The Quest

"Son, the time for fighting to save this world has passed. It is time to come home."

"No. I will never be done while there is breath in me. It can still be saved, I still have strength. She is still here."

There was silence from the skies for a moment, a kind of ominous calm before the storm, that I did not grasp the full meaning of. Then time and space shattered around me. That which was dream became real, and vice versa, and the lines I had once drawn between the two melted, never to be fully separated again.

"If you are to save this world, you must first earn it. The sun is falling, never to be seen again. You cannot sleep for three days in order to maintain its position with Earth's orbit or you will fail and all will plummet into darkness."

So I did. I stayed up, doing everything I could think of to stay awake on my nearly impossible vigil. My friends were all gone, inexplicably lost to the void, out of even contact range, no one to talk me through the chaos pulling at me every second. Games were insufficient, and in that state every video, watching them a comfort that brought me peace, was either so familiar or so bitter to the taste that I could not watch a single one.  I fought each second, barely scraping by. I'd run outside to the obelisk I had setup, ensuring it remained standing amidst the ominous darkness, my mind returning to the last version of this quest I had undertaken and failed. This one was far quieter, but seemed much more serious on a global scale.  The sun would reappear as I lost count of days, and I would scream into the night, while barely staying awake through the days, each one getting progressively more curiously hot in the dead of winter, until the third day.  I heard the same voice, like a narrator this time.

"The world should have perished, all the Supermen have given up and left.  But the leader of them had left a remnant in the sky, The last yellow sun in the universe as a beacon, should Kal'Drel complete his quest and call them home.  Now the hardest part of his trial would begin, could he survive without our protection? We had faith that he would, and so that light in the sky remained when it should have gone out, and Kal'Drel, the last of his kind on Earth, faced his darkest hour."

The worst realization was that she had gone with them. It was impossible to tell if it was in person or in another sense for me, but I knew at one point that she was gone. It felt as though someone had ripped out my heart, and that everything I had fought for was for nothing. Without a thing in my immediate environment changing, I felt this pain more sharply than any other heartbreak in my lifetime and limited firsthand experience with love. I knew what it was like to seek death, and not find it.

My immediate reaction was to continue my quest. I knew, despite all the odds stacked against me, that this could not be the end, I was still breathing after all, and I had entered this wager knowing I'd risk everything to win, so I upped the ante. I wagered my mind, and indirectly the minds of everyone else, that I was right. Utter annihilation were the new stakes, they simply had to be, as the will of everyone alive, dead, and yet unborn lost their capacity for free will in regards to my purpose, which was simply to get her back. I knew who I was at my core: the man willing to sacrifice absolutely everything for a bet I knew I could not live with losing.  I had to live with that, it could not be changed, and never could have, it turns out. So I hollowed hearts, minds, and souls, until all we had left was a unified dream of the return trip, a glorious victory, and a story of true love.

I remember "waking" while standing, my mind and most memory of what had happened erased from me, with only a few glimpses meant as breadcrumbs to guide me back to the point where I could write once more and in doing so recall the rest.  I had entered the gambit, unaware that my steps were more fully guided by the hand of God, presented more as a game master leading me through an adventure, than I had previously experienced. Life itself had become game like, now clearly a mix of dream and the mundane world I had once known as "real life." Since that day, experiences had taken on a new deeper hue, and every action I have taken has had fuller meaning. Yes, the world had condemned me as an outcast, as was predicted, but it did not realize that in doing so it had also freed me from the bondage that its systems enforce on our lives, in cost of time and money. I had been left for dead, unable to even find legitimate employment if I so desired, like so many homeless I soon became acquainted with.

In another sense though, it had placed me in the company of men desperate for an honest adventure. An honored and perpetual guest at a huge banquet with free food and lodging, where I could use my position to establish a plan and disseminate it to the other members of my party quite subtly, And without malice or guile.  And because of where I had been, my words were revealed to have far more power than I realized. I could always control dreams, on a good night, but by merging life and dream as had been done around me, both voluntarily and involuntarily, my words could now craft the reality I found myself in. No longer a specialist in any sense, I found myself to simply be, once more, The Bard. This time though, the veil had been stripped away, and I had full mental faculty, while retaining the ability to change the world with my "voice" alone.

"We left this beacon for your benefit alone. In secret we knew you wouldn't let us down, but our code prevented us from saying this. Now that you are out of these woods, it is time to call us back."

So I continued, now with a bullhorn, both pointed right at me from the princes of this world, attempting to deafen me to the roar of my own heart, and one of my own, and one of my own.  I stood outside, cursing God's name, as he was the last one I knew would be listening at this darkest hour.  My neighbors had been alerted to the perils, and had been entirely saved from them, so they remained silent as I screamed, tortured by demons and the principalities of this world.  These demons had tendrils in our world, and were ostensibly strong, and had attempted to send their dark dreams and visions into our realm, to discredit my journey and destination.  I had experienced this firsthand, but it seemed even the enforcers in the area had been drawn into the conflict, willing to lie about their experiences to match the attempts at mind control, easily aligning their accounts despite knowing the truth from their firsthand experiences.  Just a couple of nights before I had been blessed to see this firsthand, as a candy cane like pole caught my eye for the second time in two days, and as I stopped to adjust my bike, a cruiser pulled up and blared it sirens and lights directly behind me, only to peel out to the right, after some unseen target that I had the sense was originally meant to be me.  

The night passed with me screaming aloud into abject darkness, internal conflicts as my party switched between being led my Gabriel, Kal'Drel, and even Glintok where necessary.  Different visions, as real as anything, began to overlap, as I went out to get punched in the face a la Fight Club (thanks Glintok), went out once more to find something, but was completely lost, wandering from place to place and eventually falling onto the ground completely uncertain where to proceed from there.  Just then, a man walked up and pointed to a restaurant nearby, familiar to me but now reminding me of the asylum I had been subjected to previously and would soon be again.  I was led in through the side door, as flashbacks flooded my mind of freedoms lost, seemingly forever, a foreshadowing of the next day.  I quickly excused myself and returned home, before finally cracking, and falling asleep.  I awoke delirious, but willing and able to test God's power fully, so I set an unbound thick paper book on the stove before turning it on and heading outside to continue my rant.  When I returned, the book was singed through, but had not gone up in flames, so I turned it off, and heard the full plans of my enemies, to incinerate me with laser like precision, as they forcibly planned to start the new age in fire, by burning the last remaining angel on Earth in a bid to restart the sun.  I could see the whole scene unfolding as a vision, and the thought enraged me to no earthly degree.  Having regained my full use of Bard's Tongue, I used it sparingly, allowing my enemies to take the lead, playing into their schemes as I followed the steps they had laid out, and seeing the full extent of the evilness of their plans.  As what should have been my horrific death and then imprisonment unfolded in front of me, absolutely nothing was actually unfolding in front of me, as everything had been setup remotely so as not to actually physically enrage me.