/lit/ - Literature

>>18833950
i wouldn't recommend it

>>18635252
He suffered an absence of sensation that could only be called falling. Void was a spinning place, or so he learned, for he did not move, and it spun about him.
Then a mad, existential jarring, as if he had slipped from a precipice to be swatted motionless caught upon a ledge …
He opened eyes within already opened eyes … Cheek against the turf, shadows thrashing about and above, a scissoring forest of horse-legs … Men battling Men? Yes. Galeoth knights vying with golden-armoured Coyauri.
Mengedda?
By the God, his fury felt so empty, so frail against the earth …
He was already gazing across trampled turf. Motionless, he saw a young man fallen the same as he, heavily armoured in the old style, sandy-blond hair jutting from his mail hood. He watched him reach out in horror and confusion and grasp his own hand, squeeze the leathery fingers, the glass nails. He felt nothing …
A nightmarish moment of recognition, too surreal to be terrifying.
It was his face! His own hand had clasped him!
He tried to scream.
Nothing.
He tried to move, to twitch …
Absolute immobility encapsulated him. He felt only void across his exterior skin, but within … It seemed a door had swung or swollen open.
And he knew the way all the Dead knew, with the certainty of timeless recollection.
Hell … rising on a bubbling rush. Agony and wickedness chattering with famished glee …
Demons, come to pull his outside through his inside, to invert and expose, to bare his every tenderness to fire and gnashing teeth …
Damnation … in spite of everything.
There was no describing the horror.
He tried to clutch with dead fingers … to hold on …
Don’t! he tried to call across the space of a dead man’s reach. But his ribs were a breathless cage, his lips cold soil. Don’t let go …
Please! he screamed at his younger self, trying to communicate the whole of his life with sightless eyes … Fool! Ingrate!
Don’t trust Hi—

>R. Scott Bakker. “The Great Ordeal.”