The Garden of Light and Darkness - Part 8 (Incomplete)

Let me tell you a secret. I am inclined toward madness. But just as reason has locked chambers and as many faces as there are boring men, there are many kinds of madness. My senses have begun to shift. Sounds emerge sharper, filled with a growing harmonic chorus. Darkness advances to envelop me, caress me. That's why I've now staggered diagonally toward the part of the garden covered in vegetation. Strange—I'm not that drunk. It's in these moments that I am visited by gods. I sense them in the breeze. See their outlines where there is movement. The only certainty is that I don't know who I am, what this place is. What anything is or will become. I am lost in the many paths, wherever a cosmic wind may lead. Spreading myself across choices. Disappearing into alternatives. Finding myself in new places, with new faces. Once more, I seize weapons in a fateful battle by a boundary stone in Wallachia. I've been here before. The riders are dragging me away, hauled behind a lasso. Hold nothing back—redemption lies in a lightning sphere. On foot, I catch up to them, the Spanish rapier raised for a final thrust.

The explosion comes from above in the form of a swirling cloud of leaves. Before my eyes, one of the fairies drops headfirst and dangles there with a smile.

"HEEEY!"

"Hey."

She is blue. Blue as a bright night, clad in starlight. In vague unease, I watch the star trails shift across her slowly swaying wings. Upon her head rests a sapphire deeper than the sea.

The blue fairy raises her hands toward me. Our palms meet as they must. I bend down, she rises up, and lilac-painted lips touch mine in a lingering kiss. Giggling, the fairy hoists herself up and vanishes somewhere among the branches. My unsteady journey continues.

It must be by chance that I step into the empty communal area, the place where we took our meals like in the Gaulish village of Asterix and Obelix. Now the tables are occupied by ghosts, and retro bulbs hanging from twine create their own glowing color zones. I pass through blue, purple, yellow, and red—and stop. At the border where the colors clash, I lift my gaze. The paper fairies in the branches are bathed in an icy blue hue, their drawn-on smiley faces twisted to reveal the razor-sharp teeth rows of grinning sharks, raw mockery, or no smiles at all. They don't frighten me. I'm accustomed to evil's chill and the grotesque—how the world appears when you haven't received enough love. But just as the brave cannot fight beyond their strength, neither can the wise reverse omens or write backward. The antler-crowned male figure, cut from a single sheet of paper, is trapped in a flickering orange glow. My feet are sucked into the ground.

It looks as though he stands in a blaze of light. The stag figure raises his palms in greeting—and burns.