Sounds become visible, my screams for it all to stop only serving to trigger intense tsunamis of alien tastes and textures. Some of them are pleasant before they become unbearable, others are so foreign and deep that they defy comprehension, much less explanation. I feel like I am being lowered into something colder than liquid nitrogen.
For a fractured moment that stretches on like taffy, I start to see more. An infinity of infinities, sparkles of sensation within the void. Swirls and eddies that tug at my attention before shoving me aside. Unearthly tones that scream out. Wrong. And yet right, as well. Too right. Movement. Not something physical, but deeper and more intense than mere matter. Leviathans that move by folding like origami cranes only to thrust forward and swell out once more. Sparks of will-o'-the-wisp streaking past like superluminal starships in science fiction.
It all grows, the constant barrage of information, of color, of sound, of texture, of smells, it all melds together to the point that picking anything further from the maelstrom around me is beyond my capability. It all competes for my attention, with no regard for my ability to cope. The overwhelming glimpse that stretches through the eternal Now interferes with itself, pushing my sanity to the brink.
In an act of pure self-preservation, I try to close my eyes. I strain to block it all out. To no avail. I have no eyes to close, here. I am just... bombarded. Overwhelmed. Horribly exposed. Naked to the storm, so naked that I do not even have a body. I shudder at that thought, and focus as hard as I can, trying to shield myself with memory. To cloak myself in concentrated Intent.
For a moment, it blessedly works. My childhood, my early education, my first apartment, my wife, my pregnant and gloriously radiant wife, my daughter, in swaddling clothes, our first house, our home. Everything good in my life flashes before my eyes, desperate shields against the chaos that are torn away from me, each causing a new sensation. Pain.
Only the living feel pain. That thought gives me courage. I am alive. I still exist. Somehow.
Time stretches out with that realization, condenses and vibrates around me. Oscillating through me, making me vibrate in a way that no sound, no pressure wave, ever could. Finally, mercifully, as I run out of shields forged of raw memory I feel something new. Everything around me collapses like I am standing amidst an infinity of tsunamis coming at me from every possible angle. Even the most unlikely of angles. Crushing me into a singular point. There is no more pain, but in the midst of this collapse there is equally no sense of being beaten under the waves.
Instead, I feel a sharp lurch, shooting me at high velocity. Vertigo claims my bodiless self, mind and soul. Yet, it is not peaceful here. Just profoundly and utterly empty... a void of darkness deeper than anything I have ever experienced before. Deeper than anything I could have conceived. A feeling of weightlessness buoys me... and then a sudden cruel and crushing gravity. I ought to be feeling wind blowing past me, tearing me into flinders and setting what is left of me into a furious flame like a shooting star coming in way too fast. My awareness tells me that I am...
That I am...
Impact. A deep, emphatic, resonant impact. Soul-rattling.
My train of thought is interrupted, and I once again feel pain. This time, the pain is different. My senses detonate forth, every sound is too loud, a candle's crackling sounds like continuous rolling thunder booming in my ears. My breathing rasps like sandpaper, the air tasting like something sweet, pungent, and burning in my nose and throat. That first breath is almost impossible, but when I manage it regardless, I cough weakly on the raw stench. The movement makes my skin feel as if it had been flayed from my bones, and then some drunkard had the indecency to pull my nerves out and crudely rewire them. I shiver, I am so cold. I feel like I walked through a blizzard. My body is not responding to my need to move. I can barely twitch my toes.
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Light floods into my eyes, too bright. Too sharp. I instantly regret it as my eyes slide, refusing to focus on anything. I feel the world swirling drunkenly, overwhelming exhaustion and a desire to simply give up and fucking die already pressing in on me. My chest aches like a sharp, red-hot poker had stabbed into me, just to one side of my heart. No, not red-hot... as cold as the void. Or perhaps like someone had mixed up the hardware for a taser with a Tesla coil and jabbed that into me and turned it up to 42.
I manage to close my eyes, and despite all the sheer wrong screaming at me from all sides, I manage to fall asleep. Maybe only for a moment, or perhaps for a million years, I have no way of telling.
I hear sounds, footsteps on stone, babbling voices in a tongue I do not recognize. Old English, perhaps? Then something that reminds me more of, I don't know. I'm not a linguist. But it sounds old, strange, and eminently foreign to my ears. There is a strange cadence to it, a rhythm that tugs at my attention.
Amidst the babble, I hear my name. Not my first name, but my middle name. Aaron. But strongly accented. Ahren, maybe? Aren? It comes and goes a few times, interspersed within the decidedly feminine chatter. A teenaged girl's voice? Shock. Concern merging with fear as my whole body is suddenly wracked by a trembling, a violent spasming that I cannot stop.
The girl's voice starts to plead, she starts to yell something. My head swims. A pair of hands roll me onto my side. Cool, gentle fingertips press against my forehead. Someone rubs my back in slow, careful circles as I heave. My stomach flips a few times in rapid succession, my sense of up and down going crazy.
My eyes betray me, opening slightly. I manage to focus this time. A wrought metal sconce on a stone wall of this space. I am in a room, somewhere, lit by candles. A draft teases over my skin, feeling as sharp and cold as an arctic wind before the intense warmth coming off a small fireplace dispels that coldness and leaves me sweating. Copiously. The scent of wood smoke, of pine resin, feels oddly familiar and yet utterly foreign to me. I try to sit up, but I cannot move. Just shifting my gaze is exhausting, my eyes burning like hot coals in my head.
There is a strange but faint purple shimmering light, a radiance dancing across the homespun sheet draped over me. Strange, the body beneath that sheet... my body... it looks so small. Too small. The proportions that I am familiar with are not there. But before the panic of that thought can start to take root, the mattress under me jabs me like thorns and a wracking cough demands attention as it escapes my throat. The need to vomit starts to grow, a surge of bile coming up my throat. My body twitches, and I set aside the awareness that no matter how foreign the surroundings are, my proprioception, my sense of where my limbs are is dissonant. I feel alien, but I also feel so intensely ill that I cannot make myself care.
Not now.
I catch a glimpse of an unfamiliar face. A freckled, tear-streaked girl maybe fifteen years of age. The voice I was hearing? Is this her? She has reddish-brown hair tied into a simple braid, held in place with a mottled brown strip of fabric. Cotton, maybe? Her skin tone has a faintly purplish cast to it as I look at her, the candlelight halos her form like a saint in stained glass.
My vision loses focus again, my eyes burning and itching furiously. I want to rub them, but my arms do not respond. I croak out something, thick and muffled, but no one could possibly understand me. Least of all, myself.
When it is about to become so overwhelming that I want to scream, I feel something inside my head. A searing migraine pain that someone cruelly decided to allow to coalesce and scurry around on countless tiny feet. I cannot hold back. I scream until my throat fails me, then I start to dry heave and shudder. I succumb to a seizure, then another and another, feeling like I am about to explode.
Then, a new voice. Calm. Older than this teenage girl trying to comfort me. To tend to me. My body, no not my body... I shake off the thought as the voice says something, I hear an odd thrumming sound, then more voice. Over and over. At least this voice is not loud... I cannot even tell that I am hearing it with my ears, not really. It feels more like it is resonating within my mind, an understanding, a clarity beyond anything I have heard before.
> [You have gained a new comprehension.]
Then, a few moments later, that not quite a voice returns, flowing through my overwhelmed mind as I shudder.
> [Your mastery of the language
Suddenly, the girl's words start to make sense. They are not being translated for me, but I understand them perfectly well. Too perfectly.