Immortals | ✓

05 | aethera

━━ αθάνατοι ━━

HIS face is etched in my mind. As it should be. He is the man whom I must find to get some answers, the first clue. Before this vision, I had been aimless, pointlessly thinking of theories that were making absolutely no sense.

But unlike Art, I knew. I knew that whatever this was, it required a deeper understanding of something unknown to us, something that we could not find by just sitting around, pretending as if this was a vacation. Something, we could never find if it wasn't for the vision. Everything from the point that I had collapsed from the excruciating pain felt different and not the kind of different I think was normal to human beings.

Usually, faces dissipate after a dream ends and we forget about them or the dream as the day moves on, the memory of it ready to be replaced by another. But since the moment I woke up, his face was clear in my mind. It is tattooed and it's unwilling to diminish. Every moment that I spent in that dream is a reality I will never forget.

A man stood in the garden in my dream, wearing a suit that was torn in places but looking like the godliest thing I had ever laid my eyes upon. His existence, in place of where Art should have been petrified me at first but his voice, goddamn, his voice was the most surreal melody I had ever heard.

However cryptic his existence and the reason for it may have seemed, the visions that followed weren't. The aged mansion wasn't a memory as clear as how the vision of seeing that man was, but it was clear enough for me to hold onto it.

For that couple of minutes that Art was in my room after I woke up, probably for the first time since we arrived here, the argument flushed out of my brain, its memory long replaced by a sudden dream. We didn't speak, he just checked on me, nodded, and left me alone in the room.

I was relieved, I didn't want to talk about it. A part of me wanted to yell at him. "Told ya, bitch!" I would say, bowing like a performer at the curtain draw but this wasn't the time for mockery.

His expression was very clear - he knew it. He knew, now, at last, that I had been right. I couldn't spend another second being petty about this, as even the vision did not solve all of our problems but I must admit, it was satisfactory to know that there is something and someone out there who might have answers and this entity just proved me right by showing us that vision. I wanted to throw it in his face so bad, to tell him and show him that I had been right, it was impossible to not walk in right now and scream it.

However, I did have one more thing on my mind that was more persistent than that urge.

Rubyn Castle.

Rubyn Castle is probably the only person in the world who can tell us what's going on, why else would he ask me to find him?

Just like that, the ticking began. The need, the sudden urge to do something was back within me like before. I wasn't as desperate as I was before to quench this thirst, I felt much more calculative, much more patient now, and much calmer.

Ever since we had arrived here, I had given up on finding any clue, any lead. There was none. We weren't going to find it in a home library, in a cottage in the middle of nowhere everything I tried to even do to get answers seemed like a wasted effort so I took my time, gathered my thoughts, measured my position and calmed the fuck down because that one day took a took on me like never before. I was thrown into all kinds of things, escaping, packing, travelling, and lying. All the things that I never had the guts to do. The thrill of it wore me down, I wasn't like Art after all. I didn't escape to the town on a death bike, I couldn't afford to.

But after we arrived here, I tried for hours to touch base with myself again and for hours wondered about what had happened and what would I do differently. Basically, I did all the overthinking I had the capacity to do.