CHAPTER THREE: Descent into Madness

He will do what he can to leave today, as he has others. He will think the unthinkable. Attempt the impossible. He will try; he will fail. It was his pride that wouldn't let him leave this God-forsaken place.

One thing stays intact, and that is the little consciousness he has left. His vast knowledge hasn't gone away merely muddled, divided across a whirlpool of chaos and disarray. Insanity is a spectrum, its layers like the onion; thus, so is the spirit: the divine soul is pure, indivisible, unbreakable, and enlightened; it is the purpose of good nature, the warm feelings you get inside. When the spirit leaves, what you are left with is death. If that is no longer an option, you are left alone. Eventually, even that will go, and ideology will leave as a conjoined contingent. Thrown into madness I descend; it was the honesty I discovered to be the most profound. And the truth is, forever had its end.

A vague voice came from Lucifer's side as he whispered in the dark and said, Why are you telling me all of this?

The man was noticed by his mind's eye. Lucifer couldn't get a good look; he only captured the silhouette of his being and could comprehend a portion of his complex strands. From the perspective, he was an apparition devoid of features. A simple sketch of the outlines of a person. He plopped a hunk of poorly fused bedrock, coals, iron, and soil pike out of the metamorphic grade. How much did you hear? Lucifer asked.

The man replied, Most of it. Gibberish, some nonsense. Have you been drinking in this cave? Were you even speaking to me? Do you believe me to be a fake? He had many questions and sounded awfully confused. You called me here, Lucifer; do you not remember?

He did not recall. He said, Yes, anyway.

The man lowered his head briefly, bringing it back up, as to suggest he was listening to the nonsense Lucifer was spewing, whatever it may have been attentively, and had a fondness that derived from woes. He explained, I've tried to help. You've lied constantly about the smallest of things, tricked me, said foul words, and now completely uttered nonsense. From what could be made out, his head began to dot around the room. He didn't like talking to dead people; it made him feel sad. Your psychic mind is saying every word in your head out loud. A soliloquy is sung for anyone who dares to get close.

Lucifer was not psychic, but telekinetic. And there was a metaphorical hole, through which his thoughts could be heard. Words leaked out of the mind; the filter had sadly been removed. It was not a monologue or a preface to be read; it was barely linear thoughts. Things that wouldn't stop coming to his mind a thousand times over. The man was like a fly coming back around to buzz into the ear canals.

When you came, you were a broken man, you were once someone who stood for wonder and change. Now look at you. The man mentioned, You had a story to tell me, if you recall? a sort of truth.

A confession.

Yes! He exclaimed excitedly for a simpler version of the answers he was after, batting and then tipping the head once again.

Lucifer said it in his head: Why does he keep nodding?

The man repeated himself from earlier: You are saying everything in your head out loud; do you not understand that?

He was getting frustrated. He's explained this many times before, hasn't he? When did he start doing that? Dementia? No, psychosis. He's passed to the other side, where only lower quality and disillusionment reside.

A bilateral dissociation known as cross-chattering within Lucifer's brain was occurring where one side of the brain's hemisphere was clearly compensating for the other's inactivity. In most cases, he found that the right hemisphere of the brain was always the beneficiary and not the recipient of the malfunctioning left. Undamaged, but overworked and rewired as one whole. The corpus callosum, which is in the middle of the cerebrum and connects the two hemispheres through pathways and white matter that looks like a C shape, was mostly smudged, with only the right side having any noticeable white matter below the fibers of the cortex. This was happening; he experienced all this, and a unilateral one in cooperation with the withering of his mind, or rather, in response to the bilateral damage, a unilateral effect was happening elsewhere. This was trekking into sticky waters, he thought, panicking. He knew what this was. He may never recover; his body was already gone, but still, the light bulb was lit, and there was still a faint spark clawing back. Something was fighting in him yet. No. What this meant was that there was no longer any hope—hope to fight, hope to get out of here and conquer the unconquerable. This was his own theoretical neuroscience at work; he called it on the coin, heads.

CHAPTER FOUR: The Battle for Consciousness

Neurosis entwinement syndrome is a dominolike effect of symptoms that interacts and corresponds with the lapsing of the mind, creating a symbiotic relationship between two given mishaps caused by one. The first is cross-chatter, and the second Perceivable reality is always the last thing to go—not the outer perception of the world but inner, deeper thought and self-perception. This proprioception is protected automatically through an instinct that has been adapted to it at the genetic level. Inside all nodes of the brain known to take away things like motor functions, linguistic skills, and memory both short and long spanning, before it ever acts, it thinks itself to take away from the proprioception awareness an individual has, to keep what it has, hogging loads of brain power and cell usage to maintain. But it second-guessed its choices, like a child stealing from the cookie jar and turning their heads back twice before taking off the lid. They were reluctant, behavior driven by lesser impulses, unwilling to admit, identify the misbehavior and the problem, and ignore all the signs for cookies. Simplistic wants over needs assimilated the shadow, almost animated now that the unconsciousness had become a part of the uncanny. In relation, there must be another schism; the proxy for that was the blind man's brain, which has to compensate by gaining improved hearing from the reliance on that one sense. Take away all those senses, and they will then gain an iron grip on the wall of reality, and other apurposeful functions will be boosted. This was the unilateral denaturing of the opposite course of action, again stealing all it could to protect the remnant. A self-preservation mechanism of the brain has become complete discourse, biting off more than it can chew, going into a catatonic stupor. In truth, it was more of an unfolding from one ailment, a disorder, to a degrading disease, to a complex syndrome that could lead to syndromes of the garden variety, that were then corporate and unified. The entwinement part comes from this newlywed relationship, similar to how identical particles may get entangled and communicate among themselves from anywhere in the universe. These copycat symptoms coup against the brain in close proximity, behind their own backs, to kill itself while unknowingly saving itself, to unravel, crinkle, and re-twine. The reason behind this was simple. It was unsure of what it was doing. The thoughts of thoughts could not think. It was possibly trying to kill the automatons of worth, thought itself. Instead of unmasking like it should have and dissociating, it became the literal neurotic suicide of thought. The culprit is the brain, the self-killer. There are no secrets now.

The man got up from the rock he was sitting on, saying, Your solution is an absent mind. Foolish.

You could see the gunk move away from the ground he walked upon. These sorts of things didn't affect him—the filth, the dark—no, he was a light bringer. He was strong, fast, and far more intelligent than anyone ever hoped to be. Feared during a time of primordiality when fear was nonexistent, they were scared. In a separate dimension from the heavens, a higher dimension beyond the boundaries of known existence, he was there. His name, unbeknownst to the Tree of Knowledge, usurped himself from records and people like them. Lucifer does not know or bother to ask. There is no need for names when things fade into the snapping of obscurity. It was holding a rope that had something important knotted to the other end of it. Tied to its integrity was the indulgence in life itself. You lose the rope in search of two integral sums. You start to notice the trees around you and how big this world really is. Overall, a loss should be considered. He wished he would've known, been told this information sooner, and thus stayed more grounded. Instead, the sheep and sheep herder searched unequivocally for idle beliefs.

The man approached my body from the point of view of Dreg.

The man replied, That's not what I think about you Lucifer.

Shame! He stared at me shamefully! It felt like some sort of resentment, but it wasn't. There must have been dismay and true hatred, somewhere within that heart of his.

Stop Lucifer; you're doing this to yourself! He added, and Lucifer stopped. He continued on: These conversations are getting pointless. They get nowhere, and there is no reason to be with you anymore. Like your environment, you have become 'The Silent Pandemonium.' I need you to know my empathy runs wearily thin for these backs and forths.

.....

He walked away. Enough is enough.

Lucifer was about to be alone when he talked to himself: He didn't have to be here, so why? He could've been anywhere, yet he insists on lecturing me. Call me foolish. Pity me! The man hesitated to take the last steps. He took the first step, then the second. You're stuck here the same as I am; we're not going anywhere anytime soon.

Another voice chimed in Lucifer's head: He was getting out of reach now.

Lucifer rebutted: What! He can go with all his philosophy of-'

Come back. No one called out, stopping Lucifer from finishing his last thought. And then he forgot all for no apparent reason.

The man appeared promptly. He wanted to be here. Lucifer figures, how things have played out; he had the reins on the man as much as the man did him. Which gave considerable amounts of slack to play with, seeing how he wouldn't leave, and Lucifer could not be convinced. Now they were to play tug-of-war with what they had.

Tell me! The man said, I know you want to. You, your innermost self, don't understand. This will never be a conscious decision for you, will it? He was pouring his heart out; that much was obvious. You've gone all your life pretending, and where has that gotten you?

Say it how it is. I'm the devil; what do you expect? He opens his eyes; empty space is to be expected but helps in introspection. The apparition's void was filled with a bright, heavy white light. He was the personification of glory, not his morning star. A rage built within Lucifer's entropy; another sickening display of beauty brought forth by the light of God sparked something deep within his mind.

Lucifer exclaimed, Finally, a memory worth reliving! I'm almost glad he came!

His psyche displayed these varied instances to him. Projections of the most tragic of events.