explaining the unexplainable. the worlds under us and the worlds all around.

Extract from "Book of Two" by Chris Norgate. A moment to think after a journey through Hell. So close to home and yet so far away. As seen by Imogen and her creature guide.

Stars blazed their trails across the darkness, plants hung heavy close enough to reach out and touch. It felt like they had arrived but even now there was a journey to go on, a path to walk. The throne was easier to climb as it was knocked and cracked; the creature even stooped to offer her a leg up to the first major handhold.  And so a journey of a thousand handholds starts with a single accent. It finished with an epiphany.

The creature was looking at his own hands, how the skin moved as its muscles worked to flex its fingers. Moisture formed at the corner of its inefficient eyes as he looked out in wonder. The coldness of the rutted slab on which they sat numbed his new fuller behind. It was very aware of the small thing it had escorted all this way sat next to it crying wholeheartedly. It did something alien to its whole being, it worked its muscles and extended its arm around the mortal thing and pulled it close. The mortal rested its head on his shoulder. There were troubling thoughts as the creature considered ripping the cowering mortals throat out, hearing the cracking of it's bones  or the rendering of its carcass as the creature snuffed all life from its broken body. But right now it was content to sit here marveling at its hands and what dominated the view from this point above the Steps.

Across everywhere under them were worlds, every conceivable realm from folklore or historical reference, every torturous Hell or afterlife described by scholars or theologians laid out side by side. Perspective was difficult, it hurt the human brain in its understanding of what it was seeing. The worlds, all distinct and individual and all separate from its neighbour. Faint silvery lines linked some worlds together like a sparkler’s trail spiraling almost randomly across them all. The worlds did not sit into neat little rows like rooms in a hotel, each spatially conducive to all those around it. Sometimes, without even moving the perspective they appeared stacked the bedrock of the floor forming the roof of the one below which ceilinged the one below that; world after world after world all the way down. Imogen made sense of what she saw by crying at the complexity of it all, the beauty it created the very essence of it all and that she was the only person to ever have seen this.

Above her was a sky, for the first time since all this began a real sky and not the fake roof of the next world but her sky. She recognised the constellations and the patterns the stars made even if she had no idea what they were called or which one was Polaris or the great bear. Orion sat there, his belt pulled tight across his waist in a way only photo-shopped supermodels could wish to emulate. She was a whispers thickness away from home and yet she was so far away it crushed her. Above a faint barely visible like the membrane across your eye was a ghost outline of the world where she was born, the contour of the Earth, the rise of the hills, the low of the valley; even hard edged building seemed to sit not there in the corner of her eye giving the viewer the impression they were sat in the bowels of a glass Earth looking out. Of all the places she had recently been, of all the suffering she had witnessed or endured, here, so tantalizingly close to where she desperately wanted to be was by far the worst.