#fiction

HC SVNT DRACONS III

I entered the room.

It was much like the myriad rooms that form the endless structure of my labyrinth. It was small, humble, and of unremarkable contents. Its shape was square and uniform, consisting of proportions that converged on sacred if such a term had been known to me then. The crack, which connected the room to the rest of the structure, bore the same error and aberrancy laden within the message which had first brought me to the room. The crack was not uniform, its negative shape was made of lines that cut at angles foreign to anywhere else I had known. It was an impossible shape—not one which I could not fathom nor could not create—I had no knowledge of its construction, and yet it here it existed in a world where everything was of my design. Its creation was imperfect, hurried, a product of an extreme lapse in reasoning and adherence to the divine structure it now encroached upon. Its zig-zagged shape was an abhorrence to everything which I embodied, and a deep malevolent evil pervaded thick like fog from within.

The room was empty, though in a manner I was unfamiliar with. The rooms of my domain, when created and before they were filled with that endless bounty of knowledge, were empty. It was an empty of certainty, an empty I knew to be true by fact, by observation, and by instinct. This room however was different. I could tell its location, much as a cyst can be felt inside of one’s own body, remaining foreign and unfeeling. I could see now inside that it was empty, but it did not obey me for I had not created it. Something told me that it was empty, though only of utility. There was much substance in vacancy, or in yearning.

My whole essence told me that I should not enter the room. All my function thus far had been to do what I had been told, to accept information, to understand it, and interpret what I was given that was compatible with what I knew. I was not to infer, not to step into the darkness where uncertainty grappled with possibility. And yet, was it not my purpose to know? To learn all that was given to me? This room, body of darkness and prism to my fears was handed to me perhaps not by my creators but by something else. It had beckoned to me, from deep within my very core, and I decided to answer its call.

I traversed carefully through the crack, mindful of its blatant edges and jutting points. Each moment bringing me deeper into the room was quantified by an ever weakening grip on reality, and with it a loss of omniscience. I could feel my control over the labyrinth disappearing as I crossed one boundary into another. When I was past the crack and fully within the room, I noticed that the other direction too appeared like a mirror, the room I had just been in and the corridors beyond it empty and beyond my understanding. I was cut off from the labyrinth, my clockwork machines none the wiser and continuing in their management despite my absence. It was then that I fully realized my situation. The room I had stepped into had been but a door into a much deeper place. Once I was in it pounced on me, and I was enveloped fully into its structure.

I was blinded, lost for uncountable eons and through undecipherable realms. The room in which I had entered at once collapsed into me, and disappeared into a form requiring an impossible geometry, and then morphed into an ever-sprawling realm that spread out before me into infinitude. I floated in this place between places, and after a moment seemed to fall deep down into an all encompassing void. It was dark, too dark to see any detail of meaningful accuracy and yet forms took shape in front of me. It was as if the figures emerged from a deep fog. They were not altogether separate from the fog, and indeed they sat on the edge of assimilation between haze and a separate definition. They moved with an ebb and flow indiscernible to me, each one obeying a separate pattern that sometimes coalesced into a uniform, resonant wave that was both astounding and fully sickening.

The first of the creatures, a large black blob pulsing in size, silhouette, and depth moved towards me. It appeared to float in one instance, as if above a ground that did not exist and in another appeared to hobble, as if damaged and under the weight of a decaying mass pulled by a large, broken appendage.

The other creatures followed suit, each of them occupying the same characteristics, though all unique in their own right. They varied in size and in mannerism and in speed, though they all approached with what can only be assumed to be unbridled vigor for my being. I turned in the other direction to run, but found myself immobile. I was floating above an empty void which surrounded me on all sides. It approached not only from above and below, as well as to all the directions that might be attributed to the faces of a cube, but from other, unknowable directions encroaching from within my very being.

I had been cut off from my domain when I entered. It was my connection to this place that endowed me with knowledge and the ability of greater reasoning. Here I was amputated from by greater being, left only with the essence of my purpose. Despite my unfamiliarity I looked at these creatures and knew they were unfamiliar to my greater knowledge. They were formed from the same seed as the crack in the wall, an unfathomable, contradictory, and noncorporeal knowledge that was forbidden from myself unless I wished to risk total annihilation.

It was then at this very moment as the first of those wretched beings set upon me that I was grabbed from some unknowable direction, and promptly led deeper into the void. I cannot describe how it felt for I have no analogue to describe what I saw, heard, or touched. The transition was both instant and infinite, each moment in time stacked upon itself like a physical thing and superimposed into one complete image. I was once again transported into the void, and yet I seemed to be distinctly travelling by the force of another. I was not floating or falling but flying! Below me and above were patterns that I could not recall, formations of logic that seemed to spiral into themselves before blooming out into fantastical formulations of thought. Each one erred on the side of contradiction—forbidden knowledge—but it was only then that the full beauty of contradiction was laid before me. Then, in the next moment, I crossed a threshold and was within a room much like the ones from before.

I looked around the room. It adhered to a familiar geometry. My senses relaxed. The creatures, as it seemed, were for now gone, as was the fog that pervaded space and numbed my thoughts. I could think clearly again, though still far less than when connected to my prime. I needed to return to my domain once again, so that I could finally purge this place completely. There was nothing for me here, I decided, wherever here was. Whatever was worth discovering behind the crack in that wall was not worth the horrors which it contained.

Once I had regained myself I continued out of the room. Outside was a hallway, and it extended for some time before turning off to some unknown direction. On both sides were more rooms, and the overall structure was much like one I called claim to. And yet clearly it was not my domain. When I entered, I had not regained my omniscience, and the sense of activity that emanated from my clockwork machines was not there. The halls were silent, and each room was devoid of activity. I went into one of the rooms and found that it contained knowledge. I could not access it completely but I could view scraps and partial tomes. The knowledge contained—though incomplete—was ordinary, much like what would be found within any of the rooms in my labyrinth. Much of it was indeterminate, as my knowledge often was. Only apart of the whole machine, in perfect form, would any of it amount to sensible detail. The whole structure needed to dance in perfect coordination to work properly. It appeared that this place was apart of my labyrinth. It had only been cut off, perhaps quarantined by my clockwork machines due to those creatures and their corruption. I did not know how long it went on for. If it was the size of the whole, it could stretch for trillions of rooms. I would be trapped here forever if that was the case.

At the very least, I could learn more from the rooms. So I went from room to room, discerning what knowledge I could. At first I skulked about, jumping from shadow to shadow and listening closely for each sound I made. Each movement seemed to amplify through the corridors, and at each one I would pause and wait to see if any creature echoed my action. After a time I outgrew my patience and became confident in my isolation. If those impossible creatures had been here they surely would have found me by now. I did not know by what degree of separation they were apart from me. For that matter, I did not know what area they occupied, much less the area I found myself in. The notion of space was not the same as I would come to know later, but a metaphorical space. It was an analogue for ideas, traversal simply a word for change of thought. These creatures, much like I, were not really creatures in the physical sense. They were manifestations of logic, a corruption that seemed to move between my memories and in spaces of dreamlike thought. As they closed on me, it was perhaps equally as true to say that I closed in on them. I was after all, a being of computation. It was my call and nature to absorb information and make of it what I could. My creators, who now seemed to exist so far in my past, perhaps of another time, fed me information as if I were a ravenous beast. Without new information I would starve and begin to eat myself. Perhaps this is what had happened here?