3 Gifts

There was only so much abuse one mind can take before it takes steps to protect itself. And so Merrill Rhodes slowly crumpled to the ground in a boneless heap. His eyes which seemed to flash with the light of countless stars turned back to their usual brown as they closed in rest.

And rest he would need, for sleep was a time for the mind to reorganize itself – to break from the strain of consciousness and all the information it must take in over the course of the day. And yet, the burden of daily life was but a shadow on the wall compared to what Merrill was gifted, if gifted was the right word.

Unbeknownst to him, the myriad eyes that polluted his body like squirming parasites were closed, one by one, until not a trace of them could be seen. His breathing evened out and the look of animal madness on his face eased off into something less dire. And finally, the winding trails of blood on his arms and legs dripped off onto the earth below, soaking into the strange land he'd found himself in.

–––

Merrill woke up knowing more than he did before. Significantly more. Things that filled him with wonder. Things that sent him reeling in confusion. Things that horrified him to the depths of his soul.

But most importantly, things that gave him context.

Laying on the ground, eyes closed and brows furrowed, Merrill could only groan in dread. For what he had gained was only matched by what he had lost. And neither could be taken back nor reversed.

He was a beyonder – from now until they day he died. A human on a crooked path where power and madness stood hand in hand – albeit one who had barely taken their first steps. He was a child fumbling in the dark in the grand scheme of things, but a child that still stood above anything he might have thought possible.

Mystery Pryer - the words bubbled up from a well of knowledge that he most definitely hadn't had the day before.

His fingers twitched as threads of mystical knowledge flowed out from behind those two words – a deluge of whispered secrets and shadowed mystery that beckoned for his attention. He quickly clamped down and pushed it all back. He would have time to comb through it all later. Right now it was too much, too fast.

He more more gifts to look over anyway.

His eyes – he shuddered, why did it always have to come back to eyes – had been changed. Not physically, nothing as mundane as that.

Eyes of Mystery Prying – once more, knowledge flowed and he knew.

He may have a waiting well of mystical understanding to tap into, but it was static, like an introductory textbook. What it held was what he had to work with, hard stop.

Unless he looked.

His eyes had been given the ability to pry behind the curtain that divided the mundane from what lurked beyond. Too see what wasn't visible to the everyday eye. A tool to build upon the foundation he had been given.

A poisoned apple.

Merrill scowled in frustration. This wasn't an ability he could turn off – ever. Rather, it wasn't an ability at all, but his eyes in a fundamental sense. And unless he felt like blinding himself, he was stuck with eyes that were always investigating into things they had no right to. As the saying went, when you stared into the abyss, the abyss stared back.

Merrill very much didn't want the abyss to stare back.

The only work around, temporarily, was what he had continued to do since he had awoken – keep his eyes shut. Otherwise, should he open them but a crack, he might be liable to see things he very much shouldn't.

Normally the situation wouldn't be quite so dire, but his situation was nowhere near normal. He barked out a harsh laugh – wasn't that an understatement. His situation was ever teetering on the brink of disaster.

Something, his instincts perhaps, told him that to open his eyes here, in this strange and stranger land, would be a deadly mistake. That whatever he may have seen the day before was a mere veneer for what lay beneath. Secrets and knowledge that best lay buried for the continued state of his well-being.

He let out a shuddering breath and steered away from that last train of thought. He needed to focus on something else, anything else.

In his mind's eye, he imagined the constellations that were surely still spinning up above if he were to look. Mere points of light, yet so much more. Not in the sense that they were massive stars floating in the void of space, but in that they were stories, connections to the past.

How many of his ancestors had looked up to the night sky and seen those same lights? How many had assigned the same meaning to what were otherwise arbitrary points of light in the dark? It was a connection that reached deep into the shared past of humanity.

The thought, somehow, someway, settled him down. It left him breathing a little easier, more ready to deal with the hand he'd been given.

One step at a time.

Merrill leveraged himself up into a sitting position and blindly cast his hands around until his fingers felt the smooth casing of his swiss army knife. Then, carefully, he felt around the tool, poking and prodding until he managed to flip out one of its blades without nicking himself.

Hesitantly, he brought the knife to the bottom of his pants and began to clumsily saw off the bottoms of each pant leg. It was awkward, took a long while, and he no doubt butchered the fabric, but he was eventually left with two strips of material to work with. A good deal of awkward trial and error later and Merrill was able to tie the two strips together into a serviceable, if crude, blindfold.

It fit, which was probably the best he could do for now.

Taking a deep breath to steel himself, he cracked one eye open, just a sliver, and slumped down in relief when he wasn't inundated by the secrets and mysteries around him. The blindfold wasn't exactly comfortable, but the material was dark and thick enough that it served its purpose well. He would be effectively blind for the near future, but he wasn't in danger of his brain leaking out his ears either.

A compromise he could heartily get behind.

With that squared away, he could finally move on to the last of his gifts – divination. He wasn't surprised when the thought dragged out a tangle of related information concerning the practice. Once more, Merrill stemmed the tide and pushed the knowledge back for when he was more settled.

Not to say he didn't grab a treat to chew on for the moment. Specifically, the fact that the art of divination leveraged one's spirit in the search for information.

The tidbit stuck with him. Could it have been his spirit that warned him of the danger of his new sight? He had assumed it to be intuition, but perhaps there was a better answer here. Or maybe what humans called intuition was merely a weak expression of the more robust spirit he now possessed?

It was a thought, Merrill conceded with a sigh. In fact, that was all he had at the moment, thought, or so it seemed. Stripped of his sight, it felt as if there was no world around him – no him either. Just thoughts lightly bound to an ego, floating around an unfamiliar darkness.

He didn't like it, not being able to see. The loss grated at him along with no small amount of fear. The unknown hid too many dangers for him to ever feel comfortable with it.

Merrill wanted to rage at it all, but what would be the point?

As a wise man once said, so it goes.