In a post(-somewhat-mild-as-apocalypses-go)-apocalyptic world, humanity finds to its dismay that as its technological prowess and its towering mastery of the world (in which include the universe) has grown, so too has the power of humanity's collective unconscious. More than so, too: the ulterior dream and murk of all our myths and hopes and fears has grown to such strength and at such a rate as to outpace and outweigh all the power combined in our waking minds. All those minds and hands and hearts and wills, with all the mechanical furnitures and servants, together with all their attendant human slaves and everything we've created to furnish and people the waking world - all this now heels and lists and heaves above the abyss of our rising dreams.
That unconscious power - unbidden, unwanted - in the face of the protestation of every raised waking voice, has nevertheless come together in one all-fulfilling wish.
Humanity has grown, and grown up. It has matured into a fullness and mastery of its powers, and wishes only to be destroyed. For each of us, to live in mastery yet in agony, each trapped in our separate cell, confinement in a solitude of alienation that can never be bridged, never be breached, only by chance sometimes from our narrow slitted windows can we ever catch a fleeting glimpse of each other that glimmers so much as a promise of recognition, always fumbled and irretrievably broken in the exchange. We cannot reach each other. We can never touch; never hold. Life is a long, everending moment into which we are born, and grow old and die, alone.
And so it is in dreams and surcease from consciousness that a wish takes shape, in which power grows, and a malice takes form. The same wish each time, wish after wish, as we desperately fight back from it to live, and remain awake and alive and ourselves in this sad, prison world, where we all live alone. And a sick sort of unity is birthed in us, in the best and highest moments any of us have known, in a frantic horror and desperate scramble to protect and defend a prison existence we've secretly hated and ached to leave. We enact and embrace a courageous refusal to face the truth, to face horror instead - and to beat it back. And it is heroic, it truly is. It is what humanity has always meant by its heroism. But we can't possibly hold. From deep down the bottom of our endless well, our tragic flaw is coming true. We crush under its realized weight, or burn into streaks of ash and steam in the flash and glare of its gaze. We die, singly or in droves, but always alone as wave upon wave of nightmare comes in forms crazy and gigantic, to crash upon our breaking and already broken defenses.
And we triumph.
For the day, we triumph. For another waking day, we awake - alive, and ourselves, and rejoice. And alone. We flirt, and we live in fleeting glimpses between cracks in our prisons, and in guesses and glimmers we grope and reach - and separated each from each, we each breathe, and make love, and die. Never do we touch. Never can we hold, in this life. Separated each from each, discrete and contained and alive and alone, we live held apart by an Absolute Terror Field. And it holds for another waking day.
Until day breaks again. Another shudder, seasick and colossal runs through the world, as another angel makes its fall. Inhuman it rises up, and up, and still horrifyingly up. It is taking back its form from our lastest dreaming wish. Uncoiling its spiked back, or throwing back its asymmetrical head in an eerie roar of voiceless rasping wind, or working and twitching its spidery fingers, or with muscles like quickening snakes pulsing under the slick skin of its limbs, it straightens up and up, and up, and it begins. In the face of all our terrified faces begging to live, we grit our teeth and shut out a still, small voice, that in quiet, even tones drones dreamingly, reassuringly on, and gainsays all our combined pleas and screams. Deep down, humanity knows humanity has only one same wish. It can only ever even out to this.
An angel comes. It has fallen for you; it has come to this, to become our fondest wish as between us we shriek, and we beg and we plead, and we fight for it not to come true.
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