Out of the Shadows 015
A 5-star machine-augmented MIDNIGHT'S WAR novel
Crimson Metamorphosis
The first sensation that swept gradually through his body was not pain but a strange sense of absence—a voiding of something he had never known he possessed until it began to drain away. It felt like color seeping from stained glass as night falls, taking with it everything of what had once filled the frame.
Her teeth—for it was a woman, surely, though her face had become abstract in memory, a collage of vermilion and ivory—had pierced his throat with unexpected gentleness. She had given him two small wounds that should have been inconsequential. How many times had he cut himself more severely on ordinary objects? The edge of a piece of paper. A fruit knife. The most mundane dangers the world had to offer.
It was as if the twin punctures were doorways rather than wounds, opening him to an overwhelming reality he had never known before.
The room tilted, not suddenly but gradually, as if the architecture surrounding him had become somehow become liquid, and were pouring toward some unknown gravity well. The walls expanded and contracted again as if they were breathing. The ceiling receded upward into impossible heights, and stars glimmered in the distant plaster as if they were galaxies being born. The carpet beneath him undulated in slow waves, as if he lay not on fibers but on the surface of some ancient kelp-covered sea.
His heartbeat—so faithful, so mechanical in its persistence—stuttered momentarily, then accelerated, before slowing to a rhythm unlike anything he had experienced in his thirty-seven years of life. Each contraction became a lifetime of sensation. Every pulse was a cathedral of sound. He could hear his own blood now, not the vague oceanic rush of human circulation but distinct currents, each corpuscle sliding against its neighbors with crystalline clarity.
“Yes,” she whispered, though her lips never left his throat. The word did not flow through the air but directly into his mind, a silken intrusion that left traces like a dark flowery perfume. “Relax.”
Time began to fold in upon itself. Forgotten memories arose unbidden, not as recollections but as he was experiencing them for the first time again. His seventh birthday candles burned again upon the tongue that now tasted his own diminishing life. The first kiss he had ever received blossomed anew upon lips that struggled to form words that would never be spoken again. The grief of his father’s funeral settled once more into bones that were beginning to transform into something that could bear the weight of eternity.
Cold emerged from within rather than without. Not the cold of ice or winter, but something more profound—the cold of interstellar space, of potentiality unmanifest. It traveled from marrow outward, claiming flesh inch by inch in a slow, inexorable conquest.
He wanted to scream, not from horror but from wonder. The transformation was terrible, yes, but sublime in its terrible beauty. Like watching one’s beloved city burn from a distant hill—tragic yet somehow necessary, as if destruction were merely change misunderstood.
Colors shifted in his perception. Reds deepened until they contained violets within their depths. Blues sharpened to an almost painful brilliance, revealing spectrums invisible moments before. The yellow lamplight fractured into constituent rainbows, each one telling stories in a language that his dying humanity almost—but not quite—comprehended.
