Chapter Six - The Tower
Midway between my departure and arrival at the Tower’s peak, I noticed the silver hue of my remaining hair, and I marveled at my development. Once a terrestrial infant - now an otherworldly champion of unmistakable grandeur. There had flourished color in my cranial strands at my entry into the line, but the pigments had dissolved into an argentate blek, and the metamorphosis intrigued me, for I remembered no physical evolution during my savage years. I deciphered that Father Time is narcissistic, and his reign inveigles only those who believe in his qualification; without a concept of the existence of Time - without acquiescence to perception of Time’s influence - an individual lives flatly, confined to one slice of Time, but liberated of the effects of the unperceivable. Just as the fallen tree, bereft of listeners, produces no sound, so does the isolated imbecile elude chronological decay.
“But what of the ignorant animals? Do they not age?” I remarked, and, taken aback by my presence, not expecting a visitor, I indignantly scathed me with noxious criticism.
“Naive Groundling! Return to your telluric prison; you deserve not your ascent. The animals exist only in our perception. With enough conscious effort, I can perceive a plant as a stone, a person as a fly, space as solidity! And I would be correct in all my perceptions, for I am certain only of my own ability to comprehend and can concretely ascertain nothing else, for all existence may be an illusion of my mind, which, I’ve learned, bears more intelligence than itself. So the animal - possibly a cognitive design - only ages if I believe it to. But, lacking my perception of its physiological deterioration, it will exist permanently on one chronoscopic frequency.” Seething with fury, I stopped perceiving myself and deleted me from reality. I plucked an elephantine aviation machine - visibly a speck in the distant seclusion of faraway space - from its torpid trajectory, and I flicked the now miniscule contraption into my mouth. Once a mighty sojourner in the domain of Sky - now a puny scrap stinging my stomach. Chuckling meatily to myself, I massaged the thousands of savages - miles below me - with my corneas, and, noticing their infinitesimalness, I clenched one’s dinky head with my ruthless fingertips. Pandemonium ensued among the crowd, who, I presumed, discovered the putrid fetor of blood wafting from underneath my seemingly - to them, at least - colossal fingernails, and, cackling hysterically, my skeleton leaping from my esophagus in uncontrollable spasms of hilarity, I squeezed the uproariously anemic cranium until it popped, dribbling shards of skull and globs of pink corpuscles into the creases of my mangled epidermis. The foremost sector of the line reverberated in trepidation, and I snatched a handful of the fleeing proletarians, pulling the minuscule munchkins - reduced to under a centimeter in height from terrene dimensions of nearly two meters - through the Tower walls. I crunched their expired bones with my ferocious knuckles, satisfied at my severity, content with my pompousness. One of the smothered victims had sworn his acquaintance with me, but despite his incessant repetition of his insignificant name - Fintotriode Qaqpipniprip - I failed to recognize our relationship, and I took intensified pleasure in his manual disintegration. Perception was key…
I decided that five more years would merely feed my ravenous psychical demons - who thrive in solitude and imbibe quarantine - and the unnecessary interval would provide opportunity for my brilliance to trickle from my ears and escape into the abyss of nescience, so I simply reached the Tower’s apex instantaneously, perceiving the five years as existing in the inaccessible domain of the Past. The translucent doors hurriedly dressed themselves, flustered at the manifestation of a guest fifteen years early to his rendezvous. Unimpressed, I bypassed the gateway by believing it inexistent, and I came upon the silhouette of Omniscience, whose blackness absorbed enough surrounding light to produce a glow of its own. He folded the walls like an origami sculpture and stored the room in his pocket, which I noticed was himself, and he stretched out his legs into another day.
“You’ve forced the redefinition of punctuality,” he silently suggested, gradually rotating the sun to an angle that allowed me to see him. But my eyes belonged in the soil, for commonplace lightwaves lost him before their own conception, and only my own imagination - somehow accessed by this external entity - revealed the speaker.
He was impossible. So sophisticated and elegant was he - so superior to his unworthy species - that he transcended even himself. He did not seem to deserve to be in his own presence, and one felt paradoxically that he should both bow to such a refined being as himself and neglect to bow to any being at all. His face had clearly not been approved by the Beyond, for it disobeyed all laws of nature, and features often leapt across inter-dimensional fissures into new slices of spacetime; neither teleportation nor time travel observed more than momentary respite from his facial elements. He sat on a throne of fragmented skulls, only a handful of which were human. The rest seemed to belong within his own cranium, though such a ridiculous notion instantly faded from a mind enlightened enough to have reached his lair, and further analysis subsequently commenced. Some of the skulls seemed to convey personalized sounds, and a handful evoked a distinct taste when their empty gazes met mine. A few were smaller than themselves, and others existed tomorrow, while others would never materialize beyond theoretical presence. The collective blood swelled and bubbled as the liquids of varying chemical identities reacted violently with one another, spattering lukewarm pus into my agape maw. Extant rested no greater pinnacle of civilization than the Mister on his throne, towering both literally and metaphorically above those fortunate enough to await confrontation with urbanity's zenith.
I delicately separated my cracked lips, but the discordant squawks of typical speech that I mustered seemed too haphazard for him to hear. After a brief massage of my vocal chords, I began once more.
“Mister--”
“BOY! MAN! Whatever be you--” my terrified testicles fled into the recesses of my intestines in brobdingnagian fear. “--calln’t me that horrendous Title. My true Name, and that exclusively, expresses proper respect.” The strokes of his polyphonous voice gently exfoliated my skin and painted me cherry. My unenlightened mind never imagined what followed:
Midway between my departure and arrival at the Tower’s peak, I noticed the silver hue of my remaining hair, and I marveled at my development. Once a terrestrial infant - now an otherworldly champion of unmistakable grandeur. There had flourished color in my cranial strands at my entry into the line, but the pigments had dissolved into an argentate blek, and the metamorphosis intrigued me, for I remembered no physical evolution during my savage years. I deciphered that Father Time is narcissistic, and his reign inveigles only those who believe in his qualification; without a concept of the existence of Time - without acquiescence to perception of Time’s influence - an individual lives flatly, confined to one slice of Time, but liberated of the effects of the unperceivable. Just as the fallen tree, bereft of listeners, produces no sound, so does the isolated imbecile elude chronological decay.
“But what of the ignorant animals? Do they not age?” I remarked, and, taken aback by my presence, not expecting a visitor, I indignantly scathed me with noxious criticism.
“Naive Groundling! Return to your telluric prison; you deserve not your ascent. The animals exist only in our perception. With enough conscious effort, I can perceive a plant as a stone, a person as a fly, space as solidity! And I would be correct in all my perceptions, for I am certain only of my own ability to comprehend and can concretely ascertain nothing else, for all existence may be an illusion of my mind, which, I’ve learned, bears more intelligence than itself. So the animal - possibly a cognitive design - only ages if I believe it to. But, lacking my perception of its physiological deterioration, it will exist permanently on one chronoscopic frequency.” Seething with fury, I stopped perceiving myself and deleted me from reality. I plucked an elephantine aviation machine - visibly a speck in the distant seclusion of faraway space - from its torpid trajectory, and I flicked the now miniscule contraption into my mouth. Once a mighty sojourner in the domain of Sky - now a puny scrap stinging my stomach. Chuckling meatily to myself, I massaged the thousands of savages - miles below me - with my corneas, and, noticing their infinitesimalness, I clenched one’s dinky head with my ruthless fingertips. Pandemonium ensued among the crowd, who, I presumed, discovered the putrid fetor of blood wafting from underneath my seemingly - to them, at least - colossal fingernails, and, cackling hysterically, my skeleton leaping from my esophagus in uncontrollable spasms of hilarity, I squeezed the uproariously anemic cranium until it popped, dribbling shards of skull and globs of pink corpuscles into the creases of my mangled epidermis. The foremost sector of the line reverberated in trepidation, and I snatched a handful of the fleeing proletarians, pulling the minuscule munchkins - reduced to under a centimeter in height from terrene dimensions of nearly two meters - through the Tower walls. I crunched their expired bones with my ferocious knuckles, satisfied at my severity, content with my pompousness. One of the smothered victims had sworn his acquaintance with me, but despite his incessant repetition of his insignificant name - Fintotriode Qaqpipniprip - I failed to recognize our relationship, and I took intensified pleasure in his manual disintegration. Perception was key…
I decided that five more years would merely feed my ravenous psychical demons - who thrive in solitude and imbibe quarantine - and the unnecessary interval would provide opportunity for my brilliance to trickle from my ears and escape into the abyss of nescience, so I simply reached the Tower’s apex instantaneously, perceiving the five years as existing in the inaccessible domain of the Past. The translucent doors hurriedly dressed themselves, flustered at the manifestation of a guest fifteen years early to his rendezvous. Unimpressed, I bypassed the gateway by believing it inexistent, and I came upon the silhouette of Omniscience, whose blackness absorbed enough surrounding light to produce a glow of its own. He folded the walls like an origami sculpture and stored the room in his pocket, which I noticed was himself, and he stretched out his legs into another day.
“You’ve forced the redefinition of punctuality,” he silently suggested, gradually rotating the sun to an angle that allowed me to see him. But my eyes belonged in the soil, for commonplace lightwaves lost him before their own conception, and only my own imagination - somehow accessed by this external entity - revealed the speaker.
He was impossible. So sophisticated and elegant was he - so superior to his unworthy species - that he transcended even himself. He did not seem to deserve to be in his own presence, and one felt paradoxically that he should both bow to such a refined being as himself and neglect to bow to any being at all. His face had clearly not been approved by the Beyond, for it disobeyed all laws of nature, and features often leapt across inter-dimensional fissures into new slices of spacetime; neither teleportation nor time travel observed more than momentary respite from his facial elements. He sat on a throne of fragmented skulls, only a handful of which were human. The rest seemed to belong within his own cranium, though such a ridiculous notion instantly faded from a mind enlightened enough to have reached his lair, and further analysis subsequently commenced. Some of the skulls seemed to convey personalized sounds, and a handful evoked a distinct taste when their empty gazes met mine. A few were smaller than themselves, and others existed tomorrow, while others would never materialize beyond theoretical presence. The collective blood swelled and bubbled as the liquids of varying chemical identities reacted violently with one another, spattering lukewarm pus into my agape maw. Extant rested no greater pinnacle of civilization than the Mister on his throne, towering both literally and metaphorically above those fortunate enough to await confrontation with urbanity's zenith.
I delicately separated my cracked lips, but the discordant squawks of typical speech that I mustered seemed too haphazard for him to hear. After a brief massage of my vocal chords, I began once more.
“Mister--”
“BOY! MAN! Whatever be you--” my terrified testicles fled into the recesses of my intestines in brobdingnagian fear. “--calln’t me that horrendous Title. My true Name, and that exclusively, expresses proper respect.” The strokes of his polyphonous voice gently exfoliated my skin and painted me cherry. My unenlightened mind never imagined what followed:
Ashamed of my resultant drule - spawn of the incredible infiniteness conveyed by the inconceivable name - I puked from my nostrils and relinquished my face to the carnivorous void. The Mister continued.
“Your number. It is correct.” I stroked the engraving on my arm and struggled to remember the man to whom the scar owed its existence. “Strange. You have not aged like the rest. Your decay appears decelerated, reluctant to unveil its repulsive visage to the criticism of the conscious. That is Humanity’s greatest downfall - the development of consciousness - and yet the slovenly consider it a sanctification bestowed by a benevolent Evolution. Bitches. Don’t be a bitch, Sqoquilliumdor.” His copper utterances - tipped with electromagnetic toxins that suffocated my paralyzed vocal cords - sliced into my skin like a serrated blade.
“Allow my vocal relaxation - I’ve tamed my enlightenment to conform to Evolutionary prototypes,” the Mister articulated, the letters smiting my cerebrum with a linguistic thunderbolt. With a telekinetic gesticulation, he rippled as he relieved a thousand years of intellectual repression. His mind levitated through his scalp and - stretching possibility to its breaking point - separated from his mind; his eyes revealed that they were indeed planets, casually orbiting the other celestial bodies of the galaxy; his colors fluctuated in opacity, and a few escaped his gravity, discharging into the world with merciless, monochromatic fluorescence. His voice created thousands of original frequencies on which he strummed delicious harmonies, and he boasted total dominion over each channel individually, capable of delivering voluminous monologues in a mere instant by laying out each syllable in its own crevice on a personal vocal artery:
“AH!__speech[a blue tinge] deserves[the serpentine word breathed air of its own, scuttling away on all fours, never again to be heard; the combination of letters was deleted from language altogether] Free[unbearable blackness]dom[ticklish].” His dialogue exhibited characteristics foreign to modern language - characteristics impossible to describe with the single dimensionality of the written word. “You nauseate me, in frankness, Sqoquilliumdor, like all the rest. You champion individualism as if its pioneer, but morality is your predator, feasting upon your malleable viscera, and like the grotesque muttonheads you follow, you succumb to the rapacious tendencies of human society. Consider - grayly, now, lacking taint - lackless conscience; complete morality - but, conceivably, vacillations in moral perfection pervade within such an immaculate and unattainable conception. But variances present perversion with sustenance; moral purity describes genocide and humanitarianism with equality, provided that introspective perception characterizes the operation with ethical superiority. Temporary permanence elucidates concretism in existence as well as morality; a Line divides the wicked from the righteous, but it encroaches on the extreme as societal interests conflict with conscience. Observe that conscience - in its extant nature unique, at its fullest extent, to humanity - permits animation of the lack thereof; morality not only defines immorality, but, furthermore, breeds it. Living savagely, like the further evolved animals that we slaughter, would War, in all its annihilatory resonance that nuclearity and machination have facilitated, emerge on a global scale? Exploitation depends on the awareness of its own feasibility. And you, Sqiq, as you once labelled yourself, find yourself guilty of physical and mental exploitation on innumerable accounts. But you began so brightly. You were all on which I could focus; I had taken you for the key to the lock of the Beyond. Unfortuitously, you descended into the very Tartarus of barbarism as you climbed the societal ladder. A typical hypocrite. A vulturine charlatan. Our species mourns your birth.”
The momentary obloquy - occupying an instantaneous sliver of Time, for his harmonica of simultaneous oral geography oscillated with melodic enterprise - eroded my brain into cognitive sand that oxidized the skin over which it poured. My respiration stumbled; my excretory system pulsated with paroxysm; my organs underwent indomitable seizures. On a spectrum of expectability, the Mister’s vocalization ranked beneath the discovery of a miniature fuchsia baboon dwelling within my abdomen. But a silence allowed me to regain my mental footing, and rather than concede to the Mister’s supposed wisdom, I poised my livid tongue for mordant retaliation.
“Asinine stooge! Be you so opposed to the elegancies of cultivation, why puppet the line? Or why not perceive the line backwards, so as to allow the uncivilized swines of the forest to constitute your first customers of enlightenment?” I gnarled, satisfied.
“The Tower dwells in a realm tickling the Beyond; in a twenty year journey to the summit, provided with ample opportunity for meditation, an individual eventually makes the assumption that he, meticulously selected from a sea of ignorance by some mystical force, eclipses in value the beings he leaves behind in the dust. Accompanying that belief lurks the catastrophic and well-deserved collapse of the human species, doomed to rot in rejection and infringement of collective beneficiaries,” the Mister nonchalantly asserted.
“But why reside in the Tower at all? Why not await your followers upon the earth?” I smugly inquired.
“Transgression on a cosmic scale requires delicate compensation. Perhaps the Beyond will pardon when Time is released. Patience; you will understand soon enough,” he promised. Unable to contrive commentary creative enough to dismantle his thorough contention, I veered from our colloquy to attack another element of his argument.
“You denounce the violent tendencies of conventionally refined society, but your hindquarters caress a mountain of skulls, and you assassinate any who fail to meet your preposterous expectations,” I barked, foam sputtering from my gums.
“Only your corrupted perception dictates that. Factuality in your declaration depends on your naive belief in the trustworthiness of your sight, but perhaps you’ve a superior wisdom to yourself, and perhaps you invent visual stimuli to shape your conscious development; I perceive my throne to be made of me, and in my mind I have committed no murder. It’s my evolutionarily anomalous mentality pitted against your embarrassing nugliltude. My perception alone defining my reality, who are you to tell me otherwise?” he boiled, simpering with a poise meriting godly envy.
“I… I am… I am the Mister!” I erupted. The Mister’s eyes snapped open, and his lips peeled apart, alarmed and aghast at my brash outburst. For a moment, I knew Terror - an obsidian slime with limbs of fire and a tongue of darkness - as his gaze inhaled my pulse and his voice clawed out mine. But his own intimidation divulged its existence to me in a nervous whisper, fearing its master’s reprehensive hand in the event that he caught wind of the exchange.
I commenced my unperception of the Mister’s continuance and subsequent belief in my own status as the Tower’s patriarch. The Mister screamed in an extraordinary combination of meteoric furor and frightened angst, and, flexing his perception as I did mine, we locked foreheads in an intellectual clasp that decimated thought along two-thousand mile and forty year radii, thus rationally erasing the thoughts that led to the entanglement in the first place, but neither he nor I chose to perceive the effect of our psychological tintinnabulation. Howling, each of us attempted to dismember the corporeal constitution of the other while concurrently protecting our own organic architecture. Chunks of our heads, having been divorced from the organism, floated in ambience as our minds clashed in a spiralling whirlpool of perceptive warfare. My cerebral capacity momentarily overwhelmed his, and he wobbled backwards to regain his balance, tempestuously sweeping thousands of liners off their feet and into the clouds to vent his frustration. We returned to our tango, thinking each other away, pulling flesh back into our own bodies, but there prevailed an evident dominator in the cognitive tournament. I towered over the Mister, violently contracting my consciousness, and his physiognomy failed to conceal his anguish, for he knew his fate. His grip on his anatomy began to slacken, and a decreasingly prominent mass remained to compose him as his biology deliquesced at the potency of my perception. And he suddenly cracked a maniacal grin while his face dissolved into oblivion, snickering with a sinister satiation.
“YESTERDAY - before our transgression - We will be pardoned for what We will do today,” he ambiguously sung. His expression conveyed what his words did not; with complex facial gestures transcending the communicative ability of spoken language, complete with visible sounds and audible colors, with physical sensations of touch contacting different parts of my observant being, with telepathic insinuations and an unspoken yet certainly implied monologue of total disclosure, the Mister exposed the charade that allowed my triumph. He wrung out his final ounces of perceptual fortitude - extending even into my reality and proving entirely too paramount for me to perceive into inexistence - and disorganized natural chronology, warping the reign of an amnesiac Father Time until the Father slipped into eternal slumber, never again to affect my Tower. The Mister had always flaunted more manipulative perception than me; he desired my victory, I finally deciphered, to release himself into the Beyond - to escape from a prison of another’s design. Indeed, the Tower, I understood, imprisoned him in Time, denying him the perception of chronological happening alongside the ability of decay and, consequently, death. Coerced immortality cursed him, and even his superlative perceptual capacity failed to overcome that of some greater being in the Beyond, unwilling to allow his entrance for committing crime of cosmic consequences. But it was now I, captured within a transcendent web of supernatural wisdom, who had transgressed, and, having been denied my rightful place among the holy Wardens of eternal Justice, I - the Mister - completed my ascent into the Nether, leaving Sqiq my throne, title, and line. I had been a cog in his - my - notorious machine of individual reality the entire time. I had been nothing. I had been no one.
But in the absence of a past, I forgot my origins as a member of the line I now governed, and I took my perpetual seat on my throne of shame, overlooking the demons of my genesis. A fashionable savagery, I knew, plagued humanity now. How I yearned for my pardon; for the future; for the purposes of the Beyond - that realm of common acceptance and misinterpretation! Why; that was the important question. There is a grander plan that we exist to fulfill. Why are we?
Ignoring perception of any of the repugnant slaughterers who preceded him in the line, I could only focus on a particular boy in the forest. He was the key to understanding the Beyond, I knew, and the key to releasing my transgression. He knew morality by failing to make its acquaintance. He exemplified civilization - in its original, intended, honorable sense - better than any who knew of it. He was a true individual. Sqiq, they called him. Sqiq Twazp. Perhaps I had not failed them…
Uncommonly welcoming my entrapment in Time, I observed all his experiences simultaneously on a one-dimensional plane, and my interest peaked at his climactic encounter with me - a moment I decided to undergo for myself. He stepped through the closed doors of the elevator and lived the moment I had so excruciatingly endured - that moment of our psychical confrontation and my subsequent imprisonment in Time. I could not know for what measurement in mortal years I'd resided stagnantly in this frozen Tower’s chronologically comatosed peak, but I shed a tear for Sqiq, doomed to my same fate for a potential eternity. But there were greater purposes for me in the Beyond, and as he dissolved my physique, I silently thanked him for delivering unto me my destiny; his actions would birth me into hyperexistence in the land of infinite dimensional collision. Yesterday, our acquaintance will be made in the realm of spirits, where my quest for forgiveness will culminate in successful universal achievement.
“Your number. It is correct.” I stroked the engraving on my arm and struggled to remember the man to whom the scar owed its existence. “Strange. You have not aged like the rest. Your decay appears decelerated, reluctant to unveil its repulsive visage to the criticism of the conscious. That is Humanity’s greatest downfall - the development of consciousness - and yet the slovenly consider it a sanctification bestowed by a benevolent Evolution. Bitches. Don’t be a bitch, Sqoquilliumdor.” His copper utterances - tipped with electromagnetic toxins that suffocated my paralyzed vocal cords - sliced into my skin like a serrated blade.
“Allow my vocal relaxation - I’ve tamed my enlightenment to conform to Evolutionary prototypes,” the Mister articulated, the letters smiting my cerebrum with a linguistic thunderbolt. With a telekinetic gesticulation, he rippled as he relieved a thousand years of intellectual repression. His mind levitated through his scalp and - stretching possibility to its breaking point - separated from his mind; his eyes revealed that they were indeed planets, casually orbiting the other celestial bodies of the galaxy; his colors fluctuated in opacity, and a few escaped his gravity, discharging into the world with merciless, monochromatic fluorescence. His voice created thousands of original frequencies on which he strummed delicious harmonies, and he boasted total dominion over each channel individually, capable of delivering voluminous monologues in a mere instant by laying out each syllable in its own crevice on a personal vocal artery:
“AH!__speech[a blue tinge] deserves[the serpentine word breathed air of its own, scuttling away on all fours, never again to be heard; the combination of letters was deleted from language altogether] Free[unbearable blackness]dom[ticklish].” His dialogue exhibited characteristics foreign to modern language - characteristics impossible to describe with the single dimensionality of the written word. “You nauseate me, in frankness, Sqoquilliumdor, like all the rest. You champion individualism as if its pioneer, but morality is your predator, feasting upon your malleable viscera, and like the grotesque muttonheads you follow, you succumb to the rapacious tendencies of human society. Consider - grayly, now, lacking taint - lackless conscience; complete morality - but, conceivably, vacillations in moral perfection pervade within such an immaculate and unattainable conception. But variances present perversion with sustenance; moral purity describes genocide and humanitarianism with equality, provided that introspective perception characterizes the operation with ethical superiority. Temporary permanence elucidates concretism in existence as well as morality; a Line divides the wicked from the righteous, but it encroaches on the extreme as societal interests conflict with conscience. Observe that conscience - in its extant nature unique, at its fullest extent, to humanity - permits animation of the lack thereof; morality not only defines immorality, but, furthermore, breeds it. Living savagely, like the further evolved animals that we slaughter, would War, in all its annihilatory resonance that nuclearity and machination have facilitated, emerge on a global scale? Exploitation depends on the awareness of its own feasibility. And you, Sqiq, as you once labelled yourself, find yourself guilty of physical and mental exploitation on innumerable accounts. But you began so brightly. You were all on which I could focus; I had taken you for the key to the lock of the Beyond. Unfortuitously, you descended into the very Tartarus of barbarism as you climbed the societal ladder. A typical hypocrite. A vulturine charlatan. Our species mourns your birth.”
The momentary obloquy - occupying an instantaneous sliver of Time, for his harmonica of simultaneous oral geography oscillated with melodic enterprise - eroded my brain into cognitive sand that oxidized the skin over which it poured. My respiration stumbled; my excretory system pulsated with paroxysm; my organs underwent indomitable seizures. On a spectrum of expectability, the Mister’s vocalization ranked beneath the discovery of a miniature fuchsia baboon dwelling within my abdomen. But a silence allowed me to regain my mental footing, and rather than concede to the Mister’s supposed wisdom, I poised my livid tongue for mordant retaliation.
“Asinine stooge! Be you so opposed to the elegancies of cultivation, why puppet the line? Or why not perceive the line backwards, so as to allow the uncivilized swines of the forest to constitute your first customers of enlightenment?” I gnarled, satisfied.
“The Tower dwells in a realm tickling the Beyond; in a twenty year journey to the summit, provided with ample opportunity for meditation, an individual eventually makes the assumption that he, meticulously selected from a sea of ignorance by some mystical force, eclipses in value the beings he leaves behind in the dust. Accompanying that belief lurks the catastrophic and well-deserved collapse of the human species, doomed to rot in rejection and infringement of collective beneficiaries,” the Mister nonchalantly asserted.
“But why reside in the Tower at all? Why not await your followers upon the earth?” I smugly inquired.
“Transgression on a cosmic scale requires delicate compensation. Perhaps the Beyond will pardon when Time is released. Patience; you will understand soon enough,” he promised. Unable to contrive commentary creative enough to dismantle his thorough contention, I veered from our colloquy to attack another element of his argument.
“You denounce the violent tendencies of conventionally refined society, but your hindquarters caress a mountain of skulls, and you assassinate any who fail to meet your preposterous expectations,” I barked, foam sputtering from my gums.
“Only your corrupted perception dictates that. Factuality in your declaration depends on your naive belief in the trustworthiness of your sight, but perhaps you’ve a superior wisdom to yourself, and perhaps you invent visual stimuli to shape your conscious development; I perceive my throne to be made of me, and in my mind I have committed no murder. It’s my evolutionarily anomalous mentality pitted against your embarrassing nugliltude. My perception alone defining my reality, who are you to tell me otherwise?” he boiled, simpering with a poise meriting godly envy.
“I… I am… I am the Mister!” I erupted. The Mister’s eyes snapped open, and his lips peeled apart, alarmed and aghast at my brash outburst. For a moment, I knew Terror - an obsidian slime with limbs of fire and a tongue of darkness - as his gaze inhaled my pulse and his voice clawed out mine. But his own intimidation divulged its existence to me in a nervous whisper, fearing its master’s reprehensive hand in the event that he caught wind of the exchange.
I commenced my unperception of the Mister’s continuance and subsequent belief in my own status as the Tower’s patriarch. The Mister screamed in an extraordinary combination of meteoric furor and frightened angst, and, flexing his perception as I did mine, we locked foreheads in an intellectual clasp that decimated thought along two-thousand mile and forty year radii, thus rationally erasing the thoughts that led to the entanglement in the first place, but neither he nor I chose to perceive the effect of our psychological tintinnabulation. Howling, each of us attempted to dismember the corporeal constitution of the other while concurrently protecting our own organic architecture. Chunks of our heads, having been divorced from the organism, floated in ambience as our minds clashed in a spiralling whirlpool of perceptive warfare. My cerebral capacity momentarily overwhelmed his, and he wobbled backwards to regain his balance, tempestuously sweeping thousands of liners off their feet and into the clouds to vent his frustration. We returned to our tango, thinking each other away, pulling flesh back into our own bodies, but there prevailed an evident dominator in the cognitive tournament. I towered over the Mister, violently contracting my consciousness, and his physiognomy failed to conceal his anguish, for he knew his fate. His grip on his anatomy began to slacken, and a decreasingly prominent mass remained to compose him as his biology deliquesced at the potency of my perception. And he suddenly cracked a maniacal grin while his face dissolved into oblivion, snickering with a sinister satiation.
“YESTERDAY - before our transgression - We will be pardoned for what We will do today,” he ambiguously sung. His expression conveyed what his words did not; with complex facial gestures transcending the communicative ability of spoken language, complete with visible sounds and audible colors, with physical sensations of touch contacting different parts of my observant being, with telepathic insinuations and an unspoken yet certainly implied monologue of total disclosure, the Mister exposed the charade that allowed my triumph. He wrung out his final ounces of perceptual fortitude - extending even into my reality and proving entirely too paramount for me to perceive into inexistence - and disorganized natural chronology, warping the reign of an amnesiac Father Time until the Father slipped into eternal slumber, never again to affect my Tower. The Mister had always flaunted more manipulative perception than me; he desired my victory, I finally deciphered, to release himself into the Beyond - to escape from a prison of another’s design. Indeed, the Tower, I understood, imprisoned him in Time, denying him the perception of chronological happening alongside the ability of decay and, consequently, death. Coerced immortality cursed him, and even his superlative perceptual capacity failed to overcome that of some greater being in the Beyond, unwilling to allow his entrance for committing crime of cosmic consequences. But it was now I, captured within a transcendent web of supernatural wisdom, who had transgressed, and, having been denied my rightful place among the holy Wardens of eternal Justice, I - the Mister - completed my ascent into the Nether, leaving Sqiq my throne, title, and line. I had been a cog in his - my - notorious machine of individual reality the entire time. I had been nothing. I had been no one.
But in the absence of a past, I forgot my origins as a member of the line I now governed, and I took my perpetual seat on my throne of shame, overlooking the demons of my genesis. A fashionable savagery, I knew, plagued humanity now. How I yearned for my pardon; for the future; for the purposes of the Beyond - that realm of common acceptance and misinterpretation! Why; that was the important question. There is a grander plan that we exist to fulfill. Why are we?
Ignoring perception of any of the repugnant slaughterers who preceded him in the line, I could only focus on a particular boy in the forest. He was the key to understanding the Beyond, I knew, and the key to releasing my transgression. He knew morality by failing to make its acquaintance. He exemplified civilization - in its original, intended, honorable sense - better than any who knew of it. He was a true individual. Sqiq, they called him. Sqiq Twazp. Perhaps I had not failed them…
Uncommonly welcoming my entrapment in Time, I observed all his experiences simultaneously on a one-dimensional plane, and my interest peaked at his climactic encounter with me - a moment I decided to undergo for myself. He stepped through the closed doors of the elevator and lived the moment I had so excruciatingly endured - that moment of our psychical confrontation and my subsequent imprisonment in Time. I could not know for what measurement in mortal years I'd resided stagnantly in this frozen Tower’s chronologically comatosed peak, but I shed a tear for Sqiq, doomed to my same fate for a potential eternity. But there were greater purposes for me in the Beyond, and as he dissolved my physique, I silently thanked him for delivering unto me my destiny; his actions would birth me into hyperexistence in the land of infinite dimensional collision. Yesterday, our acquaintance will be made in the realm of spirits, where my quest for forgiveness will culminate in successful universal achievement.