My name is Rudi. Some 15 years ago I wrote The Symbiosis of Life and Death. It was a crude and ugly thing held together with sticky tape, paperclips, some few pieces of string and post-it note or two. It is a fictional tale that was inspired by my own personal journey at the time through some of the many philosophical and religious discussions, opinions, comments, poems and arguments that I had here at AKpCEP and a few other forum sites back then. A few radical life-changing events later, some of the things that I believed and had written at the time became obsolete, so after putting it off for far too long I finally decided to fix and finish the journey that I had started. This is the third rewrite in less than 6 months and probably as close to an end result as it will get. Over the next months (or years) depending on the relativity of time and space in Alexanderverse I will humbly share it with you chapter by chapter. Please feel free to comment, compliment or criticize it as you see fit. Hopefully, my mind and my abuse of the English language is not too raw for anybody to digest.


FOREWORD

THE BEAST
AN ALLEGORICAL ATTEMPT
(Adapted from an essay by Benjamin Wright)

He looked out the window. It’s out there, waiting for him. He could sense it, calling out his name every day, watching and waiting. He tried to limit his ventures into The World outside the window as much as possible, to work and back again, but even that didn’t work. The Beast could smell the blood and every day it would drink a little more, sap a little more light from his soul.

It feeds on everyone. No one is free from its grip and no one can hold onto their sanity under the influence of its delusions. Its voice is everywhere. Even when they sleep it works on them, telling them what to want, where to find it and when they need it. Desires are its strength and lies are its greatest weapon.

Over the past few years, his life had acquired a certain monotony but still, he could not get a decent night’s sleep. Shortly after closing his eyes, he would wake up drenched in sweat, struggling to hold back the screams of terror by biting on his fist. It’s an ongoing battle against The Darkness that much he knew.

Every night he would lie in bed and stare at his wife, watching her expressions and listen to the unintelligible muttering as she tossed from side to side. “Maggots,” he thought, “maggots crawling in The Darkness and burrowing into her mind. The sordid whispers mingling with her thoughts, growing, feeding off her desires while slowly turning her into just another smiling puppet.

Others as well. His friends and family. Even his son. He has a big poster on his wall designed to make them mad, “WANKING IS MY DRUG” and it did too. Not him as much as his wife. They’re all the same. So very much alike, like everybody else. The voices are everywhere. The insinuations, in the music, the papers, the news, everywhere. There is no escape. Signs attacking you and the billboards screaming at you every hour. The rest of the time is filled with background noise, pop culture and syntactical insinuations, pathetically shallow storylines all mingling into one another.

It’s all the same, only the tone of voice would change. All designed to entertain. Distraction is what it’s all about, distraction from reality, from yourself until all that remains is the illusion. Like a magician who operates the attention of a crowd to produce the most amazing visions and The Beast is the master magician.
He locked himself in his room, ignoring his family and friends. It saddened him, but he reminded himself time and time again that every war had its casualties and The Beast had already killed all of them years ago. He tried to open their eyes, to make them see. Talked to them calmly, sternly and then shouted, but they were deaf to the truth. Safe in the illusion so they let him be for a while, hoping that he would come to his senses.

Two days went by during which he threw everything in his room out the window. Magazines, pamphlets, television, radio, phone, even all the unpaid bills that had piled up in the past few months. He tried to isolate himself from every possible influence, every alien thought, every inflicted desire and every social responsibility, hoping to free his mind from the shackles of The Beast. This is it. He would keep The Beast at bay at all cost. All that remained was himself, naked with a pencil and a blank piece of paper to draw on. He would simply draw inconsequential doodles to try to smother out the voices and prevent the infected desires from creeping in.

Two more days went by before his wife and son walked into his room to see what he was up to. While she pleaded with him, cried, shouted and then just stood there weeping, he continued to doodle on the piece of paper, oblivious to her presence. Finally, in a barely audible whisper, she announced that she was calling the authorities. For the first time in three days, he lifted his eyes from the piece of paper and looked at his weeping wife, the phone in her hand, thinking that she wouldn’t dare, but she did.

She was busy calling agents of The Beast, inviting The Darkness into his home and he could feel the anger boiling from within. He tried to hold it back, tried with all his might to shove it into the farthest corner of his mind, but still it boiled and boiled until he could hold it back no more. He still had the pencil in his hand, clutching it like a child would clutch the last remaining crayon. In one frantic swipe, he punctured his wife’s throat while his son watched in horror. She tumbled to the ground trying to stop the blood from pouring out with a stunned look of disbelief painted on her face. His son stood frozen, paralyzed with fear. He punched the pencil into his son’s chest seventeen times before the anger and frustration finally subsided.

In the deathly silence that followed, he looked out the window. The city was burning. He could see the flames. The Darkness is everywhere, watching, waiting for him and no matter where he went he couldn’t hide. It was only a matter of time. He could run, try to get away, but he couldn’t hide. The Beast could smell the blood.