1 Rebirth

Dew on the tall grass glinted in the morning sunshine as blinding scintillations, the branches of towering trees swayed and creaked from the high breeze, the small fauna chirped and warbled, and a small ladybug could be seen buzzing toward a ripe dew drop which sat atop a pale-green blade of grass.

Looking down from the serene scene, though, a ghastly view gave Ethan its dissent: viscous maroon splattered on the mint-colored grass surrounding him; red crust on pallid skin; disheveled clothes shredded, torn, covered in dried mud, and stained in a deep vermilion; chunks of half-digested food scattered above the muddy soil soaked in a mixture of thrown up blood and stomach acid; and worst of it all: a large, gaping hole on the left of his abdomen, which revealed his torn flesh, long since drained of its blood and dried out from the cold, autumn nighttime air.

He stretched out his fingers as best he could, managed an arduous twitch, and returned to stillness.

The pain and the cold had since faded from his awareness, but that bloody sight seemed to remain imprinted onto his dry and tired eyes, no matter where he forced them.

Inner demons, deepest fears, and final wishes had all created a violent storm of desperation in his mind, but slowly, he could feel that even his mind was beginning to slip from him.

'I don't... I can't...' he soon found himself scraping at the shrinking boundaries of his mind for even the most basic words. This change scared him more than anything else, yet it dissolved part of the vicious turmoil plaguing his mind; while his mind was silent, his emotions screamed, and his body's every muscle attempted to flail about in a neanderthalic response to his dire situation...

Just as his mind was shutting down, from some unknown corner of his subconscious, images, sensations, smells, and emotions silently spewed out, flooding what was left of his mind: all seemed to him like distant memories—some he had entirely forgotten, while others, he could never forget.

Shock filled his very core, but after the images faded, a most discomforting tranquility ensued along with a disturbing blindness.

He couldn't see any definite shapes, but a few quickly fading streaks of colors and shapes flying around a colorless void. It was darker than dark, like the wires connecting his eyes to his brain had been severed: trying to look around was akin to turning on the tv just to see static in return. And he couldn't feel anything that grounded him in where he was, but instead, just some strange, painful itchiness that gave him something of a loose idea of his physical boundaries.

'Is this death?' He inwardly asked. He felt in his words—crisp, sharp, and flat—along with the uncanny calmness, a strange frame of mind, like he had become lucid from within a dream.

Without having to think about it, he tried to reach out with his arm to try and get up, or at the very least, feel around for his immediate surroundings, but even that felt like something was missing: as he reached out, he couldn't feel any coldness or warmth, nor any air currents around him nor any of his clothes sliding across his skin; and from trying to clench his hand, he immediately noticed that he couldn't even feel the surface of his fingers on his palm, nor anything else—just that itchiness which turned into pure pain at the attempt to move his body. It seemed to keep him stuck in the broken posture he wore in the moments before death, while being painful enough to be nauseating, as his whole body felt like it was being twisted and warped from the inside by an invisible force.

'...phantom pain,' he realized, feeling a small pang of fear break away that cold calm, then continued, half confirming things, half just trying to break away at the unnatural, icy barrier: 'phantom pain... blindness... deafness...' he tried to breathe in through his nose, finding that he could not feel his torso expanding, nor the air flowing through his nostrils, nor anything else at all. '...I can't even breathe.'

The cold, icy wall cracked under the pressure of his new understanding of his senses, or rather, the lack thereof; existential dread began to seep through the crack in the form of sporadic, wayward thoughts, expanding and widening it until it shattered under the weight of his resistance, submerging him in a torrent sea of emotions; and, without any physical apparatus to release the mental tension, he quickly found himself trapped in that proverbial bottle without any of the tools needed to unscrew its top.

His mind was in overdrive, but as time passed on, it slowly flowed into a dull, cloudy mental space that prevented proper thought and rumination. This new, but hazy mindset made him too exhausted to do anything but rest, pressing snooze on the existential dread he had felt for the last several hours.

In this state of hibernation, time slipped by, as he began to regain some of his bodily functions—such as feeling, moving, and hearing.

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet?" a masculine, baritone voice spoke. The voice was muffled, like a thin wall stood between them; the voice was full of confidence, yet gentle. He had been hearing what sounded vaguely like voices, but it was the first time he was actually able to hear it with such clarity, although he failed to recognize a word any of them spoke.

"Consectetur adipiscing elit," a feminine, alto voice seemed to respond with a sigh; this one was more clear, as if he had his ear against the wall for this one; she sounded drained, like she had just gotten done with a 15-hour shift—yet, from the few times he had heard the voice, that was usually how it seemed to sound. "sed do eiusmod—tempor incididunt..."

The two voices continued their conversations, but after a few seconds, the lack of energy called him back into his furlough.

This memory, for the most part, faded from his mind, as did all the others he would experience in this prenatal state, but they sparked a subconscious familiarity with the two voices nonetheless; and as time paced on, the familiarity with several other voices grew into something of a loose, subconscious web of understanding. He could tell between the mother and father since the female one sounded louder, and the other was the second most common of all of them, but there wasn't any way to tell between a grandmother and just some elderly woman, or an uncle and just some random guy—not to mention he was in not in the right headspace for hypothesizing about who was who.

He couldn't understand what they were saying, but he slowly started to sort of recognize the flow of the language they spoke.

Months passed in this state, and then, an instinctual reveille bellowed in his psyche, ordering him out of his murky state and into a new, heightened awareness.

A few chaotic and very, very disturbing hours passed by before he found himself wound up in a soft, warm blanket, looking around the room he found himself in. It seemed to be the golden hour, as beautiful rays of blond light shone through a set of leaded windows, giving the white and stone walls an ethereal glow.

"Arthureus, puer meus! Grata domum!" the feminine voice exclaimed happily as he was exchanged into the speaker's arms.

He found himself focused solely on her voice, which spoke directly to him for the first time since he had heard it—for the first time, clean and clear. It filled him with a sense of gratefulness and a familial type of love towards this woman, but at the same time, he also felt outside of himself; he was left wondering where, when, how, and why he was where he was.

The shock of the whole situation faded, being replaced by an overwhelming mix of emotions—ranging from confusion and apprehension, to disgust and bewilderment—all expressing themselves through his new, infantile body as an uncontrollable outburst of tears, screams, and snot; but while he was trapped in a maelstrom of fear and angst, the crying and screaming told everyone else that all was as it should be.

His vision was blurry from all the tears pouring out of his little eyes, but looking around the room, almost every outline seemed to have a familiar voice. He barely had any recollection of these voices, so the familiarity they had was mostly confused him. The physiognomies brang a rough visage to the voices he had heard in the past months, and brought that subconscious web to its fully-conscious fruition; but, he couldn't see any one of them as family, so much as some vaguely familiar set of people, all clamoring to get a look at him and towering over and around him like giants.

A few more minutes passed by as everything was cleaned and the mother-son duo double-triple checked on before a young, feminine voice said in a professional tone that failed to conceal her exhaustion, "Faciam ut valefaciam." The sound of several sets of footsteps leaving the room soon echoed over the creaking floorboards before the quiet squeaking and latching of a door. Everyone had finally left the room, leaving the mother and child alone in the suddenly quiet room.