Darkness.  Familiar, welcoming and warming darkness.  Within the cocoon of the instance, soundless and without even a gentle breeze, the depth of emptiness holds him in embrace as distant friends, long separated, would hold. 

Beneath, no footsteps disturb the silence for there is only the absence of ground beneath his feet. 

Above, no sky taunts him and no burdens find his shoulders. 

All around, there is peace, there is nothing.

How long it had been since this feeling, this comfort, had been missing from his life he could no longer tell,  his senses disorientated by time and reality of the waking world, but now time had no meaning and his senses felt nothing but the dark space enveloping him.  This world between worlds, the stepping stone from the darkness of reality to the unseen light of illusion, was his solace, his sanctuary from stimuli, and in the lonely and empty isolation, he felt at peace, he felt...nothing.

His breath, no more necessary than the flesh and bone that portrays the coded entity, breaks the silence.  The inhalation and exhalation giving the world back the time, that had been taken by his presence, in its steady rhythm.  Still darkness holds, yet he knows that with time, the progression to the next world will come soon. 

Sooner than he had hoped.  The noise, the echoing, empty mechanical noise of machine and wire hums in the depths of his mind. A sound of both worlds, a sound born both of reality and illusion, the sound that informs his senses of caution upon the next step.  Darkness holds.

The noise, ceaseless and recurrent, grows louder as the oncoming torrent of the surrounding code begins to change, begins to form into the world of illusion.  All around, the darkness in his mind begins to flicker with the subtle sounds and presence of the world beyond; familiar voices, and unfamiliar, merged to one battering assualt of sound upon his mind, unremorseless in their whispers, unrelenting in the barrage.  The stepping stone, now near drowned in the flood of illusionary stimuli, releases him as his lungs fill.

And in that instant, in that moment between breaths, between the nothing, and illusion, there comes something new, something never felt or seen or welcomed before by his long dead eyes.  It lasts but that moment, yet the moment seems an eternity of both pain and wonder, and dissipates as swiftly as its arrival.

There comes light.  Light of reality, light of illusion, light of both worlds where he had only ever perceived one.  Light, glorious yet fleeting, met not by his dreams, not by the re-creation of senses in his mind, but seen with the eyes that had never seen before.  Seen, as one would perceive the virgin sight of the moon behind thick and clouded sky.

As his lungs empty in exhalation and the world of illusion takes hold, his senses flare to the familiar pain of the living world.  Noise, sound, even the touch of the ground beneath him come as one, as one touching a flame would feel the pain and the heat and the smell of burning flesh.

Once, this pain had been familiar, had even been a comforting reminder of the world in which he had reached, yet now without close memories of the torture, it brings him to his knees.  His mind burns with the conflagration of the illusionary stimulus; each spoken word, passing car, even from a distance, adding fuel to the flames.  He fights at first, his anger, his rage building against the blistering flames that ravage his senses, yet the pain only becomes worse. 

He succumbs, he relaxes to the world around and breathes.  Slowly.  For an instant, the pain remains as once the darkness had done, yet just as the solace of darkness had been lost, so too does the pain begin to subside.  A memory, "Control", reverberates from the back of his mind, forcing its way through the fire to his lips, uttered yet not heard by any. 

Control. 

The fire struggles as partitions and walls erect within the mind, each sense contained, each input restrained and tempered, until it burns only as cinders.  The sounds, the smells, the feel of the ground beneath his feet all come as one, yet his mind begins to perceive each as its own. The pain, reduced but never absent, become bareable, tolerable, and from his knees he ascends once more.

Only the memory of that instant, the memory of light, haunts him as he steps forth into the unseen world...Out of the Darkness...and into the light.

(tbc)

((My name has been too long absent from these pages *chuckles*))