FYS: The Visitor, Part Six
Dec. 26th, 2014 03:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jeriendhalOnce Ahn had been a counselor-priest, trained to guide minds onto healthy paths of thought. But in the Screaming Room she had been overwhelmed, her attempts to speak reason, to tell everyone around her that this empty, numbing existence would eventually pass, had not been heard. One by one she saw friends, family, strangers she'd grown to admire, fall back into madness, their crude avatars flailing, weeping, wailing, against the horror of what they had become.
So she'd withdrawn. She could not cut herself off from the Screaming Room, but she could... push it aside... compartmentalize her mind. Say this is there, acknowledge that it was there, would always be there, but that it was not here. So she was left to her increasingly slower thoughts, not asleep but drifting, her consciousness numbed, the years passing, blurring into one another in an eternal gray dreariness. Until one day she had truly slept.
And then she woke up. To a whitewashed healer chamber, laying on a bed with warm sheets, where there was no screaming, no sound at all except for the whistles of birds through the open window and her own breathing.
Breathing!
Her fingers stroked the fabric of the sheets, feeling the tight weave of the linen fibers under her fingertips. There was soft light peeking through a window to her left, and a closed door in front of her. Beside the bed was a small table with a voicer sitting on it.
Wait, that wasn't right. Who put a voicer in a healer chamber, where it would ring and quite probably disturb the patient trying to rest?
“Hello?” she called out, testing her voice. She rose to her feet, tottering slightly as she regained her balance. Stepping over to the window she looked outward. Instead of a city, or even a parking lot, there was a field of undulating curlgrass waving a slight breeze, filling the horizon. Two quick steps to the door, which opened easily under her hand, revealed not a healer tower corridor but more grass, as if the room had been dropped into a field.
“Oh, I've gone mad,” Ahn said with disappointment. Behind her the voicer began to ring. She ignored it. If she had gone mad it wouldn't do her much good to listen after all.
After a good ten minutes walking around the exterior of the room, reveling in the feel of the curlgrass under her feet even as her rational mind refused to believe in it, she started getting tired of the voicer's constant ring. So she went inside, lifted the receiver, and said distinctly, “I'm not listening to voices in my own head.”
We understand, came the calm reply, the voice vaguely male, but somehow not. Would it help to tell you that you're not actually insane?
“No,” she replied.
Ah, the voice sighed. Well, we knew this wouldn't be easy...
So she'd withdrawn. She could not cut herself off from the Screaming Room, but she could... push it aside... compartmentalize her mind. Say this is there, acknowledge that it was there, would always be there, but that it was not here. So she was left to her increasingly slower thoughts, not asleep but drifting, her consciousness numbed, the years passing, blurring into one another in an eternal gray dreariness. Until one day she had truly slept.
And then she woke up. To a whitewashed healer chamber, laying on a bed with warm sheets, where there was no screaming, no sound at all except for the whistles of birds through the open window and her own breathing.
Breathing!
Her fingers stroked the fabric of the sheets, feeling the tight weave of the linen fibers under her fingertips. There was soft light peeking through a window to her left, and a closed door in front of her. Beside the bed was a small table with a voicer sitting on it.
Wait, that wasn't right. Who put a voicer in a healer chamber, where it would ring and quite probably disturb the patient trying to rest?
“Hello?” she called out, testing her voice. She rose to her feet, tottering slightly as she regained her balance. Stepping over to the window she looked outward. Instead of a city, or even a parking lot, there was a field of undulating curlgrass waving a slight breeze, filling the horizon. Two quick steps to the door, which opened easily under her hand, revealed not a healer tower corridor but more grass, as if the room had been dropped into a field.
“Oh, I've gone mad,” Ahn said with disappointment. Behind her the voicer began to ring. She ignored it. If she had gone mad it wouldn't do her much good to listen after all.
After a good ten minutes walking around the exterior of the room, reveling in the feel of the curlgrass under her feet even as her rational mind refused to believe in it, she started getting tired of the voicer's constant ring. So she went inside, lifted the receiver, and said distinctly, “I'm not listening to voices in my own head.”
We understand, came the calm reply, the voice vaguely male, but somehow not. Would it help to tell you that you're not actually insane?
“No,” she replied.
Ah, the voice sighed. Well, we knew this wouldn't be easy...
