The Five Trials

Quintus was finally ready. The only thing left to do was enter. The large round mirror in the center of the floor began to ripple like a pond. This was the only way, Quintus told himself. This was the only way to gaze into his own soul.

Quintus stepped onto the soft surface. He began to sink down slowly as gold jelly crept up his legs, the over his groin, then his nipples, then finally over his neck and face. 

There would be five trials.

Quintus lost his sense of orientation. His head was the first apparatus to emerge. A foul scent overwhelmed his nostrils. Once the fluid seemed to spit him up. The surface of the floor became warm and solid. There were no walls or ceilings in view, yet immediate space seemed to be illuminated.

Quintus heard a the sound of sludge. A bubbling brown mass the size of a large bedroom slid out of the darkness. The stench was unbearable. Quintus could barely keep from throwing up.

It spoke in a deep gurgling hiss:
“Look upon me human! I am what you are. I am the essence that you leave behind. I am everything that you have tried to flush away over the course of your endless consumption. I am that part of you that dwells deep in the sewers–far from sight and far from mind.”

Quintus stared at the pile of shit. His shit. For the first time he felt doubt about the journey ahead.

The mountain spoke again.
“You should have accepted me as a part of yourself. You should have seen my value. You should have understood how I connected you to other beings in the world. You are a fool”

Quintus imagined defecating with a purpose. He imagined pooping for compost. He imagined pooping outside and feeding a community of micro-organisms and mycelium. He imagined his poop going through an entire chain of life. He imagined his poop being a small part of everything he ate. It was a nice thought, but Quintus couldn’t be bothered to take any more time that this for a pile of shit.

“Tell me that you respect me,” The putrid mass threatened.

Quintus would never lower himself to commune with his own shit in such a way”
“I squeezed you from the bowels of my body because I didn’t need you. If I could I’d shit you out and flush you down all over again.”

“THEN YOU CAN DIE–die while I swallow you and shit you out!
The tremendous ooze bellowed hatefully as it began to charge.

Quintus turned and ran as hard as his scrawny little legs could push him. His heart was in his throat and his butt was clenched in total fear.

A wooden door approached. It was completely isolated. Quintus opened the door and entered it as red light spilled over the threshold. He quickly locked the door behind him. There was one single tremendous thud, then complete silence.

Quintus turned away from the door to find a large red orb glowing and floating. He approached cautiously. He circled the entire object. It was very shiny. He put out a finger and touched it. As soon as his fingertip made contact with its soft surface a spark of intense sensation surged down his arm and through every nerve in his body. He snatched his finger back instantly. His entire body quivered with intensity.

Quintus examined the space around the orb. Apart from the door which he entered through and the orb in front of him, there did not seem to be anything in sight. Quintus deduced that entering the orb must be his only option. Still there was no absolute reason to believe other options did not exist.

The temptation to leap forward was as great as the temptation to stay in place.

Curiosity finally tipped the balance. Quintus touched his entire palm to the sphere. Tremendous pleasure flowed through him. He felt the orb draw him in closer. He experienced a mild sense of distress but allowed his entire body to be pressed up against the foreign surface. The membrane of the orb absorbed him completely.

As Quintus floated toward the center of the sphere he ran out of breath. Desperately, he gasped and swallowed. The gooey fluid filled his lungs harmlessly and began to push deep into each of his pores. The pleasure intensified.

Quintus soon found it impossible to think, so completely filled with sensation was each cell in his body. The euphoria and ecstasy were far beyond orgasm. The sensation was constant and complete satisfaction.

Quintus lost all sense of time. There were centuries between his vague impulses to be about some busyness or other. In between there was nothing, only the sense of a lovely and forgotten dream. Perhaps from another life.

Eventually, Quintus discovered within himself a completely irrational need to DO something. The need to act overpowered all other sensations or thoughts.

Quintus writhed maniacally until he found himself lying face down flat on the ground. He simply lay there for a long, long time. His body slowly remembered how to use its muscles to move, and his memory slowly pieced together a life long forgotten.

Quintus crawled before he walk again. He never learned how to talk again. 

Sometimes he would look over at the shiny glowing red orb and experience a very strong desire to return to it. He would remind himself that he had gone there before and stayed for a very long time. He wished to feel something different, something very different. 

He wandered far away from the orb until he arrived in a place where the ground turned to sand and space was green. He began to dig. He dug for decades. He dug for dozens of decades. Deep down at the bottom of the hole, a faint glimmer of blue seeped up from below. As Quintus continued to dig the glow became brighter.

Unexpectedly, Quintus broke through the bottom of his hole and entered a state of free-fall.

The world looked similar to the sky just after dusk or after dawn. Indeed, at times there were clouds of varied hue and shape or auroras dancing about, this way or that.

Quintus’s stomach remained steadfastly in his anus indefinitely. There was no end in sight.

The wind became smoother overtime and the fall began to feel more and more like emptiness. The world grew more purple and Quintus wept. Each tear that he cried plummeted in close proximity. Some bonded together to form large bubbles.

Quintus knew despair.

Quintus began to perceive ominous shadows in the clouds. Shadows that reminded him of himself. After a time Quintus became his despair. His lip curled cynically and pessimistically. The expression became the default of his face. 

The air grew colder.

Some of the tears Quintus had freed began to form huge snowflakes nearby. Many spiraled like helicopter blades. Some fell motionlessly. Quintus found it hard to ignore the playful shape and motion. His grimace slackened slightly.

A particularly large grouping of tears formed a perfect and clear globe. Quintus reached out for it. The object was beautiful to him. Quintus clutched the mirror ball carefully. It was cold to the touch.

Quintus took his heart carefully, opened it up, and tucked the globe of frozen tears safely inside. He closed his heart gently, but not too tightly, and returned it to its rightful cavity.

Quintus new both despair and hope.

Quintus cried tears of joy which all soon solidified into into crystals. He broke the crystals apart then welded them back together again with new tears. He mad the tears into feathers and the feathers into wings.

Quintus stopped falling and started gliding. Quintus turned his glide into flight. He flew toward a large hole in the sky. Through the hole Quintus saw familiar things, human things. Quintus saw skyscrapers and aircraft. The hole in the sky sealed itself behind him.

Quintus took in the world breathlessly. The sun lit the sky and reflected in the windows of buildings and of vehicles. It lit the world bellow a brilliant yellow. His wings shimmered and bent the suns rays like a prism. His wings were radiant, but they were wings of water. They were wings that would melt.

Quintus landed in a large park at the edge of the city. He watched the fragments of his wings melt in the grass. He walked through the park and took deep breaths. A canopy of vegetation spotted the earth with leafy darkness and specks of light.

Over a stream, upon a bridge, Quintus came across another human being. She turned her gaze from the sparkling, trickling stream to smile at Quintus. Quintus felt he should say something to her but did not remember how to speak. Instead Quintus reached into his heart and took from it the globe of his frozen tears. His heart had kept it safe, and intact, and clear. The sun cast a spectrum of color our from the globe in place of its shadow. He held the globe out to the other.

As her palm made contact with the frozen globe a pure white light emanated from it and bathed them both. The light felt soothing, and calm, and peaceful.

Quintus and she held eye contact and gazed deeply.

For that eternal instant, Quintus was finally able to see his soul.