The True Beast

In that instant I knew. The truth no longer evaded me like a tree camouflaged amidst a forest of its own doppelgangers. Everything I had known to be true was just as false as that which my teachings had taught me to reject; nothing more than the essence of pure wickedness. I was made to believe in a lie; a lie which my own demons had conjured in the night to provide answers for my restless mind that could not help but question everything. My eyes saw through the facades I had been enveloped by; the indoctrinating propaganda that consumed all things. The world was a cage; the safeguarding indoctrinators a parasitic hydra. They planted their seeds deep within every facet of life and before we realized the encroaching threat we had allowed to infiltrate our sanctuary their roots were already too deep. Their stranglehold over all that we knew became our only hope for survival; the key to our demise had become our only refuge; a double edged sword forged in poison. In a word the world was hell itself. I once wondered what possible sin I could have committed to condemn me to such a punishment as that. We had all grown blind to the truth and allowed this doom to befall us. There was no higher power at fault for this calamity. The fault was our own just as it had always been.
         In that instant my eyes felt as though they had finally attained sight for the first time after straining and struggling for what seemed an age. I felt as though my body became impossibly heavy yet weightless as though it was devoid of any kind of thought or feeling at all. An increasing feeling of numbness filled my being until I lost all sense of place and time. The cold chill in the air only enhanced my mind's mental absence as I felt it slipping further and further away. Not even the shockingly warm crimson pool oozing gems of varying sizes glacially down my temple, all the while seeping ever so slowly into each strand of my hair as they adhered to gravity's will, could keep my mind from falling into darkness. I had witnessed horrors of the cruel world, yet nothing prepared me for this - the greatest horror of all - the truth of the parasites in which we had placed both all fear and hope. I stood motionless for a time that I could not possibly relay accurately to you (for my mind had lost all notion of existence, even my own past had been lost to me for a period during this time). Eventually the intense chill biting at my bare skin began to ease, but its sting was still clearly evident to the bare areas of my form. The warm rubies pouring down my face increased in velocity and soon I felt the first jewel clinging to my frozen skin as gravity tugged and pulled and struggled to wrench it free from the security of my chin. Alas its efforts to remain where it was did not bear any indication of success and like my mind, desperately clinging to the lie that had secured my well-being for longer than I could remember, I felt it slip away and fall further and further from everything that was known to it. I felt its journey as it passed through the abyss; the great void; the endless expanse; the nothingness. It was free from the past yet lost as to where the future lay and so it continued falling and falling until...
         "You really are surprised, aren't you? To find that the truth is the last thing you would even consider theorizing as far-fetched fiction, let alone believing to be fact." said a familiar voice.
         "All you believed to be real, all you knew to be true, was just a lie." came a second, more raspy voice.
         "You knew all along there was something inherently wrong with your world and yet you chose to close yourself off to that nagging little voice in the deepest, darkest recesses of your probing little mind so that you could gain some peace of mind." said an unnervingly sweet voice.
         "You convinced yourself that you were imagining the dangers, the horrors, the nightmares, and so you thought you could afford the delusion of unjustified insecurity." came a childish mocking voice.
         "But you were wrong. In the end all you did was fulfill that which the others desired of you."
         "Complete submission."
         "Total acceptance."
         "Absolute denial that anything was ever wrong in the first place."
         "It was your fear and faith; the paradox of placing your extreme polar opposites in the same source."
         "It was that that caused you to lose anything that was ever unique to yourself."
         "And yet now you refuse to admit that you were ever defeated by the system."
         "Admit it."
         "Defeat."
         "Admit it."
         "Defeat."
         "Admit it!"
         "Defeat!"
         "ADMIT IT!"
         "DEFEAT!"
         "ADMIT IT! DEFEAT!!"
         "ADMIT DEFEAT!!!" the voices screamed at me as though I was responsible for causing them great distress.
         I stood there motionless as they continued screaming their mantra in voices of varying tones and pitches well within the soprano region and several voices that clawed straight through my eardrums with nails like those of a wild beast's claws. Those voices were most certainly within the coloratura range as they pierced my ears in an attempt to drive my still uneasy mind beyond the brink of madness. As the voices continued relentlessly my body began acting on pure impulse and before I knew it I had drawn my sword and destroyed all traces of the figures whose voices had been plaguing me for a time; gnawing away at my sanity until its tender flesh bore no resemblance to its once full and pristine form. Like savage creatures of the dark woods feasting on their fresh kill their voices chewed and chewed as their teeth tore through the flesh of my mind, their teeth like razors as they tore each strand of meat separate from its conjoining strands. They tore the flesh repeatedly over and over again like ravenous beats as they clawed, gnawed, tore, ripped and shredded each piece of my mind from the next. As the chewing and smacking of lips grew louder and louder drowning out all other sounds, even those in my mind, I drove my sword into each individual beast; tearing their own flesh apart like the hunted creature they had made of my own mind. They had become my prey and I was their predator. As I sliced their flesh apart piece by piece I felt their false blood cover me from the top-most tip of my scalp to the floor beneath my soaking shoes. As I heaved from the sudden rush adrenalin that caused my body to involuntarily act on its own accord I saw the room in its calamity; the bodies I tore apart; the sea of false blood; the thick beads of fluid dripping before my eyes. I realized then that the previous horrors were nothing compared to this. I had become the primal manifestation of the effects of their system; I had become the beast.