Be (II)

The cold, desolate plain spread out in all directions, the eye seeing little beyond a massive expanse of bare ice creeping along the ground. This vision of cold isolation was interrupted by only the veil of snow and bright white glow that cut visibility to little more than ten or so meters in any direction. Even when opening his third eye the man, red haired, saw little; no people came or went in the middle of this baron wasteland and even the spirits seemed few and far between, though to be certain he had little idea how the spirits came to be where they rested. At times they appeared to drift to population centers, at others they gathered in places of mass death, and still he could find them in places almost utterly untouched by human hands of feet or life. While introspective by nature, he preferred not to think too closely on why these otherworldly being moved in the ways and patterns and places that they did; something deep within him hinted that a deep and total madness dwelt within that labyrinth of thought. Upon this mountain he would meditate and so he entered this hallucination.

But alas, his thoughts today needed to stray and tarry to the nature of spirits, or at least to the goings on of one particular entity and, as he opened up that evil eye upon his forehead, the massive, twisting frame of a deep sea leviathan swam, as always, to fill his mind and the landscape before him. Unlike with some, this creature brought with it no warmth nor love nor reassurance. Instead, it brought with its arrival an even deeper, more pervasive chill, a frigidity of the mind that pierced more deeply than bone or sinew. No, this creature, this unruly beast, could provide no meaningful comfort beyond the harsh light of eternal, ethereal wisdom and, to the luck of this man, he found himself perfectly content with this sort of insight the monstrosity provided. He could not say with notable certainty, but he felt that others - perhaps the ancestral wielders of his blood - would not largely be comfortable with such an arrangement.

He pulled, with alarming alacrity, a small collection of artistic dolls, used primarily in the rendering of crude human forms, from his bag and tossed them into the air, allowing them to fall like discolored and misshapen snowflakes in a large radius around him. Aside from the small pack he carried he bore nothing else, save a doubled pair of thick pants and a large, fur lined jacket to keep him warm. Even so, the cold air entered him and lowered his temperature and he knew that, considering the nature of his training today, he would likely not be able to stay for long. Regardless, he fell gracefully into a cross-legged sitting pose, closed his two functional eyes, and began to take in the world on another plane.

Within moments he had willed the many tentacled beast to shoot one of its limbs off to one of the dolls. It was a strange connection they pair had, with the man directing the beast's physical actions and the beast, in many respects, directing the man's. A balance perhaps? But not quite, for something felt not purely even, as if the exchange was tilted, though this man could not fully make out what exactly this meant or even why he felt this way. The doll grasped rose at first on unsteady legs before entering into an elaborate set of gymnastic routines, back flips and somersaults, cartwheels and hand stands and elegant poses struck after more difficult landings. This now was simple routine, the manipulation of a single possessed puppet unnoticed by human eyes. He wondered if, perhaps, the puppeteers of his clan had all been claimed as witch doctors and voodoo priests, controlling their weapons with no visible strings or hand motions. He supposed that, to most, such a feat would assuredly seem deeply perverse and unnatural. The madness intensified.

Two more suction cupped tentacles and two more dolls brought the total to three, all of which joined up in a slow and courtly dance with the third of the group always on the outs of the intimate circling of the two. After a short time they broke in to a small fight, punches and kicks landing and missing in roughly equal proportions. He added a fourth and then a fifth to the fray, straining himself mentally as he reached beyond the current limits of his abilities. How ridiculous that he, a puppeteer of his own spiritual real, could control so few creations and while yes, he understood that controlling more than three at any given time was likely extremely impractical, he still wanted that show of power, that feat of impressiveness from slinging around a small army of weapons platforms. And so, with the final vestiges of his budding mind, he reached out a final sixth tendril and attached it to one of the dolls.