[[WC: 1072]]
A lioness had given birth to four very special cubs. They were conceived by the God of Ashes, a sad deity by the name of Fleance. His gloom crept through the undergrowth, burning all that he touched, leaving only silvery ashes. Ashes that filled his footprints and drifted through the air from his wings. The cubs shared the colors of these ashes, gray and black, muddied with the browns of their mother – dark, haunting colors.
But the cubs were also seers, demigods with the gift of visions of past, present, future, and everything in between – though were they truly gifts? Or curses?
A pale female was brought into the world, only the second female born of Ashes, sharing her father’s pelt but graced by her mother’s browns, a white choker patterned around her neck. She could not yet see, her eyes sealed shut from birth – but she was by no means deprived of sight. Her world was in constant explosion from sensory overload, psychedelic experiences defining her life before she knew anything different.
She lay curled in the grass, her soft newborn fur mingling with the bodies of her brothers, rubbing and chafing, pulsing with fresh life. She could smell them, her nose buried in fur, and she could hear them, their muffled mewling and quiet movements. She could even taste them, her mouth opening in a soft scream, her small tongue brushing their fur. But her eyes could not see them. Her eyes were preoccupied, filled with living dreams that crawled through her senses even while awake, images etching themselves into her eyelids, searing into her immature pupils.
A great spiral rose before her vision, blinding white streaked by deep black, rotating quickly and dizzyingly. It grew and shrank without acknowledgement to order or time, taking its changes randomly. Here and there, a branch of the spiral would bend outwards, going against the grain. It would bloom and blossom, developing its own spirals. Sometimes they faded into the distance as she fell deeper into the mother spiral. Sometimes the mother spiral twirled away, out of her vision, as she was swallowed by the new spirals. Sometimes they would change direction completely – but it wasn’t a matter of twisting clockwise or counterclockwise. They would grow into vast three dimensional shapes, massive spheres of twisting, twirling chaos, leveling onto different planes, rotating not just in circles but in squares, diamonds – any shapes at all, just rotating, rotating.
Her spirals had begun to change color, switching from soothingly cool colors to painfully bright warm colors, the palette of her mind intensifying with every switch – but they blended together so randomly and under so many dimensions, that often she wouldn’t even notice the change. Sometimes several evolutions occurred at once, layering on top of each other within her visions, chaotic blending mixing with stark contrasts, rainbows of light and shapes spiraling out of control within her mind.
But the spirals were only the beginning. It did not take long for the visions to blur together, colors morphing and melting and burning and melting and flowing and stuttering and screaming and twisting away into psychedelia. They were changing more quickly now, each one more abstract than and yet indistinguishable from their successors. Her irises writhed beneath their sheathes, constantly in a state of what appeared to be REM sleep – but she was so very awake. Stories would begin to unfold within her visions, but would just as quickly end or fade into each other. Flashes of lights, bursts of colors, violent with contrast, shaking her body with impact, wrenching unknown senses into existence. With every breath she took, the whoosh of air through her lungs equaled a rush of angry sounds, screams and screeches grinding into her mind by surpassing her ears. Every touch of her siblings, her mother, her father, even herself, sent tremors through her spine and directly into her eyes, shapes shifting and forming into amorphous masses, complete with vivid colors and never ending spirals. Never ending! Racing through her mind faster than the speed of light, creeping slower than death. They would hide behind those eyelids, stretching and contracting through her mind in a vicious cycle.
There was one vision that seemed to last for days, the swirling colors and shapes edging into her peripherals, but never quite taking shape. It was a vast expanse of colors, relatively calm in comparison to the usual typhoon of chaos. It stretched on into an endless horizon, an infinite landscape. In the far distance was a dark shape, at first indistinguishable from the rest of the vision, but it grew. It crept across the level plane, growing in size as perspective shortened, amorphous and fluctuating, but retaining the blackness within its silhouette – blackness that couldn’t be described with black. Indeed, it was every color, all of them at once, and yet none of them at all. Over days and days and days it grew closer, haunting limbs stretching forward, so slowly they were hardly moving – but they were running. Time was beginning to stretch within her visions now, and she could see nothing aside from this figure on the landscape. The closer it came, the more chaotic its outline, as if it was bursting with energy and terrible things, sadness and regret, mingling with anger and fear – all to the highest degrees. The dark shape was burning with fire of all colors, seizing and convulsing with bedlam, always moving at the agonizingly slow pace.
Finally the figure reached her, and in those silently screaming moments of being mere inches away, she could feel herself screaming in agony and terror, the vibrations of her young lungs ripping at her own eyes as they trembled through her senses. The anticipation and the fear and the inability to run away from this terrifying moment swallowed her as the figure tore through her, the colors flashing violently, the fractals and spirals and unimaginable shapes inducing chaos. The madness was everywhere, the colors, the shapes, the energy – exploding into ashes, raining down around her, the fire burning with a savage flame – the coals searing her lungs, the ash filling her ears, filling the air, clouding her eyes. Spinning out of control, faster and faster and faster, and then a jump, a leap of the mind, she broke free - Tuhka’s eyes gasped for breath as they finally escaped into the colors of the real world, vivid teals glowing into life.
