Feverish nightmares. Bones snapping. Blood seeping. That sort of thing. Then the imagery changed. Wizards and ancient powers. Poured into a pen. A modern pen. Before they even existed. That just didn’t make sense.
“Don’t be a moron.” A wizard. “It’s just the way your mind is interpreting it. It didn’t look like a modern pen to begin with. It was a feather, a quilled pen. It changed over time – simple transmogrification. Any idiot can see that.”
Jack looked around. He was in some kind of strange chamber, but imagery was overlying all of this, a confusing maelstrom of overlapping visions...
The wizard popped Jack’s arm back into its socket, and Jack cried out in pain. “Fuck! That HURTS. Even my subconscious is insulting and torturing me.”
…Tall spires of a castle, falling to flame…
“It’s really simple,” the wizard continued, straightening one of Jack’s unnaturally crooked legs, “What you write becomes truth. Whether the ink fades or not.”
…What looked like a universe in a cauldron, spinning, being poured into something…
“FUCK!” Jack was perspiring from the pain. “Even my dreams suck now! What are you going on about? Who are you, and who invited you into my mind?” Jack asked, annoyed.
…inhuman shapes fighting one another on vast, blood-soaked fields of rock…
“I’m telling you this for your own good.” Finger pulled and straightened.
…vortexes of energy challenging one another for supremacy…
“Goddammit, I was having a perfectly good suicide until you came along.”
“Rubbish.” The wizard straightened another finger, eliciting another curse from Jack. “You botched it horribly, and lived.”
…light and shadow, fire and ice…
“Jesus Christ, are you for real?”
“Jesus Christ has nothing to do with it. So you may as well make the best of it and listen to me, you’ll need this information later.”
…half-recognized images, incomprehensible – at least to the conscious mind...
“The pen cap… if you put it on the back end of the pen, it stops time while you write. Remove it, time resumes.”
Jack cried in pain as the wizard gave him a good strong tug from his shoulders, straightening his spine.
…images of wars and armies…
“FUCK! STOP THAT!”
…angels and demons…
“You’re a demon,” Jack accused.
…of things of legend long passed…
“The wizard crossed his arms. “Don’t be daft, there’s no such thing as angels or demons – at least not in the way your current superstitions portray them.”
…of a vast future expanding deep into the stars…
“Now I really must insist,” The wizard continued…
…A dark hand crossing the cosmos, its dark presence dimming the very stars it touched…
“…that you WAKE UP.”
“The pen!” Jack awoke and sat up with a gasp and a startling realization. “It’s alive!”
As soon as the words were out, they started fading. His heart was racing, the imagery from his nightmare muddling his mind with things he only half understood, and things he feared to see. But then, as dreams and even nightmares have a way of doing, it immediately started fading in the morning light.
Jack rubbed his head, confused. What the hell was going on? Where was he? He looked around.
A breath of air rustled the trees around him. The woods seemed so peaceful and serene. The last vestiges of Jack’s nightmare were brushed aside with his realization of where he was and what he had done.
The woods. Yes, of course, he had decided suicide was the most prudent option and stepped off a ledge. He looked up at the ledge high above. He never considered he would have the bad luck of surviving. But he remembered he was dying.
“What the fuck?” he looked at his hands, his arms, his legs and body. His clothing was dirty, torn and soaked with blood, but his body and his skin seemed untouched, as if he had never fallen at all. “What the fuck?” he repeated, feeling his arms, legs and torso, and finding no wounds, feeling no pain. He felt perfectly fine – in fact even better than he had in some time, full of energy and life. He got up and started laughing, stretching his body and enjoying being alive. Then he noticed the word “healed” written in ink on his arm where he had scrawled it before passing out, and remembered the pen.
He looked down on the ground where he had been laying. On a bed of leaves, the pen gleamed in the sunlight, still slick with his blood, its cap only a few inches away. It looked so ordinary, so mundane. But its wholly unremarkable appearance belied the truth.
Jack picked up the pen, sliding the cap back on, pondering it quietly.