Giant wings spread out across the Northern sky, blotting out the trace of sunlight peaking through the clouds. The wings curled back in on themselves, rolling up like twin, black cocoons. Alykoth's eyelids were tightly shut, and the skin around them wrinkled with pressure. Behind those lids were his black eyes, moving rapidly in their sockets, searching for something visible to no one else...
...The ground was odd, and grey. It had cracks of various sizes running over it, giving it a dry appearance. At the same time, though, it looked moist and spongy. As strange as the ground was, stranger still was the huge tree jutting out from a tear in the surface, marring the otherwise perfect, pale and misty orange sky. The tree was hundreds of feet high, if not more. It had a smooth, glossy, black trunk, and branches of similar texture snaked out from the main stem. No leaves, though; the tree was barren. Raising his eyes, Alykoth searched for the end of the massive piece of alien flora, but his efforts were in vain, for no end could be seen. Giving up on the tree, Alykoth turned his attention to the rest of the landscape, and was surprised--apart from the weird tree, there was nothing. Not another tree, not another living thing. Not even an energy reading.
The Eckolon opened his mouth to speak, but found that his words, quite literally, slipped on his tongue and fell to the grey ground, where they disappeared between the cracks. One of his clawed hands shot out in an attempt to save his speech, but the words would not be caught. Abandoning yet another futile endeavour, Alykoth wandered this bleak, otherworldly land. And it was only then that he made the terrifying, unnatural discovery: He was not Himself.
A step forward and a glance downward revealed not his own leg in mid step, but instead a vast, multitude of legs--hundreds, if not thousands of legs grew from him. Primarily they were fair or dark tan, but pale blues and greens were not hard to see. . .there were even scattered greys. Continuing his stride, Alykoth watched his other leg, or rather, his other set of legs come into view. They were the same; an uncountable mass of lower appendages extending down, carrying him over the weird ground. Alykoth reached to touch this oddity, and was surprised again (although not so much this time) to find his arms were of similar composition. Then it happened. Alykoth heard speech, but no one was around. Slowly and quietly at first, but then the one voice turned to two, and two to four, and four rocketed to millions of voices echoing through his mind at once. He heard conversations, arguments, rants, confessions, proclamations of love and hate. So much talking, and all inside his head. Alykoth stood, frozen in his place, unable to move from the chaos bouncing around inside of him. He listened a while, and heard things he would not have heard anywhere else: plans for domination and surrender, unscrupulous speeches and violence in the making, and insanity conversing with clarity; a madman with a sage. Then in one instant, from standing on millions of legs, listening to billions of voices, Alykoth collapsed. He fell, completely broken by his brain unable to handle all the mental equations and his synapses not firing quickly enough to keep up with the innumerable thought-processes. He hit the foreign ground and fell again, this time into a mental torrent of colours and sounds. He descended into a spiraling river of shades and colours he had never seen before; some looked like reds, but with more blue, while others appeared white, but had no traces of white in them. The colours enveloped him and washed from him the lies and the dirt that covered his numb body. Waves of sound lifted him from the river and let him rise above everything else. The unknown pitches and wavelengths shattered his mind and blew away everything he had once believed to be the truth. Patterns of textual anomalies weaved in and out of his self, stitching together a brand new, clean, Ultimate Truth. Alykoth viewed himself from above and felt inside of him an awe unmatched by anything else he had ever seen. He was massive, truly gargantuan. Attempting to see himself clearly, Alykoth flew far above the world, up past the clouds and into a vast, unfathomably large and infinite space dotted with swirls of brilliance and patterns of absolute beauty. And still, even from his outer-worldly view, he could not fully see his pseudo-physical body below. Returning at once to the ground, Alykoth opened his mouth to scream, and it was huge. He felt it stretching wider and wider, like the unhinged jaw of some titanic snake, open and ready to swallow the universe whole. Bending and arching his massive body, Alykoth curved over and around the planet, gazing up into the space he had briefly visited. It was then that he peered into infinity and even beyond. It was then, too, that he awoke. . .
The snap back to reality came cruel and hard; an iron-handed slap to the face. His eyes blinked open, and Alykoth saw familiar shapes buzz back into existance.
Trees. And a mountain far off on the horizon. They were covered in snow, and more of the white flakes fell from the gray, cloudy sky. Rocky outcrops littered the landscape, and dotted here and there were small groupings of arctic shrubs. After a moment or two of recalibrating himself, Alykoth gathered his wits and hauled his huge body to its feet. Flexing his mental muscles, the Eckolon felt a few small energy readings around, the farthest not being more than a mile or two. The odd thing was: they weren't anyone's on Eden. Alykoth had been here before, and it was not the place he thought it was.
[shadow=black,left,500]This...This place is not Eden. It is not anywhere I've been. Yet, I know it. I know this place. I have been here.[/shadow] Alykoth's thoughts rang out inside his head. They sounded so pristine and clear, like he was brand new.
There are things, as that is the best word possible to describe, which dwell on the outer-most edge of this reality unknown to the rest of the universe. Things rarely encountered, and for no ill reason. For most, security is in their ignorance, and life can be peacefully lived without any knowledge of Outer Things; with no idea of what lurks at once just below the surface and at the very limits of timespace. For others, encounters are brief and terrible. For Alykoth, it was inevitable.
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It had been weeks, even months since Alykoth awoke and tore free from his Self, and for the most part, living continued as normal. A reclusive lifestyle had come easy to the Eckolon as of late, and that suited him nicely. Shortly after returning to Generica, Alykoth had been inexplicably drawn to the High Mountains at the northern-most coast of the country, and had ended up in a hollowed-out portion of one of the taller, rocky spires. It had been a good home. Until rather recently. Recently, it would seem that rumors had spread to the rest of the country of his whereabouts. Well, not his whereabouts, exactly, but more so the location of a "Mountain Monster," which had of course led to much unwanted publicity and even more foolish adventurers taking it upon themselves to "rid Generica of the beast!" Many had died. In fact, only a handful had been let live, and solely on the reason that they were the more scholarly types, looking to communicate with the fabled "beast," and not destroy him. It was among these few notable humans that Alykoth had met Theo, a youngish male of about twenty-odd human years. Theo's intent on visiting Alykoth, it turned out, was a misconception, but interesting all the same. As it so happened, Theo suffered from a very strange psychosis--one undocumented and therefore quite incurable. Once Alykoth decided the boy meant no harm, he admitted him stay in the mountain side. They had similar plights. As time went by, Theo revealed more and more about his ailment, and Alykoth listened with a peaked interest, though rarely showing it. Theo, it seemed, had stumbled into a most unique and terrifying realm of the Unknown and was plagued with strange dreams: set on what he had concluded as a distant star; so distant, in fact, it had been lost to all scientific record. The star (which Theo had come to call Kylth-Bal) was massive; a behemoth of unparalleled proportions, and home to many of the most horrible things the likes of which neither Theo nor Alykoth had ever imagined. It was not until after many hours of talk that Alykoth came to a most unsettling and profound discovery: he knew this star; he had been to Kylth-Bal, and more than once. The strange, cracked, dry and moist, grey landscape was all to familiar, as was the pale orange skyline and disturbingly other-worldly flora.
The Sleepings. That was where, and how, and when Alykoth had been to Kylth-Bal. What did this speak of Theo, then? And more pressingly, of Alykoth? How could the both of them, a human of youthful years, and an Eckolon of ancient years, share the same dreamscape? The answer was all too obvious: Kylth-Bal was alive, somewhere near the edge of all space. Waiting.