The Me Of The Past Hates You Of The Present

The inner world of one Yaksha Dokuja was an odd thing to behold, at first. Everything looked...normal, at a glance. The world was simply one of sunlight streaming through clouds, which drifted ever so gently through the sky. There was the far-off sound of conversations, too muffled and distorted to really comprehend, no matter how hard one tried. The grass was green, the sky was blue, and there was nothing to be afraid of.

All the same, being here for Yaksha was always an unsettling, disturbing deed. He had spent long enough here to notice the indiscrepancies; the sunlight trickling through was ever so faintly the wrong shade of yellow, the grass beneath his feet had an almost synthetic feel to it, and if one chased the voices, they would quickly find things best not committed to memories. Like a stained glass mirror, Yaksha had managed to nab bits and pieces of the world around him, slotting them all into place, creating an image that was beautiful on the surface.

But stained glass was a delicate process, and to a hollow delicacy could mean only one thing. He had been forced to shave and pare down every memory he had, every thought he'd ever run across, had been force to snip off slivers here and there to finally make things fit. Yaksha's inner world was in fact two worlds. The surface world, of beauty and delight and normalcy. A world that he may one day strive to take his rightful place as a part of, once more. A world where he could perhaps make things go right this time around.

And the world of all the leftover bits, of everything that didn't quite fit in. It was a hideous eyesore of a world, something that seemed to shift and writhe as one watched it, moving with an oddly organic feel to it. It was a world of puzzle pieces, all left over and poorly maintained, striving to fit together into something sensible. Yaksha Dokuja had managed to take a handful of delusion, a smidge of narcissism, a dollop of sociopathy, and any other number of mad things...and he had carefully, cooly, with a mind that ticked away with a dreadful cold sanity so intense that it couldn't rightfully be called sanity anymore, mixed them all together in a bowl until he'd made something that resembled sanity, in every possible way.

But in the same manner that one could add acids and bases to the same container in the same ratios to create water, there was always substrate. Not even Yaksha could filly destroy madness, not on his own. And so he had simply settled for a bowl full of all the best things he could remember from the human world, with a toxic sludge of foul things lingering just at the bottom.

And now something was stirring it up. Yaksha stared up at the sky once more, inhaling slowly. Before his very eyes the sunlight seemed to darken and thicken, as if by a solar eclipse. But it was not darkness that poured down from above, but something else. It was a thing of asymmetry and horrible beauty and even staring at it made Yaksha's teeth vibrate and made him want to move forward to embrace it to hold it close to let it become a part of him.

But it had always been a part of him, and Yaksha could no more embrace it into himself than one could invite a man who has already made his way into your domicile to come inside. He knew what this thing was, whatever other names it preferred to go by. He knew that his mind would never be able to fully comprehend it, to understand the foul indescribable abominations he'd left behind as a result of becoming what he was.

He leaned towards the ground, pulling away at the grass near himself, his mind working fervently, capturing the image of a trapdoor even as he worked to unearth it. This was his inner world after all, and lucid dreaming was a talent that anyone could learn given enough time. It took him perhaps a minute of digging before he managed to strike it however, and he tugged up on the faint ring connecting it.

Only to peer down into a hungry, gaping maw. He had forgotten the damned steps! And now the Juin, this damnable parasite, this stupid inconsequential braindead thing was throwing up roadblocks to him! Yaksha wasn't sure if this could really be called a battle of wills, not when the juin were simply opportunistically pushing every button they could find, trying to rewrite his mind. No, this was a battle of man against nature. And that meant Yaksha could take nothing for granted.

He shoved his hand into the maw, and as soon as it clamped down, intent to suck him inside to be digested in whatever horrid stomach it had formed, he reversed his grip, yanking it back through the stone teeth. And with it he brought something only he could've thought up. The juin was competent, but mere competence couldn't beat canniness. Yaksha held aloft the key he had snatched out; the beast had no duodenum that he'd been able to see, so he'd simply made one. And this time as he closed the trapdoor, leaving that hungry mouth dissatisfied, he shoved the oddly-shaped organ into an even-more oddly shaped keyhole, one that had simply appeared on the ground. He twisted it, gently and with great focus, until he heard the faintest clicking sound. And this time, he envisioned the stairs. Heavy marble stairs, the sort of stairs that could stand for millenia, glowing from within with some sort of bioluminescence. He hopped into the hole, shutting the trapdoor behind himself, and then shoving the key back through the hole.

Let some random passing spectre try and figure that puzzle out. Yaksha had needed a solid few minutes of exerting his will upon a place where he had already claimed dominion just to get down here. There was no way an intruder in his realm could follow that easily. Content in his isolation now, Yaksha began the long, distasteful trek downwards, into the primordial soup of the soul. To once more bask in a place where time held no meaning, where physics were a mere signpost on an infinitely long pole, denoting dozens of alternative theories.

Into our realm, Dear Reader.