem to be trying to open, not because of the wind but because they want to. Oh, they want me to step out.

"I am ready."

I pulled out a knife I had kept inside the water bowl. My Eternal self that I could see on the surface did not disappear. It looked at me with a calming intensity.

As the doors gently swing open against the shock thrusting of the raging wind, I can hear something.

It wants me to, listen, instead. Not simply hear. It's a soft play of the piano. It's preparing me not for action but for the right inner containment I must invoke. And hold throughout. It feels like the sun's deceitful embrace as his light struggles to reach me past the dense canopy. But at his slightest touch, emerges a rising feeling of light and peace. I must carry this. Listening to the mellowed rising tunes of the unseen piano, I take a step forward. 

A ghoul of dust throws me off path. I lift my head to see my Eternal self smile at me. The unspoken confidence that shines through the curve of the lips and the glow of the face unsettles me for I can see a path-less throng ahead. A throng of people, of humans in unfathomable despair. But I can fathom it because I have been holding it in the bottomless vessel within. For ageless time. I have felt it always. So deeply that I live it without really living it in real. 

I am the head advisor to someone who never needed advice. Never listened truly but to the appealing words of Conceit. The day she saw light, her ever-vain eyes, in the piercing sword she always carried, she stopped listening. And I sat beside her on the table that bore a board of the head advisor with my name. I sat there hoping that some day light dropping in through the small windows would also accompany the hope of truth. But it was all dim and gloomy.  She, Crysal, bore no gloom within. Gloom was silenced inside her sky-like, expansive inner world and replaced with the vacuum of inflicting fear. Crysal was fearful herself of her insignificance and little worth. She was fearful of her non-influence in the world. So came the decision of inflicting fear instead, rousing and spreading feared awe for herself. For her hungry ego. I could see it coming, the decision, the thought-pattern, the obsessive fixation, came like the slow trail of blood that flows down a sharp dagger. And then it doesn't stop there but it drips, drop by drop, ticking like the second-hand of a clock. I was the second-hand of the clock, of Crysal, that mechanically ticked away to endlessness. The endlessness of hope. Waiting for the right time to strike, to stop with a bang.

Remember, the old-soul despair, the unfelt grief I carried? It was heavy now. Why? Oh, those shiny promises of a glorious future, of a healthy populace. They were hollow. They lacked substance. Crysal vowed to actualise them. But, she never spoke, like the cleverest wisdom of a tyrannical despot, her darkest desires. The future she promised, the lamp she promised to light, the sun she promised to show uncovering the clouds, was hers, hers alone. The future she had envisioned for all was only meant for her. And that meant it was for no one else, not a wailing child, a heartless father, a motherless mother, a leafless plant. It was for her, her alone. It was, or rather was about to be, utterly veiled by the hollow cave of death. One steps in to never return. It was meant to be bright and glorious for her. And death for anyone who challenges it. For he would challenge the Dark only to be engulfed by it. Who would become the fiery flame of hope, of justice, of morality and burn himself to ashes to bring Crysaltown and the world to the glory of light? I was up for it. I had to do it.

Remember, the old-soul despair, the unfelt grief I carried? Remember, the vision of my Eternal self smiling back at me from the bowl of water? 

As I walked, on the terrain of death himself, I saw sights. I heard things I want to unhear, but can I? I want to unsee the seen, but can I? Children spoke of killing their childhood. They had no tears because they had dried along with the uncared for crops. Farmers spoke of burying themselves alive in the very, once fertile, fields they had dedicated their lives to. Why? Crysal had robbed away not just wealth, land, houses, but the subtlety of emotion too. Like a hideous monster, she had fed on the inherent empathy to nourish other life. Women began feeding their children powdered stones. For what else was left? People in tens broke down their houses with axes and hammers abound. For no one wanted to live. Merchants began distributing, rather throwing away all the wealth and money deposited. Not because the vulnerable feeling of being there for the needy lit up in them. But because they wanted to roam all poor. With nothing. Not as ascetics who renounce worldly comforts but as hopeless wanderers oblivious to comfort itself. Birds could be seen refusing to chirp the hymns of life. The ones which did chirp were pecked to their end by the others. I wanted to forget these sights, sounds and pretend as though I had never been exposed to them in the first place.

I was their saviour. A saviour who wanted to save his crumbling inner self to stability and reconcile Crysaltown and the world with the elegant simplicity of optimism. And everything the inhabitants of Crysaltown had lost. 

"Can I do this? Am I worthy enough? Am I capable enough?"

I could see my Eternal self shine against the smoke across the horizon; the smoke from the burnt houses and fields; of burnt hope. It smiled a disconcerting smile again as though I had no choice but to confront this eerie discomfort. The discomfort I had found shelter in for so long. 

My walk of almost an epic-like rescue had come to an end. I stopped. Crysal stood in front of me. She seemed to know what was about to happen, yet she stood unrelenting. Behind her was a hut in flames. She had set it burning. And within a small family. 

I pulled out my knife and straight it went through her. 

A deafening scream that seemed to invoke the spirits of death followed. I had put an end to her spell of fear. I brought an end to the fear inside her that had given life to fear outside. She was a sorceress trained in the dark magic of emotion. But the darkness consumed her in the process of feeding on others' emotions of joy. She lay traps for others, regurgitated her unresolved emotional paranoia on others. And? And fed on their joy. On their life. But she never grew happier. For insecurity and fear are managed and worked with. Not used in sorcery. 

I fainted.

And when I woke up I felt a scathing torturous pain in my heart. It was the pain of the stab. And the pain of emotional transformation. It was the ephemeral pain of suffering that leads to ultimate cleansing. The Crysal in me had died. Crysaltown now ceased to exist.

Gaurav Chandra Tuli